http://www.fembotcentral.com/viewtopic.php?t=8867
... when I am role playing malfunction sequences, I have found myself being insecure about giving enough variety, and also getting a little overwhelmed by all the possibilities. The results was: I felt a little uncreative and repetitive
My first attempt to write out possibilities of malfunctions helped somewhat, in that I was able to scan a list and use a few, but then I found myself bogged down in real-time by having to mentally keep track of "which of these have I already used?" So I stopped looking at the list, which put me back at square one.
During the thread above, I thought of the idea of building a little randomizer for malfunction ideas. I wanted it to be as simple to build and use as possible, so that not only could I use it, but anybody else in the community who wanted to use it for role plays or stories could grab it and do whatever they wanted with it.
I used Excel, and saved the spreadsheet as an old format (Excel 97-2003 format) so hopefully as many people can use it as possible.
There is no "web interface" to it, it's just a straight download of an excel file.
The file can be downloaded here:
http://psophotos.net/galianachance/tech ... erator.xls
The concept is simple: each idea has a random number, a Category and an Example. Some examples are concepts (slow speed / raise speed), and some are specific phrases ("System crash is imminent").
The random number is generated by this Excel function: RandBetween(1,100)
The number re-generates every time the spreadsheet is recalculated. This recalculation event is triggered when the list is sorted (Why? I dunno, but it's handy, so I'm not questioning it...).
I put an Excel filter on the column headers, so all you have to do to re-scramble the list is to re-sort the column titled "RE-SORT ME" (click on the little arrow by the words "RE-SORT ME" and choose "Sort Smallest to Largest"). Voila!
The font is Terminal to amuse myself.
Over to the right are phrases which are helpful upon rebooting or restarting some component, which I found I wanted handy all the time instead of being buried at some random place on the list.
I had two malfunction role plays yesterday: one before I did the generator and one after. The one before felt like I was searching / breaking flow, and repetitive, and I felt like I had concentrate hard to come up with things to do.
The malfunction role play I did with the generator felt ten times easier, significantly smoother in terms of rhythm and pacing, and infinitely more varied and creative. I could just keep scrolling down the list and pick the next relevant thing without being concerned about having to think of something new or keeping track of what I'd done already. I found myself skipping things because they didn't fit the context, but that worked great.
So, I'm pleased. Yay!
Please feel to offer suggestions for improvement, or additional items for my list - I'm sure I'll add stuff all the time. I'll try to remember to keep the publicly linked one up to date with my latest phrases.
You may use any or all of the file in any way you wish, whether to help you build better malfunction sequences in your fiction, to do better role plays, or heck, I'd kinda like it if you just got turned on by it as a little work of art
I'd love to know what you think!!
) I was very pleased at just how positively it affected my experience. So many varieties of malfunctions and we got to use quite a few of them and every single one made sense in the moment and all of them integrated seamlessly into the flow of the conversation. This is an excellent resource to have available.
