Pen & Paper: I died last night

So, last night in one of my pen & paper campaigns, my character died. Now I've had characters die before, usually towards the end of a campaign, as was the case here, but this death was somewhat unspectacular and anticlimactic. It also totally blindsided me and came right after a first for me in an RPG. Let me tell you about Dr. Hong-Owen and his not-so gallant death.

Dr. Tyson Hong-Owen (extra-points for anyone who gets the reference to my favorite body of sci-fi works) was a space-archaeologist. Space Indiana-Jonesing was the pitch that our GM had baited me in with so that was the profession I chose for my character. A young, vigorous man in the process of discovering Space-Mayan artifacts and working with passion on discovering their secrets. So when, during the course of the campaign living Space-Mayas showed up, he was on the forefront of first contact with them. And it cost him his life.



The specifics of the campaign were really not that important. It ended up in an ancient bunker that was part of some old FTL-communications network of ancient magitech. Bad Guys were after our band of intrepid heroes, who had sealed themselves inside the complex. We were on a real time clock, as our GM likes to set secret timers on his phone that make shit hit the fan when they go off, even when we're in the middle of RPing some scene. A bit like Hitchcock's bomb under the table.

Normally, being on a timer is not too bad, after all, we're talking and/or rolling dice, which can be sped up immensely when people know that they have limited time. I myself find over-analyzing situations in RPGs annoying enough - we're making decisions that our characters need to make in split-seconds and taking minutes for it? That's wrong. And no, our characters don't have time to discuss this all out. So, the timer was running and my character was trying to get power to the installations A.I., which our psycher could talk to with his mind somehow. And our GM whips out an actual tile-riddle. Like, physical tiles he had printed and cut out. He goes "This is what's in the fuse-box. You need to figure it out." I got excited. "My first old-school dungeon-riddle!" Then I realized that at this point, the skills of my character, who has a doctorate degree in Space-Mayanistics and cyber-implants allowing him to scan complex machinery are totally moot: I am the one who has to solve this riddle, no dice-rolling involved. On a real-world timer. Damn.

Our GM hadn't had time to test the difficulty of the riddle with a neutral person, as he admitted later. So he had no idea if the thing was actually beatable. There are an awful lot of possible combinations for a grid of that size, as another player, a physicist in real life, unhelpfully pointed out, doing some rough math on the spot and telling me that it would take however many thousand hours for me to try them all out. Me and another player, who was playing our psycher, who was in the same room as my guy, got to work but he was quickly needed elsewhere. So it was me and Dr. Hong-Owen working on this riddle.

Three times I needed to reset the whole thing. Then I painted dotted lines onto the base sheet of paper. My fellow player looked at my half-finished thing and suggested one tile. Then it made click in my head. I worked quickly, finishing the lines and connections. Had I been close to giving up seconds ago, it was suddenly finished. In all its glory I even had two tiles left over, unused. My solution happened to be more efficient than the original our GM had made.

Fuck yeah!

So, our GM gave the thing a once-over and we had power to the base just as the timer rang and our assailants started cutting through the door we had sealed them behind. The other PCs had prepared some defenses in form of explosives and some boxes stacked for cover. A firefight ensued, where we had to learn the hard way that some of the attackers wore armor that our puny handguns couldn't penetrate. When the last two entered the room, Dr. Hong-Owen fired at one of them twice, the bullets pinging off the armor like they were nothing. The guy returned fire with a laser-weapon and killed me twice over. And that was it. Of four PCs, two were shot, one was captured and likely psi-tortured for the rest of his existence and one, our psycher, was able to escape using some side-function of the FTL-transmitter. Two NPCs we had with us probably died too.

Well, that campaign is over. I only feel sad for Tyson Hong-Owen because he died before he could reap the fruit of his professional work. He had just established contact with an alien culture, found priceless ancient technology and was on the way of becoming the foremost expert in his field. Then a stray laser probably cut him in half. Sad, when you think about it. But I like roleplaying a lot for the stories it generates, especially when they are NOT like Hollywood. So it is good.