Description
Harmonix · 2007
Up to four players take lead guitar, bass, drums and vocals on the same song, each reading their own note highway with their own plastic controller. Each part is scored on its own, but the individual meters feed a single Band Meter.
A player who misses too much drops out of the song, and while they are out they pull the Band Meter down for everyone. They cannot recover on their own. The only way back in is for another player to deploy Overdrive — energy banked by playing marked phrases cleanly, and normally spent to multiply the band’s score. Spending it to revive someone costs the spender that multiplier. A player can be brought back twice; after the third failure they stay out for the rest of the song, and if the Band Meter empties the whole band fails.
source — Rock Band (2007) · Overdrive rules
image: Rock Band 3 played at San Diego Comic-Con, 2010; the keyboard part at right was added in that edition. Photo: The Phantomnaut, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)