Real Life Mary-Sue Derails Campaign

Full disclosure, I created this account a week ago just so I could post on this Reddit. I learned about this place a while back and have been dying to share a story or two I've accumulated over the years. I've tried to stay within the guidelines and I apologize for any faux pas I may have made with this post.

In the waning days of the lockdowns, my wife and I were really itching to get back into tabletop gaming. We had been part of a gaming group a few years earlier, but the group had a huge falling out. Max (obviously not his real name, none of the names in this story are) and his wife had also been part of this group, but the two had since gone through a messy divorce, so when Max invited us to join a new game at his house, we were unsure what to expect.

The game was set to be an evil Pathfinder Adventure Path and we were all tasked to create level 1 evil characters. Max, who was notorious for min/max’ing his characters (see what I did there?) would be GM’ing the game and wasn’t going to play any DMPCs. The other players in this new group would be Jane (Max’s new girlfriend), Phil (Jane’s best friend growing up), and Nate (Max’s best friend and roommate). Jane wasn’t very familiar with the game, so Max created a totally broken archer Ranger for her. Phil had created a Vampire Assassin, which was also borderline broken. And Nate had talked Max into allowing him to create a Changeling Druid, but they had altered the rules a bit to make him a little more nerfed than it would have normally been. My wife and I had come up with a couple of the vilest characters we could come up with, a sleazy lawyer necromancer and a multi-level marketing bard.

One thing to note here is that my wife and I love to create interesting characters to roleplay, and we usually optimize them for utility rather than combat. Essentially, we create fun characters that can hold their own in a fight if pressed but are more suited to skill checks and buffing or de-buffing, if not getting around combat entirely when possible. Taking that into consideration, we were the odd ones out in this game, and this was fine with Max, Jane, and Phil, but Nate seemed personally offended that we didn’t focus as much on dealing as much damage as possible.

We had gamed with Nate once or twice in the past, and he seemed like an alright guy, if not a little overly enthusiastic and confident, but a lot of players in the local Pathfinder scene were like that where we lived. Now we were getting a full dose of Nate outside of a public venue and things got awkward real quick.

The first few sessions went okay. The rest of the group was a little surprised by our choice of characters, but we proved very useful by either intimidating NPCs with excessive litigation or lulling them into complacency with lengthy sales pitches. On a side note, I didn’t know it at the time, but Max had actually gone through law school and remarked that I was almost convincible as a lawyer and got a lot of the legalese pretty close. Nate showed a little annoyance that we were avoiding some encounters, but mostly he was friendly enough.

The thing was though, that Nate liked to have himself a nice glass of spirits from time to time, and by glass I mean bottle, by spirits I mean hard liquor, and by time to time I mean frequently until black out drunk. Another thing we eventually came to learn about Nate was that he was not just some part-time beer truck driver that lived in his best friend’s basement. No, he was indeed, the most amazing and interesting person in the entire world. The best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be.

As Nate would go from buzzed to drunk, he would regale us with excerpts from his life’s story. His first true passion was playing the saxophone which he mastered in high school. He believed that he was able to accomplish this because he was born with strong ties to the Native American fertility deity, Kokopelli. Unfortunately, he abandoned his music to travel to Nepal to train with Buddhist monks that he was quickly able to gain reverence from by exhibiting his ability to meditate while sitting under the flow of a trickling waterfall of ice-cold glacier water.

Eventually, he would make his way back to the states, where one night he would happen upon the scene of an accident where a drunk driver had flipped their car into the median of a freeway. Immediately he sprung into action, pushing aside the useless firefighters and paramedics to reach the car with the drunk woman pinned inside. Luckily for her, adrenalin kicked in and Nate ripped the car door off it’s hinges with his bare hands and pulled the woman to safety before the car caught fire. Being a humble man and not seeking recognition, Nate then fled the scene before the police could question him.

