On Thursday night at ZenKaiKon, upon our room reaching critical mass, one Dan Howard decided that the room would play a rousing game of Werewolf. We, being a rowdy and quite game bunch, agreed. Many of us were also drunk. Your humble narrator was already fully in the bag, and about to get even more so. And so almost the whole room joined in and put their heads down. Or rather, most of us. Mr. Ellis was heavily engrossed in a game of FTL at the time and so only had to spin his chair around. Pay attention to that fact, it'll come in handy in a moment.
For those uninitiated, a game of Werewolf goes like this: First, the Narrator deals out a bunch of cards. One person is the Werewolf, and one person is the Hunter. Everyone else is Townspeople. The Narrator begins telling their soon-to-be blood-soaked story and instructs everyone to put their heads down. Then the Narrator instructs the Werewolf to rise and point someone out to be killed during his story, and instructs the Hunter to rise and point out one person to investigate. The Hunter is then told that the person is the werewolf, or that they are not. Then everyone puts their heads up, the person who has been "killed" is out, and everyone begins accusing and voting on who is the killer. If a consensus is reached, the players have "lynched" the person they voted for, and they are also out of the game. If said lynched person is the Werewolf, the game ends. If said lynched person is the Hunter, they've just made their job harder. Anyone else, and the game continues. So here goes:
ROUND ONE
Before the game even started, Feldman, a gamer and evil plotter par excellence, ran down a bunch of statistics for us. His take on it was that after the first few rounds, it would get nigh-impossible to find the culprit. To me, this meant we would have to take someone out every turn. Dan narrated the first sundown, and then said "And the werewolf rose and devoured one of the townspeople..." and I got the first hint of what was going on. Of course, I was drunk off my ass (and doo-doo-dooing the theme song to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer at one point), so it took a little while, but here's the way I remember it:
When the werewolf bit was narrated, There was a sudden "whoosh" right by my head as I almost got whacked by a chair turning around. This narrowed down the suspects immensely, but it wasn't concrete. Neither was the "whoosh" of the chair almost whacking me in the head when it turned back once the werewolf section ended. Huh, I thought to myself. That's odd.
Something was working around in my head, especially when I saw my friend and compatriot Mr. Ellis spin around in his chair for the accusations and voting. Okay, fucker, my pickled braincells told each other and silently told Mr. Ellis, I have you dead to rights. I threw my arm out dramatically when it was my turn to accuse and screamed "J'ACCUSE!" at the top of my lungs. I then gave an impassioned and rather hammy speech about how I was drunk and therefore Ellis, a man who has known me since college, would underestimate me, as he finds that my tolerance is low and my reasoning is faulty. This line of logic, possibly because it was backed by enough ham to put every deli in New York out of business, was accepted and we went to the first vote.
However, there's a round after the the accusation round: The rebuttal round. And despite my brief pursuit in favor of hamming it up for a living*, Mr. Ellis has one talent I sadly do not: Escalation. He is very good at escalating things. Lord only knows how it works. So as over the top as I was, he was even more over the top. Also, because physical evidence is sort of inadmissible in a game of Werewolf, I wasn't allowed to add on "And that god damn chair kept nearly whacking me in the head when he turned around to off a player. You schmuck." as I thought that would be cheating. So he launches into an impassioned defense lauding his accuser and talking about how all he wants to do is just play his game, so why would he bother just going through the motions if he's playing the Werewolf?
They acquitted him. The jackwagon.
So I try to figure out other tells. But I'm pretty out of it, so it's basically me giggling and trying to find a pattern in the kills that isn't there. I accuse him again the next round, as that stupid chair nearly whacked me again, so I figure once again I have him dead to rights. The vote gets split among the various candidates, and the next nighttime section starts.
