Distant Star Games Blog

Moving!

2007-02-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

I finally caved in and switched over to WordPress (which was very painless and easy). The site is here: http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/

The RSS feed is here: http://yarukizero.wordpress.com/feed/
And LiveJournal thingy is here: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ykz_games/profile

Anime and Roleplaying, Part 2

2007-02-05T08:15:00.000-08:00

Continuing from my last post, some more on how to represent anime in RPG form. The Culture Clash 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 I mean by anime, and how it relates to roleplaying games. The second section was inspired in part by reading Daniel Mackay's book The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art, as was the earlier one on allusion.

Culture Clash

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 (“splatbook”). 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 Japan 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 “OEL manga,” 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 Japan – regardless of their actual quality – from the anime/manga “club.”

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 Sgt. Frog 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 honne and tatemae – 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.

While it seems there will always be fans who grumble about “non-authentic” anime and manga, the better titles – Avatar: The Last Airbender, Oban Star-Racers, Dramacon, 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. Adam Warren and Fred Perry, 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.

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 Mutants & Masterminds 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 Japan. I’ve already discussed the “visual paradigm” stuff; now for melodrama.

Melodrama is a common trait in popular Japanese entertainment, whether it’s Kabuki and woodblock prints, puroresu and tokusatsu, or anime and TV dramas. 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 Akira or Ghost in the Shell, much less Princess Mononoke[1] or Grave of the Fireflies. 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 Naruto and Keroro Gunsou, with colorful characters that raise their voices a lot.

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 Story Games. 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.

The Game, The Artifact

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.

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 not-so-miniatures), 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 Evangelion. But whether it’s the Colossal Red Dragon or the 12” figure of Rei Ayanami in bandages[2], people enjoy 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.

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 Dungeons & Dragons 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 Queen’s Blade (probably NSFW) series is basically a fanservicey manga take on Flying Buffalo’s Lost Worlds 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.

Games based off of existing properties are, in effect, secondary artifacts in and of themselves. For a Firely/Serentiy fan the TV show and movie are the primary objects, and MWP’s Serenity 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 Azumanga Daioh 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.

Without the luxury of having or being secondary artifacts, the only artifact a less commercially successful RPG can offer directly 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 Pinky St. dolls to create physical representations of their characters[3].

One of the important concepts in the game I’m planning is what I call the “Fan Guide,” inspired partly by The Dictionary of Mu, 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.

[1] It’s worth noting that while Miyazaki’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.

[2] Which raises other interesting psychological issues with regard to otaku, though they’re not especially pertinent here.

[3] Someone who’s not me totally needs to design a Pink St. RPG.

Anime and Roleplaying

2007-02-01T17:39:00.000-08:00

As 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.

Towards Anime Roleplaying

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 Mekton Z and Heavy Gear are probably the most enduring examples. More recently, we’ve had BESM 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.

Others, like OVA and RandomAnime, 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 Teen Titans to Dark Knight Returns (or simply from Batman to Superman) without missing a beat (Truth & Justice is probably up to it), there can certainly be an anime RPG that can go from Sgt. Frog to Rurouni Kenshin.

BESM 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 America’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.

One interesting example of the above taken to an extreme is in the Tenchi Muyo! RPG; 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 Bubblegum Crisis 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.

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.

The Power of Allusion

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.

Roleplaying games’ relationship with direct adaptations from other media has been an odd one, and doubly so with regard to anime, even in Japan. With the exception of a handful of titles – notably Bubblegum Crisis and Project A-ko – 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 Japan 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 Japan to speak of.

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. Michael Hopcroft 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.

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.

Random Stuff

2007-01-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

I 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.

Last night we wound up playing InSpectres 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.

I got to flip through his shiny new copy of BESM3e, 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 that much more complicated, though I still think OVA will be my go-to game for that kind of thing.

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 Thing Game Sucks, 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) publisher's website, and ordered it. I will post about it when it arrives.

The Dictionary of Mu and The Shab-al-Hiri Roach both came in the mail yesterday too. Happy dance. :3

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.

Addendum (January 30, 11:38 a.m.)
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:

Alshard ff
RuLiLuRa (which I totally can't say at all)
Arianrhod (which was apparently published in a bunko/little paperback format for about 700 yen)
The latest issue of Role&Roll, which AFAIK is Japan's main tabletop RPG magazine.

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.

GenCon Indy!

2007-01-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

So, today I finally decided for certain that I'm going to GenCon Indy 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 Story Games and whatnot -- but it was when Guy Shalev 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.

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.

Maid RPG 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. At this rate I'm going to have to start looking into how I might be able to license and publish it for real...

Other possibilities include:

Mascot-tan (which, bizarrely, seems to have something of a cult following)
My Fudge-based Halo RPG. (Still need to actually try it out with my friends)
My Magic Shop Risus one-shot ("Slayers meets Are You Being Served?")

Another Random Game Idea

2007-01-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

So, I got Wario Ware: Smooth Moves 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.

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 "Neko Neko Wai!" 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).

Things

2007-01-07T08:28:00.000-08:00

I 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).

Probably the biggest thing for me, RPG-wise, is Moonsick. This weird little RPG, inspired by Superflat surrealism, is a possible candidate for the next volume of Push, but it needs a major overhaul from my first draft. Surprisingly helpful thread on it here. Rethinking the game has been a wonderful challenge, and I think I'm moving in the right direction.

At some point I do still want to do the we are flat game anthology, but I'm thinking for that I'll replace Moonsick 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.

We also finally had our first real session of Ghostbusters, 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.

Clancy: "Yeah, I've flow before. Military vehicles."
Oswaldo: "Don't listen to him! He means he's flown a jeep!"

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.

Thinking About 2006

2006-12-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

First, a random thought, inspired by this:

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."

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.

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.
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.
I created the thing called Mascot-tan, which seems to have a small following on RPG.net.
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).
Worked a bunch on a Fudge-powered Halo adaptation, that I really should sit down and play some time soon.
Two game companies I'm a little ambivalent about -- albeit for very different reasons -- had financial troubles. Palladium pulled through, with much discussion on the net about it, while Guardians of Order went under, after many months of abject silence.
I did my first (and so far only) 24-hour RPG, Hikikomori RPG.
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.
I made some considerable progress but never quite got around to finishing up the first draft of Thrash 2.0.
Wound up chatting online with Guy Shalev now and then.
Began regularly visiting the Story Games forum.
Purchased:

The Mountain Witch
Buffy Revised
Exalted 2e
The Mister Lincoln eXperiment (MLX)
Timestream
Panty Explosion
Slayers d20 (for $5!)
Hearts, Swords, Flowers (also for $5)
Maid RPG
Maid RPG In Love (sourcebook)
Dreaming Maid RPG (adventure anthology, w/some supplemental rules)
Yuuyake Koyake
Don't Rest Your Head
My Life With Master
WEG D6 Ghostbusters (present for a friend)
Possibly some other things I can't think of right now.

Ordered

BESM 3e (via Amazon)
Dictionary of Mu
Drowning and Falling
The Shab-al-hiri Roach

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.

Maximum Extreme Uber

2006-12-29T10:19:00.000-08:00

Last night we did my friend's one-shot OVA-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 very 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. ^_^;;;;

Mike bought a copy of John Wick's Play Dirty 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 really good stuff; from those I'd call the book "Game Mastering Secrets" (except that title's already been done, 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 "XTREME ROLEPLAYING!!!1!" 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? You said they're supposed to simulate literature. I think it depends on the game." when I should be paying attention to the really good GM advice (on character death) that follows.

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).

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 me, Ewen, in real life, and thus less fun. Just let me breathe now and then, and we'll be cool.

Neat Stuff About Maid RPG

2006-12-27T16:54:00.000-08:00

As a sort of fun side-project to do over the winter break, I’ve decided to do a fan translation of Maid RPG, a 32-page RPG from Japanese publisher Sunset Games. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tokyo Heroes: External Playtest

2006-12-15T22:14:00.000-08:00

Mendel 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.

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.")

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,

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.

Also: we are flat
Just before that, I got a bit further on we are flat, my anthology of three crazy Superflat-inspired games. In particular, I'm finally starting to figure out what to do with Magical Burst, 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 Maid RPG, and for similar reasons. There's still lots of things I need to figure out, but the crazy random tables angle is definitely

The first draft of Moonsick is done too, but I suspect it desperately 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 Paranoia and Cell Gamma (one of the games from the No-Press Anthology), not to mention The Mountain Witch having accidentally become a major inspiration.

For the third one, Black Hole Girls, 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.

Japanese RPGs!

2006-11-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

After hearing what Andy K had to say about Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake, two RPGs put out by a small Japanese publisher called Sunset Games, 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.

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.

Maid RPG 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.

Yuuyake Koyake 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 character sheet is adorable.

More on these as I read through them. ^_^

Moonsick Stuff

2006-11-21T20:12:00.000-08:00

So, one of my weirder RPG design projects is called we are flat, 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 Moonsick, which is going to actually require some pieces of artwork to function. Here are the first few bits of artwork:

Cranium Explosion (Or, Thoughts On Character Creation)

2006-11-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

(Because Panty Rats would be just plain wrong...) Over the weekend I finally got around to running Panty Explosion, as well as reading Cranium Rats, and wound up pondering character creation a bit.

Panty Explosion
I first heard about Panty Explosion when Jake Richmond 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, Narutaru or Alien Nine, much less Takashi Murakami’s Hiropon (I would give a link, but for some reason even the Wikipedia entry is NSFW...)

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).

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.

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).

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.

Cranium Rats
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 "CSI games," 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.

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.

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.

Creating Characters
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. Risus' roll-your-own Cliches make the book (all 6 pages) almost completely unnecessary, and there's games like Toon, where if you know the basics, the character sheet has everything you need. For Tokyo Heroes 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.

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 Mascot-tan 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 must 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.

What published games do this particularly well or badly?

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 23-24

2006-11-12T08:15:00.000-08:00

I feel empty, empty as a high school student. I should be feeling all kinds of things right now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No future, no name, no hope. No choices, just someone else's script.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

2006-11-04T14:53:00.000-08:00

Can you believe I've put up 80 posts on this blog so far? Anyway.

My order from Titan Games 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 (Wikipedia article, RPGnet review). 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 Risus, which is by far my favorite free RPG.

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!)

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 John Wick game (and InSpectres 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 I'm 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 box, 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.

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.

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 this), 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.

Especially considering how big of a Ghostbusters fan he is, I'm very much looking forward to playing when Elton runs the game.

Back to the video game thing, the other day I got Children of Mana for Nintendo DS. I haven't played it much because I'm still obsessing over Final Fantasy IV Advance, 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...

Things I Learned From Video Games

2006-11-03T07:52:00.000-08:00

Of 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 Final Fantasy IV Advance, 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.

Story Genres and Functional Genres
Lost Garden is a really fascinating blog about video game development, and its most influential entry 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).

Video games, by and large, are divided into genres not by the subject matter, but by how they play. Halo: Combat Evolved and Starcraft 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 Dungeons & Dragons 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.

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).

D&D's class/level/kill things and take their stuff setup. It's rarely imitated anymore.
GURPS, Hero System, and other crunchy, point-based universal systems.
"Non-interference" systems that provide a basic, generic framework and little else; BESM, Cinematic Unisystem.
Games focused on a specific setting or premise; World of Darkness, Cat
Highly thematic/story games; The Mountain Witch, DRYH, DitV, MLWM
Systems that primarily serve to distribute narrative control; PTA, octaNe
Games that are narrowly focused on a specific roleplaying type activity; The Shal-al-Hiri Roach, Breaking the Ice

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 Dogs in the Vineyard and Prime Time Adventures 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.

Independence
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 Greg Costikyan who wants to tear apart the current order, or Alex Seropian's efforts to found a company that's small and streamlined with lots of outsourcing, or just Will Wright using radically different programming techniques. It would be a mistake to discard the mainstream or to assume that the new hotness (procedural generation) is going to totally change everything rather than becoming part of the overall palette.

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 (Guitar Hero) and cult classics (Katamari Damacy) 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.

Accessibility
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 Bunco, so what if they started doing the same for, say, Primetime Adventures? The conundrum, of course, is how the hell to make that happen.

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 1PG games, 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.

Random RPG Night

2006-10-29T14:26:00.000-08:00

So, 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.

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).

My Games
Tokyo Heroes
Halo: The Covenant War
Thrash 2.0
Mascot-tan

Published Games
Panty Explosion
The Mountain Witch
Mister Lincoln eXperiment
Cat
InSpectres
octaNe
Prime Time Adventures
Schauermarchen
Dogs in the Vineyard
My Life With Master
Exosuit A-ok
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Toon

Games I'm Thinking About Getting
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
Don't Rest Your Head
Shock:
The Dictionary of Mu
Hero's Banner
Faery's Tale
Orbit
(Your Game Here, Maybe?)

Setting Ideas (To Be Paired With An Appropriate System)
Magic Shop (Slayers meets Are You Being Served?)
Angel Soul (Scryed, but with angels)
Kitsune (fox-spirits in modern-day Japan)
Full Metal President (inspired by Metal Wolf Chaos)
Black Hole Girls (normal schoolgirls with extremely powerful alien symbiotes)

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 21-22

2006-10-29T07:51:00.000-08:00

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Web Search II: Electric Googleoo

2006-10-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

So, once again I got bored enough to do some ego-googling, and I actually found some interesting stuff.

On an Italian RPG message board there's a thread about Mascot-tan, including illustrations for D&D-tan and SeventhSea-tan.

On Wikipedia there's something that's just pain odd. The list of fictional expletives 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).

(BTW, it turns out that, not surprisingly one of my friends stuck the FUNC reference into Wikipedia...)

Go Go Tokyo Heroes!

2006-10-05T19:57:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

...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").

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 20

2006-09-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

Okay. 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 very 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.

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.

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
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.

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.

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.

Anyway, giant robot to fight. Gotta go!

[Actual Play] Truth & Justice: Gatekeepers

2006-09-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

I 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.

The Setup
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.

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:

Glenn/Dynamo: 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.
Jack Smith 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.
Sam Novak 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).
Raz: 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.
Hikaru: 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 Kamen Rider Blade (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.

Rules of the Game
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.

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.

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!)

Human Stuff
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.

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.

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.

Input
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.

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.

Journals
The character journals of Raz 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 Ichigo Mashimaro) 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.

Immersion
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.

It also made the playtest of Tokyo Heroes 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

BTW,
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.

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.

Tokyo Heroes: Bug Fixes

2006-09-19T08:17:00.000-07:00

I'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.

For Tokyo Heroes, as mentioned before the first playtest was very successful overall, but revealed some things that need work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lotsa' Games

2006-09-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

Darnit. I had yet another idea for an RPG to design. Time to go over the ideas I have cooking:

Thrash 2.0: 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.
Tokyo Heroes: My sentai/magical girl RPG. The first playtest went pretty well, and I have plenty of stuff to work on.
we are flat: A trilogy of short games inspired by the "superflat" art movement, which means really weird, twisted anime/manga-inspired stuff. The first game, Moonsick, is actually coming along pretty well. It borrows a lot from The Mountain Witch, and it's weird as all get-out.
Nekketsu! Battle Stars: 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 Bleach and Naruto), and present three radically different settings with freely tweaked rules. Nekketsu (熱血) means something like "hot-blooded" in Japanese, and refers to crazy, over-the-top fighting heroes.
Distorted Futures: "A Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG." Like Neo or Violet or V, you can make the world a better place, but what will you sacrifice?
I Hate You: "A Cartoon CSI Game For Two Good Friends." Coyote vs. Roadrunner, Tom vs. Jerry, etc., as a competitive RPG.

Also, from the world of video games, Prof. Henry Jenkins of MIT was interviewed 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:

HJ: 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.

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.

Regarding Mascot-tan

2006-09-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

You really have no idea how happy this makes me. Definitely way more than it should.

(I don't even actually post on RPG.net all that much -- though I lurk like a madman -- but I think this is the second time I inadvertently started a new meme over there).

Tokyo Heroes Playtest! (and a couple other things)

2006-08-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

The playtest of Tokyo Heroes is now well under way. Last week we made characters and such, and this week was the first session. The players seemed to have had a good time, and I'm finding the results of all this incredibly useful. I've started a thread in the Forge's Playtesting forum about it. For this game I have a lot to think about and a lot to work on now.

I've also put the current draft of the rules online for people to peruse.

As a total side tangent, it's worth noting that Greg Costikyan and company recently got Manifesto Games up and running. This is the thing he's been talking about for a while, a site that sells quality independent computer games (so it's sort of the video game world's answer to IPR), and even though I really need to hold off spending money I'm sorely tempted to go buy some things.

The other day I had another random idea for a game that I probably won't get to for quite a while. Toon was the first RPG I ever bought, and not many people seem to notice that it was basically set up as a light, silly version of GURPS. This isn't inherently a bad thing, and the Toon-ified versions of Car Wars and CoC and whatnot in the Tooniversal Tour Guide book were actually really neat. But having been exposed to all this new indie stuff, I have to wonder what an indie take on Saturday morning cartoons would be like. The game idea I came up with was to do a game based around the sort of "predator vs. prey" cartoons, stuff like Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry. And it occurs to me that I may have just come up with an idea for a CSI game. There would be two players, and while the predator character would pretty much always lose, the players would be competing, probably to be the ones who make the predator's failures more interesting. And it would be called something like "I Hate You: A Cartoon CSI Game For Two Good Friends." So, that goes right alongside Distorted Futures: A Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG on the back burner.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 19

2006-08-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

I did the best I could, trying to talk to Ryo about things. At first he wouldn't talk to me, and I just started crying and couldn't help it. Mom came in and told us something that shocked me. When dad first came to earth, he was a timid young man, practically scared of his own shadow, and he grew into the hero that we've always heard about. His shoes don't seem quite so big to fill anymore, and if anything I feel like I take after him that much more. There was a time when I was a crybaby too.

I also did Razmus' little test, giving present-day Ryo something to memorize and sending someone else to the ship to ask future Ryo if he remembers it. I used a tanka poem by Ishikawa Takuboku:

原稿氏でなくては字を書かぬと
かたく信ずる、あ我が子のあどけなさ
(Firmly believing you can't write characters
except on lined paper, Oh my child's innocence.)

I sent Glenn up to deal with it, and future Ryo passed the test. I wonder if he understands the poem. And I wish I understood what it meant. That time travel is even possible is something that blows open our conceptions of physics, and it's frustrating as hell that I have no basis for even guessing at how it all works, beyond science fiction movies. So, I've chosen to irrationally believe that time can be changed for the better.

On our last day in Japan I had lunch with Eri and Takeshi, and wound up telling them about the whole superhero thing, albeit not in much detail. It turned out Suzuka had caught some kind of really nasty cold or flu, and somehow because of it she'd decided she didn't need to see Razmus. Which means something's up and neither of them is willing to tell me; Suzuka doesn't generally act that rational unless she's using her brain to better accomplish something irrational. At her apartment most of her stuff was packed in boxes. So my best guess is she's moving to America and doesn't want to tell me. Part of me would like to see a familiar face from home now and then, but Suzuka is like Razmus in that she's not exactly a source of stability in my life. Suzuka because of her insanity, and Razmus because he's apparently incapable of letting anything be simple and straightforward, and for his ability to make sensible advice sound like he's lecturing a child. (And I especially like how he called the Riders "racists." Him of all people playing the victim card).

Oh, I did actually do a little training with Raz -- and as New Hikaru it's a very different experience by the way -- but when he asked about what had gone down the night before I got too depressed to continue. The good news is I didn't really get rusty, probably partly because I've been applying it as a Rider.

So. On our last day Sam decided to be an idiot and show off his powers to the whole neighborhood (man, I'm bitchy today), Jack went and bothered the monk at the Buddhist temple down the street, and Glenn didn't seem to be able to figure out what he wanted to do. In the evening, we went to the neighborhood's summer festival. I actually wore a yukata, and Ryo came too. It made me feel a lot better.

And then when we got back to the house, it turned out that Glenn had gotten an emergency call. Mom had dropped him off at the U.S. airforce base, and was to relay a message that we need to call the Super Mentors about Raz' trial. I did that quietly, on my cell phone from my room -- it would be very like Raz to pick up an extension of the house's phone or creep up behind me. We need the information from his summons to get things moving properly, but at least I got the ball rolling.

I wasn't in the mood for talking much on the flight back to America. I listened to music and read the rest of that genetics book I bought in Aegis, and tried to think things over some more. Victory Rider is getting slammed in the Japanese press, not that I trust or care about them. I was a bit concerned about PR before -- and I think even Raz is starting to understand why it's important -- but with the invasion and war hanging over our heads it suddenly seems pretty trivial. All I could really figure out is that the next bad guy who gets in my way is going to regret it.

Some Neat Things

2006-08-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

Go Play: I like this; it reminds me of something I need to do more of.

I got Push in the mail the other day; getting that and some comics from lulu took about 9 days total. I like it entirely too much, and I want to submit something for Volume 2.

Faery's Tale and Panty Explosion are both available in print, through their respective publishers and through Key20. Way too many games coming out I want to get, and almost none of them are showing up at my local game stores (though I haven't been to Game Kastle in a while). And I have entirely too many indie games on my shelf that call to mind the Go Play thing.

Guy Shalev, Vincent Baker, and of course Nathan Paoletta have kindly linked to this blog on theirs. Thanks guys! I shouldn't have to tell you that they're all doing some really neat stuff. :)

I finally announced to my friends that I want to playtest Tokyo Heroes in the near future, and we wound up scheduling the first session for this coming Saturday!

Three Things I Like About Tokyo Heroes (so far)

2006-08-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to the mall, basically to do some stuff by myself and clear my head. I was especially thinking about getting more of my creative stuff off the ground. One side of that has been harassing my artist friends to get my T-shirt design project seriously under way, but over lunch I pulled out my laptop and wound up rereading the unfinished manuscript of Tokyo Heries, and I realized that I really liked what I saw. Which is why I wound up dropping everything else I was doing (writing/RPG design-wise) for the moment to work on this game.

Sentai is an odd genre, to say the least. "Tokusatsu" -- live-action special effects -- shows in Japan tend to use cheap effects and cheesy, melodramatic storylines with a gonzo enthusiasm, whether it's Godzilla stomping Tokyo flat or Kamen Rider saving it from the machinations of the Shocker organization. Although I watched some Godzilla movies when I was a kid, and I find Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus just too cool for words, the early Power Rangers series had me keeping most of that stuff at arm's length. Over time my changing tastes, my rampant Japanophilia, and the pure awesomeness that is Dekaranger made me a fan of sentai. It can be goofy at times, but the emphasis is squarely on fun.

The game also covers "fighting" magical girl anime like Sailor Moon and Tokyo Mew Mew. I've been intrigued by these for a long time (shut up), and the differences between these and sentai seem to be mainly trivialities like the distribution of power levels and flavor text -- stuff that matters for how you play the character, but not at all for how the game works.

I originally came up with the idea for Tokyo Heroes in my hotel room at GenCon SoCal 2004. Sentai seems absolutely perfect for roleplaying, since the notion of a team of heroes working together is so ingrained into the genre. In the U.S. tokusatsu in general is a very small niche fandom, and in Japan it's mostly something young boys watch, so there's next to nothing for roleplaying the genre.

(There is a gentleman who mentioned on RPG.net that he's working on an RPG called HENSHIN!, which I'm looking forward to almost as much as my own game. So hey, there's now two on the way).

Anyway, here are some things I'm especially fond of about the game:

Character Creation
The thing about sentai is that between series you can have one team that uses super-science given to the by aliens, and another that uses ninja powers, and a third that drawns on dinosaur totem spirits, and somehow they mostly have the same powers. Even when I included the sentai-influenced magical girl anime series, the basic formula changed only slightly.

