The Gaming Den

Crissa wrote:If you say you're going to help, help. He doesn't. Which is why the gods abandon him and he dies on the battlefield, a loser.

Such is the difference between being able to get over it and not. He's an example of taking adversity and letting it own your ass.

-Crissa

You volunteer to help some people, do your best and get nothing but insults and assholishness in return. You honestly say that you'd keep on holding up the entire team after all this?

Should employees just grin and bear an asshole boss who insults them in front of their coworkers? Who regularly stiffs them on bonuses?

He said he'd win the war for them. He totally could have.

He didn't.

He could've just gone home and fed a couple of offerings to the gods instead.

It's the difference between owning adversity or letting it own you.

-Crissa

Employees say they'll work for their company. They totally could do.

Striking workers don't.



Every time you give your word it comes with the implicit subclause "so long as you're not an asshole".

Dude Achilles is essentially a mercenary/brigand, he fights FOR PAY.

Some of that pay is physical stuff-- the Iliad contains a whole bunch fo stories about Achilles going around, kicking over people's cities and carrying of lot in big santa sacks. Sometimes that pay is in "time" (honor) which is a kind of social status that is more or less quantifiable and directly exchangeable for goods and services.

We don't see the conversation where Achilles joins up, but I imagine it goes something like this:

"Hey Achilles, we hear you like to kick over cities and take all their stuff"

"Yeah?"

"Well, we were just on our way over to kick down a city and take all their stuff. You want in?"

"Sure!"

With possibly also some promise of less tangible rewards like honor, glory (not the same thing as honor at all), and improved relations with neighboring tribes.

Anyway, at the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon is literally stealing Achilles' stuff, stuff that was already given to him, for no reason related ot any misbehavior on Achilles' part. Plus, it's implied a couple times that he and the slave-girl may actually be in love.

Neeeek wrote:characters who aren't assholes are Trojans. Other than maybe Odysseus.

Man, what a douche. How he made it all those years without outright mutiny is beyond me.

Odius's crew did the next best thing.

Several times. It's why his trip took so long, and why most of them died.

They ate the sacred cows; the crew got wtfpwned by guys on scythed chariots. They invaded come enchantress' pad, they got wtfpigpwned. They tried to steal the "clinking bag" that Odius watched over like a mad-man; only to find out that the 'bag' was holding every wind that was stopping them from going home; and then pushed them all the way back to where they started.

Achilles didn't want to fight for anything tangible, the only thing that he's been described as wanting are the same things that the Hound of Culan wanted, a legacy as being a fearsome warrior, and maybe a hero too.

He only fought for intangible things. Agamemnon was able to cock-block his army's star player of "honour" and "glory" b/c he wanted to feel big in pants. Since Achillies was only there to earn the very things that Agamemnon was denying him, I'd say that he was on justifiable strike.

He 'could' have left, and forced Agamemnon to give him his just dues; like you know, the slave girl that he was used to, or an invitation to the after-party, or you know, his share of the loot.



If this was a D&D game; where people got to vote on shit; and one person was "in charge", but the "Star player" was someone else, then the above situation is perfectly tenable. In fact, I'd actually expect the players to act that way with their PCs.

If the dumb Ogre Ajax, the cohort-feat taking Agamemnon, and the Rogue Odius can't win all their fights without the combat-demon Achilles and his ant-lion-construct-soldiers; then they had better give Achilles his share of the loot, glory and slaves if they expect him to keep playing ball.

I mean, fuck, I've had games stall where the shitty player wasn't effective. Could you imagine how stupid it would be to be an asshole to your best team member? You know, the guy that downs monsters his own CR every round? Yeah, that guy. I don't see how taking his loot is a smart move.

It's like giving the Fighter the ability to make all 5-man party decisions. Except that there's a Druid, Cleric, Wizard and Rogue in there as well. You can very well assume that unless he's very fair and equitable, the Fighter is simply going to die.

If anyone is the douche, it's Agamemnon. He had a history of being an asshole. He killed his own daughter in order to wage this war on behalf of his brother, and he used marriage to Achilles are a ruse to get his daughter sent to where his army was on the coast, trying to sail to Troy.

Plus he did other stuff, like bringing his "war spoil" Cassandra back home with him, to his wife. I mean, how much more stupid can you possibly be? It's obvious (and, I think even implied) that Agamemnon was having some sort of relationship with Cassandra, but to bring her home to his wife (whose daughter he's also sacrificed since he killed a sacred deer) is the complete height of both stupidity, or hubris, or both.

