in our day jobs, we're Keystone Cops

Jo's game is The Fun, but I swear our roleplaying group is the most dysfunctional, incoherent bunch of wild individualists with whom I have ever had the (mostly) pleasure of playing. I mean, we make my Falkenstein group look like a well-oiled machine. If an action is worth taking, it's worth taking after two and a half hours of argument, false starts, lone and eccentric forays wholly without consultation, and wildly inappropriate planning which we will subsequently abandon completely in favour of reacting on the fly. I honestly don't know how we've got this far. If our planning skills are any indication we should long since have ended up painted blue and buried alive in a lead-lined box full of rabid gnats.

So, last night's game (a short session owing to my state of lurgy) was distinguished by the need to rescue a party comrade from a small island in the middle of a lake in the middle of a zoo in the middle of a highly over-regimented squeaky-clean Big Brother city. This bloody city cripples us: we can't use any of our (considerable) magical abilities without being detected, squashed, sat upon and neutralised by several scores of Official Wizards who then drug us and ship us off to the mad prince in the crazy south where we Do Not Wish To Go.

librsa's character is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by means of forty metres of rope ladder constructed from the disassembled fragments of three stepladders, which he's subsequently packed into a barrel which is too large for him to carry alone, and none of us will help because we think it's a silly plan. After considerable argument while we sneak through the sleeping streets he has to stash the Suspicious Bloody Great Barrel in an alley somewhere before the unnaturally polite city police start asking inconvenient questions. Despite all this we arrive at the zoo undetected and break in using the one teeny bit of magic ability this bloody city doesn't detect, and which we're all crap at, and make our way to said island.

khoi_boi's character, the notorious Snow Owl, is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by draining the lake. There is no evidence that there is, in fact, a way of draining the lake, but he's adamant there must be a giant plug somewhere, detectable by swimming. The lake is murky and disgusting. We persuade him, after much argument, that draining the lake is unfeasible and if he must swim, rather swim out to the island with a rope so we can construct a rope bridge. He does so, arriving bleeding and exhausted as it transpires that the lake is filled with carnivorous fish who make a spirited attempt to remove his leg while he swims. The person we are trying to rescue declines to go back across the rope bridge, being pathologically afraid of water. Rescuee and bleeding rescuer remain on the island, arguing.

Jean's character is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by using a carriage as a boat. Hearing a carriage clatter through the zoo, she dashes after it, critically fails her sneak check, and falls into a pit which turns out to contain an angry gorilla and his two wives. After a brief, painful interlude she has two cracked ribs, considerable bruising and a dead gorilla. The two female gorillas steal two-thirds of her rope, which is the only rope left after Snow Owl's island swimming adventure. She is subsequently too exhausted to throw the remnants of the rope up for rescue by librsa's character, who has arrived late to the party as a result of fumbling his attempt to hear where she'd gone, and starting off in the opposite direction at speed. She is eventually extracted with difficulty from the pit, and returns to the lake shore to recover within recrimination distance of the bleeding Snow Owl. By popular consent, a natural 20 (critical fumble in this system) is henceforth dubbed an "angry gorilla".

My character is convinced that we'll perform this rescue by improvising a raft out of materials at hand. She spends most of the session sneaking around the zoo and discovering that there are no materials at hand.

As the curtain falls on this sorry episode, my character and librsa's are planning an assault on a food storage shed with his handy pickaxe, for purposes of stealing four barrels and the door to construct a raft with. In the intervening week before we play again, each member of the group will infallibly concoct a plan which we will then argue about for two hours before doing something completely different which has far more potential for going entertainingly wrong.

I love this game. Probably not as much as the sadistic DM does, though.