Check out this madman. Apparently a one time friend of acclaimed comic book writer Kurt Busiek, things went sour. It's a bit of a journey, but there are many entertaining moments in this tale of geeks gone bad. This is my favorite part:


Something none of you know about Scott MacLeod is that he ran a killer roleplaying campaign. Because Scott was by far the most studious of all of us, and had the most demanding curriculum (being in Visual and Performing Arts, and taking it seriously) he rarely had time to game with us. I recall only one time where he ever roleplayed with us, and rare occasions when he would agree to dust off his own roleplaying 'dungeon' and referee a run were avidly enjoyed by all participants. Well, mostly.


On one occasion, we were all playing, and Kurt's character, Welkin, had picked up a Star Trek type phaser from somewhere. We were walking by a room and we saw some Star Wars storm troopers in it. Naturally, Kurt leaned around the doorway and blasted them. (Actual 'roleplaying' was not at a premium in these long ago games. Enacting as much random, senseless, gratuitous violence, while perfunctorily trying to fulfill some arbitrary 'quest', was pretty much the deal.) Scott rolled dice and determined that Kurt's phaser beam had struck a Storm Trooper's blaster rifle, resulting in a huge explosion that did rather a lot of damage to Kurt, and my character, Donnybrook, who happened to be standing in the doorway. 


Kurt was furious, and promptly began to argue with Scott that "Star Trek phasers don't work that way". Furthermore, "everyone knows" that physics didn't work that way, and it was all ridiculous, and if it DID work that way, then his character should have known it, and wouldn't have done it. 


Scott, for a wonder, actually overruled him. In fact, Scott, very unusually for him, actually got a little angry, and told Kurt to shut up and stop arguing. This hardly ever happened, but then, Scott hardly ever refereed. Usually I refereed, or Jeff Webb, or Andy Gillespie, and Kurt was very used to molding our judgments to suit his whim, regardless of established precedent, anyone else's superior knowledge of how some aspect of reality actually worked, or the way the dice had come up. 

Got that? I admit, I played my share of Dungeons and Dragons before I became a teenager, so the spectacle of college students getting in such a row over it that it poisons their friendship for twenty years is a bit unsettling. But what do I know?