by Richard Aronson
We'll call him Chuck (not his real name, but what does it matter). Keep in mind that I'm pretty selective about who I'll play with, and I've avoided lots of GMs that I knew were bad. But Chuck, well, Chuck had a couple of real flaws. We played at an Institute of Higher Learning, where all GMs had to have their dungeons approved for standard play in a universe that travelled seven years for one so as to coincide with the school year. Every September everyone started over from scratch, save for a few selected high-levels who became demigods or NPCs, just to help out, y'understand. And everybody has multiple characters in their own dungeons, as long as someone else calls for them. Okay? A real hack 'n' slash world, lots of fun and energy.
Now remember, in all the years of playing FRPs, I've never once had a mage with Teleport. The plans I had! Sigh. And Chuck had this annoying, truly annoying habit, of playing his PCs in his world. If a powerful, useful-to-own (or be possessed by) magic item was available, his characters always rushed to pick it up. If a cursed item was around, his characters never picked it up.
So I had a mage one level away from Teleport; Corey can vouch for most of this. And we had a high-profit expedition, and came home with enough XP for a Teleport level and one scroll Chuck's mage wouldn't read. Well, we're role-playing, right? I can't turn down a scroll because of a bad GM, can I? But I take precautions; we wait for XP and levels (an extra hit point or two can't hurt), and I delight in learning Teleport, the only fifth level spell that anybody knew yet early in that universe, and my mage gets tied to a tree, with lots of components but no hands free, and I read the scroll and disappear. Teleported to the 15th level of a gnarly dungeon.
Okay, so I Teleport home. Chuck asks when I learned Teleport. I told him that's part of why we waited a couple of days. He asked me to show that I had written it on my character sheet. I hadn't (game time: two days; real time: two minutes). He asked why I couldn't have learned some other spell. I told him that Teleport was the only spell known. Well, another party had returned just before ours with other fifth level spells. He rules I knew no Teleport. Sigh.
So I sat and waited, in this room. In come some Indians, despite my spiking the doors. They make threatening gestures. I surrender. They kill me anyway.
Okay, if my body can still be recovered, I'm still okay, perhaps. A high-level NPC mage had a service to find (and possibly recover) anything. My other characters rush to him with much gold. Maybe fifteen minutes have passed. By this time, the Indians had already stripped my body and thrown it down a trash chute where it was eaten and digested. Real likely, huh? And I still have never had a mage played to where he learned Teleport.
So Charles, uh, Chuck, if you want to know who I think is the worst GM I've ever encountered at Caltech, er, at any theoretically adult game, now you know. And may you never have players to game with. And rest assured that any of your characters in my game will find themselves facing disintegrations that I'll grow out of whole cloth just like you did, nice guy that I am or not!
(Originally appeared in Re:Quests!, issue #16B, October 1988, p. 16; Mary H Kelly, editor.)
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