FUCKED UP HELL BUILDING

Starts: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3460258&userid=169066#post453593380

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Minimal editing done (mostly to show formating things that don't cp well)

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Alright I've got another story about a bloated trainwreck of a game. This is another one with the same extended roleplaying group as the Fate/Stay Night game, and it had the same structural tendency to take on huge amounts of bloat - by the time I joined, there were something like 4 GMs and 8 PCs, each of whom were in charge of multiple characters that weren't always fully aligned with each other. I joined when Liz, one of the GMs, told me that she was having trouble doing right by all the NPCs she was in charge of. She explained one of the factions she played to me and asked me if I'd be interested in taking them on, and since I was always looking for RPG opportunities and she seemed stressed out about it, I agreed to sign on. I figured I'd be helping solve an overcomplication problem, though in retrospect I was obviously contributing to it.

Let's back up a bit and explain the initial premise of the game. It's billed as a sorta post-apocalyptic urban fantasy survival horror joint that takes place in a massive apartment complex that got sealed off by the future fascist government a few decades ago for ominous and vague reasons. There's something like 50,000 folks in there, and not nearly enough food to keep the population stable. Over time, most of the surviving residents have coalesced into a handful of "nations" organized around economic and defensive interests, nascent cultural ties, and shared understandings of what the hell's going on in this building. Each player starts out playing one mid-level representative of a specific nation, with an initial adventure hook of "there's a diplomatic conference that concerns all your nations, and you're the folks who are at the right nexus of responsible and expendable, so you're attending this meeting that might well be a trap".

An important wrinkle, and one of the reasons I hadn't joined up with the game until Liz pitched me on taking over part of her NPCing duties, was that this game already had a pretty sordid history. This was like the fourth run of it, by my counting. It had originally been written and GMed some five years ago by Eva, a published high-concept sci-fi author who had a reputation in this RPing group as someone who ran incredibly fascinating, intense, and emotionally draining games. I don't know what happened in that first run, but I know a lot of my friends were in the second run and most seemed miserable throughout. And then the third run happened halfway across the country and apparently involved one of the PCs eating most of the others? But three of those friends in that miserable second run were now on the GM team for this fourth run, so I figured I was getting a slanted take on the game because I'd become the designated person to vent to. And besides, now that they were at the helm alongside Eva, they'd be able to steer away from the pitfalls that made them miserable before, right?

As far as what actually made this game a trainwreck, the first big stumbling block is that it's fundamentally sold to the PCs on false premises. When they join up, they're essentially given the spiel I described above, with the added wrinkle of "there also appears to be at least one primitive god in this building, and you can make minor miracles happen by praying to them". But it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that these initial characters you've made are a canard and that the god powers are what really matter, because that initial diplomatic event is explicitly written to be as boring as possible in order to nudge players toward tossing around their god powers just to make something happen. See, this is really a god game all along, and you get to start playing as the nascent god of your nation as soon as your human character dies. So if you've gotten invested in the character you've been roleplaying this whole time because that's the game you signed up for, you get penalized in comparison to the guy who says "Yeah, fuck it, I'm done with this. Gimme control over the god and the whole nation".

Now, while moving to a national and divine power level definitely strips away that primal, claustrophobic, survival horror-esque feeling that serves as one of the game's big selling points, it definitely doesn't convert everything into smooth sailing. It turns out that the diplomatic tensions between the nations are even more important now that everything's at a divine scale, because one of these infant gods has to end up as "king" of the pantheon. The game's metaphysics operate on one of those "belief generates power" deals, and it turns out most of the gods played by the GM team have read the manual on how to most efficiently grind belief and devotion from their nations and thus make themselves the strongest gods around. Accordingly, a PC using their newfound divine powers to do anything too drastic tends to be tamped down by one of these stronger gods, OR the ancient full-fledged god who's been hanging around this building the whole time, OR the mysterious witch who can enslave gods. PCs are mostly encouraged to color within the lines: they should grind up their god's stats, advance national interests in small-scale ways at the expense of nations they don't like, and grovel before omnipotent NPCs whenever necessary.

This is all before I even joined the game, keep in mind, and all without even mentioning the player who made Danny from the Fate Stay/Night game look like a model citizen as far as PC cooperation and reasonable roleplaying assumptions go. I can go real deep with this one, depending on thread interest, because it's a truly rich vein of structural problems and dysfunctional interpersonal interactions.

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Doodmons posted:

I have a real problem with GMs pitching one game and then running something completely different to that without telling you. It can work really well if the GM knows the group really well and if they trust the GM not to get it wrong, but considering the GM basically starts the game by lying to all their friends it's really risky. I don't know why people do this.

Yeah for real. I had always just assumed that the players were told about this shift in focus when they signed up, or that the former players from the second run had at least corrected that now that they were GMs, but apparently not. Would it be surprising if I told you that Eva was also the main writer and GM for that Renaissance game I wrote about a little bit back, where low-intensity hijinks gradually gave way to world-crushing angst? Because, uh

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt II

That's kinda Eva's MO in general, as far as I can tell. This game's not quite the same kind of 180 tonal shift, but it totally is the case that the early goings have the same kind of gallows humor among the post-apocalyptic setting that you might find in, say, Fallout. These folks are cut off from the modern world, so they don't know the actual terms for things, and you end up with some goofy "yes and" revisionist history. For example, the nation that maintains the building's library is pretty terrible at that job, so it's in their national character sheet that Hitler and Gargamel are both great historical villains from the outside world and probably allies. Wacky!

That stuff is sorta designed to fade into the background as the game goes on, though, because all the pronouncements it actually makes about history and setting are cartoonishly bleak. For example, the reason this building's been sealed off in the first place has to do with a cataclysmic war going on between the world's two main superpowers, Oceania and Eurasia (yeah as far as I can tell there's no actual connection to 1984 beyond "this is a dystopia"). The building's in Oceania, which is a sci-fi fascist hellhole that's killed off all its gods by being overly rational scientists, and which is getting its shit kicked in by Eurasia, a much less technologically advanced country that contains most of the pantheons from real-world historical societies (though weirdly enough, the only ones that show up are from pantheons you learn about in grade school...?) and has priests that throw around impossibly powerful miracles on the battlefield.

So the Fucked Up Hell Building was created when a preposterously evil scientist on the Oceanic government's payroll suggested they cram a bunch of folks, including a bunch of Totally Dangerous Mental Patients, into the worst environment possible in the hope that these folks will devolve into a primordial societal state and eventually cry out into the void for something to save them, and that'll result in some gods. If you're thinking, "Wait, that seems like a dubious military strategy, since you have to wait for the people in the building to forget the outside world and form primitive cultures and religions", it's all good because it apparently only takes ~20 years for all of this to happen. If you're thinking, "Wait, that seems like it would only generate a specific type of god because what does, say, Hephaestus have to do with providing comfort and salvation in the face of oblivion", it's all good because every kind of god comes from that same process.

Which I can deal with, I guess? They're pretty big reaches, but I can roll with some setting abstractions if the concept of the game calls for them. It's only been 20 years because there's a bunch of NPCs involved in the initial creation of the Fucked Up Hell Building that Eva wanted to still be around, and there's that weird unified model for how gods are born because Eva wanted to let PCs define their gods broadly while keeping them on the same rule set. So it all makes... some kind of sense? As long as it makes the actual environment of the building a rich and compelling one to play in. Unfortunately, in practice, it mostly means that the building has an excuse to get crammed full of as much torture, rape, slavery, and cannibalism as possible. All that high-concept backstory kinda just ends up as justification for why there's a dozen torture porn movies going on in the background at any given time.

It also means that, like I mentioned before, effecting any kind of positive change is a huge uphill battle against the whims of the GMs, even when you have a god on your side. There's a being in the building called the Primordium that's there to serve as an enemy to the pantheon, and it goes around rampaging and exploding shit throughout the building and undoing most of the gains that PCs work towards in terms of making things better. Whichever god kills the Primordium gets to be king of the pantheon, so get to work grinding belief out of your nation faster than all the other PCs are, because that's the only way you're ever actually going to be able to make things better, and because that's how Eva explicitly defines "winning the game" once she finally lays all the cards out on the table. Incidentally, the Primordium was formed after the lead scientist on the Fucked Up Hell Building project subjected his son to decades of torture and abuse, because of course it was.

Of course, killing the Primordium doesn't actually solve the core issue of "we are at the mercy of the GMs' ability to fuck everything over at any time they want", because like I mentioned in my last post, there's a whole mess of uber-powerful gods out there and once they become aware of you, you're in charge of making sure they don't immediately kill you. If you've ground out your stats efficiently and become king of the pantheon, your divine stat total at this point might be somewhere around a few hundred? But Apollo is out there with a stat total "in the million", with the ability to instantly, fatally snipe you from any point in the world, and with prophetic powers that mean that literally any plan against him will get instantly discovered and foiled unless it's put together in a special prophecy-proof room. So functionally, you better be ready to spend a session or two grovelling before Apollo and his pals.

This is all, I feel like, a product of Eva's very specific and very weird understanding of what power dynamics inherently involve (hint: a lot of grovelling). More on that topic in Pt III, where I finally get to the subject of the character I was assigned.

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Kavak posted:

This sounds like a fascinating premise

Yeah, definitely! There's definitely a reason that Eva keeps drawing in players for her games despite all of her previous games devolving into miserable trainwrecks. She has a lot of creative talent, she's mostly just missing all the other skills that lead to a successful RPG. From what I can tell her non-RPG writing, while still sometimes bleak to the point where I have to tap out, is much better.

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Captain Bravo posted:

So let me get this straight. The entire point of the game is to become King God. You do this by defeating the God-Killer. But once you do, there's a shitton of other gods which completely dwarf him in power that will push your shit in if they think you're too uppity? So the entire point of the game is to bypass your limitations and become the master of your domain, just so you can then be sixteenth-fiddle to old money and serve them abrosia in their parlors while they laugh about the squabbling peasants you recently were one of?

