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Agile Ribbit-ribbit, my Creators salute you! • 2019 rpg
Echinorlax • https://twitter.com/echinorlax
A party game of incorrect assumptions for minimum four players.
Players are amorphous technoblobs, tasked by their CREATORS with contacting Earthlings, bound by:
Biased instructions - to "Copy NATIVES' form and behavior to facilitate the contact". CREATORS are uniform and they evolved on perfectly monotypic planet. Concepts like "lesser species", "diversity's consequences" are meaningless to them.
Matter - Ants? Elephants? Whatever you resemble, you weigh 1 lb with size to scale.
Everyone puts same number (3 + planned number of rounds) of unrevealed animal names (no microorganisms) into the drawing bag.
Everyone draws from the bag to meet their first NATIVE. They depart before you finish morphing, but you are ready... for some rushed ASSUMPTIONS.
Everyone, in turns:
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Share your assumptions on how your CURRENT form signifies SAPIENCE.
Search for another NATIVE: draw from the bag.
Strive to achieve communication, against remaining players collectively roleplaying the NATIVE, reaching "consensus" by: first come, first served, unless second is funnier!
Reassemble yourself if required, accept and analyze your failure aloud, morph into the NATIVE just met.
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After a full round, each player distributes four points among two opponents, awarding most entertaining attempts.
Start next round, or:
Tally the scorecard and declare the winner.
Author Comments
On the challenge: When I was done, I had 450 words and I started to understand that designing the game was the easy part. Next day, at 270, entirely out of fluff and spare words, I understood NOW was the hardest part. How to play a game without the setting properly set up? How to write a game manual that reads well without some witty quips? And, by the gods, how to shrink the essentials against the very meaning of this word? At 230 I was just screaming internally… maybe it was time to stop making assumptions? :P
On the idea: It is common theory, that aliens wishing to examine our planet would use Artificial Intelligence probes, for sublight travel spanning thousands of years is not feasible for living beings. It is also my personal experience, that code can behave dumb, but it can’t BE dumb. Behavioral traits are inherited in their entirety from the coder. The core of the idea is the story of Cambrian fossil named Hallucigenia, which was initially reconstructed upside down and back to front (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucigenia) But hey, if alien scout was to see first a centipede and later a sleeping hedgehog, it would be fair to assume it sleeps belly-up and has hundreds of legs, right?