The result of this is that in the game characters are defined with relatively few traits, many of which will be the same for all of the PCs. In order for the players to have an appropriate amount of input into what their characters are going to be like, the group has to meet together for character creation and hash out the important details. It also forces the GM to avoid planning too much in advance, something I personally need to work on as a GM anyway.

The group has to settle on what Edges and Keys are common to the team. Edges are special powers, gear, and other benefits. Keys are similar to those in The Shadow of Yesterday, but they play into the teamwork thing (Keys earn Hero Dice, that are used by the whole group).

Group character creation is also important because of Aspects. In sentai, the heroes each wear a different color spandex costume, and these have grown into archetypes that to some degree dictate a character's personality. In game terms, Aspects carry some guidelines for roleplaying, give the character another Key, and provide a small special ability. Since each team should generally only have one of a given Aspect, and needs both Red and Blue, players can't come to the table too attached to a character concept either, though with ten Aspects in the game (Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Pink, Black, White, Gold, Silver, Master), and some of them kind of vague (especially Green and Yellow), players shouldn't have too much trouble coming up with the character they want.

Another interesting thing here is the concept of Ally Characters (ACs). Sentai shows frequently introduce new heroes after the fact. There's the archetypal Sixth Ranger of course, and there's been stuff like Hurricanger and Abaranger, where enemy rangers became good guys, and Dekaranger, where supporting characters have occasionally revealed they can transform too. It's also a handy way to fill out the roster when you have less than 5 players and really want a full team of 5 heroes. An AC is basically an NPC that is by definition friendly to the PCs. Each player has Karma (experience) points, and one of the things they can invest Karma in is taking control of an AC for a scene. If they do well, they get their Karma back with interest, and if they do poorly they lose some of it.

Team Dynamic
Teamwork is a very important theme in this game, and I've tried to make the mechanics reflect that. Hero Dice are one of the more important ways in which it does that; characters' Keys don't earn them XP, but Hero Dice, which go into a collective pool available to the whole team. Hero Dice can be used to add to rolls, to restore Stamina points during combat, or to power certain Edges. (Finishing attacks always use Hero Dice, as does stuff like DekaYellow's esper ability, for example). The idea here is to give everyone the ability to contribute to the group's success just by playing their character to the hilt.

The way dice are handled is also meant to enable cooperation, and generally keep everyone at the table doing something. Rolls are done with pools of six-siders; normally you want to roll 4 or higher (a Target of 4) to get Successes. If you assist someone, you get a +1 Target modifier (so you have to roll 5 or higher), and if you merely encourage someone it's +2, but all of your successes are added to theirs. This sort of thing because especially important when the team

Session Structure
My first Japanese RPG, Beast Bind: New Testament, wound up being a big influence on how game sessions are set up in Tokyo Heroes. From what Andy K has said, it seems that in Japan there are a lot more people who learn how to play by reading the books rather than being taught by someone else, and if BBNT is any indication, the way the books are put together strongly reflects this. This particular game outlines how to structure a session, from "pre-session" (getting everyone together and settled in) to "on-session" (the meat of the game) to "post-session" (concluding bookkeeping, cleaning up, etc.), and it even goes so far as to suggest going to a coffee shop of family restaurant to relax and discuss the game. It also makes a point of dividing the on-session portion up into scenes. Although scene breaks aren't hugely important to the game mechanics, the text does a credible job of explaining how scenes begin and end, and it even has a rule for an "appearance check," a roll to see if your character appears during a given scene.

All of the above I think helps a lot to capture the feel of sentai. If you cut out the opening, ending, and preview, a typical sentai episode is about 20 minutes long, so each scene needs to do its job and get over with. It also means that a given game session could potentially fit in multiple complete episodes if you're so inclined. Appearance checks are perhaps a little more practical than in Beast Bind, since they're more likely to be used for something like whether your character can run fast enough to reach that stereotypical sentai rock quarry in time to participate in the battle and bail his friends out.

Another interesthing thing that came out of this is the idea of including a "preview" at the end of each session. This is for not only the usual post-session stuff, but a chance for the GM to give hints about the nature of the next episode and the players to give input as well. In particular, there's a mechanic for "spotlight episodes." Sentai shows frequently have episodes that center around a given hero; the plot is mostly about them, and they get to show off. Players can invest Karma points, and in return their hero earns extra Hero Dice and has a -1 Target modifier to everything they do for that episode. (Newly introduced characters also get a spotlight episode effect for free, and new robots get a scene-long spotlight effect).

Sample Characters
Okay, I lied. Four.

I have way too much fun coming up with characters (this'll be especially obvious once Battlefield Press gets Open Anime published), so I had a fun time coming up with two teams of sample heroes for the Tokyo Heroes book, one sentai team and one magical girl team. I'm entirely too satisfied with myself for coming up with a a sixth ranger called Dynamic Knight, a grim warrior bent on revenge whose real name is Jax Goldwraith, and an evil magical girl who fights dirty called Magical Girl Destiny. Some of the campaign seeds tie into the Dynarangers setting, and once I do some playtesting and get more revisions done I'll be writing examples for the game text using these characters. I'm hoping to have actual art done up of these characters for the final game; at the moment I'm getting my artist friends to help work on the magical girl designs.

I'm really looking forward to playing this game. Every time I watch sentai now I can map out what's going on in game terms in my head. Also, the fact that it's specifically made to not require too much planning (in fact it discourages it in certain ways) will help keep me from dragging my feet and get around to running it sooner. There's still some writing to do, but I now have all of the rules in place, and everything left is revising and/or expanding, rather than creating stuff from scratch.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 18

2006-08-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

Things are really starting to get to me lately, and I feel like the old me would be better at handling all of this, but apart from an occasional moment of clarity, it's just not an option. "Take one day at a time," says grandpa, but each day feels like a month lately.

The Wild Rider I fought at the ceremony is (if we believe what he's said) Ryo from about seven years in the future. The brace he wears appears to be the Mega-Brace from the future, but he says it was damaged, and repaired with components from the Wild Brace. I want it to not be true, for him to be some especially clever clone or something, because everything he says is scary and hurtful. Future Ryo hates me for "stealing his heritage," and he's a broken, ragged person, a survivor of two wars and (in his time) humanity's last hope. And he wants to kill Raz, to keep him from going insane and calling down the shapeshifting aliens a second time. And the rest of the Gatekeepers, starting with me, get assassinated two years after the first war ends. It sounds stupid that I'm here thinking "I don't want to die." I mean, I knew there was danger when I signed up for this ride, and I never had a problem with jumping into the fray, but having it hanging over my head two years and six months from now scares the bejeezus out of me. And naturally, Future Ryo doesn't know the details of how it happens.

And yet, the part that hurts the most is that he hates me. He's known me longer than anyone, except for mom, and we always got along. And now it seems like it's me -- not even Victory Rider, but Hikaru -- who's going to totally fuck it up. I tried to talk to him about it, but I think it'll have to wait for tomorrow. I hope I feel a little better tomorrow.

Oh, and we got to find out a bit more about Jack today. A monk -- a Western monk in brown robes -- just showed up at the door (and sunk into the ground when he left!). The Catholic Church had its own version of Project Perseus, and his family was part of a splinter group that broke off over believing that metahumans should be worked with, and science used. His parents were geneticists no less. So, there is a group withing the Church that wants to come after him, and now this splinter group wants him to do a mission when he gets back to America. I'm glad someone else's past is going to be dumping stuff on us for a change.

And since coming clean about stuff was the order of the day, Razmus (who of late has been remarkably tractable and non-jerky, come to think of it) told the group something he mentioned to me the other day. Since he left that town in Colorado, he's been hearing a girl's voice in his head. She'd tell him what to do, and if he doesn't do it he gets monstrous headaches. And joining us was one of the things she ordered him to do. Sam did hear her once, and I'm wondering if this third helix business has something to do with inheriting some of Razmus' latent psychic potential.

There's not too much time left before we're going back to America. I really need to talk to Ryo. At this point time travel is all theory, but if he really is from the future, maybe we can change all this somehow. I sure got the kick in the pants I needed to actually sit down and talk to him. What else can we change? I don't want to die, because I'd be letting too many people down. I don't want Glenn and mom and Ryo to lose a second Rider, I don't want to leave Razmus and Sam and Jack behind, and I don't want to stop protecting the things that matter to me.

I'm not giving up without a fight.

That's right. The old me and the new me agree 100% on this. We've come so far already. No surrender, no retreat.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 17

2006-08-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

I really don't know what to make of Razmus anymore. Or myself, for that matter. Somehow, his errand to the base turned into an unannounced trip to Arizona. I tell myself I don't care about him anymore, and that this is the last time, yet again. He doesn't seem to give a shit about me or any of our other teammates (weird, considering it's not like he has anyone else to turn to in the entire world). And as usual he's medically incapable of admitting he's done anything wrong. See, I had grandpa teleport me into his Greyhound bus, and I tried to find out what the fuck he was thinking, and why he felt the need to run away. And naturally, he brushed off the talk of running away, unable to face the situation even verbally. I get that trusting people isn't always easy, especially when your adolescence was as screwed up as his, but I'm really not clear on why he would think it's okay to just run off like that without a word. It's not like we'd be able to force him to stay if he told us he was quitting. I want to smack him so damn hard sometimes, but he can kick my ass and if he did he'd probably convince himself that he was somehow right to do it.

And Swan is suing him, and he's acting like its some kind of goddamn game. I really hope Glenn knows a good lawyer. One that won't let Raz talk too much. He really is a teenager; he says otherwise, but he doesn't understand mortality. He can't fit into his tiny little mind that everything he has and does and says will eventually be completely gone from the universe. That's the way things work.

But who am I to talk? I don't even know what's going on in my own head anymore. The Victory Brace sort of took away my limited, so I have a hard time not saying every damn thing that pops into my head. At first I was brimming over with confidence, but right now I feel like a class clown who got sent to the principal's office. Gotta get it together. I explained to Ryo about how I'd become a Rider, and I think the old me would've done a better job. He was giving me some weird looks and saying "What about me?" Being a world-renowned soccer player isn't enough, huh?

Pop quiz time! Which is worse:
(a) Not being able to express emotions.
(b) Not being able to stop yourself from expressing emotions.
(c) Not being able to express emotions unless it's calculated and fake.

And then Razmus came back. He sent me an email asking for a teleport, and I laughed out loud. I really don't know what the fuck to do with him, but unless my head gets even more messed up, I'm probably not going to be willing to waste my time trying to talk sense into him -- being immune to that must be one of his other superpowers.

I was lucid enough to let my mom pick out my formal wear for dad's memorial ceremony, so I wound up going in this expensive black kimono. It looked better on me than I expected. The same goes for Jack in a suit. We got through most of the ceremony before bad stuff happened. I started crying during the speeches -- especially Glenn's -- and couldn't stop. I'm starting to realize just how incredible dad really was, as a person and not just some guy in a mask. Those are some damn big shoes to fill.

And then a cargo plane buzzed the Tokyo Dome. Seriously. A bunch of black-suited military guys dropped down, along with Wild Rider. We split up jump into the fray. And I figured out my hero name. (drum roll) Victory Rider! And the sword, the Victory Blade. Wild Rider thought the name was stupid (but at least he was talking), but I kicked his ass in a big way. (Oh, shit, I'm thinking like Raz. Someone shoot me.) That Rider Delta Combination move I came up with was just plain cool, if I do say so myself.

By the time I finished, my teammates had dealt with all of the soldiers (who were actual guys this time and not clones, thank god). And then things got freaky, because I swear to god under the mask Wild Rider looks like an older version of Ryo. A lot. He was fighting a lot better than last time too, like a trained martial artist instead of Captain Punchy.

Raz jumped onto the plane and brought it down from inside, apparently, and the others did some pretty crazy stuff too. I gotta watch the news to see more of that.

And then the media came in. I told them that I'm MegaRider's daughter, and that since Japan is so well-protected I'll be in San Francisco, with Dynamo as my mentor. (I saw Glenn shake his head at that, as he usually does when I say something unpleasant yet true). I bowed, and resisted the urge to make a big V-sign with my hands, because it wasn't that kind of day.

So, we're a little closer to figuring out what the hell is going on with Wild Rider, which'll hopefully also give us something to work with for when the time comes to deal with Wash and Pinnacle. My head is screwed up, and I need to go up or down, not this inbetween crap, and I'm thinking I should see someone about it -- it could be some brain chemistry thing. And maybe, just maybe, Razmus has some inkling of how good he has it. I am so messed up right now.

Random Things

2006-08-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

I wound up getting inspired to work on writing stories, even though I seem to be sucking at it right now (I did at least finish one short story the other day). I've been in a bit of a funk the past couple weeks, with regard to everything, not just games, hence Thrash 2.0 isn't the only thing I'm not making progress on. I'm trying to read more, and watch more, but my attention span is unusually short lately. So, I have jack to say about games I'm working on (or failing to work on), but plenty on some tangential things.

Comic Con
I went to Comic Con, and it took a while for me to recover. (Not totally coherent LiveJournal entry is here). There were a couple of panels on RPGs there, which was sort of surprising considering there was no RPG programming there apart from a small smattering of RPGA stuff. Chris Chinn covered it better than I could in his blog, but suffice to say the first panel didn't tell me much of anything I didn't already know, and the second I didn't attend because it conflicted with some other panel I wanted to go to. There were actually a small handful of RPG things in the exhibit hall though. There was a dealer with lots of GURPS books (amongst other things), the guy who did Artesia was selling the RPG alongside the comic, and Annie Rush had a table in the indie area (appropriately enough). I picked up a copy of House of Horiku, though I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Snakes on a Game, indeed. I also picked up a sketchbook called Mariachi Samurai, and damn but I want to roleplay as the title character some time. I'm thinking his name would be Pedro. Or maybe Jesus.

No More Goo
It's sad that Guardians of Order is done with, but Mark seems to be doing okay for himself, and most of their IP is going to be getting new homes, which in turn means that BESM3e will be coming out, even if it'll take a while. For various reasons, I've had mixed feelings about GoO from their inception, but I never found fault with the quality of their products. The deafening silence hasn't been good for PR (see this RPG.net thread), and it's good to finally hear what the hell is going on. Plus I have an acquaintance who got a book green-lighted from them just before all this nonsense happened. My general opinion of Tri-Stat is that it's a great, elegant little system that was never adequately explained in its rulebooks (hence the lengthy essays at the beginning of my netbook). It's also one of those games where a younger me said immature crap about it on message boards, though there are those who make me not feel quite so bad about it, for all the wrong reasons, and in a few cases I was just pointing out stuff that really ought to have been addressed (like, why the insistence on using only SI units for a game predominantly played by Americans?).

Anyway, I'm definitely going to pick up BESM3e whenever it comes out, but (1) I'm glad I didn't give into the temptation to preorder, and (2) right now OAV would be my go-to game for that kind of thing anyway (they need to get some more stuff out at some point though). Still, in the 9 or so years it was around, GoO wound up teaching me a lot about RPGs, and for that more than anything I'm grateful.

How To Do Stuff
Inspired by this thread on Story Games, I went and checked out Elements of Typographic Style from the library. I've only read a little bit (it's really good), but it occurred to me that there are certain things that apply to any creative endeavor. As I'm seriously pursuing designing RPGs and writing, and have dabbled in graphic art, I started to see patterns. I'm going to write up an essay on this whenever I get around to it.

Practice. A Lot.: Whatever you do, do it a whole lot. Every day if at all possible.
Learn the Basics: In any medium there are basic, foundation type things that should be practiced to death. An artist needs to learn how to draw straight lines, which means pencil mileage.
Learn From Others: Look at other works in your chosen medium and others close to it. Include works that you woudn't ordinarily look at (i.e., even if you're writing sci-fi with Venusian telepathic squids, go read literary classics).
Find out the "Rules": In each medium there are formulas that can be training wheels for beginners, "don'ts" that can be violated if you do so skillfully and for the right reasons, and principles that become tools you can use.
Get and Recieve Useful Criticism: Get people to look at your stuff and tell you what's bad about it and what's good. If someone has nothing to say beyond "this sucks," then Triumph the Insult Comic Dog could do the same job, and be more entertaining.
Find Your Own Style: Don't imitate your idols. Don't worry that you can't create something as great as . Concentrate on creating stuff that only you could do.

Thrash 2.0: Agility

2006-07-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

More Fighting Games
I've gotten over the crazy obsessive playing of fighting games (which is good, since my carpal tunnel syndrome will start creeping up on me otherwise), but still, I've been playing a lot of them. I even borrowed my friend's copy of Tekken 3, despite the fact that I don't really go in for the series (though it does have some of the coolest extras of any fighting game). I also keep forgetting just how many King of Fighters games there are now; the first one was in '94, and the main series alone has had one game for every year since, not to mention a zillion spin-off games like Maximum Impact (3D for PS2), Neowave (for Atomiswave, ported to PS2 and Xbox), EX (GBA), Kyo (quasi-CRPG thing for PSX). Plus the epic storyline that kicked off in KoF '95 has so far been the first of three. I kind of need to get caught up on all of that. I also went and ordered a copy of Cyberbots (does anyone else remember this game?) for Sega Saturn off of eBay, along with the Samurai Shodown CRPG. I've mainly been concentrating on the hand-to-hand stuff, but at some point I'll need to mess around with the more weapon-based fighting games to try and figure out what I need to include for the weapon maneuvers.

As For Thrash 2.0...
When I got back into Thrash 2.0 last month, it felt like I mostly just had a big morass of maneuvers to write. Fortunately, I was wrong about that. The design process is proving to be interesting and creative, which it needs to be both for producing a better game and for keeping me interested.

Thrash is noticably more complex than any other game I'm designing right now, and I don't necessarily think it's playing to my strengths even, but I'm having fun doing it all the same. (And if I wasn't, I have more than enough other things to distract me). An important part of what I've been doing is trying to make sure all the pieces fit together nicely, which means answering questions like, "What happens if you want a Mega-Attack version of a Multi-Kick?" (I haven't got a good answer to that one yet, but I know roughly what I want to do). A good example is the rule for variant maneuvers; if you want to buy multiple versions of a maneuver with different modifiers, you get a discount on the base cost. This is 1 point off for each version after the first, to a minimum of 2. For balance reasons, I wound up having to create a special rule that modified Basic Maneuvers have to go off of a starting cost listed in a table in the Modifiers section.

I think I may have come up with a workable solution to the "Agility as god-stat" problem. In a nutshell, since originally Agility was added to every combat-related roll, mechanically there was no particular reason not to have Agility be as high as the game allows. And yet, in the source material Zangief is about the opposite of what people think of when they hear the word "agility," but he doesn't have much trouble hitting things. My idea is sort of a mashup between BESM and WWE: Know Your Role, where different attributes are averaged to get a set of three new stats, which I'm calling "Combat Proficiencies," to represent the character's accuracy with different kinds of moves. Right now they're called Force (for big moves that overwhelm the opponent), Finesse (for technical moves that are effective because they're skillfully executed), and Aim (for moves that are effective because they're accurately hitting the target, or a part thereof). Each would be an average of two (three?) attributes. Going through the maneuvers and replacing Agility with one of the three for each turned out to be easier than I expected. There are a few where the player gets to choose between Power or Finesse (including the basic Punch and Kick), and Aim is a little underused, but since they're not traits the player has to invest points into directly, I think it'll be okay.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 16

2006-07-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

Have you ever looked in the mirror and found you weren't quite sure who was looking back? That was today in a nutshell. Let me start at the beginning.

I woke up, totally stressed out, and got ready to go see the Riders. Glenn gave me some crap about smoking -- and I suppose he has a point -- and Razmus was hanging out on the roof and probably got up at an ungodly hour to watch the sunrise. Never mind that the smog makes Tokyo the Land of the Rising Brightish Haze. And Suzuka came by to glom onto him. The usual stuff.

When gramps finally showed up, it was after lunch time. He took me up to the spaceship, showed me around some, and took me in to see the Rider Council. It was kind of anticlimactic. I was expecting to have to beat one of them in single combat or something else appropriately cliche. Instead he offered me a chance to walk away from the whole thing. Having a conscience is a bitch, not to mention the whole thing about the oncoming alien hordes. Did they actually think I was going to say no? They probably did; that's how they think. They had me swap transformation braces, and when I tried the new one, I was me, in this new armor. It felt right. It felt perfect. In hindsight, I'd describe the feeling like this: Imagine in one instant suddenly knowing that you had arrived at the true purpose of your existence.

Gramps gave me another toy, which I'm supposed to keep a secret: a new sword, one that talks. I need to take some time to have a chat with it (him/her?) when I get a chance, and come up with a name. And I need a name for this new Rider version of me.

When I got back to the house, it turned out that where nearly three hours had gone by on the ship, about a minute had passed for my teammates. Then... I got a little bit crazy. At first, I was thinking that I was just in a really good mood for some reason -- which, knowing how I've been for the past four years or so is kind of a dumb thing to think -- and the guys were a little worried about me. Still, I went out shopping, and did kind of an image change thing. I got contacts, a new haircut, and a new outfit (grandpa complains that it's too "revealing"). I can't remember the last time I wore a skirt that wasn't part of a uniform. Sam didn't even recognize me at first, even with the molecular biology book I was reading.

It turned out Razmus had gone out trying to find Magical Land, that weird little amusement park, and Sam and I wound up going to join him. So not like me. I even helped distract the security guards while Sam crashed the little pro wrestling show they had going on, but then I got kinda bored and went for the roller coaster nearby. And when I got off, I felt sick. My stomach was a little churned by the ride, but I think it was something more than that. I wanted to lie down, but it was as much to cover my head with a pillow and be alone as it was to make my head stop spinning.

After that I was calmed down a bit, but I was and still am a little weird. Glenn told me he'd checked out the museum, and it'd turned out that dad's bike they had there had been stolen. When Grandpa finally showed up, we had a big pow-wow about where things stood. I was acting kind of dumb there, making stupid jokes that no one except my deranged self found funny. The Riders are testing me, Earth could be the site of the final decisive battle between the Riders and the Beast Race, and our earthling villain guys could well know about the alien invasion themselves (save the world and then take it over kind of thing). Amalgam had been aiming to create some kind of power to manipulate nuclear forces, but it got divided, half and half, between him and Dynamo, and Wash may have gotten the complete version. And gramps had no clue why I've been funny in the head ever since I transformed.

Glenn is appropriately concerned, but Raz just doesn't seem to give a shit. This new Hikaru is more to his liking, so I guess it doesn't matter to him that I could be completely losing my mind, in more ways than one. Different bits of me feel different things right now, but every snap decision gets deferred to this new Hikaru. But another piece of me is scared shitless about this whole thing. I have to tell Ryo the truth, but to do that I have to figure out what the hell is true. This new brace feels different -- a better fit -- but there's still that same feeling of being loathe to take it off. The fact that there was a new one in front of me was the only thing that let me take off the Mega-Brace. I'm acting more like my dad, only much more impulsive, so far.

There. Just now. I started seriously thinking about quitting smoking. I mean, I've been thinking about it for ages, but just now I was thinking that putting up with withdrawl symptoms would be worth it. The old me always said it was too much trouble and not worth the effort, like a lot of things in life. I am exhausted, and as usual everyone's fucking with me. I really wonder if all this isn't part of something one of the Riders did on purpose. I never did figure out what was going on with Void Rider. For a bunch of guys so intent on setting up a boys-only club, they let me off the hook relatively easy.

God damn it, I'm going around in circles again, just faster than before. I am Hikaru Hirose, and so is she. Now what?

Thrash 2.0: The Maneuvers

2006-07-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

It hadn't occurred to me before, but it's been a while since I played much in the way of fighting games. If my collection of old PlayStation, Saturn, and Dreamcast games is any indication I was really into those back in the day, and I have a good number of both import and domestic releases (Sega Saturn represent and all that). The point of all this is to get into the nitty-gritty of the special moves for Thrash 2.0, since I was getting a nagging feeling that there were some important moves I was missing. There were, though it was primarily the kind of stuff most people would overlook.