So now I have a plan. I have him dead to rights, and I'm finally to the point where I don't care, it's me or that stupid chair and that stupid chair is going down. And--
It was at that point that the right and honorable Mr. D. Howard started his narration and narrated me dead. I watched as the game slipped away from me, and at the end, Mr. Ellis stood up and revealed himself as the killer, causing cries of "aaargh" and my "I freaking knew it. You kept almost bumping into me with the chair." Still, he did win, and won clean, so one cannot fault success. Feldman pointed out where Mr. Ellis had tells, and we decided we were gonna play another round, as we were all still pretty invigorated. So Mr. Howard passed out the cards, and into the second round we went:
ROUND TWO
This round, I had the Werewolf card. So I started to plot out a course. I knew I had to take out Feldman, but I couldn't do it right away. He was a player who watched for tells, and knew the first two or three rounds were crucial to the group winning. If I took him out right away, there was a high chance I'd be taken out. He'd have to be second. Or third. So for my first target, I picked the one person who was sort of a newcomer to the party. I'd met Amy at the New Year's party I went to with the group, and while she was already someone who'd been accepted with open arms, she was also still the newest person to all of this. A target with no obvious pattern. So I picked her right out of the gate. It'd be a good first pick, I'd avoid the tells, and I'd keep the heat off of me. Sure enough, first round, there wasn't enough heat to push me to the fore. I slipped into the second round, and here's where things get hazy.
Feldman says I picked him second, but for the life of me, I can't remember it. I seem to believe I picked Mr. Ellis second, and Feldman third. Either way, when I got Feldman out of the game, Josh, a friend and partner in crime as far as terrible antics go, started to notice a pattern in my picks and called me on it. He did it in a grandiose way, he actually played up my ability to chaos-troll quite a bit**. I knew that the chances of me getting out of this were slim, but I also really, really wanted to rebut the argument. I needed misdirection, I needed distraction, I needed escalation.
So I voted for myself during the accusation round.
The fun thing about audacity is that when you do it for no god damn reason, it throws people off. At a certain point in games of Munchkin for instance, I stopped playing to win and just offered my help for absolutely free to undercut one of the main tactics of the game. The move in this case was incredibly risky, as I would lose if I screwed even one thing up.
I launched into a piece brown-nosing Feldman, the guy I'd just knocked out of the game, so hard that were it an actual attempt it would probably have shown up in some group of body-horror pictures people aren't sure are photoshopped or not. However, as previously mentioned, I was drunk and working on, like, beer number three, cider number two, and glass of liquor number one and a half. When I'd finished my convoluted and fawning paean, Josh looked at me and went, "So...your defense is that he's too worthy an opponent?"
"YES!" I slurred, "Let's face it, he's the worthy opponent, the rest of you are schmucks!***" With that, the round of voting commenced, with Abby and DAS, two good friends who have cut me a lot more slack than I have ever deserved and have also spurred me to new and terrible heights, voting for me just because I insulted them to their faces. (And probably also because even when I'm being audacious...I'm good, but I ain't that good). Somehow, and I am very lucky, they didn't manage to make it stick, and I continued my spree by knocking out first Abby, then Josh before he could accuse me again, and finally revealed myself, copping a Kubrick stare and throwing the horns with both hands. Because I'm classy, obviously. Instead of the angrish, I was met with bewilderment and "Oh god damn it, we all knew, how was he able to get out of that?"
I still don't have an answer to that question. Still invigorated, we moved into:
ROUND THREE
Feldman took over as narrator and moved the action from a small town beset by werewolves to 1930s Chicago. For convenience, he also made his "mob boss" a werewolf. And so we started the third round paranoid and willing to toss everyone out the window. Possibly because the first two times, we'd let things go a little too much. In the third game, we practically lost two people every turn, one to the werewolf/mob boss, and one to the lynch mob. We were also flummoxed. There wasn't an easy pattern, and so we were pretty much accusing and lynching at random. Until finally, it came down to two completely surprising elements.
