Something I've Written Which May Amuse All Of You · 4:26pm May 25th, 2016
So, a few days back, a friend of mine invoked me to post on my Tumblr blog about a certain infamous player I knew of from the halcyon days of running Dungeons and Dragons in college. I spent most of my free time yesterday typing out the post, and, having finished, I figured you guys might also enjoy it. So, without (much) further ado, I present to you the legend of Gene, Destroyer of Games.
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Lo, what fool calls me forth? What boon do you seek?
… Ah. Ahhhh, I see. So then, knowledge is it? Knowledge of… him. Of the dark one. Of Gene, Destroyer of Games.
A warning to you, listener. The exploits of Gene are many, and thus I have many tales to tell. Only listen if you intend to listen for a while yet. That said, let us begin.
***
Lo, it was many moons ago in my youth, that I came upon a gaming shop across the street from my college. Many an hour was spent at that place, running games, talking shop, watching the terrible second and third season of Heroes. There I met a motley crew of alumni who had made the shop a second home, and among this crew was where I met… him.
Gene, Destroyer of Games.
At first glance Gene appeared to be… an idiot. A profound idiot, yes, but an idiot none-the-less. Little was I to know of the carnage this bumbling overweight libertarian had and would yet leave in his wake…
A Portrait of a Man Named Gene
Gene was, as mentioned, not a terribly bright person. He quoted Fox News as the word of god and referred to the winos and drug addicts who patronized the gas station he worked at as the “Democratic Party Votebase.” Gene was also, by all rights, a truly terrible player. He metagamed. He roleplayed in bad faith. He had no impulse control. He consistently failed to coordinate with his teammates. Outside the table he was hardly much better, having been fired from his job at the gas station five times and was hired back entirely on his willingness to work the graveyard shift. Once he was fired because he was caught exchanging beer with customers for oral sex.
The catch was, naturally, that Gene was an idiot. No matter how selfish, myopic, bigoted, or impulsive his bad habits were, his stupidity would subvert them, causing them to rebound against him in catastrophic ways. The collateral damage was often extreme, but make no mistakes, Gene was and will most likely always be his own worst enemy. Furthermore, Gene was sincere in his stupidity. He would throw himself into his latest ill advised venture with cool confidence and when the bodies began racking up and everyone was shouting at him he would feel no end of self pity, and sulk or smirk because no one could appreciate his genius.
Thus it was that Gene entered into a lives of us at the shop, and the following are the tales of woe, bloodshed, and pouting that form just some of the legend of Gene, Destroyer of Games
The Many Deaths of Gene
Before I came to the shop, one of the consummate DMs, a man named Weem, had run a lengthy 3.5 campaign in which Gene was a member. In this game Gene had earned a reputation.
He died.
A lot.
Often pointlessly.
The following are but only the stories of which I was told.
- Early on Gene played a ranger. His animal companion, a wolf, scouted ahead of him and fell into a trap. A pit opened up, revealing a gelatinous cube. The wolf tumbled in, but made it’s balance check, just barely straddling the surface of the ooze without falling in and suffering a horrible, agonizing death where it’s flesh was dissolved by the acidic body of the cube.
Gene declared that he would leap into the pit to save his companion. He was both heavier than his wolf and far less skilled at balance. He promptly crashed onto the back of his wolf, and plunging them both into the acid where they died horrible, agonizing deaths.
- Gene, playing a fighter now, went with the current ranger to scout out a cave. A swarm of wolves came out. Gene defiantly stood his ground and was promptly surrounded, hamstrung, and eaten alive.
The ranger simply scampered up the mountain-face and snuck to safety while Gene provided a sanguine and protein rich distraction.
- The party had been adventuring in the Underdark and had apparently had a foul encounter with a beast that lived within the seas of that place. As such, when they found themselves in a battle on a cliff overlooking another underground sea, they found themselves wary. Alas, the druid was knocked into the black water. Gene panicked, but the druid tried to allay his fears. Headless, Gene lept into the ocean to save his friend.
In heavy armor.
