tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-199931902024-03-06T22:32:17.320-08:00Distant Star Games BlogDesign notes and general musings from "Distant Star Games," which is really just Ewen Cluney (aka Neko Ewen). Stuff about whatever games I'm working on, games I'm reading or playing, and RPG-related stuff I'm thinking about.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-36361570601205984622007-02-10T09:17:00.000-08:002007-02-10T09:13:51.532-08:00Moving!I finally caved in and switched over to WordPress (which was very painless and easy). The site is here: <a href="http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/">http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/</a><br /><br />The RSS feed is here: <a href="http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/feed/">http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/feed/</a><br />And LiveJournal thingy is here: <a href="http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ykz_games/profile">http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ykz_games/profile</a>Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1170693194364939212007-02-05T08:15:00.000-08:002007-02-05T08:34:13.036-08:00Anime and Roleplaying, Part 2Continuing from <a href="http://neko-rpg.blogspot.com/2007/02/anime-and-roleplaying.html">my last post</a>, some more on how to represent anime in RPG form. The <span style="font-style: italic;">Culture Clash</span> section was inspired in part by an exchange with Nagisawa Takumi on RPG.net. I doubt we'll ever agree as to what "anime" means (for reasons you'll see below), but I came out of it with a much better understanding of what <span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> mean by anime, and how it relates to roleplaying games. The second section was inspired in part by reading Daniel Mackay's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Role-Playing-Game-New-Performing/dp/0786408154/sr=8-1/qid=1170692390/ref=sr_1_1/002-0251250-6198425?ie=UTF8&s=books">The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art</a>, as was the earlier one on allusion.<br /><h2><span style="">Culture Clash<o:p></o:p></span></h2> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Trying to emulate anime (and manga) in another medium inevitably runs into the question of how to define anime. It’s been my experience that particularly online, the biggest arguments regarding RPGs concern or are caused by words with fuzzy definitions, particularly ones created by the fandom (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatbook">splatbook</a>”). Arguments over the words “anime” and “manga” stem primarily from the notion that a work can only wear that label if they’re made by one or more Japanese people in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=""> for consumption by the Japanese public. In some ways this definition is useful, since it lets us distinguish between Japanese manga, Korean manhwa, Chinese manhua, what Tokyopop calls “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_English-language_manga">OEL manga</a>,” and so on. Still, particularly as invoked on the internet, this conservative definition is more often used as a cudgel to exclude works not made in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=""> – regardless of their actual quality – from the anime/manga “club.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">When it comes to roleplaying games, the problem with defining anime in terms of culture is that it largely goes outside the scope of what an RPG can hope to cover, particularly mechanically. While <i style="">Sgt. Frog</i> takes place in Japan and has episodes concerning Japanese holidays like Tanabata and Children’s Day and things like hot springs and sumo, the important underlying elements of Japanese culture – things like <i style="">honne </i>and <i style="">tatemae</i> – tend to get lost in the haze of color and sound. Moreover, by that definition a tabletop RPG designed and/or played by non-Japanese would be categorically excluded from “anime” status. That makes such a definition counterproductive if not useless for the purposes of roleplaying games.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">While it seems there will always be fans who grumble about “non-authentic” anime and manga, the better titles – <i style="">Avatar: The Last Airbender</i>, <i style="">Oban Star-Racers</i>, <i style="">Dramacon</i>, etc. – capture other essential features of mainstream anime and manga, most notably the kinetic, planar aesthetic and character-centric melodrama. Indeed, this latest generation of creators understands the underlying structure of Japanese-style storytelling much better than their predecessors. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Warren">Adam Warren</a> and <a href="http://www.cheetaholics.net/">Fred Perry</a>, though exceedingly talented, are nonetheless essentially creating American comics with manga-inspired artwork. It’s with this definition of “anime” – perhaps different from what is more widely accepted, but also much more useful for designing a roleplaying game – that I wish to move forward.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">In terms of how successfully the game emulates the source material, I am only concerned with how well it does mainstream anime. I am absolutely certain that the game I create will be useful for games not based in anime, and I do not consider this a problem. The fact that <i style="">Mutants & Masterminds</i> can conceivably be used for fantasy, for example, does not inherently make it less of a superhero RPG. It’s in the nature of RPGs that it’s virtually impossible to design a game so focused that it can’t be repurposed in some way. The things I consider to be defining traits of anime are indeed present in other media, particularly in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="">. I’ve already discussed the “visual paradigm” stuff; now for melodrama.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Melodrama is a common trait in popular Japanese entertainment, whether it’s Kabuki and woodblock prints, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puroresu">puroresu</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokusatsu">tokusatsu</a>, or anime and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_television_drama">TV dramas</a>. The stark, austere atmosphere of Noh theater, tea ceremony, and the greats of Japanese literature are a sharp contrast to the blatantly emotional, melodramatic mainstream of Japanese narrative. Understanding and embracing this style of narrative is key to the game I want to create. It’s not going to be a game to use for <i style="">Akira</i> or <i style="">Ghost in the Shell</i>, much less <i style="">Princess Mononoke<a style="" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style=""><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[1]</span></b></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a></i> or <i style="">Grave of the Fireflies</i>. When people react to the word “anime” – positively, negatively, or just with a resounding “WTF?” – these titles are not what most readily come to mind, and they would be better served by other games. I want to make a game for shows like <i style="">Naruto</i> and <i style="">Keroro Gunsou</i>, with colorful characters that raise their voices a lot.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">I wouldn’t call it a flaw that BESM and OVA don’t particularly attempt to include melodrama on a mechanical level. They grew out of different lineages of RPGs; Mark MacKinnon is an avid Amber fan, and Clay Gardner did a great deal of online freeform roleplaying, neither of which lends itself to letting the game mechanics have an particular hold on the roleplaying/performance aspect of the game. For better or for worse I’ve been heavily influenced by the indie scene, especially through <a href="http://www.story-games.com/">Story Games</a>. The game that’s begun coming together very clearly shows this lineage, and distinguishes itself from other anime RPGs primarily in this manner. If it didn’t, I would probably be wasting my time.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <h2><span style="">The Game, The Artifact<o:p></o:p></span></h2> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">One of the unique qualities of roleplaying games is that there’s a very odd relationship between the media that go into it and the end product that comes out. The actual narrative that results is not to be found in the rulebook or even in a recording of the game session. The game is just that, and the participants are taking the largely non-narrative sequence of events from the game and organizing them into a narrative in their heads. Interactive entertainment naturally has narrative as an emergent property, and human beings naturally arrange events into narrative form. From this view, the narrative that comes out of an RPG is ephemeral, and does not normally take the form of a physical artifact.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">This is an important consideration because most geeky subcultures – including roleplayers and otaku – have a strong fixation on what might be called “secondary artifacts.” A gamer doesn’t particularly need a stack of sourcebooks, a box of hand-painted miniatures (or <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=products/dndmin/957520000">not-so-miniatures</a>), and tubes of matching sparkly dice to play D&D, any more than an otaku needs figures of Rei and Asuka dressed as nurses to sit down and watch <i style="">Evangelion</i>. But whether it’s the Colossal Red Dragon or the 12” figure of Rei Ayanami in bandages<a style="" href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>, people <i style="">enjoy</i> having these artifacts around their living spaces, and probably enjoy the task of accumulating them – from stores, at conventions, and through the internet – even more.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Roleplaying games typically take place in an original world created specifically for that purpose, so the capacity for secondary artifacts is limited. Very popular titles like <i style="">Dungeons & Dragons</i> and to a lesser extent White Wolf’s World of Darkness games can pull it off to some degree because they have the economic might to do so. A handful of Japanese tabletop games have managed to produce some merchandise, though chances are they’re appealing as much or more to fans of the merchandise in general. The <a href="http://queensblade.net/character/"><i style="">Queen’s Blade</i></a> (probably NSFW) series is basically a fanservicey manga take on Flying Buffalo’s <i style="">Lost Worlds</i> combat book game, but the number of detailed plastic figures of the characters sold is probably substantially greater than that of the actual game books.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Games based off of existing properties are, in effect, secondary artifacts in and of themselves. For a <i style="">Firely</i>/<i style="">Serentiy</i> fan the TV show and movie are the primary objects, and <a href="http://www.serenityrpg.com/">MWP’s <i style="">Serenity</i></a> RPG is an unnecessary but pleasant way to heighten one’s enjoyment of the property. Such games, whether officially licensed or put together by fans, can potentially integrate themselves into an overall fandom of the property, which can in turn allow the participants’ accumulated merchandise to become a tool for the game. I own a set of miniature <i style="">Azumanga Daioh </i>plush toys, and some time I want to run a one-shot where each player has one of these to represent their character. This, by the way, is another reason why I want to make a game that specifically embraces players using adaptations of their favorite anime series.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Without the luxury of having or being secondary artifacts, the only artifact a less commercially successful RPG can offer <i style="">directly</i> is the game book itself. Where early RPGs typically came in boxes and had several booklets and possibly cards, dice, etc. the cost of creating these and retailers’ unwillingness to handle them has made books the norm. This doesn’t necessarily preclude the presence of secondary artifact, but it means they have to either be created by the participants or in some way repurposed from somewhere else. In the latter case, if I wanted to I could run an original game where the player characters were some kind of trendy girls, and have the players play with </span><a href="http://www.pinky-street.com/"><st1:street><st1:address><span style="">Pinky St.</span></st1:address></st1:street></a><span style=""><a href="http://www.pinky-street.com/"> dolls</a> to create physical representations of their characters<a style="" href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:12;" >[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">One of the important concepts in the game I’m planning is what I call the “Fan Guide,” inspired partly by <a href="http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/products.php?publisherLink=pakasThread&PHPSESSID=7eaf993622a1fa88da2ca58dee9f10f0"><i style="">The Dictionary of Mu</i></a>, and partly by the above theoretical underpinnings. The idea is to have the group collectively create a guidebook to their shared imaginary world, similar in form to the art books and series guides produced for real anime series. My aim is both to tap into the players’ desire for artifacts – just think of when the campaign has been going on for a while and you have this shiny binder with a treasure trove of info – and the practical matter of archiving the contents of the game. RPGs thrive on the enthusiasm of the participants, and hopefully this can be a useful and effective way to invigorate and channel that enthusiasm.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <div style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br /> <hr align="left" width="33%" style="font-size:78%;"> <!