RAM Play Report 11/26/2025
Unfortunately tonight I did not get a chance to break out my magical squid Dungeon Lord in my weekly His Majesty the Worm game. On the plus side, that meant I had a captive audience to take a crack at playing Random Access Memory in its pre-Alpha state! I had four players and an hour to prepare, so I decided to grab a short adventure module from Michael at Undelved. His brief dungeon, Beneath the Spire, was a perfect 14-room jaunt in the basement of a wizard's tower for a newborn robot to stretch its legs.
Check out the original post about RAM here
I gave the players a quick spiel on the premise of the game and then let them pick their personalities, the "Positronic Clusters", before depositing them unceremoniously at the front door of the dungeon. When I described them descending into darkness, I expected them to create some form of lamp or torch. My Reliability player decided "no, we will deal with darkness with sonar", which became the party's first encoded action: Sonar Scan Vicinity. It was encoded as a 4 of Diamonds, which meant that it got a lot of mileage tonight. Reliable access to sonar in a fantasy dungeon reveals a lot of interesting information, and it ended up being an incredibly useful way to navigate the obstacles in this module.
The party ended up taking a fairly meandering path through the dungeon. After much perseveration, they freed K'rrot, the fungal spirit that was trapped in the ground below the basement. They freed him by encoding a Break a Curse action with a fitting 10 of Diamonds (very hard to successfully repeat with a d12 roll) and continued on their merry way. They were then faced with a 20-foot-wide pool of spilled chemical reagents and had to decide how to best cross the toxic gap. Reliability pitched gravity manipulation and Conservation pitched a simple 20-foot long jump. We negotiated that a 20-foot long jump would cost no additional resources, but gravity manipulation would probably cost some coins or magic items. They eventually settled on a more versatile option of two separate actions, Double Jump and Uppercut to be performed in sequence like a character in Super Smash Bros. They acknowledged that this was risky; the deck had been reshuffled, so each successive draw risked pulling one of their previously-encoded actions while in midair, or worse: a dreaded Memory Leak.
By the end of the session, the party found what they were looking for in a pocket dimension tucked into the back of a storage closet. The Life Bringer crystal had been eaten by a slug 250 years ago and was retrieved after extensive testing of the boundaries of the illusionary space. The PARTY discussed the option of using the Life Bringer for themselves to turn into four real humans and agreed that it would take an encoded action to free themselves from this life of servitude to The Adventuring Company. They drew their card...and it had previously been encoded as Breakdance. They melancholically made their way out of the dungeon, met up with their sponsor, and Rocket Kicked him into low earth orbit. They took the Life Bringer for themselves out into the world, agreeing to stay together for now.
Final Game State
What Worked?
I think the core mechanics worked well! This was fun at the table, the players were super creative. They were reasonable when I took a moderately hard line that each action had to be specific and reasonably situational. We spent a little while negotiating whether "repair object" was specific enough, but the Ethics player understood why "Repair Glass Object" was as general as I was willing to get. Additionally, invoking a Memory Leak as a pacing mechanism to get the players moving was useful. It was really exciting to get to the first draw from a shuffled deck; the players immediately realized that their actions were no longer guaranteed or free, even if it was more likely than not that their first attempts would still work.
The players also immediately picked up on how the random distribution of memory checks informs what feels more and less repeatable. This immediately took the PARTY from a blank slate to something with an odd degree of specificity and personality; the PARTY was great at Lying, Sonar, Reconstituting (from liquid form), and jumping. It was passable at Scanning Creatures and Collecting Samples. It was downright terrible at Flamethrowers, Curse Breaking, Dark Vision, and turning into a liquid form. It doesn't paint a clear picture, but it paints a hell of a picture.
What Needs Tuning?
The Reliability personality used his different die distributions for every roll and I think it took some oxygen out of the room for the other personalities making actions. I discussed further with the Prediction player and we agreed that the different distributions should either cost some coinage to invoke or the other personality abilities should be made cheaper/more applicable.
Last Notes?
We didn't do any combat in a 3.5 hour dungeon delve and that didn't bother me at all; the players apologized and I explained that combat is just a flavor of obstacle! I wanted to see how creative they could get within the constraints that the current writeup provides, and they absolutely delivered.
It was a blast and I can absolutely see us taking this robot out for another spin or starting back from scratch. I would like to see how the system holds up in longer adventures or multiple adventures! I ran about an hour of RAM for some members of the Prismatic Wasteland discord a few weeks ago, but my internet died before we got to exercise many mechanics so I hope to have a better play report from that table when we can get together next. That group is playing through Skerples' Magical Murder Mansion and they are certainly going to end up with a different set of encoded actions by the end of their jaunt.