Fanfic / That Guy Destroys Psionics

">2 Full Hendersons: Near mythic levels. Unrepresentable by number in this or any scale. The action undertaken has undergone all steps above, except possibly the last one. Either way, the game somehow refuses to go away and die. Maybe the GM initiated The Scratch, but the game remains in some form, screwing with the players. Only one person, to our knowledge, managed to actually do it."

~ The Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment

Perhaps the only tale of Off the Rails greater than Old Man Henderson and The Ballad of Edgardo. This story focuses on an epic-level Pathfinder group. The plot of their story was that magic had been falling out of use as more people developed psionic powers, and the rest was basically D&D meets X-Men. The narrator played as an elf wizard called Elsimore, and the others were a monk/psionic fist/soul fist, a Wilder, a Magus, and a regular Psion.

The game did not go well. The players were quickly at each other's throats (well, the Wilder was at Elsimore's throat, and the Monk and Psion defended her), and when the Big Bad showed up, Elsimore chose an... unorthodox way to defeat him, which resulted in psionics being utterly destroyed at their source. When the DM gave the Big Bad his powers back, Elsimore retreated to his private demiplane, and re-depowers the Big Bad by adding the 'non-psionic' trait to it (this isn't normally possible in the game rules, but the DM had houseruled in ways for psionics to be affected like magic). The DM put the kibosh on that, so Elsimore used an "anti-psionics field" to disable his powers again and had mining constructs in his demiplane swarm the Big Bad to kill him again.

At this point, Elsimore was thrown out of the game. No Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies, just the GM pointing at him, saying "you're out", and throwing him out of his house.

For more roleplay-derailing madness, see The Ballad of Edgardo.

It can be read here.

That Guy Involves Tropes:

