Every week gets a little weirder, a little louder. Our RPG game night is heading off the rails. The GM designed his campaign to make our characters really powerful, really quickly, and we are loading up with more skills, knowledge, powers, and weapons than any gaming group I have been in, possibly ever, at the very least since high school. Tonight we were all hyperaware of just how chaotic all of our players are... and I don't mean just the characters we play. Everyone talks over each other, we go off on tangents, and steering us forward through the storyline takes heroic effort. And even when we are actively playing, paying attention, at any moment any one of us may pull a wild and crazy stunt that puts all of the characters in danger. The only saving grace is that more often than not, the stunts are so exquisitely silly that it leaves all of us laughing to the point of tears, and we know we will be retelling these stories to each other for years.
Back when I first started playing these games in high school, the "alignment chart" was familiar to only us nerds. Now with the ubiquity of social media and memes, everyone has seen some version (several versions) of the lawful-neutral-chaotic by good-neutral-evil grid. Until this last year, I'd never seen anyone's characters move places in that grid once selected. Now twice Mr S-P's creations have migrated towards the naughty corner of the chart, and our daughter thought she had to follow him down there. She may only be stuck at chaotic neutral, with her sudden ability and class change tonight, depending on how she builds out the new iteration of her character.
Two sessions ago, Mr S-P's character (a fiery magical girl named Chornya) stole key items from the group and disappeared. We have been trying to decide whether to chase and confront her or go on and keep gathering the other items like those she stole. The Mr has been present at the games, listening to what we are choosing to do, even though we don't know where Chornya is. Even when he is not role-playing with the rest of us, he's throwing out hints or taunts or just weird little feints to mangle our progress. We bounced back and forth from trying to ignore him, to forgetting and letting him participate in the planning. At the end of the evening, the GM put it better than anyone I have ever heard describe Mr S-P's natural chaos. He said something very close to, "You guys are making a lovely soup, and he is a raccoon who comes up and washes garbage in it." No one could top that. The game broke up for the evening not long afterwards.
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