Ninja Burger!

[efindel]

This is a slightly edited repost of a post I made on the Indie-Netgaming Yahoo list.  For those not familiar with it, Ninja Burger is a comedy RPG from the same folks who put out Kobolds Ate My Baby, based on the http://www.ninjaburger.com web site.

Sunday night, I ran Ninja Burger for the folks who were
gathered in the indie-netgaming IRC channels. Here's my thoughts on it...

1 - It's a pretty quick little game. We had five players, and managed to
make up characters in about an hour or hour and a half... much of which was
me explaining the rules and typing out the random character generation
tables. I'd expect that in "live" play this would go much faster...
especially since the character sheet includes many of the needed tables.

The play portion we got to spend a bit under an hour and a half on as well.
In that time we did some four or five "turns around the table" with the six
players (counting myself, since the Ninja Manager (GM) gets a turn as
well). That's about three or four minutes per player-turn. The first few
turns were slow, later ones sped up a bit.

The rules to encourage silliness seemed to work well. In particular, the
"Ninja Never Fail!" rule was one that a lot of people had fun with. We had
one character death, with a haiku resulting (Haiku rule -- if you can
compose a haiku about your dead ninja and recite it for the players, you
may re-enter the game with a new ninja).

I was a bit worried about the random chargen at first, especially since one
player wound up with very low stats... however, that player seemed to be
one of the ones having the most fun. He was particularly funny in
employing the "Ninja Never Fail!" rule.

The second thing that I was worried about is that the game relies heavily on
a map divided into squares for the "race" aspect. In IRC, I basically had
to fudge movement, but no one seemed to mind.

Players also seemed to be "getting into" the mechanics well by the end of
the session, and having fun with them -- e.g., using the "official" names
for their actions (possible actions are Go!, Do!, Attack!, Skill!, Versus!,
and Do More!). I personally had some fun with the "honorable respect"
rules... asking each player on their turn "(Character Name)-san, what is
your action!?"

All in all, people seemed to have fun, even though we didn't get to complete
the game.

[Mad-Eye Moody]

Very Brave Ninja!
Delivers Fast Food.
Cut down by traitor.

It quite fun.  Character Generation would probably be much quicker in person.

Thanks for running it, I think we all had a blast.

[C. Edwards]

Success!  ;)

Ninja Burger was hilarious fun. I think it would be even better face to face. I never made it past the lobby of the building we were making our deliveries to but it didn't matter. I was laughing the whole time.

One word of advice, security guards rival the Terminator in combat prowess, avoid them or die! :)

-Chris

[Bob McNamee]

Yeah...

A fun snippet of play. Looks like a great short game for face to face play!

Bob McNamee

[GreatWolf]

What is the "Ninja Never Fail" rule?  I just skimmed my copy of the rules but I can't find it.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

[C. Edwards]

Hey Seth,

I don't have my copy yet, but it goes something like this: Ninja never fail. They either ignore that they did not succeed or pretend like they did exactly what they meant to do.

Hence my constant exclamations of "Success!" during the game. Fun fun.

-Chris

[efindel]

In the copy of the rules I have, its officially called the "The NINJA FAILURE (?) Rule" (question mark in parentheses is part of its name).  It's on page 17.

--Travis

[hyphz]

Very Brave Ninja!
Delivers Fast Food.
Cut down by traitor.

"Not a haiku.  Needs to mention a season and end the second line with a stop."

(... just kidding ;) )