get in the fucking robot play report
Apr. 9th, 2021 07:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catchasparkAbout a month ago I played a game of Get In The Fucking Robot with some friends (who may identify themselves at will) and had a fantastic time. Then I promised I would do a writeup. Then I found myself extremely stymied in doing a full writeup of the plot, so that may still come at a later date, but I did want to review the game, so I'm posting this now.
This game was written as a shitpost and some comments on tumblr and in the specs suggest that it was, ideally, meant to generate comedy, and maybe with a different group of players it can totally do that, but with our group it was an instant tragedy machine. Which was spectacular. I mean, it was a really, really good system. This might be my favorite quote-unquote one shot I've played in a year of playing a fair few! So I wanted to do a writeup/play report both because, you know, you enjoy a ttrpg you write a too-long review about it or record a podcast of it and I'm too lazy for podcast, and also because our game was great.
Get in the Fucking Robot is, to quickly summarize, a game about characters who are for whatever reason destined/determined/employed to pilot a particular mecha, and the player with the most "confidence" (the game's mechanical currency) by the end of play is the one who pilots that mecha. Your goal is to lose: if your character gets in the fucking robot it is bad news for the character, and possibly the world.
setup
We ran with a setting mashing up a bunch of stuff we'd been watching/reading/playing*; we were the surviving members of a whaling crew in a messy hypercapitalist space future, where space whales are a major hazard to the shipping lanes (because they don't know where the shipping lanes are, because they're whales? maybe) and also valuable for their parts, and whaling is carried out by piloting a robot that then forms a psychic connection to the whale. Our ship had been a star of the industry until profits started dipping and then finally ran out, so we had to go into cryo until our "interests" paid off our "debts".
Except they: didn't. And we didn't wake up. So our game took place forty years later, when we were finally defrosted with an offer we couldn't refuse from a cruise spaceship that was offering an Authentic Space Whaling Experiences (Whales Now Almost Entirely Extinct), Now Complete With: Real Whalers! And One of Their Old Ass Robots!
The game comes with premade Roles and we had one character per Role:
story
group of disgruntled conscripted whalers-turned-hoteliers gear up very slowly to go on strike and commit major sabotage until blindsided at the very end by grad student scabbing by soulbonding with a whale
The tension came from the fact that this was a completely voluntary whale encounter for the entertainment of the cruise ship, which was on the one hand wildly dangerous to the ship in a way that the cruise ship refused to account for because what a rare opportunity!, and was on the other hand a completely pointless way to gravely risk the life of one of our gently defrosting crew, and was on the third increasingly unforgettable flipper a completely pointless way to kill a whale. So we got to ping pong a lot about like: nobody should get in the fucking robot; however someone will have to get in the fucking robot; what if there was another way, without the fucking robot?; no, turns out that way also involves the fucking robot, but at least it will mean something; fucking will it though
The round structure (three rounds to a game) let us play out three short futility nightmares-- round one, no we absolutely cannot get the cruise director to turn the ship; round two, no there is no evacuation plan and the best option we have to enact one involves some minor sabotage; round three, we can absolutely do some major sabotage to try to turn the ship around but everyone gets the best chance of survival if someone also flies the robot out to try to turn the whale around, probably resulting in the loss of their life.
This was absolutely the best, SPEAKING PERSONALLY, as it let me play Cleo as someone with this like dull crushing sense of being too stupid and powerless to avert a disaster, but just stupid enough to be willing to get in the robot to go out there and be the part of the disaster that stops the disaster from killing anyone else she knows. It was also the best again speaking personally because it meant that I could try to shove Arti into the whale.
mmm, sometimes in this post I find myself typing sentences and am like, this game was a shitpost about Eva! anyway
the point is, also each round more characters who had thought this whole thing was-- one way or another-- completely pointless came on board with the idea of trying to turn the metaphorical and literal ship; but, since the game is a mechanically guaranteed tragedy to at least some extent, this meant that we were balancing the tension of telling a story about getting more and more invested in the idea of averting disaster while we as players knew that at least one deep interpersonal form of disaster wouldn't be averted. That's fun stuff!
gameplay
Get in the Fucking Robot is designed for play with tokens around a table; we used Zoom, a custom powerpoint, and a dice roller, which worked great. (A previous game that was voice only with the same tools was also very fun.) It is listed for 3-5 players and it is allegedly a one-shot. The previous game I had played was with 5 people and we'd gotten through 2/3 of it in two hours so, like a fool, I assumed 6 players would be able to get through it in three hours if we did some pre-prep. That was very much not the case. With one exception our scenes were not very long, we only took five minute breaks, and we didn't have much cross-chat, but it was three ~3.5 hour sessions to complete the whole thing.
