Roleplay / The Sue Files

The SUE Files is a series of blog posts that recounts the suffering and tribulations of a group of players at the hand of a sadistic, self-aggrandizing Killer Game Master who forces them to play in an omniverse that has been taken over by his self-insert, literally godlike alternate self... and all that already happened way before the game proper even begins.

Two of the players (Zeroller and Me, Myself and I)desperately attempt to wring any kind of enjoyment out of the game, with the DM (dubbed Marty) stonewalling anything they attempt to do and robbing them of even the smallest semblance of gratification whenever they think they are making progress, using his in-game avatar (also called Marty) to mock and torment them at every step of the way.

The whole saga can be read here.

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The story contains examples of following tropes:

• Alternate Universe: At least one of the 7200 universes in the game's setting (the one Villain!Marty has complete control over) is at least very similar to Earth, or at the very least has a New York City given that he chooses to materialize his mansion in its outskirts. Of course, fictional worlds that take place in or include Earth also qualify.
• Anti-Climax: The Moonlight Tower arc ends after months of real-time sessions spent slogging through hordes of minions that are optimized against the party (they're immune to critical hits from Rick's guns and they have high grappling skills to overpower Lily). The fight with the lich resolves by just hitting him with an Anti-Magic Field and beating him up.
  • The anti-climax sinks even lower when Rick and Lily are looking for the lich's phylactery and DM!Marty decides they have to find it via an out-of-character game of Hangman.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: The liches truly believe that the legendary wizard guarding one of the MacGuffins the party has to recover simply disappeared. The thought he turned himself into a lich never seems to cross the collective minds of the, you know, liches.
• Artistic License: Used in pretty much every way possible. History, politics, economics and military are bent over backwards to justify Villain!Marty's totalitarian multiversal empire running smoothly as it does, while physics, chemistry, biology and much more are altered on the fly to invalidate the player characters' plans from working.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: DM!Marty's playstyle is described as such in the off-topic blog post. In the Deadlands campaign, he only takes powers that let him burn and explode enemies, and tries to strong-arm the party away from any situation that can't be solved with violence. Zeroller also mentions that his go-to tactic in strategy games is to simply spam the strongest units possible, only to then mod the game to skew the numbers in his favor when that tactic fails.
• Battle Butler / Ninja Maid: Villain!Marty staffs his mansion with these on a whim.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: The men who kidnap Villain!Marty in the setting's prologue literally hand him the means and knowledge he needs to escape, kill them, and gain omnipotence by explaining how Authyrs work to him and then letting him have a pen and paper to use his Reality Warper powers, no matter how much DM!Marty tries to make it sound like he's outsmarted them.
• Calvinball: Any session where DM!Marty is in the master's seat quickly devolves into one of these, rewriting rules, settings and powers (or making them up entirely) on a whim to ensure the players are unable to do anything except follow the critical path.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': The Multiverse Integrity Committee brings down the hammer on anyone leaving their original universe, no matter if they did it entirely by accident or if they're just trying to escape from a Crapsack World.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: In some of the blog posts, the writers have other players interject with their own comments and stories: the parts written by them are highlighted in a different color.
• Complexity Addiction: The homebrew system has about seventy different skills for characters to specialize in, requiring this be used as a game mechanic when attempting anything remotely complicated. DM!Marty weaponizes this whenever he wants a player to fail by simply requiring they roll a check for a skill they don't have.
  • In the origin story, Villain!Marty also goes for needlessly complex plans, such as having a vampire kill his kidnappers and walk all the way to te North Pole to get eaten by a polar bear instead of simply writing the three out of existance, or creating a mansion that is hooked up to the grid but has its bills "mysteriously" paid for instead of just creating a power source for himself. Of course, being the writer both in- and out- of universe, he just wills his plans to succeed without a hitch regardless.
• Crutch Character: Blackhawk in the homebrew game and the Tagers in Cthulhutech are vastly superior to the player characters and expected to do most of the heavy lifting for them.
