Weekly Games: M&M

On In Character Perspective and Paying Attention

Okay, it looks like my weekly Mutants & Masterminds game might have died a death last night. Which is a great shame, personally, because I had a lot more stories to play.

As an experiment, though, I believe it was successful, and I can happily report the following conclusion:

Without custom online playing tools, running an online Pen & Paper RPG is HARD. I regularly had upwards of ten open windows, just to manage normal play, as well as all of the rulebooks immediately to hand. It went smoothest when I had my darling wife acting as an assistant GM for me.

Now, this is not to say that it's impossible. It's not. It's just a lot of hard work. And when RPing becomes hard work, it stops being fun. Not a lot of point playing if you're not having fun.

Anyway, things kind of blew up a bit, last night. I'm still fairly bitter about what happened, but I'll try not to let that colour my points too much.

Okay, here's the scene:

The heroes have just rescued the Atlantean Princess from the villainous plot to hook her into a weather control machine, through the simple expedient of blowing the machine up with a rocket attack, and then beating the stuffing out of the bad guys.

Yay, awesome, woohoo and so forth.

The heroes are planning on taking the crooks to a police station that is capable of handling super-powered prisoners.

Fail the first: When informed that the anti-super police squad have their HQ at 14th precinct, opening the magical portal to 16th precinct doesn't help.

During the course of events, as the prisoners are being dragged toward the magical portal to the (wrong) police station, the Atlantean Princess mentions that the villains' plan involved hooking her up to "that strange machine".

Now, I'm going to digress here for a moment, to consider a few things about the Princess. Firstly, she's never visited the surface world before. Second, she lives underwater. Thirdly, electricity and water (especially salt water, like you tend to find in oceans) really do not mix. Fourthly, to the best of my knowledge (aided by a university course in geophysics), there's not a lot of weather in the depths of the oceans. So I don't consider it to be especially unusual that the Princess would consider a Reed-Richards-esque, high-technology, computer-controlled, human-interface weather control machine to be "strange".

Fail the second: When RPing online, and your GM has you as a friend on Steam, if you go off to play another game that is registered there, your GM gets a pop-up that tells him what you're doing.

I had some ideas on what to do when the players dragged the villains to the anti-super police squad's HQ. I was prepared to wing it, when it became clear that they were heading somewhere completely different.

So, thinks I, here we go for an RP-intensive cooldown session.

Fail the third: If you turn up for an online game session an hour after it starts, expressing surprise that very little has happened (other than some obviously unimportant dialogue) is not condusive to a fun mood.

I then got stopped dead. Completely. Utterly. As in, the-GM's-brain-has-stopped-functioning-because-he-cannot-comprehend-what-you-are-asking.

I can't remember the exact words, as I'm nowhere near my logs as I write this, but it went something like this:

"Strange machine? I don't remember nothing about no strange machine!"

"What does it look like? We can't continue until we get a response from Chem about this."

"Chem? Is it big? Small? Square? Round? What colour is it?"

Fail the fourth: When, in-character, a character who would not know what a weather control machine would looks like mentions a "strange machine", and the GM has only ever mentioned one machine being in that room, with that machine being the now-destroyed weather control machine that said character wouldn't recognise the appearance of, it is not the GREATEST leap of logic to assume that, since you, the players, destroyed said weather control machine last session, that just might be the "strange machine" to which the Atlantean Princess who has never even seen a car, radio or computer before is referring. Maybe.

Result: Game-lock. I kid you not. Because the players could not continue without getting a detailed description of a machine that they blew up last session.

I, not to put too fine a point on it, was stunned. Completely. So utterly stunned that I had to go outside for a cigarette (don't smoke - it's bad for you). While I was gone my darling wife (with my blessing) took over the keyboard for me and got so frustrated with the replies she got that she logged out of the chat server.

Again, I kid you not. Apparently, asking for a detailed description of a room-sized piece of destroyed machinery is "trying to move the game toward the police station". I still can't figure out how.

I will always believe that no plot survives contact with the players, but there's a difference between the plot and "extraneous gubbins".

So, as a result of this, it's quite likely that the game isn't going to go anywhere. Which is a shame, because it has been a lot of fun, but at the same time it's been a lot of work.