The Guy Who Dies

This is the story about my long term stint into Free Form RPGs on Forum Boards. The period lasted for about... 12 years, and the reputation that built up across several different boards over that time. It was during this time I earned my title of "old man", or being referred to as some "battle scarred veteran RPer" and such as typically (At least the sites I ended up on) almost every RPer there was between 16-23 and had maybe a "few years" of Roleplaying under their belt, if not brand new.

What always surprised me about those "kids", was their attitudes of presuming because "I've RPed for 3 years now" that they somehow knew everything about the craft. I have decades of experience and I'm still learning new tricks, new processes, new tools all the time. I never really believed it was a craft that you could just "master". So I tried to study it and was always open to new ideas.

The Guy Who Dies

There was one problem I had with Play by Post RPGs, particularly free form, that I realized fairly early on. Oh granted it still took me a couple of years before the novelty of "Always having a game" and being able to log on pretty much every day and have Roleplaying to do sort of wore off and I realized it, but here was my issue.

It tended to lack plot.

Well that's the big tag line. The truth is that they do tend to have plots, just not strong, actionable plots. I'd say a vast majority, if not all, Free Form Play by Post RPGs I've been in for any length of time (I seriously can't remember a single example off the top of my head that didn't bottom out into this after a month or so, be it ones I participated in or just read), devolved into what I called "Sit, Chat, and Fuck" RPGs. They might have claimed there was a plot going on somehow, usually related to character backstory angst, but the typical "RPG day" as it came to be was:

Wakes up.
Goes to the local bar/hangout
Meets friends, small talks with them.
May get around to brooding about some secret backstory angst that is never acted upon beyond brooding.
Get some nookie from one of the friends as romance is a good way to keep the RPG Drama going without having to do much.

This isn't to say I don't like Romance in a RPG. Quite the opposite, I like romance. But I feel it works the best as a Subplot, something that is added to the overall narrative rather than being the whole point. If nothing else is going on other than the burgeoning romance, it tends to bottom out so to speak. Nothing really stops them from hooking up (Except possible self inflicted angst), and once they do the plot is kind of effectively over and resolved, which hasn't solved the core issue of why the Romance Plot was really brought up... because no one has anything to do.

So I recognized this problem. Even when I drifted to Gaia, where they had the "Free For All" forums that at least promised organizational conflicts, battles, etc, that MIGHT give me things to do, I found it lacking. I don't know if it changed from when I was last there, but the problem had an additional layer of Non-Interactivity to it. People built these "Bases" for them to Roleplay in as part of the forum. The forum's topics almost without exception all had locations that read like what they probably were... an 18 year old's attempt to have an "edgy" and cool organization that is completely invincible and untouchable behind dozens of layers of unbeatable defenses where they could basically curl up in their isolation womb and never have to deal with someone possibly ruining their their day of sitting around and chatting.

So I realized the problem. And I eventually found the solution, interestingly enough on Gaia. A man posted up a topic that caught my attention saying he needed a rival/villain for an RP arc as he was desperate to get away from the "Sit, Chat, and Fuck" sort of Roleplaying.

That arc still ended up some of my favorite Free Form roleplaying at the time. I managed to cause the player (And his friends) a lot of misery, infiltrated their group, had an epic duel with the hero, and had so thoroughly mindscrewed every one there that by the time the duel was over, and we were both down, out, and bleeding to death the hero's own friends decide to let him die in order to save my villain instead. Good times all around.

So I found out that even Free Form Roleplaying still needs a DM, for lack of a better term. Someone who actively takes charge of the world, provides obstacles and difficulties other than self created angst. I began hiring myself out on various boards as the Villain Guy, (though I avoided using the term DM, because Free Form Roleplayers can tend to have this odd chip on their shoulder about DMs as evil egomaniacs) and gained the reputation as "The Guy who Dies".

That's the other part I realized needed to be fixed, consequences. There was a natural habit for things not to matter. Even though characters never did anything but spend money and chat they always had money. Nothing ever really went wrong. Even if an "emergency" popped up, there just happened to be a helpful NPC wandering by in the next minute or so. I found that if there's no chance you can Lose, there's no chance you can Win. I mean what impact does it really have on you of finding the legendary sword of DOOM if in the same Roleplay someone who just needed it happens to find it just laying nearby when they need it?