--[endif]--> <div style="" id="ftn1"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> It’s worth noting that while <st1:city><st1:place>Miyazaki</st1:place></st1:city>’s works are at times called “anime,” he largely rejects otaku sensibilities as much as possible in his works, and his movies are regarded as “safe” and acceptable even by people who normally despise anime and otaku.</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn2"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Which raises other interesting psychological issues with regard to otaku, though they’re not especially pertinent here.</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn3"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=""><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:10;" >[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> Someone who’s not me <i style="">totally</i> needs to design a Pink St. RPG.<o:p></o:p></p> </div> </div>Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1170381686570898922007-02-01T17:39:00.000-08:002007-02-01T18:01:26.593-08:00Anime and RoleplayingAs I've mentioned before, I think I've accidentally wound up starting on an anime RPG. What follows are some musing on anime RPGs, past, present and future, and some of the ideas that are looking like they'll become the foundations of this new game.<br /><h2>Towards Anime Roleplaying</h2><span style="">RPGs have a decidedly odd relationship with anime. For a considerable time, if one went by the “anime” RPGs being released one would’ve had to conclude that “anime” is synonymous with “mecha.” In part this reflects the general style of RPG that was popular at the time, of which <i style="">Mekton Z</i> and <i style="">Heavy Gear</i> are probably the most enduring examples. More recently, we’ve had <i style="">BESM</i> and a handful of others try to tackle anime in the form of a “universal anime RPG.” BESM is a curious game in that it largely avoids trying to influence how the game is played, with the intent that the game is just a framework that provides unobtrusive guidelines to complement whatever you want to roleplay, anime or otherwise.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Others, like <a href="http://www.wiseturtle.com/"><i style="">OVA</i></a> and <a href="http://www.infernalfunhouse.com/"><i style="">RandomAnime</i></a>, tried to codify some of the clichés of anime into their rules, to varying degrees. There has been a long-running tradition on RPG message boards of denying anime any hint of uniqueness that could be coded into the rules of an RPG. I think this argument has certain flaws, and ultimately for whatever reason anime seems to be judged by some impossibly high, ephemeral standard when it comes to what an RPG can achieve with regard to genre emulation. This tendency towards overly harsh critical evaluations of “anime-ness” – either by calling it insufficient or denouncing the existence of such a thing in the first place – seems ridiculous when contrasted to the reactions to RPGs that strive for any given genre from most any other media. If there can be a super hero RPG that can go anywhere from Cartoon Network <i style="">Teen Titans</i> to <i style="">Dark Knight Returns</i> (or simply from Batman to Superman) without missing a beat (<i style="">Truth & Justice</i> is probably up to it), there can certainly be an anime RPG that can go from <i style="">Sgt. Frog</i> to <i style="">Rurouni Kenshin</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><i style=""><span style="">BESM</span></i><span style=""> is by far the anime RPG that has enjoyed the greatest success, despite the fact that Guardians of Order is now out of business. Its timing – hitting the market right around the time of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="">’s big anime boom – probably had something to do with this, but there is one respect in which it fits anime better than many other RPGs. GURPS and BESM are in many ways rather similar games, especially in their newest iterations, but there is one fundamental difference in their paradigms: GURPS is grounded in simulating reality or at least plausible conjecture, while BESM is about providing the right general look and feel. In this sense BESM is a more “visual” RPG, and in the game it’s more important that a character appear to have the right stats on the character sheet, and succeed in die rolls an appropriate percentage of the time. However, while there are many rules intended to facilitate including just about anything that might be witnessed in an anime, it keeps its hands off of the events of the game, for good or for ill. The anime flavor in the book come through in the form of artwork, examples, and advice, and without these Tri-Stat is an ordinary universal system, one GoO had little difficulty repurposing for superheroes, as a generic universal system, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">One interesting example of the above taken to an extreme is in the <i style="">Tenchi Muyo! RPG</i>; the vast majority of the characters in the OAVs are give full game stats, and in the case of the main characters there are bios of at least two full pages as well. However, certain characters like Misaki and Serio have nothing more than a couple paragraphs of description. This might seem odd—and were the game approached in a manner more in line with R. Talsorian’s <i style="">Bubblegum Crisis</i> RPG the designers would almost certainly have devised stats of some sort—but within BESM’s paradigm that simply isn’t necessary. Misaki and Serio are both Juraian nobles and presumably very powerful, but the role they played in the anime is purely social. If played using the Tri-Stat system the way the creator intended, the game mechanics would never once have come into play regarding these characters. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">One of the my aims is to take the visual roleplaying paradigm further, in the service of anime-inspired roleplaying. The types of anime I’m most interested in emulating don’t have all that much of a logical internal structure, and don’t particularly engage in the kind of world-building favored by speculative fiction writers. In genre fiction the characters often seem to exist simply as a foreground to a fantastical background; anime favors the opposite extreme, tending to be highly character-centric. Details about the setting only come into play because they are pertinent to the plot at the time, and pretty much anything of any real importance happens on-camera, during a scene. An anime RPG needs to suggest rather than simulate, with things defined in broad, “planar” terms that can be detailed and refined when the need arises.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <h2><span style="">The Power of Allusion<o:p></o:p></span></h2> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">One of the key features of both otaku culture and American gamer culture is a referential nature. In both cases there is a geek culture with a cultural canon of product art that must be internalized for full admission. In the case of roleplaying games, this leads to allusion being not only a key cultural factor, but a mechanism for enabling the game. Professional creators try to avoid being too referential, or at least keep their references suitably high-brow, but doujinshi artists and gamers by and large embrace intertextualism. While it can be taken to excess (how many Monty Python and Simpsons quotes does a game session need?), gamers ultimately benefit from it. We can take bits and pieces of the media we enjoy, and use them as a source of inspiration and leverage to better express ourselves within a gaming group.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Roleplaying games’ relationship with direct adaptations from other media has been an odd one, and doubly so with regard to anime, even in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="">. With the exception of a handful of titles – notably <i style="">Bubblegum Crisis</i> and <i style="">Project A-ko</i> – the vast majority of licensed anime RPGs were produced by Guardians of Order, using their Tri-Stat system and its attendant paradigm. These books were of good quality at first, but GoO switched to an “Ultimate Fan Guide” format, which is to say they created episode guides with a small amount of BESM game material in the back. While some fans of the company were glad to not pay for the same rules over and over, and while one could debate their quality, they nonetheless lacked in depth. In </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=""> the hobby is even smaller, and several anime licenses were somehow snatched up by a publisher that poorly implemented them with the bland “MAGIUS” system. Those games have since gone out of print, and there are no licensed anime RPGs in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="">Japan</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style=""> to speak of.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">Much of roleplaying is done with settings created specifically for that purpose, even though cultural allusions form one of the basic building blocks of the medium. However, this is a stark contrast to online free-form roleplaying, which is dominated by games taking place in settings taken directly from existing media. There are also a good number of tabletop RPG players who are looking to take their favorite anime and create a roleplaying game experience based on it. <a href="http://www.mphpress.com/">Michael Hopcroft</a> is an ideal example; on countless RPG message boards he pops up with threads about how he wants to adapt a given anime (Azumanga Daioh, Read Or Die, and Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan, to name a few) to a particular published RPG system.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style="">It’s easy to dismiss this style of gaming as essentially “roleplaying fanfiction,” but allusion is fundamental to how the hobby is played in general, and there are evidently a considerable number of players who want exactly that experience. An RPG based on anime should recognize and embrace allusion and adaptation as being fundamental to the experience the participants are trying to create.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1170021111833039872007-01-28T13:37:00.000-08:002007-01-30T11:53:22.476-08:00Random StuffI kind of like not trying to have this blog be a series of carefully-constructed articles, because I can do meandering posts like this one. Anyway.<br /><br />Last night we wound up playing <span style="font-weight: bold;">InSpectres </span>for the first time. We'd never played anything quite like it before, and it totally clicked perfectly right away. It helped that Mike was so on top of the GMing part; the GM has less creative control in that game, but IMO is every bit as important, if not more so, to making it happen.<br /><br />I got to flip through his shiny new copy of <span style="font-weight: bold;">BESM3e</span>, which he picked up while he was in Berkeley to see Robotech: Shadow Chronicles (while I was home with a cold and lots of translation work, from which this post is in fact a distraction). Still waiting for my copy to come in the mail from Amazon, but then I paid $26 for it, so I can't complain. I'm not sure what to say about it, especially since I haven't really read much of any of it yet, but it seems very much like the game that comes after BESM1e and BESM2e, in good ways and bad ways. There tons of full-color art, though I recognized a lot of it from earlier BESM stuff, from second edition, d20, and various sourcebooks, including covers. It's all the really over-the-top color CG stuff, naturally. Although there are bigger numbers (stats are 10/level) to deal with, and optional rules for tweaking the hell out of Attributes, it doesn't seem like it was made all <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> much more complicated, though I still think OVA will be my go-to game for that kind of thing.<br /><br />Mike's co-worker who was joining us for gaming the second time, mentioned about a card game one of his friends had showed him called <span style="font-weight: bold;">Thing Game Sucks</span>, which is about participants running out of patience at a bad RPG session. I don't normally like card games (or board games, or war games), but this one was too intriguing to pass up. I found the (tiny) <a href="http://www.allegedenterprises.com/main/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=8&MMN_position=11:3">publisher's website</a>, and ordered it. I will post about it when it arrives.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Dictionary of Mu</span> and <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Shab-al-Hiri Roach</span> both came in the mail yesterday too. Happy dance. :3<br /><br />I also wound up coming up with a concept for another, as yet unnamed, anime RPG, which is now starting to come together (just when I'm too busy to really commit much time to it...). More on that later.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Addendum (January 30, 11:38 a.m.)</span><br />Just got my copy of BESM3e in the mail (like, the mailman handed me the box from Amazon 5 minutes ago, so I haven't even opened it just yet. I also gave into temptation and ordered some Japanese TRPGs from Amazon Japan:<br /><ul><li style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.fear.co.jp/alshard/index.htm">Alshard ff</a></li><li><a href="http://www.hobbyjapan.co.jp/rulilura/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">RuLiLuRa</span></a> (which I totally can't say at all)</li><li><a href="http://www.fear.co.jp/ari/index.htm"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Arianrhod</span></a> (which was apparently published in a bunko/little paperback format for about 700 yen)</li><li>The latest issue of <a href="http://www.arclight.co.jp/r_r/"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Role&Roll</span></a>, which AFAIK is Japan's main tabletop RPG magazine.