Play proceeds with each player in turn setting a scene vs. one other player, with opportunities from other characters to "support" another character by dropping in. (More than half the time when we had another player cameo in a scene, it was genuinely difficult to decide by the end of the scene who that player had supported even when they'd gone in with the best of intentions and at least twice we had to assign it to the character who the "supporting" player had done least to actively obstruct.) At the end of each scene, players roll a number of dice determined by the various special roles and who supported them and also a mechanic I'm gonna enthuse about in more detail in a minute. Winner gains Confidence, thereby placing them one step closer to the robot, and the fucking-in-getting. A round ends when every player has played a scene and the game goes for three rounds, plus a scene ending the story.
What made this game so fabulous and also such a natural engine for very rich interpersonal drama is that every player is meant to set one more or less positive attribute that they're embodying at the start of a scene--enthusiasm, vulnerability, or empathy--and then at the end can declare that they are trying to nullify some of the dice they'd normally roll by spending tokens** out of a negative quality that actually affected them in that scene--apathy, alienation, or self-loathing. There's a roshambo mechanic in which positive qualities knockout other negative qualities which is fun, dice roll wise, but what's so great about it is just that like-- hey, you know what really helps roleplay? When you have to think before a scene "what energy am I bringing into this and which of these shitty character traits might hold me back?" It's a mechanical demand that your character not just be their absolute worst selves, but also a mechanical reward for making your character at least somewhat their worst selves.
Not every scene involved one of the negative qualities! In the third round I think people spent no tokens more often than not, meaning that they didn't feel that any of those negative qualities really applied, which felt really narratively satisfying in and of itself because like-- cool, we've grown more animated, more invested, more open, more real, and more capable of seeing each other as people, that's fantastic, anyway that means it is more likely that one of us is going to meet a horrible fate!
ALSO, ANOTHER thing that was great about this character building method is that the characters with 5 in negative personality traits played like characters with 5 points in negative personality traits. Cleo, Val and Dia were all people who you could really see why God and his little angels would try to force them into a robot; also they were all people who could destroy everything if you did so. On the other hand, the characters with 4 in their personality traits were much less deserving of a terrible fate, and yet if they got a terrible fate, they were in fact not so maladjusted that they would take the rest of us down with them. This felt narratively correct and also, sad.
As I said, we stayed clustered together in the rankings for most of the game; only one player was mathematically eliminated by the second-to-last scene. Tensions in terms of a profound desire not to kill any of our PCs therefore stayed high. Several conversations were had about whether or not we would simply "not" do the end of Get in the Fucking Robot but instead "start playing Beam Saber" or maybe just "announce the cruise ship revolution".
One thing that went fine in our play but that I could see being an issue is making sure to keep the plot moving. There is a slight gravitational tendency for every scene to turn into literally just two people talking about why they should or should not get into the fucking robot. That might be fine in shorter games but if that had been all that was going on in a 18 scene game, nightmare zone.
in conclusion
hope you enjoyed these 3000 words about space whales
* source list includes: Gundam Wing, Space Sweepers, Moby-Dick, Pacific Rim, Hotel del Luna, and a Blades in the Dark game one of us is in
** a quick technical note-- it was good that it was my second game of this and not my first because the first time we didn't realize that you needed to keep track of your actual score for your worst attributes, not just the tokens in it-- which of course you spend over the course of the game! so some hasty math had to be done. got it the second time though.
This game was written as a shitpost and some comments on tumblr and in the specs suggest that it was, ideally, meant to generate comedy, and maybe with a different group of players it can totally do that, but with our group it was an instant tragedy machine. Which was spectacular. I mean, it was a really, really good system. This might be my favorite quote-unquote one shot I've played in a year of playing a fair few! So I wanted to do a writeup/play report both because, you know, you enjoy a ttrpg you write a too-long review about it or record a podcast of it and I'm too lazy for podcast, and also because our game was great.