What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Yeah this is a pretty depressingly accurate read, with a few small caveats. I think there IS some hope that the PCs will eventually get out from under the thumb of the old money gods, especially once they get access the entire population of Oceania as potential believers, not just the ~50k people in the building. So you can theoretically get past that if the game goes long enough, but guess how many runs of this game have gone long enough! The only paradigm I've ever seen the game have is "I'm trying my best to help these people below me that trust me and rely on me, while also worrying about the people above me who can invalidate that at a moment's notice if I don't play nice." In that way, it functions admirably as a Corporate Middle Management Hell Simulator.

Now, I know I promised in my last post that I'd start talking about the actual characters I was in charge of, but after speaking to a former player I've realized there's still a lot to cover, so that'll have to wait for another installment. In the meantime,

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt III

I'd like to dive a little deeper into the life cycle of a PC. I've already mentioned how Eva keeps her cards close to her chest in a way that leads to fundamental bait-and-switches, but there's actually a few layers to that. Here's how the character creation process works: first, you're given a document about the overall setting, including brief overviews on all the nations in the building. You tell the GMs, "I'm interested in playing someone from this nation, this nation, or maybe this nation." Though there's a limit of one PC per nation, everything is still framed as making a single character, not taking ownership of the whole nation. You're then given what's called a "Sheet of No Return" for each nation that you expressed interest in, which rates the nations on a five-point scale across the following metrics:

- How evil are you really?

- How likely is it you will come into direct conflict with other players?

- How much out-of-session extra time will you likely need to put in?

- How high-risk is your character's arc?

- How hard is it to achieve your character goals?

- How much subterfuge will you be caught up in?

- How many secrets will you need to keep?

Now, all of these are useful things to know before making a character commitment, but we can already see some problems. First off, a question like "how hard is it to achieve your character goals?" only even makes sense if you're already assuming character goals are the same as national goals, because otherwise how could the GMs know how difficult a PC's goals are when that PC doesn't even exist yet? Moreover, questions like "How much evil?" and "How many secrets?" seem really hard to fully answer with just a five-point scale, leading to multiple examples of players who signed up for a nation without realizing just what they'd gotten themselves into.

So once you've reviewed a nation's Sheet of No Return and accepted it, you're given a "Stage 1" document about that nation. It's about 12 pages long, and includes information on the history, cultural identity, capabilities, secrets, and diplomatic ties of your nation. There's also a few sample character concepts to help you brainstorm your character, and requirements for where you need to allocate (preposterously bloated homebrew system) stats if you're going to play someone from this nation. Nothing explicitly divine is mentioned yet, except some notes tucked away in your secrets and capabilities that mention that your character will be able to access some maybe-supernatural abilities and you probably don't want to let outsiders know about them.

It's only once that character's died that you get a "Stage 2" document that fills you in on the backstory, initial identity, and mechanics of your new divine character. You're then generally given wholesale control over the nation, with a few limitations that vary from nation to nation. You're also encouraged to create at least one new mortal character because your infant god will need someone to act as a vessel or prophet, but at this point you're in charge of everyone. Your Stage 2 document lists a pretty specific set of political goals that you're now responsible for advancing, so whatever new mortal PC you make should probably be in a position to help advance those goals. If you signed onto a nation hoping to play a character with a complicated relationship to his or her national values, sorry. You are now required, at least initially, to stand by and advance all of the dominant values of your nation.

There's also the matter of divine mechanics, which are utterly crucial to the game once Stage 2 starts but are intensely obfuscated from the PCs (with the exception of any PCs who have hotlines to NPCs involved in the creation of the Fucked Up Hell Building project, who can just get that info whenever they want). You have three core stats that contribute to your overall divine strength: Belief, Domain, and Self. Belief is how many folks worship you and how intensely they worship you, Domain is how many concepts you've rolled up into your portfolio, and Self is how well-defined you are as an entity. Domain and Self can be kinda tricky to separate, but the gist is that Domain covers things like "I am a god of nature, of animals, of the hunt", and Self is more like "I manifest as a taciturn, sharp-eyed huntress with the horns of a great stag".

Grinding belief is pretty straightforward once you get the gist of it, but you can work yourself into a pretty permanent hole if you don't immediately systematize it by having your clergy toss around flashy miracles and aggressively evangelize to your people. Grinding self is also pretty much of telling the GMs things about your god and getting numbers in return, though I should mention there's also a preposterous trap option where you can get a big one-time Self boost by declaring "I'm this deity from an existing religious tradition". The cost is that the GMs, from then on, get to veto any action you take if they feel it's inconsistent with [their understanding of] that deity, but thankfully nobody I know actually fucked up by taking that option. The real fuck-ups come from attempts to grind Domain.

The way it works is you give the GMs a list of 1-2 domains that you want to go for during this "round", and they either veto it (too disjointed from your existing identity, too broad/powerful, etc.) or they approve it. Once it's approved, your god reaches a god tentacle into the god sea and tries to pick up that domain. If nobody else currently has that domain, congratulations! You have acquired it, and you can slot it into a body part - e.g. you carry Fire in your eyes. But if someone else DOES already have it, you reach your god tentacle at them and attempt to rip it out. If you fail, the status quo stays intact, but if you succeed, you rip out some limb or organ from this other god and add it to yourself. Note that at this point, divine PCs likely haven't met the other gods yet, and might not even know that other gods exist at all. That's right, there's a completely secret PVP system that you might accidentally trigger by filling out a routine request from the GMs, and if you do too well at it, you're dismembering and traumatizing another PC.

So knowing all of that, let's finally talk about the specific experience of one of the players. When Chris looked at the initial setting document, a nation called the Bordermen caught his eye. They're a well-respected warrior nation that lives on the lower floors of the building and sorta acts like a Night's Watch against the constant threat of "Them Below", the spooky monsters that prowl the bottom few floors and make escaping the building through the front door impossible. Chris saw their Sheet of No Return, saw that they rated pretty highly on the evil and secrets scales, but he was hyped enough about the concept of the nation that he figured he'd go through with it. After all, he could always play a naive and idealistic Borderman who didn't know the full extent of his nation's evil secrets.

Spoiler: those secrets are mostly torture and slavery, and the Bordermen are selfish and bloodthirsty assholes who take advantage of the building's gratitude to them for keeping the monsters at bay. Chris wasn't too enthused about this, but since he was just playing the one character and he was already too far in to choose another nation, he figured he could roll with it. After all, surely the Bordermen needed some useful idiots at the front lines in order to keep up their heroic reputation with the other nations, right? So he kept going and had a pretty fun time until he hit Stage 2 and was told that he's now playing Shamshir, the vicious God of Damnation, and all the warmongering sadists under his control.

Chris was incredibly uncomfortable with all of this, and voiced his concerns almost immediately. Lexi, the lead GM on this run, reassured him that this was just the starting point for Shamshir, and he'd be able to develop this god into different directions. Chris figured that since he had national control, he should start the long process of reshaping the Bordermen into a nation that he'd be remotely comfortable playing, and created a splinter group within the nation called the Order of Resolve. They were idealistic heretics that worshipped Shamshir as a sort of boisterous bro-paladin God of Heroes, and Chris's idea was that their vision of Shamshir would slowly influence and redeem him. Lexi thought this was a great idea and signed off on it as long as Chris understood that the change wasn't happening overnight.

Eva, however, wasn't as pleased. To her, the fact that the Bordermen were secretly evil was a key component of balancing the national/divine PVP metagame. The Bordermen were militarily powerful and had strong diplomatic and trade ties across the tower due to their well-respected role, so Eva argued that there had to be a moment where everyone realized how awful they were and turned against them. Chris spent months and months working through this personally meaningful arc where the Bordermen overcame their national demons and were truly inspired to be their best selves, and even capped it off by playing out a civil war wherein the Order of Resolve overthrew the ruling Bordermen junta, putting a significant dent in their military capabilities due to the significant casualties on both sides.

At every step of the way, Eva tried to block Chris and insisted that he was cheating, even as Chris cut himself off from a lot of interaction with other PCs because playing out this cultural shift within the Bordermen mattered that much to him. Thankfully, all of this DID help him steer clear of those domain-grabbing landmines, since the other PCs generally understood the idea that "Shamshir is going for every domain tied to the idea of being a dopey bro-paladin god, let's give him that room to breathe".

On a broader level, Eva's attitude toward Chris's arc was pretty endemic of her thoughts on PC "balance". Because the mechanical system was such a pile of flimflam and multiple sets of two-digit numbers added to d100 rolls, she turned to largely qualitative means to ensure balance once things hit the divine/national level. Something like "your people are strong and well-fed" was balanced against "you have knowledge of what the world was like before the Fucked Up Hell Building" was balanced against "you control the building's primary transportation network" was balanced against "other nations like you".

In theory, I could see something like that working, but it was so heavily based on the PCs interacting exactly like Eva predicted they would. If a PC decided to share their nation's secret knowledge for the broader good of the building, or if they decided to forgive another nation when a dark secret came to light, that wasn't just a roleplaying choice to Eva. That was an attempt to subvert the carefully balanced systems she'd put in place, and it should be treated as such. Of course, since she'd handed the lead GM reins off to Lexi and was involved as a secondary GM and setting resource, it was possible to overrule her. But since she still commanded a lot of respect and admiration for having put together such a deep and rich game, even Lexi deferred to her way more often than she should have.

Alright that's all for today. Stay tuned for Pt IV, where unless I come to another major realization, I promise I'll actually start talking about who I played. We'll also meet Justin, probably the single most incomprehensible and adversarial player I've ever seen in an RPG. See you dorks then!!!

