[Sign In Stranger] Oh, we just LOVE humans here! - Forge Midwest

[Larry L.]

Emily Care Boss ran a game of Sign In Stranger at Forge Midwest. Players were Emily, Eppy, me, Matt*, Tim, and Willow. Hilarity ensued.

First came the world generation. The system used for world generation is... well, it's Exquisite Corpse. Everyone fills in a couple blanks on their form, then folds the sheet back and passes it to the player on the left. Then the finished sheets are revealed to everyone, and the group decides which world they wish to go to. After some spirited discussion of which of these would offer the most fun, we opted to go to the planet inhabited by the planet of the Bork Bork Borks, who were know for their fine whiskeys, had a language based entirely on sarcasm, and were in need of kangaroo herders.

The random generator in this game is... well, it's Mad Libs. Everyone wrote down a couple nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which were then placed in three appropriately labelled cups. When a random creative element was required, the player draws a word from a cup and come up with something that incorporates that word. Each time a draw is made, we cycled to the next cup. It was not clear to me why the cups needed to be segregated by grammatical element, as there were no conditions for which you picked, say, a noun in one situation and a verb in another.

Character generation is pretty simple. Everyone comes up with a mundane Earth profession they had before the aliens came. Then they draw a word which describes their motivation for going into space. In my case, this posed a creative challenge, when my janitor everyman concept had to incorporate "greed." I reconciled these by creating a smarmy egotistical guy with dreams of plying his mundane talent into an interstellar sanitation empire. Then we picked a course of training at the moon base to prepare us for our new duties. I jumped on trade/economics, of course.

Let's see... I believe Eppy had an AM-talk-radio-listening rancher from Oklahoma, Matt had a used car salesman, Willow had a liberal Islamic academic. I hope Em and Tim can remind me of their characters.

Then Emily had us take turns reading the backstory of the unfortunate events that hit Earth, dragging the planet into a choice between isolation and service. This reminded me a bit too much of elementary school Christmas plays and boxed texts from so many old D&D modules. This led into the more interesting task of each player taking a world-shaking event from the timeline and describing "where they were when it happened." (There was a lot of mention of "the Cure," so I made the obligatory Robert Smith joke so no one else would have to.)

Then we went on our mission. The group is tasked with reporting back on a number of cultural questions. The game play goes something like this. A player offers a question about this world they would like to investigate. Someone else draws a word from a cup, and makes up an answer based on that word. This leads to some serious wackiness, which also has the de facto effect of advancing the narrative. The room the characters had been provided was completely PINK, and featured some sort of XYLOPHONE. The doors were large SPHINCTERS. Some of the characters managed to get the front door open, but then got trapped on the outside, where they encountered the "kangaroos," which were actually giant tentacled CUCUMBER things, which roamed in the subterranean FIRE. In the meantime, we discovered the Bork Bork Borks were large WOLVES that wore tight-fitting shiny PANTS. Their sweat was fine whiskey, which they traded for GOLD with off-worlders.

There was some sort of mechanic, the procedure for which was never quite clear to me, where if a character took an injury it triggered a flashback to a similar situation to her old Earth life. These flashbacks were, interestingly, the most traditionally get-in-character type "role-playing" part of the game. Matt's character got bitten by a flaming cucumberoo. Matt framed a scene where he was being hazed by his college fraternity. Other players took up roles as his frat brothers or the pledgemaster. Wearing a dress, Matt's guy had to play some prank on a homeless guy. His buddies ran off as the homeless guy bit him on the arm... which cut back to the cucumberoo gnawing on his arm.

Willow, who trained as the medic at moon academy, took a different tack when her character was bitten. She framed a rather serious scene where her father died after a terrorist attack. She exchanged some last words with her father about ending intercultural violence before she failed to save him... which segued back to her failing to keep another character from sliding into worsening cucumberoo sickness.

The characters got back inside to find their medic had taken to drinking the whiskey to stave off the infection, and she was now so messed up she believed she was a NINJA. The team sought out a Bork Bork Bork doctor.

Eppy took up the role of the doctor, and played up the sarcasm thing to the hilt.

"Oh, I see. Of course I can help you! Human anatomy is basically just like our anatomy. I don't see why there would be any problem healing a species from a completely different planet."

"I sure hope you'll send lots more humans here. We really love having you here."

I'll give the other participants a chance to fill in details before I continue on to some critical opinions.

* Neither Snyder nor Wilson. There was sort of on ongoing running joke at this convention about the number of guys walking around with just "Matt" on their nametags, which is sort of funny if you've talked to a number of guys named Matt online but never met them in person.  At one point somebody wrote "Guest of Honor: Matt ___" on the whiteboard.

[Willow]

That game was a lot of fun!  Eagerly watching this thread.