• Action Girl: The Wilder, as she was a near epic-level psion.
• Ambiguous Syntax: The title isn't meant to be read as in "Look out for Elsimore, that guy destroys Psionics." Rather, "That Guy" is a tabletop roleplaying term for a Jerkass that nobody likes to be around, as per the phrase "Don't be That Guy.". The title is meant to be read like a newspaper headline, such as "Jerkass destroys Psionics."
• At Least I Admit It:
  • The narrator fully admits that he's a toxic player in his own right, even calling himself the 4chan term for an asshole player in the story's title (though even he still seems decent compared to most of the rest of his table).
  • Even more surprising, even the Date Rape Psion seems to have been fully aware of how scummy he was, as he actually gave his character an Evil alignment.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: After their first attempt to PK Elsimore fails, the group makes it look like he attacked the Big Bad. The Big Bad attacks back, Elsimore proceeds to defend himself. . . starting with creating a Reality-Breaking Paradox.
• Batman Gambit: After his first time killing the BBEG is retconned out of existence, Elsimore interrupts his Evil Gloating with a scroll of Time Stop and teleports to his own demiplane, knowing full well that the Big Bad is going to follow him there. Because no cartoon supervillain worth his salt will rest until he finishes his monologue! When he does so, Elsimore applies the "nonpsionic" trait to the demiplane, depowering the BBEG and leaving him a defenseless commoner again.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The narrator was originally going to play a rogue with a focus on trap making and disabling, but was shot down by the DM, who told him to minmax or GTFO. The disgruntled narrator responded by creating Elsimore, a character so obnoxiously powerful his mere presence made it impossible for the story to progress. At least, the way the DM wanted it to.
• Big Bad: The BBEG driving the story's plot is based on Magneto, and he's trying to turn Psions against Non-psions.
• Big Fun: The only other competent player and decent dude was described as a “Landwhale” at one point.
• The Big Guy: The DM is described as 'a bear of a man'.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: The narrator wanted Elsimore to look like as much of a stereotypical wizard as possible, which naturally included a long Wizard Beard. However, the DM declared that elves in the setting were unable to grow facial hair, so the narrator settled for Elsimore having eyebrows so long they reached his belt.
• Broke the Rating Scale: The story itself, as graded by the Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment. One Henderson indicates "Total Plot Derailment", where the plot has gone totally Off the Rails and an entirely new one must be made. Two means that the Game Master has to scrap the entire game and start a new one. The rating of ">2 Hendersons" was purely theoretical at the time it was added, as it would require the GM to repeatedly try (and fail) to salvage the original plot by retconning the cause of the derailment. And yet, That Guy managed to achieve it.
• Death by a Thousand Cuts: Elsimore's player knows that he's never going to be able to defeat the Big Bad in a straight fight...but he can De-power him in a way that removes all of his defensive and offensive abilities, leaving him a defenseless commoner while Elsimore just casts low-level spells on him until he dies. Three times in a row.
• Depraved Homosexual: The Date Rape Psion got his nickname for a reason, and Elsimore eventually had to stop him with a permanent 'Protection from Evil' spell. According to the Narrator, his player was the same. The Narrator comments that he's the sort of gay man who would turn people homophobic if they'd never met a normal gay guy before.
  Narrator: He had no concept of personal space and no concept of 'I'm not gay.' Thankfully, he did have a concept of 'If you touch me there again, I'm going to pummel you and file a sexual misconduct suit.'
• De-power: How Elsimore kills the Big Bad, three times in a row, in three different ways. His strategies are:
  1. Use Scroll of Timestop. Teleport to Plane of Force, source of all psionic powers. Open a permanent gate to the negative energy plane, essentially creating a massive black hole that destroys the plane from which the BBEG draws his power, leaving him defenceless. Cast level-draining spells on the BBEG til he dies.
  2. Use another Scroll of Timestop. Teleport to custom demiplane, knowing the BBEG will follow. When BBEG arrives, use a Scroll of Greater Demiplane to apply the restriction "non-psionic" to the entire demiplane, leaving BBEG without his powers again. Cast level-draining spells on the BBEG til he dies.
  3. Cast anti-psionic field and dimensional anchor on BBEG. Have army of fire elemental constructs (who get stat bonuses for being in this demiplane) dogpile BBEG and beat on him non-stop. Cast Greater Invisibility and an anti-detection spell on self to avoid being targeted. Cast level-draining spells on the BBEG til he dies.
• Disproportionate Retribution: What's the Wilder's reaction to Elsimore using a spell to prattle in her ear (after she was talking over him and apparently projecting her hatred for her ex onto him)? Why, try to murder him, of course!
• Double Standard: The Psion spent half the time raping NPCs, yet the one the Monk and the Wilder went after was Elsimore, whose only crime was annoying the Wilder.
