Gamer Profile : The Monster GM

There's more to role-playing than dice and books. Much as we'd like to avoid it sometimes, there's people too. The SBG here begins a series of profiles of people I've gamed with, for better or worse. Names withheld unless I'm fond of them.

I thought I'd open this subject up with an evil GameMaster that we'll just call The Monster. Now I'd heard all about this guy in my teenage years through his brother who was in my class. The Monster's brother of course played in his group and would come to class with stories of death and disaster. I'm not saying my games were perfect back then, but they sounded nothing like the Monster's games.

For one thing, I was surprised to hear that my friend had to roll up a new character every session or so because he'd died in the previous one. Indeed, it seemed like half the party would regularly be killed in these games. Part of the reason was The Monster's use of Grimtooth's Traps as if they weren't jokes. His brother would attempt to entertain me with the cleverness of The Monster's elaborate puzzles and traps only to find that I already knew the punchlines. The Monster would just plop 5-skull traps into his dungeons and strive for Total Party Kills (TPKs). The same door trap would be used over and over until a way around it was discovered, at which point every door after that had a different trap, and so on.

I eventually got the chance to game with The Monster in my first year of university. He wanted to run Scourge of the Slave Lords and, along with my compères, offered to play. But we went into it with our eyes open, and came armed. My own character was a pathological liar who could really screw up your campaign by sending NPCs off with "magic stones" to fight their own battles (I am a nightmare), and I was fully prepared to counter any unfairness on The Monster's part with in-character sabotage.

Unfairness like: We have to stop for the night at a castle and are informed there's a banquet, etc. Then it's the next morning, and since one player's character tried to rape the king's daughter, we're running for our lives. Uhm... what? No player decision to do this. No scene role-played. Just the facts of the case. So we ran... and never played with him again.

But that was a foregone conclusion. I don't think we would have anyway. Aside from the power tripping shenanigans and the fact we were just curious and up to no good in the first place, I don't think we could have withstood his presentational style for another session. The Monster had a peculiar voice, you see. It sounded just like Rom (from Deep Space 9), but mean and barking-like rather than slow-witted. He would spit at he spoke, so no one would sit across from the table from him, only to the sides. And to make matters worse, he would read his adventure module's boxed text in a heavily accented English (we're all Francophones with varying levels of bilingualism). You couldn't understand a damn thing. He never agreed to paraphrase.

Lessons learned: There are games when channeling The Monster can be useful. Dream Park, for example, requires you to play a GM character that is an antagonist to the player's Players. I've used his attitude in that context. In Paranoia, the GM needs to be unfair! Still, it's hard to use The Monster's tricks in ANY game. When your tactics can't even be used in Paranoia, you know you're a bad GM!

But that voice... that voice... It would be one of my staple characters if it wasn't so distinctively attachable to The Monster.