The evil of banality

After the better part of a year, the end of Necessary Evil was, to say the least, anticlimactic. We seemed all primed for a final showdown which would determine the fate of the world when the GM suddenly changed his mind, brought in literally the biggest Deus Ex Machina available to him, and ended with a basically pointless combat that was as badly mismatched as anything could be.

For reasons mysterious to all, he pitted the three non-combat characters against an egregiously overpowered (someone figured out just how broken the rules were and exploited that to the hilt) and then seemed surprised when we were all killed in short order. ("You don't have Fighting at all?") In the end, it was one player playing their original character against two others reading stats off sheets with all the investment of someone watching the finale of a tv series they never followed.

JB was as put out by this turn of events as I was, but even so he admitted that it had been a good game up until then, with some surprising reveals and the resolution of several character arcs. Grergory shocked everyone with a completely unforeseen murder-suicide and one of the villains basically took over the world. Which made it all the more disappointing that vianegativa pronounced it "the worst game I've ever run". He later hedged that a bit, but all my attempts to talk up our accomplishments fell flat before him.

Looking back, I had exactly the problems with my character that I foresaw at the beginning: she was a Dark Age persona in a Four-Color setting. I ignored this for as long as I could in the interests of group harmony and with the assumption that we were heading into a gory free-for-all at the end anyway. But then the GM forced a Heroic Redemption on everyone except for the character who became the Big Bad and there was no room for an independent actor to make her mark.

So it's a relief to leave behind a milieu I've never really embraced and get back to the gritty moral ambiguity of a street-level post-apocalyptic setting. JB will be running and everyone has signed on to play. There's no preset campaign goal, no "sides", and--best of all--no giant omnipotent alien intelligence waiting just outside frame to intervene at the last moment!