<br /></li></ul>I also got some manga (Rozen Maiden, Genshiken, and Yotsubato! all came out with new volumes), and caved in and got those "Moe Moe" guides to ancient and modern weapons.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1169338080713658802007-01-20T15:57:00.000-08:002007-01-20T16:08:00.730-08:00GenCon Indy!So, today I finally decided for certain that I'm going to <a href="http://www.gencon.com/2007/indy/">GenCon Indy</a> this year. I'd been heavily leaning towards going anyway -- both to have fun and to meet some of the neat people I've been interacting with online via <a href="http://www.story-games.com/forums/">Story Games</a> and whatnot -- but it was when <a href="http://competitiverpgs.wordpress.com/">Guy Shalev</a> came on AIM and said that he was looking for hotel roommates that I decided for sure that I'm going. Registration doesn't open until February 11, and there's the matter of plane tickets to contend with (I'm probably going to have to fly out of SFO, since it'll literally be cheaper than SJC by $100 to $150), but at least I don't have to worry about lodgings.<br /><br />Over the next few months I need to figure out what I want to do at the con, and in particular what I want to run.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Maid RPG</span> is definitely, absolutely on the list. A friend of mine has been showing my partially translated version to some of his other friends and co-workers, and I keep being blown away by just how much people not only accept the concept, but fall in love with it. <span style="font-size:78%;">At this rate I'm going to have to start looking into how I might be able to license and publish it for real...</span><br /><br />Other possibilities include:<br /><ul><li>Mascot-tan (which, bizarrely, seems to have something of a cult following)</li><li>My Fudge-based Halo RPG. (Still need to actually try it out with my friends)</li><li>My Magic Shop Risus one-shot ("<span style="font-style: italic;">Slayers</span> meets <span style="font-style: italic;">Are You Being Served?</span>")<br /></li></ul>Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1169055505945971652007-01-17T09:29:00.000-08:002007-01-17T09:38:26.086-08:00Another Random Game IdeaSo, I got <span style="font-weight: bold;">Wario Ware: Smooth Moves</span> for Nintendo Wii. Like the other Wario Ware games it's a collection of "micro-games" that are thrown at you rapid-fire, so fast that sometimes figuring out what you're supposed to do is part of the challenge. I haven't had a chance to try out the multiplayer stuff at all (because for some bizarre reason Nintendo felt it should be unlockable...), but the multiplayer on the GameCube version had some surprisingly meta-game stuff. Like, there's a version where each turn a doctor tells the player to do something ("Stare At Player 2," "While reciting a tongue twister," "While yawning," etc.) while playing the micro-game, and the other players tap the A button to applaud how well the player pulled it off. At the end, the score is actually based on applause, and success or failure at the micro-games is unimportant.<br /><br />Anyway, I had this zany idea to do a "Game Thing" that sort of plays off of this idea in a tabletop format. The Host of the game has the players do weird little things with dice, a rubber ball, pencils, etc., that in turn determine success or failure at a main game, of which there are a couple different types, including a board game and a silly RPG. I'm tentatively calling this project "<span style="font-weight: bold;">Neko Neko Wai!</span>" on account of titles aren't really my strong point. (Though if I do wind up keeping that title, it'll be an excuse to get cute catgirl art for the game).Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1168188377456558482007-01-07T08:28:00.000-08:002007-01-07T08:46:17.483-08:00ThingsI know there's maybe four or five people who really read this (Elton, Guy, Mori, and occasionally Jake), but I'm going to go over where things are, admittedly more for my own benefit. This has been a very strange winter break for me, and I'm not totally sure I'm ready for more grad school in the spring, but we'll see. My fan translation of Maid RPG has kind of gotten sidetracked on account of other, more pressing projects (like translation work that I get paid for).<br /><br />Probably the biggest thing for me, RPG-wise, is <span style="font-style: italic;">Moonsick</span>. This weird little RPG, inspired by Superflat surrealism, is a possible candidate for the next volume of <span style="font-style: italic;">Push</span>, but it needs a <span style="font-style: italic;">major </span>overhaul from my first draft. Surprisingly helpful thread on it <a href="http://www.plays-well.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7">here</a>. Rethinking the game has been a wonderful challenge, and I think I'm moving in the right direction.<br /><br />At some point I do still want to do the <span style="font-style: italic;">we are flat</span> game anthology, but I'm thinking for that I'll replace <span style="font-style: italic;">Moonsick</span> with something deliberately aimed at looking at American otaku through a Superflat-like lens. One of the inherent limitations of this project is that I'm an American (if a Japanophile) interpreting these elements of Japanese culture. The similarities and differences between American and Japanese otaku are a source of endless fascination to me, after all.<br /><br />We also finally had our first real session of <span style="font-style: italic;">Ghostbusters</span>, run by my friend Elton, and it rocked. He honestly keeps impressing me with his GMing skills and creativity, and everyone else was unusually on the ball last night. And my character, an amoral technical guy named Art Griffin, is incredibly fun to play.<br /><br />Clancy: "Yeah, I've flow before. Military vehicles."<br />Oswaldo: "Don't listen to him! He means he's flown a <span style="font-style: italic;">jeep!</span>"<br /><br />Which leaves just about everything else being neglected. It's been weeks since I had a chance to look at Tokyo Heroes, much less Thrash 2.0. Hopefully school won't totally kill my free time.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1167586211600600312006-12-31T08:56:00.000-08:002006-12-31T09:30:11.676-08:00Thinking About 2006First, a random thought, inspired by <a href="http://shootingdice.blogspot.com/2006/12/looking-back-on-06.html">this</a>:<br /><br />I design games that I think will be fun to play with my friends. To the extent that I pay attention to games made by other people, internet forums, RPG theory, etc., it's basically all in the hope of coming up with more and more interesting stuff that'll help me have fun with my friends. While I like seeing other people making and playing games. I'm pretty sure that that falls somewhere between or outside of being either on the bleeding edge or having "sentimental reasons."<br /><br />I started up this blog in December 2005, not too long after going to GenCon SoCal and discovering indie games. Being the introvert that I am, I can't really comment too coherently on stuff that happened outside of my own direct gaming experience.<br /><ul><li>I started buying Japanese RPGs on occasion, first Beast Bind, then an anthology called TRPG Super Session Daikyouen, and more recently Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake. They've given me neat ideas and a fresh perspective on RPGs.</li><li>Play in a friend's Truth & Justice campaign, and kept an in-character diary (posted here). The game is probably going to, at a minimum, go on hiatus or something.<br /></li><li>I created the thing called Mascot-tan, which seems to have a small following on RPG.net.</li><li>I started work on my sentai RPG, Tokyo Heroes, and finished a first draft (which needs to be worked on more whenever I can find the time and inspiration).</li><li>Worked a bunch on a Fudge-powered <a href="http://neko-rpg.blogspot.com/2006/06/halo-covenant-war-launch.html">Halo adaptation</a>, that I really should sit down and play some time soon.</li><li>Two game companies I'm a little ambivalent about -- albeit for very different reasons -- had financial troubles. <a href="http://neko-rpg.blogspot.com/2006/04/thoughts-on-palladium-or-love-loathing.html">Palladium</a> pulled through, with much discussion on the net about it, while <a href="http://neko-rpg.blogspot.com/2006/08/random-things.html">Guardians of Order</a> went under, after many months of abject silence.</li><li>I did my first (and so far only) 24-hour RPG, Hikikomori RPG.</li><li>The internet side of the hobby had lots of completely idiotic and nonproductive identity politics arguments, as though the hobby hasn't been big enough to encompass vastly different styles of play from its inception.</li><li>I made some considerable progress but never quite got around to finishing up the first draft of Thrash 2.0.</li><li>Wound up chatting online with Guy Shalev now and then.</li><li>Began regularly visiting the Story Games forum.<br /></li><li>Purchased:</li><ul><li><a href="http://www.timfire.com/MountainWitch.html">The Mountain Witch</a></li><li><a href="http://www.btvsrpg.com/main.htm">Buffy Revised</a></li><li><a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/exalted/index.php">Exalted 2e</a></li><li><a href="http://www.lulu.com/content/364290">The Mister Lincoln eXperiment (MLX)</a></li><li><a href="http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/products.php?publisherLink=hamsterprophet">Timestream</a></li><li><a href="http://www.atarashigames.com/">Panty Explosion</a></li><li>Slayers d20 (for $5!)</li><li>Hearts, Swords, Flowers (also for $5)</li><li><a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/maidrpg/maidrpg.htm">Maid RPG</a></li><li>Maid RPG In Love (sourcebook)<br /></li><li>Dreaming Maid RPG (adventure anthology, w/some supplemental rules)</li><li><a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/youyake/youyake.htm">Yuuyake Koyake</a></li><li>Don't Rest Your Head</li><li>My Life With Master</li><li>WEG D6 Ghostbusters (present for a friend)<br /></li><li>Possibly some other things I can't think of right now.</li></ul><li>Ordered</li><ul><li>BESM 3e (via Amazon)</li><li>Dictionary of Mu</li><li>Drowning and Falling</li><li>The Shab-al-hiri Roach</li></ul></ul>The main thing I'm thinking about, game-wise, for next year is going to GenCon Indy. I've got some crazy stuff I'd like to run, people I've interacted with online that I'd like to meet, and (hopefully) there'll be plenty of awesome new games to check out.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1167419854479691652006-12-29T10:19:00.000-08:002006-12-29T11:17:34.573-08:00Maximum Extreme UberLast night we did my friend's one-shot <a href="http://www.wiseturtle.com/">OVA</a>-powered fantasy game, which (not for the first time) is turning into at least a 2-shot. He and I both own copies of the game, but up until now we've never used it for anything, and while the game session didn't have all that much dice-rolling or anything, I was overall very happy with how it played. Mike's "Breaker" system (a sort of free-wheeling take on Final Fantasy style Limit Breaks) also looks promising, but needs more development. He also brought along one of his coworkers, who as it turned out fit in with our group frighteningly well. And like just about everyone else I know, he absolutely wants to try Maid RPG. Now that I'm well into translating the replay, which has some <span style="font-style: italic;">very</span> questionable content, I think it's safe to say that America is not ready for this game, the only exception being the 4chan type crowd (like most of my friends) who are no longer capable of really being shocked by much of anything, and tend to be amused by content that would make average want to claw their eyes out. ^_^;;;;<br /><br />Mike bought a copy of John Wick's <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.wicked-dead.com/playdirty.html">Play Dirty</a> for the GM of our regular Truth & Justice game (who also happens to be named Mike) , who finished reading it very quickly and then lent it to me. It was an interesting read, to be sure. How can I explain it? The tips and tricks contained in the book are <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> good stuff; from those I'd call the book "Game Mastering Secrets" (except <a href="http://gmsecrets.com/">that title's already been done</a>, though I would push the double entendre in the title just for fun). On the other hand, for the overbearing attitude and rhetorical style ("And with that in mind, let's move on to this month's topic. Twenty bucks says you can't figure it out until we're all done."), I think it could to be called "<span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 0, 0); font-style: italic;">XTREME ROLEPLAYING!!!1!</span>" I'm being silly and using hyperbole, which I wouldn't do ordinarily, 'cuz that's just not how I roll. There are some rhetorical questions that I found just distracting though. "If roleplaying games are supposed to simulate life, why are so many people obsessed with making them 'fair?'" and I'm sitting there thinking "Who the hell said they're supposed to simulate life? <span style="font-style: italic;">You</span> said they're supposed to simulate literature. <span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> think it depends on the game." when I should be paying attention to the <span style="font-style: italic;">really good</span> GM advice (on character death) that follows.