1. Notes: 4 / 4 months ago 

   Reaper’s Very Assisted Suicide

   Being fairly new to RPGs and having had every game before this fall apart in a matter of sessions, I have just now passed what I consider to be a milestone, my first PC death.

   
   My GM, myself, and another player spent a good part of last night talking about why she died and the mistakes that each PC (including me) made that led them to that point.  We’re a new group, so I really appreciate this type of discussion.

   
   To understand what went wrong I must first describe Reaper a little and how she died.  We are playing Aberrant (in a slightly alternate timeline from the fluff in the book) and Reaper, born Penelope, was a party girl who erupted when she tried to kill herself with a drug overdose.  She was angry at the world for not letting her die and she got entropy and time-controlling powers out of the deal.  Reaper tended to treat people in authority with a lot of suspicion and mockery.  She did things just to shock people and she had a hard time opening up to anyone.  I know, as a player, that she could be obnoxious and I know that it was my failure as a player to reign her in.  I would get in this mode where it was impossibly for me to do anything but be exactly her.  But, I was working with the GM to grow her.  We were working on Reaper’s anger issues as well as her trusting people.  I, as a player, was making progress in playing a three-dimensional person who grows instead of a caricature of a person.  Which is when things went to shit plot-wise…

   
   Reaper stumbled on a family secret which involved a global conspiracy and a lot of nasty stuff.  Not knowing really what to do she called in her “friends”, the other PCs (i.e. I took the plot hooks that meant bringing in the rest of the group rather than doing what the character would probably actually do which is to say, “Fuck you, dad, you can have your family secrets now that your dead, it’s not like you treated me like family when you were alive” and walking away).  She also had met someone who she believed to have the power to predict the future (precog) and forsee mentally (not precog) the consequences of complex sets of actions.  She trusted that he was trying to save novas (people with superpowers) and that he needed as much data as possible in order to be able to do so, so she sent him the data as she got it.  Fast forward quite a bit, it wasn’t her data, a “man in black” showed up to demand the data, another PC threw me in front of the train by volunteering that he knew that I had sent the data to someone else, yet another PC had read my mind without my permission and actually knew who it was and had called the “man in black” behind our backs to tell him we had the data, Reaper wanted assurances that if they cooperated the recipients of the data wouldn’t be hurt, she also wanted to know what was going to happen from there, the “man in black” ran out of patience with Reaper’s “bitchiness” (GM’s words) with that last question and kicked Reaper’s head in.

   
   That’s it.  Game over.  PC dead.

   
   I know that Reaper (my) actions directly caused this and yet it is hard to be put in a situation where the character on her own can not genuinely do anything else and where all of the progress that my character had made was not relevant to the situation.

   
   Maybe I’m just making excuses saying that my character would not have seen or understood the complexities of the situation when in reality it was me, the player who did not understand.  Has being punished for it made me learn my lesson?  What about the other players who chose to leave Reaper in front of a speeding train instead of pushing her out of the way?  One tried to warn me (but was also the person who called the “man in black” behind the group’s back), one decided to stand up with me when it came to a fight (shout out to Cliff who reconstructed Reaper’s face and carried around her dead body for most of the session), one decided to observe and maybe fight, and two teleported out at the first hint that something was going wrong.

   
   I have a new character and we worked on making her a unifying force in the group.  I am letting go of the betrayal that Reaper felt right before she died.  I am letting go of Reaper’s dysfunctional relationships with the other PCs (and everyone in the whole world).  It’s time for me to practice playing someone who doesn’t fuck shit up and alienate everyone.

2. Notes

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