Get in the Fucking Robot is, to quickly summarize, a game about characters who are for whatever reason destined/determined/employed to pilot a particular mecha, and the player with the most "confidence" (the game's mechanical currency) by the end of play is the one who pilots that mecha. Your goal is to lose: if your character gets in the fucking robot it is bad news for the character, and possibly the world.
setup
We ran with a setting mashing up a bunch of stuff we'd been watching/reading/playing*; we were the surviving members of a whaling crew in a messy hypercapitalist space future, where space whales are a major hazard to the shipping lanes (because they don't know where the shipping lanes are, because they're whales? maybe) and also valuable for their parts, and whaling is carried out by piloting a robot that then forms a psychic connection to the whale. Our ship had been a star of the industry until profits started dipping and then finally ran out, so we had to go into cryo until our "interests" paid off our "debts".
Except they: didn't. And we didn't wake up. So our game took place forty years later, when we were finally defrosted with an offer we couldn't refuse from a cruise spaceship that was offering an Authentic Space Whaling Experiences (Whales Now Almost Entirely Extinct), Now Complete With: Real Whalers! And One of Their Old Ass Robots!
The game comes with premade Roles and we had one character per Role:
- Cpt. Cleopatra "Cleo" Ciel, the Hero, who was sick to shit of people cheaply spending her crew's lives, including her crew;
- Arcadia "Dia" Normal, the Rival, whose family had bought her onto the ship to protect their economic interests and who wanted with feverish intensity to prove herself (and also did not think anyone would miss her if she was gone);
- Valerian "Val" Thorn, the Traitor, who had a few successful whale kills under his belt and one whale kill where he had-- uniquely-- survived the experience of the whale dying without ever losing the connection on the way down and had gotten a little Fucked Up about the Whole Thing;
- Maximilian "Milo" Velocity 2.7, the Pro, who was a clone from a line of clones of the most successful whaler of all time (Max Velocity 1.0, protagonist of a shit ton of movies and a popular line of children's toys) and who had skated by so far without anyone noticing that they'd tuned and/or slithered the fuck out any time someone tried to train them for or conscript them into their death in a robot;
- Serra (SR-094), the Mascot, the robot who'd been assigned to watch the crew in cryo and a secret huge Max Velocity fan who knew if given the chance she could do a great job piloting the robot and saving us all from our evident unhappiness, which was of course her primary function;
- and Artimaea "Arti" Panther, the Novice, a cetology grad student who had signed up with the crew for industry research experience and had woken up forty years later All But Dissertation and with a whale girl past and a secret conviction that the whale wouldn't hurt her if it came down to it.
story
group of disgruntled conscripted whalers-turned-hoteliers gear up very slowly to go on strike and commit major sabotage until blindsided at the very end by grad student scabbing by soulbonding with a whale
The tension came from the fact that this was a completely voluntary whale encounter for the entertainment of the cruise ship, which was on the one hand wildly dangerous to the ship in a way that the cruise ship refused to account for because what a rare opportunity!, and was on the other hand a completely pointless way to gravely risk the life of one of our gently defrosting crew, and was on the third increasingly unforgettable flipper a completely pointless way to kill a whale. So we got to ping pong a lot about like: nobody should get in the fucking robot; however someone will have to get in the fucking robot; what if there was another way, without the fucking robot?; no, turns out that way also involves the fucking robot, but at least it will mean something; fucking will it though
The round structure (three rounds to a game) let us play out three short futility nightmares-- round one, no we absolutely cannot get the cruise director to turn the ship; round two, no there is no evacuation plan and the best option we have to enact one involves some minor sabotage; round three, we can absolutely do some major sabotage to try to turn the ship around but everyone gets the best chance of survival if someone also flies the robot out to try to turn the whale around, probably resulting in the loss of their life.
