Happy Birthday Robot!

[firth]

Happy Birthday Robot. I was once young too, but selfish, and made mistakes. I kept my buttons and my wife at home. Soon she grew lonely and sold them. I hated her for it and plotted her demise. I quickly hired an assassin and took a buttonless vacation

Comments

[ex_gobi]

Whoa, did you really write this by playing the game?

[firth]

Yeah, totally game generated.

I convinced my improv troupe to give an RPG a shot since we focus on storytelling. We were going to play a longer game but one of our members couldn't make it, so we held off on that. I had played Happy Birthday Robot a few times at gencon so suggested it. Those gencon runs had gone 15-30 minutes (with much more light-hearted stories) but last night's lasted about two hours with four of us playing.

They all really, really liked it though. We even talked about maybe playing it as a more frequent rehearsal warmup activity, with 15-second-ish limits on sentence creating. I'll need to make my own custom dice if we do that... :)

[ex_gobi]

Oh! You were in the infamous GenCon group! That's so awesome, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Tell me, how do you handle the down time when it's time for a player to come up with their contribution? I notice that it's a very quiet moment and the other players don't have much to do during that time. I didn't know if that was a bad thing, though. What do you think?

[majcher]

Hooray, we're infamous! :)

[firth]

The downtime wasn't too bad for us. Maybe because there were four of us only one person wasn't involved in the current sentence at any point? Or maybe because we're a troupe and interested in how the other people create things?

Either way, we were all fairly engaged the whole time, focused on the storytelling together, caring about the new sentence that was added... With some snack eating and small amounts of other chatting on the side.

[ex_gobi]

Oh yeah, I forgot about how involved the neighbors are in each turn! I guess it's not such a problem after all. w00t!