The druid polymorphed into a duck and flew to safety. Gene sank like a stone and was consumed by a passing Megalodon.
- The party came across a cult of Kua-toa attempted to summon some elder evil or another from the Plane of Elemental Water. The ritual was taking place around a sphere of water that acted as a portal to that plane in a large open roofed amphitheater. Gene, now a Rogue, declares that he is drinking an invisibility potion and will attempt to climb up the sides of the ritual grounds and leap in through the open roof.
He does not do so in character.
When Gene, invisible mind you, reaches the zenith, he declares his intent to leap into the room and attack the Kua-toa. A check is called. A check is failed. Gene lands in the sphere of suspended trans-dimensional saline. Invisible.
The party and the Kua-toa hear a sudden splash and are unable to determine it’s source.
Gene, desperate to survive, calls upon his Bag of Tricks.
A hippo suddenly and inexplicably manifests inside of the sphere. The party and the Kua-toa cult stand dumbstruck. The hippo, and the undetectable Gene, is promptly sucked into the Elemental Plane of Water where they both, predictably, drown.
Fear and Loathing in Barovia
This was one of the few incidents that I personally bore witness to. For Halloween Weem ran a Castle and Crusades conversion for Castle Ravenloft, and I was invited. So was Gene.
Early on we are met with an NPC who offered us shelter and seemed to be somewhat aware of the mysterious land we found ourselves embroiled in. Gene adamantly refused both the hospitality of the character and the obvious plot thread we were meant to follow. He instead purchases a room at the inn for a night, a bottle of booze, and, thinking himself very clever, smashes the bottle and leaves the broken glass scattered under the door to his room.
Unfortunately for him, vampires can turn into mist. They also have mind-controlling stares that can make witless, arrogant players into their willing slaves.
Thus it came to pass that Gene was made into Strahd’s “cockpocket.” We, meanwhile, were very happy inside a home covered with crucifixes.
Later we sought help from a band of Romani. Gene declared that, since he feared the fortune teller might detect the vampiric influence upon him, that he would step outside. There he was pulled into a merry dance and enjoyed himself while we had our fortune told. That was, until someone stole Gene’s knife.
Gene accused the Romani of being thieves. They did not take this well and when tension mounted, a fight broke out. We came outside to see Gene’s character locked in a mortal brawl with the Romani. The brawl was shouted into silence, but by then Gene had killed several of them. The fortune teller, incensed, offered Gene a knife in compensation for his stolen one since he had killed her nephew over the subject. Gene refused it as a point of honor because, after-all, it wasn’t his knife. The Romani, coldly furious, packed up their camp and left us to the hoard of zombies which were coming after us. Gene, wounded from his brawl, was surrounded and eaten. Wounded and weary, we retreated to the crucifix house to rest, but the scales had already tipped. Slowly but surely, each attempt we made to regain our footing resulted in more death and loss and, one by one, we all died on the road to Castle Ravenloft.
Gene was given a box of Hot Pockets to commemorate the episode.
Genefall
Gene was part of a long running Mutants and Masterminds campaign, also game mastered by Weem. The campaign ran for, as far as I know, years. Here are some of the events that Gene got himself up too in that campaign, and where he truly earned his epitaph as the Destroyer of Games.
- Gene’s character had the power to grow 20 feet tall. During a fight with a supervillain in the city park people began to panic and flee the scene, only to find the gates in and out of the park sealed. Gene promptly grew two stories and began screaming at them not to be afraid. The park goers go into a frenzy and start trampling against the gates to escape the screaming giant.
Innocent people died that day.
- Gene, playing the same character, is staking out a trailer park. In a Jerry Springer-seq twist, a black supervillain has been having an affair with the wife of a white supremacist supervillain with pyromancy powers. Gene has taken watch to see if he can catch the black villain visiting his beau. A fight breaks out when the husband catches them in the act, and Gene intervenes, growing gigantic. The pyromancer responds by hitting the largest, easiest target. Gene, now on fire, does the only sensible thing, which is to stop, drop, and roll.
