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Watching gangster TV shows and movies I am struck with two realizations about the people who played criminals in most of my game worlds.
They are not near immoral enough to be TV bad guys.
AND
TV bad guys pale compared to the depravity of the real world.
Players will steal and murder, but I can only think of one rape. No pederasty. No selling people of any kind. They'd smuggle things, but never drugs.
Oftentimes they'd act against their fellow criminals who did.
Murderhobos with a code! Queue 'A-Team' music.
The only time real criminals are shown on TV are the various 'real homicide' or 'real police' shows, and even then they edit out a lot.
ReplyDeleteLike the nutcase running around Miami stark naked (except for lots of blood) with the head of his '12yo' girlfriend in his arms. Too a shotgun blast of OOBuck dead center over his heart. And lived. 'Not guilty by reason of insanity,' so he went to the 'not a prison because they aren't prisoners because not guilty by reason of insanity' that's located east of Gainesville, FL. Real evil nutcase.
On the plus side, my players were nearly always SMARTER than the average criminal you see on a "real police" show.
DeleteThey really thought they were hard, though. I still laugh about the bunch that got butthurt about me not getting the "hardened criminal" memo, and petitioned Thag to make me retire my decent guy. Okay, fine, gaming is a social activity; I can be a villain if that's what we're doing.
ReplyDeleteSo they took a nobleman's son hostage for ransom while I created Jon Green, the requested criminal. I was busy with character generation, and failed to notice that they cut the kid's arm off and sent it to daddy as proof that we had him and were dangerous criminals you don't want to fuck with. This will become funny later.
By the time I'm playing again, it has become clear that they picked the wrong nobleman: I seem to have missed an escalating series of alleged payouts that all turned out to be traps. This is pretty much Traveller, especially the bit where a highly ranked nobleman can field actual warships, note the plural, if somebody pisses him all the way off. NPC accomplice and I agree that this plan was a bust; we're not getting paid, and we manage to convince the other players of this before they walk us into the next trap.
Okay, so what do we do with this worthless so-called hostage? Chuck him out the airlock, obviously. We're all hardened criminals, right? We said we'd kill him if we didn't get paid, and we didn't get paid. What part of this is difficult for you?
Wait, seriously? Very well, Captain Green has a solution. Thag, I shove the kid into the airlock. [tap] Close Inner Door. [tap] Emergency Open Outer Door. After the other players pick their jaws off the floor, a stammering "hardened criminal" points out that I just blasted a kid out into space with no helmet. [gasp!] You're right; I did. How terribly thoughtless of me! Well, let me put that right, then. [tap] Close Outer Door, [tap] Pressurize Airlock. Can I find the helmet? Sure, it's right there. [tap] Open Inner Door, toss helmet into airlock, [tap] Close Inner Door, [tap] Emergency Open Outer Door.
There, he has his helmet. Happy now?
That's when somebody mentions the arm-chopping. At the time, I only noticed the physical comedy of somebody trying to catch and don a helmet with only one hand before hypoxia gets him. Completely slipped my mind that the bozos whining about killing the kid were the ones who grabbed him, maimed him, and told daddy to pay up or we'll murder him. Yo ho ho and a bottle of dumb.
I remembered some details differently when I told this story: https://mcthag.blogspot.com/2014/05/captain-greene.html
DeleteBut the looks of shock from the players with "hardened criminal" characters was well worth the price of admission.
Also, that was the last session of that campaign. None of them wanted to play their hardened criminal characters with a well resourced noble after them in full-on vendetta mode. Except, maybe, FuzzyGeff...
DeleteOkay, a decade fresher memory is probably more reliable. Your version makes their decision to chop bits off to prove we had the hostage even dumber than mine does: "hey, Jeeves, tell daddy the reason junior isn't with you is we took him hostage" ought to be credible enough for anybody.
ReplyDeleteI don't remember thinking of it in these terms at the time, but either way, spacing the kid sent a fucking message.