My Weekend

[hkellick]

It's been an.. interesting.. weekend. Both good and bad.
The bad: this is the first weekend in... a while where I didn't see Kristen at all.
Mind you, I saw her Friday and I'll see her Tuesday, but still...
She's at the cottage with her family and I'm.. well one day we went to the cottage, and the other day I roleplayed.

The reason I had to go to the cottage this week was my cousin Freddie and his Fiancee' Ellen were coming up for the day (Saturday).
Freddie is my favorite cousin. He's actually my mom's cousin, but we call him Cousin Freddie anyways. He's a good man and I just enjoy hanging out with him, ya know?
So we went to the family cottage Saturday to see him.
Got there and the sun is shining, so we wait for Freddie and Ellen to get in from Rochester.
By the time they get in, it's 1:00.. and.. dark and rainy-looking.
(The one thing I don't like about this summer is that the weather has been very unstable this summer. One moment it's sunny, than cloudy and rainy, then sunny, then rainy. It's just not been a good summer weatherwise.)
Actually, I'm sorta worried about that for Saturday when Kristen and I will probably try to do Darien Lake.
But anwyays, the weather has turned decidedly nasty. It's dark, is threatning rain and is suddenly fairly windy.
So we sit in the living room and talk about things.. Freddie and Ellen's wedding...
Well, let me take a moment on that.
Freddie and Ellen are moving down to Florida in the beginning of next year into a house that's being built right now and are going to get married in a really small ceremony.. like 12 very very close friends and family. No one from the family but grandma are even invited (forget how we'd get there.), which irritated me at first.
But he's going to have a reception in Buffalo afterwards.. probably some time in March for the rest of their family and friends.
So, anyways, it starts to rain... so, as it turns out, it's Crystal Beach day.
For those NOT born and raised in the Buffalo area (everyone but myself, ecwoodburn and blackfelicula), Crystal Beach Amusement Park WAS a nice little park in Fort Erie, Ontario. It had some nice rides: The Shot in the Dark, the Magic Castle, The Octopus, Two Coasters (including my favorite for many years: The Comet).
Unfortunately, it ended up in direct competition with Darien Lake and it lost out.
It closed it's doors in 1988. A couple years later, it was ripped apart and now there's apartments there. Which is sad.
But every year they pull out the old Crystal Beach ride leftovers, the postcard, the posters etc. and make a weekend of it.
I went last year and came back with a bunch of postcards. This time I came back with an official Crystal Beach (same company who used to make this stuff before) lollipop. And that was it. I REALLY WANTED this picture someone drew that distilled all sorts of nifty scenes from Crystal Beach, but at it's cheapest, it was $30 Canadian and I didn't have that much on me. *sob* :(
So we went back home, talked some more, ate.. and then went home.
Freddie and Ellen decided they wanted to come with us so they could look at places to host the reception.. both near our house.. University Inn and Daffodil's. So I drove with Freddie, Ellen drove with Mom and Josh drove home alone (he had worked and drove up for supper). Amusingly, Freddie and I had ended up ahead of everyone else. He wanted to go down Thompson Road to the QEW to the Peace Bridge and home. But.. we turned too early and ended up in Walmart.
We look behind us and Josh is following us. OK, maybe he didn't know where he was going.
Then we look behind us some more.. and mom is following us. Why in hells bells is she following us? SHE certainly knows how to go home.
In the end, we ended up going in a big circle and I was very amused that both Josh, but especially mom had followed us around it.
So we get home and Freddie, Ellen and mom go off to look at University Inn and Daffodil's.
And I call Kristen, talk to her for half an hour, forty mintues, then toddle off to bed. I really wish she'd been with. I do want her to meet my family and she'd have loved Freddie and Ellen. They're just great.