• Easy Logistics: As MM&I points out, everything in the setting from guns to vehicles to giant spaceships is always fighting fit and never needs repairs or maintenance except restocking fuel and ammo unless deliberately damaged.
• Edible Ammunition: At the climax of the Cthulhutech campaign, the players' plan to turn the tables on the dhohanoids includes exploding cheese wheels. Which are themselves packed with "Henderson's Explosive blend", packages of coffee mixed with Cael's home-produced explosive.
• Establishing Character Moment: The first thing Blackhawk does once he enters the scene is shove the player characters aside, inform them there is a bomb on the ship, then single-handedly dispose of the bomb with no effort whatsoever.
• Evolving Weapon: Windblade, the Razor Wind-shooting katana obtained by Rick, gets upgraded by Lily into the Winterflame, a much more powerful sword that becomes his weapon of choice for the rest of the homebrew arc.
• Face–Heel Turn: Both in the setting description and in actual play, characters seem to switch to Villain!Marty's side on a dime, most notably Blackhawk.
• Feed It a Bomb: How Rick defeats a Cornugon in his introductory session: he cuts the fiend open and stuffs a thermal detonator inside the wound.
• Failed a Spot Check: The players in Shadow Dolts eagerly accepted a job that turned out to be a hit on themselves, which they would have realized had they cared to learn anything about their mark except their coordinates. It doesn't help that they used automatic guided missiles to carry out the hit.
  • In the homebrew setting, Walter C. Dornez, former vampire hunter, is dragged into service for Villain!Marty, and seemingly never notices his new master displaying vampire-like abilities or having a servant whose only job is to feed him her blood on the daily.
• Fun Size: The dragons from the homebrew campaign return as cat-sized pests in Cthulhutech, accidentally summoned by Ian.
• Hijacked by Ganon: When the party believes they have defeated the main threat in the fantasy world, a clone of Villain!Marty shows up to dispel the illusion that they accomplished anything at all. This was also the plan for the Cthulhutech campaign until DM!Marty called it off.
• Hypocrite: Zeroller calls himself one for thrashing the entire experience despite he himself having poorly DM'ed several campaigns, including a Shadowrun game where he himself became a Killer Game Master to punish his murder-happy Munchkin players.
• Insane Troll Logic: DM!Marty won't allow players to come up with any plan he couldn't have thought of himself, because he states that since Villain!Marty is himself, and he has the highest stats of everything in the omniverse, including intelligence, the player characters are by definition dumber than him, thus if he doesn't know something they never know either.
  • Also, he "proves" his strategy of just building the biggest and most heavily armed ships he can afford and sending them en masse to attack is viable by enacting it in Space Empires. Where it only works if he's either giving his opponent massive handicaps or controlling his opponent to give himself the time to assemble said ships.
• Insistent Terminology: Due to DM!Marty refusing to fix a typo, the magical forges the party has to use to create enchanted items are called thuribles instead of crucibles.
• Insult Backfire: In Cthulhutech, while preparing for the Byakhee attack, DM!Marty demeans Cael's small group of followers telling him "nobody wants to play Psycho Pan and the Lost Boys with him". Cael's player replies by singing the lyrics to Bangarang during the attack.
• Katanas Are Just Better: In fact, they're the only swords that are used in the games. Rick gets two magical one (Windblade and the humorously named Onigiri), Blackhawk has one, and the clone of Villain!Marty not only has an incredibly powerful katana, but even tosses an equally powerful one to Rick to make their duel more "sporting".
• Killer Rabbit: The science vessel Zeroller's first character finds himself in at the beginning of the homebrew campaign turns out to have dozens of clones of the killer rabbit of Caerbannog. Things go awry when an Animal Wrongs Group sets them loose around the ship.
• Large Ham: Most NPCs speak...slowly...and... with pompous tones to emphasize how they're more important than the player characters.
• Last Day of Normalcy: In the homebrew campaign the player characters get to work as MCI agents for a time before Villain!Marty's unstoppable conquest annexes the MCI too. Or rather, Igor and Rick do, as Zeroller's scientist is court martialed and permanently removed from the game upon clearing their first mission.
• Lovecraft Lite: DM!Marty's take on the Cthulhutech settings turns an already lighter-hearted lovecraftian story into a semi-utopia where mankind can fight lovecraftian horror on equal footing from the comfort of their technologically advanced lifestyle.
• MacGyvering: The player characters are forced to do this constantly as DM!Marty bans them from using or obtaining various kinds of objects from cameras to laser tripwires to volleyball nets, forcing them to make do with the simple items he does allow them to have.

