SNAKES ON A PLANE
The Roleplaying Game of Personal Discovery, Dire Combat And Mother
ing Snakes
INTRODUCTION
There's mother
ing snakes on this plane!
You and the other players take the role of people on an airplane. One player takes the role of the SnakeMaster (SM). The SM adjudicates rules disputes, helps direct the story and controls all the snakes.
CHARACTER CREATION
You have five stats, ranked from 1 to 9.
GUTS: How tough and strong you are. Indicates how slowly you'll die if bitten by a snake.
NERVE: How quickly you react; reflexes and coordination. You'll use this to dodge snakes.
COOL: How likely you are to flip out under tense circumstances. This will be tested whenever you encounter an unexpected snake.
WITS: You're a smart mother
er, aren't you? Too bad you're on a plane full of snakes.
CHARM: How attractive and charismatic you are. Works better on people than it does on snakes.
Distribute 25 points among these stats; minimum of 1, maximum of 9.
In addition, your character has a Story. This is a bit of background explaining what you're doing on this plane. This should be no more than one sentence. It cannot use words that you'd find in an SAT vocabulary prep book or in a Proust novel.
"Snuck onto the plane to pitch my script to a producer": GOOD.
"Escorting a witness to testify in a federal trial": GOOD.
"Flying to Hawaiian retreat to seek succor from the ennui that is my existence": BAD.
TASK RESOLUTION
Whenever you're asked to test a stat, roll a number of six-sided dice equal to that stat's rank. Every die that comes up 5 or 6 is a
success. Every die that comes up 1 is a
snake.
If you get more snakes than successes, you are attacked by a snake (see
Mothering Snakes, below).
If you get an equal or greater number of successes, you avoid the snakes and do what you need to do.
GAMEPLAY
The game begins in the middle of the flight, just before the snakes are released. This is known as the
before-goddamned snakes stage, or BGS. During the BGS stage, no one needs to test a stat to do anything. You can go to the bathroom (unless the light's on), talk to people, have a drink, read a magazine, whatever. Just a perfectly normal flight.
When the SM decides it's time to release the snakes, then that's it. The snakes are out. SM: You are encouraged to use as many adjectives as possible to describe how terrifying it is to be in a narrow closed space with two hundred people and twice as many snakes. "Slithering," "rasping," "hissing," "coiling," and other words will add to the overwhelming environment of snakes on this plane.
Once the snakes have been released, we enter the
after-goddamned snakes stage, or AGS. During AGS, every action other than dialogue requires task resolution. If you want to go to the bathroom, roll your Nerve. If you want to punch a flight attendant, roll your Guts. If you want to plead with the cop to save your life, roll your Charm. Everything you could possibly want to do,
other than deliver dialogue, requires you to test a trait.
MOTHERING SNAKES
If you are attacked by a snake, the SM will roll 1 die and consult the following table.
- The snake tries to bite you. Lose 1 point of Guts as you swat it away.
- The snake is poised to strike. Lose 1 point of Nerve as you throw something at it.
- The snake falls in your hair or crawls up your pants leg. Lose 1 point of Cool as you totally flip out because, dude, it's a goddamned snake.
- The snake presents you with a logic puzzle, such as Sudoku or a rubik's cube. Lose 1 point of Wits beating this insidious game.
- There's someone bigger or tougher than you nearby. Lose 1 point of Charm as you convince them to go deal with that ing snake.
- Reroll and double all point values lost; you stumbled onto a lot of mothering snakes. Reroll and double every time the die comes up 6.
Once you subtract the point or points from your relevant trait, you have dealt with the snake (for now). If a trait is at 0 and you are asked to subtract points from it, the snake kills you.
Example: we're in AGS and my character, a husband trying to save his marriage, sees his wife and his kid being accosted by a drunken and terrified passenger. He tries to pull the passenger off them. This is a Guts roll and my character has a Guts of 5. He rolls 1, 1, 3, 4, 5: one success and two snakes. He is attacked by a snake.
The GM rolls a 6 on the Mothering Snakes table. He rerolls and gets a 3: two snakes land in my hair. I lose 2 Cool points getting them out. This reduces my Cool from 3 to 1. If my Cool (or any other trait) is reduced below 0, the snakes kill me.
HOW MUCH LONGER
The snakes are
always released at the midpoint of a trans-oceanic flight. This is a necessary rule, as otherwise the pilot could just land the plane and get rid of the snakes. Creative SMs can come up with exceptions to this rule, such as:
- This is a cross-country flight but there's a gigantic snowstorm and the pilot can't land anywhere but his destination.
- This is a cross-country flight but the pilot is bitten by a snake. Thus the plane can't be landed without help.
The plane has between 2 and 12 hours to reach its destination once the snakes are released; the SM rolls 2 dice to determine how many hours.
Every time a character makes a task resolution check, the clock advances by 15 minutes. Every time a character is attacked by a snake, the clock advances 30 minutes.
Once the time remaining elapses, the plane arrives at its destination. Everyone who accomplished the task stated in their Story is a WINNER. Everyone who did not accomplish that task is BITTEN BY A SNAKE and DIES.
SNAKEMASTER'S ADVICE: PLAYERS KEEP OUT
As the Snakemaster, it's your duty to keep the characters moving. There will be a great temptation by the players to keep the characters in their seats. Since dialogue doesn't incur the risk of snake attacks, they may just sit there screaming, "Oh god, we're going to die" or "Can't somebody do something?" or "Get these mother
ing snakes off this mother
ing plane!"
Do not allow this to happen! You must constantly confront the players with events that challenge their characters' Stories. Get them out of the seats. They should be running up and down the aisles, screaming and fighting and carrying on. Throw things at them to force them to act. Every action they take brings with it the risk of snake attack, and snake attacks drive the narrative.
You're also within your perogative to declare an unprovoked snake attack. Roll 1 die on the Mother
ing Snake table and tell a player whose character hasn't moved in a while that he has to deal with a snake now.