So, Sunday comes around. I don't do much until 10:30.. I watch some TV (yay, original Trek!) and some jobs, but otherwise..
at 10:30, dad calls.. and I'm writing his message to Josh down when.. knock knock door opens and Marc is here. Oh JOY!
Now Marc does NOT know we went to the Beach Saturday to see Freddie and none of us intend to tell him so.
Anyways, he wanted to see when we were going to the Beach again. Based on timing, I think he was hoping to catch us just as we were going so he could follow us there. (which would upset my grandmother considerably, having Marc over with no prior warning/knowledge)
I came up with a good line though, a fair one "We will be going to the beach when the weather is actually beachworthy"
Anyways, I forgot that his car had dyed one day and had not been reparable (or rather, was too expensive to repair), so it surprised me when mom asked how he got here.
And was even further surprised to hear Marc say he's got a new car. A 99.. something or other. I forget.
And Marc says that dad cosigned his loan.
Upon reflection, this is not possible. We've had credit problems in our family before (for those who don't know, when my father left my mom he took away all the moneys and left her with all the bills. It took a while for my mom to get situated with a job where she had enough to pay for all our expenses. Mom declared bankruptcy. Also, she helped me ruin my own credit history by running up massive charges on my one and only credit card when I was 18 and never paying the bill.
Long story short, when mom's car died and she needed a new one, she tried to get a loan and was turned down, even when my grandmother cosigned with her. That's why the car is in her name.
That means that Marc lied.. either he paid for the car with dirty money or dad paid everything for him. I dunno which one. Truthfully, it doesn't really matter.. just more reason to dislike the both of them. (one more out of a thousand or so.)
So Marc leaves, I do some quick grocery shopping and go roleplay.

