Wow - what a turnaround for my game.
I was recently bitching about how idiotic, illogical and unmotivating my game was becoming. Well damn, what a turnaround. I got rid of 2 players (moved them to a new game I'm starting) cause they where basically just stuffing around the entire game. They can now do dumb stuff in their own game and stop distracting the hard-core players.
My game on Fri nite was sooo cool. I had problems with players actually role-playing their characters. Everyone looked out for themselves only, even if the other guy was a lifelong friend etc. Well this changed bigtime. Heres what happend for anyone that's interested:
The decker had tried to handle a system that was basically too far out of his league and got hammered by IC. If anyone's read Shadowplay, it's the IC that puts you in a bio-feedback loop with the deck, so that if you jack out, you die, while they're tracing you.
Anyway, one of the other characters figured out they where being traced and decided to pull the jack anyway. Oops, dead decker. No quarter given. The player had put a lot of work into the character however and I felt very sad to see it go to waste as it wasn't really his fault. So I decided he could use his "Hand of god". But then again, nothing is free in my games.
The rest of the group grabbed his body and fled to one of their close friends places, a high level voodoo shaman. The shaman said ok, there might be a chance they could save this, if they perform an astral quest to get his spirit back- RIGHT FRAGGING NOW! (Decker's body is quietly entering riggor mortis).
The party's mage and the shaman start the ritual. I figured that since the mage was about to initiate, this would be his trial as well. Anyway, after fighting through the various places of the metaplanes, they got to my version of the Citadel.
Inside was a prison where the mage could see the spirit of his friend chained to a wall. After negotiating with various strange entities for the release of his friends spirit, he was offered a deal. You stay here, and in exchange, your friend can go.
The mage player just stared at me for about five seconds. It has pretty much become known that in the games I run, I play for keeps. He realised that his character that he'd put so much work into was about to 'die' for all intents and purposes.
The player then looked at me, handed me his character sheet and said "I accept." The decker player looked at him incredulously. "You'd really do that for me?"
It was really a moment. Anyway, it was actually part of his test for the place he was in. I didn't really expect him to accept the deal and figured he'd either leave it (dead decker) or try find another way.
Just as the mage was being dragged off to another cell in chains, the jailer transformed into a glowing being and said, "You have passed the test. Leave this place, initiate."
It was a really wow game. Much karma was handed out for good roleplaying.
I WISH