Topic: again with the killing puppies!
Started by: lumpley
Started on: 4/19/2004
Board: Actual Play
On 4/19/2004 at 3:11pm, lumpley wrote:
again with the killing puppies!
I ran kill puppies for satan at OurCon this weekend, for 5 undergrad students and 1 grad student, 4 women 2 men, with two romantic couples present, I believe - I'm not certain.
It went how kill puppies for satan always goes. There was some good sacrilege and I always have fun playing the straight man to the players' depravity. I'd be going ow ow ow ow with my eyes all squinched closed and one of the players kept giggling and saying "I think we broke him..." so that was good.
The Line: we established early on that there were some topics out of bounds - that is, I hinted at sex and paid close attention to the darting looks and the shifting seats, and dropped it. Nobody wanted to go there so we didn't. Instead we were really truly atrocious to the poor kittens, and The Line was far away. It's something to see: people can describe horrific acts cheerfully, and spend three hours doing nothing but one-upping each others' cheerful horrific acts, and at the end they're still laughing. People delight me.
I might have pushed a smaller group further. If I coulda kept 3 and ditched 3, I'd know just which ones to keep, and we might have gone somewhere serious. It may interest you to know that I'd've kept 1 and ditched 1 from both of the couples.
There was a nice PC vs PC conflict to cut back to whenever things elsewhere got slow, and I was pleased how well the two players orchestrated their characters. The characters hated but the players were very good at keeping the fight fair and funny.
Jared Sorensen stopped in and told me I should be ashamed. He sat and listened until somebody started building a doggie-sized electric chair, then excused himself. He's one to talk, he took a melon baller to a seeing eye dog one time.
Satan called them up a lot. We got this good schtick going where I'd have the phone ring, in receptionist-voice I'd say "hold for Satan," and everybody at the table would start singing "Hey Jude" along with the on-hold muzak.
Anyhow just like puppies always goes.
But here's a really cool thing:
Putricene and Kaylen are the PCs who hate one another. They've horked flaming snot and gushed vast shit and between the two of them they managed to kill one metric fuckload of maggots (=2.2 fuckloads imperial), which Satan called them up about and wasn't too pleased - "have you seen the state of my office?" he said - and they burned down each others' houses and shit. Anyhow Putricene runs through the neighborhood peering in the windows until he finds somebody with a wall-sized tropical fishtank, he jimmies the door, and he feeds the fish with speed and pcp. He slaps a sticker on the fishtank that says "DARE to keep kids [scratched out] fish off drugs." I'm like, "cool, somebody hates you for that! It's ... let's say a vampire. He's asleep in his coffin in the basement right now! He's a vampire who keeps tropical fish."
We cut to something else. Fluffy crucifying the kittens in the church sanctuary? Atilla chucking mutilated kittens through the window into the YMCA 1st-grade swim class? Both?
Kaylen catches up with Putricene in time to see him applying the DARE sticker. Kaylen's still covered in shit, so he starts throwing it at Putricene. They fight, and Putricene gets the worst of it. Kaylen's there smacking his head into the refridgerator and I'm like, "did I mention that there's a tropical-fish loving vampire who hates you asleep in the basement?" and they're like, "yeah, and I'll bet the sun just went down," and I'm like, "yeah."
So I'm like, "okay, should this be a scary vampire or a like Vampire vampire? Let's vote."
Scary wins, 4 to 2. Putricene's player and Kaylen's player were the 2.
"So you're there smacking his head into the fridge, right, and the front door, it's been open, it swings - slowly - slowly - click."
Kaylen's player pantomimes holding Putricene by the collar but not smacking anymore, looking around scared.
"Let's, uh, take this somewhere else," he says.
Dude! I did two cheesy special effects, the closing door and someone unseen touching Kaylen's face, and they were running around in circles squeaking and waving their arms! Pissing themselves! All because the vote got them to buy into a "scary" vampire. It was just like my two kids in the Good Knights, talking about whether it was a "bad" battle or not:
"...But not a scary vampire."
"A scary vampire."
Uh oh! A scary vampire!
That was my favorite part.
-Vincent
On 4/19/2004 at 3:49pm, Christopher Weeks wrote:
RE: again with the killing puppies!
Excellent! You know, when I was reading the line where you asked them if it should be a "scary" vampire of a "Vampire" vampire, I was thinking about your "bad" battle. These guys must have been a riot.
I really love reading about this game, but I don't think I'm strong enough to play it. I think I'd be too disturbed at hurting kittens. Somehow with puppies, I could yuck up about and just feel dirty afterwards, but I think kittens would affect me too viscerally.
Chris
On 4/19/2004 at 3:59pm, Gaerik wrote:
RE: again with the killing puppies!
Heh. I love reading about this game too. It's pretty much a sicko Paranoia game, replacing the Computer with Satan. Lots of cool stuff here.
Christopher Weeks wrote:
I really love reading about this game, but I don't think I'm strong enough to play it. I think I'd be too disturbed at hurting kittens. Somehow with puppies, I could yuck up about and just feel dirty afterwards, but I think kittens would affect me too viscerally.
Oh, I could kill the kittens and giggle with glee while saving the world from one more cat. Of course, it is hard to think kindly of an animal that causes your eyes to nearly swell shut and your lungs to fill with phlegm. :)
On 4/19/2004 at 4:19pm, Ron Edwards wrote:
RE: again with the killing puppies!
Hiya,
That Line/Veil stuff is amazing to consider, isn't it? In our game, we tended to Veil the pet-killing a bit, and the sex was fast, furious, and explicit. "I'm working on multiple orgasms" was, I believe, a player-response to my inquiry about what her character was doing next, and it wasn't delivered abstractly - we knew where, with whom, and how. I'm just a big wuss about explicit puppy-nastiness, I guess.
Best,
Ron
On 4/19/2004 at 8:45pm, lumpley wrote:
RE: again with the killing puppies!
That Line/Veil stuff is amazing to consider, isn't it?
It sure is. I especially dig how group-dependent it is - it's like it's the combination of players that sets the lines, not any player individually. I drop a sex hint and read plainly on someone's face: "I'm cool with that, but not sitting next to my boyfriend here..."
In at least a couple of the demos I've run, fucked up sex was the arena for the one-ups and the puppy killing was relatively sedate. One of the demos at GenCon got close to my line, as the fucked up sex depended more and more on, well, amputation to give its degrading dialogue oomph. Yikes.
Chris, Gaerik, I may have biased this group toward kittens. When I introduced myself I used my line from GenCon: "my cat just had kittens and I've been bonding with them all week, so this game is guaranteed to fuck me up." It worked so well that I decided to use it again, even though now the kittens are ten months old and mostly live elsewhere.
-Vincent
On 4/23/2004 at 1:21pm, hawklord2112 wrote:
Re: again with the killing puppies!
when i run KPFS i get the players to play the person sat next to them. and then you sit back and watch Rob's reaction when John (who is playing Rob, and who hates rob's wifes' bunnyrabbits IRL) decides that Rob has had enough and goes gain a couple of Evil from staking the rabbits out on the lawn and then filling the sprinklers with battery acid..
lumpley wrote: ...are the PCs who hate one another. They've horked flaming snot and gushed vast shit and between the two of them they managed to kill one metric fuckload of maggots (=2.2 fuckloads imperial), which Satan called them up about and wasn't too pleased - "have you seen the state of my office?" he said -Vincent
ok so now i'm jealous. my guys didnt go much past the included list of powers for using evil.
oh, apart from the converted WWE wrestlers that i had - they were spending evil points to pull some crazy moves (elbow drops off a 12 floor building....)