The Emperor of the Nerds with a Middle Age Crisis
A few months ago I went to check out a local board game association that hosts events in a library. There I met a couple of guys, one around my age (early 20s) and another around 40. Over time we formed a friend group that now has about 14 people.
Everyone has different lifestyles, interests and schedules, so in practice you end up seeing about half of the group regularly while the others show up rarely. Roughly half of the regulars are interested in RPGs, while the others mostly prefer board games.
The 40-year-old guy has been playing RPGs for decades. About six months ago, since many people in the group had either never played or had bad past experiences with RPGs, he proposed running a Call of Cthulhu oneshot.
I made a cabaret artist character and played him as a kind of joke-cracking skeptic. It was supposed to be a oneshot, so I went with something light and silly.
The oneshot lasted 15 sessions.
Mostly because the GM didn’t really know how to handle missing players. He didn’t want to progress the story if someone was absent, but he still wanted to play, so we had sessions that were basically filler. For example, one session was just our characters having visions in the back of a van. Another was us gathering information while we were IRL sitting in a restaurant eating pizza.
There were also some strange character death situations. My character died at one point and was brought back the next session as a ghost. Another character died and came back as a time traveler. A third character died and the GM was planning to bring him back as some kind of half-zombie, but the player arrived late that day, so instead he temporarily played the “half” of my character that wanted to pass on. Which was pretty pointless, since he liked what my character was doing and didn’t even try to stop him.
Overall I’d say the campaign was… average. It did become the classic meme of “the oneshot that lasts forever”. But honestly, if someone says they have decades of experience running RPGs, and the oneshot turns into a 15-session campaign because the scenario clearly wasn’t a oneshot from the start, I’m not sure that counts as good experience. Apparently, since he met us, he didn’t have a group, and from what I understood, he hasn’t had an RPG group since COVID.
And like in any horror story, I started noticing strange behaviors in him, both in and out of the game. For example, he created a smaller group inside the main group called “The Four Emperors” (which already felt a bit like a personality cult). It was supposed to be the group that made decisions for everyone else on how to run the group. The four members were me, the other guy in his 20s, him, and his wife. The reasoning was that the three of us “started the group”, and his wife was included because, I don’t know, she felt lonely? He didn’t want to talk with her? There were clearly issues in their relationship, but that would make this post way too long. The point is that the “moderation” group had 4 people, while the group being “moderated” had 10. Very useful.
Beyond that, he constantly seemed to try to position himself as the leader of the group. Activities were usually organized only if he was present, we often ended up playing what he suggested, and criticism wasn’t really welcome. Sometimes he would even judge you as a person based on how you played board games or RPGs.
Then he started proposing bigger and bigger ideas: turning the Cthulhu campaign into a “replay”, opening a YouTube channel, creating an Instagram page so random people could come play with us, complaining that half the group was “inactive”, discussing after how long absent people should be kicked out, talking about “social contracts”, and proposing more RPG projects than we would realistically ever have time to play.
At one point he even created a fictional city that we were supposed to use for future oneshots, which basically meant that if you wanted to GM something you were expected to set it there. The overall feeling was that the group should gradually start playing RPGs his way, because he was “teaching” us based on his 20+ years of experience.
You’ve probably already noticed, but a lot of what happened was confusing, because he himself was confusing: he would say one thing and do another. For example, complaining that people in the group were inactive, but then “recruiting” new people without even asking about their availability.
I wasn’t the only one noticing and disliking these behaviors, but people either tolerated it because they weren’t the type to say no, or because he was seen as “the group leader who decides what to do”. Also, the other “founder” of the group was always on his side, since he has family and relationship issues and sees him as a father figure. On the other hand, he seems to see that guy as someone who proves he’s still young and still has value despite his age, wife, and child.
The moment that really made me question things happened in private.
I proposed running a game of Fabula Ultima for the group. He immediately tried to take control of the project by insisting on running a oneshot prologue himself. Then he proposed a homebrew rule where two classes would be fused together. In Fabula Ultima one class focuses on exploration and the other on combat, and he basically wanted to combine their unique mechanics, which would have broken both systems.
When I said no, he spent three days trying to convince me to change my mind. At one point he even said something along the lines of “Let’s drop this topic before I don’t want to see you GM another campaign.” Literally just an argument from authority. Also, am I supposed to stop thinking about running a campaign just because you said “no”? At worst, the group says no. At best, they say yes and you just don’t play.
