Skippy, the Shadowrun Chiphead.
Oct 3, 2018 17:46:02 GMT -8
Post by Ed from Minnesota on Oct 3, 2018 17:46:02 GMT -8
Hello everyone!
For those souls sad enough to visit this, I wanted to recount the story of one of my favorite characters, Skippy. This is a story about vengeance, hatred, and ultimate boredom. I hope you love it.
Back in the 1990's, we played a lot of Shadowrun 2nd edition. My friends and I played all sorts of games, and one of our players decided to run a game after a long pause between GMing. He wanted to run a truly epic game, and so he had us create Ubermensch (superhuman) characters, with ungodly amounts of money and experience (10 million credits and 100 Karma, for those in the know). And we went to town. There were 5 of us, each a min-maxed death machine with all of the extras we could never do in a regular game. We were armed with the ultimate in new tech, both internally (cybered) and externally (gear). We had cybergasms of coolness. It took us days to spend all the money on our characters, but we did it. And we were ready.
Our team of ultra-super-awesome mercenaries were hired by a big Mr. Johnson to provide security for his party on his private island. Except we actually couldn't do anything or make suggestions, we were just there to provide backup. At 1,000,000 a day in premium, why should we question this, right? (if you see the alarm klaxon going already, give yourself two points).
So the game gets going. And we are all at the party, providing protection to the guests. Suddenly, the normal security alerts us to multiple aircraft inbound. We ask where they are, and suddenly there are multiple people landing around the island (damn those teleporting bad guys!!). We race to the outer wall surrounding the facility to see what is going on. And suddenly a man appears on the wall, with an anti-tank rifle on a gyro-mount (for firing Machineguns), and he shoots me and kills me in one shot. 5 minutes into the game. I roll dice, but really there wasn't any chance to evade or do anything about it.
So I had a moment of clarity. At 16, I realized that my friend was a dick. And that no matter what I did, he had to be better than me. So I decided to play the game by new rules.
I said I was fine, and started on my new character (this one was by the normal rules. I was the only person whom died). I took a computer hacker, gave him all of the electronic and computer skills I could, and horrible stats except for Intelligence. I was unlikeable, weak, unhealthy, clumsy, and unlikable. I took a lot of money, and sunk it into cyberware and the baddest-ass simsense deck you could buy. With a lot of chips. My character was Walter 'Skip' Skiponowski. He was a computer programmer by day, and chip-head by night. He plugged into his computer and pretended at night to be Neil the Ork Barbarian, or any of a thousand other gaming/movie heroes. And he was at the party when gunshots started going, and he snapped. Thinking he was in a game, he grabbed a gun from a dead security guard and charged the attackers firing wildly. Skippy had no combat skills at all. He had terrible stats. He relied on quantity of fire, not quality of fire to hit the enemy. And nobody shot at him because he wasn't a threat.
After somehow killing two of the enemies (I still think the GM to this day is astounded by the fact), the party recruited Skippy as a mascot and brought him along. And I played Skippy to the hilt, demanding outrageous fees, terrible jobs, and doing everything without any skill so the results were never in my favor. And the players always watched out for Skippy, and kept him alive. And nobody ever really thought him a threat, so he survived to the end of the campaign. What was supposed to be a giant middle finger to my friend turned out to be one of my favorite memories of gaming.
Damn Skippy.
For those souls sad enough to visit this, I wanted to recount the story of one of my favorite characters, Skippy. This is a story about vengeance, hatred, and ultimate boredom. I hope you love it.
Back in the 1990's, we played a lot of Shadowrun 2nd edition. My friends and I played all sorts of games, and one of our players decided to run a game after a long pause between GMing. He wanted to run a truly epic game, and so he had us create Ubermensch (superhuman) characters, with ungodly amounts of money and experience (10 million credits and 100 Karma, for those in the know). And we went to town. There were 5 of us, each a min-maxed death machine with all of the extras we could never do in a regular game. We were armed with the ultimate in new tech, both internally (cybered) and externally (gear). We had cybergasms of coolness. It took us days to spend all the money on our characters, but we did it. And we were ready.
Our team of ultra-super-awesome mercenaries were hired by a big Mr. Johnson to provide security for his party on his private island. Except we actually couldn't do anything or make suggestions, we were just there to provide backup. At 1,000,000 a day in premium, why should we question this, right? (if you see the alarm klaxon going already, give yourself two points).
So the game gets going. And we are all at the party, providing protection to the guests. Suddenly, the normal security alerts us to multiple aircraft inbound. We ask where they are, and suddenly there are multiple people landing around the island (damn those teleporting bad guys!!). We race to the outer wall surrounding the facility to see what is going on. And suddenly a man appears on the wall, with an anti-tank rifle on a gyro-mount (for firing Machineguns), and he shoots me and kills me in one shot. 5 minutes into the game. I roll dice, but really there wasn't any chance to evade or do anything about it.
So I had a moment of clarity. At 16, I realized that my friend was a dick. And that no matter what I did, he had to be better than me. So I decided to play the game by new rules.
I said I was fine, and started on my new character (this one was by the normal rules. I was the only person whom died). I took a computer hacker, gave him all of the electronic and computer skills I could, and horrible stats except for Intelligence. I was unlikeable, weak, unhealthy, clumsy, and unlikable. I took a lot of money, and sunk it into cyberware and the baddest-ass simsense deck you could buy. With a lot of chips. My character was Walter 'Skip' Skiponowski. He was a computer programmer by day, and chip-head by night. He plugged into his computer and pretended at night to be Neil the Ork Barbarian, or any of a thousand other gaming/movie heroes. And he was at the party when gunshots started going, and he snapped. Thinking he was in a game, he grabbed a gun from a dead security guard and charged the attackers firing wildly. Skippy had no combat skills at all. He had terrible stats. He relied on quantity of fire, not quality of fire to hit the enemy. And nobody shot at him because he wasn't a threat.
After somehow killing two of the enemies (I still think the GM to this day is astounded by the fact), the party recruited Skippy as a mascot and brought him along. And I played Skippy to the hilt, demanding outrageous fees, terrible jobs, and doing everything without any skill so the results were never in my favor. And the players always watched out for Skippy, and kept him alive. And nobody ever really thought him a threat, so he survived to the end of the campaign. What was supposed to be a giant middle finger to my friend turned out to be one of my favorite memories of gaming.
Damn Skippy.