It sounds silly, and you might just chalk it up to bad players, but it's a fairly consistent thing in Free Form Roleplays, particularly ones that don't strive to mimic our modern reality as much as possible (At least in those ones people tend to mention having jobs and off screen time that might explain where things are happening and there's no Magic Man wizard always lurking around the corner to cast Curaga every time they get so much as a paper cut). Even when I'd see things like two "warriors" going all out on some Katana duel, with no one wearing armor, the worst that ever happens to them is they get "knocked out" or maybe a "flesh wound" that does nothing but give them a badass scar.

But here I was roleplaying the villains, and I knew if I went with the "just a flesh wound" things or Magic NPCs it would ruin the whole point of having a villain. Or at least the impact. If everytime they beat me and I was just "knocked out" swearing revenge someday I become less like Kefka, and more like Cobra Commander in full 90s cartoon mode. So I knew I couldn't force the same sort of lethality on other people to make things matter... they'd just bitch then retcon it. So I had to accept that I was going to be the only one suffering any sort of real, meaningful defeats.

My villains died before the armies of the Perfect and Inviolable heroes. A lot of them. People actually started to think I was eager to kill off characters. Though the truth as I told them was "... no... it's just that if you hit my guy in the face with a battleaxe, I'm going to treat it like you hit me in the face with a battle axe being swung by your 7' tall ungodly muscled hero, rather than just somehow get knocked out without lasting injury from a battle axe to the face."

I think the point where I really cemented my reputation as "the Guy who Dies" was during one of the "Events" on Gaia called Heaven or Hell. A weird little "tournament" combat Roleplay that honestly had a lot of irksome things about it, but I was excited to get a chance to play with such a wide variety of characters. Plus it was said it was going to be judged on "how well you played and how entertaining it was" rather than "the actual results of the roleplay", with the implication that if someone went all Invincible Hero on me and crushed me flat, I could still "win" by the fact that honestly my storytelling was better and more entertaining than just seeing someone say "its just a flesh wound!" to my actions and proceed to beat me about the face unto death.

So we're in a battle, it's a team thing, 3 on 3 with each person doing solo fights with one round "tag attacks" being usable as the guy who created this whole thing really was a King of Fighters fanboy. I honestly thought we were doing well, we were "losing" the fights in character, but we were definitely being more entertaining. I figured we had good chances to win despite the In Character result being 0-2 so far. I was the anchor match with my mostly human Bounty Hunter type character, a scrapper but not a huge power house fantasy warrior or cyborg assassin, etc. Our stage was a "Bar", which makes sense because about 80% of Gaia RP locations seemed to be Bars anyway. Least the sort of bars that people who never have gone to a bar think bars are like. My opponent was this amazonian warrior woman who went into battle in what seemed to be a bikini and high heeled sandals if I remember correctly.

... so on one hand you ahve Fantasy Warrior Woman to a T, on the other you have a guy who is pretending to be massively inebriated because hey he's a normal human and he needs as many advantages as he can get, including using stage props to pretend he's drunk so people might go easy on him at first. The rules forbid certain things I otherwise almost assuredly would have tried like setting fire to the place (After all, it was supposed to be a spectator sport) or doing anything "purposefully lethal".

So I lured Barbarella, Queen of the Amazons in by pretending to be drunk off my ass... and when she fell for it (I don't know how as I mentioned time and again the 'bottle' I had been drinking out of was still entirely full and unopened). I clocked her over the head with it figuring if she was remotely human it would at least phase her to have glass shattered over her skull, soaked in booze and shards of glass, etc. Instead I got the tone of the fight right away. Doesn't phase her, not even a flinch, and she just grabs me by the collar and uses her height and apparent strength advantage to haul me off my feet.

Well, in real life I was the "small guy" almost all my life until I had a growth spurt around 18. I was also on the wrestling team, and practiced with my brother who was 7 years old, much stronger, and taller than me my whole life. I knew how to handle this.

