This weekend I finally managed to get my regular group (3.5 D&D gamers) to try out an Indie game--The Shab al-Hiri Roach. It was actually one of the last sessions with one of our members (Patrick, the louse, is daring to move to Minnesota where he can actually live with his partner) and the DM for the session canceled at the last minute. Clearly, we were still going to play something--Katie suggested we try this 'Roach game' I have been talking about.

And it was wonderful,a great last gaming session with Patrick--everyone had fun (read: stepped up and embraced the debauchery) and had some good spotlight action. Some of my favorite things (of many):

Much of the drama ended up being over whether the Foreign Language department (Patrick's asst. prof Anton von Lombardy II) could take over the larger Theater building, exiling them (and Tom's character, Jack E.(gregious) Wilson) to a much smaller building. The chancellor was roached by one faction then poisoned and buried in place of a student who had committed suicide. The student's body then became a point of contest between the crazy physicist (Stan's Asst. prof. Alfred Einstein of physics) and roach-possessed botanist for reanimation.

Regina became the source of a running mutilation gag--she lost her leg in the swamp and the Drama professor (Jack Wilson) arranged to have her hand bitten off by the same alligator so she could fill the role he had envisioned for her in the Pirates of Penzance.

Said dead student (Jenny Biggs) was reanimated by the roached Botanist (Katie's Full professor Miranda Talley, dissolute daughter of the Reverend) in an unholy and vile ancient Sumerian ritual so she could serve as the 'perfect blank slate' for the will of the Roach.

Which led to the Homecoming Queen race between a Roached Regina (peg leg and hook hand) and Jenny Biggs (still a little puffy from her swamp suicide). All the players took sides and went to great lengths to slander their rivals and use all manner of unseemly bribes to get their way. It's hard to describe how wonderful it was.

And that doesn't even mention my character's (asst. prof of experimental psychology Annabelle O'Connor) foiling of Wilson's selfish plot to roach the students with his own eggs at the Pirates' reception. I got to use my roach command (eat until you burst) to devour his roach tainted food. It was beautiful--Jack tried to have sex with O'Connor (using his roach die--copulate with this person) to stop me, but ended up in a fist fight with Anton instead. So, the audience came into the reception to find Annabelle binging and purging while Jack and Anton scuffled in the middle of the floor. Needless to say, they had no appetite for the food.

And, appropriately enough, Patrick won the game after managing to dislodge his roach before the last event.

was there any dissonance or difficulty in switching gears for them?

Some. I had introduced them to stake setting in a one-off session I did while I was DM-ing, so they weren't entirely unfamiliar with the idea. Still, the idea that they could narrate in other characters besides their own when they were 'just a player' took a little getting used to. I did a fair amount of kibbitzing to get people to set stakes and negotiate.

Occasionally, someone would 'set a stake' without trying to negotiate--just say 'my stake is x' but that seemed pretty normal given their experience where a GM would then handle that. I pushed a bit to get them to really justify any dice they picked up for narrating a character--not just for including them, but narrating how the character helped them (even if unwittingly) attain their goal. We were a little fast and loose with enthusiasms, but, again, I pushed a them to narrate those more fully as the game progressed.

Katie and Stan make interesting poles:

Katie (only been gaming a couple of years, pretty much only with D&D and a tiny bit of Chaosium Call of Cthulhu) took to it very quickly, choosing enthusiasms she could easily narrate into scenes (Pleasure and self-destruction). She just decided she would enjoy some activity or another and find a way to embrace it in a self-destructive fashion. She also took the most liberty with framing, pushing the setting and introducing unusual twists--raising the dead girl as roach queen was her doing. As was the funny aside that cuneiform grafitti started showing up around campus.

Stan, a player just joining the group (Katie's boyfriend, just moved in from out of state), had the most difficulty with the game. He is also the player who has done the most traditional gaming. He started in 1979, making the jump from boardgames to D&D. He expressed the most confusion with the structure ("This is not a game my brother and I could play--it's too freeform") and was more responsive than active. That being said, he actually introduced the idea of reanimating the body, falling back on a mad scientist trope with which he was familiar and letting everyone else carry it off in crazy ways.

Was this their first "indie" experience?

Unless you include the little indie hacks I worked in to our standard game, yes. And those were nothing compared to the big narration switch.

How about Patrick stealing victory at the end - any grumbling about the cruel capriciousness of that?

No real grumbling--he and Tom's character both shed the roach at the same time, it was just that Patrick already had a decisive lead in the reputation tally by that point. Tom would have liked to win, but the capriciousness did not bother him. Katie (and me, too, actually) really enjoyed the whole process and didn't really care so much about winning or losing (although if the game had ended with everyone roached, she would have been the clear winner for her debased servitude to the roach).

How did you guys address the narration of NPCs into events - was there any escalation of narration, or did you establish some socially acceptable limits?

There was some escalation, but we agreed early on that you had to get the character into the scene in an interesting and meaningful way to get the die. Everyone saw that too much escalation would spoil the story vibe. Tom noted in one scene that he had not narrated one of the NPC's assigned to him into the stake action and so wouldn't roll his die. When it came to mobs of students or townspeople (petition signing occurred at one point, drama at the football game), we only allowed certain distinctive figures (Regina and Bantam often stood in for student body) to 'count' for dice.

Did the "I call bullshit" rule get used at all?

No--I think in part because no one felt too entitled to veto someone else's idea. It was all new, so they just went with what came up. It was probably also why our game went off the rails in some interesting ways. I was tempted a few times to say "this seems a little off-color" and rally for a veto, but decided to just see where it went instead since everyone enjoyed the hijinks.

For the same reason, too, the negotiations were pretty good. If someone set a stake that really set the story way outside what other players wanted, people were eager to accommodate and scale back to something everyone could enjoy.

As an aside--everyone loved the inspirational cheat sheets from the website and eagerly used them to generate the names for characters and places to set scenes.

Thanks Isbo, this was a great writeup. I'm glad to see that the download extras (the cheat sheet, etc) came in handy. Do you think other kinds of pre-generated color like that (such as biographies or character sketches for the NPCs) would increase the fun, or just dampen the creativity?

So now that Patrick has moved on, what's next for your group? Do you think they'll want to play the Roach again someday, or perhaps other indie games?

Paging Pavlov! Nice move with the candy, Isbo.

Too spendy for con giveaways, but fun for a local game. A while back I looked for cockroach candy molds but, strangely, they are hard to come by.