I mean, hell, if someone you were married to tricks you into sending your child to them, then kills them in order to wage a 10-year war; then comes back with some much younger slam-piece (and honestly, I don't think that the now partly raving Cassandra was a willing party, she's just driven mad by everything that she sees, Agamemnon was probably raping her the whole time); don't you think that you'll get mad?

I think that wangst, if we determine that as periods of sulking and whining is disliked just because it is not very interesting to watch/read about. Emotional breakdowns are OK when they are integrated into an overall plot and fit the character, but sitting on your ass and complaining about your life is not particularly dramatic or engaging. Particularly if this complaining is extended. (This is doubly relevant to roleplaying games - "woe is me" stuff gets old very fast, and usually becomes forgotten in favor of actually doing something.) However, as I see it, some people tend to overreact and label any moment of sorrow, shock, frustration or undecisiveness as wangst, even if the character in question leaps back to doing stuff, like, 15 seconds later (see Luke's example above in the thread).

Sorry, nothing pisses me off more at the table, as a player, than to see another character say "I don't kill any monsters this round because I'm coping with the loss of <something that died last round>."

On the flip side, it is completely awesome to wig out and kill something "In the name of my best friend recently slain!"

Out of combat, you can sulk in your tent or whatever and the other players can do whatever they want. But seriously, when there is a war to fight sulking is really stupid.

what about when one PC wants to stop the rest of the party from killing a monster that has now surrendered, but had insta-gibbed one of the PCs in the first round?

Because....while I know that the guy playing the paladin was in the right, it still pissed me off that I couldn't get revenge for the killed PC. It pissed me off a lot.

Most adventuring parties work on the pirate version of democracy. There are some ground rules, and then everyone has one vote in affairs of moment, and the penalty for attempted tyranny is kick murder.

So if a PC wants to stop the rest of the party from doing something, they have to build consensus. Even reluctant consensus will do.

You know, I always wondered how Agamemnon got off relatively scot-free (in proportion to what he did) in the eyes of the audience than the other characters. I mean Hector, Achilles, and even Oddy-poddy get mocked/jeered at more than that guy. So what the hey?

Agamemnon always looks like a dick. You can probably pick him out of a lineup with no other knowledge than "Agamemnon looks like a dick." The rest of them have more emoness, but Agamemnon got screwed by every casting director ever involved in a movie he appeared in.

My PC just decided to leave as another player started building consensus to start killing things based upon their race instead of whether we'd captured them or not.

Luckily, the DM made up a new game for me to play, maybe coming back to the group after they've had their asses handed to them enough.

-Crissa

Crissa, why are you feeling sympathy for the stinky brown green savages with bones in their noses?

Neeeek wrote:It's important to note that the descendants of the Trojans wrote the Iliad, which is why all the characters who aren't assholes are Trojans. Other than maybe Odysseus.

Wrong. The Iliad was "written" by Greeks. The Trojans died. Virgil picks them up in the Aenid.

And Paris is clearly identified as a pussy throughout.

...

Achilles is a dick, but he gets a pass because he's so fucking badass.

Agamemnon is widely regarded as a dick with no pass. He goes to Troy to whomp ass for his brother's wife? Sure, why the fuck not. His wife kills him for the reasons pointed out earlier.

Character is of a race that would normally con evil in a detect spell.

-Crissa

SunTzuWarmaster wrote:
On the flip side, it is completely awesome to wig out and kill something "In the name of my best friend recently slain!"

Heh; one of my fondest 2E roleplaying moments was when my character went on a total rampage after his pseudodragon familiar got killed in the Demonweb Pits (due to a combo of Gygaxian bullshit and DM douchebaggery). He hauled his ass back to the Prime Material to get the spell he needed to bring the l'il fella back to life, and when the uber-powerful NPC wizard we knew wouldn't sell him the goods, my character dropped a stone mastodon on his castle from low orbit...

I should totally have been rubbed out several times in that fight, but it's a story the dice just seemed to want to tell. My abiding memory is of the DM shaking his head in disbelief at something like my fourth natural 20 saving throw in a row and saying "It's... it's... it's like he's too pissed off to die..."

My character - whose first consideration for most of his career up to that point had been "looking out for his own hide" - was so furious that, having retrieved the necessary, he voluntarily returned to the actual Abyss in order to knifecrime Lolth *just* so the spell to bring his familiar back would work. Epic rage was epic.

Angsty or wangsty? It seemed pretty awesome at the time, although I now can't help but wonder whether the phrase "disproportionate response" wouldn't be more apt.

I am totally cool on disproportionate response in RPGs.

Is this the part where I link to relevant tropes for the lulz, only to get bitched at tomorrow because people wasted hours link hopping?