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Kavak posted:

I already know the answer, but if the factions reacting to certain developments a specific way was so goddamn important for the story, why did she let the players have any control over that? I'm actually okay with being railroaded a little if the setting's interesting enough (I.E. cut out the pantheon bullshit.)

It's a good question. I think the answer has a lot to do with how much Eva values players getting emotionally invested in her games. She reasons that players need a sense of ownership and investment in what's happening to their characters, in order for the big dramatic and traumatic moments to actually land with impact. And in that sense, she's right! It turns out that if you've put a lot of thought and care into your character, another PC accidentally and arbitrary ripping their eyes out is going to feel awful. Hence she tries to only use those omnipotent NPCs as a last resort, because while she's very invested in the way the story is "supposed to go", she'd much rather have you make those "right choices" than have her omnipotent NPCs make those choices for you. I feel like it's a lot of why she can keep these games rolling for so long? If you do what she wants, things go relatively smoothly, and if you don't do what she wants, it just feels like "Whoops, I took a risk and got burned in this bleak post-apocalyptic setting" rather than "the GM is railroading me into her weird idea of game balance and a proper narrative arc".

This also extends to how she interacted with the other GMs. It might seem kinda weird that most of this stuff is about Eva when the lead GM on this run of the game was Lexi, but throughout the entire game, Eva kept Lexi in the dark about key setting details because it was "still her setting". So that kinda tells you about the power dynamic on the GM team, huh.

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NGDBSS posted:

Ladies and gentlemen, this right here is the difference between de jure and de facto.

Haha yeah definitely. It was slightly more complicated than that, e.g. how Lexi allowed Chris to play out his Order of Resolve arc over Eva's protests, but it was definitely a situation where Eva would keep setting details to herself until she could set up "Well, actually" moments to soft-railroad the other GMs and players onto her preferred narrative track.

Alright, you guys ready to finally hear about what I was doing in all of this? Cool, because it's time to meet the charming Fishermen in today's installment of

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt IV

So like I mentioned way back in Pt I, Liz mentioned that she was getting overwhelmed with playing multiple NPC nations and asked if I'd like to take over one of the ones she was responsible for. These folks were the Fishermen, one of the few nations that's explicitly an NPC nation rather than just getting shoved into an NPC role if nobody picks them. There's a few legitimate diamonds in the rough with them, and I tried my best to salvage what I was handed, but they definitely dive headfirst into the bland, over-the-top evil endemic to the setting. They also serve as a great demonstration of how incredibly disorganized and adversarial the GM team could be, and how easy the game made it to assume that incredibly fucked-up interpersonal dynamics were "just the way it is". Let's begin, shall we?

The Fishermen are a relatively secure and prosperous nation that draws most of their power from their status as one of the building's two main food producers. They've got four distinct but allied "kingdoms" on floors 15, 25, 35, and 45 of the building, each of which is centered around a huge pool filled with tilapia. They also control the slave trade in the building, and host gladiatorial games - they've definitely got a vibe of piecing together half-remembered reverence for great classical empires, sorta like Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas. One of the things that drew me in to them is that they've got a sort of good-cop-bad-cop vibe with their four kingdoms, wherein the lower floors are full of active and unapologetic brutality, while the upper floors put a veneer of gentility and paternalism over the whole institutional slavery thing. Behind the scenes, all of their kingdoms get along really well, and the different presentations serve primarily as a diplomatic smokescreen. If someone from 15 crosses the line with their brutality and sparks an international incident, we can depose them and have someone from 45 take over to put a nice face on it for a while, or vice versa.

They also define themselves, as soon as the gods show up, as the explicitly anti-god nation. They've got spooky blasphemous weapons made of priest bones that can cut gods, and the more powerful and fervent Fishermen even have a sort of magic resistance that lets them reject miracles. So if they hadn't already alienated the PCs before with their slave-trading, sadism, and general decadence, they step into an antagonist role pretty explicitly once everyone gets gods and they're running around chanting "No gods no masters, Ron Paul 2012". It gets even worse when the PCs inevitably realize that the Fishermen have their own god like every other nation, they're just keeping her enslaved and forcing her to work miracles for them under the threat of spooky divine torture.

By the time I joined, the game was already well into Stage 2 and the PCs were very familiar with the Fishermen's awful ways. Apparently Liz had been playing them in a scattershot way, treating them as either "wave after wave of evil Fishermen grunts charge at you with god-killing spears" and "a calm, respectable Fishermen queen gives you a long lecture about mortal self-determination" interchangeably. They'd already suffered major military losses against the PC nations, and the PCs were about to launch a joint operation to free their enslaved god, so I did wonder why the GMs needed a new person to take them over if their arc seemed to be coming to an end. It seems like it'd make sense to wipe them out with that operation and have them serve as A) a demonstration that the arrival of the gods meant that things finally could get better in the Fucked Up Hell Building on an institutional level and B) a chilling reminder to the gods that fear-driven mortals are capable of great acts of cruelty and blasphemy.

The GMs insisted that they were fully on board with me joining up and wanted the Fishermen to stay on as a major villainous player, so I said alright and got to work thinking of ways to rescue them from their imminent fate as a rump state. I decided to focus on some seeds that existed in the already-existing character of Peter Rabbit, the 15-year-old genius sociopath secret supreme ruler of the Fishermen (yeah I know), whom Liz seemed to have mostly ignored as an actual character. The two things that piqued my interest most about him were that he had a public cover identity as a sullen, rebellious bastard prince that the rest of the Fishermen nobility looked down on, and that he had conned his way into a research assistant position with one of the scientists behind the original Fucked Up Hell Building project, who'd been tossed into the building with everyone else when it was sealed off. That gave Peter both a strong platform to take advantage of the aforementioned good-cop-bad-cop angle, and enough knowledge of the mechanisms of divine creation to interface with the god-level stuff in a more nuanced way than "we single-mindedly hate gods and still stab them whenever we see them".

Accordingly, when he got word that the other nations were knocking on his door and breaking out his enslaved god, Peter engaged a last-ditch plan and drank a "turn you into a god, or maybe kill you?" potion that he'd pilfered from the scientist. The potion was successful, and he transferred his consciousness to the divine realm in an attempt to kill the enslaved Fishermen god (still played by Liz) before the others could free her. It was too late, though, and he had to improvise by taking the form of a cute white rabbit and pulling a "I'm scared and am only only attacking because I think you're all here to kill me" routine. The PCs were super-suspicious at first but gradually bought into the cover story: this infant rabbit god, Lightfoot, had been created and raised in secrecy and isolation by that one surly prince, Peter Rabbit. Peter had been ordered by the ruling Fishermen to steal a "god-seed" from the project scientist, but couldn't bring himself to hand over another god to a life of slavery, so he faked Lightfoot's death and raised him in secret, with the eventual goal of overthrowing the cruel slavery of the Fishermen.

There were definitely still some holdouts, but most of the PCs quickly accepted the idea that this Peter kid was probably still an asshole but at least he was a rebel with a cause, and that this Lightfoot god was naive and sheltered but had his heart in the right place and could grow into a productive member of the pantheon if they all pitched in and taught him right. Meanwhile, Peter could infiltrate and destabilize the pantheon in his divine Lightfoot identity, and could put up an effective smokescreen around the Fishermen's blatant evil in his mortal identity. After all, if there's already a faction of Fishermen who want to overthrow their terrible shit, maybe we should support that coup instead of just invading wholesale and carving up their territory. The broader narrative idea was to transition the Fishermen from a pack of super-obvious villains shouting "We hate the good thing!" at nobody in particular to an exploration of how toxic power structures can obfuscate in order to perpetuate themselves, e.g. American slavery transitioning into sharecropping and Jim Crow. That, I figured, would let Peter/Lightfoot survive long enough to grow into a legitimate threat and eventually get taken down in a climactic fashion before the PCs moved onto bigger threats like the Primordium, the outside gods, etc.

Unfortunately, Liz was still maintaining partial control over the Fishermen as a sort of transition period, and I learned too late that she had some real weird ideas about what the Fishermen were all about. It turns out that she was really into that whole "principled, respectable anti-theists" angle, despite the fact that the Fishermen had literally zero opinions about gods until Peter learned of their existence, freaked out because his megalomania couldn't handle the idea of someone more powerful than him, and told the other nobles, "Hey, these gods are going to take your slaves away unless we enslave them first". Liz had apparently been conducting a long-term negotiation, without letting me know, where one of the Fishermen queens would agree to give up all of her kingdom's slaves if the gods agreed to leave the remaining Fishermen alone. That's... I don't even know how to react to that, that's like Tea Partiers agreeing to abolish the Second Amendment as long as Obama promises not to use all the guns he's just grabbed to infringe on their freedom.

She also had apparently wildly misinterpreted the long-term plans for the Fishermen, and decided to have a letter reading "Hi, here is our entire evil plan, including the stuff where Lightfoot is secretly awful, Peter Rabbit's revolution is just a smokescreen, and the only way to solve anything is to dismantle the entire Fishermen nobility" fall into the hands of one of the other nations. When she told me she was going to do that, I was a bit concerned and asked if she was sure that this is what the other GMs wanted, and she reassured me that it definitely was and she'd confirm with them that this was all on the level before she went forward. Turns out the only thing she confirmed with the GMs was that the specific miracle that'd allow the PC to intercept the letter would work, and she failed to mention the whole "blowing open everything about the Fishermen and kneecapping Jenny's attempts to make them an actual threat" angle.

