Event 3: Nationally Televised Debate

1. Harold shoves Nootie, Christi and Jo into a town car with Regina Forrest, Perky Cub Reporter (Jackson) who has come astonishingly far despite her pronounced lisp, in hopes that one or all of them will get catty and provide the reporter with a scandal.
   
   John: "You know, on one level this is a reporter with three candidates, and on another level it's just Nootie with three chicks."
   Chris: "If this was a Nootie limo, I'd be even more for it!"
   
   After some sniping between Christi and Jo, Nootie orders the driver to pull over so that he can look at the sunrise. "Master, you have come!" he declares shrilly, standing on the side of the highway, and drops his pants to ululate praises to his newly discovered roach. Christi plays a roach card to "confront this one in the proper manner," and hisses loudly before spraying acid from her mouth in Jo's eyes. Matthew, whose character wasn't even there, wins the roll--so Regina reports everything, and none of the three candidates comes off looking good.

(At this point, it was after 11 and we skipped to the final event.)

Event 4: National Convention

1. John drew another roach card and wanted to eject it, so he narrated a short scene in which Christi and Martin were coupling violently in the back of a limo when she vomited her roach directly into his mouth. He woke up roached in a drunk tank, and she lost her enthusiasm for debauchery, "never again to know the touch of a man." No opposition.
   
   
2. Nootie's keynote speech, in which he declares that Jeffery Tourneau is "not like the others" and displays poorly photoshopped pictures to indicate that he consorts with Chegroes. He then begins ululating, waggling his tongue and pinching his nipples on live TV. Cheers all around. No opposition.
   
   
3. Combo scene! We start with Jeffery's speech declaring that while a vote for him is a vote for success, there are some votes more important. He roaches up and plays his "praise this person" card on Stuart, "a candidate not wholly man, not wholly machine," as Stuart and his chair descend from the ceiling on wires, pinwheel fireworks on each wheel and sparklers out his ears.
   
   Stuart says that he's proud to accept Jeffery's endorsement, and I in turn play Slander on Harold to reduce his status dice to d4, declaring that he was "not an American citizen, tied to paramilitary neo-Nazi groups" (the delegates simply nod, unsurprised) and that while Stuart might be half machine, at least he's not "half man, half woman!" Gasps all around.
   
   Matthew counters with I don't remember what card, but it takes his dice back up to d10s, and Harold headlocks Jeffery to declare that his muscles are "100% natural."
   
   Cut! We jump backstage here to a simultaneous scene in which Christi confronts Jo about the impending danger of the roach to the american people, since Christi can tell that the roach hates Jo and she's not yet infected. At this point, roach-wild Nootie stumbles backstage shrieking and waving a shotgun he's commandeered from one of Jefferey's gun nut guards. Jo (who, remember, is not roached) wins the resulting roll; she calmly takes advantage of Nootie's distraction to get revenge for the acid-spitting by pulling a syringe from her pocket and poisoning Christi.
   
   Cut back to on stage: Jeffery takes the headlock opportunity to point a pistol at Harold's bicep and explain that the Gubernator's hazardous workout regimens cost Jeffery's son his arms twenty years ago. We roll, Jeffery wins, and the bullet rips through both Harold's biceps and incidentally his chest. (The security snipers on the balcony, hearing shots fired, immediately train their laser sights on Harold and shoot him several times in the head.) Matthew declared that the strategically placed bullet holes revealed Stuart's intimations about Harold's intersexuality to be all too true.
   
   
4. We came to the final speeches--a conflict between me and Ping to see which one of our characters would get kicked out of the party entirely. Christi, poison coursing through her veins, stumbles onstage for her speech and tries to inform the nation that the federal government is their enemy. "Split into autonomous groups of no more than seven people," she manages. "National Guard armories must be redistributed locally. County administrators can manage this until the power transfer is completed. To vote is to become food, so" THUD.
   