The first was Amy. She had been playing the Hunter this whole time, a role that doesn't get much play because usually no one believes you and you have to make sure you've got an airtight story to go along with it. She came forward with the information after a few rounds, but told us that she thought she was cheating, since she saw the cards and knew who to investigate. After a while, we managed to convince her it didn't matter, and it was all right, because she'd gone about it the right way.
The second was Abby. She was the werewolf that time, and between our confusion and her actually fairly well-hidden picks (despite the one that should have been obvious, but that we were all surprised about), she managed to hide it until Amy took her out in the final rounds. At one point, I'd claimed she was my apprentice/bastard understudy. I think now that may be a little too apt. The game wound down after that, and we wound up playing a game of Cards Against Humanity-- a game I find keeps popping up in my life, and that I should really be losing less.
In the end, I am left with this to say about the people I know. When Mr. Ellis and I were the only two in our little legion of chaos, I could be fairly certain that the only reason we'd ever come into conflict and make it stick was when I inevitably try to end the world****. I never really thought I'd have competition for ending the world. Then I met this group. The people I mentioned by name-- even sort of-- are only a small sample of the overall group. Who will hopefully feature in other stories on this very blog. I figure it's a matter of time before one of us finally ends the whole mess, and I just hope it's me. The day after my end of the world, I have dinner plans.
UP NEXT:
A story that proves I at least have some moral fiber, then goes a bit wrong
*I was interested in acting at one point. Sadly, those were the days when I had no grasp of social conventions or anything like that, so networking eluded me. Also, I was eight and thankfully did not have stage parents. So when I didn't feel like it was how I wanted to do things, they understood. I tried it again, but just didn't dig the shit actors have to go through to get roles. So I went into writing, and used my skills at character work to do stuff like LARP and online roleplay. Go figure.
**Chaos-trolling is the act of trolling for no other purpose than making things go nuts. No antagonizing people, no making anyone hurt, just causing the most bizarre circumstances you can and then giggling and watching what happens. When you do it right, it makes it look like you've done nothing at all. When you do it well, you really don't know what you've done until months after the fact, when you go "...holy crap..."
***None of you are schmucks. Love you guys. Seriously.
****Hey. HEY. I said end, not destroy. There's a difference.
For those uninitiated, a game of Werewolf goes like this: First, the Narrator deals out a bunch of cards. One person is the Werewolf, and one person is the Hunter. Everyone else is Townspeople. The Narrator begins telling their soon-to-be blood-soaked story and instructs everyone to put their heads down. Then the Narrator instructs the Werewolf to rise and point someone out to be killed during his story, and instructs the Hunter to rise and point out one person to investigate. The Hunter is then told that the person is the werewolf, or that they are not. Then everyone puts their heads up, the person who has been "killed" is out, and everyone begins accusing and voting on who is the killer. If a consensus is reached, the players have "lynched" the person they voted for, and they are also out of the game. If said lynched person is the Werewolf, the game ends. If said lynched person is the Hunter, they've just made their job harder. Anyone else, and the game continues. So here goes:
ROUND ONE
Before the game even started, Feldman, a gamer and evil plotter par excellence, ran down a bunch of statistics for us. His take on it was that after the first few rounds, it would get nigh-impossible to find the culprit. To me, this meant we would have to take someone out every turn. Dan narrated the first sundown, and then said "And the werewolf rose and devoured one of the townspeople..." and I got the first hint of what was going on. Of course, I was drunk off my ass (and doo-doo-dooing the theme song to Buffy: The Vampire Slayer at one point), so it took a little while, but here's the way I remember it:
When the werewolf bit was narrated, There was a sudden "whoosh" right by my head as I almost got whacked by a chair turning around. This narrowed down the suspects immensely, but it wasn't concrete. Neither was the "whoosh" of the chair almost whacking me in the head when it turned back once the werewolf section ended. Huh, I thought to myself. That's odd.