  And so begins a long tradition of me reinventing the wheel with stone knives and bearskins because wheels are banned.

  • Cael builds "Crazy Pete's BBQ Grill" (a high power cannon designed to destroy a byakhee) out of a shopping cart, several potted plants, bowling balls, pipes, plywood, an umbrella and a metal drum.
• Medieval Stasis: The fantasy land Villain!Marty exiles the party to in the homebrew campaign is this - and thanks to DM!Marty contriving more and more outlandish reasons for the party's attempts at spreading technology to that land fail or become irrelevant, it stays that way.
• Monster Town: There is a city populated by non-aggressive liches in the fantasy setting.
• Moving the Goalposts: One of the most common techniquest used to hamper player character progression is to retcon their successes in skill checks as only having cleared a small part of what they were doing the check for, requiring several more checks to actually do what they intended.
• Munchkin: DM!Marty does this whether he's in the DM's seat or not, picking all the most powerful abilities and completely ignoring (or trying to ignore, if he's the player) their downsides. The other players eventually have to resort to this to try and keep up with the constant powercreep DM!Marty throws at them.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Player characters are constantly subjected to circumnstance penalties to their rolls that results in them failing most checks or attacks. NPC's and enemies never have to worry about those.
• No Ending: The homebrew campaign ends with Rick effortlessly killed by Marty and Lily taking off to parts unknown with his preserved corpse and weapons. The Cthulhutech campaign is cancelled by Marty after the party manages to finally derail the campaign by pulling off the heist at the cheese warehouse.
• Noodle Implements: One of MM&I's plans to create explosives that is nixed by DM!Marty involves dolphins. He never elaborates on what he was going to do with them.
• No-Sell: Due to the homebrew system's rules allowing for characters to become immune to many sources of damage and gain a ludicrously high amount of block actions per turn, high level characters can quickly become all but indestructible to anything that doesn't deal enough damage to kill them outright. Of course, only NPC's get to fully exploit this system as the players never level up enough to keep up the pace.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Speed, in the homebrew system, increases a character's actions per turn, which can be used to attack, defend from arttacks, or move (with Speed also increasing how much ground a character can cover with a single action), making a character who invests in high Speed into a Lightning Bruiser.
• Only Sane Man: With pretty much every NPC in the game playing Calvinball to deny any significance of the player characters and only speaking in demeaning insults and exposition dump, the player characters fulfill this role in the story.
  Ahhh, I get it now. The treason wasn't being criminally insane. It was being criminally sane.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Two demonic dragon-like creatures (that DM!Marty specifically states are NOT dragons) are the main enemy in the fantasy world part.
• Psychic Nosebleed: An extreme example in the homebrew campaign, where even casting simple spells had a chance to drop a character down on the exhaustion tracker (possibly enough to instantly kill them with a bad enough roll)
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: Quoted almost verbatim by Zeroller when DM!Marty decides to ignore the system he himself wrote to justify giving even more power to Villain!Marty:
  Screw the rules I wrote, I have more rules.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Thanks to Marty invalidating any progress the player characters make, every session ends up being this. Most egregiously, when they think they had at least given Villain!Marty a hint of defiance by at least putting up a fight against him even if they got soundly defeated, DM!Marty feels the need to inform them they were just fighting a vastly depowered clone of him all along and the real Villain!Marty didn't even acknowledge their existance at all.
• Status Quo Is God: DM!Marty doesn't believe in player agency. The writers constantly report that he's so obsessed with his setting being perfect that he refuses to take any possible change brought by the players into account.
• Superpower Lottery: Becoming an Authyr and thus gaining potentially limitless Reality Warper powers seems to be able to happen at random to anyone who has written a piece of media. Of course, DM!Marty has Villain!Marty be one such individual.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: How DM!Marty's Deadlands character gets crippled: he attempts to stop a speeding truck by phasing out of reality and then phasing back in the vehicle's cabin (and killing the driver for no clear reason). His plan works up to the moment where he rematerializes, upon which the truck's inside slams into his immobile body crushing him.
• The Bad Guy Wins: A foregone conclusion both in and out of universe, given how Villain!Marty is an invincible, omnipotent Reality Warper who only lets the player characters think they stand a chance for as long as he seems fit to humor them.
• The Chosen Many: Authyrs, in the homebrew setting, are chosen people with the power to control their own universes. Villain!Marty just happens to be the first among all of them to have the idea to use his omnipotence to take over other universes.
• The Load: After being banished to the fantasy land, the party finds themselves at the head of an army of engineers...who, since DM!Marty doesn't want to let them even try to settle down and ignore his plot thread, don't even know how to build something as basic as a lean-to with tree branches. They do nothing of note and gradually die off shortly after.
• The Worf Effect: Darth Vader gets unceremoniously blown up by Rick when Villain!Marty attacks the MCI. The fact this was done by a player character, which is at the bottom of the pecking order in the setting, should hint at what kind of power levels are being thrown around in the game.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Villain!Marty ensures that anyone who helped him reach the apex of his power is either directly enslaved by him or dead, regardless of the fact he could easily wipe their memory, keep them as allies or ensure their loyalty in limitless ways that didn't involve killing them.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Courtesy of Marty willing it so, everything he does in every dimension of the omniverse has already been decreed and will play out as expected.
  • On a broader scale, the canon events of every universe will keep panning out the same way no matter what interferences interdimensional travelers bring. Zeroller points out that this makes the very existance of the MCI a moot point as the canon is never in any danger to begin with.