<br /><br />There's also some stuff that basically could be a major foundation block of a kickass indie game (like the Living City chapter) being presented as advice for mainstream RPGs. Of course, that comes back to the thing that (as someone smarter than me said on an RPGnet thread) a lot of the wacky mechanics in indie games came out of trying to hard-code techniques developed through gameplay. There are also some bits that remind me very much of the kinds of things I read in the oWoD Storyteller's Guides. (As an aside: One of those offered up the idea of each player having a binder/notebook for their character, for the character sheet and notes and whatnot. We now do that for every long-term campaign, and sometimes my artist friends will whip up illustrations and covers for them to boot).<br /><br />So, in short, I was not planning to pick this book up because the "attitude" it exuded put me off, but it's got some real gems of advice in it, and I'm glad I did read it (albeit a friend's copy, for free). My only caveat, more of a personal taste thing (which I told Mike -- the T&J GM Mike -- the other day) is that at a certain point the balls-to-the-wall in-your-face style of roleplaying will make the game become stressful for <span style="font-style: italic;">me</span>, Ewen, in real life, and thus less fun. Just let me breathe now and then, and we'll be cool.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1167267445689326342006-12-27T16:54:00.000-08:002006-12-27T16:57:25.706-08:00Neat Stuff About Maid RPGAs a sort of fun side-project to do over the winter break, I’ve decided to do a fan translation of <span style="font-style: italic;">Maid RPG</span>, a 32-page RPG from Japanese publisher <a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/">Sunset Games</a>. I remember Andy K saying how the game does some interesting things, but I didn’t realize how much so until I was about 2/3 of the way done translating the book. I also didn’t realize just how messed up it was until I got to the play examples with Yugami tormenting her sempai Hizumi. Anyway, right now I’ve finished my rough translation of the character creation and gameplay rules, which leaves only a replay and two scenarios (11 pages) to go. I’m seriously thinking of trying to run this game at the next gaming con I go to, and of course with my usual gaming group.<br /><br />One of the most important things is the way the game sets up the relationship between the master – the GM’s primary NPC – and the maids, the player characters who serve the master and try to keep him happy. If the play examples used to explain the rules are any indication, the game strongly encourages breaking the fourth wall and metagaming. I haven’t gotten to the replay included just yet (that’s next), but in the examples Kamiya (designer of the game, and in these the master) and his maids Hizumi and Yugami continually talk about the rules (“If only my Luck attribute was a little higher…”). I want to say it reminds me of HackMaster, but I never got around to reading or playing it, so I can’t. I think this kind of thing is usually avoided or at least overlooked, and certainly seldom turned into a strength.<br /><br />Character creation is almost completely random. Seriously; I’m getting my programmer friend to whip up a random character generator program for this. Normally I don’t go in for random character creation, but this is one of those games where it seems very fitting to deprive the players of choices about their characters.<br /><br />The game has no mechanic for physical damage at all. What there is, is Stress. Any time you have one character trying to force another to do something, you use the “Combat” rules, and the losing side in the opposed roll will accumulate some Stress Points. When a maid gets more Stress than her Spirit rating, she has a Stress Explosion. When that happens, the player has to act out the thing originally rolled up on the Stress Explosion chart during character creation—stuff like drinking, violence, sleep, gluttony, etc.—for a number of minutes in real time equal to the number of Stress points accumulated, after which all the Stress goes away.<br /><br />How much each maid is in good graces with the master is measured in points of Favor, which the GM doles out whenever he feels like it, based on how good a job the maids do of pleasing the master. A maid who goes into negative Favor gets dismissed (removed from the campaign), but otherwise Favor mainly works like a combination of Drama Points (for boosting rolls and getting rid of Stress) and XP (for raising attributes). But players can also spend 1D6 Favor to cause a random event to happen. The GM has the player roll on the appropriate Random Event chart, and whatever result comes up is dropped into the story, centering around the maid whose player wanted the Random Event. The main rulebook has three charts (Outer Space, Modern, and Fantasy), and quite a few of the events are the kinds of things that can make the whole game swerve. The section on creating scenarios/adventures says that (1) rolling on the table can be a good way to come up with the basis of a whole session, and (2) it’s a good idea to come up with a table of 6 random events tailored to the particular scenario.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1166250764703106722006-12-15T22:14:00.000-08:002006-12-15T22:32:44.736-08:00Tokyo Heroes: External PlaytestMendel Schmiedekamp from the Story Games forum was kind enough to run a session of Tokyo Heroes the other day, and today he emailed me with the results. Not surprisingly, this was major food for thought, and it shows that as far as the game has come, it has a long way to go yet. I'm extremely grateful to have gotten this opportunity, since it exposed some stuff about the game that didn't really come up with my group, at least not in the first session. I'm onto something (one of my friends called the game "addictive") but there's still plenty of work to do.<br /><br />On the plus side, for his group character creation went very well, and became this sort of mashup of evil aliens and Iron Chef. ("the main villain being Apocalyptic Chef Andromedan - who is planning to cook Earth as part of his course for Theme Ingredient: Mortal Souls.")<br /><br />The major problem is that the combat rules need an overhaul. They don't allow for a whole lot of variety, which makes whittling down the opponent's Stamina a repetitive process, and initiative and attack power are the only things that really matter, and they can seriously overwhelm the opposition unfairly. It ought to reward creativity a bit more,<br /><br />I really need to sit down and think about this, and try to get something new together for Mendel's group and mine alike to try out, probably some time after winter break. For the moment my creative stuff is kind of hamstrung by finals and freelance work.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Also: we are flat</span></span><br />Just before that, I got a bit further on <span style="font-style: italic;">we are flat</span>, my anthology of three crazy Superflat-inspired games. In particular, I'm finally starting to figure out what to do with <span style="font-style: italic;">Magical Burst</span>, the over-the-top insane-o magical girl game that's basically a reworking of my Magical World campaign setting, with its own set of rules. One of the major things I did was to go hog-wild with random tables, inspired by <span style="font-style: italic;">Maid RPG</span>, and for similar reasons. There's still lots of things I need to figure out, but the crazy random tables angle is definitely<br /><br />The first draft of <span style="font-style: italic;">Moonsick</span> is done too, but I suspect it <span style="font-style: italic;">desperately</span> needs playtesting, and to at least be eyeballed by some other people. This is where I run into the problem that the way the game is set up, someone who's read it all the way through would make a very poor playtester, and it'd be harder to get the full effect on someone who's played it before. Shades of <span style="font-style: italic;">Paranoia</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Cell Gamma</span> (one of the games from the No-Press Anthology), not to mention <span style="font-style: italic;">The Mountain Witch</span> having accidentally become a major inspiration.<br /><br />For the third one, <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Hole Girls</span>, I've come up with some stuff that seems kinda sorta promising, but I really have to develop and playtest it in order to see if I'm even remotely on the right track.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1164486622961935442006-11-25T12:16:00.000-08:002006-11-25T12:30:23.033-08:00Japanese RPGs!After hearing what Andy K had to say about Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake, two RPGs put out by a small Japanese publisher called <a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/">Sunset Games</a>, I decided I really, really wanted to pick them up. Since they're not listed on Amazon Japan or anything (unlike the stuff from, say, Enterbrain and F.E.A.R.), I wound up trying to email them directly about it. Shortly thereafter I got a reply, in English no less (even though I'd emailed them in Japanese...) asking if PayPal was okay.<br /><br />So, today I got them in the mail. It'll take a while for me to read through them (though the base rulebook of the Maid RPG is only 32 pages), but they both look really neat, and not just in terms of the nice artwork.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/maidrpg/maidrpg.htm">Maid RPG</a> in some ways feels like it's the otaku world's answer to Paranoia, in that in the game the player characters are maids and the GM is their Master. Especially if you include the two supplements, it takes the concept and runs with it headlong into every genre and genre trope imaginable, and maids can range from a cute girl-next-door to a combat android. Character creation is mostly random, I think to reinforce the game's general atmosphere ("Let's roll... Looks like you'll have blue hair!" "But I don't like blue!" "Too bad! Blue hair it is!"). It uses many, many tables to bring all kinds of crazy anime stuff into the game.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/youyake/youyake.htm">Yuuyake Koyake</a> feels a bit more artsy, and as I understand it is about girls who straddle the line between human and animal, childhood and adulthood. Even the <a href="http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/youyake/yuuyake_charasheet.pdf">character sheet</a> is adorable.<br /><br />More on these as I read through them. ^_^Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1164169063748313322006-11-21T20:12:00.000-08:002006-11-21T20:17:43.763-08:00Moonsick StuffSo, one of my weirder RPG design projects is called <span style="font-style: italic;">we are flat</span>, an "anthology" of three short games inspired by the superflat art movement and what it represents for otaku culture. The first of these is an experiment called <span style="font-style: italic;">Moonsick</span>, which is going to actually require some pieces of artwork to function. Here are the first few bits of artwork:<br /><br /><img src="http://neko-machi.com/extra/moonsick.jpg"><br /><br /><img src="http://neko-machi.com/extra/moonsick-hair-chart.jpg">Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1164126031273684202006-11-21T07:55:00.000-08:002006-11-21T08:20:31.366-08:00Cranium Explosion (Or, Thoughts On Character Creation)(Because Panty Rats would be just plain wrong...) Over the weekend I finally got around to running <a href="http://www.atarashigames.com/">Panty Explosion</a>, as well as reading <a href="http://craniumrats.pbwiki.com/">Cranium Rats</a>, and wound up pondering character creation a bit.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Panty Explosion</span></span><br />I first heard about Panty Explosion when <a href="http://jakerichmond.wordpress.com/">Jake Richmond</a> posted about it on RPG.net, and I instantly fell in love with the concept. I’m not sure what this says about me, but then I also really like superflat, so go figure. My tastes keep getting weirder and weirder, and especially in terms of what’s actually in the rulebook, PE is less shocking than, say, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Star">Narutaru</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Nine">Alien Nine</a>, much less Takashi Murakami’s Hiropon (I would give a link, but for some reason even the Wikipedia entry is NSFW...)<br /><br />Creating characters went pretty smoothly, and the players were able to come up with fairly interesting characters to boot. The one issue that came up was one in no way specific to Panty Explosion, and one I think I want to look at more in RPG design in general. Since creating a character involves picking out elemental dice, blood type, and zodiac animal, none of which a beginning player can really understand the significance of just by looking at the names. As a result, making four characters at once was a bit cumbersome and required passing the book around a lot. Needless to say it was nothing compared to any number of other games I could name, but next time I think I'll make some cheat sheets or something. Still, once it was done the players had surprisingly distinct and well-defined characters, from Haruka, the socialite kogal, to Kuromu, the creepy psychic girl who always tries to defuse arguments (and whose telepathic abilities cause nosebleeds).<br /><br />One of the things about Panty Explosion is that the conflict resolution mechanics work best when the conflicts are decently long. We kept having overly short conflicts; this isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it means that the players often had no reason not to dump a bunch of dice on one or two actions. The way narration is distributed on the basis of Best Friends and Rivals took some getting used to, and some players wound up narrating much more than others.<br /><br />In terms of getting the proper Panty Explosion feel I think I made a mistake in that I had the PCs all be from a school that was closed due to a mysterious fire, and were sent to another school. Hence, it created more of an us-against-them feel, instead of an us-against-us kind of thing, and made it so the PCs didn’t have many hooks into the setting. Though to be fair, I suspect my group isn't used to playing RPGs in any remotely competitive way in the first place (need more Paranoia).