theferrett

I like naked people, and I like Rock Band.  And for years, I’ve been caught in this awful Scylla and Charybdis conundrum: Gee, I’m having fun being naked with these people, but I’d really like to be playing Rock Band. Or This Rock Band sure is entertaining, but all these clothes are too restrictive.

Hence, the need for official rules for Strip Rock Band.

Now, I have some friends in other locales who are famed for their strip Rock Band parties, but the local scuttlebutt is that the stripping proceeds asynchronously – some people have all of their clothes on, if they are not playing Rock Band.  This shall not do for me.  (And besides, it was more entertaining to try to devise them on my own.) Plus, there may be large numbers of people who’d want to attend a strip Rock Band party, and since the main goal of a strip game is to get everyone naked, doing it through the narrow gateway of one person every song seemed unduly laggardly.

In addition, some people wanted a punitive measure to allow the losers to catch up – if you were a great Rock Band player, you might never remove an item of clothing.  Some suggested that every winner should be forced to do a shot, but I’ve had bad experiences with drinking games – I turn into a real asshole if I don’t monitor my drinking carefully.  So I wanted to have an optional way where a) people who wanted to do it as a drinking game could, but b) those who chose not to drink would be forced to doff clothing.

Hence: The Official Beta-Rules Of Strip Rock Band.

1) Every person entering the house is assigned semi-randomly to one of four teams: tentatively called Paul, John, George, and Ringo.

2)  When you join a team, you must a) choose a difficulty setting (“Easy” to “Expert”), which you will play at all night, and b) decide whether you are in the “official drinkers” or not.

3) Each song must be manned by people from at least three different groups.  (So at least Paul, John, and Ringo must be playing on the song to count for strip purposes.)

4)  You “win” a song by achieving the highest percentage on the song.  If you “win,” all members of the team who are listed as “official drinkers” must do a shot.

5) You “lose” a song by achieving the lowest percentage on the song.  If you “lose,” all members of the team must remove an item of clothing.

6)  If two or more groups tie for a percentage, the wins or losses are spread across all groups.  (So if Paul and George both get 67% in a song, bottoming out, all members of Paul and George must lose an item of clothing.)

7)  You gotta at least try.  No bullshit dropping the controller to make everybody strip.  If I’m not allowing “NO FAIL” mode at my house, I’m not allowing auto-fail mode either. 

The only problem we have thus far is the problem of late arrivers.  I’m still not sure whether they should just be forced to strip down on arrival, which is potentially humiliating but fair, or whether we force them to play repeatedly until they doff one at a time.  Or perhaps some other mechanism.  Certainly we’ll have an good idea of which team is the most losing team, so it should be easy to slot them on.

Also, it feels like this system is gamed fairly easily. If y’all have any improvements, I’m listening.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.