TW for brief discussion of character suicide.

This is my best-worst gaming story to tell people. It stars myself in the ostensible gamewrecker role, but I think also gets to a lot of the essential lessons to learn if you're gonna start playing RPGs for any substantial length of time.

4-5 years back, the GM who'd first taught me DnD is looking for something to run, and my college friend group volunteers to play a Fate Core campaign. The setting was homebrew and basically Firefly for the purposes of this story.

My character (let's call her the Mechanic) was a 17 y/o combat-averse loudmouth who mostly followed the lead of her closest PC ally, the Muscle. The Muscle very quickly developed a rivalry with another PC, the Captain, while the Mechanic became fast friends with the Robot, who was a sentient AI PC.

Some things to note about this campaign: we had no session zero, and most of us were very new to RPGs. While now it's obvious to me how vast a range of expectations our group had, we didn't really have an idea of how to articulate or deal with in-game situations that crossed boundaries. Basically: it's red flags all the way down, my friends.

Within the first few sessions of play, the Muscle decides he can no longer trust the Captain to make the right decisions with the crew, and enlists the Mechanic's help in rerouting the ship's security protocols so that we can take over the ship if the Captain gets too "out of control." Mechanic and Muscle sneak onto the ship to do this while everyone else is off on a mission...and are discovered by the Robot. PvP ensues, Muscle/Mechanic win, and Mechanic wipes Robot's memory so that their sabotage (the specific details of which are kept secret between ourselves and the GM) isn't discovered.

The Robot, upon finding the gaps in his memory, proceeds to spiral emotionally until he goes to the Captain and, upon explaining that there must be something wrong with his AI, decides to "reboot" himself, essentially committing suicide as all of his prior relationships and memories are wiped. The GM allows this to happen. Everyone at the table is shocked and upset.

I wrestle with the idea that my character's best friend just killed himself because of something my character did, and decide that the Mechanic no longer trusts the Muscle OR the Captain. By this point, I have dimly recognized enough red flags to know that there is something deeply wrong with the way our party was handling secret-keeping and inter-PC fighting (as every other conversation involves the Captain arguing with either Mechanic or Muscle about how we don't trust each other).

So I decide that the Mechanic is going to fix things.

I tell the GM my plan and craft some gadgets when we dock at a fueling station. And then one session, I get the nod from my GM and narrate as my character wakes up in the middle of the night, sneaks into the bridge, disarms the Robot, and activates the hacked security protocols to lock the rest of the crew inside their bunks.

I have not told the rest of the party that I was going to do this. I go into this fully expecting the Mechanic to be murdered by the crew, and I rationalize that making her a villain will at least bring the rest of the party together as a unit. I do not tell the party this, either.

Needless to say, the rest of the party goes apeshit.

The rest of the session turns into a huge PvP wherein the other crew members fight their way out of their locked doors and into the bridge. The Mechanic is saying things over the intercom about how she can only trust herself and there have been too many secrets on this crew. At some point, the Mechanic realizes the Captain has shot a hole through the ship's hull and tells the Muscle to subdue him. Muscle enters PvP with Captain. At some point, I'm asked to physically act out the things happening to my character as she's finally captured (something I would absolutely never consent to nowadays).

The session ends with half the crew capturing the Mechanic as the rest of the party flees in the ship's shuttle. We have a two-hour-long debrief after session, most of which consists of other players telling me that I need to apologize for breaking their trust and not telling them what I was trying to do. The Muscle's player loses all trust in me as a person after this, and our friendship ends a few months later.

We still complete the campaign, but with a months-long in-game timeskip that allows for a refresh of the crew's relationships and the overall plot. Of course, the Mechanic refrains from making any big moves, and I spend the rest of the game just doing my best to stay out of trouble with everyone else.

With a few more years of experience (and emotional intelligence) under my belt, I fully recognize where I went wrong, though I still have a soft spot for the Mechanic as she was my first campaign character. Plus, I can now recognize the myriad ways in which that explosive session was just the straw on the camel's back of everything our party had been doing up until that point.

TL;DR - A low-trust, high-PvP campaign with no metagame safety considerations gets blown up when my character does a surprise one-person mutiny.