“Critical Failures” by Robert Bevan
Jul. 9th, 2015 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAmazon recommended this to me because I liked “The 8-Bit Bard”, and even though it was free, I’m not sure it was worth the money. A group of supreme asshole gamers (homophobic, misogynist, racist and just generally jerks) pissed off their new game master enough that he uses his magic dice to send them into the game world. The emphasis on bodily excretions cannot be downplayed, as “gross-out comedy” is obviously a favored genre of the author.
I was all set to pan the book and just leave it at that, except that amazingly, it fired my imagination. The characters are clearly trapped in a D&D 3E game (even with the serial numbers filed off), and I literally wrote the book on powergaming 3rd edition. The story got my brain going on wanting to be trapped in this world with Edgehopper, Cubby_t_bear and Scott, the gaming group that inspired the Broken Rules Compendium in the first place. Knowing the system rules and their edge cases in a situation like that is like knowing cheat codes to the universe; and if the GM wasn’t present and the world reverted to just “rules as written”, we could be god-emperors inside of a month.
(There’s also a better book to be written with a more likeable set of central protagonists and more clearly defined gaming styles—the powergamer, the loony, the roleplayer—and/or a GM that actively wants the characters to succeed but is bound by the rules as much as they are. Actually, I feel like a “rescue mission” story of a new GM who inserts himself as a GMPC character and intentionally nerfs encounters could be really amusing.)
SPOILERS
The climax of the book is that the players manage to trick Mordred into locking himself in a walk-in freezer in the real world, so they can force him to free them. Unfortunately, he can’t let them out without the magic dice he left outside the freezer, and when he passes out (and is presumed dead) they’re trapped forever. Which is the best indication that no one at the table is a proper powergamer (which we’d guess already, if their character builds were any indication) and that they’re all generally idiots. Because if you have the GM over a barrel, you can have anything in the game world you want. “Okay, you can’t just let us out? Put a Ring of Wishing with infinite charges under that rock and we’ll try wishing our way out. Have a dragon get distracted by something shiny down the road so I can cast Shivering Touch on him and rocket up to 77th level and try epic magic to get out. Write a doting archmage uncle into my backstory so we can use his power and influence to try other tricks.” Mordred is dying and the rest of the party will be trapped forever, and they can’t be arsed to work together to break the game and find a solution?
Overall: I’m not going to claim that this is a good book, as it’s not. But it got my imagination going, so there’s only so nasty I can be. I want a better version of this book, really.
I was all set to pan the book and just leave it at that, except that amazingly, it fired my imagination. The characters are clearly trapped in a D&D 3E game (even with the serial numbers filed off), and I literally wrote the book on powergaming 3rd edition. The story got my brain going on wanting to be trapped in this world with Edgehopper, Cubby_t_bear and Scott, the gaming group that inspired the Broken Rules Compendium in the first place. Knowing the system rules and their edge cases in a situation like that is like knowing cheat codes to the universe; and if the GM wasn’t present and the world reverted to just “rules as written”, we could be god-emperors inside of a month.
(There’s also a better book to be written with a more likeable set of central protagonists and more clearly defined gaming styles—the powergamer, the loony, the roleplayer—and/or a GM that actively wants the characters to succeed but is bound by the rules as much as they are. Actually, I feel like a “rescue mission” story of a new GM who inserts himself as a GMPC character and intentionally nerfs encounters could be really amusing.)
SPOILERS
The climax of the book is that the players manage to trick Mordred into locking himself in a walk-in freezer in the real world, so they can force him to free them. Unfortunately, he can’t let them out without the magic dice he left outside the freezer, and when he passes out (and is presumed dead) they’re trapped forever. Which is the best indication that no one at the table is a proper powergamer (which we’d guess already, if their character builds were any indication) and that they’re all generally idiots. Because if you have the GM over a barrel, you can have anything in the game world you want. “Okay, you can’t just let us out? Put a Ring of Wishing with infinite charges under that rock and we’ll try wishing our way out. Have a dragon get distracted by something shiny down the road so I can cast Shivering Touch on him and rocket up to 77th level and try epic magic to get out. Write a doting archmage uncle into my backstory so we can use his power and influence to try other tricks.” Mordred is dying and the rest of the party will be trapped forever, and they can’t be arsed to work together to break the game and find a solution?
Overall: I’m not going to claim that this is a good book, as it’s not. But it got my imagination going, so there’s only so nasty I can be. I want a better version of this book, really.