While giant.
In the middle of a trailer park, crushing and burning occupied homes as he goes.
Innocent people died that day.
- Ultimately that character died and was replaced by another. Many sessions come and go and it has become something of a running gag that whenever Gene does something stupid, one of the players calls for a vote to kick his character off of the team. Things go as well as can be expected until one night when the group finds itself pushed to it’s limits. After a disastrous struggle with a group of supervillains the party returns to their Hall of Justice to find it has been covered in hair-trigger explosives. The slightest wrong move would turn then entire block-wide structure into a cloud of fire and shrapnel.
One player begins laying out plans to defuse the situation with the rest of the group. They work quickly on plans to evacuate the surrounding neighborhood and defuse the bombs when suddenly in the middle of the heated discussion a voice cries out above the rest:
“I punch the ground, releasing a shock-wave to destroy the bombs!”
The group, stunned, is left to watch in horror as Weem begins to rapidly rattle off the consequences. The entire Hall of Justice detonates, but that’s only the beginning. The gas main also catches fire, causing the surrounding blocks to also explode as the fireball burns through the gas pipes of the surrounding buildings. Hundreds if not thousands of people are sucked screaming into a vortex of fire, their lives literally snuffed out in an instant.
Innocent people died that day.
One of the player characters, a living angel, declares that the Vatican cannot be connected with these events and flees the scene. The others slowly realize that the oncoming PR fallout would mean a more or less end to their super hero team as a public entity. As one of their last official act, Gene’s antagonistic teammate calls for a team vote to kick Gene’s character off the team.
It was decided unanimously in favor of doing so.
The Book of Gene
Some months later I found myself at another session of the same Mutants and Masterminds game. The group is settling down to play while I set up to do homework at the next table over, as does the wife of a friend of mine, Gina. Gene sees this and suddenly grows distraught. Gina, I learn, plays a character in the campaign but won’t be playing that day due to a homework backlog of her own. Gene then begins pleading with her, revealing that all of his ex-girlfriends have become lesbians and he can no longer handle rejection from women in an effort to garner her pity so she would play.
I sat in stunned silence, only broken by the shuffling of paper and scratching of pencil. You see, the group had begun a Book of Gene-isms, where they recorded the pitiful, outlandish, or offensive things Gene said on a day to day basis for posterity, and that statement had just made the cut as another entry.
A Strong Influence on the Weak Minded
Later on I learned more of the state of that campaign and Gene’s exploits within. For one, he was playing an old character who had mysteriously returned from death and the campaign had taken to space to avoid an incursion of shape-shifting warrior aliens. I also learned that Weem had forbidden Gene from playing characters with high willpower from that point on. Now if he did something horrendously stupid the team Psion would declared that action to have been a hallucination and then explained what Gene’s character had actually done – while under the Psion’s mind control, naturally.
Not long after this the team came across a derelict ship littered with the bodies of the setting’s copyright friendly take on the Green Lantern and Sinestro Corps. They party, while investigating come a cross a villain who attempts to escape into space. Gene, desperate to give chase, loots a nearby body for the magic power armor that gives both the heroic and villainous star-knights their powers.
He naturally looted the body of a villainous one.
He is suddenly informed by a voice that he has power to cause great fear in the universe, and one botched will-save later finds himself flying away to be trained as a villainous avatar of fear and tyranny.
Some arguable good came of this though. A friend’s character, a riff on Iron Man and Batman, seized a set of heroic star knight armor to give chase and attempt to save Gene from his fate. He also failed his will save to resist, and ended up being taken away to train as a heroic avatar of willpower and freedom.
Weem was forced to advance the game’s time-line several months to recover from the debacle.
Planes, Trains, and Paladin Mounts
Of Gene’s many ticks and obsessions, wanting to play a Paladin is a prominent one.
He is also often forbidden from doing so, for reasons that are, perhaps, obvious this deep into my tales. Matters were not helped by the fact that his previous paladin character had been declared to be bisexual so that he could make “lay on hands” jokes as much as he wished.