Roleplay (Yes, I'm making this it's own sub-heading)
I'd like to say roleplay was great.. but it wasn't.
I've been iffy about this campaign for a while, there's been (as dawnstar sort of put it), too much roll play and not enough role play. I'm a cat who can turn into a human who can control the kami (japanese elemental spirits) and my companion is a weael who can turn into a human and, oh by the way, is a ninja. Surely, there should be more to this than.. battle, battle, battle, battle.
And he's just evil. Not a good sort of evil most of the time. I've managed to give him ideas (we were randomly attacked by a celestial boar once. I write a creative post in which I suggest that it's another goddess going after ours.. and.. shock upon shock.. next campaign, it is!) and he just.. enh.. it's just not been much fun. Especially lately. Not even particularly good stress relief.
I like the GM and his brother (the other PC), but.. this campaign hasn't been great for a while.
Well, yesterday we got into a big battle.. two ogres, some orc snipers, a handful of worgs and a bunch of Dark Ones (from some book Todd (the GM) read. They basically look like dragonmen). We get our asses kicked, CAN'T run away and are captured and thrown into a dungeon.
This, in itself, doesn't bother me. Dungeons can be OK.. make it a challenge to let the PCs try to figure out how to escape.
For example.. my idea..
My character is a shapeshifter. He can become not just a cat but any number of shapes ranging in size from small to large.
So my character was going to turn into a raven, fly to the one lone window near the roof, turn into a cat and get through the bars, turn back into a raven and plan an escape for my friends, possibly including ropes and/or alchemy.
But the GM had not prepared for such imagination on my part. When I attempt my escape plan (specifically the second day when the Dark Ones open up the door into the dungeon and tell me they have come for me.), a mysterious force captures me and does not allow me any chance to escape. Lovely :p .. and entierly not fair. :p
When I get annoyed and accuse the GM of cheating with his l33t GM powers, he proceeds to tell me that if I'd tried it BEFORE they came for me, he'd have allowed it. Mmhmm. Riiiight.
So my character is captured and forced into a cell. I kick and scream and bite the whole way. I get strapped to a table so I'm figuring, OOC that OK, they're going to torture us. Lovely. Oh well. Then a fight breaks out in my room and I'm all "OK, I try to escape ala Houdini".. try says the GM, I roll fairly well "Well, that's under 30. You fail." Uhhh? The fight ends and then a female dark one tells me I am what she needs, and proceeds to rape my character.. And then another comes and rapes him.. and another.. and apparently this goes on all day.
Now I'm pretty laid back about fantasy and roleplaying. If it had been plain old torture.. OK, lovely but par for the course. I mean.. this is a fantasy world. You do one of a few things with prisoners in a fantasy world and torture is certainly among that list. Being left to rot in a prison.. doesn't bother me. Being forced to eat roasted human.. doesn't bother me. Again, all par for the course.
But the rape.. that bothers me. The GMs explanation was something like "Well, Dark Ones can't breed amongst thesmelves. They require others for breeding." This explanation does not make me feel better.
OF COURSE, once we've all been raped, the next morning, a female paladin arrives to rescue us.
And I'm sitting here going "Are you so unimaginative, so restrictive, so...sick.. that you had to put our characters through that?"
I mean, you are the GM, you are the storycrafter. WHAT was your reasoning behind that scene?
As some of you know, I'm not the model GM. When I had my chance, I screwed up my Neogenesis campaign and it crumbled around me. I learned many lessons screwing up that campaign.. more than I did in a semi-succesful if short campaign I ran at RIT. I learned that, in the end, YOU are the storycrafter and it is your world that they are playing in. If you craft your world well and make it an interesting and fun place for your players, they'll want to keep playing that. But you always have to be mindful of your players.
I have the power, right now, to destroy his whole world. All I have to do is stop playing. There's only two players left.. me and Todd's brother Scott. If I quit, then the campaign probably ends and that, as they say, is probably that.
It's not like he doesn't have some good ideas. There were some great ideas.
At the beginning of the campaign, we had to stop The Darkwyrm (like Cthulhu, sort of, but a world-eater, not a soul-eater) and.. maybe we succeeded, but that was dropped.
Then Scott's PC found a goddess statue and defiled it and to make up for it, he has to build a temple for her. That was sort of dropped.
I was tossed into a magic well by an evil spirit and am slowly but surely turning gold. THAT was basically dropped.
All we do is battle, battle, battle.
So, anyways.. my point.. I'm very much bothered by the being raped scene. And it's the kind of "I'm bothered" where.. I can't just let it go. Maybe if the campaign was better than it actually is, I could move on, but that was a last straw sort of thing for me.
So I have two choices I can foresee... I can pull Todd aside or call him or something and tell him all this.. the being annoyed by the battle after battle, the being bothered by being raped etc. Or, I could quit the campaign.
Quitting is easy.. it had been over a month since we'd roleplayed last and alot of that happens to be because my weekends have been taken up by being with my Kristen. :)
At the moment, I feel like just quitting. The problem is, I genuinely enjoy roleplaying.. I enjoy creating a character, fleshing it out and going with it. That's why I love The Sims so much. If I quit Todd's campaign, I might actually miss actual roleplaying and I'll have lost that chances.. even if the campaign hasn't been the greatest in the world.
So.. I dunno what to do.

Then, we decided we wanted to go see LXG (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I know some of you didn't enjoy it and thought it was dumb. To be honest, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was campy at times, sure and there were certain bits I could nitpick to death, but.. all in all, I really enjoyed the movie and I found it no less believable than most of the other stories these characters were based on.
Then I went home and talked to Kristen until 11:00.
And that was my weekend.
Exciting, no?

OK, I think I've typed enough for a while. Now to post.

Comments

[amaterasu.livejournal.com]

About the RPing:

I'm still pretty much a newbie in the gaming world, but it sounds like your GM is Bad News, and/or very inexperienced. I think too many GMs suffer from the "God Complex," and that could be the case here. Shouldn't the GM be able to deal with whatever the players throw at them, instead of saying, "No, you can't do that because it's not the solution I came up with?"

And, personally, I find the rape scenario horribly offensive, and there's no way in seven hells that I would have stood for it. Of course, I'd also have made a huge, steaming fuss about it--sounds like you handled it a bit more... tactfully. I don't blame you for being upset, or for not being able to let go of it. I would advise you to take the GM aside and (calmly, if you can) explain your feelings. And THEN quit the campaign. You shouldn't have to put up with that, and isn't the point of gaming to have fun? That isn't what I call fun.

Can you find another RP group in the area? I know that's a problem for some people...