<br /><br />Unfortunately we only got about halfway through the scenario I’d planned, and Real Life™ interfered with our plans for playing more on Saturday. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to run the conclusion, but hopefully this coming weekend.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Cranium Rats</span></span><br />I probably would have overlooked this game were it not for Guy persistently asking me to check it out via AIM. His big thing is what he calls "<a href="http://competitiverpgs.wordpress.com/">CSI games</a>," and it being his baby he can explain it far better than me (and he will if you give him half a chance; his enthusiasm is impressive). I'm going to have to read it over again to really see how the pieces fit together, but I'm starting to understand why he's so enthusiastic about it. It's very "indie," and it has elements of both narrative control distribution and almost board game-like competition. Given that I’ve seen none of the films he lists as inspiration, I don’t know that I’m the best person to comment on it. The essential idea is that you’re not playing a character, but one of three Aspects—Water, Dirt, or Rat—of a character. Ideally the group makes three characters, and in each scene one player is handling one of each Aspect, and each player plays every Aspect at different times during the game as it cycles through different characters.<br /><br />The thing about it that I found exceedingly cool was the sort of "round robin" character creation. In CR it comes from the fact that each player is playing Aspects of characters, rather than the characters directly, and as a result it naturally lends itself to the different players having different kinds of input into the character.<br /><br />The writing in Cranium Rats is interesting in terms of how Guy uses and controls voice. This is something I find incredibly hard, to the point where I’m designing an entire RPG (Moonsick) around working the writing style. It’s really frustrating, since I don’t have the same struggle to control voice when I write fiction or poetry. CR has a mixture of a lot of different things, each “compartmentalized” in the text. There are “Legends” sections that set a deep, philosophical tone (“And Man and Woman tempt Snake - into coming and tempting them once more.”), fairly measured rules explanations, and footnotes that very much remind me of the virtual noogie giver I talk to on AIM (“Fuck that lie! Play for the win!”). This is one interesting solution to marrying the need to present clear and concise rules and the desire to give the game personality and teeth.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Creating Characters</span></span><br />One of the things I'm noticing is it seems like not too many RPGs give much thought to the circumstances in which characters are being created. Some make it much easier to create characters as a group than others (and to a certain extent it's just page-flipping that makes this annoying), but the question is what kind of experience is born at the gaming table, and how it fits in with the aims of the game itself. <a href="http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/risus.htm">Risus</a>' roll-your-own Cliches make the book (all 6 pages) almost completely unnecessary, and there's games like <a href="http://www.sjgames.com/toon/">Toon</a>, where if you know the basics, the character sheet has everything you need. For <a href="http://dsg.neko-machi.com/tokyoheroes/tokyo_heroes.pdf">Tokyo Heroes</a> you have to create characters as a group, and if my playtest is any indication the brainstorming was far more time-consuming than anything stemming from the game mechanics.<br /><br />Of course, like not a few indie games the character creation in Tokyo Heroes is in part a codification of stuff my group tends to do during play. Ever since the first <a href="http://dsg.neko-machi.com/mascot-tan.html">Mascot-tan</a> playtest, where all three PCs had Smarts at 1 (and thus my original scenario fell apart under the weight of the characters' stupidity), my group has been trying make characters that are as distinct from each other as possible. In the case of Panty Explosion, without any prompting from me they made a point of having no two characters with the same Zodiac sign or primary element. D&D encourages this kind of behavior to a certain extent, since a party can get into big trouble without a cleric or rogue (when we played no one really wanted to be the cleric though…), but you <span style="font-style: italic;">must</span> have a copy of the Player's Handbook to create a character. In the cases of Cranium Rats and Tokyo Heroes, the way the character creation process is carried out stems from the intended genre and such, but the end result is that both games strongly take into account the environment in which a group of players will be creating characters.<br /><br />What published games do this particularly well or badly?Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1163360704800655682006-11-12T08:15:00.000-08:002006-11-12T11:45:04.890-08:00[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 23-24I feel empty, empty as a high school student. I should be feeling all kinds of things right now.<br /><br />Raz and Sam left for Utah, intent on doing detective work or some such to find Raz' mother. I went out for a long ride around the city, to clear my head. I took long enough that they'd already left. It was somewhere along the Embarcadero that the numbness set in.<br /><br />It turned out Raz' actions forced the monks to move up their schedule. We were teleported to a safe house, which was the ultimate in spartan living. Raz and Sam were brought there too, though they weren't really happy about it. They'd apparently gotten lots and lots of guns from somewhere and, unsurprisingly, they turned out to be worse than useless. Worse, because for some reason Sam decided to shoot the tire of the van. I remain of the opinion that superheroes shouldn't need them, and experience has yet to prove otherwise.<br /><br />Anyway, our mission went relatively smoothly, considering. Raz went off on his own, which proved every bit as pointless as the gun and grenades he brought with him. We wound up side-by-side on the same stairway anyway, after all. He calls that his "insurance policy," whatever that means.<br /><br />The guards were just normal humans, and bored, tired ones at that. The real problem was in the office. It was Razmus' mother, sort of. The woman there was definitely the one in the photo, except the she didn't smile once. She threw a punch that sent me flying, and had no qualms about sparring with Raz, easily deflecting each and every attack he brought to bear, while the rest of us freed the imprisoned metahumans.<br /><br />Then, this woman gave us more pieces of the puzzle, but unpleasant ones. She's part of Project Perseus, and one of the Beast Race aliens, a Devourer. She's working to help protect Earth, but apparently purely for her own selfish reasons. She showed us the true face of the enemy: she is cold, inhuman, and vicious. And according to her, everything Raz has believed was a lie. He and the others like him were created by fusing the DNA of Rekemi herself and a human, a living weapon intended to protect Earth from the invasion. He is unique only in that he is the pure, general-purpose model, while the other, of which there are over 100 remaining, have been more extensively modified. She feels nothing more towards him than she would a laboratory specimen. His childhood, his adolescence, that town in Colorado, everything until about 10 months ago, was a fiction.<br /><br />I can't imagine what he's going through. What would it be like if everything I thought I knew about myself was a lie? I don't know. He used me up, and I can't make myself care right now. We're as close as he's ever had to family, and like a family there was little choice involved. Even now I can't abandon him, but I also can't be what he needs right now. Sometimes not feeling is convenient, but sometimes the yawning cavern of silence presses down too hard.<br /><br />No future, no name, no hope. No choices, just someone else's script.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1162683980641930302006-11-04T14:53:00.000-08:002006-11-04T15:48:38.960-08:00Who Ya Gonna Call?Can you believe I've put up 80 posts on this blog so far? Anyway.<br /><br />My order from <a href="http://www.titangames.com/">Titan Games</a> came in the mail today. Elton, one of my best friends doesn't do birthdays or Christmas for religious reasons, so I constantly intend to get him something cool but forget because there are no calendar dates to force me to do something. But finally, at long last, I've gotten him a copy of the Ghostbusters RPG that was published by West End Games in 1986 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_%28role-playing_game%29">Wikipedia article</a>, <a href="http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_1550.html">RPGnet review</a>). I'm especially interested in it because (1) I've heard it mentioned a lot, particularly as an example of a perfect introductory RPG, and (2) S. John Ross listed it as one of the major influences on <a href="http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/risus.htm">Risus</a>, which is by far my favorite free RPG.<br /><br />It comes with some inserts and cards, and two rulebooks -- a 24-page Training Manual for players and a 62-page Operations Manual for the GM ("Ghostmaster"). Since Elton is going to be running the game for our group (that was one of the stipulations for me buying the game for him), I'm avoiding reading the latter, since it seems to consist mostly of adventures. (And while they're not part of the original package, for some reason the box also contained two adventure modules!)<br /><br />This game was literally published 20 years ago, yet it reads like a crazy mash-up of D6 Star Wars, Unisystem Buffy, and some crazy <a href="http://www.wicked-dead.com/">John Wick</a> game (and <a href="http://www.memento-mori.com/inspectres/">InSpectres</a> is definitely its successor). And one of the things I totally didn't know was that it was published by West End Games, but the game was designed by Chaosium. Anyway, characters have four stats (Muscles, Brains, Cool, and Moves) rated 1-5, and one talent for each stat. You roll a number of dice equal to your stat, plus 3 if your talent comes into play. Each character has Brownie Points (20 to start with), that work a lot like Drama Points. The game doesn't have any kind of hit points/wounds either; you either spend enough Brownie Points to convince the GM to let you off the hook (and you narrate how exactly your character does it) or suffer the consequences. Overall, it reminds me a lot of certain indie games, and for that matter some of the games <span style="font-style: italic;">I'm</span> working on. On the other hand, there are elements of the design that are very old-school, and a few that are sort of board-game-like. It comes in a <span style="font-style: italic;">box</span>, after all, and comes with all the dice you need, plus equipment cards and handouts. It also has a goofy sense of humor that very much fits the tone of a mid-80s humor RPG.<br /><br />As an aside, each character also has a "Motivation," which gives them an avenue for gaining Brownie Points. And to my surprise, one of these is Sex (which, naturally, is Peter Venkman's). The game description talks more about going on dates with random partners for shallow reasons, but even today you don't see the word "sex" in RPGs all that often.<br /><br />The only thing that was missing from this used copy of the game was, unfortunately, the handout that supposedly explained the basic rules in the space of 2 pages. Although the rules are simple enough that it's easy to imagine how they could fit in such a small space (it might look something like <a href="http://www.protoncharging.com/ghostbusters/articles/feature_gb_rpg1.html">this</a>), I'd really like to see with my own eyes how they did it. The other handouts have an example of play and some amusing handouts, so the GM can have players fill out their characters' Ghostbusters International franchise paperwork, last wills, etc.<br /><br />Especially considering how big of a Ghostbusters fan he is, I'm very much looking forward to playing when Elton runs the game.<br /><br />Back to the video game thing, the other day I got <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Mana">Children of Mana</a> for Nintendo DS. I haven't played it much because I'm still obsessing over <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_IV">Final Fantasy IV Advance</a>, but the thing that CoM does (which isn't unusual or anything) is to introduce you to how to play the game a bit at a time, and through the characters in the game speaking to you. It can sound a little odd to have someone saying "Hey Tamber, you know you can press Y to use your healing items, right?", but I wonder if a similar approach could actually work with the right kind of RPG, with an NPC (or just the GM as narrator) telling the players/PCs how to do things in the game, in the early stages of an adventure. Hmm...Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1162569960041787722006-11-03T07:52:00.000-08:002006-11-03T08:06:00.090-08:00Things I Learned From Video GamesOf late, I can't really call myself an "avid" video gamer. I have so much in the way of work and hobbies that other stuff takes up a lot of time, and it's become rarer for any given game to really do it for me. The most recent game that I got obsessed with was <span style="font-style: italic;">Final Fantasy IV Advance</span>, a GBA port of a game I played more than 10 years ago on SNES, so go figure. But still, I do play video games when I can (my Nintendo DS is helping save my sanity on my long train commute for graduate school), and pay attention to the industry. Although they're in many ways a very different medium, I do think that RPGs could learn a lot from video games -- and vice versa.