So I used every trick I learned in real life, attacking pressure points, going for places that were "painful" if not debilitating in order to get her to let go, using superior locks and reverses to keep ahead of what she was trying to do, just hold me up in the air and punch my face until I stopped fighting.

Eventually I had: Broken a chair over her, hip threw her through a table, broke another bottle over her, cut a 5 inch long gash along her femoral artery, punched her square in the throat... And none of this even caused the character to so much as blink as she eventually used her superior size, weight, and muscle to try to pin me down. Generally in a badly described way that had her trying to tell me that the counters I used "wouldn't work" because I used the description she provided. Such as one where she said she picked me up and held me at arm's length before going for some crushing bear hug. At which point I interrupted at "held me at arm's length" and said "I punch you in the throat since you're going for a hug and a quick jab is going to get in".

It got to the point where we were pinned down on the ground grappling, she's trying to choke out my character, and he's in this caged animal scared mode as NOTHING he's gone has even phased this woman for a moment and she shows no sign of stopping even if he's about to pass out from lack of oxygen. So he uses his last opening she provided to bite her neck and like some feral beast try to just rip her throat out.

.... which resulted in her saying her neck muscles were too strong for that to even break through the skin. Yes, effectively the strongest muscles in the human body, as I recalled as bites can produce insane amounts of pressure, couldn't even break her skin. In response to the indignation however of daring to try something that might have actually hurt her (I'm still convinced even if the bite worked it wouldn't have killed her), she decides she's "Done" with it and just goes for a neck snap.

And I let her. He's a normal human nowhere near as strong as she was, she had the positioning to do it. She snaps his neck, he dies. I knew I was effectively writing myself out of the tournament, but if that was the quality I had to look forward to, I didn't really want to look on. At the very least I knew my opponent would get all sorts of violations from killing her competitor, so I was guaranteeing my team the victory (and they had an Alternate waiting so I didn't feel bad about it). All it all it became one of the more dramatic fights I saw during that first round. It wasn't "Badass" in that it wasn't big and flashy. No one had super tech, or magic, etc, to make the big special effects. But it was dramatic in the sense that this guy who was entirely outclassed fought so well, so hard, that eventually this person he had no chance of ever beating was forced to kill him.

... then I meet the last level of "bullshit" as the judging came around. Remember this whole Tournament was predicated on, and the rules even stated, that results were basically about who was more entertaining and skilled as a writer rather than who just built a character that was so Hardcore they couldn't be beaten.

I looked at our "scores". My team won ever round. With the penalty points (Though I did get a bullshit one as I saw it for "Attempting a lethal attack" with the bite even though we all knew it wasn't going to be lethal), I just crushed my fight flat. We won in every way we were told mattered in the rules despite "losing" all 3 rounds in the roleplay itself.

We were told we "lost" and weren't moving on. The reason we were given? "Well it doesn't seem right that a team that lost a majority of the rounds, would be moved ahead in the bracket any".

...

What?

I mean seriously, WHAT?!

I knew they had some biases, they liked "Magic" (including vaguely defined Ki powers) over Technology (Though they sometimes let basic science kind of muddle magic, like the guy who is a Fire Mage is also an Ice Mage because Cold is just the absence of heat, and also an 'Air Mage" because of therodynamics on atmosphere, etc. Basically letting them BS as "I'm just good at one thing" being an excuse to be good at whatever they want), they let "Huge Guys" get away with some power gaming stuff of just ignoring effects and muscling through things because they were Huge Guys rather than because it was good writing necessarily. But the whole point was that you were supposed to be entertaining and write well. Whole... point. If I knew it was only IC results that mattered I would have brought in one of my arch mage characters and just threw the enemy into the sun or something. Who cares if it's shitty writing, I won the fight and even if they gave me a 0 score I win and advance.


But I was the only one to die, in a tournament where people are regularly getting stabbed, set on fire, frozen, pile drivered through trains, etc. I already had the reputation as the "Guy who Dies" but that forever cemented it. I don't really regret dying, it was a good dramatic moment for people. I just wish I knew that in the end only results really mattered so I could have brought a more appropriate character and perhaps gone further, and had more great moments.