• Evil Gloating: The Big Bad first shows up to terrify the party with his immeasurable psionic power and rant about his goals. Rather than sit and listen, the party tries to set him on Elsimore. That didn't go so well. Everything else can be directly linked to the DM refusing to let anything get in the way of the Big Bad finishing his monologue.
• Expy:
  • Elsimore has some definite Dumbledore-like traits, being an immensely powerful and ancient wizard with long silver-grey hair, who is in charge of a school focused on educating young magic-users. His player even Lampshaded the obvious similarities while describing the characters.
    That Guy: I made a Wizard, stereotypical in dress from the conical hat to the robes and tiny glasses. He was going to recruit anyone he saw with even a modicum of magical talent by showing up on random people's doorsteps, telling their children that they were wizards, and spiriting them a way to a permanent greater demiplane with a castle where his cohort would teach them magic. If you get the joke, you're smarter than most of this group.
  • That Guy describes the Big Bad as "a psion-supremicist not!Magneto."
• Fan Disservice: Apparently Fish Face wasn't very attractive, but acted like she was hot stuff. For this reason, OP mentally superimposed a carp over her face whenever he looked at her.
• Flat Character: Nancy No-Chin's character was basically a standard monk, with very little in the way of characterisation beyond being a stereotypical monk.
• Forced Transformation: Elsimore defeats the Wilder's attempt to teamkill him by using the "baleful polymorph" spell to turn her into a newt (he's all about the classics).
• The Generic Guy: Nancy No-Chin was quiet and out of the way, and his character was described as a pretty bland "I-only-want-peace-but-will-kill-you" monk stereotype.
• Get Out!: After three straight instances where Elsimore killed the BBEG by using exploits in the rules and powers he'd obtained, the GM just said "you're out" and kicked Elsimore out of the game, and his player out of the house.
• The GM Is a Cheating Bastard: The GM repeatedly enacting Ass Pulls to prevent Elsimore one-shotting the BBEG has shades of this. All of the ways he killed the BBEG were entirely legitimate, only to be fiated by the GM to prevent the plot ending there and then.
• Gone Horribly Right: The narrator initially wanted to try another build, a Rogue based around the Use Magic Device skill, but the DM told him, paraphrased, "Minmax or GTFO". Elsimore, a wizard that destroyed a chunk of multiverse just to kill off the Big Bad, was the result.
• Jerkass: The Wilder, The Date Rape Psion, and to a lesser extent Nancy No-Chin and GM. By the narrator's own admission, he mostly lived down to the toxicity of the vast majority of his group too, and his descriptions of Elsimore's antics do sound infuriating, even if they are delivered to generally-richly-deserving parties.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The GM vetoed the poster's first character and essentially told him to "minmax or GTFO". The GM proceeds to get exactly what he wanted in the form of Elsimore; a character so game-breakingly powerful that he killed the BBEG three times in a row, by himself, only a few hours into the campaign, and with various restrictions placed on him. Furthermore, he even abused several of the GM's own house rules to do it!
• The Magic Goes Away: Part of the setting's backstory is that magic is slowly falling out of use due to psionic powers becoming more common. Elsimore's main goal is to try and stop this by finding and tutoring magic-sensitive children to become mages.
• Misplaced Retribution: The Narrator notes with some confusion that the Wilder chose to get all morally superior and lecturey at Elsimore, despite the Date Rape Psion doing horrible things to pretty much everyone who caught his eye (which would have included Elsimore, had he not slapped a permanent Protection from Evil spell on himself).
• Mistaken for Pedophile: Elsimore's attempts to find children with magical abilities to train them so magic won't die away make him seem like he wants them for less noble reasons. At least, the Wilder thinks so.
• The Nicknamer: OP. He calls the Monk's player Nancy No-Chin, the Wilder's player Fish Face, and the Psion the Date Rape Psion. In fact, everyone gets a less-than-flattering nickname, aside from "The Only Decent Player" (And even he gets a "Good Guy Landwhale" thrown in, which borders on it).
• Off the Rails: The page quote lauds this story as having done this extensively. Elsimore's player applied the dead zone on the plane of force after rolling to gain the know-how with the full intention of nullifying all psionic powers. The first time won the battle only a few hours into the adventure. The DM didn't want it to end that way, and so rewound back to before it happened and made a new rule to keep the BBEG's powers intact. Again, Elsimore exploited various rules to depower him again, and the third time he made a demiplane that first negated psionics and then applied an anti-psionics field when that decision was stopped. At that point, the plot was a goner. The GM had to kick Elsimore's player out of his house rather than try and salvage things for a fourth time, showing just how far off the rails things had gone.
• Our Elves Are Different: Elsimore and the Wilder were elves, with Elsimore being a surface elf and the Wilder being a Drow.
