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I'm sorry for the length of this, but reading some of these stories reminded me of my own experience with gaming. This is a story of my first - and last - time playing Warhammer 40K. When I was fourteen I had a friend named Dan. He was an odd guy and your stereotypical young nerd: Wolf/dragon shirts, long greasy hair, always wore some kind of "fancy" hat like a fedora or a pageboy, and most of the time didn't bathe. But, with me being shy and a little antisocial, he was one of my best friends at the time. We loved swords, magic, all that kind of stuff, and played D&D every once in a while. One day when we were hanging out after school, he brings a codex over for us to look at. His uncle had given it to him for his birthday a couple of days before along with a starter set and Dan had been pawing through it fervently ever since. Once he showed it to me I was hooked. The artwork in it was amazing and everything in it was badass. You can have sword guys in powered armor beat up on demons?! What's better than that? We bought every book about Warhammer 40K we could get our hands on with our allowance and read through each of them multiple times. Needless to say, we really wanted to learn how to play. Dan's Uncle owned a local appliance repair business and during a housecall managed to find out that one of his clients had a son who was willing to teach us. With that news, we were elated and quickly arranged a time during the weekend through Dan's uncle as he didn't like giving out clients phone numbers. We learn that the man teaching us is named Michael and he's apparently won a few tournaments in WH40K. I remember grinning like a madman hearing that news. The day arrives and Dan's parents dropped us off a little bit early, so we took the time to sit on Michael's front porch and look at all the little space marine miniatures that we had haphazardly painted the day before with spray-paint and the shakiest hands ever. "These guys are sooooo BADASS!" Dan told me, while pretending his hands were guns and shooting them at a stray cat that had wandered up to us. The color scheme we picked, looking back on it now, was atrocious. We had painted "badass" motifs like bloody skulls and crossed swords onto armor that we had mostly painted a violent shade of orange. The cat wandered off, bored with us, so I looked at my watch and knocked on the door. We were still a little early, but I was getting impatient. An old woman answers the door and offers us some snickers bars. "You must be the kids playing that game with Michael today." she tells us, "I'm Martha, please come in!" She leads us through the house and it's full of the typical grandma-style decorations: plastic over the furniture, flowery beige wallpaper, and lots and lots of family photos. At least until she leads us downstairs to the basement and knocks on the door. We hear a muffled "Come in," and Martha opens the door. Dan and I shuffle into the room only to be welcomed by the most horrendous stench I've ever smelled. Martha tells us to have fun and closes the door behind us. The basement is Michael's domain and he is king. To say that Michael's room reeked would be an insult to bad smells. Empty food containers and chip bags were strewn about the room mingling with what looked like piles of wet laundry. What little we could see of the floor was covered in brown stains, dust, and hair. The only clean corner of the room contained a bookcase crammed full of different Warhammer and WH40K miniatures immaculately painted. In the center of the room was a card table set up with different sets of terrain, a few rulers, and a massive Necron army with Michael sitting in a ripped leather recliner behind it. He was about forty years old, immensely fat and looked like he hadn't left that recliner in years. He didn't have 'chins', just a sack of fat hanging down onto his food stained what-was-once-white ripped shirt. His receding hairline was pulled back into a messy ponytail that draped over his shoulder like a greasy pet. He was also constantly eating from bags of chips that he had by his side. Being too polite and more than a little intimidated to just say "gently caress this" and leave, Dan and I introduce ourselves and sit down at the table. I don't remember the specifics of what happened next. Michael seemed normal despite himself and we get going learning the basics. He's more than a little impatient with us, glowering and getting a little red whenever we do something dumb or forget a rule, but we're learning at a fairly brisk pace and everything seems to be going smoothly. That is, until Michael wants to have a two-on-one battle with both of us facing his massive Necron army. We really had no hope of winning and we didn't really expect to, but we agreed anyway. Michael gets an amazingly intense look of concentration on his face as he sets up his army and refuses to talk to us as he's doing it. In very short order, Michael is crushing our squads with his and we're losing pretty steadily, but Dan and I are having fun. I manage to maneuver one of my squads near one of his Necron Lords and with a few lucky rolls manage to take it out. I'm amazed and laugh a little because that was one of the few units we were actually able to take out but Michael's face slowly contorts into a look of confusion and rage. His face goes beet red and he explodes at us, screaming at the top of his lungs how we're terrible players, how we're wasting his time, that we should crawl back into our mother's womb because we're utter children, etc. He just keeps screaming at us and we're sitting there absolutely stunned. Right in the middle of a sentence, Michael begins drawing very rapid breaths and clutching his chest, groaning in pain and slumping over in his seat. Dan and I look at each other and share a moment of silence together, then ask Michael if he's ok. He only moans in response so we get up and take a look at him. He's breathing hard and pale as a ghost. Being fourteen, we panic, and run up the stairs screaming, surprising Martha. We hastily explain what happened and Martha dials 911. The paramedics come and take Michael to the hospital, while Dan and I quietly cry and everything to the police and Martha. We go home emotionally drained and we both swore off and tabletop games for a while. A few days later we hear that Michael had a heart attack but is in recovery and doing better. Dan and I sent a get well card to his hospital room but we didn't dare show up in case he became enraged just by the sight of us. As the years pass we didn't hear much of Michael after that, but I did eventually learn that Michael used that experience to lose a lot of weight and take anger management classes. So at least there's a silver lining to all of this. TL;DR: A fat nerd gets so angry at kids that he has a heart attack and then uses the experience to better his life.