I played some of Touki Denshou: Angel Eyes, an obscure all-girl fighting game that Tecmo put out in 1999, with some of my favorite and most blatant fighting game characters (like Mysterious Power, a retro superheroine with bouncy breasts and a ray gun, or Chibiko, a loli P.E.-themed girl in bloomers), and an array of dashing and jumping moves that make for insane, kinetic fights (a homing jump!). I also finally actually played the copy of Asuka 120% Burning Fest. Final that I picked up for cheap during my trip to Japan like 3 years ago. That game is also a schoolgirl fighter, with each character using moves based on what club she belongs to (Asuka, the main character, is in the chemisty club, and has a special move where she tosses out a flask that explodes). The fighting in that isn't as aerial as in Angel Eyes, but it's still pretty insane. And I haven't even gotten into the doujin fighters like Queen of Heart and Eternal Fighter Zero, which let you do off-the-ground attacks that most 2D fighting games studiously avoid. Unfortunately, my Saturn has seen better days (I think I need to try another RAM cartridge), so I didn't get around to playing Vampire Savior or Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter. And I ought to go borrow a few games from my friends too. I got plenty of Street Fighter in too. I still need to play:

DarkStalkers
King of Fighters
Capcom Vs. SNK
SVC Chaos
Waku Waku 7
Samurai Shodown
Last Blade
What else?

The maneuvers in Thrash are getting a bit broader out of necessity, and certain kinds of moves have become recurring. I'm starting to be able to look at most fighting game characters and define their special moves in Thrash terms, which is a Good Thing. There's a definite need for the maneuvers in Thrash to not correspond to the number of "hits" in a fighting game (not that they ever did in the first place...). This isn't just for stuff like the Tiger Uppercut doing 7+ hits (to say nothing of the triple-digit weirdness in MvC2); in Asuka 120% there's a character whose rising uppercut has a slapdown hit at the end, and it occurs to me that this could easily be treated as a "special effect" rather than making life needlessly complicated with a superfluous modifier or mucking around with combo maneuvers.

Anyway, here's the new maneuvers I've come up with so far:

Blast Knuckle: A heavy standing punch that sends the opponent flying backwards.
Death From Above: The character leaps high into the air and comes down on the opponent. Popular with ninjas.
Forward Leap Kick: The character somehow jumps/flips/whatevers forward to clock the opponent with one or both feet. Not the most widely recognized maneuver, but actually pretty common.
Intercept Counter: Not 100% sure what to call it, but basically the special counter maneuvers, Geese Howard's being the most notable.
Justice Fist: A powerful standing punch that knocks the opponent down. Named (for better or for worse) for Allen's move from SFEX, but Karin (SFA3) has what amounts to an open-palm version of the same thing.
Leaping Power Throw: The fighter jumps at the opponent, and grabs them while airborne to do a throw. Alex (SF3) has this maneuver a couple times over.
Stepping Power Kick: A powerful thrusting kick done with a short hop. As seen in Cody's Ruffian Kick, amongst others.
Through Strike: The fighter whisks past the opponent, and delivers a lightning-fast attack whose effects are felt a moment later. A very anime-esque move, and Gen (SFA2) has a super version of this.

I've also found myself poking at the Thrash Companion a little bit, which'll be the first sourcebook for the game, and a general collection of neat stuff. Weird Powers wound up divided into the categories of Freaks (cyborgs, robots, mutant animals, aliens, guys like Blanka and Dhalsim, etc.) and "Metapowers" (espers, magic, gadgets, "otherworld power" -- like Dizzy and Jedah -- and so on). Freaks will mostly just be a set of themed character traits (should you want stretchy limbs, or claws, or whatever), and I'm not sure how to handle metapowers just yet. It's also going to be a repository for wackier maneuvers and other character traits. Whatever crazy rules options I come up with will also go in here; I have a vague notion of a universal Thrash variant and an FPS-themed variant. Plus I have this idea for a thing called The Fighter's Soul which would bring in a sort of narrativist "layer" to the game, and replace the game's boring character advancement mechanics in the process.

So yeah, I'm definitely in the thick of things with Thrash, and enjoying it. ^_^

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 15

2006-07-02T16:54:00.000-07:00

It's finally getting to me, all the scheming and paranoia and fear and frustration. We went to Ryo's soccer match as planned, with Suzuka still clinging to Razmus even after their date was allegedly concluded. The ref at the game was Wash. I don't know how it happened, but he was there, calling the game normally, as though he wasn't a supervillain and didn't have fifty cloaked robots on the field. When Raz went down there and tried to hit one with with his baseball bat (I don't know why he bothers using those on non-squishy opponents when they always get bent without doing any damage) the robots started uncloaking. As the people fled, Glenn and I rushed over to Ryo, but he just vanished, another abuse of their cloaking technology.

While Razmus and Sam started tearing through the robots -- which kept self-destructing every time they took any decent amount of damage -- I transformed and went for the eye of the storm, where Wash stood, calm as usual, behind a force field. He was in his usual obnoxious bantering mood, and he gave us coordinates where he wanted us to come get Ryo, and I can't remember the last time I got that angry. Part of me knew that hacking at his force field wouldn't do any good, but I just didn't care. He said that Ryo was involved in this now. I don't know how, but Razmus teleported inside the force field and beheaded Wash. With an SDF jet circling overhead, I was having visions of another Swan incident, but worse, but Wash laughed off the beheading like everything else. He said he was immortal now. If only we could launch him into the sun. Nothing we did could even slow him down; he seemed to be able to change into an energy form, then restore his corporeal body, completely intact. He teleported away. By the time my grandfather came back from taking Suzuka and mom to the van it was all over.

We tried hard to think up a plan for entering the base. Wash and his associates seem to really like making us walk into traps. But absolutely everything we could think of was a dead end. Between the five of us we have a would-be biochemist (that's me), two who specialize in stealth (Razmus and Jack), a veteran superhero (Glenn), and someone who until recently made a living by bluffing (Sam). And yet in the end we had to barge in there, because there was nothing we could do to gain any advantage of any sort. The power lines were buried (a rarity in Japan), there was only one entrance, and very little to explore. I want to fight a supervillain where it actually means something. I can live with getting injured even, so long as there's a sense of accomplishment that goes beyond enduring yet another of Wash's monologues. I want to fight a villain who actually feels pain; I can live with being hated, so long as it's by someone who will see us as something more than ants in a terrarium.

By all accounts it was, as Wash had said, a rural Project Perseus facility. There were four fake buildings, no more than movie props, and the real base was carved directly into the rock. Glenn drove the van straight in, through the glass doors and offices, until we got as far as it would take us. In an office area we found folders with data on various people -- including myself and Glenn. Each one had a detailed profile, some kind of complex formula, and at the end a "Suitability Rating." For both myself and Glenn this was listed as "High." Which makes it a distinct possibility that his inclusion in all this wasn't accidental after all.

After the offices was a stone hallway lined with portraits. There was only one that any of us recognized, and of all people it was of Amalgam, Glenn's nemesis. At the end was a T intersection. In the right-hand branch we found Wash again -- and Wild Rider. At that point all of our frustration seemed to come to a head, because Glenn made it look like he was refusing to take the confrontation seriously. Before long we'd all joined in. He claimed we were boring him, but ironically enough words are apparently the one thing that can get to him. Wild Rider was just as reticent as last time, but I could see his clenched fist shaking with fury. And then they vanished again.

In the other branch of the corridor, we found a set of holding cells. In one, Ryo was sleeping peacefully, while in another there was a middle-aged man, very badly beaten. We took them both back with us. The man had an imprint on his right arm, as though he'd been wearing a brace, and Sam said he was dreaming of being Wild Rider. At grandfather's insistence we brought the man to our house instead of a hospital, and the old man did something to stabilize him and teleported him up to the spaceship.

Once Ryo was in his bed -- he didn't wake up the entire time, and may have been drugged -- I found myself explaining to my grandfather what had happened, and all the while wondering why he wasn't helping. Instead, he had more bad news. The alien shapeshifters are coming to Earth, in about six months' time. For the first time Jack managed to say something really offensive, which in turn got Raz even further into denial about the whole matter. In fact, grandfather recognized Raz' mother from that photo he carries, as a rebel who defied her own race to protect innocent lives. That definitely sounds like someone who could've been one of Razmus' parents.

The other thing is, the Rider Council is waiting to speak to me. According to grandfather, opinions are divided as to whether I represent heresy or evolution. At least I know it's finally come. When I think about what I've seen and read about metahumans, the Riders' boys-only club seems utterly ridiculous. The metahuman heroes of earth are men and women, and they come from every corner of the world, from every social class, every religion, every nation. There are Australian aborigines, wealthy businessmen, common street thugs, and starving, orphaned children who have realized they have power, and used it to make the world a better place.

Tomorrow. I need sleep, if I can manage it. I shouldn't have had that tea. Tomorrow morning is the next hurdle put in front of me. I feel like I'm nearing my breaking point. I think I still want to do this thing, but I need to do it as myself, not as my father's shadow, an agglomeration of childood memories. Everything before this was just going through the motions, trying to stall for time and combat the boredom that came down from the sky, pressing everything flat. I had all these things to say to the council, and right now they sound like childish excuses. I want to be the light in the darkness, but instead we've been trying to cope with the problems brought about by the circumstances of our origins, in spite of having so little to work with. We're in the dark ourselves, with nothing to light the way, just hands to hold.

I'm not going to cry. Ryo is safe. I can deal with this, because I have to. I want someone to tell me what to do, but I don't think I'd believe them.

Mascot-tan: Update!

2006-06-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

A small update on Mascot-tan: the designs for the last two RPG girls (Twenty-tan and Story-tan) are complete. I'll be making some minor revisions to the game, not to mention making the descriptions of the RPG Girls match the illustrations better, and putting up a snazzy, with-art-and-everything final version of the game in a PDF whenever I get around to it. I've made some good progress on Thrash 2.0, but it turns out I have a little more to go on that freelance translation work I was doing, so RPG stuff goes on a brief hiatus once again. TT3TT

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 14

2006-06-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

I think I'm finally coming into my own.

So. The old Project Perseus building. The upper levels had since been leased out to other companies, but it was entirely too easy to get into the basement levels through the back. The research labs had been completely gutted, as though someone was trying very hard to make it appear as though there had never been a high-security government facility there. The equipment -- including some really massive stuff -- had all been removed, probably disassembled, and even the industrial electrical outlets were removed, the wires covered up by a new layer of drywall. The first four basement levels had a few desks, and nothing else. Apart from a keypad lock on the back entrance, there were no traces of the project's extensive security systems, no cameras, magnetic locks, key card readers, retinal scanners, nothing.

The fifth level -- which I'd never been to before -- was an entirely different matter. The room was pitch-black, save for a single cone of white light coming from the ceiling. The man who stepped into the light was Sam's missing tag-team partner, Wash. In spite of his tacky Hawaiian shirt, he began speaking of world-shaking events. And he had some friends with him: Pinnacle, and more clone soldiers. Pinnacle was unusually quiet, while Wash started gloating about how the experiment to create new metahumans was a resounding success. Raz was impulsive as usual, and found out that they had another force field set up. He did at least give us a few puzzle pieces. Glenn was not part of their plans, for example. And they still know far too much about us. He offered to answer one question, and while I was trying to formulate a question about the nature of the catalyst, Jack asked him how to take down the force field. Wash's answer was, "Take out the power for 15 city blocks." Which tells us a bit more than he probably intended. Their force field device doesn't have an independent power source, and it uses a large amount of electricity. The big question is whether they need to set it up in advance or they can simply deploy it quickly had have it somehow drain the power automatically.

They tried to work their vanishing act, but when Glenn opened the elevator, there was Pinnacle with four soldiers, and more started pouring in through the doors. Pinnacle was a formiddable opponent to say the least, but this time he seemed virtually invincible. He went beyond his usual inhuman combat skill, and everything we brought against him he either anticipated or outright ingored. He batted Glenn away, took Razmus' claw attack unfazed, my Rider Drill did nothing against his armor, he happily inhaled the burning steam vapors Sam brought to bear and ignored it when Sam froze them in his lungs, and he simply stepped out of the way every time Jack tried to use his shadow powers. Seeing that this was getting us nowhere, I used the Mega-Beam, firing it past him at the soldiers in the elevator and sweeping it upwards until I blasted the ceiling above Pinnacle. The falling rubble made a massive dust cloud, and when it cleared, there was no sign of him. The soldiers faded away and were gone. We beat a hasty retreat as the klaxons began to sound.

But there was still more in store for the evening. A massive motorcycle growl sounded in the streets, a 1000cc engine, and a sound I knew. A custom Fenrir bike streaked past us, and I swear I saw a long red scarf streaking behind it. The other Rider.

Razmus decided to spend the night at a hotel, to avoid my grandfather. The old man is proving to have a lot of information, though as Glenn pointed out, he's undoubtedly not telling us everything he knows. What he did tell me was that we were probably dealing with Wild Rider, a maverick Rider who wanders the universe on his own, and unusual in that he fights hand-to-hand. But what he was doing on Earth, he had no idea. When I asked him if it was normal that I was having so many dreams about my father, he just said, "I miss him too."

The next day Razmus showed up in time to go to Akiba with Suzuka, who had already made a little plushie of him to hang on her bag. She makes those of most of the boys she likes, though some wind up with pins stuck in them. I don't know how it went, and I'm not sure I want to.

Glenn and I went to visit the auto shop where dad's motorcycle was built. Mr. Shige Matsumoto was there, and he took us down to his hidden underground shop where he was working on his secret custom bikes. When we asked about Wild Rider, he was shocked too. He'd made three bikes for my father. One was destroyed in Paris (so it was the Eiffel tower), one was in the National Historical Museum (we need to check to see if it's still there), and the third was there in the garage, an updated version that was intended to be a present for Ryo's 18th birthday. Matsumoto was unfazed when he found out that there had been a change of plans, and he was happy to give me the key.

It turned out to be just in time, because Wild Rider himself pulled up in front of the garage just as we got back upstairs, pointed at me (and how the hell did he know that I'm a Rider?) and said, "RACE ME." So, I raced him. We both had a couple of the most powerful bikes in the world, and we tore through city streets before we found our way onto a mostly empty highway loop. I never quite got ahead of him, but I never fell behind either. I always liked motorcycles -- it's one of the few things where I'm a lot like my father -- but this was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Even now I'm itching to ride some more, just for the hell of it. But Wild Rider wasn't content to just race; he screeched to a halt, hopped off his bike, and took up a fighting stance. With the helicopters circling overhead, we fought. His punches hit hard, sending me flying a couple of times even in my heavy armor, but the Rider Gemini Slash apparently did enough damage to convince him to turn tail and leave the scene.

I got back to the house as quickly as I could without being followed. We'd been on the news, which was now buzzing with that "Rider Lady" nonsense. I really need to come up with a name of my own, but then I have no idea what my adapted armor will even look like. From the picture I took with my cameraphone before the race, my grandfather was surprised to find that Wild Rider's armor had changed somewhat, and from the description I gave, he said the voice had changed as well. If there is someone new who took up the mantle of being Wild Rider, then it had to have been someone with the Rider's genetic factor that makes transforming possible. With the sighting the Watcher mentioned, plus the two times I saw him with my own eyes, it can't be a normal human. Grandfather said the only other person on the planet who could do it would be Ryo, except he's not old enough. It could explain his simplistic fightng style -- nothing but big, powerful punches -- but I'm not about to jump to conclusions. If the catalyst let me use the Mega-Brace in spite of being a woman, there's no telling what might've happened to someone else. Even still, I took the opportunity to look through Ryo's room (I used Sam the wrestler to distract him) just in case, but there was nothing apart from the usual boatloads of Mega-Rider merchandise, even more than I remember (I should've guessed they'd have "10th Anniversary Memorial" merchandise coming out). I really hope he was just playing soccer. Oh, and Razmus called me to congratulate me on a cool fight.

The thing that's still bugging me is that Pinnacle and his friends have such good surveillance on us. They seem to know every move we make, though details of the conversation proved that they didn't know what was said in my house, at least, even while my grandfather wasn't there. I wonder if we could use their watchful eyes to our advantage somehow. And I can't believe Razmus actually thought I'd look at him differently because of his ancestry. Just being Raz is more than enough. And I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and someone to come tell me I can't be a Rider because I'm a girl. My mother has been quiet as ever (do I take after her?), my grandfather was a little surprised, but mostly just took it in stride, and Wild Rider said all of two words to me in the whole of his little test. I can't stop now; heroism is just as addictive as nicotine (my grandfather smokes too, indoors), and probably worse for your health in the long run.

Next up is Ryo's big soccer match, and we have four hours to kill until then, which isn't enough time to go to the museum. At the rate things have been going, we're probably due for another incident there. With more media coverage.

Moonsick Part I

2006-06-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

I sort of "accidentally" wound up working a bit on Moonsick, one of the games in my planned trilogy of Superflat-inspired RPGs, we are flat, owing in part to having finally bought Takashi Murakami's Little Boy book, and in turn getting inspired to pull out Junko Mizuno's Pure Trance (which is very unlike any other manga I've ever seen, and a bit weird even compared to her other works). The thing with Moonsick is that I'm finding it surprisingly easy to control my writing style in the same way I do when writing pure prose. I think reading Schauermärchen and especially Lacuna Part I did a lot to help me get there.

Lacuna does certain things that could put off a casual browser (some of which I intend to avoid), and I didn't bother checking it out until a forum post tipped me off to why the game is the way it is. It's called Part I even though Sorensen has specifically stated that there will never be a Part II (Second Attempt notwithstanding), it was the inspiration for the unfunny (IMHO) April Fool's joke that got him banned from RPG.net, and everything describing the game is full of vague, leading questions and almost nothing solid. Nothing about the city in the collective unconscious or that there's a fascinating set of game mechanics dealing with heart rate that's central to the game, just cryptic stuff about Spidermen and the Blue City. The thing is, reading the book doesn't actually answer all that many of those questions. There's no such thing as a "right" way to play any given RPG, and in the case of Lacuna Part I that's even more true than usual because it very deliberately forces anyone who plays it to fill in some gaps on their own. The back of the book gives hints, but even the GM doesn't know what the designer intended the true nature of the Girl to be.

Moonsick is about girls who can't grow up, who live on the moon and look down at an irradiated earth and wonder if the world was ever something different. It's about feeling powerless and having a hard time making meaningful choices. The works of Junko Mizuno, Aya Takano, and Chiho Aoshima (amongst others) inform some of the game's feel. The wording of the text, which stays rooted in this fictional world as much as possible, treats readers of the players' section like children, and the game mechanics force them to make several choices right off the bat that seem pointless and aesthetic but are potentially significant in a purely arbitrary way. The number 28 matters in Moonsick for the same reason it's significant in Akira.

The other thing with this game is that I'm winding up wanting to use visuals in very specific ways. The "rabbits" the game constantly refers to are not cuddly leporids (I'm not 100% sure what they are just yet), but the game text is not going to explain what they are, period. Instead I'll have an illustration of one. Similarly, the fact that the girls on the moon all wear the same kind of white slip will only be shown in pictures, and one of the choices in character creation will be to pick out a hairstyle from a chart. I'm considering doing something similar with the various mutants on earth (like the Meltyplane and Prettyhead), purposely making it so the GM holds up a picture when the thing appears in the game, because it's as close as he's got to a description himself.

I have some vague ideas, but I really need to sit down and think about what rules the game needs, and what I want them to do. I think I'm designing a narrativist game, but I also suspect that simply designing a game about girls who live on the moon with rabbits that aren't rabbits would be a better use of my time.

Perfect Explosion

2006-06-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

I sure have been posting a lot here lately. Writing up 80 or so maneuvers for Thrash 2.0 is going to be interesting.

My forum monkey habit has been really bad lately, but I do come across cool stuff now and then. Two games by other people I want to call attention to:

Perfect 20: Levi from RPG.net has this stripped-down variant of d20 he created. It's not quite perfect (heh) but in many ways it's a thing of beauty.
Panty Explosion: I swear I am not making this up. I usually suck at titles, and this... this one just takes your breath away. It's an RPG about the fucked up lives of Japanese schoolgirls, some of whom have psychic powers, though it's rare for anything good to come out of using them. He's got a PDF of a playtest version he's showing around for comments. I want to give this a try some time.

Hello, Old Friend (Thrash 2.0)

2006-06-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a chance to do any testing with Halo: The Covenant War, but over at the Fudge Forum a fellow who goes by CmdrCody posted saying that he gave it a spin with his friends and they had a blast. I mostly design games because (1) I wanna play them with my friends, and (2) designing games is fun, but being able to share them is definitely nice. That third one is part of why my next big thing is to get back into working on Thrash 2.0, something that, if my old notes are any indication, I've been failing to do since 2002. Of course, I've mentioned here and elsewhere that this partly has to do with me getting so much more experience with RPGs, from every angle (designer, player, GM, reader, theory, etc.).

Thrash 2.0 has a lot of major changes, but compared to some of the things I could be doing with it in terms of creating a fighting game system (like going all Narrativist all of a sudden) it's still true to the earlier versions. And it's still doing a genre that no one else is really bothering with right now. There are some new martial arts related RPGs (like Weapons of the Gods and Final Stand), but they've tended more towards the kung fu movie end of things. Living Room Games had announced their Capcom World Tournament thing a while back (and I was very interested, even if I wasn't hellbent on playing it), but a few months ago they announced on their forums that it was going on "indefinite haitus." I don't think I've ever heard that from an RPG publisher before, but I think it's safe to say that CWT is kaput. The LRG guy was scant on details, and no doubt had to be for contractual reasons, but the combined weight of printing and licensing costs were apparently the main problem. This kind of thing is part of why I don't particularly aspire to run my own company. The indie approach I think would work much better for me.

While I've been a fan of Street Fighter for ages (and of KoF, DarkStalkers, Samurai Shodown, etc.), I'm planning to concentrate primarily if not exclusively on original content for Thrash 2.0. I already have a laundry list of things I want to add to the game (and Weird Powers is at the top), though I'm going to be putting out Thrash 2.0 under a Creative Commons license, so everyone will be free to make whatever they want for it anyway. I also want to try to be more active on the mailing list, and having a version of the game I can stand to look at will help make that happen. ^_^; I'm also thinking of putting together an inexpensive POD version, so that those who are so inclined will be able to order a nice printed book, but that'll wait until I've gotten through plenty of playtesting, feedback, and editing, and added some artwork.

At the moment, I've gotten the basic framework of the game all figured out. It was pretty simple overall, and what innovations and changes I've made were mostly either logical extensions of what was there before (like the more extensive rules for super bars) or stuff that should've been blindingly obvious (like getting rid of styles as a character trait). The bulk of the work I have to do right now is, unfortunately, the annoying grunt work of putting together the stats for all of the character traits, especially the maneuvers. Granted, I need to take care of writing the GM chapter too (which, like everything else, I'm rewriting from the ground up), but it's the maneuvers and whatnot that will fill the system out to the point where I can run playtests. Just like with writing novels, everything I work on has gotten more time-consuming, but of better quality when it finally does arrive. :P

After so long writing/designing RPG material, I think I'm starting to get tired of writing descriptions of skills and other traits. To a certain extent it's possible to design an RPG without these, or at least without too many of them, but apart from the annoyance it causes when I have to sit down and write descriptions--which inevitably becomes repetetive and boring--it's not worth it to try to fit the whole game around that design concept. Risus has only player-defined traits for a specific reason, but other games rely on pre-defined ones for specific reasons. I just wish I could figure out a good way to write them without getting bored, especially considering that if I'm bored writing that part of the game, the reader can't be all that enthralled either. The only time I ever manage to make that sort of thing remotely interesting is when I get sarcastic, but that only works for certain games (like with Mascot-tan).

