Month: October 2020

A lot of people look at my RPG characters and find them weird. I can never make a normal character, they say. What brought this about? I was talking about table top games on Twitter and it reminded me of one of my favorites: Dylan and Maxwell.

What is a table top RPG? It is a game where you make characters and pretend to be them in a world the game master creates. They decide what you come across and you decide what you get to do.

We were playing a zombie game called Dead Reign. The GM, game master is the person in charge of the game, was asking us about our character backgrounds before he’d finalize our characters. My friend was an ex police officer turned detective. Another a doctor in the bad side of town spending his nights fixing up addicts and fighting them off on his way home. The other friend was just a drug dealer. Me? I was a veterinarian student.

Before I continue onto my character I need to explain some things. Dead Reign is a zombie apocalypse game. However, the GM told us we are starting on day 0 and we had no clue what zombies were. Like not even in pop culture. We actually asked that question. The class I chose gives you an animal companion and the skills to take care of animals. I had to choose a real life job where I would understand animals and have one. However, I also needed a reason to know how to shoot guns. This is where we get back to my character.

I didn’t know he was going to ask us our backgrounds. I didn’t know we needed one to prove why we knew how to use guns. I mean for fucks sake the game took place in South Carolina. People shoot for fun there. Dylan was a vet student. However, in class one day he fell asleep and shit his pants. From then on everyone at the school bullied him and the girl he loved was grossed out and made fun of him. He decided to go to the gun range to learn to shoot. Why? He was planning on shooting up his university. Maxwell was my dog.

When pressed on this I explained he focused mainly on rifles with secondary on pistols and never really learned how to properly use a shot gun. Just load and blast. When the GM looked at my character sheet he saw this displayed in my points for each weapon. The GM laughed, as did my friends, and asked if this was my background. I said yes. He said this is the first time he had ever had school shooter as someone’s background.

Why did I choose a school shooter? Simply because I needed something that made sense. For me I tend to make characters that make sense, aren’t god like, and have serious flaws. Dylan was easily manipulated and had a distrust for the law. He was also argumentative in situations he thought he would be safe in. So, why would a guy who spends most of his time studying and taking care of animals know about guns? School shooter. I could’ve done more but it fit with his easily manipulated personality and argumentative cowardliness nature.

I’ve done a lot of weird characters that had flaws. Like, I had a character who would forget everything he’d hear, not read, 5 minutes after he heard it. Then a hour later he’d remember it but the time frame would be wrong. For instance, he would think you told him it last year, 7 hours ago, what have you. If you said something like “Meet me here at night fall” he’d think you told him that a month ago and just never show because he assumed he missed it a month ago.

The deal is he played with a lot of “edgy” goth types and the “darker” types. He would constantly try to one up us on “dark” shit when we were just fucking around being us. Frequently he said we were the smartest group he played with. He also loved our attention to role playing.

What about the title of this post? Well, I’ll combine that story here too.

Dylan met up with the drug dealer and became friends. I forget how but it made sense. The detective I was standoffish against. Doctor I mocked because he couldn’t identify animal meds for people. Then we all had high IQs in the game, except the detective. Well, he had a IQ of 140. Ours were all 200+. Every single one of us mocked him and called him retarded or Radio. That’s besides the point. So, I didn’t trust Radio because he was a cop. I was a planning school shooter. I was afraid he’d try to stop me when I was shooting. Radio and I were never around each other often.

When we were driving through the woods on a bus a tire went flat. We stopped and tried to help the driver. At this point we had seen no zombies. We didn’t know what was going on. We were rushed into a bus and told to put our shit under the bus. Guns were allowed. So the drug dealer and I try to break into the underside of the bus to take our guns and sneak them back onto the bus. When we hear a rustling from the woods.

Out runs a zombie and starts to bite someone. Sorry, not a zombie. A bear. We didn’t know what they were. We just saw people get taken down and eaten in the woods. We called them bears. Luckily drug dealer and I had our guns so we were able to open fire and get others back onto the bus.

Detective:”What the fuck was that?”
Dealer:”Nigga that was bears!”
me:”That doesn’t look like any bears I’ve seen.”
Doc:”Maybe a meth head. We see them often.”
Dealer:”Nah nigga. We wuz in the woods. That shit be bears.”
Doc:”May..”
Dealer:”NIGGA METH HEADS DON’T EAT PEOPLE!”

That is when we dawned the term bears. They were not zombies but bears from that point. Every special zombie we met we came up with some bear name for. Like Papa bears, moma bears, polar bears, grizzly etc… Later a person who played Dead Reign before joined us and kept getting mad that we had our own names. Every time she would use the book terms we called he a retard. Mostly because her IQ was 90 but also because she was meta gaming. That is knowing things you are not supposed to know.

So, one point we got a bunch of spray paint. We spray painted on our bus “Fuck the bears”. However, we kept writing over it with random shit. “Bear the fucks” was ultimately what we landed on. That bus was a mess.