Optional Rules for RAM
RAID Array Mischief is intentionally a lean and mean game. The goal is to get a table of people playing one of your poor, neglected adventure modules in as little time as possible, which is why there's no character generation and there's a single shared memory sheet. In my open table lunchtime game, I even skipped any assignment of "Positronic Clusters", the mechanical differentiation of different players at the table, until after a session or two so that players could jump right into the core play loop.
During this last lunchtime session, two of the four players had previously joined the game and thus had been assigned Positronic Clusters. As we started playing, I offered for the two new players to choose PC abilities and they politely declined in the interest of getting the game going. I was curious to see how that would shake out and was pleasantly surprised with the results!
Fundamentally, RAM is a game where multiple brains steer a single character, so from the jump there is less pressure for players to mechanically or fictionally differentiate from one another. The "differentiation" shifts to the decision-making layer, where players tend to be more excited to have each other considering the situation from unique perspectives. Thus, they engaged with the Positronic Clusters not as class differentiators but as additional rule configurations that the individual players could manage independently.
You end up seeing significant differentiation between how different players phrase their encoded actions!
As I've thought about the life cycle of this game, I have seen space for additional, modular rules that can be plugged in to change the gamefeel of long-form play. Something like the rules for campaign play on the last page that allow players to "apply for a factory reset" to clear out junk actions from their memory between adventures. But these last few sessions of play make me think that some of these modular rules could instead be fit to the template of the Positronic Clusters. Rather than a player permanently donning the title of Reliability Cluster, the table could collectively decide each session what constellation of additional rules they want to track on behalf of the GM.
Each cluster provides the party with an active ability and a "Random Access Event Trigger". The active ability provides players some way to engage with the fiction or to manipulate a game object (such as scrying cards or rolling different dice for skill checks) while the Random Access Event Trigger forces the deck to be shuffled when certain conditions are met. I think this cluster template is far more extensible once it's treated as interchangeable or optional rules! This thought first struck me during the playtesting I did with my friends Scott and David in Skerples's Magical Murder Mansion - during the second session of that test, another friend could not join so we did not use the PC mechanics that they had originally picked. If we had thought about PCs as modular rules rather than, like, a class mechanic to be invoked by a single player, then we could have carried ahead with the additional complexity shared between remaining players.
Really this is just recreating "pilot your absent friend's character sheet" from first principles. In that case, you are either doing so because the fiction benefits from the character being present or because the game mechanics (or the GM's prep) depend on things like party size and composition. In our case for RAM, the fiction always treats the party as a single entity but there are a small number of rules that are sensitive to the current number of players.
I see space for a revision to the game where each Positronic Cluster includes a more specific downside in addition to an active ability and a random access trigger. These player-count-sensitive mechanics are then rewritten to depend on the number of active Positronic Cluster rules and a table of any size can simply choose however many clusters they want to manage in that session's particular constellation. Maybe two experienced players decide they can manage five rule clusters, while four new players decide to just use one rule cluster for their first session! Let me know what you think.