Did you notice I've been trying to talk in terms of "designing RPGs" instead of "writing RPGs"? There was a blog post (and crap, I can't remember whose it was) that pointed out that there is a difference, and an important one. I think it's important to keep in mind that what I'm doing here is making games. There's a side of it that's similar to writing stories (but then, I do that separately), but I feel I need to try to give higher priority to the design aspect, and thereby make better games.

And once the beta version of Thrash 2.0 is done, I need to get back into Tokyo Heroes, my sentai/magical girl RPG (the combination makes sense if you read the game). All that one really needs is for me to finish up the rules for bad guys and write up some of the sample characters, and it'll be ready to playtest. I really do come up with too many projects for myself.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 13

2006-06-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

Today was about me, apparently. I came to Japan wanting answers, but I didn't expect to be buried in them without trying.

On the plane, Razmus was relatively well-behaved, and he even apologized for the "sellout" comment. He also showed me a polaroid of him and his parents, obviously from a number of years ago, and said that he might've said such a thing out of jealousy.

Mom and Ryo met us at the airport, and neither has changed much. Ryo's soccer team is on its way to the division finals, and mom is... well, mom. For some reason Razmus felt the need to tell my mother, in broken Japanese, that he is "Hikaru's boyfriend that he met on the internet." He seemed annoyed that I shut him down ("こいつ、彼氏なんかねぇよ。"). He either has a poor sense of humor or doesn't understand that my mother wouldn't have believed it for a second. He forgets that we've only known each other for about six weeks.

The house is just as I remember it though. It feels like I've been away a lifetime, but really it's only been a matter of months. The next morning, Eri, Takeshi, and Suzuka arrived, and it surprised no one that Suzuka was all over Razmus. What surprised me was that she got him to agree to a date of sorts -- a trip to Akiba.

When mom asked me to go buy some salmon at the market, and I wound up with Razmus and Sam tagging along, and that's when business started trying to ambush me. There was a scruffy Westerner in the market, who was fitting in perfectly. He telepathically introduced himself as the Watcher, and told me to say hi to Glenn for him. He went on to say that he was born in the 1700s, that he had a premonition that something important was going to happen soon, that there was another Rider operating somewhere in Japan, and that we should check out Project Perseus' abandoned Tokyo facility. Razmus and Sam neither saw nor suspected anything at the time.

But that wasn't the half of it. I took Glenn and mom into the kitchen to talk about a few things. I'd been gearing up to confess about what I've been doing, but she'd already figured it out. No climax. "I wouldn't be your mother if I didn't know." What other surprises does she have? Glenn was surprised to hear about the Watcher, to be sure. Then my erstwhile grandfather made his appearance. He looked like a typical wizened old Japanese man, but he had a Brace of his own, and I could see from the look in his eyes that he is a man of experience and power. Then, he let Glenn and I ask questions.

My father really was an alien then, and so is my grandfather. The Riders consider themselves guardians of justice in the universe, and they send Riders to distant planets in need of heroes. Earth already has many native heroes, so they sent only one, my father, some 19 years ago (which would mean I was concieved not too long after he arrived...). The Braces are techno-organic, and contain a memory of sorts, though only some of the first-generation ones are sentient (the Mega-Brace is not one of those... and yet it's 9,000 years old). It draws from a dimensional pocket an organic inner suit that serves as insulation and interface, and an organic outer armor, that wraps around the wearer. My grandfather (his name is Yukimaru) was shocked that I could transform, and while inspecting my armor he noted that it was very close to finally adapting to me. I've been able to use the suit's main powers -- armor, jumping, the Mega-Sword, and the Mega-Beam -- but there's another level, which involves combining them in different ways.

Being a Rider is treated as a hereditary post, but passed down from father to son. Ryo would've been the one to recieve the Mega-Brace next, but (thank god) not until he turned 18. If dad's attitude was typical of Riders, Ryo would make a better fit, but it's a little late for that right now. What is puzzling is that in theory the Brace should've gone into hiding on its own, and then proceeded to appear to Ryo when he came of age. Instead it somehow wound up in the hands of Project Perseus, and then me. On the plus side, if I really do decide to retire, Ryo would be able to take up the fight, but not until he's old enough. On the other hand, when all's said and done he has the power to make the world a better place without becoming a superhero. He'll probably be furious at me for, in effect, stealing "his" superpowers, but that's ironic considering that far more than me he can appreciate a normal life.

The other thing is that my father's people have been waging a war against another race, an implacable enemy that is a bane to civilized life in the universe. And if my grandfather is to believed, Razmus is one of that race. I could tell the old man wanted to rip him apart, but he held back because Razmus is one of my comrades. When my grandfather finally left--vanishing in a flash of light--I went and told the others the parts I felt were safe to tell.

Raz, predictably, immediately went into denial, as though his ancestry somehow invalidated the experiences of his family, the circumstances of his birth. Neither the archeological evidence that points to Japanese people having come to the islands from the mainland, nor the fact that I've been living in San Francisco, nor even the fact that my father was an alien, make me less Japanese, much less not human. Razmus is still Razmus, and the man and woman in the picture are his parents. The problem is, we could find ourselves facing other shapeshifters who aren't so friendly as him or his family. And another thing. Although I know better than to be naive about it, there remains the distinct possibility that what my grandfather told me was only the truth as he knows it. There are two sides to every story.

In any case, with that done, I announced that we were going to investigate Project Perseus' Tokyo facility. And everyone went along with it. I don't think of myself as having leadership qualities, but Razmus is too independent for that, Glenn just doesn't seem to want to tell people what to do if he can help it (and I don't blame him), and Sam and Jack are too passive. Still, when I took the initiative like that, I didn't expect it to work out so smoothly.

Of course, we haven't yet entered the building, so we'll soon find out whether I made a good decision. What we're approaching--by train--is outwardly a fairly ordinary office building in the middle of the city. It's since been leased out to another, more innocuous organization. I have to try to remember where the research labs and such were located. I think most of that stuff was in the second and third basement levels.

I'm glad no one saw me the morning after we arrived. I woke up, and something about the dream I had made me wake up crying. I still can't remember what it was about, but I coudn't stop crying anyway. That isn't like me.

H:tCW continued/24-hour Hikikomori

2006-06-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

I finally get Halo up (and Louis Wu at halo.bungie.org was kind enough to post a news item about it), and I've already got a laundry list of things to add:

Some more rules options for character creation, damage, and so forth. Some for putting the more standard Fudge rules back into the book, some new stuff.
Other optional rules for running a Red Vs. Blue style game.
Filling out the rest of the variants of the Covenant aliens (e.g., I have several flavors of Elites, but I need to add Rangers, Honor Guards, and a few others).
Stats for important characters from the games. Tartarus is going to be interesting.
Stats for semi-canon toys like the flamethrower and ATV.
Details for stuff relating to the Halo ringworlds themselves -- stats for the Sentinels and the Flood.

Anyway, in a few minutes I'll be starting my 24-hour RPG. I've posted about it before, but to reiterate (for myself as much for the miniscule number of people who actually read this) it's going to be a "solo RPG" about hikikomori. A friend of mine suggested making it a more standard RPG, but with the different players taking on the role of elements of the shut-in's deranged mind, but stuff like that has actually been done before, if mostly in the indie scene (Cranium Rats comes to mind) and in stuff like 24-hour RPGs. So for this exercise I'll be sticking to my original idea, which is a little bit choose your own adventure, a little bit RPG, and a little bit writing exercise.

I decided to start after a good meal (which makes my choice of having lunch at Denny's questionable), in the afternoon so that I work until late at night, then sleep, and wake up and get a few more solid hous in. At the moment I have some System of a Down playing in the background ("If it wasn't for bad taste I wouldn't have no taste at all") and on the way home I got a 2-liter of Coke, which I suspect won't last anywhere near as long as it should.

Wish me luck!

Update #1 (4:20 p.m.): Two hours in. I switched to Nine Inch Nails for my tasteless music, and the bottle of Coke is half empty. I should go easier on it. I've written just over 2,000 words, and I've actually figured out the basic framework of the game; I just need to fill in the details. If you try it out, you're going to get a lot of mileage out of those ten-siders.

Update #2 (7:15 p.m.): I realized that I hadn't eaten dinner, so it's time. I also switched computers, since my posture will be better at my desktop (sort of). It's currently up to about 5,300 words, and I really feel like I had the basic design (which was pretty simple, admittedly) in my head, and I just have to finish pouring it out and executing things. Still, five hours so far. I'm remembering the good and the bad about marathon RPG development. Ideally this thing would need a good amount of playtesting to get the numbers in order and balanced, but that's how it goes. And after this I'll be getting back to my freelance work, and then getting back into Thrash 2.0. I decided to switch gears and change from music (Lordi) to anime (Evangelion). Now, back into the action...

Update #3 (9:55 p.m.): After nearly 8 hours straight, and my brain is turning to Jell-O. I've written about as much as I think I can in one sitting, which actually has the game very nearly done. I'm going to write a little bit more, then go to bed and get an early start (I'm weird and I'll probably be up at 6 a.m., or 8 at the latest) and do the remaining writing and editing.

Update #4 (6:05 a.m.): Told you I'd be up at 6 a.m.

Update #5 (7:39 a.m.): Wow. That's it then. Download Hikikomori (I couldn't come up with a better title). Be afraid. I think next time I need to not have so much of it in my head before I start. Like, not even a concept.

Update #6 (10:11 p.m.): Yay! It's official!

Halo: The Covenant War, LAUNCH!

2006-06-11T03:53:00.000-07:00

It's definitely nice to actually get a project moving. I've uploaded the initial draft of Halo: The Covenant War, the aforementioned Fudge-powered RPG adaptation of Bungie's Halo video games. It's completely untested, but them's the breaks. Any comments would be appreciated. New versions and new matieral will follow paytesting.

My artist friend also realized that I suck at inking and coloring, especially comapred to him (which was not a big revelation), and took it upon himself to re-do the coloring for the forthcoming paper minis:

Up next is an adventure scenario for Halo, then Thrash 2.0 (fighting game RPG), and then Tokyo Heroes (sentai RPG), and I have entirely too many ideas for what'll come after that. Plus a 24-hour RPG mixed in there somewhere.

Power 19: Tokyo Heroes

2006-06-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

The Power 19 are a series of questions meant to help guide game designers. I decided to take a stab at answering these for Tokyo Heroes, and later on other RPG projects I've been working on or contemplating.

1.) What is your game about?
Heroes that work together to beat up bad guys.

2.) What do the characters do?
Seek out, confront, and defeat bad guys.

3.) What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?
The GM comes up with the Monster of the Week. The players try to do what they characters would want to do, building up to that episode's final battle.

4.) How does your setting (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The game has a milleu of sorts, but the setting is left up to the individual group. From the source material, there is a notion that heroes are the same in every setting. Despite the similarities and the crossover movies, each year's Super Sentai Series is a totally new setting.

5.) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Characters must be made as a group, with many important details decided by the group as a whole, and thus they have to be concieved as a team.

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
Teamwork is strongly encouraged; going solo is difficult at best.

7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Hero Dice and Karma are the most important form of reward in the game. Hero Dice contribute to the teamwork side of things -- and are all but required to win battles -- while Karma points reward individuality and thereby create a certain amount of tension.

8.) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
Mostly in a traditional fashion, except that at the end of each session players have an opportunity to give the GM input about what will happen in the next session/episode.

9.) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
The heroes in this game must participate and do things in accordance with their Keys in order for the group to gain enough Hero Dice to function effectively.

10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
It's a dice pool system using six-siders. The base target number is 4 (so dice come up as successes half of the time), but this varies depending on the circumstances. Hero Dice can be spent on any given action by any group member.

11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
The resolution mechanics are intended to strongly encourage teamwork. Characters can almost always assist their friends in some way, even if the target gets pushed up to 6. Unlike previous attempts at the game, it lets each player roll their own dice and see their contributions to the whole.

12.) Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Basic character competence is improved by spending Karma points, while new weapons, giant robots, etc., are handed out whenever the GM feels like it.

13.) How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
The fact that Karma is the basis of character advancement adds to the characters' individual drive for achievement, and is meant to create tension. That the GM periodically plays Santa Claus draws in the source material's tendency towards deus ex machina, but also frees players to spend Karma on improving their characters' abilities over time.

14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
Primarily, I want to capture the fun, melodramatic, vivid, and cool style of sentai shows, and get them to play their characters to the hilt.

15.) What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
The game is mostly about a genre, so the emphasis is very squarely on conveying that genre and why I think it's cool enough to be worth the effort of roleplaying to the reader.

16.) Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
Aside from the fact that it's meant to bring what I consider to be a really fun genre into the realm of RPGs, I'm really excited to see how well the Keys/Hero Dice really work. To me it's at the heart of the game, and a big part of what makes it feel like it'll fit the genre.

17.) Where does your game take the players that other games can’t, don’t, or won’t?
The sentai genre has been almost completely overlooked by RPGs, even in Japan.

18.) What are your publishing goals for your game?
My main concern is putting together a fun game to play with my friends, but if I can put together something that other people would actually be interested in, I'll probably try to get it out there, on Lulu.com and RPGnow and such. I don't have the personality or resources to really concern myself too much with it as a commercial venture, but from the beginning I was eyeing this game as possibly something to sell.

19.) Who is your target audience?
People who are fans of sentai, or at least curious about it. It's a small niche hobby, but as I mentioned before there's next to nothing for it in the realm of tabletop RPGs.

Do I post too much?

2006-06-05T21:38:00.000-07:00

Halo: The Covenant War is coming along nicely now that I can spare some time to work on it. At this point I have a few more rules to fill in, and I need to finish statting up some generic NPCs (both UNSC and Covenant), and I'll be ready to hand it over to some friends for preliminary checking before I throw it out onto the internet. Then it'll finally be time to actually try out the game. :3

The aforementioned we are flat idea is coming together better than I would've expected, and at this point I've pretty much decided to go with simple, forgey original systems for all three games to be contained therein. Tenatively, the three games are:

Magical Burst: For a long time the world was without magic, but one day the magic started to come back. The people of the magical worlds can’t survive in the human world themselves, so they would recruit humans to fight for them, to become magical girls. Only, the magic won’t stop coming. Magical girls are becoming a nuisance, and the more of them there are, the stranger and more dangerous they become.
Moonsick: Earth was blown up, so we all have to live on the moon, with the rabbits. Some day we’ll find a way to fix the Earth so it won’t make us sick, so we can go back, but until then the moon won’t let us grow big. Are we even human now?
Spores: Mommy always told you not to eat wild mushrooms, but for some reason you didn’t listen. The mushrooms don’t like you, not at all. Can you get home alright, or will the mushrooms change you?

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 12

2006-06-04T11:49:00.000-07:00

We spoke to Glenn about Razmus' findings, and the implications of what we've learned. We just don't know enough, and we keep finding ourselves thinking around in circles. Glenn told us about the history between himself and Amalgam -- they both became metahumans because of the same nuclear accident -- who may be the one behind all this. Or there might be someone above him. That raises the question of whether Glenn was meant to be involved in this, and so on. Circles.

Razmus and I both got our powers from our parents though, and Project Perseus was trying to use both in some way. Furthermore, there are similarities between the cellular breakdown that would theoretically be caused by normal humans using the Mega-Brace and that which we've witnessed in the clones of Razmus. It's not exactly the same, but the general process -- where chromosomes are broken down at specific points -- is very similar. In the case of the Mega-Brace this is because it's meant "attach" at a genetic level when activated, and ordinary human DNA can't withstand the stress that's being applied at the wrong points. In the case of the clones, it may be a deliberate self-destruct mechanism.

In spite of the excitement the water nymph incident caused, the people here in Aegis seem fairly blase about the matter, and reconstruction began promptly. I also visited the costume shop and got a riding outfit as intended. Thankfully that part went smoothly.

The big news today was that Aphrodite was visiting Aegis. At least in terms of PR, she is far and away America's biggest superhero. I don't share Raz's pathological need to insult her at every turn -- a need that in him exceeds any pragmatism -- but (apart from Jack) we're all in agreement that she's an arrogant bitch and not qualified to call herself a superhero anymore. It was her own arrogance and impulsiveness that cost Avatar her powers and split up the Watchmen (a lesson Razmus needs to remember I think), and the moment there were no cameras around she revealed her true colors, and it wasn't pretty. That she has fans doesn't surprise me; it's the absolute devotion she's afforded. No one, human or metahuman, can even stomach the idea of her being tarnished in any way, even by a 16-year-old who to all outward appearances should be of no consequence whatsoever. People act like she's above the law, and by now she probably believes it too. And the control of information about her on the internet and in the media is downright Orwellian. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt -- she does at least give the world a positive view of metahumans -- but that was a waste. She would be an impossibly powerful foe if it came to that.

Razmus has been a lot more friendly and such (and he even listened to me when I told him not to make pointless trouble by throwing a tomato at Aphrodite), but he still can't help but find ways to infuriate me. In one of his regular visits to the comics store he picked up a Mega-Rider manga tankoubon -- I didn't know they published them in English -- and when I mentioned about the extensive Mega-Rider merchandise (and Ryo's collection of such) he immediately went conclusion-jumping and assumed that my father (you know, the one that Raz knows nothing about, much less has ever met) was a "sellout." I'm going to let it slide this time.

I wonder if these dreams are because of the Mega-Brace. I hate feeling helpless. Two more weeks to go, and they're passing so quickly. I called mom and told her Glenn and I -- and three more -- were coming. When I asked about my grandfather, she just said, "We'll talk about that when you get here." I suppose since she married him she must know something about my father, but it never occurred to me that there'd be something she was keeping from me. She's always seemed so normal, and I think that's what dad liked about her.

Too Many Goddamn Ideas

2006-06-03T22:48:00.000-07:00

As usual, the amount of inspiration I get far exceeds the amount of stuff I can actually work on. Here's a quick rundown of the various things I've been thinking about. I'm sure I forgot a few.

Thrash 2.0: The vastly overdue new version of my old fighting game RPG is turning out pretty nicely... so I just need to find time to actually work on it. Original system, though the original version was heavily influenced by Interlock/Mekton Z and SF:STG, and the new version shows a bit of Cinematic Unisystem influence too. Once I have it up and running it'll be time to put together second edition Weird Powers rules, amongst other things.
Tokyo Heroes: My crazy sentai/magical girl RPG. Also coming along nicely, but in dire need of playtesting once it's done.
Catgirl: A tongue-in-cheek White Wolf-ish RPG about catgirls in a modern-day setting. Powered by a weird variant of Fudge.
Halo: The Covenant War: A Halo RPG. Powered by a different weird variant of Fudge.
Distorted Futures: A dystopian ass-kicking RPG.
Hikikomori: A solo RPG where you play a guy who almost never leaves his room and may or may not be going insane. I want to try this as a 24-hour RPG.
Eternal Saga: A fantasy RPG in the style of Japanese CRPGs. I've been failing to work on this one for ages, though there are a few neat ideas in there.
Something along the lines of Alien Nine, using Sorcerer. Player characters are schoolgirls who have to live with alien symbionts. Will you stay human, or will you become something else?
Karyuu Densetsu: A revised version of my original Thrash campaign setting.
WFL: The World Fighting Leage, a WWE-ish campaign setting for Thrash.
Tiny Aliens/Battle Maids/Puzzle Girls: Three relatively self-explanatory campaign settings for Mascot-tan. Maybe in one book.
Aniverse: Exploring the anime multiverse. This was originally a BESM book, but I never really finished it, and now I have some new ideas to incorporate. If I ever get around to redoing it, I'd prolly use OVA and/or BESM d20, in order to freely use the rules on my own.
we are flat: Somehow I find myself wanting to try to do a mini-anthology of anime-inspired RPG settings that attempt to put some of the Superflat aesthetic into a roleplaying game. This may or may not be a terrible idea. I'm thinking there would be three in here, and one would be an even more twisted new version of Magical World. Not sure what system to use, but I'm eyeing OAV. Maybe Fudge instead, or maybe a forgey original system for each one. I have a ton of other ideas for less acid trippy anime mini-settings too.
Our Truth & Justice campaign has wound up developing a fairly interesting original superhero setting with a wealth of nifty characters, and once the campaign is finished I think it'd be cool to compile all of that into a book.

With this much stuff, plus a stack of indie games I want to give a whirl (mainly octaNe and The Mountain Witch), I'm thinking that when the current epic campaign finishes up I should try to organize a regular "anthology campaign," which is to say a weekly grab-bag of mini-campaigns, one-shots, and playtests.

I'm also considering attending GenCon SoCal this year and running something too. Halo is definitely high on the list.

Googlism

2006-06-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

I don't really have all that much of an ego (at least, I like to think so), but every now and then I google for my own name. Today I found this, and I'm kind of at a loss for words. ^_^;

Character Playing Pieces

2006-05-31T10:23:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to participating on the Story Games forum, which is proving to be fun and interesting, and, as stated, a good midpoint between RPGnet and the Forge. I wound up starting this thread, which turned out to be fairly interesting.

Yesterday a friend of mine was at KublaCon, and he picked up a copy of a Japanese game at the dealers room, which turned out to be a Japanese game company's fanservicey entries into Flying Buffalo's Lost Worlds "fantasy combat books," called "Queen's Blade." Each book represents a character, and you actually trade books with your opponent so they get a "first person" view of your character. This in turn reminded me of Cheapass Games' Button Men, where your playing piece is a button with numbers on it, that represents a character, not to mention Brawl, where each character is represented by a specific deck of cards.

I was wondering if this approach had been tried in an RPG context before, not as a thing done just for a convention game, but as part of the design, and from the replies, it had, basically in a few different types of contexts:

Superhero and other RPGs that involve highly iconic characters. The original Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR is a good example in that it was designed mainly for using the pre-made Marvel characters, and the rules for original characters resulted in PCs that were random and potentially underpowered. (The "fanfic" approach).
LARP games routinely have pregens of some kind, intended to set up certain situations in how they interact, but still fairly open-ended. So (assuming I'm understanding this right) if you get a particular character, it's assigned that he has goal X, but how and why he's after it is left up to the player. (The "plotting" approach).
There are some games from the indie scene that have their whole concept based around a specific group of characters. Jonathan Walton in particular has taken that approach in several games (e.g., Kamikaze Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan is basically a GM-less word game for two people, with two very specific, archetypal characters). (The "iconic" approach).
Certain games have archetypes that define most of the stuff about a character. In Unisystem games this is more of a way providing examples and showing how to use the character creation system, while in Tenra Bansho Zero the archetypes are most of what you do in terms of character creation, on account of the game being designed for extremely fast play. (The "play aid" approach).

Obviously, an RPG has different needs from a game like Lost Worlds or Brawl when it comes to characters. Each Brawl deck/character has a distinctive look and style, but the original set had no character bios whatsoever, while the Queen's Blade Lost World books have about two paragraphs at most. "Character creation" is one of those persistent memes in RPGs, and I think even indie games haven't challenged it all that much (YMMV, change for change's sake is dumb, etc.).

Aside from the aforementioned approaches, I'm wondering what kinds of RPGs could put pregenerated characters to especially good use, especially in the style of the aforementioned table games with pretty illustrations and all that. I do think it'd be neat to put together a "custom build" of Thrash, meant specifically for using a particular fighting game cast. Using PCs as "playing pieces" in a sufficiently Gamist RPG might be a good way to go.

What's in a name?

2006-05-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

John Kim's LJ has been home to a raging debate/discussion about "traditional" and "nontraditional" RPGs, along with some clashing personalities here and there. The Forge has put a lot of energy into defining itself as being a community that explores and transcends traditional roleplaying games. One of the things the comments on this post bring to light is that the notion of what constitutes a traditional RPG is pretty poorly defined.