   Jo enters immediately to declare that this poor woman is exhausted and probably dying--if only she had universal health care! (We later noticed that she was promoting her agenda literally over her opponent's dead body.) Stuart takes the stage for the final speech, declaring that Jo and her health care obsession are relics of the past. Stuart stakes his position that the new crucial issue is equal rights for all--the man and the machine; the regular and the intersexed (gesture to poor dead Harold); and both the pure-strain human AND (hug Jeffery, now his running mate) the "roachfully enabled." We roll, with all three of Ping's Reputation staked against my one (with six in reserve). Ping wins!

Conclusion

However! The original setup of the game was that the living, unroached player with the most Rep would win the party nomination, and the roached player with the most rep would get the VP nod. Ping doubles her stake of three on that last roll and I lose my ante of one, which leaves us tied at six each. Since Stuart and Jeffery have just been kicked out of the party, we decide that they leave and mount a successful independent candidacy together, while Jo gets the real party nod and is stuck with gleefully insane Nootie as her running mate (to compete for the roached vote, naturally).

This is great. It seems like The Roach is often a dark mirror to the soul of the players.

Posted By: Brendanand explain to me again how Jo won a Nobel Prize and became a Luminary while I was distracted

She drew the "Awarded Noble Prize" card and played it out while we were all stuffed into the limo. But before I dropped trow and before she got acid spit on her.

Running for office is a tough business.

After having his dice reduced to d4s by your Slander, Harold brought in a bit of Sport Enthusiasm with his flexing and showing his natural muscles and tossed down the Genius card to make all his dice d10s. Nice counter! A bit of a stretch to call Harold a genius at anything but hey, we're playing the Roach, right? Still, his rolls were not enough to save him from the hail of gunfire that revealed him for the apparent hermaphrodite that he was. Autopsy reports showed the Gubenator to have XYY chromosome structures heavily influenced by massive hormone treatments. These facts may explain much. Or not.

I still feel the glow of the awesomeness myself. And still strangely attracted to John as a hangover from our Buck, Blaylock and bon bons scene. It's left me feeling very unfresh.

Jason, we used my rules changes from this post, and the events and NPCs that WillH suggested a little way down the page. I just wrote on small post-it notes and stuck them to the original cards to make changes. This was a no-prep game so we ran it pretty quick and dirty.

But stepping back a sec to talk about the Roach as a whole, I don't think I've ever gotten through all six events in a one-shot. And we sped things along by not having each character host a scene in each event. We just made sure that each character had at least one appearance in each events. Cutting to just three interesting events and getting to the endgame in one session was pretty satisfying.

Posted By: moleculoI still feel the glow of the awesomeness myself. And still strangely attracted to John as a hangover from our Buck, Blaylock and bon bons scene. It's left me feeling very unfresh.

I was gonna have us all rolling around in the leftover debris from Christi's seven lobster dinners, maybe starting a small fire with the sterno from the butter warmer, but it was only the first scene and I wasn't sure where everyone's boundaries were.

Posted By: Caesar_X
So I guess you found out pretty soon afterwards, then.

Ah, yeah. Your greeting of the dawn thing kinda made me wish I'd tied Martin to something, like maybe to a busboy or two.

More generally: the Roach has been a longtime entry on my I-want-to-play-this list, so thanks to Chris for making it so. And holy crap, people in this game brought the funny. The milk solids, the Chigroes, the Greeting Of The Dawn, Herr Schvartzenaccent, the stammering/hot flash line, the repeated ruination of xmas, the poison syringe -- gold, all of it. Thanks guys!

I went in with the idea that the Roach would be compelling us to do unspeakably evil things rather than making us behave badly. But in this game, the Roach seemed like an embarrassing relative rather than a force for evil. Discovering this, and then getting poisoned by my ambitious but unroached rival while I was desperately trying to warn the nation about the alien menace, was very satisfying.

(Originally, my speech idea for Christi was to get Nutie out on stage with her and re-enact that scene in V where the Visitors are revealed to be lizards. She would jam some spicy tofu crawdads into him and force the Roach to flee his body, on camera. But I liked the syringe so much that I wanted to go out on that bit.)