Critical Miss: Issue 3 (The Worst Roleplaying Game Ever Written?)

The Worst Roleplaying Game Ever Written?

The Execution

*Ahem*. I was hoping you'd forgotten about that. Oh well...

This happened right at the start of the adventure when we were still numbed from the briefing. Well that's my excuse although it sounds pretty lame at the moment. Would you believe that we were method roleplayers roleplaying power-crazed adolescents roleplaying cyborgs?

Didn't think so.

What happened was this. We got to the place, the home of a movie actor, in Southern California where we were to pick up the trucks. There we found three trucks with drivers. Just as we were about to set off, another person (a bandit of some kind) stole into one of the untended trucks and drove off.

We immediately set off in pursuit, two of us running (Steve Austin style), the other (possibly) in a jeep, and eventually caught up. One of us lifted up the rear of the truck to stop it, whilst the others pulled him out of the cab. Then firing broke out from the side of the road. We guessed that they were some companions of his and so instructed him, with a gun to his head, to order them to lay down their weapons and emerge from cover. They did so.

It turned out that they were starving civilians (well that's what they said) who had thought that the trucks contained food. I don't quite know where the notion came from, but the idea was floated that as "traitors" who had attacked a "military" convoy carrying "vital" supplies during a period of "martial law" their appropriate sentence was death.

I asked the GM if I could make an intelligence roll to see if I was stupid enough to believe this. I rolled about 3 (out of 100). Apparently I was.

This Is Where It Gets Embarrassing

So we gathered the three together by the road, gave them shovels and told them to start digging. And they, poor innocent saps that they were, quite happily complied, thinking it was some kind of labour punishment. Eventually when the hole was deep enough, we asked them to step down into it, and began to experiment with the settings on our built-in weapons.

At this point they realised what was happening and began to panic, sort of. A disturbing scenario was turned farcical by the workings of the initiative system. The order of action went:

1) Prisoner A 2) Us three cyborgs 3) Prisoners B and C

So whilst Prisoner A desperately ran for the ridge, with us taking a series of wild potshots at him, his two dumb-fuck comrades just stood mutely beside us. And of course, as new characters, we were crap. It took the three of us a full two rounds before we finally managed to blow him away. By the time we got round to the other two we'd begun to wonder what the other weapons did.

"I'm gunna try a shot with my... microwave gun."

Could it get worse..?