Now we’d get to Nate’s great fall from grace. After receiving his masters in chemistry from university, Nate got a job at one of the major food additive companies (he’s under an NDA, so he can’t reveal which one) where he quickly excelled due to his preternatural sense of taste and smell. He revealed that his sense of smell was so incredible that it caused him much annoyance due to being able to tell, to the hour, when was the last time a person had had sex or had bathed. Nate was on the edge of a major breakthrough in extract flavoring that would revolutionize the industry, but he was cut down in his prime by a manager that felt threatened by his success.

Though Nate had now been reduced to but a humble beer truck driver, he was not as down and out as it may have appeared. His new job offered him more time to perfect his art of forging Damascus steel, but not the steel that is considered to be Damascus steel nowadays. No, you see Nate had discovered the long-lost ancient method for forging true Damascus steel which is better in every way than any modern steel. His plan was to perfect the technique and use it to forge custom kitchen knife sets that he would then sell to an exclusive clientele.

Nate had a lot of irons in the fire, so we were lucky that he even took the time to come and join our little campaign. This attitude combined with his drinking made for some pretty unbearable sessions. More than once, the party was trying to come up with a plan to hold off a siege or steal a major artifact, while Nate interrogated NPCs that had little to no information of any substance because they were very minor characters. That was when he wasn’t trying to pick fights with high level Paladin NPCs that we were obviously meant to avoid at all costs.

All of this got much worse once he hit level 4 and finally got his shapeshifting ability that he had worked out with Max. Early on he could only shapeshift into general things, but later he would gain the ability to mimic specific people or animals. The first really awkward situation with this ability came when we were trying to get ready for some sort of major event, but long sections of the session were dedicated to Nate shapeshifting into a bear to seduce a semi-friendly NPC’s bear companion. I don’t think any of us knew what exactly his plan was, but he really wanted to get it on with this bear in character, and even tried to create a romantic side plot with him and the bear.

This wouldn’t be the only time that Nate used shapeshifting to romantically pursue an animal. He did this more than once or twice from what I recall. Although I must admit that there was one time where it was actually useful to the party. There was one session where we had to ruin the reputation to a powerful merchant in town and we ended up accomplishing this by Nate’s character shapeshifting into the merchant and very publicly getting intimate with an influential nobleman’s favorite horse at a very exclusive ball. This even came back as a reoccurring joke with the merchant being labelled a ‘notorious horse [lover]’ anytime he was brought up by local NPCs. I stress though, this was one of the very few times, Nate’s antics were even mildly helpful or relevant to the story.

Eventually, the sessions became more and more awkward. Jane eventually quit showing up and then seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth. Phil stuck with it and tried to make the best of the situation, but he was spending more and more time playing on his phone rather than trying to stay invested in the game. Nate and I eventually got into an argument over the significance of Paprika to Hungarian cuisine and it got heated enough that Max intervened and asked if we were going to be okay. I lied and told him, that it was just a friendly argument, but it obviously wasn’t. It was around this point where we would have to call sessions early or focus on side stories because Nate was passing out from time to time.

The end came shortly after my wife’s character was killed off in a very difficult encounter. I had gathered up all of my and her loot to sell to pay for a resurrection of her character at a lower level, but in the next session we were both killed off in an encounter that was way beyond a difficult CR for the party at that level. I took this as a good time to call it quits. I told Max that we’d create a couple new characters over the next few weeks, but I’m pretty sure that he knew we weren’t coming back. I could be wrong, but I think he knew that things were devolving to the point of no return sooner or later, so he ended things the smoothest way he could.

I felt really bad doing that to Max, but I think he understood. It was a shame because I really liked hanging out with him and Phil was pretty cool too, but Nate was just too insufferable to deal with. Ironically, Max eventually passed the bar and became an attorney, but I have no idea what ever happened to anyone else. I haven’t seen those True Damascus Steel knife sets out there for sale, but then again, I’m probably just not a high enough rank in the Illuminati to have heard about them yet.

TL;DR: Pathfinder campaign gets ruined by GM’s drunken narcissist roommate, so he kills half the party off to avoid conflict.