Accordingly, the letter made its way into PC hands, and while Lexi, Eva, and Charlie (the last GM) confirmed that this wasn't even slightly the plan, the verdict was "welp, it happened, so let's deal with it in-character now, I guess". I was a little uneasy with that, but it made some sense, since it's hard to tell a PC, "Hey, that letter you just received in-character? Actually ignore all of it, it's not canon anymore." So I set up a plan to have Peter walk into an obvious trap from that PC with the hopes of convincing them that the letter was just him trying to keep the other Fishermen nobles from squashing his revolution before it even started. On the plus side, it worked, and Peter was no longer in danger of getting exposed! On the minus side, the PC in question was Justin. Which meant that during the course of that encounter, he decided he needed to hypnotize, torture, and sexually assault Peter, and then to try and kill him with black holes after Peter convinced his characters that he was on the level.

Justin's a weird fuckin' dude. He's also the focus of the upcoming Pt V, so get ready for some weird shit. It's going to be a guest post by Ben, a good friend who was a PC and who had a lot more direct interaction with Justin's bullshit.

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Happy Friday, dorks! I'm real happy today, because I've got a nice long weekend ahead of me and also because I got to outsource today's edition of Fucked Up Hell Building to Ben, the aforementioned PC who was much closer to Justin's fuckery. I should also note that I'm really happy to see the discussion around Justin centering on "here's why allowing evil PCs is so dangerous", because guess what, Justin was one of those PCs who'd write "Chaotic Good" on his sheet and then do all of that terrifying shit anyway. How the hell does that work? Find out in

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt V

Ben posted:

Justin was, well, let’s start with this: Justin created a gmail account for this RPG, because he normally refused to use Google due to privacy issues. OK, I thought, that’s a little eccentric but it’s not like there aren’t privacy worries one could have. I really should have thought about what that eccentricity was going to mean to the general game. A game, to be clear, that was founded on paranoia, information asymmetry, and vicious antagonism between PCs. But, then again, I didn’t know those would be the foundation of PC interactions when I signed on. Funny how that works out. Justin would go on to be the single worst player I have ever played with in any capacity. It's a real indictment of the Fucked Up Hell Building that it encouraged his pathologies let him pass as just a dedicated player for so long.

In this particular game, I was playing the Residentials, or Rezzies - the nation of random whackaloons with no nation. This was because I’d heard this game could get ugly and I wanted the least involved group, and I was drawn to the creative freedom I’d have in the apparently rich and interesting apartment complex setting playing random weird tribes in the halls. I was a fool. When my god showed up, it was more defined than any other, due to Plot Things, so I was suddenly playing a horse skeleton god of death with a thousand severed arms, far more powerful than any two other PCs combined, with the mind of a friendly child terminally unable to say no to friends and written to basically never use that power. Yeah, that high ringing noise is the alarm bells I should have heard.

Justin, meanwhile, was assigned possibly the most desirable nation in the game, the Highwaymen. These are the gullible but gallant idiots who have an extensive library, think Gargamel took part in WWII, run around calling themselves knights, and are generally a barrel of monkeys kind of fun. They don’t have any dark secrets, their sworn enemies are straightforwardly evil, they have allies and resources, and a library-god has a lot of obvious options for character design. The first domain this god is assigned is Stories – so, all fiction, myth, and history. Pretty sweet gig for a god, honestly.

I didn’t interact with Justin’s mortals much, so I didn’t know this until much later, but his first decision on taking command of this society was to start a campaign of paranoid militarization. He fortified the library and everything he could reach, and barring access to the (previously open) collection of knowledge. But the real problems only started with the arrival of the Highwayman god that Justin. I made friends with the god, named ‘Alexander,’ the first time I met him, because why not? I was a fool.

The first time I met Alexander, Justin sent me a link to a competent, but deeply uncompelling, piece of art depicting an anthropomorphic dragon in pretty bog-standard D&D-style armor. This, he told me, was his end goal for his god’s appearance, he just didn’t have the domains for wings or weaponry yet. This wasn’t really any kind of warning sign, but in retrospect I feel like he began as he meant to go on, aesthetically and in terms of bringing his own ideas to the table before checking whether they fit.

The scene: The first time all the gods appear together in a neutral space. One of them is the sworn enemy of the Highwaymen, a real horrible piece of work called the Professor. Whatever - this is supposed to be a sizing-up opportunity. However, Alexander refuses to countenance anyone speaking to the Professor, at all, which really makes this meeting fun. It gets to the point that rather than let people talk to his enemy, Alexander attacks the Professor. That ends the meeting. So far, so paranoid, but the GMs are happy with this. Justin’s not, because people keep wanting to talk to the Professor - who, for the record, is a PC. How dare they! Don’t they know he’s evil!? Apparently not.

From this point on, Justin started waging one-god guerrilla war on the concept of diplomacy. He constantly tried to undermine any attempt to discuss things, stonewalled on every issue, and turned half the attempts to interact as a group into rants about the Professor. This didn’t get much done, and turned everyone but myself and a few NPCs against him. I was, OOC, ready to abandon him to his own devices, but my character as written would try to convince him to stop being a useless jerk. I was a fool.

During this extended period of the game, Justin and I got to know each other a bit outside of the game. We would have hours-long arguments about pointless stuff late at night, often about the game. He was always completely certain that I simply did not perceive the obvious truth of what he said, and he always claimed to have more information than I did. Some of this information turned out to be blatantly false, but I always assumed he’d been the victim of deceit, or forgot about it because it didn’t matter that much to me. He also tried to pull off a number of really dumb plans, a few of which I managed to at least talk him down from. He was always certain his next plan would change the whole status quo, or this new evidence he’d unearthed would completely change the game; most of the time these were completely irrelevant. He was, in short, a conspiracy theorist. Incidentally, he was a conspiracy theorist in real life, too, but we thankfully avoided talking politics much.

Since a full chronicle of Justin’s terrible decisions would be far, far, far too long to real, I’ll just give two examples. Once, he accidentally ripped the skin off of another god, because that skin was the ‘Stealth’ domain. This god (thankfully an NPC) was basically writhing in pain for an entire session, while Alexander insists his new, bloody invisibility cloak has nothing to do with the flayed god. When I tell him that it obviously does, he declares me a terrible friend, plays the victim, and insists that his new invisibility cloak domain is something else entirely. Eventually I use my stupidly high numbers to grab it off him and stick it on the other god, fixing the problem and earning a round of sulking on his part. He never admitted that I was right, and I suspect he really didn’t believe I was. Don’t ask me how that works.

Two, there was his consistent choice of domains: Big, impressive things like ‘light’ and ‘gravity’ that barely had any connection to the Highwayman core god-concept, but that he thought would make good weapons (which isn’t really how weaponizing domains worked). When another PC told him they were avoiding taking the domains of a knowledge and wisdom god, so that the library-god of the library-people in the library-nation could take them, Alexander when off the handle. How dare we try to tell him what kind of god he was? He was going to be a fighter-god for his specific people, and he would fight anyone who said otherwise. In retrospect I’m glad neither of the existing gods of war and battle in the pantheon decided to weigh in on that.

So, that’s all baffling, antagonistic, and stupid. But what really gave me pause was something out of character: Justin doesn’t believe in anything between Truth and a Lie, with as much neurosis as those capital letters imply. If you’re wrong, in any particular or interpretation, you’re not just wrong. You’re lying. He’s the first person I’ve ever met with a toxic epistemology, not just a toxic personality. To Justin, there’s no such thing as an innocent mistake, and there’s not such thing as a metaphor, and there’s no such thing as incomplete knowledge. Lies, all of them. Further, the only true knowledge is what science tells us now, because any previous model of the universe is a lie, has always been a lie, and has always been morally culpable as a lie. He really hates lies, too.

I tried to talk him through at least a basic admission that ignorance isn’t the same as evil, especially given the inevitability of certain kinds of ignorance. Nope! Everyone has a moral obligation to know everything, apparently. You’d expect him to sit out of anything he didn’t have perfect knowledge of, but, that would imply a basic self-awareness he did not possess. Instead, he just assumed anything he believed to be likely was completely true, as far as I can tell. Justin had no setting between ‘total ignorance’ and ‘total certainty’ because if he ever said something incorrect, that would be a lie. And he knew he wasn’t lying.

How did this interact with what he did in game? It meant he basically made things up constantly. Not just conscious lies – which, sure, he did that for the greater good as he saw it – but stupid mistakes where he invented entire new parts of the game, and entirely misinterpreted everything around him. Then, when this was proved wrong (again) (and again) (and again) he would pinball to the next interpretation, never admitting to his mistakes. He completely misunderstood the obscured mechanics repeatedly, which is understandable – however, every time he thought he had the beginnings of an understanding, he went off like a rocket chasing the vague sense his pattern recognition had given him. This led him into more conflict with other gods, and maybe explains the whole ‘I-ripped-your-skin-off-but-won’t-admit-it’ thing, and sent him deeper into paranoid isolation.

Through all this, I was having pretty much weekly three-to-five hour conversations with Justin. They tended to start in-character, with me going ‘why you do these things you do’ and him responding ‘I AM THE ONLY MORAL PERSON IN THIS WORLD’ and it generally went in circles for a while, skipped in and out of character, and ended with me saying ‘Well we’re still friends, I guess, don’t get yourself killed. You idiot.’ I sent transcripts to the GMs, since they liked to keep an eye on out-of-session RP. At one point I went to Lexi and said this was draining and pointless, and could the GMs maybe take Justin aside and explain that this incredibly basic thing I was saying was in fact accurate, since I was really sick and tired of trying to make him agree that yes, the GMs had explicitly confirmed this for me OOC, so that probably made it true. GM response, paraphrased: ‘Thanks so much for taking up Justin’s attention! Really, it’s a big help.’ And that was it for GM support, until the grand slide into chaos began.

That’s when things really, really got fucked up. Because until then, Justin was keeping his internal pressures to himself, and to me, and to any attempt at reasonable discussion. He hadn’t really cut loose yet. That happened when Jenny’s character, Peter the jerk, got involved. And from there, things snowballed. I really didn’t believe Justin could get worse. I was a fool.