Something was working around in my head, especially when I saw my friend and compatriot Mr. Ellis spin around in his chair for the accusations and voting. Okay, fucker, my pickled braincells told each other and silently told Mr. Ellis, I have you dead to rights. I threw my arm out dramatically when it was my turn to accuse and screamed "J'ACCUSE!" at the top of my lungs. I then gave an impassioned and rather hammy speech about how I was drunk and therefore Ellis, a man who has known me since college, would underestimate me, as he finds that my tolerance is low and my reasoning is faulty. This line of logic, possibly because it was backed by enough ham to put every deli in New York out of business, was accepted and we went to the first vote.
However, there's a round after the the accusation round: The rebuttal round. And despite my brief pursuit in favor of hamming it up for a living*, Mr. Ellis has one talent I sadly do not: Escalation. He is very good at escalating things. Lord only knows how it works. So as over the top as I was, he was even more over the top. Also, because physical evidence is sort of inadmissible in a game of Werewolf, I wasn't allowed to add on "And that god damn chair kept nearly whacking me in the head when he turned around to off a player. You schmuck." as I thought that would be cheating. So he launches into an impassioned defense lauding his accuser and talking about how all he wants to do is just play his game, so why would he bother just going through the motions if he's playing the Werewolf?
They acquitted him. The jackwagon.
So I try to figure out other tells. But I'm pretty out of it, so it's basically me giggling and trying to find a pattern in the kills that isn't there. I accuse him again the next round, as that stupid chair nearly whacked me again, so I figure once again I have him dead to rights. The vote gets split among the various candidates, and the next nighttime section starts.
So now I have a plan. I have him dead to rights, and I'm finally to the point where I don't care, it's me or that stupid chair and that stupid chair is going down. And--
It was at that point that the right and honorable Mr. D. Howard started his narration and narrated me dead. I watched as the game slipped away from me, and at the end, Mr. Ellis stood up and revealed himself as the killer, causing cries of "aaargh" and my "I freaking knew it. You kept almost bumping into me with the chair." Still, he did win, and won clean, so one cannot fault success. Feldman pointed out where Mr. Ellis had tells, and we decided we were gonna play another round, as we were all still pretty invigorated. So Mr. Howard passed out the cards, and into the second round we went:
ROUND TWO
This round, I had the Werewolf card. So I started to plot out a course. I knew I had to take out Feldman, but I couldn't do it right away. He was a player who watched for tells, and knew the first two or three rounds were crucial to the group winning. If I took him out right away, there was a high chance I'd be taken out. He'd have to be second. Or third. So for my first target, I picked the one person who was sort of a newcomer to the party. I'd met Amy at the New Year's party I went to with the group, and while she was already someone who'd been accepted with open arms, she was also still the newest person to all of this. A target with no obvious pattern. So I picked her right out of the gate. It'd be a good first pick, I'd avoid the tells, and I'd keep the heat off of me. Sure enough, first round, there wasn't enough heat to push me to the fore. I slipped into the second round, and here's where things get hazy.
Feldman says I picked him second, but for the life of me, I can't remember it. I seem to believe I picked Mr. Ellis second, and Feldman third. Either way, when I got Feldman out of the game, Josh, a friend and partner in crime as far as terrible antics go, started to notice a pattern in my picks and called me on it. He did it in a grandiose way, he actually played up my ability to chaos-troll quite a bit**. I knew that the chances of me getting out of this were slim, but I also really, really wanted to rebut the argument. I needed misdirection, I needed distraction, I needed escalation.
So I voted for myself during the accusation round.
The fun thing about audacity is that when you do it for no god damn reason, it throws people off. At a certain point in games of Munchkin for instance, I stopped playing to win and just offered my help for absolutely free to undercut one of the main tactics of the game. The move in this case was incredibly risky, as I would lose if I screwed even one thing up.