Still, in a DnD game not run by Weem, Gene was granted his wish, playing a Fire Genasi Paladin. Furthermore, another peculiar subset of Gene’s obsession with playing a paladin was the paladin mount. He desperately wanted his. One episode involved him going to his church, and undergoing a series of ritualistic actions, including prayer, giving of wealth to the church, and fasting. At the end of this long set of pageantry, he turned and asked the game master if he could, perhaps, get his paladin mount a level early, given he was being such a good paladin and all.
Unamused, the game master informed him no.
Still, Gene carried on with his obsession. When the promised level came and went without his heavenly steed appearing, he began constantly whining and wheedling the gamemaster, begging and wondering when it would appear. Besides this, he kept pestering the gamemaster about purchasing magic weapons in a setting where magic was meant to be rare and powerful. Finally the game master snapped and informed him that not only where wizards hard to come by, but few would have the desire to rip out chunks of their soul to make him some magical toys in exchange for some coin.
So Gene sullenly trudged on, mount-less and without access to even a decently stocked magic Walmart.
Then, one night, his quest for a mount came to a head.
The party came across a castle infested with dangerous enemies. They fight their way into the fray and come into the courtyard surrounded on all sides when Gene is treated to a pair of sights. On one side of the yard he sees a pair of helpless women, chained to a wall as a monstrous scorpion closes in on them. Across from them though, a mighty steed of fire and clockwork gears fights for it’s life against the hoard.
Gene, without hesitation, dives for the horse. Before he can reach it, the horse, the scorpion, and the maidens vanish into so much smoke, and Gene stumbles and finds himself stripped of his station and his paladin powers.
So with impatience and and self-centeredness did Gene fail the most basic of tests a paladin can face, and thus Fell.
***
These, of course, are but the stories that I know. I am sure there are many more that passed beyond my gaze and knowledge. Perhaps even to this day Gene carries on, with quick dice and dim wit, brining ruin in his wake.
If so, that is a tale for another time; another story in the legacy of Gene, the Destroyer of Games.
And I literally just read this on tumblr.
~Skeeter The Lurker
It's funny how every group seems to have "that one guy".
Normally, I'd think you meant "heedless," but this is clearly accurate. I have had some doozies in my playgroup, but none so thoroughly disruptive and foolish as Gene.
There aren't enough of these...
Praise Gene. The Legend
The Chronicles of Gene: The Rogue, the Hippo and the Water Portal - I'd love to read a full story in which he and the hippo survived and are cruising through the infinite waters of the Elemental Plane of Water.
A most enjoyable read overall, thanks for sharing!
Innocent people died that day.
Many, many innocent people
I kinda have to wonder why Gene keeps getting invited to games, with a track record like this. I mean, by the time you reach the point of having a book of Gene-isms, he's clearly a toxic influence in the group, and everyone's just sort of putting up with him to see how he'll wreck the game next.
3974313 I would imagine simply to have as many characters as possible while still avoiding the need to have the DM play a character and master at the same time or having players with multiple characters.
I didn't play much but I had quite a few games get aborted because people disagreed with the DM character's actions and wouldn't accept it as not being meta-gaming and a few because a player built exceedingly complimenting characters that were too good together but worth very little if the DM forced them to be separated.
My mark of great pride / shame is that I'm no longer allowed to play any character with an increased ability in improvising weapons or wielding same after having derailed the plot one too many times by being able to fight and win using garbage to re-equip my character rather than running from what should have been a suicidal fight or throwing set dressings at an antagonist to great effect when I had been disarmed.
For a while my group had someone who constantly played a kleptomaniac thief and would steal random set dressings including a few times stealing McGuffins before we knew what they were.
The DM kept a record of some of the more interesting or detrimental things that were taken.
3974313 ... possibly because Gene is so bad, he's good?
Would these games have been better off without Gene? Would you still be recounting them today?
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3974313
That is a fair point, actually. As I've been saying to people who asked about Gene, there is a certain charm to having your own personal real-life Archer character on tap.