This was absolutely the best, SPEAKING PERSONALLY, as it let me play Cleo as someone with this like dull crushing sense of being too stupid and powerless to avert a disaster, but just stupid enough to be willing to get in the robot to go out there and be the part of the disaster that stops the disaster from killing anyone else she knows. It was also the best again speaking personally because it meant that I could try to shove Arti into the whale.
mmm, sometimes in this post I find myself typing sentences and am like, this game was a shitpost about Eva! anyway
the point is, also each round more characters who had thought this whole thing was-- one way or another-- completely pointless came on board with the idea of trying to turn the metaphorical and literal ship; but, since the game is a mechanically guaranteed tragedy to at least some extent, this meant that we were balancing the tension of telling a story about getting more and more invested in the idea of averting disaster while we as players knew that at least one deep interpersonal form of disaster wouldn't be averted. That's fun stuff!
gameplay
Get in the Fucking Robot is designed for play with tokens around a table; we used Zoom, a custom powerpoint, and a dice roller, which worked great. (A previous game that was voice only with the same tools was also very fun.) It is listed for 3-5 players and it is allegedly a one-shot. The previous game I had played was with 5 people and we'd gotten through 2/3 of it in two hours so, like a fool, I assumed 6 players would be able to get through it in three hours if we did some pre-prep. That was very much not the case. With one exception our scenes were not very long, we only took five minute breaks, and we didn't have much cross-chat, but it was three ~3.5 hour sessions to complete the whole thing.
Play proceeds with each player in turn setting a scene vs. one other player, with opportunities from other characters to "support" another character by dropping in. (More than half the time when we had another player cameo in a scene, it was genuinely difficult to decide by the end of the scene who that player had supported even when they'd gone in with the best of intentions and at least twice we had to assign it to the character who the "supporting" player had done least to actively obstruct.) At the end of each scene, players roll a number of dice determined by the various special roles and who supported them and also a mechanic I'm gonna enthuse about in more detail in a minute. Winner gains Confidence, thereby placing them one step closer to the robot, and the fucking-in-getting. A round ends when every player has played a scene and the game goes for three rounds, plus a scene ending the story.
What made this game so fabulous and also such a natural engine for very rich interpersonal drama is that every player is meant to set one more or less positive attribute that they're embodying at the start of a scene--enthusiasm, vulnerability, or empathy--and then at the end can declare that they are trying to nullify some of the dice they'd normally roll by spending tokens** out of a negative quality that actually affected them in that scene--apathy, alienation, or self-loathing. There's a roshambo mechanic in which positive qualities knockout other negative qualities which is fun, dice roll wise, but what's so great about it is just that like-- hey, you know what really helps roleplay? When you have to think before a scene "what energy am I bringing into this and which of these shitty character traits might hold me back?" It's a mechanical demand that your character not just be their absolute worst selves, but also a mechanical reward for making your character at least somewhat their worst selves.
Not every scene involved one of the negative qualities! In the third round I think people spent no tokens more often than not, meaning that they didn't feel that any of those negative qualities really applied, which felt really narratively satisfying in and of itself because like-- cool, we've grown more animated, more invested, more open, more real, and more capable of seeing each other as people, that's fantastic, anyway that means it is more likely that one of us is going to meet a horrible fate!
ALSO, ANOTHER thing that was great about this character building method is that the characters with 5 in negative personality traits played like characters with 5 points in negative personality traits. Cleo, Val and Dia were all people who you could really see why God and his little angels would try to force them into a robot; also they were all people who could destroy everything if you did so. On the other hand, the characters with 4 in their personality traits were much less deserving of a terrible fate, and yet if they got a terrible fate, they were in fact not so maladjusted that they would take the rest of us down with them. This felt narratively correct and also, sad.
As I said, we stayed clustered together in the rankings for most of the game; only one player was mathematically eliminated by the second-to-last scene. Tensions in terms of a profound desire not to kill any of our PCs therefore stayed high. Several conversations were had about whether or not we would simply "not" do the end of Get in the Fucking Robot but instead "start playing Beam Saber" or maybe just "announce the cruise ship revolution".
One thing that went fine in our play but that I could see being an issue is making sure to keep the plot moving. There is a slight gravitational tendency for every scene to turn into literally just two people talking about why they should or should not get into the fucking robot. That might be fine in shorter games but if that had been all that was going on in a 18 scene game, nightmare zone.
in conclusion
hope you enjoyed these 3000 words about space whales
* source list includes: Gundam Wing, Space Sweepers, Moby-Dick, Pacific Rim, Hotel del Luna, and a Blades in the Dark game one of us is in
** a quick technical note-- it was good that it was my second game of this and not my first because the first time we didn't realize that you needed to keep track of your actual score for your worst attributes, not just the tokens in it-- which of course you spend over the course of the game! so some hasty math had to be done. got it the second time though.
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Date: 2021-04-11 05:04 pm (UTC)