Of course, if RPG.net is any indication, there are a lot of terms for which roleplayers have fuzzy and/or divergent ideas about what they mean. I distinctly remember a thread that turned into a raging debate over what constituted a "splatbook." The term comes from how White Wolf had Clanbooks, Tradition Books, Tribe Books, etc. for their various lines, so people got into the habit of calling them "*books online, and then the * got pronounced as "splat." But people couldn't agree on whether or not (for example) the class-specific D&D books constituted splatbooks. I think this is partly because the RPG hobby is small and decentralized, and even the very basic bits of terminology that everyone can pretty much agree on vary, particularly among the big players, for no good reason. If you look carefully, D&D is an "Adventure Game," and Vampire is a "Storytelling Game." (Mark Rein-Hagen was trying to make a point with the "storytelling" stuff, even if WW has since tried very hard to distance itself from its early pretentionsness, just as the indie games that call dice rolling processes "Conflict Resolution" are doing it for a purpose).

Anyway, one point that was raised was that traditional RPGs have a certain kind of power structure between the participants. There's some definite variability -- no two groups play the same way of course, and the GM can ultimately do whatever he wants -- but in general a game like D&D does more to moderate interaction through game mechanics. Character advancement, for example, is a detailed and complex matter, and moreover something a player with the knowhow can do independent of the DM. It's quite a contrast to, say, Fudge's subjective character advancement, not to mention Dogs In The Vineyard. I've been playing with a group that consists mostly of friends I've known for over a decade, so I'm not having to take chances playing with strangers, and thus not feeling any need for the added moderation.

With our current campaign, I'm starting to think that doing the superhero genre properly requires a certain amount of trust, because the characters are defined in large part by their powers, yet it's a part of the genre that circumstances can remove, alter, or otherwise fuck with anyone's powers from time to time.

The inevitable problem with definitions is that when you create a definition from the thing in front of you it works fine, but then when you try to use the definition to decide whether or not something falls within the area of your shiny new term there winds up being a lot of quibbling, especially with regard to stuff on the egdes. A lot of Forge games are based around altering the power structure of the game -- shifting narrative control in mechanically interesting ways and such -- but at a certain point (say with a game like Capes that does away with the GM entirely) you wind up with people questioning whether what you've created is really an RPG. For that matter "nontraditional" and "indie" aren't the same thing (and for that matter, "indie" and "Forge" aren't the same thing either). John Wick's Cat and Enemy Gods have an unusual take on what kinds of characters and situations you roleplay, but the game mechanics aren't anything unfamiliar. Mostly your cat or epic hero is rolling six-sided dice and counting successes, and the GM is the GM like usual.

This is turning out to be longer and more rambling than I intended, but that's okay.

Really, the main thing I like about the indie RPG scene is that it's done a lot to bust wide open what's considered appropriate genres and whatnot for an RPG. Ten years ago, if someone told you there'd be a brilliant RPG about mormon cowboy inquisitors, you'd probably have called them crazy. And now he have DitV, Cat, The Moutain Witch, Dead Inside, Breaking The Ice, and so on. Of course, White Wolf was started with a similar breaking down of walls in mind; you don't have to kill the monsters, you can be one (and not quite in the Flying Buffalo Games' Monsters! Monsters! sense), whether for deep roleplaying or simply a new breed of power fantasy.

I am so not going to comment on the social aspect of this traditional/nontraditional divide, mainly because it involves extensive wankery on both sides.

So, I'll revisit that "I am 3d6" post from a while back. I've been playing New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, and looking at previews of Super Paper Mario, and realizing just how incredibly cool the Psychotronic Mario Brothers thing that dyjoots posted to RPGnet really is. I was in one of the castles in NSMB, and it occured to me that Bowser has the power to force his Koopa Troopers to serve him even after death, and for that matter he's recruited rogue mushrooms, living bullets, and ghosts to his side, in addition to having statues of himself that shoot laser beams (in SMB3) in his main castle. I also noticed something that would only happen in a video game when Mario died from being caught between the scenery and the edge of the auto-scrolling screen. So the list of one-shots and mini-campaigns I want to run now goes:

octaNe
The Mountain Witch
Halo: The Covenant War
octaNe (Psychotronic Mario Brothers)

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 11

2006-05-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

It's been a long day. And a long night. After the water nymph incident was finally done with, everyone broke off to do their own thing. I went to look at motorcycles, and learned that I don't have anywhere near the funds to get something that would actually support my armor. I picked up a book on metahuman genetics to give me something to do in my free time (I need a new hobby), and wound up having dinner with Glenn, Sam, and Jack. Over dinner, Glenn suggested we look into getting some kind of superhero costumes, for anonymity. Considering that Pinnacle and who knows what else are out there, in principle this sounds like a good idea. No tights for me though. I'm thinking a motorcycle riding outfit.

I'd suspected that Raz had slipped off somewhere to indulge his martyr complex, and it turned out he had in fact gone off hitchhiking to the south of Aegis. The guy from the Super-Mentors gave us a lift to go look for him, and we found him on the side of the road. He got his powers back (as I was sure he would, one way or another) and then some, so at least he's got one less thing to complain about. When he was in the car, Raz handed me something he'd picked up, a folder of experimental data. And the watermark on every page was the twin snakes and sword of the Perseus Project.

Now, here's the funny thing. He insisted that the two of us talk about it in private. He's confiding in and trusting me. And reminding me a lot of Ryo, actually. Anyway, from what Raz told me and what was in the file, it looks like the project has facilities in the U.S., including an abandonded one that's too close to Aegis to be a coincidence. The files showed chemical, genetic, and radiological experiments--stuff that the project's stated ethical guidelines expressly forbids--being used on human subjects. The data is incomplete, a sheaf of surviving pages from at least a dozen different lab reports, and the chemicals and processes being used are exceedingly complex, but I've started trying to piece it together. More importantly, Raz said that in the facility -- which was left wide open -- he found another clone, only this one had been left in a tube of some chemical compound, and telepathically begged him for release, for death. He also found out the locations of some of the other clones, most in the Americas, but a couple in Japan. I told him about what they were planning with the Mega-Brace. I keep thinking I left something out.

He told me to call him "Razmus." I don't know what that means exactly, but I suspect it's the beginning of the end of the friction between us.

Does the cellular breakdown that the Mega-Brace would cause to humans have some connection to the way the clones of Raz turn into a dehydrated black goo? I need to go over that data again. Plus Raz brought me some new samples. Having him around really is like having another little brother at times.

I need answers. This whole thing is driving me crazy. And now more than ever I think I'm only going to find those answers by going back to Japan. If I don't get some kind of answer, some kind of sign, I may just decide to drop the superhero act and try to live some kind of normal life. It's not too late to apply to Todai again.

I've been a different person once before. There was that little space between when my father died and when I started middle school, when I was the klutzy crybaby, and apart from the teachers, the only one in my class who wore glasses. Oneechan (who was actually my best friend Chiaki's older sister) was the one who helped me grow up a little. She also exposed us to a fair amount of second-hand smoke, but nobody's perfect. Chiaki, Miho, Karen, Oneechan, and me. I think Chiaki's family is still in Yokohama.

I had that dream again. I really miss my father.

2006-05-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

There's this and there's this. The comments add more context to the story, but ultimately make your brain melt. If I ever let myself get caught in stupid flamey arguments about games and thereby wasting time that could be spent creating or enjoying games, someone please slap me. Games are for having fun. Stupid flamey arguments are not fun.

I'm oversimplifying. My workload is wearing on me. Outside of my close friends almost no one reads this stuff anyway.

...

Or do you?

Oh yeah. I ordered The Mountain Witch (IPR was having a sale, so I finally caved in), and finished reading it the other day. Along with octaNe and the Halo game I need to finish writing, it's now on the list of games I really want to try out.

Current Mood: Exhausted
Current Music: Pink Floyd - Time

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 10

2006-05-10T14:34:00.000-07:00

Today I got to feel useful.

We took a private jet to Aegis, in the middle of the night. I keep mentioning Raz, but no one else feels the need to shove so many things in other people's faces. He has a way of looking at the world that draws out the flaws in others. So, he accused the metahumans of Aegis of xenophobia. I suppose there's a kernel of truth somewhere in there, but it's leaving out so much of the story, seemingly to give him an excuse to look down on an entire city of people he's never even met. If there's anyone who should understand the desire to get away from people prejudiced against those who are different, it's Raz. Instead, accusations, conflating cause and effect.

Aegis is small and flat and new, and populated not only by metahumans, but their families, and an entire secondary population that takes care of much of the day to day matters. Especially for a nonprofit organization, the facilities of the Super-Mentors is impressive. We signed the paperwork that made us a super-team. Officially. Unfortunately, not too long after we had two problems emerge -- and at this point I can only assume they're in some way related. Sam was feeling exceedingly tired, and had to be hospitalized, while Raz... seemed to have lost his powers.

I decided to investigate what I could, comparing the original samples with the black goo and the new samples taken by the medical center. The metahuman element in Raz seemed to have simply vanished, while Sam was... growing a third DNA helix, making him something unique in the world. It's hard to say what exactly this means, except that it created a new incident. As the process was nearing completion, the water in the medical center started to go crazy. He started creating water nymphs, just like Raz said he did at Sunspot's house, but this time there were several hundred of them, and they began to combine into two colossal ones.

I stopped Raz from going in there. He wants me to trust my instincts and make snap decisions, and that's what he got. He said something odd; he asked how I would feel if someone took the Mega-Brace. I made some lame comment about how "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it," but once again he doesn't understand how I think. I'm not proud of it, but if my conscience would let me be rid of it, I would. If the Mega-Brace hadn't entered into my life, I could be attending Tokyo University right now, and instead I'm lying to my family, risking my life, and wearing my father's mask, all for ideals I haven't really been able to fulfill yet. The only life I can definitely say I saved was that of Swan after all. He said something about how his powers are how he knows who he is. Is this a teenager thing? I know who I am, even if I'm not always happy with it, and the Mega-Brace is at best a symbol, not the article itself.

Glenn and Jack rescued the comatose Sam from the medical center, and I used the Mega-Beam for the first time to help defeat the giant water nymphs. It was quite a sight to see more than 50 metahumans working as one, and an amazing feeling to be a part of something so big. The first one we literally evaporated, and the second one Glenn put oxygen tanks into, and I detonated. I wound up using it four times, and it took a lot out of me.

When the dust settled, the medical center was all but demolished, Raz still had no powers, and Sam was feeling exceptionally healthy. Maybe "Stormcrows" would be a better name for our group. When disaster doesn't come to us, we bring it ourselves, one way or another.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 9

2006-05-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

I'm still off-balance. My life has never changed so much; it was always a succession of grades and schools, the differences more and more meaningless. In our morning training session, Raz had me dance. That I went along with it is a testament to how determined I am to make this superhero thing happen. I remember dancing with Keisuke, the night before he went off to study in England, and I remember not crying and wondering why.

Today was about Raz, mostly. We were investigating a series of seemingly random beatings, by someone who from the surveillance footage might or might not have been the spitting image of him. There were some kind of telepathic messages involved -- "Suffer" -- from someone who must not understand the nature of the human condition. I think I need to get a better grasp of Raz's philosophy of spontanaity in case he decides to try to be a martyr again. Superheroes are supposed to help people, and that includes other superheroes. We caught up with him at the airport, where he was fighting what looked like some kind of clone or duplicate of himself, and some sort of force field kept us from getting involved. When he beheaded his other self, the body dissolved into black goo. I still need to do an analysis, not that we have the facilities to do the in-depth study I'd like to do. He actually handled it fine himself this time, but there's no telling how many others there are out there.

This wouldn't be so frustrating, except I transformed in public. People were running for their lives, and somehow they found time to point a damn television camera, so "Mega-Rider II" is all over the news. I never really thought about what it would be like to be famous, but seeing myself on the news makes my skin crawl. I need to become a different person, a better person, but I can't change fast enough.

Things are moving even faster now. We're probably going to be flying out to Colorado, to Aegis, a town supposedly populated by metahumans, tomorrow. I don't think of myself as a metahuman, but then I don't think I ever quite figured out what a human is in the first place. Life requires certain assumptions of you, including the assumption that those around you have the same kinds of thoughts, feelings, and rights. That people think otherwise is why we need superheroes, I suppose. Still, I wonder. The population of metahumans has been steadily rising through the 20th century and into the present. It's still a small fraction of the world population, but for how long?

The tenth anniversary of my father's death is looming nearer every day. I've never known the world to care much for round numbers -- January 1, 2000 was by all accounts a dull and ordinary day -- but I can't shake the feeling that this will be an exception, if only because someone wishes to make it so.

Webcomic

2006-05-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

I don't often run into it, on account of being a somewhat antisocial college student, but there is still somewhat of a stigma against RPGs. Today's Chugworth Academy reminds me of why no one should care.

Halo: The Covenant War, Vehicle Minis

2006-04-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

I should mention that the Halo minis are only the things that'll be used in the scenario I'm working on (or not working on, since at the moment I'm too busy to seriously work on fun stuff). Hence the vehicles part has only thee (including the Shade turret). Note the different Warthog turrets.

Also, although the guys at halo.bungie.org liked the character minis enough to include them in the random pictures that show up in the upper left corner of the site (though they have hundreds, so it's not like it shows up super often), my artist friend is going to give them a proper inking coloring job. Now I just need the game to go with them... ^_^;

Halo: The Covenant War, Minis

2006-04-26T21:34:00.000-07:00

My artist friend is doing up a art for paper minis for my Halo RPG thingy, and he's completed the major ones (just a couple of vehicles to finish things up), but he left the inking and whatnot to me. So, that's finally out of the way. Eventually we'll put together a PDF or something, but in the meantime here's what they look like:

I'm a big fan of his cartoony style (he does anime well too, as seen in the Mascot-tan illustrations, plus he's doing a piece for Uresia). It's a little weird to look at it just because unlike him I've played both games a whole lot, and the Covenant guys especially have a lot of weird details that you tend not to notice while they're shooting at you.

Power and Consequences

2006-04-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

During our last T&J session, one of the players said something (out of character) that stuck in my mind. The confrontation between Raz and Hikaru was really dramatic, and one of the players said that it's because the players have the amount of power they do that things get so dramatic and intense. I think there's some truth to that, but there's also more to it.

The thing with Raz and Hikaru specifically is that there's a crucible at work. They're very different characters in terms of their motivations and personalities (Red Ranger and Blue Ranger, and then some), and under normal circumstances they'd be off and away from each other in no time. Instead, having become superheroes with common enemies and a very real need to be part of a functional team, they're stuck with each other. This is IMO a big part of what makes Harry Potter work; given a choice Harry would go to a Hogwart's that didn't have the likes of Draco Malfoy and Professor Snape, or House Slytherin in general, just as Draco no doubt thinks the school would be a better place without Harry and his Gryffindor friends. Instead, they both have to deal, and conflicts arise.

Power has the potential to magnify actions, which is what Raz has run into; his super-strength stopped a dangerous supervillain, but it's also about ready to earn a shitstorm of bad publicity and possibly get him sued. Harry Potter is in some ways the opposite of this, since in the HP world magic is more often than not good at mitigating consequences. In Dragon Ball Z, the "Z Fighters" wind up largely keeping their powers a secret from most of the world, and the heroes' rarely if ever have their own abilities go wrong, unless it's directly caused by a bad guy. On the other hand, there is something exciting about the ludicrously strong alien invader who the two strongest warriors in the world had to go all-out to defeat saying, "My boss is listening in on this, and he's ten times stronger than me." After the Frieza Saga (which was where Toriyama originally planned to end the manga) it got kind of dumb at times with the endlessly escalating power, but that first time, watching it on syndicated TV Sunday mornings, I was hooked. Buffy I think did a good job with having power with consequences, and that theme is a big part of what goes into Willow's character in season 6. So, it's not necessarily the power level, but the hold the consequences can have over the characters, something that power level can feed into if done right.

All of the above is why for Exalted I'd probably be most interested in a Dragon Blooded campaign; the Solars are scattered and don't really have a foothold in the Realm, but the Terrestrials are the Realm, with scheming houses and social responsibilities, and even boarding schools where kids (who all desperately hope that they'll exalt) are sent to learn the ways of the society and nobility. But with a modern setting it's that much easier for us to make things spiral off into the land of consequences. Superheroes are public figures -- unlike most WoD characters -- and can run into stuff like lawsuits, making enemies, ticking off allies, etc. that much more easily.

Thoughts On Palladium. Or, Love, Loathing, Nostalgia, and Indifference

2006-04-25T17:04:00.000-07:00

The big buzz on RPG.net this past week is that due to some problems with theft and embezzlement, Palladium Books is in dire financial trouble. The main RPG.net thread on the topic (it's spawned like 10 others) is over 100 pages now, covering the usual range of reactions to things Palladium-related (though somehow the thread hasn't been locked).

I suspect my range of reactions to Palladium is typical.

In middle school and especially high school they were the RPG publisher, accept no substitutes. We played mainly Rifts and Robotech, with a little Heroes Unlimited and TMNT and Nightspawn (screw you, MacFarlane) thrown in for good measure. One of my friends back then whom I don't really talk to anymore had a way of saying memorable stuff and then not remembering it himself, and then if you brought it up in conversation looking at you like you were crazy so hard that other people started to believe him. One of those quotes was with regard to my experimenting with other systems -- both stuff like playing GURPS and making my own games from scratch: "But the Palladium system is, like, perfect. You're the only one who has to be a deviant and make your own systems." My memory is tricky, and full of holes, but certain things stick really well (too well), and I'm pretty sure that that is a verbatim quote, or very close to one. Today that quote represents a hilarious display of naivete -- and the same guy later became primarily a White Wolf gamer after all -- but in high school it summed up the general consensus pretty well. No one saw any real flaws in the game, or any reason to switch to anything else. Part of that, I'm sure, was a result of the fact that none of us really had ready access to other games in the first place. I had Toon (which the aforementioned friend totally missed the point of and called "lame," though my other friends enjoyed it), and we did Paranoia one-shots now and then, but the only store with any substantial RPG selection was the one that to this day puts all the books in shrink-wrap, and anyway very few of us had money to spend on unknown games.

When I first started college, I was starting to really see the glaring flaws in the system, and from then on we never quite settled on any one game. The games we played significantly were Mage, Fading Suns, Thrash, and Mekton Z. On online forums I was sometimes disdainful and critical of Palladium's games to the point of being an immature fucktard at times. Analyzing it now, I would say that the thing is the enjoyment of roleplaying can be relatively independent of the system -- that is, Rifts is fun, but it wouldn't be made less fun by a sensibly chosen alternate system -- so the system should at least have some kind of utility. At that point one of the more fun campaigns I'd run had been all free-form, so there really wasn't any excuse for having to put up with the Palladium system's quirks. In spite of that, it was also around this time that I took all of the stuff I wrote for Rifts through high school -- and there was a lot (I ought to look through it again some time) -- and submitted it to the Rifter, though only one section (on "Space Magic") got published, with illustrations by Wayne Breaux no less. So not only was Palladium my first source of RPGs, but they're responsible for the first time I got published. (My first full RPG book is due out from Battlefield Press some time this summer).

I'm still in college (but that has more to do with me taking so damn long to figure out what I really wanted to major in), but I matured a bit over time, and took a different attitude towards Palladium. I went from the feeling betrayed stage to the nostalgic, "if only my high school memories of awesomeness could be brought back with a better system" stage. I would read through RPG.net threads on Palladium for amusement (actually I still do sometimes), and nod along with the criticisms (this review of Robotech is especially entertaining, particularly when Bill Coffin, who from what I've seen is generally a cool, level-headed guy online, tries to mix it up). Once or twice I tried to come up with Rifts conversions, before Palladium's policies put me off the idea of even doing it just for use among my friends. (The GURPS conversion was going really well, right up until I tried to do vehicles).

Now I find myself feeling pretty emphatically indifferent. Online, some people report places where Palladium's products are selling well, but in my neck of the woods, and from what the majority of people are saying, their stuff is now selling poorly if at all, and stores are ordering less and less. The way my group roleplays has shifted a lot over time, and that has something to do with it. It's been quite a while since we last used a pre-packaged RPG setting of any kind. There was that Planescape campaign I did during our flirtation with D&D3e (and the group's consensus was that the worst adventures were always the ones I got from published modules), but since then we did Macross (an adaptation of the later anime and games, using Mekton Z), Star Sorcerer (original, powered by Fudge), and Truth & Justice (though in spite of the wealth of published superhero characters that could be adapted, our entire setting has consisted of original stuff).

I'm an odd person in that I can't get a proper hate-on going unless I have really strongly negative, intensely personal experiences with something. Having played and run D&D3e a decent amount, I find d20-hate to be just plain silly. For me the worst of it is that it takes some extra work on the DM's part to run the game. And since since I have a solid and close-knit group that so seldom does anything with published in what passes for mainstream in the RPG industry, I don't have any reason to get worked up over what's going on with all that. It gets doubly absurd when we talk about games. If other people want to blow shit up in a post-apocalyptic future or kill things and take their stuff in a dungeon, more power to them. Obviously I think the kind of roleplaying I do is neat and I think it'd be cool to introduce other people to it, but claiming that it's better is kind of like telling people they should give up pop music and listen to punk instead.

I don't know that it reflects positively on me, but Palladium's financial woes strike me as being someone else's problem. If Palladium went under (at this point it seems like it's going to survive) it's entirely possible that it could hurt the industry as a whole, but nothing along those lines could kill it off for my group. Of course, this is my perspective. I'm someone who has never moved to a new town and searched in vain for a new roleplaying group, or been frustrated by a lack of non-D&D groups seeking members, etc. The overlap between the people I hang out with on a weekly basis and the people I game with has always been almost total, and I agree with the sentiment mentioned somewhere or other that if I wouldn't want to just hang out with someone, then I wouldn't want to game with them either. This is partly because a certain portion of a gaming session is going to be spent on what amounts to hanging out anyway. (As the Shooting Dice guy mentioned in a recent post, the "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours of gaming" thing is more like "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours of another kind of fun.")

For better or for worse, I think I've not only outgrown Palladium, but outgrown resenting Palladium too. Palladium is one of those friends from high school I've lost touch with and never worked up any particular desire to see again.

But you know, if by some miracle a new edition of Rifts came out with a substantially improved system (original, licensed, or whatever) I would at a minimum buy the book in a heartbeat.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 8

2006-04-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

I think I'm just going to have to get used to not being able to get a firm footing in things. Invisible waves pressing down from the sky, a motorcycle the other me can't ride, and dreams that are memories of alien delusions. The life of a superhero is punctuated equilibrium, swathes of boredom and sudden electric shocks of adrenaline and death. Survival of the maddest.

Enough poetry. I spent a week with very little to do besides replay the incident with Swan in my mind and worry about the future. I went to the training room by myself a few times, but the weight of everything on my mind left me sprawled on my bed more often than not. There were days like that in high school sometimes, but high school was only rarely life and death. I know why I'm doing this hero thing--my conscience won't let me not do it--but the motivations of the others are alien to me. Glenn did it for years, and I wonder if even he knows why he does it anymore. Sam is just opaque to me, and Jack isn't entirely right in the head. Raz is a lot of things, including a screwed-up teenager whose standard delusions of immortality are validated by real super powers. And I think he's running from something.

I finally talked to Raz though. I've been avoiding it, dreading it. Now that it's over I'm not sure whether I was more concerned about what I would say or what he would say. He's just so damn sure of himself, so sure that just because things went horribly wrong doesn't mean he didn't do the right thing. Being a hero is already treading on thin ice in so many ways, power and responsibility. Of course, he's just like me in that he has a hard time seeing the world through different eyes. He talks about trusting instincts and following your heart, as though it's something you can just pick up. He talks a lot, actually. There are some things you can't learn by trying to learn them.