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I hope you doofuses had a good weekend! Ben will be back with the conclusion to the Justin saga tomorrow, but for now I've got plenty of my own material in the way of Justin horror stories. So get ready for

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt VI

So, how did I get involved with Justin? It started in the session where "Lightfoot" first showed up. One of the gods that Lightfoot had attacked while doing his "Get away from me, I'm scared" routine was Lily, a small and childlike NPC god that Alexander had developed a protective instinct toward. So while everyone else pretty much bought the scared kid story and started to trust Lightfoot, Alexander still wanted him to be punished and got promptly outvoted. I had an idea for how to take advantage of that dissenting opinion, but before going through with it I checked in with the GMs on how much hostility and manipulation was too much when it came to interacting with PCs, and the answer I got was pretty much "Sky's the limit, in fact this is your job. Go fuck him up". Since I had joined so late, I assumed that meant that there was already a healthy-if-adversarial dynamic and set of assumptions in place with the PCs, and that I could take the gloves off with Justin without causing any real issues. Like Ben, I was a fool.

Lightfoot visited all the other gods one by one on an Apology Tour, acting properly guilty and embarrassed and promising to not hurt anyone again. Since he spoke and acted like a sweet and naive kid, everyone pretty much accepted the apologies and reassured him. Importantly, he also mentioned to each of the gods he visited that he'd be going to see Alexander last, since Alexander was mean and scary, but he knew he had to eventually work up the courage to do it. When Lightfoot finally did meet with Alexander, he not only apologized but offered to subject himself to a punishment that Alexander thought was appropriate, even if the other gods didn't agree. Alexander declared that a reasonable punishment would be for Lightfoot to temporarily give one of his domains to Lily as compensation - he chose the domain of Fire specifically. Lightfoot agreed, but he had a trick up his sleeve - as a newly-formed child god, he still had the ability to move domains around and have them represent different parts of his body. Accordingly, he moved Fire to his eyes, removed them, and fumbled around blindly in the divine realm calling out for Lily and telling her how sorry he was.

When the other gods found out about this, they immediately went "Holy fuck Alexander, you made this kid rip his own eyes out?". Since I wanted to plant the seeds that Lightfoot wasn't on the level, I was banking on Alexander explaining what really happened and Lightfoot's own accounting of the exchange not quite adding up. Justin, however, had other ideas: Alexander simply snarled and scoffed and called Lightfoot an idiot and called the other gods idiots for believing him. By the time I tried to backpedal a bit and have Lightfoot tell the other gods that he offered to do it, Alexander didn't force him, etc., they were having none of it - quite understandably, they largely assumed that Alexander had browbeaten Lightfoot into doing it, and that Lightfoot was trying to take the blame off Alexander because he was still wracked with guilt and trying to be everyone's friend.

This was far from an auspicious start, but I was still willing to trust in the GM team's assurance that Justin was just a very principled player dedicated to playing an unpleasant, difficult-to-deal-with character. Things got way worse when I started interacting with him in the mortal realm - this is the torture session I mentioned a few installments ago. To give a bit more detail on the context, the Highwaymen had intercepted that letter that Liz wrote for whatever reason, and now had hard evidence that, at the very least, Peter and Lightfoot were both full of shit and were actively conspiring with the rest of the Fishermen to pull a fast one on the building. The Highwaymen sent an incredibly obvious trap invitation to Peter, telling him they had found a neat book on rabbits in their library and wanted to give it to him. Peter saw through it but wanted to make sure he knew what they knew and to nip any suspicions in the bud as soon as possible, so we agreed to meet them in their library. At worst, he figured he could use his divine abilities to get out of dodge if things went south.

When he arrived in Highwaymen territory, they bound him up in ropes and threw him down an elevator shaft, leaving him hanging upside down at the bottom of the shaft. A super-evil dude in parachute pants approached Peter and tried to hypnotize him, which didn't work because he was a god. Super-evil dude then asked Peter some basic questions and used his connection to Alexander to act as a divine lie detector... which again didn't work, because the GMs didn't want all of this unraveled immediately and gave me clearance to use my own divine abilities to block it. When Justin realized that he couldn't just get a 100% truth/lie reading on every statement from Peter, he flipped out both out-of-character and in-character, assaulting Peter viciously throwing around accusations like "You have lied on every question, or you have hidden your intentions - which is equivalent to a lie!" Eventually he grudgingly accepted that he'd have to have an actual conversation with Peter instead of instantly getting all the information he wanted. He insisted, however, on having his super-evil character strip Peter down and molest him with a feather while they were talking, and to tell me variants of "I just rolled an 83 on Facial Micro-Expressions - is he lying NOW?" every minute or two.

Eventually, Peter managed to convince the Highwaymen - and Justin - that the letter was full of shit, that it was something he'd sent in desperation to the other Fishermen after they discovered Lightfoot was a thing. When Peter told the Highwaymen about his plans to lead a revolution within the Fishermen with Lightfoot's aid, Justin started scoffing and speaking really condescendingly to Peter, telling him that there was nothing left to do, since the bad Fishermen on floors 15 and 25 were already pretty much out of power, and the pleasant friendly Fishermen on floors 35 and 45 were going to be in charge of all the fish pools now. Peter explained the whole good-cop-bad-cop con, and told the Highwaymen that they had no idea how dangerous the Fishermen really were if they thought they were almost done for. Justin was having none of it - even if everything this kid was saying was true, it made no difference that the Fishermen were as strong as ever and all the gains that the Highwaymen had made against them were illusory. The top priority was now imprisoning Peter Rabbit so that his plans for revolution wouldn't interfere with the Highwaymen's plans to ... do pretty much exactly what they'd been doing for the last several months to no actual effect.

Well, they did plan to make one change to their strategy, which was the other reason they wanted to imprison Peter even after deciding they believed his story about being a good-hearted if abrasive revolutionary. In Justin's understanding, the fact that Lightfoot had shown up after the rest of the gods meant it was possible to create as many new gods as you wanted, whenever you wanted, and that Peter knew how. This had no basis in reality, and ran completely contrary to the actual mechanics of divine creation. Still, the Highwaymen demanded that Peter tell them how to make new gods, and explained their plan to create a hundreds-strong army of super-powerful demigod soldiers and use them to crush the rest of the Fucked Up Hell Building beneath their heel. Peter was horrified and disgusted by that plan - both in his principled revolutionary cover identity, and on an earnest level, since it went completely against his philosophy of Proper Methods of Rule. He told the Highwaymen that even if such a method existed, he'd never tell them, and while they weren't convinced at all, they decided to take another tack and ask him who else would know. He gave up a name (Queen Manta of floor 35) and started pleading for his release, promising to coordinate his revolution with the other nations of the building and not to ruin "what the Highwaymen were working for".

They denied his request, and instead moved to transport him to a prison. Sensing that trying to convince them was quickly becoming a losing effort, Peter started mounting a divinely-empowered escape. For their part, the Highwaymen first responded by trying to stab him and shoot him full of arrows. When that didn't work, they escalated by using divine powers to throw black holes at Peter. To reiterate: at this point, these guys think Peter is completely on the level about his noble plans, but they're still trying to murder him with black holes because he won't agree to stay in their prison and give them a demigod army. He eventually manages to escape with heavy injuries and holes up in a safe room, sending divine messages to dispatch his agents to provide urgent medical care. Justin sends me some more condescending out-of-character messages telling me about how foolish Peter was not to just give the Highwaymen everything they wanted, and we wrap that encounter up.

I figure I'm (thankfully) done interacting with Justin for a while, until he sends me an email telling me he wants to run another one-on-one scene with me. Apparently, he's going to disguise one of his men as Peter while the real Peter is recovering in his safe room, then send the fake Peter to speak with Manta and get her to tell him how to create that demigod army. I figure the risk is probably low since he's now in my territory rather than the other way around, and agree to it. As soon as he starts the scene, it becomes apparent that there's a gaping hole in Justin's plan: he's basing his entire understanding of who Peter Rabbit is off that one conversation, and Peter had been feeding him bullshit the entire time.

I figure that maybe I can work with this! When "Peter" shows up and says that Lightfoot's been corrupted so they've got to start from scratch and Manta needs to tell him the entire god-making process again, in detail, I start dropping increasingly obvious hints that Peter had fed him a pack of lies. Queen Manta at first seems oddly deferential to this supposedly-despised bastard prince, and when he keeps acting deferential to her, she moves the conversation to a more private place and surreptitiously asks if they're being watched. When he presses her for details on how to make gods, she starts nervously bullshitting in an OOC attempt to make it clear that she has no idea what she's talking about on front because Peter gave up a meaningless name. When she finally figures out that this isn't the real Peter and thus isn't her boss, she first has a long, obvious moment of realization, then completely turns her behavior around and starts acting imperious and cruel towards this fake Peter. Even then, she seems to pause and stammer a bit when saying anything particularly cruel, to indicate how much of a "You disrespect me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize" hold her king has over her.

Justin picks up on none of this. I'm trying literally every trick in my book to clue him in on the fact that something suspicious is going on, short of having Manta outright say "Greetings, your majesty Peter Rabbit, who is secretly King of All Fishermen and who pretends publicly to be an outcast revolutionary in order to take the heat off our awful slavery that we're all really really into", but this dense motherfucker is having none of it. No matter how obvious and inept I make Manta's changes in attitude and behavior, he just keeps going to the "Tell me how to make this demigod army" well again and again. Eventually I figure there's no use trying to clue him in on the larger Fishermen plot without revealing the whole thing, so I give him an out by having Manta say something in the vein of "Enough of these games - it's obvious that you're a body double that Peter sent because he was too cowardly to come himself. You're merely doing the job your master gave you, so you can go free, but the next time you see Peter, tell him he will be punished for this deception". Justin tries one last time to get her to tell him how to make a demigod army (again: this doesn't exist), and then finally leaves.