I launched into a piece brown-nosing Feldman, the guy I'd just knocked out of the game, so hard that were it an actual attempt it would probably have shown up in some group of body-horror pictures people aren't sure are photoshopped or not. However, as previously mentioned, I was drunk and working on, like, beer number three, cider number two, and glass of liquor number one and a half. When I'd finished my convoluted and fawning paean, Josh looked at me and went, "So...your defense is that he's too worthy an opponent?"
"YES!" I slurred, "Let's face it, he's the worthy opponent, the rest of you are schmucks!***" With that, the round of voting commenced, with Abby and DAS, two good friends who have cut me a lot more slack than I have ever deserved and have also spurred me to new and terrible heights, voting for me just because I insulted them to their faces. (And probably also because even when I'm being audacious...I'm good, but I ain't that good). Somehow, and I am very lucky, they didn't manage to make it stick, and I continued my spree by knocking out first Abby, then Josh before he could accuse me again, and finally revealed myself, copping a Kubrick stare and throwing the horns with both hands. Because I'm classy, obviously. Instead of the angrish, I was met with bewilderment and "Oh god damn it, we all knew, how was he able to get out of that?"
I still don't have an answer to that question. Still invigorated, we moved into:
ROUND THREE
Feldman took over as narrator and moved the action from a small town beset by werewolves to 1930s Chicago. For convenience, he also made his "mob boss" a werewolf. And so we started the third round paranoid and willing to toss everyone out the window. Possibly because the first two times, we'd let things go a little too much. In the third game, we practically lost two people every turn, one to the werewolf/mob boss, and one to the lynch mob. We were also flummoxed. There wasn't an easy pattern, and so we were pretty much accusing and lynching at random. Until finally, it came down to two completely surprising elements.
The first was Amy. She had been playing the Hunter this whole time, a role that doesn't get much play because usually no one believes you and you have to make sure you've got an airtight story to go along with it. She came forward with the information after a few rounds, but told us that she thought she was cheating, since she saw the cards and knew who to investigate. After a while, we managed to convince her it didn't matter, and it was all right, because she'd gone about it the right way.
The second was Abby. She was the werewolf that time, and between our confusion and her actually fairly well-hidden picks (despite the one that should have been obvious, but that we were all surprised about), she managed to hide it until Amy took her out in the final rounds. At one point, I'd claimed she was my apprentice/bastard understudy. I think now that may be a little too apt. The game wound down after that, and we wound up playing a game of Cards Against Humanity-- a game I find keeps popping up in my life, and that I should really be losing less.
In the end, I am left with this to say about the people I know. When Mr. Ellis and I were the only two in our little legion of chaos, I could be fairly certain that the only reason we'd ever come into conflict and make it stick was when I inevitably try to end the world****. I never really thought I'd have competition for ending the world. Then I met this group. The people I mentioned by name-- even sort of-- are only a small sample of the overall group. Who will hopefully feature in other stories on this very blog. I figure it's a matter of time before one of us finally ends the whole mess, and I just hope it's me. The day after my end of the world, I have dinner plans.
UP NEXT:
A story that proves I at least have some moral fiber, then goes a bit wrong
*I was interested in acting at one point. Sadly, those were the days when I had no grasp of social conventions or anything like that, so networking eluded me. Also, I was eight and thankfully did not have stage parents. So when I didn't feel like it was how I wanted to do things, they understood. I tried it again, but just didn't dig the shit actors have to go through to get roles. So I went into writing, and used my skills at character work to do stuff like LARP and online roleplay. Go figure.
**Chaos-trolling is the act of trolling for no other purpose than making things go nuts. No antagonizing people, no making anyone hurt, just causing the most bizarre circumstances you can and then giggling and watching what happens. When you do it right, it makes it look like you've done nothing at all. When you do it well, you really don't know what you've done until months after the fact, when you go "...holy crap..."
***None of you are schmucks. Love you guys. Seriously.
****Hey. HEY. I said end, not destroy. There's a difference.
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