I don't know how I got this way, though losing my father to a kaijuu when I was eight probably had something to do with it. High school taught me that emotions are a double-edged sword, and that drama is a cave where what you find is what you take in with you. I really wonder if the people in this new life would even recognize me if they saw me in high school. Everything seemed so pointless back then, but I played some of the games anyway as a way to alleviate the boredom. So now I'm a cynic who's tired of relationships and sex, and deeply addicted to nicotine. I have that same floating sensation, only the current is stronger.

Japan shouldn't feel so far away, in time as well as space. But my life now is so far removed from my high school life. When I go back there -- less than two months now -- it won't be the same anyway. But knowing my mom, she's going to make sure I wind up seeing all of my high school "friends." Suzuka, Takeshi, Eri, and the others. Takeshi and Suzuka are the only ones I ever told about my father's secret identity (and that had more to do with Ryo having such a big mouth). I'm trying to imagine introducing them to my new superhero teammates, and any way I look at it the picture includes Suzuka being all over Raz. She always liked the younger pretty boys. As long as they understand that I have no interest in him in that way. And bringing Sam and Jack to Japan would be... an experience.

I'm going to have to tell mom the truth about what I've been doing. If there's anyone who ought to know the truth. I don't know that she'll be happy about it, but better me than Ryo. He's been eyeing the Mega-Brace since he was nine, and he managed to break his leg once without getting into a super-battle (he was playing soccer; I had to go pick him up from school).

Anyway, with Raz I think things are as patched up as they're going to get. He demonstrated why I don't have the same trust in snap decisions: the moment a conversation becomes heated, people say stupid things they don't mean. The best I could come up with under his barrage of self-righteous words was "I don't hate you." That much is true. He infuriates me sometimes, and it would be at best stretching the truth to say that I like him, but there is something there. I can work with him. Next time it's him and Jack who need to do some kind of bonding. Raz gets so skeeved out around Jack I can't help but laugh. To me Jack is mostly just a quiet guy who keeps to himself and occasionally blurts out tasteless jokes.

I think all five of us have a past that's going to haunt us, and it looks like I'm up next. But I'm betting everyone will get their turn.

24-Hour Hikikomori, Part Deux

2006-04-18T15:46:00.000-07:00

A while back I posted about the idea of doing a 24-hour RPG about hikikomori, and today I accidentally brainstormed about it a little bit. I think it makes more sense for it to be some kind of solo game, but I think it should be different from a choose your own adventure type thing. I'm thinking the game would be played in the form of writing a diary, either on paper or in a blog, and rolling lots of dice for various things along the way so the character could accumulate real friends, imaginary friends, insanities, and other stuff along the way that have to be periodically rolled for (or maybe cards or something). It would be kind of a pointless game, but that would be fitting for something about the life of a hikikomori.

Right now I'm going to be too busy to get much done on the RPG front anyway though. Just when I thought the freelance translation work had finished its chain combo, it super cancelled into the biggest job I've had so far. By the time that's all out of the way, it'll be just about time to start graduate school (assuming I get in).

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 7

2006-04-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

Everything is moving so fast, the moment I think I know what to do the situation has already changed. I spend hours seething about Raz, and when we went to visit him in the hospital I wound up not saying any of the things I went over in my head an hundred times. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When the police chief came to visit us after the incident, it turned out he had something for me. The Japanese embassy had sent me a new passport and a renewed 2-year student visa. Which means that (1) someone with the ability to pull strings in both the Japanese and American governments knows what I'm doing, and (2) for the moment they like it.

I finally called home and talked to mom... and everything was fine. I avoided saying too much -- lying by omission -- but I did tell her that I'd met one of dad's old friends. She's met Glenn, and asked me to tell him about how the 10th anniversary memorial for dad would be in 2 months. I forgot to tell him, because the next time I got to speak to him, he got me thinking about plenty of other things. Glenn had no inkling whatsoever that dad was an alien, and really, I only "know" that because he told me when I was about six years old. He pointed to one of the stars in the sky, and said, "I came from there, because this planet needs heroes." He also said he once met my grandfather -- on my father's side. I need to ask mom about that. He also asked whether I'd tried taking my helmet off while transformed. It hadn't occurred to me to try, and now that the notion is in my head, I'm scared.

I have a feeling we're going to wind up going to the memorial. I could use some answers, but I don't want to drag the others into my problems. Only, that's the way things work, and I'm sure they'll wind up pulling me into theirs too.

Sam asked us to come to another of his wrestling shows. Ryo would've loved it, and I'm glad he's in Japan. Apparently it was some kind of big finish, one final match against the Mad Butcher, before he retired from wrestling. I'll spare the details because, really, I can't make heads or tails of them anyway. Jack got involved in it, and it was definitely memorable. Wrestling isn't my thing, but Sam loves it enough to do it in spite of the crappy pay and constant physical abuse, and he had to give it up because he's a metahuman. How far will this go?

Anyway, Glenn insisted we all go to the hospital to see Raz. Not surprisingly, he was already conscious and feeling well enough to make snide remarks. Raz' actions the other day had already started to have repercussions -- the press was having a field day, and a metahuman punching a 50-year-old woman in the throat is apparently much more interesting than the appearance of five new metahumans in the city -- and Glenn's only solution was for us to become an official super-group. When all is said and done, we all agreed to do it. Right now, none of us have anywhere else to go. Eventually we settled on a name: The Gatekeepers.

It's scary and exciting and I may have made a huge mistake, but that's the way it goes. Glenn is like a father figure to me -- he knew that part of my father far better than I did -- Raz is the obnoxious middle-child younger brother I never wanted... and Sam and Jack are just too weird to fit into familial archetypes. When we dealt with Pinnacle we saw how effective we could be when we all worked together, and the confrontation with Swan and Elephant Man gave us a taste of how badly things could go if we didn't.

I really need to explain a few things to Raz. I'm just not good at this, but I don't want to see him drag us all down. He's smarter than that, when he wants to be. I know I'm stressing over this too much, because I got through two and a half cigarettes in the hospital before I realized what I was doing. And everyone else is defintiely stressing too much because none of them seemed to even notice.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 6

2006-04-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

I take back every good thing I've ever said about Raz. Right now he's in the hospital, in a full-body cast, and I never imagined I'd have to avoid visiting someone in the hospital just because I'm too angry at them.

Today started with what has become a regular training session, except that halfway through he asked me to transform and go all-out. Now I think he was testing himself. It's like he just can't let go of the exceedingly simple notion that there could be someone better than him.

Anyway, I went downtown to run some errands -- paying the rent and closing out my old apartment, and dropping off a letter for Sam -- and that turned out to be the start of this bizarre day. Behind me at the bank was a massive man with an elephant head. No, I'm not joking. It turns out he was the metahuman known as the Elephant Man, there to rob the bank. At Glenn's advice I tried to delay him, but there was only so much I could do. The thing about the Elephant Man (or "E," as Glenn calls him) is that he's incredibly stupid, and basically good-natured. The problem is he's incredibly sensitive about his looks and extremely destructive when he gets angry. It turned out he was robbing the bank because a "poor lady" had asked him to, so she could "feed her kids."

Glenn talked him into taking us to see this lady, and she turned out to be Swan. Apparently she was an opera diva whose voice-based metahuman powers ended her career. From there she turned to a life of crime, even using her voice powers to mind-control superheroes -- including Dynamo -- rob banks and such. And it was Mega-Rider, who was immune to her mind control, who saved the day. She's now middle-aged and even more bitter.

We confronted her in her penthouse. She was not happy to see Glenn, and the feeling was definitely mutual. Things were going about as well as they could have, and then Raz got involved. At first his plan wasn't too bad; he pretended to be Swan's "son" and tried to provoke the Elephant Man (he even picked up a jar of peanuts somewhere).

Then, when Swan tried to use her voice powers on us, everything went all to hell. Raz use his full strength to punch her in the throat so hard she went through and out the window. On the 18th story. So, apparently in Raz's demented little world bad people need to just die, and he thinks he knows how to always tell who the "bad" people are and will never make a mistake and kill someone innocent. I didn't get to spend much time with my father, but I do remember him telling me that vengeance isn't justice, and killing isn't heroic. I saved that woman's life, and I saved Raz from becoming a killer. Assuming he isn't already. Is he just too stupid to understand that knocking her out or even just covering her mouth would've been enough? She has a dangerous power (or maybe I should say "had," since he may have crushed her larynx), but physically she's just a middle-aged woman.

The Elephant Man was mad at him too. I didn't get to see what happened, but the two of them came flying out of the window, and E managed to land a second blow on Raz on the way down. Jack and Glenn managed to keep him from being crushed under the Elephant Man, which might've finished him off, but he was still exceedingly injured, like he'd been hit with not one but two freight trains. The last I saw of him, he was being carried off in an ambulance, and it looked like half the bones in his body were broken.

I want to say something like "serves him right," but I can't help but think that once he heals up -- which he'll no doubt do with infuriating speed -- he'll still be certain that he was in the right. It's like what he really wants, as part of some deep instinct, is to just hurt people, and he convinces himself that since he's doing it to "bad" people he must be doing good. Hurting the bad guy only matters insofar as it protects the innocent -- and I'm sure his definition of "innocent" gets conveniently narrow at times too.

From what I know of Raz's physiology he'll be in the hospital for at least another week or two. A normal human would've been dead if they'd suffered the kind of trauma he did, and someone exceptional enough to have survived would need at least six weeks to recover enough to leave the hospital, and even then they'd probably find themselves taking painkillers for the rest of their life. After the way this past week has gone, I definitely need some time away from him.

I still need to call home. I keep thinking too hard about how to keep it from being traced back to me and running around in circles. I need to know what's going on with my mother, and ultimately, I'm going to have to face up to what I've done. Every time I go out in public as Mega-Rider, more people see me, and more questions are going to be asked. Come to think of it, I'd better see if the press is saying anything about me.

I am 3d6

2006-03-29T21:39:00.000-08:00

Today I picked up a copy of the I Am 8 Bit book, from the art show of the same name. The artists have taken imagery from old school video games and reimagined them. When these images are transferred from video game sprites to art, a curious thing happens: it strongly emphasizes just how bizarre they really are. In Super Mario Bros., Mario has to confront walking mushrooms (goombas), floating blocks that may or may not contain prizes, bullets with angry faces, and so on. When you're playing an NES game you're not likely to question these things, but when you look at it in the form of a painting, it suddenly takes on a bizarre, surreal cast. Video games have since moved more towards realism, but a lot of the great, both now and back then, have some profoundly strance concepts behind their simple, addictive gameplay. Pac-Man, Q*bert and Dig-Dug -- which also feature prominently in the book -- are at least as strange Super Mario Bros., and the same could be said for Katamari Damacy.

In board and card games there seems to be a spectrum that runs between simuation and abstraction. On one end there's stuff like the old Avalon-Hill wargames, while at the other end there's (for example) Cheapass Games' Brawl, which presents itself as a fighting card game but is mostly about matching colors. I think video games can be looked at in terms of this spectrum too, even within a given genre (Gran Turismo and Mario Kart are two very different racing games, for example).

But what about roleplaying games? The kind of abstraction I've been talking about mostly comes about as a result of making creative use of the medium itself; a game like Super Mario Bros. probably wouldn't have come about on a game console more powerful than the NES, with sprites limited to a certain size and a definite need for reusable scenery and enemies. In D&D the basic combat mechanic is based around the abstractions inherent in how its hit points and ACs work, and this in a very combat-oriented game ("kill things and take their stuff"). The intent there I suppose was to streamline things -- having all the dodging and weaving implied means that a single d20 roll can resolve whether or not an attack hits well enough to do damage, which is overall pretty nice.

A newer and IMO more interesting example of this is in Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger (from the TRPG Super Session Daikyouen RPG anthology I ordered from Japan). Since it's based on sentai shows it naturally includes "mooks" (the equivalent of Power Rangers' Putty Patrollers), but they're called "dicemen" and each has a six-sided die for a face that actually shows how many HP they have left. This is overall pretty silly (it helps that Seigiranger is pretty tongue-in-cheek) and it shoves the game mechanic directly into the continuum of the game's shared world, and yet at the same time it's a stroke of genius. The game uses playing cards for action resolution, and the dicemen transform the six-siders into a combination prop and play aid.

I'm not saying it's an inherently better approach, but I wonder what it would be like to specifically try to build off of the medium of roleplaying games to the point where realism/plausibility with regard to other media is diminised. Granted, it's probably in the nature of RPGs that this is hard to pull off well, owing to the medium's general attitude towards story, but the possibilities are intriguing.

Catgirl: The Mewoing

2006-03-26T06:36:00.000-08:00

Yet another RPG idea. On RPG.net there's a threat titled "Photoshop a game that doesn't (or shouldn't) exist," and before long anime stuff started filtering into the thread, like Exalted: Kawaii Edition, and that was followed by covers for theoretical fatsplats, starting with The Catgirls. It helps that I have a thing for catgirls, but anyway I almost immediately started having ideas for an actual RPG, with a bit of White Wolf flavor.

So, a modern-day occulty setting; the catgirls are among those who secretly defend the world against beings that would steal the very power of existence (I've been watching Shakugan no Shana), but like every White Wolf protagonist group they have many other enemies. There are humans who want to keep them as pets, other breeds of kemonomimi who hold grudges against the catgirls, and more besides.

I'd probably use Fudge yet again, but purposely structuring things very much like a WW game, with castes and/or breeds and something analogous to Exalted's Charms (but less numerous and simpler), and maybe even WW-style health levels for damage. Castes would define a character's role and charms just like in Exalted, and Breeds (or somesuch) would explain the circumstances of a character's birth, much like in Werewolf: The Apocalypse (born a catgirl to human parents, was originally a cat, a transformed human, etc.).

I should mention there's now an unofficial Fudge Forum, still kind of small (about 70+ members), but pretty active so far. I never quite got the hang of mailing lists (though the phoenyx.net people are supposedly working on a forum-style interface for the Fudge ML), so this is a good thing for me. Amongst other things, Bill Coffin mentioned that he's interested in Fudge, and also that he likes the idea of going back to being able to do an RPG in 64 pages or so. If I actually do a Catgirl RPG (still don't know what to call it yet), I think keeping it short would be a Good Thing.

Oh yeah, and on RPG.net someone posted Snakes On A Plane: The Roleplaying Game. You knew it had to happen.

Untitled RPG Idea

2006-03-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

I had another idea for an RPG today, though I doubt I'll work on it any time soon, if ever. I don't know what the title would be, but the subtitle would be along the likes of "The Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG." The idea is that the game is set up like a movie along the lines of The Matrix, Equilibrium, Ultraviolet, V For Vendetta, and probably a good number of others I can't think of right now. The world is screwed up, and the player characters are bad-ass warriors fighting to fix it. Some assorted ideas, any of which could be tossed or mutated:

Have the game be geared towards having a single player, whose character is The One.
Something to make it worth the players' while to get into weird philosophical stuff.
Make motivations (Violet's lost daughter, V's revenge, Neo's love for Trinity, etc.) play a substantial role in the game mechanics.
Do something to encourage battles that come off as works of art. One of the coolest parts of V for Vendetta was the "Dagger-Time" fight, and almost the entire appeal of Ultraviolet was in the way they set up the fight scenes*. Play with colors, shapes, settings, debris, forms of combat, clothing for the hero, etc., etc.
Play with stakes. Let players make sacrifices and get rewards (e.g., you get X bonus dice for this fight, but your character will definitely die gloriously at the end of it).
It'd probably wind up stealing lots of ideas from Wushu and There Is No Spoon.
And while we're at it, possibly Dogs in the Vineyard, notably the Button Men-esque action resolution system. RPGs need to pay more attention to other tabletop games in general anyway.
The object of the game, of course, is ultimately for the heroe(s) to figure out who they are and what powers they have and then go and kick the big boss' ass, whether that happens to be the leader of the dystopia or one of its best henchmen (paging Agent Smith). That's when the game ends (apart from a brief epilogue), though sequels are possible.

Sometimes I have too much inspiration for my own good. ^_^;

*Ultraviolet may have been substantially better before the studio decided to cut out about 22 minutes of footage against the director's wishes. And people wonder why Alan Moore hates Hollywood. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a director's cut. (P.S.: Samuel L. Jackson sez: "We got muthafuckin' snakes yo!")

Halo: The Covenant War, Update Again

2006-03-19T20:32:00.000-08:00

I was putting off H:tCW, but I got back into it. At the moment it's mostly a matter of working out the standard mechanics for stuff like autofire and vehicles. If I can get more done I might even be posting up the untested version to my website soonish.

I haven't really started working on it seriously, but I'm also planning to put together some kind of rules for doing a game in the vein of Red Vs Blue, with the PCs standing around being incredibly bored and making lots of pop culture references. I'm thinking there'll be something or other to do with each character having a different source of sanity (or whatever passes for such); for Simmons it'd be ass-kissing, for Church it's be selfishness, and so on.

I also got a wacky idea from Galaxy Angel. It'd be a sort of follow-up to my memorable Star Sorcerer campaign, except the PCs would be actors who starred in a TV drama based on the exploits of the PCs from the original campaign.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 5

2006-03-06T20:50:00.000-08:00

Today we won. It doesn't feel like it, but we won. I would gain nothing from killing Pinnacle, but knowing that he somehow escaped is gnawing at me.

It was a strange day, with a lot of waiting. Apparently Raz does comprehend the idea that swimming is best learned by starting in the shallow end of the pool rather than the depths of the ocean, because when I went to the training room he actually explained things. Which means yesterday he must've been testing me. For what I can't say. His heart is (mostly) in the right place, but he's infuriating sometimes.

Going shopping before a super battle is a surreal experience. Sam went to a toy store for a massive squirt gun, while Jack wanted to go to a hardware store. Raz managed to get himself kicked out, and apparently decided to "punish" the store manager for not wanting to sell a chainsaw to an unstable-looking 16-year-old by stealing his wallet. Irony abounds, and I was too amused to get angry. Dynamo stayed as far away from the superhero aisle in the toy store as he could without letting it be obvious.

We lured Pinnacle out to a car lot near where he'd wanted us to come. His skill was... unreal. I just couldn't touch him, and Raz didn't fare any better. (Raz seems to have a hard time with the idea that someone in the world could be more skilled than him). Dynamo managed to score a good hit, but still not enough to really faze Pinnacle. It was a combined effort--Jack teleported Pinnacle into a half-crushed car, and Raz and I combined our efforts to stomp on it from above--that brought the confrontation (I hesitate to call it a "battle") to an abrupt end. Still, there was absolutely no sign of Pinnacle, and no reason to believe he isn't still alive. His cloned soldiers vanished in front of our eyes, and the only thing left in the warehouse was a laptop whose contents were sealed away with military-grade encryption. He knows us a little too well--he might even have surveillance capability matching or exceeding our access to street and satellite cameras--and he's still at large. The only good thing here is that for the moment he's more interested in us than he is in hurting innocents, but then he knows that's something he can leverage against us.

And another thing: I need a new motorcycle. It hadn't occurred to me that the Mega-Rider armor weighing over 500 pounds means my bike can't possibly support it. If I was operating out of Tokyo I might be able to lay my hands on dad's old Fenrir II, but for the moment I'm out of luck. The armor's weight has been reduced with its recently modified form, but not nearly enough to ride an ordinary dirt bike. And besides, especially for superheroing, that kind of horsepower could actually come in handy. And don't get me started about the new Fenrir VIII.

I'm not sure if I should, but I want to call home, to see if mom is okay. There could be some kind of trap set for me already, but what choice do I have, really? Maybe there's a way to use the resources at our HQ to make a call untraceable...

[OOC: I can't help but be reminded of the closing number from Once More, With Feeling: "The battle's done and we kind of won / So we sound our victory cheer. / Where do we go from here?"]

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 4

2006-02-27T10:37:00.000-08:00

[More of Hikaru's in-character observations. The player of Raz has decided to so something similar.]

This morning Raz surprised me by acting somewhat civil and even saving me the trouble of asking him to show me how to fight. Through blind luck I managed to get one over on him and he just lost it and came after me full force, shapeshifting, super-strength, and all. I'm trying to figure out how to explain to him that different people learn differently. I need to be able to take a thing apart and understand what it's made of, while he seems to prefer to throw someone into the water and hope they figure out how to swim. Combat has an emotional dimension, to be sure, but it can also be understood through "numbers." The body has various strengths and weaknesses, points of attack and defense, limitations of perception, and so forth. An opponent is likewise a mixture of positives and negatives. Victory is a matter of taking away strengths and/or exploiting weaknesses. Thinking about it that way I can wrap my head around it, but when a rampaging visual rock lunatic is charching towards me I can't.

Maybe that has something to do with why I decided to accompany him on "patrol," which is his word for going to a bad part of town and getting into an unproductive brawl. Yes, crime is bad, drugs are bad, etc., but there has to be a better way of improving things. Moreover, we underestimated Pinnacle. We were in an alleyway and while Raz was busy ploughing through a gang of 15 or so, Pinnacle somehow managed to abduct me before any of us even knew what was happening. It was only through careful analysis of the surveillance footage after the fact that Glenn figured out that Pinnacle had used some kind of optical camouflage to sneak in and chloroform me and slip away. I had been expecting a cold-blooded killer and a skilled soldier, but it hadn't occurred to me that a man who could afford cloned soldiers and powered armor could also get his hands on an optical camouflage cloak. I was very, very lucky that for the moment Pinnacle only wanted to use me to deliver a message. He wants us to turn ourselves over by 6 p.m. tomorrow, or he'll let his soldiers loose in the middle of San Francisco. He's playing on our desire to protect the innocent, something he obviously lacks.

We went over the powers available to our group members. Dynamo's kinetic energy enhancement, Jack's shadow power, Raz's shapeshifting and super-strength, Sam's hydrokinesis, and finally my rider powers. When I demonstrated the transformation an odd thing happened though: the armor was different. It was smaller and, frankly, more feminine. It looks like it's adapting to my physiology much faster than I had dared to hope. (I should think about what to call myself when it stabilizes.) Supergroups have always had a diversity of powers, but I feel like we're blatantly mismatched. The Watchmen were varied, but we seem to all come from completely different worlds. I am very much a Japanese transforming hero, Dynamo is a rank-and-file American superhero, Raz seems to be part demon, Jack comes off as a homeless guy with weird powers, and Sam... is a pro-wrestler.

I had a dream last night, and when I woke up at 5 in the morning I couldn't get back to sleep. (Not that I've been sleeping well the past few days anyway). In the dream I was a little girl with magical powers, and I was fighting alongside my father. I can't remember any more. I don't dream often, and I don't often remember the details, but the remaining fragments of this dream are still right behind my eyes. I didn't even see him that much, but I miss my father. I miss the way he would make us feel like everything would be all right.

That's right. The Japanese government is looking for me. And mom isn't well. The Mega-Brace has to figure into the situation somehow, but... Can I risk calling home? Mom and Ryo should be alright financially with dad's pension, but what if the need me? Maybe it was dumb of me to come to America, but I can't even think about going back until we deal with Pinnacle. Maybe circumstances will force the issue again and I won't have to choose.

Halo: The Covenant War, update

2006-02-26T21:15:00.000-08:00

My friend Thinh (who also did art for Mascot-tan) has started in on the paper minis for my Halo RPG. I saw the sketches he did for the Grunt and Jackal last night, and was (predictably) very happy. I need to find a digital camera so I can take pictures of the minis from our superhero game... The Halo scenario I want to run is likewise coming together, though it's mostly a collection of set pieces for battles strung together. I need to get around to buying a bigger dry-erase battle mat thingy too...

