About a month ago I ran a game of Lasers & Feelings & I never posted about it. Mostly because I was being cagey with spoilers-- I had a pretty tight concept & it worked well, so I plan on re-using it. So eventually I'll throw up a spoiler tag, & if you think you might ever play a parlor game RPG with might one night, skip on over that part, 'kay? Alrighty then! What was most notable was that Mike, who played in my first full Oubliette campaign & whose Oisos campaign I ran roughshod over with multiple characters showed up, with Megan as well, to play with my current crop of players. Neato mosquito.
I found the game utterly charming, & my first impulse is to make a fantasy spinoff called "Swords & Sorcery" by the same logic, or a vampire one with "Beauty & the Beast" as the two poles. Click on the picture, the rules are only a page long, so I won't try to summarize further. It seems in some ways like the attraction of a Traits system distilled down, where "Hot-Shot Engineer" is your entire character sheet, with only one statistic. High numbers are more "Lasers," low numbers are more "Feelings." It worked like a charm, to the point where I played it with Olivia, & at four & a half she was able to play "D&D" with me. But that's another story.
The crew of the ISS Raptor were:
Ziggy Gobo, a Dangerous Soldier, 2. (Mike.)
Celeste Benoit, a Hot-Shot Pilot, 4, who wanted to find new worlds. (Nicole.)
Parker Lemtosh, an Android Soldier, 5, who wanted to shoot the bad guys. (Lilly.)
Nadia Diaz, a Savvy Explorer, 4, who wanted to solve weird space mysteries. (Megan.)
James Quark, an Intrepid Scientist, 5, who wanted to become captain. (James.)
Biff LeRoy, a Dangeous Engineer, 2, who wanted to keep being awesome. (Luke.)
In this story, the Raptor itself was Nimble & had Superior Sensors, but had a Grim Reputation, as Captain Darcy's last ship, the ISS Dauntless, he self-destructed with the crew on board after they got brain parasites. Darcy is in cryosleep in medbay when the story opens. I used the different rooms of my apartment to simulate the bridge, ops, engineering & medical, which worked really well, with a few minor hiccups, like Jennifer being home since her drinks out were canceled.
Spoiler time, so stop reading if yadda yadda. I went through the plots & well, I may have pretended that I rolled my plot up randomly-- the fragments of it were all pieced together from the tables, but I picked them out-- but that just adds spice to the story, the mystique. It's the reason there's a DM's screen. (Though much respect for the "let the dice lie" ethos, too.) The plot was, in a nutshell, here comes the spoilers, brain parasites. Alien Brain Worms want to Synthesize Void Crystals which will Rip a Hole in Reality, so I translated that as brain parasites which live in hyperspace, & want to reverse the polarity of the ships hyperdrive engines in order to condense the void crystals that drive the ship down & tear open a rift to hyperspace. Really though, it was just a scam to make the players do all the work: I rolled randomly, got Ziggy, took him aside & said "you don't have a character motivation, you have brain worms. If you get another player alone, you can try to infect them too." That was my plot, one & done. In the end? Everyone was turned into a brain parasite, except Celeste Benoit, who escaped in a shuttle, & the android Parker Lemtosh, who ruptured Darcy's containment tank & since he knew the ship was being invaded by brain worms...he self-destructed, killing himself & all on board.