• Out-Gambitted: Three times in a row, Elsimore tricks the BBEG into a situation where he can be depowered and killed. Eventually the GM straight-up throws Elsimore's player out of his house because he realizes that he literally cannot progress the campaign with Elsimore in the party.
• Psychic Powers: Everyone in the party but Elsimore and the Magus were psionic classes, which use these in variable forms.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: The way the Wilder specifically singled out Elsimore as an outlet for her wrath caused the narrator to suspect that she was projecting her hatred for an ex onto him.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Elsimore is a very old man even by elf standards, and as such rambles endlessly about the Good Old Days when magic was commonplace. When the Wilder gets annoyed and starts talking over him to get him to shut up, he uses a Message cantrip to continue rambling directly into her ear while he walks away out of earshot of her. Even though Message is normally two-way, the narrator successfully argued that the Wilder wouldn't know how to use it to talk back since barely anyone in the setting knows anything about magic.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: Elsimore destroyed psionics by going to the Plane of Force, which is the source of Psionic powers, and casting a permanent gate to the place where the Negative Energy Plane (a plane basically comprising a single infinite black hole) and the Quasielemental Plane of Void (a plane with literally nothing in it) met.
• Retcon: The DM retcons Elsimore's first killing of the Big Bad. And the second one. When Elsimore does it a third time, the GM just kicks Elsimore out of his house.
• Super Supremacist: The BBEG is described as viewing Psions as superior to regular humans and mages, going on at least one (omitted in the story) monologue about how the subject.
• The Roleplayer:
  • The Date-Rape Psion is a textbook example of the worst kind of "Magical Realmer" subtype: a player who makes their character solely to act out their own sexual fantasies and insist on this being luridly described, regardless of if anyone else at the table wants to be subjected to their kinks.
  • Contrastingly, The Only Decent Player (aside from Elsimore) is described as one of the only players who put effort into actually playing a character, with his tribal warrior-shaman Magus trying to keep the peace in the party while remaining true to his character's goals.
• Too Dumb to Live: After the BBEG is saved from Elsimore's first attempt to defeat him by DM fiat, Elsimore retreats to his private demiplane rather than listen to his monologuing. The BBEG then has the incredibly wise idea to follow him. It ends exactly as well as you'd expect for him. Twice.
• Too Much Information: Bad enough the Date Rape Psion is doing. . . well, pretty much exactly that to any NPC that catches his eye, but he insists on describing his (apparently) horrible and non-consensual activities to the entire party, seemingly for no other reason than to indulge his own personal fetishes. The narrator spares us repeating the specifics.
• Token Evil Teammate: The Date Rape Psion, who constantly used his powers to rape NPCs and tried to sexually assault Elsimore. Him putting a stop to that by slapping a permanent protection from evil on himself that actually prevented said psion from touching him and confirmed his alignment as Evil.
• Token Good Teammate: OP calls the Magus's player 'The Only Decent Player' and says he's the only one to actually put effort into his character (a tribal warrior-shaman trying to protect his now-vulnerable tribe from the upheavals caused by recent events.) The Magus is also the most overtly nice of the group in-character, trying to keep the other party members from each others' throats when they start to argue.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Narrator notes that the game's plot basically amounted to that of the original X-Men movies with elements of The Magic Goes Away, right down to the BBEG being a "psion-supremicist not!Magneto."
• Wizard Classic: Enforced; Elsimore's player initially wanted to play a Use Magic Device, trap focused rogue, but was told in no uncertain terms by the GM to "min-max or gtfo", and thus decided to play the most sterotypical wizard he could, pointy hat and all. The only part he wasn't allowed to have was the long beard (as elves can't grow facial hair in the setting), so he substituted it with extremely long eyebrows.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Elsimore is almost hilariously good at this. BBEG attacking him after all the other players have fled? Teleport to plane of force, open permanent gateway to plane of void, creating a Reality-Breaking Paradox that destroys all psionic abilities, leaving BBEG defenseless. Elsimore wins. Time rewinds to resurrect the BBEG? Elsimore teleports to custom demiplane, luring BBEG into a trap, then applies "nonpsionic" restriction, leaving BBEG defenseless. Elsimore wins. BBEG ignores effect of "nonpsionic" restriction? Elsimore casts anti-psionic field on him, then freezes him in place, then uses army of fire elemental constructs to beat him to death. Elsimore wins.
• You All Meet in an Inn: The Narrator provides probably the best description of this trope:
  We congeal off the walls of a high-end tavern in some urban area.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: The Big Bad's appearance was going to be a case of this, but unfortunately for him, Elsimore found a way to thwart him.