I'm also working on putting together a "soundtrack" for the game. Since it's based on a series of video games (with pretty damn good music to boot), I'll be using a combination of the Halo and Halo 2 soundtracks, plus some of the fan-created music that's out there. I'm still debating whether or not to go to the trouble of using HBO's dialogue databank to include snippets of dialogue from the video games. It could be fun (especially for the Grunts), but a lot of extra work too.

For the actual game itself I mostly need to round out the combat rules and stat up things. Midterms are starting to kick in at school (and on top of that I have to rush to apply for grad school), so I don't know how much time I'll have for to work on RPG stuff.

Halo: Combat Evolved RPG

2006-02-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

One of the players in the T&J campaign I'm playing in has been going hog-wild making paper minis on cardstock and with original art (he happens to be IMO a pretty brilliant artist too), which were surprisingly helpful all around when we had a big battle against a bunch of mooks. For no apparent reason he made a Master Chief, and I wound up getting inspired to try and tackle an idea I'd been toying with for a looong time now -- a Halo RPG. It seems like minis are at once underrated and overrated in RPGs. They make a really kickass visual aid, but they can also turn an RPG into a boardgame sometimes. Still, a lot of the fun of Halo is in the tactics, so it makes sense to include minis and maps in some capacity.

I'm kind of designing with a specific mini-campaign in mind, about a group of marines who, after endless weeks of boredom, find the planet they're stationed on suddenly under attack by the Covenant. I'll be using a highly customized flavor of Fudge--basically a simplified version of the stuff I was talking about for Ether Star, with templates and hit points--with character creation geared towards getting characters put together and into the action as quickly as possible. You pick a profession (just Marines for my first game) and a specialty (demolitions, sniper, ODST, etc.) to determine all of a character's skills, one free Gift, three personal skills at Fair (+0), and a Quirk (Whiner, Ice Queen, Slick, etc.) to give some personality.

Fudge Points are definitely going to be an important part of the game; it'll be not unlike Cinematic Unisystem how PCs use them to stay alive. Also, there'll be an NPC Spartan whom the players can spend FP to give tactical direction, thereby giving them the collective tactical brain of the whole group (and the badass with the regenerating force field is someone you want to stay alive, after all).

The actual adventure is still a bit on the sketchy side, but between various Halo machinima series and entirely too many Megadeth songs (Return to Hangar, The Disintegrators, Crush 'Em, Rust In Peace, Train of Consequences, etc.) I'm starting to put together what I hope will be a rocking experience. As usual, I'm going to put a lot of time into having a soundtrack for the game, in this case a mix of heavy metal, Halo OST selections, and whatever other soundtrack stuff seems appropriate. A lot of it will play out like an action movie (or god forbid an FPS) with a bunch of action sets where much asskicking happens, and some of these will definitely be based on Halo multiplayer stages.

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 1-3

2006-02-12T18:41:00.000-08:00

[This is my character, Hikaru Hirose, a.k.a. Mega-Rider II, eventually to be known as Victory Rider, trying to get her thoughts in order.]

Every time I think the world has completely turned upside down, it manages to invert itself in some new, unforseen way. I got into this mess because I acted on my conscience, because I was arrogant enough to think of myself as some kind of martyr shouldering a burden. A lot has happened over the past few days, and as more puzzle pieces come together I find myself asking some uncomfortable questions.

Through what seemed like a coincidence, I was among five people exposed to some mysterious substance, of which there is no trace and which I am now fairly certain is intended to activate metahuman potential. I can't even begin to contemplate the implications this could have for the world. With the exception of Dynamo--whose metahuman abilities were already active--we all show the same single genetic modification. It's hard to believe it could be something so simple, but there it is.

My case is different from the others though. Rather than gaining inherent powers, I've become able to activate the Mega-Brace and take on Mega-Rider's powers. I really wish I had the facilities to study it properly now that it can be activated, because it's opened up a host of new questions. Dynamo (a.k.a. Glen) said he had been told that only men can become riders. I seem to be able to transform at will now, even though I take on a distinctly male form when I do. The first time the experience was completely overwhelming, and... I kind of threw up on Raz. The second time, when we were attacked by some kind of mercenaries, I fought exactly as Mega-Rider would've in the old days, even shouting out ridiculous attack names. ("Rider Press"?) The fact that I can transform suggests that either the thing about riders being all men is merely cultural nonsense, or something about my genetic makeup--whether being half-human or a side-effect of the metahuman triggering agent--somehow "tricks" a failsafe mechanism in the Mega-Brace.

In any case, I'm starting to understand the nature of the Mega-Brace a little better. Whatever it is, it isn't just a tool to be used as you might a screwdriver or a pistol. I think it contains some of my father's memories. It remembers how he fought and is passing that knowledge on to me. And if the differences between the first and second time are any indication, it's already started adapting to my physiology. I can only hope that it will manage to adapt further and let me transform into something a little more like myself. I wouldn't mind being taller, of course...

Anyway, five heroes. Or metahumans at least. At the moment, I don't see a team, and I think I'm part of the problem. At first I kept wanting to strangle Raz; he just didn't seem to understand the idea that words mean things. I was waiting for my chance to tell him off, to say, "We're not your enemy, so why is everything that comes out of your mouth meant to hurt?" It was perfect in my head. But there's more to him than that, and this evening I felt like I was being a jerk.

And, I didn't want to get into this kind of thing. I spent a decade resenting my father for getting himself killed, and now I'm ready to go off and do the same thing. I kept telling myself that I'd consider being a hero only if there were innocent people that needed saving, but when we tore into those mercenaries I enjoyed myself. A lot. I remember reading somewhere that men get a high from seeing bad guys punished that women don't... It's all complicated.

The thing that had Raz suddenly becoming so quiet is probably the same thing that's weighing on all of us. We have the proverbial jigsaw puzzle in front of us, and we've just uncovered a big, disturbing piece. The cloned mercenaries and the metahuman trigger substance both look like they've come from one man, a German supersoldier named Pinnacle. It looks like he wants to build a metahuman clone army, and for the moment we're the only ones who can do anything about it. And he knows who we are and has at least some idea where and didn't mind making himself known when Raz and Sam were out and about.

Glen called him a stone killer. A lot of superheroes have died over the years, but from what I've seen not too many supervillains are the type to just take a human life in cold blood without any hesitation. When I think about who we have, I really wonder if we're ready to fight a monster like that. When I think about the things he could do to us... Human beings are fragile in so many ways, and someone with the knowledge and power to exploit that... Ugh. The worst kind of evil must come from being able to treat a person as though they were a thing. It would be convenient if I could just ignore Raz, but he's at least as human than I am.

But wait a minute... If Pinnacle really wanted to wipe us out, he wouldn't have let Raz and Sam get away. Sam can control water and Raz has super-strength and can reshape his body, but neither of them are anywhere near bulletproof. If he's a "supersoldier" he could've hit Sam's car with a lot more than a cigar. So either he wants something from us, or he likes to play with his food.

And there are still other mysteries. Sam's former tag-team partner (which will Ryo be more excited about? Me being a superhero or me knowing a real live wrestler?) vanished. All those classified military files on metahumans. They can't all be related, but I can't help but try to unravel it all, even if it gives me headaches.

Blearg/The Little Model

2006-02-06T18:04:00.000-08:00

With school going at full blast I haven't had too much time to devote to any kind of RPG stuff, apart from playing in my group's weekly Truth & Justice campaign (I'm not sure I would be able to keep up if I were running a game right now...). For that matter I haven't really been keeping up on RPG blogs much either, just doing my usual lurking on RPG.net and occasionally having some RPG ideas percolate in my brain. I'd really like to get some more stuff done for Tokyo Heroes and Thrash 2.0 once I have a better handle on school stuff, especially since I'm starting to get more ideas together for the aforementioned Ether Star and its own custom flavor of Fudge.

Anyway, what prompted me to post was this thread on RPG.net. Levi Kornelsen has basically laid out a new (still evolving) set of terms for discussing RPG theory, based on the idea that the terms used should be as intuitive as possible, and created partly in reaction to GNS and The Big Model. Right now it's primarily new terms for Forge theory, but the 'little model' (as one poster called it) has already started to evolve some on its own. Of particular interest to me is how in addition to Challenge, Theme, and Simulation-Focused games, it has "Open Focus" and "Multi-Focus," stemming from the idea that an RPG that doesn't concentrate on a particular focus/mode isn't inherently flawed. To the extent that I've found Forge theory useful, I think moving away from "crazy moon language" is a step in the right direction. Where it'll go from here is anyone's guess though.

TRPG Super Session Daikyouen

2006-01-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

My Amazon Japan order came a LOT faster than I expected, so I have TRPG Super Session Daikyouen in my hands. I haven't had a chance to do more than skim through the six games contained inside.

Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger: The aforementioned "Hero Sentai Justice Ranger." Earth (especially Japan) is being targeted. There are heroes who will rise up to defend the world. But... defending the world isn't cheap. Pleasing the sponsors earns you Sponsor Points, which are actually divided up by the category of sponsor, so you get different effects from using video game sponsor points versus foodstuff sponsor points. The four attributes are Courage, Strength, Gentleness, and Sponsorship.
Super Shounen Shoujo Comical RPG: Genki Zenkai!: A game about fifth-graders with super powers. The three attributes are Heart, Technique, and Body, and powers are determined by picking out archetypes (Android, Esper, Magical Girl, Scientist, Sueprhero, Ninja, etc.).
Monster Maker Senki: Road to Valhalla: I don't know a whole lot about this one just yet except that it has a definite tactical bent to it. It uses paper minis and hex grid maps, and the back of the book's slipcover is in fact a map and color paper minis for this game.
Survivor: Kotou Seikan: Of the six, yhis is probably the most "indie" in its concept. Ordinary people are stuck on a deserted island and have to survive and find a way to get home. There's a good amount of little tokens and whatnot that give it a little bit of a boargame look.
Heroes & Heroines: Herohero Fantasy: The art for this game has a generically non-Western feel to it (kind of like some of CLAMP's stuff), and it seems to be a fantasy RPG that makes extensive use of cards, to the point where it's practically an RPG/card game hybrid. One page in particular has monsters, which look like diagrams of cards arranged to look roughly like the critter in question.
Burnin'X'mas: Tatakau Santa-san: I'm not sure what to make of this one, except that it looks crazy and nifty. Apparently the PCs are given the job of making Christmas happen, and you pick a Class (Santa or Reindeer) and Type (Perform, Assault, Stealth). There's also a busty, scantily clad Santa-girl (I'm not sure, but I think it came out before Ken Akamatsu's Itsudatte My Santa, which recently was made into an OAV), a mean-looking cyborg with a santa hat, and an array of wicked-looking yet holiday-themed weapons, plus a really blatant send-up to Initial D.

Also, for each game there's a 2-page color comic introducing the general setting in the front, a fairly long replay (4-8 pages), and a B&W comic showing gamers reacting to the game. And although pretty, the cover has almost nothing to do with the contents. The interior art varies in quality, but it's always very appropriate and relevant to the particular game.

Anyway, more on this when I've had a chance to read through more.

Status Report

2006-01-15T20:18:00.000-08:00

I dug into Tokyo Heroes again after not looking at it for a couple weeks, and it looks like the actual rules are mostly done now. I need to fill out the rules for making bad guys, finish writing up the sample characters, and the last of the fluffy flavor text. Hopefully once that's done I can get back into working on Thrash 2.0 -- which is also mainly a matter of grunt work at this point. I'm not sure how much I'll be able to get done once school starts, of course. This semester is looking to be pretty intense.

On the TH inspirational stuff front, Tokyo Mew Mew has been getting really good lately (I'm on episode 37 right now), mainly by finding interesting things to do with the different characters. I watched the first few episodes of Genseishin Jutsirisers and was surprised by how good it was (especially after seeing the first episode of Sazer-X). It's basically a sentai show, but it has its own distinct feel, separate from the Super Sentai Series. Similar to Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (but in different ways) it deals with what it means to be a "hero" with weird powers. Two of the main characters are high school kids, and they're fighting in spite of their misgivings and fears about the whole thing. I also like how the girl character is on the school's lacrosse team basically as an excuse for the characters to have a metal stick handy when mooks show up.

Last night we had our first session of Truth & Justice, though it was mostly prologue and roleplaying. The real super action hasn't started yet, but the campaign is off to a good start at least. We've been playing mostly on Sundays at the FLGS, and the first time we played on a Saturday it was much more crowded than we've ever seen it before. It's definitely encouraging to see that many people playing games.

Ether Star RPG: Coming Some Day Maybe

2006-01-15T07:59:00.000-08:00

Yet another RPG I want to work on is "Ether Star" (formerly "Star Sorcerer," possibly to be called something else if I can come up wiht something better). I came up with the setting a while back; it basically mixes bits and pieces of Xenosaga, Phantasy Star Online, and a few other things, the result being an anime space opera setting with a big emphasis on "ether powers." Ether is sort of a distillation of psionics and magic into a single scientific practice, and is heavily used in the setting's technology.

The original Star Sorcerer campaign I ran used Fudge (with very loose rules) and was generally a big success with my group. Writing the actual book has proven to be more daunting of a task than I expected. Still, I want to sit down and try some time, and I do want to use Fudge still. One of the things I like about Beast Bind is that its character creation has a lot of "flavor" too it that generic point-based character creation lacks. There's just something about picking the Full Metal blood and then the Gospel Engine art to go with it. I'm actually kind of starting to dislike noodly point-based character creation. Granted you don't have to deal with it after your first game session, but I think a game system can go a long ways towards helping create interesting or at least pertinent characters. octaNe's archetypes kick ass on that front, and Weapons of the Gods lets you spend Destiny points on loresheets to give your character more plot hooks, and of course good old D&D's classes give you iconic characters with pre-defined niches.

Although I was toying with using Five-Point Fudge, my idea for Ether Star is to go for more Japanese-style character creation and have players select a race (human, variant human, android, simulant) and two professions (or your can double up on one), plus a few levels of stuff to personalize attributes, skills, gifts, and faults. That's the thing about Fudge; it's basically just an action resolution mechanic and a list of suggestions, but most published Fudge-based RPGs just use the Objective Character Creation rules as-is, making character creation much like every other point-based RPG out there.

OTOH I do want to come up with some kind of HP type rules for Ether Star; the damage rules of Fudge work, but for me at least they're a little clunky, plus a death spiral isn't quite the right thing for an anime-style epic space opera setting IMO. And there's the matter of vehicles/mecha and the actual ether powers too. But realistically, I think I'd better try to finish up a playtest version of Tokyo Heroes before I get into yet another RPG project.

Plus the major problem with Ether Star right now is that it doesn't have a good answer to the "What do you do?" question. In Tokyo Heroes and Thrash it's pretty obvious, but as it stands now Ether Star is a pretty wide-open setting, a big galaxy where there's all kinds of neat stuff going on, but nothing so pressing that anyone can assume it's about a particular thing. My campaign had a pretty clear focus, but it was based on keeping the PCs in the dark about a lot of stuff for a long while, so I'm not sure how effective it would be to have the secrets of the ancient Terran Empire be the answer to the "What do you do?" question. The lack of this kind of focus is one of the major things that keeps me from doing a whole lot with most of the White Wolf stuff I own. Solar Exalted are tossed out into the world to find their destiny, Dragon-Blooded are mired in imperial life, Sidereals mostly have to do stuff for Yu-Shan, etc., and all of that is pretty vague compared to "kill things, take their stuff, get stronger to kill stronger things" or "kill monsters and make people less afraid so the DeadLands disappear" or "fight supervillains for truth and justice." (Though I've been hearing on RPG.net that the new WoD books tend to be chock full of plot hooks--like they should've been over a decade ago).

Housecleaning is pretty much done though, but then school starts up in about a week and a half, and my schedule's going to be pretty heavy this time around.

Mundane Details

2006-01-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

Argh. So, when I finally got the postcard about my order from Kinokuniya it was one of those ones that says the book is out of print. Amazon Japan says differently, though I probably won't get my copy of TRPG Super Session Daikyouen from there until early March. I haven't gotten much done apart from some housecleaning for the past week or so, but having a cleaner environment to work in does help some.

Stating Things Clearly

2006-01-03T17:02:00.000-08:00

I've gotten a lot further reading Beast Bind (still need to get through the setting and GM chapters though). Apart from the way the game favors quick character creation at the expense of a certain amount of player choice, I think the main thing that separates BBNT from your average Western RPG is that there are a lot of things that are spelled out explicitly that would be left vague or unmentioned in a game from our neck of the woods. The book actually maps out the process of going through a game session, from "pre-session" (settling in, getting materials ready, episode trailer, etc.) to "on-session" (the actual scenario) to "after-session" (handing out experience points, other finishing paperwork, etc.), and it even goes so far as to suggest heading to a family restaurant (famiresu -- basically Denny's-like places) or coffee shop to relax and discuss the game.

I've also heard that Replays are a major part of the hobby in Japan. A replay is a transcript of a game session, including both in-character stuff and game-mechanic stuff, and they're common on fan websites and even sold as doujinshi. Andy K mentioned that these were helpful to the hobby in that since it was even more of a niche thing there was an even greater need for people to be able to understand what it's all about just from reading something. Actual Play threads tend to summarize more often than not, while a replay is a blow-by-blow transcript. This and the above makes me wonder whether play styles in Japan might be more homogenous than here. When you go back to the original D&D, no two groups really played it quite the same way, and it looks like each successive generation of roleplayers came to it with different games and different expectations.

The game also as divides the scenario up into scenes. Like in World of Darkness (which was probably in some ways an influence on BBNT) there are powers with "one scene" as the duration, but it also makes a big deal of figuring out which PCs appear in a given scene. Sometimes you can even make an "appearance check" (登場チェック) -- a roll on the Society attribute -- to see if your character shows up. It's not a basic, vital part of the game like in Primetime Adventures, but it's there. And the thing is, given its quasi-narrative nature an RPG session inevitably has scenes, even if the group isn't conscious of them as such. In writing fiction you have the whole scene vs summary thing, and I think that shows up in RPGs too. Even more so than in prose, using scene instead of summary emphasizes things, so I wonder if deliberately using that kind of distinction might be a good way to keep a game more tightly focused.

Needless to say I'm playing with some of this stuff for Tokyo Heroes. A sentai show contains about 20 minutes of new footage per episode, all of it meant to appeal to hyperactive little kids (and to a lesser extend the geeky older fans). The added twist for TH is that in a battle scene where a teammate has been hit at least once you can spend a Hero Die to automatically make it to the scene to help out. (Of course, sentai heroes do run into situations where they have to split up, so coming to help out isn't an option).

The aforementioned TRPG Super Session Daikyouen book I ordered should be coming pretty soon too -- hopefully some time this week, but given that most everything Japanese grinds to a halt for new year's, it's hard to say exactly when. Hopefully Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger won't contain anything that has me ripping Tokyo Heroes apart completely and starting over. I already did that once... ^_^;

On the plus side, I finally made some progress with Kidou Sentai Dynaranger, my generic example sentai team. And it is a little generic; it fits the genre perfectly I think, but I doubt at this point they'd do another general sci-fi based sentai series. If nothing else it'd wind up looking too much like the Chouseishin series (which seems to have completely fallen from grace with Sazer-X).

2K6

2006-01-01T19:56:00.000-08:00

The Year 2006
2006 is upon us. There was a thread on RPG.net asking "What RPG products are you looking forward to in 2006?" Maybe I just don't keep up on upcoming releases enough, but for both tabletop and video games there aren't that many titles I'm really anticipating. For tabletop RPGs the list goes:

And of the three, Tenra is the only one I'm strongly interested in playing. I just don't have the kind of group where running a game as crunch-tacular as Anima seems to be is practical. We've been using Fudge for long while now, and our next game is going to use Truth & Justice.

What I'm looking forward to in 2006 (which is next week, come to think about it) has more to do with actually getting my own stuff up and running. I'm in the process of writing two different games, which will need plenty of playtesting (especially Thrash 2.0). I also have a habit of buying RPGs more as reading material than for actual play, when I really ought to be getting more experience with different kinds of games. And I have a considerable variety of games in my collection now, in part thanks to all the stuff I keep hearing about on RPG.net and the Forge. At some point I want to try out otaNe, OVA, Primetime Adventures, Cat, InSpectres, etc, and I have a few ideas for original settings (anime vampires, gonzo steampunk fantasy, etc.).

RPGs as Creative Writing
Working on Tokyo Heroes has been an interesting experience creatively. I write fiction and poetry too (and I've dabbled in creative nonfiction too), and the more I got into literary fiction the more it affected my writing style. I used to write in a very linear fashion, starting with Chapter 1 and going on until the story ended. It wasn't until I started writing short stories that I really got away from that, and my writing benefited. Nekomimi Land, the novella I'm still revising, took that a step further because even more so than before I was discovering what the story was about as I went along. There are a lot of elements that are very important to the story in its current state that I hadn't the faintest idea would be in it when I started. I discovered them from reading other books, from digging into my own words, and entirely too often from random little epiphanies that happened while I was trying to sleep.

Tokyo Heroes hasn't been anywhere near that intense to work on, but it has been a constantly changing creature, and there are a lot of important concepts in the game as it's written right now that I never dreamed of before. I first concieved of the game in my hotel room at GenCon SoCal 2004 (just over a year ago), and it doesn't look much like my early attempts at putting a game together. It looks a lot better. The process of experimentation and discovery is probably what's making the game that much more fun to work on -- which would explain why for the past few weeks I've been working on TH and neglecting Thrash.

Of course, part of what makes TH fun to work on is just that it gives me an excuse to watch lots of sentai and magical girl shows. Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch didn't really do it for me, but I'm enjoying Tokyo Mew Mew more than I probably should. I also got caught up on Dekaranger, and started in on Magical Canan. I still seldom get through an episode without thinking up some new something-or-other for the game. Most recently it was the idea that instead of attacking you can "worry" an opponent, using your attack ability to harass them and keep them busy while doing minimal damage -- something bad guys like to do to magical girls all the time.

The campaign seeds are proving to be a lot of fun too. For example:

Souzou Sentai Imagiranger
Keisuke is a young boy who feels crushed by his mundane, pointless existence. His life is overwhelmed by silence and boredom; his parents are always away at work, he has no siblings, and no one at school really likes him. What keeps him going is something inside his head, a place very much like the world he lives in, except that there he’s the Red Ranger, and along with his four allies he fights the forces of evil.

But maybe there’s more to it than just daydreams. There’s this new girl at school who seems like she might actually want to talk to him, and on the same day she transferred in a new Ranger--a female, Silver Ranger--invaded his daydreams all of a sudden.

"Beast Bind: New Testament" GET!

2005-12-26T17:55:00.000-08:00

Still have RPGs on the brain, still posting here almost every day. This morning I finally got my copy of Beast Bind: New Testament from Kinokuniya.

The first thing I noticed was that the book was definitely printed in Japan. The size is smaller than our 8.5x11" format, and although it's a softcover book it has a slipcover. Looking under the cover I immediately noticed they did something clever: the back of the slipcover is the character sheet. The artist who did pretty but vaugely loli art on the front cover did that and a very brief comic, while other artists did the interior art, which is actually surprisingly sparse. Only the first 16 pages are in color, while the rest are in black and white (an approach I haven't seen in an RPG since Mekton Z). The layout was done by someone with definite skills, though it veers a little bit towards the cluttered aesthetic you see in Japanese magazines. The text is mostly in two narrow columns, albeit with lots of sidebars and diagrams, and the pages that list of numerous powers or other items are in vertical rectangular boxes arraged in a 3x3 or 3x4 grid. Western RPGs often have an example of play in the form of a dialogue showing what the GM and players say -- BBNT has those throughout the book to illustrate the rules.

