Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
A Bad Game of Star Wars
Around 1996 I played a one-off game of Star Wars at the University of Birmingham (that's the real Birmingham, in England, not some sham Birmingham in the colonies).

There were six players, who were personnel on a Rebel covert infiltration mission. The old Star Wars system has character creation from templates: you start with the template, then add points to it. The GM had picked out six templates and we decided amicably amongst ourselves who would get which. I chose to play the Pilot, and among the other charcaters were the Commander, the Scout and the Engineer. We each created our characters, and the GM naively assumed that we had done this in a sensible way. He didn't bother checking our characters to make sure that they were right. I created my character in what I thought of as a sensible way, making him a very good pilot and a reasonable engineer and soldier.

Play started and we had a briefing about our mission, which was some kind of undercover infiltration. I'm a bit vague now, but I think there was a Rebel scientist in Empire territory, and we had to get him out or failing that kill him to prevent him falling into Empire hands. The important point is that it was a stealth mission of covert infiltration. To do so, we were going to an Empire-held planet on a civilian cargo ship, posing as a civilian merchant crew.

The trouble started on the journey to said planet. The Engineer player announced that he wanted to take a standard model of energy rifle and 'boost' it to increase its damage. He had read some rules in a magazine for doing this and they meant that he could double the weapon's damage with only a small increase in it chance of malfunction. The GM would not accept these rules and said that any significant increase in damage would lead to a sizable failure rate - I think it would have had a chance of exploding in the users hands of about 1 in 3 per shot.

Now the Engineer player was deeply upset by this, because the only reason he had chosen the Engineer character was to do this. Now that he found this chance for powergaming was taken from him, he went on whining and arguing for about an hour, demanding that he be allowed to do what he wanted. This was a big pain in the arse for the rest of us.

More fun followed when we reached the planet. We had to go into a city and try to locate our man. The mission was one of covert infiltration, so quite sensibly the commander of the team ordered us to carry only pistols with us into the city. These would be easily concealed within clothing, and would be the kind of weapons that civilian spacers would carry anyway, so they would not be suspicious.

At this point the conversation went something like this:

SCOUT: I'm taking my sniper rifle.

COMMANDER: No, that would be too suspicious. Leave it behind.

SCOUT: No. I'm taking it. I can carry it in my pool cue case and it won't be suspicious at all.

COMMANDER: Look, you can't take it. I'm in charge and I'm ordering you not to take it.

SCOUT: But I'm playing a sniper. All I can do is fire this gun. I don't have any other skills. What's the point of having a sniper on the team if you're not going to let me use my sniper skills?

GM: No, you're not a sniper. You're a scout.

SCOUT: I'm not a scout. I'm a sniper. That's all my character can do.

GM: But I gave you the Scout template to create your character.

After a great deal of shouting it transpired that this player had taken the Scout template and then put all the points he possibly could into firing a sniper rifle. He had completely ignored the GM's intention that he should create a charcater with scouting skills from the Scout template. The argument raged back and forth for over an hour. The Scout player refused to back down from his position, even though he was supposed to be playing a professional soldier who was used to a chain of command with superiors giving him orders.

I don't remember how it ended. I just remember the hours of arguing as two really disruptive players carried on insisting that they had to get their way. These two players became notorious for this kind of thing. After many such incidents, most people in our circle of gamers simply refused to allow these two to play in their games.