Then he started organizing a Vampire campaign. As usual he didn’t write anything about it in the group chat. Instead he contacted people privately and only asked for their availability, making it sound like the campaign was already decided and that the only thing left was scheduling.
Then, about two months ago, we had our usual meeting at the library. At some point he pulled me aside and basically scolded me for not explicitly saying that I wouldn’t attend a meetup at a bar earlier that day.
This was despite the fact that I had told one of the people there I wouldn’t be coming, marked that I wasn’t coming in the poll, and said that I wasn’t interested in playing RPGs that evening, and also having said during other meetups that I don’t like playing if half the party isn’t there. But no, that’s definitely me being rude.
I tried to talk things out and clarify some of the issues I had with his behavior. Instead of acknowledging anything, he mostly dodged the criticism or tried to turn it back on me. For example, when I said that he seemed to be trying to act like the leader of the group, and he said he thought it was me trying to control it. Which was ironic, because:
- I’m not the one sending half the messages in the group chat.
- I’m the one who has always said that group decisions should be made openly in the group chat.
Like dude, at least call me a communist, make the nonsense you’re saying entertaining for me. Then we talked about Fabula Ultima again. He confirmed that yes, he meant exactly what he wrote earlier: by refusing his homebrew idea, I was being a bad GM.
So apparently I’m a bad GM because I want people’s first experience with an RPG to be with the actual rules of the game, instead of immediately modifying the system. Also, he clearly wasn’t “respectful” of the game, saying resource management isn’t important, that his homebrews were good because of his experience, and things like that. I obviously don’t want people throwing parties for every RPG we try, but I don’t want people with this attitude either.
Oh, also, Fabula Ultima has a mechanic called Fabula Points that lets players influence the story and collaboratively shape situations. It’s a system designed to encourage shared storytelling. And he wanted to remove that entirely.
But sure, he has experience, so he’s a good GM.
At that point the conversation also included several classic manipulative lines like “I did this for you”, “I had a very high opinion of you but it dropped a lot”, “I looked into this for you”, and “I’ve always supported you”.
There’s a limit to how much bullshit a person is willing to tolerate, and I think he exceeded mine quite a while ago.
The most absurd part is that right after this discussion we started playing a board game. When it was the first time he had to interact with me during the game, he froze for about ten seconds before deciding to change the nickname he used to call me.
That was the moment I mentally drew a line. Between the nickname thing, the constant drama, and the overall attitude, it all just felt incredibly childish and like a theater I’m no longer interested in supporting.
So I told the other “regular members”, and they too had noticed strange behaviors in him, so we formed our own smaller group, more relaxed, without the “participation rule”. Oh, I didn’t mention? He wanted to kick “inactive” members. The other “Emperors” said no, but in the end he’s the leader, so he chose yes and kicked 4 people for inactivity, including me. And yes, I could definitely think of people who were more “urgent” to kick than me. Like, dude, if you want to be the emperor, at least do it properly.
In the end, I don’t really care about this whole situation anymore. I stopped talking to him and his “adopted protégé”, and I stopped going to the board game association.
And in a way, I kind of “won”. While I was still in the group, he said that one of the goals of the Cthulhu “oneshot” was to “pass on his way of playing” to us. So:
- you’re putting yourself in a higher position than others, especially since no one asked you to, you just decided to climb onto the podium and make yourself the protagonist,
- and it’s not even a special way of playing! It was literally just “the players shape the story and the GM follows them.” Really? I thought my barber was the one shaping it!
Also, I’ve been told that after kicking us “inactive” people, it started another discussion in the group, so it’s likely that others are starting to notice his behavior too.
Talking with the others in our smaller group and going over various events, which I won’t go into too much detail about since they’re not RPG-related, but just for context/example, include him criticizing the looks and behavior of girls in the group, organizing very long group outings to avoid responsibilities with his wife and as a parent, having conversations with his wife in the group chat instead of in person, etc.), we came to the conclusion that he’s a forty-year-old clearly going through a midlife crisis, probably on the autism spectrum, with difficulties in social interactions, relationship problems with his wife, and trouble accepting his new life as a parent, which leaves him with much less time for video games and RPGs, and in a clear need for validation in being and feeling young.
And there you go, the perfect requirements to be the emperor of nerds. (Which is a meme in our smaller group, the mods group was "the emperor" but of what? Seeing the situation, probably of the nerds)
And there you go, the perfect requirements to be the emperor of nerds.
I’d rather be a farmer.