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Nov 11, 2012 00:49
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 01:06 |
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This is a cautionary tale that you really don't know someone until you roleplay with them. I made friends with a guy at work who seemed normal enough. We'd talk video games, TV shows, even dipping into some politics and philosophy, thankfully seeing eye to eye on a lot of topics. Another friend and I decided to start a D&D 5E game and I invited my work friend to join the group. Things went well for a while, before it started to get weird. He played an elderly bard obsessed with instruments and was a pretty fun character, all things considered. A few sessions in, we were adventuring through a town when we fell into a trap laid by the big bad and had to fight a minotaur. We maneuver around, trying to get in good positions when he pipes up with the following: Work Friend: I attack his butt. GM: You want to attack his butt? WF: Yeah, I want to stick my sword up his anus. GM: ...what? WF: I stick my sword right up his pooper. GM: Uhhh... OK, I guess. You do that. He then described in great detail what exactly happened to the minotaur's anus. At first, myself and the rest of the players didn't know what to make of it, but being the conflict-adverse nerds that we are, the rest of us decided to write it off as a bad attempt at humor. Boy were we wrong. Every single fight from then on he would try to attack the anus of every enemy we came across. During a later session when we had a moment of downtime while one of the players had a bathroom break, work friend regaled the rest of us about a time in college where he used his own jizz as glue to adhere pictures to a posterboard because he forgot to bring a glue stick. He treated this as just a humorous anecdote but it seriously weirded us out. It also came out of nowhere; he just volunteered this information apropos of nothing. The straw that broke the camel's back was when I texted the group to let them know that my wife and I are expecting our first child. Work friend went off on a long screed about how my wife and I are idiots for "breeding" and that we're dooming our child to a horrific future of pain and misery; a "boneheaded move" of epic proportions. Needless to say he's not a friend or in the group anymore.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:34
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CzarChasm posted:Feels like it's been a while since we had a good old fashioned cat piss story. Railing Kill posted:
Yeah, dude just went and revealed his whole rear end to us. Which reminds me: He liked to make up nicknames for the other player's characters, which isn't too bad in and of itself. One of our other players had a character named Astrid who was female presenting but preferred gender-neutral pronouns and identified as gender fluid. Cool, no problems there. We'd occasionally forget and accidentally refer to the character as she or her, but we'd apologize and correct our mistake if we realized after the fact or had it pointed out. Not work friend though, he seemed to take real pleasure in calling them by feminine pronouns only. Made for some really awkward roleplaying. He also took it upon himself to give them the nickname 'Assy', which the player found REALLY uncomfortable and wound up ignoring his character whenever he'd refer to them as such. Just a toxic person. I also found a screenshot of some of the texts he sent me when we announced the pregnancy. The rant went on for so long and this is just the tail end of it:  My favorite part was that around 5:30PM that day, after his wife got home from work and must have berated him for sending such texts, he "apologized" by saying he's sorry for his tone. As if his tone is what I would have taken issue with, lol.
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May 2, 2024 16:48
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