Fate Is Just The Weight Of Circumstances

Dungeons & Dragons was released a generation ago and quickly became a national craze. I must admit that I was amongst those who spent their Friday and Saturday nights hacking, slashing, picking pockets and throwing fireballs from our fingertips instead of going out with the fairer sex. To explain how obsessive we were, the group I rolled dice with beat the creator of D&D to getting the monsters manual published by six months. Granted, ours was in a loose binder instead of bound in a hardback book, but still...

Fairly quickly D&D, or more accurately AD&D by this time, had a slew of imitators. One of them was a sci-fi themed game called Paranoia. Though it was certainly a RPG, our group transformed it into the ANTI-role-playing game. Most RPGs stressed teamwork. But Paranoia was set up to prevent the players from working together.

Set up in a dystopian future controlled by a insane computer, the characters found themselves forced to pit themselves against each other in order to survive. Secret societies were classified as terrorist organizations and membership was grounds for automatic execution. Being an unregistered mutant was also illegal and resulted in summary execution. (And yes, every player got stuck with a character who was in an illegal secret society and an unregistered mutant.) Damaging property owned by the state was one of the greatest acts of treason to be found. (Maybe that was why Research & Development was so quick to hand out broken equipment to the party. "It worked fine when they left with it.") Additionally, most of the organization characters belonged to, such as Armed Forces or Department of Commissaries and Supplies absolutely detested one another. Any opportunity to embarrass another branch was a chance for quick promotion.

It was game of constant note passing to the DM, as players took every opportunity they could to sandbag their companions.

And to top it all off, we rarely used dice to decide the outcome of actions. The DM usually ruled that the most outlandish, off-the-wall, sure-to-get-everyone-killed idea was the one that happened.

Several years ago, a group of us were in Atlanta for a fantasy convention one weekend. After doing "con stuff" all night, we relaxed in the courtyard at the Omni one morning before the convention reopened. And how to do a bunch of people who've played AD&D for 18 straight hours relax? Why by playing a DIFFERENT RPG, of course.

So there we were handing out character sheets for a fresh game of Paranoia, when a man slightly older than we were sat down at the table next to us. We realized fairly quickly that this guy was laughing just as hard as we were at the game, so we invited him to join us. The DM tossed together a new character sheet, made a few adjustments to the other characters so they would have reason to sabotage Gary's character, and he joined our merry party.

Our group was already feared for making DMs run crying into the night, but THIS guy... Gary's character assassinated the party leader (with documented evidence of treason to justify it), and took over the party. He reprogrammed the Funbot's laser cannon to shoot lemon meringue instead (gotta admit it does make more sense in a bizarre sort of way). And altered the atomic powered cruiser so everyone else's seats were OUTSIDE the vehicle (much easier to return fire that way, you see). And all this before his character had failed an insanity check.

After a couple hours of play, the party found themselves cowering inside the cruiser surrounded by a mob of NPCs intent on the destruction of the party. To make matters worse, the party was THIS close to their objective, needing only to get up a two hundred foot cliff to reach it. Gary quickly conceived of a brilliant plan to both defeat the NPCs and create a pass in the cliff face. He directed the other party members to expend the last of their firepower while he did something to the cruiser's engine. He passed a note to the DM explaining exactly what he wanted to do.

Remember the part where I mentioned how the cruiser was powered? What happens to a bunch of violent NPCs who are caught in the blast of a self-destructing atomic pile? And that pesky cliff wouldn't last long if hit with a two megaton blast, now would it?

Granted, Gary's character would have faced charges for damaging the cruiser, and the other characters clothing, and... But as Gary pointed out, the mile wide crater left little evidence that HIS character was at fault.

After our session broke up, he mentioned in passing his last name. I'm sure you AD&D fans have already guessed, but we had sat down and played a role-playing game with none other than Gary Gygax, the creator of an entire industry.