Actual Play Directory
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Not being able do kill the Master Lisbon, Portugal, 2009 Hi there :), This last week me a two friends of mine played My Life With Master. It lasted 4 sessions including one for character and master creation only. One of the players never played this game and me and the other had played it once before, both with PCs, so this was my first time GMing this. The Master was an aristocrat cast off who was trying to build some sort of close family (wife, kids, kids friends, etc.) that he could show to the rest of his family and thus proving his worth to them (Feeder-brain I believe). It all went pretty well, and by ?well? I mean gut-wrenching, teeth grinding, body twitching, face hiding behind hands crying ?oh my god how can this be happening, I have no soul!?. So lots of fun. The players started the game by going along with their Master request, pretty soft stuff at first, throw this and that person to the dogs (so they could feed on them), kidnapping children, etc. All along trying to create and protect their connections with the town?s people. Only by the second session did they start trying to fight what the Master orders. By the end of the third session both players had a Love score greater than Fear + Weariness and (together) were able to reject the Masters order to kill everyone in the castle while he tried to run away from a group of Gypsies that were storming in. After they succeeded we entered the cycle of play to kill the master. With a couple of scenes in were I dumped all the clichés I could remember from old MLWM-like horror movies, a Fight in a tall crumbling tower during a Lightning storm, from were the three (master + minions) fell. A chariot fight thru a dark wood, a slim slippery dirt road by a cliff with the sea underneath and an unstable suspension bridge. This was when we hit a little bump. After failing the first roll the players Weariness increased (following the rules) witch diminished their dice pool (I say they because both players were involved in the fight aiding each other) and every roll after that it keep going down, until eventually they had a total of 2d4 (plus any bonus from the Intimacy, Desperation, Honesty dice) against my 12 or 13 d4s. When we got to this point we noticed that both players Epilogues were at Weariness greater than Reason + Self-Loathing, so there was no point in trying to keep rolling because it was clear that they weren?t going to be able to kill the master, nor would their epilogues changed. So we just decided that the master would run away and so would the minions. So my question with this AP is this, is the Master really supposed to die or is this scenario (a Weariness so high that winning becomes impossible) a probability fluke? Or maybe we fumbled some rule in the book during the fight, but I think not, since we kept reading it even after play ended (just to make sure we did it right). All and all it was a great game story with horrible doings, intense psychological terror and really strong character defining scenes. Even one person who wasn?t playing with us but was in the same room literally bent herself self in two when the orphanage director said to one of the minions (the one responsible for getting children for the master) ?you seem like a nice boy, could you please take charge of the orphanage while I recover from my illness (she had a broken leg)?, so that was pretty strong. All the Best, D. |
System: My Life With Master Format: Blog Language: English Viewpoint: GM
Rating: 4.0/5 (1 vote)
Clicks: 4 
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