Those are the only significant interactions I had with Justin throughout the game, but it turns out they had a lot of impact. While he was already isolated from most of the other PCs due to his antagonistic and unreasonable nature, it turns out the fallout from that first incident with Lightfoot was a sort of tipping point that sent him on the irrevocable path to Final Justin Meltdown. What did that consist of? Why, you'll find out in Pt VII!

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Mendrian posted:

I will never understand the way game mechanize lie detection.

It would have been far more engaging for you and for Justin if he could simply choose whether or not to believe Peter, but no, he has to keep throwing tests against each statement so he can have proof of whether or not he's right.

I mean, I agree wholeheartedly in theory, which is why I tried to lean on actual narrative cues in that conversation he had with Queen Manta as opposed to reading out "Uhhh yeah she rolled a 71 on faking a power dynamic, see if you can beat that". But apparently, if he didn't have the ability to throw dice rolls at every line in the conversation, he was completely lost as far as picking up obvious clues.

Which, I mean, he's constantly willfully dense. You all get that by now. But I don't think you'll appreciate just how willfully dense until you read

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt VII

Ben posted:

As you have by now become well aware, Justin was a ticking time bomb. His paranoia and self-righteousness, combined with the hands-off brinksmanship of the GM team, ultimately led to a literal explosion. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Prior to Justin’s assault on Peter, he had not exactly endeared himself to anyone involved in the game. As I've said, he was duplicitous in an obvious and unenjoyable way, in and out of character, he took moral stances that gained no ground with the entire rest of the group, and his manner was abrasive. In short, he had no real support in any of his initiatives. The closest he had to an ally was me, and by this point I was becoming thoroughly sick of him. Part of that was just that talking to him was, and I quote my younger self to a GM: “Like running through steel wool” (GM reply: “Yeah, it’s like that for everyone”, which... should have implied steps were being taken, but apparently it did not), and part of it was that he had no respect for me or mine whatsoever.

A good illustration of this was when I tried to convince him to stop eating the souls of the Highwayman dead. This was sort of a rite of passage for almost all the gods: they started off eating the souls of their dead to grow, and eventually they were supposed to realize that this was fucked and let me take the souls into the afterlife. I was, after all, the assigned God of Death, I was the psychopomp, and I had the infrastructure to house dead souls. Most gods, while not immediately willing to give up such a source of power, pretty quickly saw my point re: dissolving souls into themselves as fuel.

But Alexander wasn't, which shouldn't be surprising by now. This happened shortly after the Lightfoot’s Eyes debacle, so he was on edge. He insisted that every soul that he ate was whole, independent, and happy within him as a complete person. When asked to prove this, he displayed a memory-shade of a Highwayman, which the GMs described as very explicitly a shade – I compared this to a ghost of a Highwayman I’d acquired at random earlier, taken from the Underworld. His response to these efforts to help was to cuss me out, say my loving adopted parents (the infinity-strength NPC Hermes who was hiding in the Tower from Apollo, and Circe, yes that Circe, an NPC witch who could enslave young gods - sometime I should explain how absolutely idiotic and bizarre my character sheet turned out to be) were evil and I should dump them, and explicitly declare that he knew the mechanics of death better than I did.

We weren’t on great terms at this point – and I was still the closest thing to a friend and ally he had in the pantheon.

Meanwhile, he’d also discovered that the same scientist who set his godhood in motion during the initial stages of the Fucked Up Hell Building project was also the father of the Primordium. He decided that this meant the rest of the pantheon weren’t his real family, and we were all liars and evil, and he should go let the Primordium out of its box. Which would kill everyone, almost without recourse. As far as I know, the GMs told him this, and he went ahead anyways. I mean, what else was he going to do? Nobody could stand him, he’d alienated everyone but one GMNPC who had no power and was annoying to boot, and he continued to be the one to force conflict with everyone else. Apparently now was the time for bold action.

Around now he also sent an incredibly dumb letter to Circe, trying to convince her he knew her secrets and she should do what he wanted. The letter literally got the name of every involved character wrong, and all it accomplished was to enrage her. Meanwhile, OOC, the GMs had finally decided to take action. These two events were not unrelated: they decided that the best way to deal with Justin was to have Circe magically enslave Alexander to her will. Sure! Why not! That’s not going to be a massive headache, a massive GM overreach, and a massive boost to his persecution complex. How could it? It’s 100% in-setting for that to happen. And apparently, the rule of "don't intervene with the setting OOC" was more important than the most basic shreds of common sense. To my eternal shame, I assumed the GMs knew what they were doing in dealing with Justin. I was, as I have said before, a fool.

Luckily, that particular nightmare scenario never came to fruition. Before the GMs could try to corral him by applying in-game slavery, he went to rip open the Primordium’s cage. Naturally, everyone aware of what Alexander was doing – this was between actual sessions, mind, and run on text chat, unlike the main game – ran to stop this idiot dragon from ruining everything. NPCs, PCs - it was like the Yakkety Sax of high-stakes idiocy.

I should note: The GMs would have let him kill everyone. Of the various runs of this game, the only one ever held up by Eva as a success was the run where one of the PC gods went berserk and ate all the other gods, mostly before they had the time to gain names, powers, or identities of any kind. And she was still the arbiter of the setting’s basic functioning. So yes, catastrophic, pointless setting collapse was a possibility that could only be solved IC, not OOC. Honestly, I think this is one of the things that still upsets me the most: that player well-being and story were completely suborned to the GMs' feeling like they had correctly represented a setting based on a dream based on a Doctor Who episode based on a J.G. Ballard novel. The high art of the Fucked Up Hell Building had to be preserved.

So. Alexander’s clawing uselessly at a cage full of screaming agonized evil incarnate. Good for him. It’s worth noting, he really is useless: All his scrabbling for Domains that he can’t hold onto and all his aggressive misinterpretation of the setting have left him woefully under-ground in stats, while the first NPC to show up is Rem: the King of Grind, my sworn bro, the NPC God of Dreams played by Charlie the GM. In a bit of setting and mechanical weirdness, I'd earlier acquired the title "Faster-Than-Dreams, so I show up slightly before that. The mechanics often worked like that: if you figure out a weird trick to abuse the dumb systems efficiently, you can become very overpowered very quickly. Accordingly, I had insane stats, and was finally ready to kill my terrible, terrible friend. For some reason, I thought that we would get to have a poignant but brutal fight in which I tore Alexander a new one for the good of the whole building, and maybe he’d learn something and we could all talk it over. I was a fool.

Instead, fast on our heels was NPC of Infinite Power Hermes, whom Alexander hated enough that he could barely speak around him. That broke down any attempts at diplomacy preemptively, and Alexander attacked. In their defense, the GMs didn’t have Hermes just wipe the floor with him using unholy numbers, as they probably could have – the reasoning being that Hermes had sworn never to commit deicide again, after killing my god as a child in the weirdest case of cradle death ever (What a crazy twist! My character sheet, it turned out, was basically a secret invitation to the Twilight Zone Random Mechanical Fuckery Power Hour).

Instead, I got a few lines to try and talk Alexander down. Since the operative verb is ‘talk’ and the object is ‘Alexander’, that sentence was doomed from the start. Alexander begins to shout that I’m a terrible traitor and a terrible friend (ouch, buddy, guess I can feel better about killing you) and that he was really the only god doing the right thing, and that he was cursed with a heart of lies. I use some divine powers to determine that no, his heart is definitely Stories, which I promise to rip out of him if he doesn’t stop being an idiot. He instead attacks by grabbing for Rem's Dream heart, in what I can only call the only reasonable Domain grab he ever made. If he wanted to win this fight, it was a smart move - and it worked! I assumed this meant I would have to kill him faster, to save my quickly-fading bro. I was a fool.

Instead, the now-dying Rem insta-kills Alexander. See, Rem had the domain of ‘portals’ that he used to get around, and (as the GMs very smugly pointed out) he was no longer the God of Dreams due to heart-ripping, so it no longer meant anything that I was Faster-Than-Dreams. So he just put a portal in Alexander’s chest and the heart of Stories fell into his hand. One shot, one use of a self-satisfied system hack invented by and confirmed by GM-team, one PC kill. I wish I were kidding that it went down like this.

Screaming about how we’d all wronged him, the dying Alexander declared that he was willing himself to join with the Primordium, because we’re not his real pantheon and he’s going to go be with his real family. Nobody cares, as the other PCs arrive just in time to witness the portal-heart-murder trick and share an angstfest about Rem's tragic death. Alexander literally explodes in a pillar of flame, joining with the enemy of the gods to empower it with all his domains, belief, and followers. Kaboom, he’s gone and for good measure sets off a chain of stupid, angsty setting dominoes (more on that in a later installment). In the wake of Alexander’s spontaneous dragon combustion, we all gather around the dying Rem, trying our hardest to keep him alive – until Infinitely Powerful NPC Hermes pulls exactly the right trick out of the bag and fixes him. Good as new! Everyone have a cookie, aren’t we glad Alexander is gone? Wasn’t that really the best way to deal with him, and his player?

The immediate aftermath was a bit confused, and a lot disordered. I later learned that Justin had been told by the GMs point-blank that if Alexander did this, he was gone forever, not coming back, never to return. So of course he immediately embarked (using his remaining mortals) on a scheme to resurrect Alexander through belief and the symbolism of a funeral pyre and a phoenix, which hadn’t been his character concept at all but really, mythological creatures of fire, they’re all the same, right? So that led to a bunch of weird conversations, and a lot of increasingly firm insistence from the GMs that no, that's not how any of this worked.

Justin also argued with me when I said that ‘Stories’ and ‘Lies’ weren’t the same thing. They certainly were, from his perspective. Being a bit of a story enthusiast myself, I asked if fiction couldn’t contain truths about human behavior, or morality, or philosophy: His answer was no. Flat no, nope, never, just doesn’t happen. That’s right, Alexander, GOD OF LIBRARIES, GOD OF FICTION didn’t believe that anything not literally true had worth. This kind of explained a bit about his total unwillingness to play to concept, at least.

