You Succeed - The Curse

One of the strangest curses I ever gave to a PC was the "you succeed" curse. The specifics of this went something like this:

If it's a Dexterity/Constitution/Strength Check, you succeed. If it's a Saving Throw, you succeed.  If it's an attack roll, you hit, and the target dies. Immediately. If it's a game of chance, you succeed. What it didn't cover:  Social Skills and Abilities.  Those do not succeed automatically, and the player needs to roll.

The player, of course, loved this. Initially. You can dungeon crawl, and evade every trap, pass every saving throw, and slaughter everything in a single go. Hey, what's not to like?

Except that the other characters start giving the character the stinkeye. Go into town, gamble, win everything. The NPCs start giving you the stinkeye. You get into a fight in the tavern - every single blow you land kills.  Whether you want it to or not. The bodies pile up, and the city guard are called. You can evade them easily. Or you fight them, and of course, fighting them, you slaughter them. Not good. You let yourself get captured, go to the executioner's axe.  They go to swing, and the axe handle falls off on the backswing. You get the idea.

In Legend of the Five Rings, there's someone named Bayushi Tangen. The character has three levels of Luck, and is even more lucky because of a school technique that he devised himself. He didn't realize every success he had was from luck, he just thought he was that good.

Well, his clan got captured out in the desert and made into slaves. He staged a revolt. Which succeeded, even though it shouldn't have. The enemy general tried to take him down ... and failed, because of ill luck. He finally figured out what was going on.

So, he screamed to the heavens, "I'd rather be struck down by the gods than lose to this imbecil!"

The gods struck him down.  Right in front of Tangen.  Who then realised ... he wasn't skilled.  At all.  Nothing he accomplished was because he was good at it, it was because ... fortune willed it to be.

This completely demoralised him.  He went into isolation. Now, I like luck-based characters, and Tangen's a personal favourite, but I can also totally see where he's coming from.  In an online, official PbP game, I was playing, effectively, his heir, Bayushi Kwanchai. (In fact, one of my little RPs with him wound up in TV Tropes as a Crowning Moment of Awesome - involving paper shurikens and the discussion of how many people would survive if a courtier threw one back at him.)

Anyway, during an RP where he was talking with someone about his skill... he mentioned that this 'luck' was a curse, not a blessing, because no matter what happens to those around him, he'll survive. He lost a wife, he lost the man he was guarding, and he was afraid he'd lose his daughter. He'd outlive everyone by pure luck.

The writers for the RPG liked this scene, and melded it into an official story, as he talked to the gaaki of Bayushi Shoju. The gaaki could see where he was coming from, and Kwanchai had come up with a plan.  His lord was killed by summoned gaaki, and so he did a ritual - to send himself into Gaaki-Do. There, he would fight and slaughter gaaki ... for eternity, never tiring, never ending, because they would never be able to actually kill him. Eternal punishment, eternity to atone for his failures.

You see, the idea of having success be a curse is possible - the GM just needs to play it carefully. The character succeeds, but ... it's hollow. Sure, for a time, the character might think this is awesome... but they never truly... progress, because they don't learn from their mistakes - they don't learn anything new from trying and failing and learning and trying again. They just ... are.

I've only ever used this curse twice in roleplay on people - the first time didn't do too well, the player didn't care. The second time went a lot better, and the player did everything they could to try to end the curse.  That was some good storytelling.