(w/ Ben, Chris, and Erik)

Glad to get the chance to try some spoken-word Ribbon Drive - which I'd been thinking about for a while.

And I have to say, it's some of the most fun I've had playing a story game lately! Got me out of a rut or something. Both times I've played Ribbon Drive have been great, there's something magic there ... is it that typically all the players are in all the scenes, so we're all roleplaying all the time? Is it tagging aspects? (Ben says no, but I'm not so sure.) Is it ... the songs?

Anyhow, first song: Weird Al's Amish Paradise. Next song? Sinners Incorporated. So. Yeah. We were four Amish boys on our rumpspringa, searching for the ocean and the American dream. We got beat up, into traffic accidents, shot, stole a cop car (Erik, inspired by BOC's Monsters: 'got our hands on a ship and stole away into the night ... in black and white'), laid, and shot some more.

"Which way are we going?"
"We're going to America"

At the end, as Malachai's girl's dad and Malachai (Erik) face off with guns, none of us had applicable traits to resolve the obstacle. Detour? It seemed late in the game for a detour (though Bauhaus' King Volcano: "the pretty girl screamed" "lonely people burn like candles" did seem appropriate) it occurred to us we should reincorporate rather than mix something new in, so Ben suggested we go back to the first song, Amish Paradise, again. (There might be a good house rule there.)

So our denoument - feeding chickens back in Amish country, talking about Malachai, the one who got away.

So. A bit more gonzo than Little Miss Sunshine ... but, hey, not as gonzo as Harold & Kumar. And gonzo can be fun anyhow.

Looking at the lyrics of Monsters again, I see how much the entire story arc unfolded as the song does. It's almost like Amish Paradise, Monsters, King Volcano wrap the entire story in a bow. Eerie.

Everybody in America steals cop cars. It's normal I tell ya! They also all have filthy bathrooms.

Like any good road trip, the secondary characters we met along the way really shaped our story: Sheriff Clemens, hitchhiking college student Jessica (?), the van of smoked out hippies, and finally the stand-your-ground Texan father. Given that we were strangers in a strange land, having all these different and contradictory people as our "guides" to the true America was excellent.

I was really happy we brought it around full circle and repeated the first song as our very last song. Extremely satisfying closure and its really interesting to hear those first lyrics again after seeing what we did with them. I definitely would consider doing that in any Ribbon Drive game.

I wonder if it's not fitting, to have some kind of toggle or switch to decide whether to play another song, or the original song over--much like we had, unofficially, with the fact that we were wrapping up without anyone having crossed off their goals, and so no official protagonist.