Of course, it wasn’t the end of Justin. As obviously awful as he was, they were still committed to offering him a chance to create a new character and remain in the game. However, shortly thereafter, he mounted a passionate defense of his actions to the GMs. In his view, Alexander was a young god, basically a teenager. And all the other gods were bullying him. So exploding like that – wasn’t that really the same as a gay teenager taking their own life after being bullied? Shouldn't the GM team side with him instead of these homophobic bullies? And that was the end of anyone on the GM team suggesting Justin might be coming back.

[/ben]

That was the last I heard about Justin until about a year later, when he got kicked out and banned from a local geek convention for repeated unwanted physical contact with various women. Because of course he did. Moving on from that as quickly as possible, join me tomorrow for Pt VIII, where we learn how this sordid game finally met its end.

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I want to throw out a caution around this kind of thinking, since while it makes a lot of sense to think that this is a cool-as-hell setting being ruined by the folks in charge, it's a lot harder than it initially seems to disentangle the setting from the people in charge - specifically from Eva, and her understanding of what a good setting needs. What do I mean by that? Find out in

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt VIII

wherein we talk about the Primordium, and the conclusion of the game. When last we saw the Primordium, Alexander had just merged with him. As a result, the Primordium acquired Alexander's domains and also became a sapient - if still extremely violent and destructive - being. The Highwaymen all immediately became a raving explosion cult that served the Primordium and sought to destroy all lies, Rem was diagnosed with the infinite incurable anguish that apparently happens any time someone kills a god, and Alexander's one remaining divine friend, Lily - played by Liz - started crying and making everything about her whenever possible. The gods tried to hold a quick trial to determine whether Rem should be punished for killing Alexander, and pretty much every time someone tried to vouch for Rem by pointing out how incredibly dangerous and violent Alexander had been, the following happened:

1) Lily would start crying and insisting that Alexander was really a good person because he was nice to her and you just didn't know him well enough and you were all being unfair and mean

2) Lily's mother - also played by Liz - would shout something like "You're hurting my daughter! Stop this at once!"

3) Another god would gently offer to take Lily somewhere else while people were presenting this part of the evidence

4) Lily would sob and sniff and say that no, she was okay, she should really be here, she'd be okay from now on

That happened maybe 3-4 times. On the minus side, it was as unbearable as it sounds, but on the plus side, it effectively set the stage for what would define the game going forward: incredibly long, labored, and fruitless debates on how to solve seemingly intractable problems while trying to avoid the ever-expanding potholes of angst around everyone. See, while the Primordium was just an incoherent rage monster in a box that blew up parts of the building, the PCs were mostly on board with the idea of "kill the Primordium, get yourself a king". Sure, there were some scattered objections - Ben's nameless death god thought monarchies were dumb as hell and wanted to avoid creating a pantheon king if at all possible, and a few gods who knew about the Primordium's tragic angsty backstory were a little uneasy about killing him - but killing the Primordium was presented as a core objective of the game once the gods showed up, and most PCs weren't in a mood to argue.

Now that the Primordium was actively talking to the rest of the building, and now that he presented as a tragic, abused child, a lot of the PCs were understandably leery about pursuing the team objective of "keep beating down this traumatized kid". The PCs even agreed to hear the Primordium out and listen to his demands, the chief of which turned out to be "keep my little brother safe". It turned out he had a brother named Angel who had been subjected to the same infinite childhood torture as him, and who was being held on a sort of divine life support just outside the Fucked Up Hell Building by the government personnel running the project. Whereas the Primordium had grown into a god of destruction and desolation and gunpowder and all that good stuff, Angel had grown into a god of comfort and salvation and hope. So, alright, this seemed like a reasonable request - we can still kill off the Primordium and stop the constant earthquakes and explosions and death in the building, but let's save his much nicer little brother.

It turns out, however, that this is a fucked up game where infinitely bad things happen all the time and you've just got to deal with it. Angel was a sweet and innocent and all-loving being, sure, but it turned out he was also an extremely powerful "psuchephage", or soul-eater, much like Alexander had been gradually turning into. Nobody killed by the Primordium had ever shown up in the underworld, and it turned out that's because Angel had been eating all their souls in an attempt to give them paradise within himself (related: it turns out that the domains of "paradise" and "salvation" inherently make you a soul-eater in this setting). So if the PCs freed Angel, they had every reason to believe that, sooner or later, he'd do what all soul-eaters inevitably do and start trying to bring bring paradise to the rest of the pantheon by eating them.

Moreover, Angel's heart domain was "The Prime Domain" - comfort, solace, the assurance that your cries for help into the void have been heard. Sounds nice, but due to some immutable backstory/setting fuckery, Ben's death god had a heart that was a shadow version of it. If he ever became aware that another god had the real version of his heart, he'd apparently immediately implode. So while everyone was discussing what to do with Angel, there were constant awkward sitcom mentions of "that... you know, that THING we can't tell the death god about", right in front of the death god. If they freed Angel, it'd presumably get exponentially worse to try and have them co-exist without the one instantly causing the other's death.

So despite all the well-meaning instincts to just be nice to the traumatized kids for once, the setting apparently demanded that helping ease their pain would result in an equal or greater amount of pain somewhere else. Knowing all of this, the majority of the PCs vote against freeing Angel, but one PC, Sarah, is particularly adamant about it. She's got the support of Lily and a couple other gods played by GMs, and she grinds an entire session to a halt by delivering an incredibly long and guilt-tripping speech in tandem with Lily about how it's everyone's moral responsibility to free Angel because the poor kid has suffered enough. Sarah's god also has some augury powers that give her ready access to secrets, so she makes liberal use of telling the rest of the party just enough information to make her side of the issue look good while refusing to give clarify anything they ask. She also, of course, aggressively tries to recruit the death god to her side of the issue, while withholding the fact that siding with her might literally kill him. With most of the PCs on one side of the issue and the rest of the PCs plus most of the NPCs on the other, the session just sorta ends when everyone's out of time or energy, and there's no resolution on what to do with Angel.

The obvious question here is "How the hell does something like that happen?" Surely there would be some mechanism in place to break that kind of gridlock. In fact, a few of the PCs on the "let's not free Angel" side were considering short-circuiting the argument and saving everyone from soul-eating by just assassinating Angel while he was being restrained by the Fucked Up Hell Building project. Those plans never went forward, though, partly because they didn't want to antagonize other PCs so directly, and partly because of how Eva always frames issues like this. See, Eva loves providing these preposterously bleak "moral choices" where you either murder a kind-hearted, traumatized child or you let that child eat everyone's soul, but she also makes sure there's always a secret "better way" that the PCs can choose. Of course, all "better ways" except for the one she's specifically thinking of will not work and will probably result in the PC(s) in question being punished, and she makes sure to never give any clues about what that "better way" is. So not only are the PCs being hit by the emotional pressure of making such an awful choice, but they're also being implicitly told that they could avoid the awful choice if only they were as smart as Eva.

The game never recovered from that standstill. I proposed to the GMs that Peter could kill the Primordium himself in a cheap shot, reveal his true colors to the remaining PCs who hadn't yet figured out that he was bad news, and set himself as an obvious evil tyrant to the rest of the pantheon. That way, they could move the metaphysical apparatus of the setting forward without having all this blood on their hands. They thought it was worth a shot, but by the time they were ready to implement it, PC interest had withered and the GMs gracefully put the game on "indefinite hiatus".

I want to back up a bit here, though, because there's another major lever of control that ties closely into the "There's one secret perfect solution and fuck you if you don't find it" lever: the setting. Countless times throughout the game, one PC or another had a reaction of "That's really fucked up and I'm not sure I want to deal with that", to which the response was usually a variant of "Yeah, well, that's the setting." Because there was so much Stuff in this building, the PCs consistently got the impression that it was this incredibly well thought out, living, breathing ecosystem, and each part of it depended on each other part. So if they felt this specific aspect of the setting was over-the-line bullshit, or that it made the game less enjoyable for whatever reason, that was tough shit. It was, after all, a necessary part of the ecosystem.

Which was, of course, total bullshit. Let's look at the idea of a Primordium: the working definition that the PCs had throughout the campaign was "an ancient being of destruction and evil that threatens the world, and that a member of this nascent pantheon must rise up against and defeat in order to claim the title of King of the Gods and lead his or her pantheon into adulthood". That's fairly specific, and if you compare it against existing mythologies, there are some where it fits well, some where it fits if you tilt your head and squint, and there are some where it doesn't really fit at all. But Eva insisted that not only did every pantheon from the myths of our own world exist in this setting, but they also all had their own Primordium. So as an example, in Greek myth, you've got Uranus who was a Primordium defeated by Cronus, who became King and not a Primordium and got overthrown by Zeus, who then became King and defeated another Primordium in Typhon even though he was already King, and then Python is another Primordium even though he got killed by Apollo who is not a King. The Abrahamic God is a soul-eater who ate his Primordium, Satan, before spitting him back out. I have no idea what the fuck the Primordium in Buddhism is supposed to be. It goes on like that.

But even though this shit falls apart under the barest scrutiny, it was incredibly important because citing all those examples let Eva say "See? That's just the way it is - if you want to be an adult pantheon, you'll have to kill your Primordium. Everyone else did!" As far as I can tell, Eva had wanted to put her PCs through constant emotional wringers from the beginning, and the setting details that appeared to give rise to those wringers were really just backsolved to answer the question of "How can I fuck 'em up?" Obviously I don't need a setting to be 100% internally consistent, because trying to model complex things like economies and social structures in your elfgame can lead to major headaches. But when you leave parts of your setting up to simplification and abstraction, then holy God, make sure those abstractions are in service of your players having an enjoyable experience, not in service of putting them through one soul-crushing scenario after another.

