Monica and Ryan are Sickeningly Sweethearts who are about to get married — but there is one problem: she is an avid gamer and he, well... What's more, Monica's brother is none other than Gary from The Gamers movies, who learns about their engagement and sets out to enact the old pact that he once made with Monica. They swore to only marry gamers, and to set a trial for any prospective marital partner, to prove whether or not the couple are suited for each other. To this end, he teams up with Leo and a notorious Killer GM Harper to put Ryan through the "Trial of Initiation": if his character survives their special session of Cyberrun (definitely not Shadowrun or Cyberpunk), he will be accepted by the gamers — but if he doesn't make it, Monica will break up with him.
Natural One is a three-part Web Video mini-series Kickstarted along with The Gamers: Humans & Households in 2013
by the creators of The Gamers film series (of which it is a spin-off) and released in 2014 on their YouTube channel.
Tropes found in the mini-series include:
- Action Girl: Monica seems to typecast herself into the roles of elven action girls.
- Courteous Canadian: After Gary introduces Harper as the guy who will kill all of their characters within a few hours, Harper gets up to shake Ryan's hand and heartily thanks for him for coming. Everyone else basically goes "Oh, he is a Canadian, alright."
- Crimefighting with Cash: When forced to make his own character in a Game System he has never seen before, Ryan decides to put all points into Resources, giving him an ungodly amount of disposable cash (but little else). He even lampshades that he wants a character like Batman and Iron Man.
- Cryptic Conversation: Fist Baby tries to push this onto the party but just hands them the information in plaintext with some creative nudging from Ryan.
- Double-Meaning Title: "Natural 1" in D&D lingo refers to a Critical Failure. "Natural one" refers to a person who has a natural talent for something...
- Fight Clubbing: The "Knitting Club" run by Gary and Leo, except fittingly for geeks, they fight with foam weapons.
- Gamer Chick: Monica, as well as her female friends playing Pathfinder at the beginning.
- GM PC: Harper plays one. Leo even asks him to not make the whole game revolve about his PC — which Harper does his best to abide by, but at one point, he gets lost in his own fantasies of Conservation of Ninjutsu-powered battles until Ryan calls him out on "playing with himself" (at which point all the mooks just drop dead and the game resumes).
- I Am the Noun: Fist Baby's "I am knowlege!"
- Information Broker: Fist Baby, who trades the party the information on their target.
- Killer Game Master: Harper has an established reputation of TPKing. He tries killing the party in the end, but Ryan outsmarts him.
- My Sister Is Off-Limits: Gary goes out of his way to make sure that Monica doesn't marry a non-gamer. Ultimately subverted, however, when he has no choice but to accept Ryan as a brother-in-law after Ryan saves everyone's asses in-game. He also mentions this is the only reason he's still single, implying she's done it to him at least once.
- Noob: Ryan honestly tries to get into gaming but doesn't seem to have had his breakthrough moment yet, as Monica points out. It turns out his natural talent lies in playing The Face-slash-The Team Benefactor.
- The Promise: The reason why the whole Trial of Initiation takes place is a promise Gary and Monica made with each other long ago that they would only ever marry fellow gamers.
- Pungeon Master: Harper (who is actually the Game Master) keeps making hand-related puns during the Final Battle, leading to many a Collective Groan and the party deciding that Ryan is not talking them out of this particular fight.
- Sickeningly Sweethearts: Monica and Ryan obviously have a loving and attentive relationship. Now, if it wasn't for Ryan's inability to game...
- Talking Your Way Out: Ryan manages to resolve at least two potential combat encounters peacefully: by bribing a bouncer to let them into the club and then by trading one of his high-tech guns (of which he bought three, anyway, just because he could) for Fist Baby's information. He would have probably talked his way out of the Final Battle, too, had the other players let him. There's even a hook for it, the boss offers to just let them take the hand if someone helps her get the part she actually wants out of it.
- The Team Benefactor: After putting all his character points into Resource and getting access to Fist Baby's shop, Ryan outfits the whole party in top-notch gear and even buys everyone a preemptive resurrection, which ends up averting the TPK.
- Total Party Kill: The series opens with one, caused by Ryan's incompetence at playing a Combat Medic. The Cyberrun game almost ends with one, too.
- Unwinnable by Design: The adventure is supposed to be this, and would have been if Ryan hadn't rolled up a character with the funds for resurrections on a whim.
- Utility Party Member: Leo plays the team's Decker — a specialist who hacks computers with his mind, — whose hacking (and his sheer audacity) get the team into the villain's base. However, during the final boss fight, he is promptly immobilized, then falls under the villain's Mind Control... and is quickly ridiculed by the party because he cannot even shoot them without his gun instantly jamming. Also, Ryan discovers a natural talent at playing The Team Benefactor and The Face types of UPM, and never actually successfully attacks anyone in the entire game.