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Story Genres and Functional Genres</span><br /><a href="http://www.lostgarden.com/index.html">Lost Garden</a> is a really fascinating blog about video game development, and its most <a href="http://lostgarden.com/2005/09/nintendos-genre-innovation-strategy.html">influential entry</a> is about Nintendo's innovation strategy with the Wii, its potential to engender whole new genres of games, and the life cycle of video game genres. One or more breakout games hits it big (Castle Wolfenstein and Doom), and there's a growing demand for similar games which creates an explosion of popularity, and "genre kings" (Half-Life, Quake) emerge to dominate and define the genre, and over time the parameters of the genre get narrower and narrower, until they primarily serve a hardcore audience that looks down on games that deviate from their notion of what the genre should be (Halo), and eventually it becomes the realm of hobbyists (like what happened to turn-based strategy games).<br /><br />Video games, by and large, are divided into genres not by the subject matter, but by how they play. <span style="font-style: italic;">Halo: Combat Evolved</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Starcraft</span> are both science fiction, but to video gamers the fact that they're an FPS and RTS (respectively) is far more important. It could be argued that RPGs also have genres in the video game sense, with different ways of framing the overall experience. Of course, trying to create categories or define genres along this axis would inevitably lead to all kinds of annoying arguments over semantics, and it's something that's further complicated by drift -- how an RPG's rules can be interpreted or repurposed in play. When you play Halo, it's going to be an FPS no matter what you do, but regardless of what is optimum <span style="font-style: italic;">Dungeons & Dragons</span> can range anywhere from a tactical game to a court intrigue game. On the other hand, even in video games the divisions between genres are porous; you could easily make a continuum between third-person action and CRPG. These days action games routinely have some kind of RPG elements too them -- stats that can be booster over time and such, and there are "action RPG" games like Jade Empire and Zelda too.<br /><br />So, here's my utterly non-authoritative, thrown-together attempt to divide RPGs into "functional" genres, whcih in turn wound up being sort of a continuum between D&D and story games. (It should go without saying that none are "better" than the others, any more than RTS games are "better" than CRPGs).<br /><ul><li>D&D's class/level/kill things and take their stuff setup. It's rarely imitated anymore.</li><li>GURPS, Hero System, and other crunchy, point-based universal systems.</li><li>"Non-interference" systems that provide a basic, generic framework and little else; BESM, Cinematic Unisystem.</li><li>Games focused on a specific setting or premise; World of Darkness, Cat</li><li>Highly thematic/story games; The Mountain Witch, DRYH, DitV, MLWM</li><li>Systems that primarily serve to distribute narrative control; PTA, octaNe</li><li>Games that are narrowly focused on a specific roleplaying type activity; The Shal-al-Hiri Roach, Breaking the Ice</li></ul>In this respect, the fact that the functional genres of tabletop RPGs are so few and relatively rigid isn't too surprising, but the fact that one game dominates the market so thoroughly is something unique to the English-speaking RPG hobby. On the other hand, it could be argued that within the microcosm of the indie scene, there are in fact genres and genre kings, of which <span style="font-style: italic;">Dogs in the Vineyard</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Prime Time Adventures</span> would seem to be prime examples. It's also a small enough hobby that games that don't have much staying power for whatever reason tend to fall by the wayside completely, if they ever existed, so it's hard to come up with more crunchy/universal/point-based systems besides GURPS and Hero.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Independence</span><br />In some ways, I think the indie RPG scene represents some of where some in the video game industry feel they need to go, whether it's <a href="http://www.costik.com/weblog/">Greg Costikyan</a> who wants to tear apart the current order, or <a href="http://www.wideload.com/home.html">Alex Seropian</a>'s efforts to found a company that's small and streamlined with lots of outsourcing, or just <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_%28video_game%29">Will Wright</a> using radically different programming techniques. It would be a mistake to discard the mainstream or to assume that the new hotness (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation">procedural generation</a>) is going to totally change everything rather than becoming part of the overall palette.<br /><br />When it comes to video games the need for changes comes from the many trends that run counter to open creativity, and the production costs that are spiralling out of control. The demand for spectacular big-budget games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy won't go away, but there have been plenty of break-away hits (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero">Guitar Hero</a>) and cult classics (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy">Katamari Damacy</a>) that make it clear that the big-budget approach isn't the only way to go. For the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 there will be support for small, downloadable games. There's still something of a walled garden thing going on, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Although it's a lot harder than with tabletop games, it is still possible for a small number of people to make games in their spare time, and its exciting to think that there's a place for a simple, fun, innovative $5 video game to be sold on a major console.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Accessibility</span><br />The major importance of the Wii is that it introduces wholly new ways to play games, by doing away with what has become the standard type of controller (a thing with 12 buttons and 3 directional controls) in favor of something more intuitive (handing someone a white remote control and telling them to just swing it like a tennis racket). Some look at this kind of accessibility as both a boon to gamers who are growing up and have less time, and a way to court non-gamers. In terms of RPGs, D&D is kind of the PS2, considering at a minimum you'd want to have three 300-page hardback books and six kinds of dice, and it involves its own special breed of Tolkienesque fantasy. In this respect, the casual side of video games represents where some from the indie RPG scene want the hobby to go: something that could be mainstream and accessible to everyone. There are zillions of housewives who play casual video games on Yahoo, and not a few who get together with their friends to play <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunco">Bunco</a>, so what if they started doing the same for, say, Primetime Adventures? The conundrum, of course, is how the hell to make that happen.<br /><br />One of the things about video games, that's very difficult but potentially valuable for RPGs to do is to make it possible to get right into the action with minimal preparation. There are very, very few video games where reading the manual is even necessary, and many games teach you how to play themselves through the early stages. The Ghostbusters RPG (still waiting for it to arrive in the mail) supposedly does something like this by teaching the rules through a series of three short adventures, and for that matter Cybergeneration also had a default introductory adventure. There's also Deep 7's <a href="http://www.deep7.com/product.php?cat=1pg">1PG games</a>, which give you a complete beer-and-pretzels game in 13 pages, 6 of which are 1-page scenarios. I think it's a really cool idea that I'd like to explore more, though from personal experience I know that introductory adventures can run into the problem of having a portion of the group that's played through them before.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1162162631784010102006-10-29T14:26:00.000-08:002006-10-29T18:08:13.480-08:00Random RPG NightSo, I've managed to coerce my friends into having a second weekly game night, dedicated to trying out new stuff in one-shots and mini-campaigns, which in practice will mostly mean a mix of crazy indie stuff and me subjecting everyone to playtests of my games. Hopefully it'll also mean other people running stuff now and then (including but not limited to the Ghostbusters RPG I ordered for Elton), and maybe even new people (or old friends who don't normally roleplay) joining us sometimes.<br /><br />So, here's the list of game's I'm contemplating running. The first week is going to be the second episode of the Tokyo Heroes playtest mini-campaign (Shadow Hunter Akuranger).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">My Games</span><br />Tokyo Heroes<br />Halo: The Covenant War<br />Thrash 2.0<br />Mascot-tan<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Published Games</span><br />Panty Explosion<br />The Mountain Witch<br />Mister Lincoln eXperiment<br />Cat<br />InSpectres<br />octaNe<br />Prime Time Adventures<br />Schauermarchen<br />Dogs in the Vineyard<br />My Life With Master<br />Exosuit A-ok<br />Buffy The Vampire Slayer<br />Toon<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Games I'm Thinking About Getting</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br />The Shab-al-Hiri Roach<br />Don't Rest Your Head<br />Shock:<br />The Dictionary of Mu<br />Hero's Banner<br />Faery's Tale<br />Orbit<br />(Your Game Here, Maybe?)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Setting Ideas (To Be Paired With An Appropriate System)</span><br />Magic Shop (<span style="font-style: italic;">Slayers</span> meets <span style="font-style: italic;">Are You Being Served?</span>)<br />Angel Soul (<span style="font-style: italic;">Scryed</span>, but with angels)<br />Kitsune (fox-spirits in modern-day Japan)<br />Full Metal President (inspired by <span style="font-style: italic;">Metal Wolf Chaos</span>)<br />Black Hole Girls (normal schoolgirls with extremely powerful alien symbiotes)Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1162139019819758552006-10-29T07:51:00.000-08:002006-10-29T08:23:39.893-08:00[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 21-22I don't even know where to begin. Things are moving way too fast for me right now, and I feel like I'm about ready to snap and either kill someone or just curl into a ball and hide. And as usual, Raz has placed himself at the center of it. Caring about him drains me, and I think I'm just about dry. Every time I think he's growing up a little and acting like a decent human being (though now that I think about it, from his genetic structure I doubt he could produce live offspring with a human, one of the most important tests of whether two organisms are the same species), he manages to turn around and find some way to be infuriating. One step forward two steps back. If not for him, I think even with the bad business with Ryo, the dark future and everything, I could handle this superhero thing. Right now it's hard to be strong, much less civil.<br /><br />Anyway, I should talk about what actually happened yesterday, with BAIN and all that, and how it gave me something new to worry about, more dark dreams pressing me flat against the ground, making it hard to breathe.<br /><br />The battle against the giant robot that BAIN put together out of tank parts and such came down relatively easily once Raz got inside of it. BAIN himself, who resided at the center of it, was a whole other problem. His near indestructibility made it almost impossible to do a damn thing to him. I couldn't even knock him over, much less immobilize him. And then the nonsense with the rocket happened. The warhead-less rocket was programmed to launch, presumably somewhere calculated to cause World War III. Raz wanted to put him in the top of the rocket, ensuring that he'd land in some foreign country and roam free (he later explained how he had a plan -- one that couldn't possibly have been carried out in time), while Jack for some reason decided to put BAIN under the rocket, making sure we'd lose track of him. In the end Glenn and I wound up doing our combination move -- his acceleration to launch my Rider Drill -- through the rocket. My suit normally protects me from motion sickness and loud noises and such, but it was still unlike anything I've experienced before. The pressure wave of the exploding rocket knocked all of my teammates unconscious, leaving me with a choice between (a) doing nothing at all to BAIN, or (b) taking steps to keep my teammates from dying of sunstroke and such. I went with B.<br /><br />When we regrouped, they recovered relatively quickly. The problem was that BAIN had disappeared, and the satellite that had been tracking him went down somehow. I really didn't want to come crying for help, but I wound up calling my grandfather for help. It turned out that what I thought had merely been interference to my sword had been a hacking attempt, and probably responsible for the business with the satellite. We wound up using it to locate BAIN, and having Raz use his super-strength -- with a few wrestling pointers from Sam -- to break BAIN's internal mechanisms without too much concern about the invulnerable armor. In the end he managed to completely disable BAIN, but it kept staring at me.