So when folks say this sounds like a cool setting that's being ruined by Eva... no, it's really not. It's a setting full of cool ideas, sure, but it's also fundamentally a setting that Eva created, with everything that entails. It's also a mechanical system that Eva created, which, haha, fuck. That's it's own post. Tune in tomorrow for Pt IX, where Ben explains the Twilight Zone Random Mechanical Fuckery Power Hour, with a brief forward from myself on the time I tried in vain to build a character sheet for Peter.

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Bieeardo posted:

Regarding the Building from Hell, it strikes me that rolling your own wouldn't be too difficult. Come up with an internally consistent metaphysic, some background information on why the hell the thing was built, and start the PCs off as fledgling gods. Borrow some civilizations from the Starlost, or the Paradise Towers serial from the old Doctor Who... or from something with a slightly less silly pedigree, and Bob's your uncle.

There's also the question of what you use as your mechanical system, but lucky for you, literally almost anything will be better than what the Fucked Up Hell Building actually served up as far as mechanics. Find out more in

Fucked Up Hell Building: Pt IX

which has a quick foreword before Ben gets into the heart of the matter. See, about three months after getting involved in this game, Lexi IMs me and mentions that I should probably make a mortal character sheet for Peter Rabbit to represent his capabilities when he's not in the divine realm. I'm a little surprised when I realize that I've been coasting for three months without one of these, but I say sure and ask how to make one. Lexi more or less tells me, "Think of things that Peter would have points in, and then put points in them." Okay, uh... is there a standardized list of things to put points in? Nah, not really. Is there... a set number of points that I have to distribute? Nah, not really. Is there... a frame of reference for what these numbers mean? Uh, sorta. 50 is the maximum for a given "thing you put your points in", but as Ben is about to explain, numbers are meaningless once you dehumanize yourself and face to bloodshed.

I never ended up making a character sheet. Any attempts to hammer out any kind of context at all for these numbers were largely futile, and the way that PCs threw around their own numbers was arbitrary and confusing enough that I just said "Fuck it, I'll tell them they succeeded or failed based on whether I think it it'll be more narratively interesting and enjoyable for them - GMs can overrule me if it's a problem". That worked a looot better. Anyway:

Ben posted:

The Twilight Zone Mechanical Fuckery Power Hour

Welcome back. I’m Ben, and for my sins I get to explain the mechanics of the Fucked Up Hell Building. My sins in this case being that I grotesquely abused them at the time, because that was the only way to get anything done. I’ve seen a few expressions of what I consider an understandable sentiment: “Well, if we ran this without all the absolutely unbearable people involved, wouldn’t it be really cool?” and I know Jenny's already addressed this point well, but:

No. Not in its present form, and not in any form that didn’t rip out its mechanical skeleton and stick in a new one. See, the mechanics of this game were shoddy as hell, and existed primarily to put a gloss of setting consistency on pure GM fiat designed to lead you ever further into an emotionally-manipulative clusterfuck.

As a reminder: My mortals were the Rezzies, or Residents, the randos living in the halls of the Fucked Up Hell Building and staying alive however they could. They were also universally ‘insane’, by which Eva meant ‘have a weird imaginary friend and act all wacky and violent’, so there goes any attempt at subtlety or psychological realism. This really wasn’t necessary to get the Mad Max vibe they clearly needed, but it was the law of the land. Their god was a skeletal horse with the mind of a child, a serial killer for a best friend, Hermes Yes-That-Hermes, for an adopted father and Circe, Yes-Greek-Myths-Are-Basically-The-Main-Event-That-Circe for an adopted mother. Also over a thousand severed arms for catching the souls of the dead and taking them to the afterlife. Also some FUBAR mechanics. I hope you brought your wading boots, because this is some deep bullshit.

Let’s start with dice. This was a D100 system, in which you combined your character’s numbers with a D100 roll and higher totals were better. There was no real sense, on the player end, of what number corresponded to what level of skill. There was a cap of 50 on a given skill, but how effective that was in an absolute sense, no idea. Mortals combined basic statistics (strength, stamina, whatever - these didn’t matter at all to quote-unquote ‘well’ designed characters) with any applicable skills, like ‘Use Rope’ and ‘To Serve Man’ to nicely tie a human roast, or whatever. Skills could be as vague as you wanted, really, as long as they applied sometimes and not others. Characters also had flaws, which subtracted from their rolls, unless a particular flaw would come in handy for something, at which point they added. These flaws granted more points to the main character creation in exact proportion to how much you took. For most rolls not opposed to other players, you just had to clear 100 to be doing alright; against another player you compared totals.

To illustrate why this is dumb, if you haven’t seen it yet: my starting character was a spiteful old man called The Mountaineer who hated everyone and everything (Flaw: Hates Everyone for 40) and carried around shower-curtain harpoons. He was not about to die: I gave him the maximum possible in one skill (50) for his ability ‘Refuse to Die’, and this was allowed. When in life-threatening situations fighting anyone I hated (basically any NPC) I could add those numbers together, plus his basic strength or whatever, which was ~20. He could one-shot any NPC mortal he met. He could not be killed. Any time I could argue his ‘don’t die’ and ‘I hate you’ skills/flaws applied, he became a murderous juggernaut. So the real mechanical challenge of a mortal character was arguing that skills ought to apply and stack, and as soon as I realized that I was golden.

The GMs never put a cap on this, and I suspect some, but not all, other players were doing something similar. The mortal level of the game was supposed to be gritty, painful, and doomed. Can you tell from that character description of the Mountaineer? Because that bastard didn’t do any of that. He had to be impaled about seven times before the GMs decided that the combined penalties from blood loss killed him, and only after killing a Fisherman king and walking out of the negotiation room full of spears.

I had some other characters, but the only usefully illustrative one after that was Lancelot. Lancelot was Rezzie Batman with a special Excalibur sword-whip made from elevator cable that he used like a bat-grapple, a hand puppet named Squire Robin for a sidekick, and no mechanical brakes whatsoever. He had 35 points (again, scales to 100) on ‘while using Excalibur’ – the weapon he always used whenever he had the chance. His flaws were universally applicable to combat in a positive sense, and he had the maximum points worth of flaws, more than doubling his total value as a character. Before rolling a D100, I could get him 240 on attacking, as long as he acted like Batman. Again: What tone is this game going for? Because ‘effortless superhero victory’ is not something the GMs intended. My fault? Yeah, totally, I abused the hell out of stupid mechanics. I’m not proud, though I did like the characters I made. But I had this degree of success, while players who didn’t relentlessly stack up and fake out flaws... didn’t.

So that’s a tonal clusterfuck right there, but thankfully, mortals barely mattered at all once gods appeared. Gods, instead, had both a bunch of numbers and their domains with which to perform miracles. Miracles were basically Mage: The Arguing With GMs Into Letting You Do Things. You had your domains, you just had to argue that something could be done to the GMs to get to do it. When you did the miracle, if you were opposed you generally rolled off with Belief + Domains, and I guess Domain grabs might have involved Belief + Self? Nothing was explained outright. Obfuscated mechanics were the order of the day, not that it mattered. The GMs, especially Eva, didn’t actually mechanize the setting. At least, not much. An illustrative example: there were no mechanics for mortals losing belief or religions changing, because all god-stuff is set once you kill the Primordium, and belief lets you beam your divine commands directly into your mortals’ skulls. Every society is a theocracy – gods have complete control over everyone, after a certain point. Magic Kings in your brain for everybody!

With that said: my god character ended up no less broken than my mortals. Thus begins the saga of How Binky the Death Horse Learned One Weird Trick To Becoming Unbalanced. There were no brakes on this train. First of all, my character sheet was a combination of totally unfair advantages (NPCs who were apparently legitimately emotionally devoted to me and so powerful that the rest of the pantheon had to get along with them; massively higher stats and a more developed god than any other PC; controlling the underworld) and landmines. For example, one of those NPCs would enslave any god whose true name they learned. Also, my best buddy and high priest was the worst serial killer around. Also, if Binky ever determined that its heart was a fake it would implode in a puff of logic, and this domain was serious business for the main plot so it would come up multiple times and Binky would literally have to leave the room for main-plot-important conversations. Also, I had the mind of a child terminally unable to say no to friends, like the serial killer or Alexander. Oh, and my adoptive father killed me to take my first domain, Resurrection, which is the reason the gods outside the tower are all at war with each other. Wow, wasn’t that a mouthful.

I avoided those landmines as best I could and set about increasing the quantities I knew as ‘B, D, S’ because I didn’t even get to learn that a domain was called a domain until someone said it in an unguarded moment at the table. I had, to be clear, no idea how domains, the Primordium-killing, or any other part of the metaplot worked from my character sheet, because that was the balancing factor: I had the runaway best stats but I didn’t know what the goal of the game was. Great design right there. I pretty quickly figured out that B was ‘Belief’ and boy oh boy, did I have a lot of it, but I wanted more as fast as possible. I’d like to claim part of this was selfless: I did want to have enough stats to throw around to head off any total game-imploding fuckery. But mostly this was just because I wanted to see my numbers grow, and I liked the feeling of winning the minigame.

So I started experimenting. The only trick that matters to this, because it was the ultimate grind method, was telepathy. In the world of Fucked Up Hell Building, gods can speak directly into the brain of anyone with high ‘Connection’ (C). So I invented a quick little miracle using my free-floating severed arms to let me try and telepathy at non-Rezzies, which the GM approved if my B were high enough when combined with the mortal’s C. I just let my fingers do the walking. I’d call up every member of a nation I could talk to like that (Highwaymen would believe anything, so they were some of the first) and bam - my B would increase hugely. Then I’d reach out to the next-highest Nation on the C list. And my 