(Though it was actually my husband who died in the terrorist attack back on Earth, not my father.  Still, a very poinant scene, all the more so because of the contrast of the insanity on planet Bork Bork Bork.)

[Emily Care]

Great write up, Larry! Can't wait to hear more. My character was a shy Chinese teacher who I think left the world because of heart break.  Or was it revenge?

I learned some interesting things about the game in that session.  One ways I have people do the mad libs now is to describe what they see in the world by saying everything but the word they pull, or they can hold that to the last. It brings out really interesting, unexpected descriptions, and keeps you from  having too much of the straight mapping earth-thing to alien-thing. Though in this game that gave us some hilarious images! I'll never forget the wolf things in the shiny pant suits! And the ironic communication was to die for. 

The words do have a logic--though I may have been fuzzy on that in our session.  When you first investigate something, you pull a noun. Then if you want to get more information about it later you pull an adjective for later investigations.  You can pull a card to get a color immediately too. Those add a lot, I find.  Verbs are used if you want to see what things or beings are doing, or when you interact with an alien. And in sessions I've played since then, we've used the words a lot for when people play aliens they pull a word to see how the alien reacts, or to help them play out crazy nonsensical behaviour that the human colonists can then try to make sense of. And in the conflicts--which I'm not sure we got to in this game, if you are playing the opposition to the Colonists, you can pull a random word to help figure out how the situation escalates and gets wierder/worse if things go awry.

And that incredibly serious moment with Willow's flashback is just what I'm going for--in the context of the crazyness and even hilarity.  Both tragedy and comedy somehow in a collision course.

Bork, Bork, Bork!

best,
Em

[Larry L.]

Okay, then.


My thought is you could package this in a box, and market it as a really amazing party game to folks who have no idea what an RPG is. It reminds me a lot of the sort of humor found in Futurama, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Red Dwarf.

Things that worked:

I've been wanting a genuinely funny RPG for a long time. I nearly busted my gut playing this. I had to swear off wacky games for the rest of the convention; I think I blew a wacky fuse.

This does a marvelous job of collaborative creativity. Most of the mechanics essentially guarantee that everyone participating has contributed. I suspect everyone came away with happy feelings about how their own little contributions factored into the fun.

Things that didn't work:

I didn't understand why a few of the mechanics were present. They didn't seem to have any substantial impact on the fun.

There was a certain amount of time involved in explaining the backstory, which seemed pretty unnecessary. The concept is pretty much already understood by anyone, with a minimum of explanation.

Why I think this this has the the potential to be a really great humor game:

There was an essay in the book The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer which basically broke down the formula of why The Simpsons has been such an enduring phenomenon. The bulk of the show consists of irreverent comic things happening the the characters. However, from time to time there are elements which are genuinely earnest or even sad, which at first glance seem out of place. (Like, how the heck did an episode about a dying saxophone player get in there? That's not funny!) The idea is that these sincere bits serve to build an emotional attachment to the characters.

I think Sign In Stranger basically exhibits a similar quality. While the bulk of play lends itself to zany and even cruel humor, the flashbacks and other elements serve to portray genuinely touching character development, which is parceled out in infrequent enough chunks that players have an emotional interest in coming back to see the story of characters which might otherwise turn into mere butts of so many gags.

[David Berg]

Very interesting.  When I played in the playtest at the Big Apple Comic Con, not quite two months ago, it wasn't "a humor game" at all.  There was more laughing when looking at the words and trying to think of how to use them than there was after actually adding to the SIS*.  Most of our contributions to the SIS were neither inherently funny, nor delivered as being funny.  This despite a pile of words that included all sorts of silly things like "aardvark".

Going into it, I thought of it as "a discovery game".  I like my discovery full of drama, tension, fear, mystery and wonder, so that's what I tried to bring to the table.  Others contributed in different but compatible styles.  The overall effect was very solid on the mystery and tension fronts, with smatterings of other vibes.

I might not have enjoyed the game as much if one player had been hell-bent on, e.g., absurdist humor.  It's possible that the "pick a mission" phase of play served to test the waters on that and push toward more of a consensus.  When we went for the planet whose dominant race had the Repulsive Trait of "Enslaving sentient beings," that might have been a hint that it wouldn't be a laugh-fest.

Emily, I have plenty of questions re: "tone of play", but don't wanna thread-jack, so I'll end this post here.  I'll happily come back to 'em later if you're interested.

I'm psyched about this game.

Ps,
-David

*that's Shared Imagined Space, not Sign In Stranger

[Larry L.]

Oh, that's an interesting observation about the "pick a mission" phase of play. All of the planets that we created were pretty absurd to begin with, so I think that was a flag that at least several people were pushing for a humorous game. All of this happened quite automatically, without anyone declaring, "This is going to be FUNNY, let's play something funny."