From childishness to sociopathy...
So, some of you may remember my last rant about my LARP group, in which Little John came to the fore as being mind numbingly childish and generally an irritant. Much to my surprise, he has calmed down immensely since then and actually discovered that House voided his medical insurance, shrugged and said something which basically amounted to 'ICA=ICC'. I was stunned.
However, this is not to say that everything has been tickety boo, thus far. Oh no. You see, last year the group used a downtime based experience system, i.e. you got experience for missing sessions whether because you couldn't show up, because you agreed to monster for that session or whatever reason. This was probably instigated so that more people would monster than otherwise would; I don't know, I wasn't there.
The point is that a certain fellow, whom I'll call Overcompensating because of the ridiculous size of his gun, had numerous problems last year which I won't go into here and essentially ended up missing every session, leaving him with a ridiculous amount of experience. As a result of this, his character became a more or less unstoppable weapon of mass destruction. Irritating for those who had got significantly slighter rewards for actually showing up but not, in itself, a suck.
No, the suck begins shortly after the session proper starts. Now, Twoface and Baroness, the leaders of our merry little band, have taken Overcompensating aside before hand and told him that the PCs of newbies and certain NPCs are not to be killed for the sake of fairness to new players in the first instance and the sake of the storyline in the second.
... You can all see where this is going, can't you?
You are, of course, dear BRPS, absolutely right. Overcompensating butchered two of the off-limits NPCs and one newbie character, evidently for no reason other than that he could. This culminated when Twoface ruled that newbie PC, by name the aforementioned House, wasn't dead but had been seriously injured, thus giving House's player an opportunity to develop an IC limp, which was funny. However, it falls to the mechanic, whom I'll henceforth refer to as Viking because he reminds me of one, to get the storyline back on track. How? He realises that he can use the experience points he's accumulated to buy a skill which will enable him essentially to resurrect the aforementioned NPC, the Rebels' only source of funding and their de fact leader, with mechanical limbs and organs. Now, the formerly weedy Rebel Captain is even hardier than Overcompensating's character and... Well, he has a grudge. This could be fun.
tl;dr: Every suck has a silver lining.