<br /><br />When we got back, my grandfather's teleport didn't work at first, and once it did, I was unable to contact him. He also had some odd news about future Ryo's memories being scrambled, remembering things that never happened. So, something else to worry about, something that could change everything.<br /><br />And then Jack's churchy friend showed up with a mission, and it turns out that the facility they want to raid to free metahumans who are being used as guinea pigs apparently has Raz' mother. Hence Raz is determined to go off half-cocked and run off to Utah, never mind that even Jack hasn't been given the location and such, and that a coordinated raid with actual intelligence will probably do his mother more good than detective work and a smash-and-grab. I can't imagine what it'd be like to know one's mother is being held hostage and experimented on. I mean, I really can't imagine it; at the moment I don't have enough left in me to be capable of that kind of empathy. Am I turning into High School Hikaru again?Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1161362594807526912006-10-20T09:10:00.000-07:002006-10-26T10:16:34.966-07:00Web Search II: Electric GoogleooSo, once again I got bored enough to do some ego-googling, and I actually found some interesting stuff.<br /><br />On an Italian RPG message board there's a <a href="http://www.zaltec.net/viewtopic.php?t=738&sid=3a7ed01463cd46f4f98d0f9399639f06">thread about Mascot-tan</a>, including illustrations for <a href="http://neko-machi.com/extra/dnd-tan.jpg">D&D-tan</a> and <a href="http://neko-machi.com/extra/seventhsea-tan.jpg">SeventhSea-tan</a>.<br /><br />On Wikipedia there's something that's just pain odd. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives">list of fictional expletives</a> article mentions an RPG by yours truly called F.U.N.C. (Furutistic Urbanized Needless Combat). The thing is, I don't actually remember putting it out on the net or anything anywhere. It was something I made back in high school -- cynical, satirical, ultra-violent cyberpunk with bits of Robocop and Project A-ko thrown in. I've toyed with the idea of reviving it, but it'd need to basically be redone from the ground up. I've gotten that much more cynical, and I've got a lot more sources of inspiration to draw on (Metal Wolf Chaos, for example) and topics to explore/satirize (violence in video games).<br /><br />(BTW, it turns out that, not surprisingly one of my friends stuck the FUNC reference into Wikipedia...)Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1160104036496285762006-10-05T19:57:00.000-07:002006-10-05T20:07:16.523-07:00Go Go Tokyo Heroes!I've been watching the original Power Rangers. Yes, I'm serious. The things I get into because of roleplaying games. I just had to decide to make Tokyo Heroes more accessible to MMPR fans, which actually is looking to be easier than I thought -- mostly a matter of tweaking some of the flavor text. Guy Shalev pointed out that I coupld pitch the game as "Remember how fun Power Rangers was before it started sucking? This game is like that." I never watched it when it first came out (I was in high school... though I did still watch some cartoons), so it's a new and rather surreal experience for me. I should sit down and watch Power Rangers SPD some time too.<br /><br />Early MMPR is even more awesomely bad than sentai, partly because they're trying so hard to make it kiddified, wholesome, and politically correct, hence most of the episodes I've seen so far have a blatantly obvious moral attached (recycling is good, deaf people can be cool). I also love how in the first episode Zordon says to Alpha 5, with a straight face, "We need to recruit teenagers with attitude." That and every now and then they use footage of stuff that's blatantly, obviously Japanese (like, you know, Tokyo Tower) and hope no one will notice.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">...There's also the thing that very few people besides me will find funny, that during WWF's "invasion" storyline for a little while Stephanie McMahon started to sound a lot like Rita Repulsa. "Rhyno is going to defeat your pathetic Chris Jericho! AHAHAHAHA! Make my wrestler GROW!" (And now I just remembered JR saying how "the Million Dollar Princess has become a Dairy Queen").<br /></span>Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1159640900217626322006-09-30T10:55:00.000-07:002006-09-30T11:28:20.296-07:00[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 20Okay. So. The Super Mentors hooked us up with a lawyer who's very experienced in dealing with metahuman cases. And it doesn't look good. One of the things I like about Japan is that people aren't nearly as litigous. The brainy part of me wants to point out that tort reform is a <span style="font-weight: bold;">very </span>complex issue. Anyway, Razmus continued to react with his usual machismo BS, and apparently was serously thinking of trying to defend himself (fool for a client and all that) basically because the lawyer told him stuff he didn't like.<br /><br />And in the middle of it, Sam got all weird in the head and was drinking insane amounts of water even for him. We took him to the hospital, but... he just went back to whatever passes for normal for him a few hours later.<br /><br />Which was just as well, since Glenn's General friend asked us to go on a mission to find the guy. It turns out that there was this android called BAIN, created to end the threat of nuclear war. It's<br />just that BAIN's methodology involves obliterating humanity. It's like a sci-fi B-movie plot, except that we have to deal with a virtually indestructible monster for real. All the military guys they sent in never came back. Then Glenn didn't come back, until the general sent us out and we found him unconscious inside of a suit of power armor that was running on autopilot. Rescuing him was a step in the right direction, to be sure, but now we're confronted with a massive humanoid weapon built from all the tanks and such that failed to come back from confronting BAIN. No sign of the soldiers yet.<br /><br />We're in for a hell of a fight... And there's a possibility he could control my armor, like he can most machines. Hopefully its partly organic nature and alien origins will let me function normally. Otherwise I'm going back to the base. If Raz thinks I can be of any use to anyone with a gun (i.e., the exact opposite of a superhero's weapon), he's even more delusional than I thought.<br /><br />Oh, I forgot to mention that Swan said she'd call off the lawsuit if Raz apologized on national TV? I find it completely hilarious that he doesn't want to do it because it would mean she'd "win." Words almost never mean anything to him -- actions speak louder than words, but that doesn't mean words are mute, and most of Raz' words say that he's a jerk -- but when his idiotic pride is at stake, suddenly "I'm sorry" becomes worse than a bullet to the head. I have seriously never known anyone who has tried quite so hard to make me not want to care about them. I must have really seriously inherited my dad's heroing streak to not have completely given up on him. Or something.<br /><br />Anyway, giant robot to fight. Gotta go!Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1158682030294386242006-09-19T08:32:00.000-07:002006-09-19T09:07:10.443-07:00[Actual Play] Truth & Justice: GatekeepersI thought it'd be a good idea to write a little bit about our T&J campaign out of character, partly to give some perspective to anyone who might be reading this blog who isn't part of the campaign, and partly to take some time to examine how the game is playing. To those who are participating, please post comments and call shenanigans if necessary.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Setup</span><br />This game is being played by a group of six people, including Thinh, who while he's roleplayed a lot before and we've now known him for at least a couple years I think, hasn't roleplayed with us before except for a one-shot Mascot-tan playtest. I tend to be the group's main GM, but Mike B. sometimes runs games too. We tend do games set in original worlds, though we've done Planescape (with D&D3e) and Macross (with Mekton Z). The superhero game was his second concept for a new campaign to run, after dumping an idea for a fantasy game using GURPS 4e (and I had such a neat character concept...). We looked at several different systems, and even went so far as to try out character creation in Mutants & Masterminds, before settling on Truth & Justice.<br /><br />The PCs are a group of random people who (with the exception of Glenn, and Raz kinda sorta) didn't have superpowers at the start of the game, and it mostly takes place in San Francisco (not our hometown, but somewhere close enough for us to be familiar with the real thing) in the year 2010. The interesting thing about the characters that came out was that it seemed as though no two came from the same tradition/era of comics:<br /><ul><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Glenn/Dynamo:</span> Dynamo is a classic superhero, and his main power lets him work with kinetic energy, especially in rotational motions. He's a very down-to-earth guy who's been through a lot in his life, and being a superhero has cost him.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Jack Smith</span> is a bizarre simpleton with extensive shadow powers and a preference for darkness. He walks around in a trench coat, and upon their first meeting the other characters thought he was just some homeless guy. He eats frozen waffles, one row of squares at a time. We now know that he has connections to a secret splinted sect of the Catholic Church, and his parents were scientists.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sam Novak</span> is an indie wrestler who goes by "Mister Clean" in the ring for his physique and his shiny head. And his powers are all psychic abilities, including astral projection, telepathy, mind control, and hydrokinesis (the latter sometimes kicks in while he's asleep).<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Raz:</span> Razmus Edward Downe is descended from a Monster race (which the player, Mike S., has used in other works on occasion), people who are outwardly human but capable of shapeshifting parts of their bodies into monstrous claws, horns, fangs, wings, etc. After a happy childhood, he found himself abandonded and wandering from place to place. The superstrength that was his only active superpower, and the martial arts training he got from his father, he wound up using to become a vigilante, beating up bad guys and taking their wallets to get by. Inevitably he wound up becoming hunted and forced to leave whatever home he managed to find. Over the course of the game his origins and the disappearance of his parents have become even more mysterious.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Hikaru:</span> My character, a 19-year-old girl who is forced by circumstances to take up her deceased father's powers and basically become a Kamen Rider. So a tokusatsu character to round out the group. The idea came from <span style="font-style: italic;">Kamen Rider Blade</span> (hence she wields a sword), where there's a girl named Hirose who supports the team with her scientific know-how, and while she mellows out over time, at the start of the series she's very angry and bossy, and one of the more angsty characters in the series. In the actual Kamen Rider franchise there have only been two female Riders (Kamen Rider Femme and Kamen Rider Larc); both only appear briefly in movies, one loses her powers and vanishes, and the other gets murdered. Hikaru is very book-smart (unlike my last player character, Aiden), but kind of antisocial.<br /></li></ul><span style="font-weight: bold;">Rules of the Game</span><br />When it comes to rules, we tend to cut things down to the minimum required to get to the point of being able to roll dice and make decisions, and occasionally even less. Our Macross campaign , for example, wound up being mostly freeform. My policy these days is that I need to be able to fit most of the rules into my brain, since I can't count on all the players having actually read the rules. With T&J the rules are pretty simple, and there are only a couple of interesting things that came up with regard to how they're being used.<br /><br />By default, the GM is supposed to be doling out Hero Points during the game. For the first couple of sessions Mike did so, but mainly just for memorable one-liners, and he switched to just giving them out in bulk between sessions. The way MAX increases was a point of confusion, and we took to referring to the "ticks" that indicate when a character gains MAX as XP/Limit Points, just to keep things straight. Apart from that, the HP system has been fairly smooth.<br /><br />One aspect of PDQ in general is that all actions are on a roll of 2d6 plus applicable traits, and a single trait can't provide a bonus of more than +6, but multiple traits can be added to a single action. Our characters vary considerably in this respect. Sam most often finds himself making rolls with single powers, and thus seldom gets bonuses of more than +2 or so, Hikaru only recently got a Quality she could stack with other things (Martial Arts), and Raz has multiple powers and Qualities that are designed to stack, which lets him routinely bring a roll of 2d6+10 or more to bear. (Though the villain Pinnacle apparently has even higher bonuses!)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Human Stuff</span><br />This is a group of close friends, and we meet, usually in the spare room at my place, most Saturdays. The theoretical meeting time is "around 5 or 6," but it can take until as late as 8 to get started because of needing to make arrangements for food, and chatting about random stuff enough to get stuff out of everyone's systems. We're getting better about that, though there was the one time when another friend who lives out by Oakland came to visit, and the game session outright failed to happen.<br /><br />During the course of the game, as elsewhere, people's different styles of communication affect how they interact, and the characters' tendencies get layered on top of that too. When playing Hikaru, I try to explain my character's actions as clearly and concisely as possible (and I know I screw that and other stuff up sometimes), though sometimes that brevity makes it hard to think up appropriately cool stuff to do (I've taken to making a list of Kamen Rider-esque special moves). Raz' player tends to explain things in a very elaborate fashion, which is more time consuming but at times more creative as well, and lately I've noticed he tends to narrate his character's actions in the third person. This isn't good or bad, IMO; using third-person speech seems to let players have their characters do things that they might be more uncomfortable with saying in first person ("I start sobbing" versus "My character starts sobbing"). Jack's player purposely made a passive character; he said he did this because he has a way of making characters that dominate a campaign too much. Sam has also been somewhat passive, but when stuff comes up the character can come up with some very strong reactions.<br /><br />I don't want to say I've been hogging the spotlight over the past few sessions, but if I have been, it wasn't on purpose. We just wrapped up a story arc that's mostly about Hikaru, though the other PCs had some things of their own to deal with in Tokyo. Even still, there was a session that consisted mostly of Hikaru and Glenn asking questions of Hikaru's grandfather, and Sam and Jack in particular wound up being wallflowers. Though this isn't a common occurrence in the campaign, IMHO it's something better avoided when possible. Forcing the game to have scenes that involve the majority of the PCs would be too artificial, but putting more of the solo scenes outside of the regular sessions might be a good idea.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Input</span><br />In this campaign the players have had a lot of "front-loaded" input. Hikaru and Raz in particular have brought a huge amount of setting and plot into the game through their backgrounds, and Glenn was concieved in conjunction with the GM, and as a veteran superhero is very deeply woven into the setting. I can't speak for the others, but in my case I deliberately left a lot of details -- including what the heck the Riders actually are -- up to the GM to decide as he saw fit. While he naturally has a lot of freedom to do what he wants with these pieces, IMO he's done a good job of keeping with the spirit of what the player wanted originally. One possible exception is how Raz's Monster race, which was intended to be purely supernatural, turned out to be a marauding race of aliens, the Riders' greatest enemies, and an imminent threat to Earth.<br /><br />Sam's history has been more personal to the character -- though his missing tag team partner turned out to have become heavily involved with the main villain's schemes -- and Jack's stuff has only just started to come up in the game. Mike also asked us to come up with ideas for NPCs, heroes and villains alike. It took me months to think up any for some reason, but the result has been a pretty colorful cast. Many were totally new, some were sort of recycled, and a few (like Wild Rider) were based on CoH/CoV characters, most notably Wild Rider (though we fear the day Muscleini shows up). We've also been communicating about the game a lot outside of the normal game sessions, both online and face-to-face, sometimes to introduce new plot elements, and other times to give the GM forewarning of what the character is planning, amongst other things. Raz' trip to Akihabara with Suzuka a while back was supposed to be handled mostly through email rather than in person.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Journals</span><br />The character journals of <a href="http://raz-rpg.blogspot.com/">Raz</a> and Hikaru have also been an interesting addition to the game. I started with just in-character summaries of the events of the game, more just to keep them straight in my own head than anything else, but for me it's evolved into a way to further develop my character. In my original character bio I had very little information about Hikaru's childhood or what she was like in high school. Some details I'd had in my head but never written down (like the group of friends she had when she was 9 or so, which was heavily based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichigo_Mashimaro">Ichigo Mashimaro</a>) and others I made up as I went along. Figuring out Hikaru's high school experiences really helped me get a feel for the character that had been lacking before. Most of it doesn't actually create input into the game itself, but there are a few things -- like Hikaru's recurring dreams -- that are specifically meant to, if in a subtle way. The in-character "thinking aloud" is also meant to give the GM and other players some ideas about what I'm thinking about doing in the game. Raz' journal has likewise been a platform for the player to throw in fun anecdotes that didn't fit into the actual game (like the souped-up wheelchair he had at the hospital). With them recounting the same events through different eyes, it also creates a "he said, she said" kind of thing, especially early on when there was a lot of friction between the two characters.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Immersion</span><br />For me the game has been very immersive; I have to play by getting into Hikaru's head, which has become a stranger place to be over time. The last two sessions, where she encountered her brother as he was having traveled back in time from a bleak future with a lot of anger for his sister, were really hard on her, and actually emotionally draining for me. It also makes it really hard to be objective about Raz; while the two characters have learned how to get along, Hikaru was never exactly a fan. If I saw him while reading a comic or watching an anime, I probably wouldn't react the same way, or at least not as strongly.<br /><br />It also made the playtest of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tokyo Heroes</span> kind of a shock, because it was a roleplaying game and it was a lot of fun, but I don't think there was anywhere near that level of immersion for anyone concerned. I definitely think I could go for some more variety in that respect<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">BTW</span>,<br />In the last campaign I ran I made extensive use of background music. This time around we've barely used any, and all through Hikaru and Wild Rider's race scene I had the highway chase theme from Advent Children running through my head.<br /><br />It's now been over a month since we last played, though a combination of Real Life butting in, the GM wanting to take a break (and letting me run my Tokyo Heroes playtest) and other things, so I'm hoping the momentum isn't totally lost.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1158679632679394202006-09-19T08:17:00.000-07:002006-09-19T08:28:04.796-07:00Tokyo Heroes: Bug FixesI've gotten over the shock of starting graduate school, so I've been able to find some more time for stuff like designing games. I poked at Thrash 2.0 a bit over the past few days; I keep forgetting how much I like how it's looking, but there's also a lot of grunt work left to do.<br /><br />For <span style="font-weight: bold;">Tokyo Heroes</span>, as mentioned before the first playtest was very successful overall, but revealed some things that need work.<br /><br />One of the things that was a little problematic was how the villain seemed to always get screwed out of being able to defend. I just realized that there was a potential solution in the rules already; there's a rule for Split Actions, where a character can do multiple actions in a turn by taking a penalty equal to the number of actions being performed. Hence, a bad guy like Hellion could've defended and still been throwing around attacks that do 5-7 points of damage. I need to try it out in play to find out if it's actually a solution to the problem.<br /><br />I also reworked the mook rules a bit. For each mook the GM rolls one die, and each Success is a potential point of damage, but each success on a hero's attack knocks out one of those successes, and each success on a hero's defense prevents two.<br /><br />A friend of mine came up with a neat idea too. I hadn't consciously intended it to be that way, but Tokyo Heroes wound up being set up so that the game involves lots of fun dice rolling. So, the idea is to have players roll for bonus Karma points. I'm not 100% sure how to set this up, but I'm thinking it'll be something like the GM picks out an attribute each hero used for important stuff during the episode, and the player rolls that for bonus Karma. Either that, or players would roll as many dice as they earned Karma points, and each 6 would be a bonus point.<br /><br />Of the issues I found in the playtest, that leaves the matter of how the derived stats (Stamina, Resistance, and Initiative) are figured. The variation of Resistance between 3 and 11 in the playtest characters is a concern, not to mention the fact that the totals of Stamina never seem to work out how you expect, and Pink characters seem to wind up having a lot. Of course, in the playtest the PCs haven't yet gone up against a villain that's really meant to test those stats, so I'm not sure how problematic it really is. If I do change it, I'm not yet sure what I'd change it to anyway, but having all of the heroes start off with the same amount of Stamina and Resistance (that can be increased later) is a possibility.<br /><br />Other than that, there's still some parts that need more pure writing, and that's before we get into editing and whatnot. But still, while the actual play was different than I expected, I think I've got a fun game on my hands.Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19993190.post-1158438322019209882006-09-16T12:48:00.000-07:002006-09-16T13:25:22.086-07:00Lotsa' GamesDarnit. I had yet another idea for an RPG to design. Time to go over the ideas I have cooking:<br /><ul><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Thrash 2.0:</span> The long overdue second edition of my fighting game RPG. I really need to get my crap together on this. I've got a lot of the work finished; mainly I need to fill in the rest of the maneuvers and commence playtesting.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Tokyo Heroes:</span> My <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_sentai">sentai</a>/<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_girl">magical girl</a> RPG. The first playtest went pretty well, and I have plenty of stuff to work on.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">we are flat:</span> A trilogy of short games inspired by the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superflat">superflat</a>" art movement, which means really weird, twisted anime/manga-inspired stuff. The first game, <span style="font-style: italic;">Moonsick</span>, is actually coming along pretty well. It borrows a lot from <a href="http://www.timfire.com/MountainWitch.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Mountain Witch</span></a>, and it's weird as all get-out.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Nekketsu! Battle Stars:</span> The idea (which came together over the past few days) is to put together a general, light system for melodramatic, manga-style battles (as seen in titles like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleach_%28manga%29"><span style="font-style: italic;">Bleach</span></a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naruto"><span style="font-style: italic;">Naruto</span></a>), and present three radically different settings with freely tweaked rules. <span style="font-style: italic;">Nekketsu</span> (熱血) means something like "hot-blooded" in Japanese, and refers to crazy, over-the-top fighting heroes.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Distorted Futures:</span> "A Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG." Like Neo or Violet or V, you can make the world a better place, but what will you sacrifice?<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">I Hate You:</span> "A Cartoon CSI Game For Two Good Friends." Coyote vs. Roadrunner, Tom vs. Jerry, etc., as a competitive RPG.</li></ul>Also, from the world of video games, <a href="http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/interview/?id=13791">Prof. Henry Jenkins of MIT was interviewed</a> for GameDaily.biz, and he had a lot to say about the medium's growing and changing identitiy. On the one hand, the industry is facing all kinds of idiotic criticism, but on the other hand it's caught up in its own notions about what a video game should be:<br /><blockquote><p> </p><p> <b>HJ:</b> Let's be clear: the word, game, as used in the games industry, seems to mean anything you do on a computer for fun. The game industry lumps together a variety of different things, sports, games, design tools, toys, role play, stories, which we might keep separate in the real world and calls them all games. This is powerful from a marketing stand point. </p><p> </p><p> Then, on the other hand, they use the word, "games" rather narrowly to repel outside competitors and block new ideas. When Brenda Laurel tried to develop a girl's game movement, the recurring response was that these were not really games. The same response has from time to time been directed against educational games, serious games, and casual games, that is, anything that doesn't fit their marketing model or that might allow people outside the core industry to expand our understanding of what their medium could do.</p></blockquote>Ewenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01655255783685563769noreply@blogger.com0