It's going to take some time for me to read through it thoroughly -- I can read Japanese, but I can't really call myself fluent -- but from what I understand the system is actually relatively simple. The game has some archetypes for quicker character creation, but to start from scratch you first pick two "Bloods" (though you can double up on a single one). These are Artifact, Immortal, Irregular (a person with superhuman abilities), Stranger (someone from another world), Spirit, Celestial, Demon, Beast, Full Metal, Magician, and Legend. Each blood gives you 3-6 points in each attribute (Body, Reflexes, Emotion, Mind, Society), and then you have 3 points to put wherever you want. From each of the attributes (which range from 6 to 13 at character creation) you divide by 3 and round down to get the number you actually add to rolls, and there are about 13 skills total (stuff like Melee, Machine Operation, Knowledge, etc.) that add directly to these for rolls (and between your Bloods, your Cover identity, and your free points you only have 10 levels total). There are some other derived values, my favorite being FP, which are basically HP, but "FP" is short for "Flesh Points" (or maybe Fresh Points...). Rolls are just 2d6 plus modifiers vs. a target number.

The neat think about this game is mainly just that it's such an all-out gonzo manga take on the "supernaturals hiding in the modern day" thing. Among the included archetypes are not only a Rogue Vampire and Werewolf Cop, but a Magical Girl, a tokusatsu style transforming hero, and an android (well, gynoid) combat maid. It doesn't have the Rune Blade archetype that was in the first edition, but you can make that easily enough, along with a zillion other things. The different Bloods determine what Arts and Hyper Arts you can take, and I find the fact that the Full Metal Blood has an Art called Gospel Engine too cool for words. (It lets a machine character have a soul in case you're wondering). I am reminded not a little of Exalted's Charms, but without the trees of prerequisites. Unlike Exalted the character sheet has spaces for the relevant data and more importantly a spot for writing the relevant page reference.

Most of what makes it seem different from Western RPGs is subtleties of presentation and aesthetics. It's meant to be set up very much like an anime episode, with rules and guidelines addressing setting up scenes and whether a given PC can participate in a given scene, and it recommends doing trailers/previews for each session. Still, reading 272 pages in Japanese is going to take me a while. ^_^;

As a side note, when looking through websites for TRPGs I noticed that some of the art I'd seen in Masamune Shirrow's Intron Depot artbooks was actually originally for some of the Asura System TRPG books. I definitely need to start making a (reasonable) list of TRPGs for my friends to look for when they take a trip to Japan (which in turn means figuring out where the heck they should go to find them; I think there's a place or two in Akihabara).

24 Hour Hikikomori

2005-12-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

Holy crap I've been posting a lot. But then I've been writing two RPGs and reading lots more (I'm about halfway through reading Dogs In The Vineyard, and I finished reading Primetime Adventures; more on those when I've had time to digest). Anyway.

I'd been thinking about trying my hand at the 24 Hour RPG thing for a while, and today I came up with an idea for one. I've been reading this weird Japanese novel called Welcome to the NHK (there's also a manga adaptation, though AFAIK nothing published in English yet). It's about a hikikomori -- a guy who hardly ever leaves his apartment -- and the bizarre adventures he has. It gets into some very weird territory, including religion, drug use, conspiracy theories, otaku, lolicon, and so on. I have no idea how this would translate into an RPG, but I figure that's a good starting point for a 24 hour RPG.

The Other Side

2005-12-23T22:06:00.000-08:00

My friends and I had a Christmas party -- remarkable enough in itself just because we actually got together for a special occasion for once -- and one of the things we did was watching Kwoon. The actual episodes are hilarious, but the bonus features are actually funnier in a lot of cases. One of the longest shows Todd Roy, the main guy behind the series, promoting it at trade shows. Seriously, promoting the hell out of it. He's got a really entertaining title and he really wants to get it on the air, and he hasn't yet let up, even though each episode costs him thousands of dollars to make.

And I can't help but think, I'm so not cut out for that kind of thing. I'm not that much of a people person, and while I do like to go to cons on occasion, I find them mentally draining. Both professionally and creatively I'm more interested in working hard at typing stuff on a computer, because to me dealing with lots of people starts fun but quickly goes to that place where it ranges from boring to irritating. Designing RPGs is fun and satisfying, and while it would be nice to get a little monetary compensation for my work, I'm not sure I'm the right sort of person to be trying to sell stuff, least of all as a one-man operation. Granted, I'm perfectly willing to do it without making any money so long as it doesn't cost me much more besides time, and I think that's the kind of people the RPG hobby needs more of, but there's also something to be said for getting your work out there and having it experienced by people.

So, I really have no idea what to do about it, but then it's going to be a while before I have something finished enough that I need to worry about it.

Eternal Saga
I have some really awesome friends, for gaming with and other stuff. Between my various friends at the aforementioned Xmas party, I recieved two CRPGs for PS2 -- Makai Kingdom and Dragon Warrior VIII. Where a lot of tabletop RPG gamers (online at least) seem to complain about CRPGs as overly limiting, I take them as what they are (an entirely separate genre from tabletop RPGs) and enjoy them a lot when I'm in the right mood. So, another project that's been on the back burner for a loooong time (and every now and then I take it off, rip it apart, and put it back together again) is Eternal Saga, a generic CRPG-inspired tabletop RPG. I tend to get inspired to work on it whenever I play CRPGs, which is why the project never quite dies. It could wind up being another fantasy heartbreaker, and it is yet another combat-oriented gamist RPG (a friend of mine remarked that it's a lot like a sister game to Thrash -- being based on a video game genre and all). I still haven't worked out the main resolution mechanic, but I did come up with a few neat ideas here and there:

I stole the XP system of the .hack games, where every level is 1000 XP, but how much XP a given thing is worth depends on its level relative to yours. (In ES I'm using this so that rewards for roleplaying and whatnot always count the same amount towards your next level).
There are three character creation options: classes (pick one class and stick with it; like old-school D&D or a lot of MMOs), jobs (gain levels in multiple jobs ala D&D3e and FF Tactics), and point-based (no classes, like a lot of newer CRPGs, just points to spend however you like to create a unique character).
Bonus Points are spent on advantages and disadvantages, as well as starting gear. If the GM ups the starting level, the value of BP relative to GP increases for buying stuff.
A lot of things are based around construction systems (so getting those right is critical to making the game work) to let the GM easily come up with new classes/jobs, items, monsters, etc., since even within the same series no two CRPGs agree on the stats and whatnot for things. (OTOH the game will have a healthy selection of samples).

Thrash 2.0

2005-12-23T08:08:00.000-08:00

With a project like Thrash 2.0, I can't help but get nostalgic and whatnot. On the one hand, I can't help but kick myself for taking so long to get this far -- it's literally been about three years, mostly taken up by distractions and procrastination -- but then I've learned a lot about RPGs and game design in that time. I'm barely even looking at Thrash 1.8 as I work on the new version because every time I do I see stuff that makes we wince. Plus I've changed enough core concepts that the utility of looking at the old version is kind of limited at this point. Still, even though the rules were really wonky at that point, my Karyuu Densetsu ("Legend of the Fire Dragon") campaign was the first really long, memorable campaign my group had post-high school. It was big and melodramatic and cheesy and the player characters were kicking ass all the time, when they weren't too busy bickering. There was a really fantastic mishmash of mythical stuff, from Thuggee assassins (one of whom had a Grab/Life Drain/Choke Slam combo move) to a village of hybrids of humans and the Four Sacred Animals, to bring sucked into a realm in the astral plane where dragons roam free, to redeeming one of the genetically engineered bunny-girl clones, not to mention the elemental ninja clans.

Every time I start thinking I've left Thrash behind for good, I find myself wanting to go back, both because of those memories and because the game had its fair share of fans. At its height I was getting emails from gamers all over the world, and there were a couple different translated versions in the works. After reading and playing dozens of new RPGs, I feel much better equipped to make Thrash into the kind of game I feel it deserves to be. To do that I wound up pretty much tossing out the old edition and starting from scratch; clinging to old (bad) ideas and having no real focus for new ones is a lot of what was bogging down previous attempts at putting together 2.0.

Styles as a character trait are completely gone. That approach was full of flaws to begin with, and none of the alternative approaches I came up with were making things better. Instead, I wound up using the "Techniques" from Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, minus having styles determine a character's available maneuvers. The end result is that I don't have to worry nearly as much about styles being accurate or inaccurate, and you don't have to create new character traits to have a character whose style isn't in the book. While in SFII they went to the trouble of listing a style for every character (even if some of them were odd or just plain made up, a situation that wasn't improved when the game was localized for our neck of the woods), many fighting games don't bother. Most of the cast of Soul Calibur just fights with some European weapon, and there aren't many cool style names for that kind of stuff. It's much easier to say that if you want to make a video game Tae Kwon Do guy you need to give him lots of big kick moves.

The new AP system is probably the most important and radically altered aspect of the system, and it seems to fix several of the combat system's biggest problems in one fell swoop. All characters get 3 AP per turn, and unspent ones are actually saved up, to a maximum of 6 (taking a cue from Xenosaga). Combos, counters, and so on are all so much simpler this way. Improvised combos are just doing multiple moves in a turn, and combo maneuvers let you commit a certain amount of AP to do a set number of moves that would ordinarily use slightly more AP. Very few tabletop RPGs actually use any kind of Action Point system -- the closest I know of is Shadowrun, and they may have changed that in the new edition -- so I'm doubly curious to see how it works out in play. I'm definitely going to put those glass beads to use for tracking AP.

Maneuvers got a lot simpler too, just because I decided they should mostly be a character's special moves (the ones that, in fighting games, take a controller motion). There was a lot of confusing and unnecessary variety in maneuvers, especially throws, and paring down that selection looks like it'll benefit the game substantially. It'll probably be a little harder to make a realistic martial artist, but then this is Thrash and that's not a bad thing.

I also dropped the idea of doing a unified point-buy system. It was Mutants & Masterminds that convinced me to do this. I've heard good things about M&M and when I picked up the book and read it I was inclined to agree, but when creating a character it's hard to get a good sense of point scale, and it's just time-consuming. (Which is part of why we're probably using T&J for our upcoming superhero campaign). For a superhero game it makes sense that you'd need to be able to divert points towards attributes if you feel inclined to make a super-strong guy, but starting Thrash characters have a narrower range anyway. Right now I have Thrash set up with three pools of points at character creation -- Attributes, Techniques, and Everything Else (Edges, Flaws, Abilities/Skills, and Maneuvers).

Tokyo Heroes definitely has a bit more of an "indie" vibe to it than Thrash (insofar as you can when your game is based on a massively popular formulaic institution of Japanese television), but Thrash is where it needs to be. The thing that did the most to help me work on the basic mechanics was finally reading Unisystem (in the form of the Angel RPG). It actually uses a d10+Attribute+Skill mechanic just like Thrash's Interlock system roots, and it even has maneuvers (though they're a little different, more a quick-reference than a character trait). To the limited extent that I understand GNS theory, Thrash is basically Gamist. I've been trying to give the game a little more tactical depth (to the extent I can). I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I did wind up dropping a "Fighter Nature" mechanic (where you pick an archetype of why your character fights and you get a minor special ability and a way to earn more Karma points) because it doesn't fit with the general direction the rest of the mechanics are going. While I wonder what a more Narrativist anime martial arts game would be like, I think if I do another system I'd like it to not be about characters who fight constantly.

Just as I've been watching sentai and magical girl shows for Tokyo Heroes, for Thrash I need to get back into playing fighting games. Most of the time when I get inspired to work on Thrash it's because I was playing some fighting game that I really enjoyed. Party's Breaker and Eternal Fighter Zero helped with that in a big way at one point, and I really need to get around to playing Melty Blood at some point. Doujin games seem to be the last bastion of good 2-D fighting games these days; even SNK is trying to go 3-D. For whatever reason there aren't a whole lot of fighting anime around though. King of Fighters: Another Day looks *really* cool, but it's only sporadically released shorts, Fighting Beauty Wulong isn't being subbed (I should watch the raws anyway, really), and people online act like I'm crazy for liking Air Master (and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha for that matter). I think my Dreamcast died though (and I never got very far in DiGi Charat Fantasy either...), so I'd have to borrow a friend's or something.

It's good but weird that now when I watch sentai and magical girl shows I find myself mapping things out in terms of the Tokyo Heroes game mechanics (though I'm still not sure how exactly the Dekarangers' SWAT Mode is going to translate into game terms). Hopefully it'll work that way for Thrash as well. ^_^

Writing Style In RPGs, In Tokyo Heroes

2005-12-21T05:55:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been pondering the craft of writing -- putting together words with skill -- as it applies to RPGs. And not having much luck. One of my other hobbies is writing fiction and poetry, and I like to think I'm at least not completely horrible at it. However I find I have a hell of a time fully applying what writing ability I have to roleplaying game texts. I'm sure the differing writing genre makes a difference (I have a harder time with creative nonfiction too by the way), especially when it comes to writing game rules.

The RPG books that I can remember liking the writing style have mostly been either crisp and clear (Primetime Adventures) or sort of like a really excited yet coherent friend telling you about cool stuff (octaNe). Exalted books always develop a really awesome setting and have sentences here and there where the wording seems awkward to me. Part of that, I'm sure, is that I've found that as I work on longer pieces of fiction, the revision process lengthens exponentially rather than in a linear fashion (I don't want to talk about how long this novella is taking me, and I'm afraid of what'll happen when I try for a full-length novel). Another part of it is simply differing priorities; I'm not just writing, I'm putting together a game that needs a coherently interlocking array of rules and concepts. Just typing up the rules as I have them in my head is a challenge sometimes. I'm wondering if I should've tried taking a technical writing class alongside all those creative writing classes... And I may have to finally break down and get Dogs In The Vineyard (even though it's not something I'd run with my group), since its writing style is yet another of the things people keep praising it for.

The thing about Tokyo Heroes is that it deals with a genres that have only a cult following in the English-speaking world, so there are a lot of non-rule concepts I want to convey in the text, but I keep finding myself using "noodly" language with lots of conditional phrases ("Often the Sixth Ranger is..."). That's partly just a fault of how I think and write; another reason I like writing fiction is it's easier for me to get away from that. One idea I'm contemplating is using vingettes to convey certain concepts. Granted, RPG-related fiction is notoriously bad, outdoing even novelizations of movies at times, but I like to think I could do a bit better. ^_^;

Anyway, for that (and other purposes) I want to put together sets of original characters -- a sentai team and a magical girl team. For the magical girls I'm just taking the protagonists of a story that never quite came together, Magical Girl Rose, which takes some cues from Abaranger for how the five heroes are organized (three main heroes, one mentor, one who starts off evil and comes around at the end, and a dangerous/defective transformation item thrown into the mix). For the sentai I originally at least had the name (Dynaranger), except that then I'd wind up having heroes with the same names (Dyna+color) as Kagaku Sentai Dynaman. Besides, I want to come up with a more detailed and somewhat less generic sentai team concept. In the "wish I'd thought of it" category is one of the PBP RPGs in the Japan Hero forums, "Kensei Sentai Slashman." One of my favorite things about OVA is that it has a set of sample characters and uses them for every illustration and example.

And in other news, I ordered the aforementioned TRPG Super Session Daikyouen book with the Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger game in it, though it'll take around 3 weeks to arrive. I don't feel so bad for not knowing 饗宴 (kyouen; "feast"), since apparently the clerk at Kinokuniya (a native speaker) didn't either. A friend of mine is moving to Japan next month and I'm going to be sorely tempted to bug him to buy TRPGs for me... But it'd be much better to wait for my other friends to take their 2-week trip to Japan instead.

I've been trying to watch more source material for Tokyo Heroes, starting with Tokyo Mew Mew. I don't know that I'd call the series good, but it's definitely fun, and as usual in spite of the fact that between sentai and magical girls the number of hours of programming I've watched is now in the triple digits (holy crap, I never realized that before!) I find I need to watch it with a notebook in arm's reach, should I suddenly gain new insights into the genre.

Japanese RPGs, Anime RPGs

2005-12-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

I came across a free magical girl RPG from Japan called "Witch Quest," though it's over a 200 pages of Japanese text, so it'll take me a long while to read through it. (This while I have a copy of Beast Bind: New Testament on the way...) OTOH it seems to focus more on witch-style magical girls; the introduction starts off saying:

Haven't you ever wanted to use magic?

You could transform into someone else...
Or climb on a broom and soar through the sky...
Speak to plants and animals...
Make people smile...

This book, this "Book of Magic," is for you.

You know, learning Japanese takes a lot of work, but for me it's been totally worth it. TRPG.net (the main portal site for Japanese TRPGs) actually has a ton of good info and neat stuff -- it's just that it's mostly dense Japanese text. In the English pages there's a section on free games (and a more frequently updated Japanese version too of course). There's one called Cute Sister TRPG (or CST for short); as far as I can tell the PCs are all girls who are around a single NPC guy. It's entertaining to read just for the special abilities; there are classes like "Clumsy Girl" with special abilities for inadvertently causing damage or being really persistent and "Animal Girl" for stuff like having cat ears. I just wish it wasn't 172 pages long... ^_^;

If I keep this up I'll wind up being "the other guy who's into Japanese RPGs" on the internet (the first being Andy K), though at the moment I don't have the funds to do stuff like take a trip to Japan and drop $500 on RPGs (the $50 it'll cost to order Beast Bind is more than I should be spending). From what I've seen so far (which I admit isn't all that much) it seems like Japanese RPGs aren't more or less innovative, but they are grounded in a different culture and evolved a little differently. Tenra Bansho Zero sounds especially intriguing from what I've heard about it, but I think I'll hold out for the English version. Of course, being able to explore an entirely different RPG subculture is an intriguing idea, to the point where I kind of wish I knew a third or fourth language (German has the coolest word for RPG -- rollenspiel) to see what's cooking elsewhere in the world. But, being a sucker for cool manga-style art, taking an interest in the Japanese ones works for me. I need the practice anyway; I'm pretty sure I didn't quite pass the Level 2 JLPT (and I still haven't finished reading NHK ni Youkoso).

I was somewhat aware of this already, but another thing I've noticed is that there's no "anime" RPGs in Japan in the way that we have BESM, RandomAnime, and OVA. (Though Mekton was in fact the basis for the Japanese Gundam TRPG, coming out in English some time this century). To the extent that even stuff with anime/manga style art consciously imitates the original medium, it adopts a narrow focus. This is not unlike how in Japan there aren't any TV or radio stations devoted to anime; there's not much need when it creeps into everything (there's this new phenomenon of moe guidebooks to things where cute anime girls tell you all about English phrases or kanji or WWII military vehicles and no I'm not making this up). Anime takes a different shape in the American fan's psyche, as something special and exotic rather than being a part of the landscape.

As a wannabe game designer, I've given up on the idea of doing my own universal anime RPG (before people start using the term "anime heartbreaker"), even though I got relatively close to finishing an anime flavor of Fudge ("Chocola Anime") at one point. This is partly because I'd rather use my energy elsewhere, and partly because there are already some very good ones on the market. The most anime-like campaign I've run used Fudge, and between the existing universal anime RPGs and the numerous normal universal RPGs there's more than enough stuff to work with. (I should know; I wrote an anime sourcebook for Open Core). Instead, my model is to take a more specific genre and come up with a carefully tailored game for it, or if I don't feel that's necessary, simply pick out a suitable system and write a sourcebook for that. For Tokyo Heroes I have very, very specific ideas about what I want out of the system, so it has to be built from the ground up. Mascot-tan and Thrash are likewise along those lines, though Thrash is a little more mainstream in its style, reminiscient of Interlock and Unisystem with a dose of Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game tossed in. For Angel Soul (a Scryed-esque mini campaign setting) there's no great need for an original system, though at the moment I'm not 100% sure what existing system I'd use. I was originally thinking of going for Anime d20, but now I'm leaning more towards OVA.

Where BESM mostly tries to enable anime-style gaming by not getting in the way, OVA does actually have a few options that IMO fit really well with the typical melodramatic mainstream anime, to the point where there are a lot of times reading the book where I asked my self, "Why the hell didn't I think of that?" It's still mostly a rules-light universal RPG reminiscent of Risus or PDQ (Risus also kicks ass for the right kind of anime gaming BTW) but with just a little extra crunchiness. On the other hand zillions of people seem to be doing fine with online free-form anime roleplaying every day, so while the system plays a part in roleplaying, it isn't actually necessary per se, much less a particular "anime" RPG system. Conversely, it wouldn't hurt for people to stop assuming that an "anime RPG" has to cover everything from DiGi Charat to Grave of the Fireflies. Personally, if a system can do (off the top of my head) Bleach, Slayers, Air Master, Tokyo Underground, Scryed, Trigun, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Galaxy Angel, and Vandread, I'll be really happy with it. Though come to think of it, a Ghibli RPG might be-- Nah.

Character as Communication/Tokyo Heroes

2005-12-19T09:29:00.000-08:00

Three posts in less that twelve hours! Woo! (I really have had RPGs on the brain lately...)

Reading all this theory blog stuff (not to mention finally reading through more of The Burning Wheel) got me thinking of this idea of "character as communication." This post in Jay Loomis' LJ digs into the nature of the whole disadvantage concept as seen in GURPS, which helped bring an idea together:

A character sheet is a means of communication between player and GM, and both sides need to treat it as such. When a player puts a disadvantage or somesuch on the character, he should be in effect saying to the GM "I want the game to partly be about this!" Burning Wheel stresses this quite a bit actually, though with the added wrinkle that the group will periodically vote on new traits to be added to each player character based on how they act in-game. In RPGs, players tend to get disadvantages for points and hope that the actual downside will be minimalized, while GMs can sometimes get too caught up in the overall plot to have the PCs' individual stuff be more than a sub-plot.

I'm pretty sure I've been guilty of both, though my character for my friend's upcoming superhero campaign has some serious stuff that will come back to haunt her (which come to think of it is not unlike my character for his Macross-based Mekton Z game, though for very different reasons). With my superhero character (Victory Rider) I went so far as to even list off some possible plot/episode ideas. I deliberately left her father's alien origins a total mystery, and also suggested some wacky stuff with her rider transformation getting weird before it adapts to her physiology.

For Tokyo Heroes I'm attempting to do something with this idea. The game has a "Keys" mechanic similar to TSOY, but for Hero Dice that are shared by the group, and the group chooses 2 Keys that are possesed by all team members, and the player selects one related to his character's Aspect (ranger color) and has the option to buy a "Personal Key" to boot. Each player also has a Heroic Flaw (inspired in part by Enemy Gods), which I'm thinking of linking to the individual XP-type mechanic somehow. None of these have any point benefit during character creation; you have to pick them. Between those the players are saying a lot about what they want out of the campaign, so the text recommends that the GM either have copies of the character sheets or make a cheat sheet of the characters' stats, and look at them before doing any serious campaign planning. This is something I'm definitely going to be trying out with pretty much any game I run.

Tokyo Heroes also has a "spotlight episode" mechanic. In sentai and magical girl shows there are often episodes that revolve around one particular hero; the team gets drawn into the plot because of a friend of that hero, and it's that hero who leads the way into battle. In Dekaranger the episode titles are actually color coded, and there are episodes like "Perfect Blue" -- where DekaBlue has an old partner come to Earth for a visit, but turns out to be a bad guy, and they have a climactic shootout. So, in Tokyo Heroes a player can invest personal points (I've been calling them Karma in my notes, but as a placeholder) -- sort of like the Star Power in Hong Kong Action Theater 1st Edition -- at the end of a session to have the next session be a spotlight episode. The character gets certain mechanical benefits and has the plot center around them for that session. In spite of that last sentence being really horrible convoluted, the point is that this is a way for players to force the issue and make it so that their characters' desires and whatnot become a part of the game.

Also, just when I thought there weren't any other sentai RPGs out there at all, it turns out there is in fact one in Japan. It's called Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger (Hero Sentai Justice Ranger), part of a 175-page RPG anthology called TRPG Super Session: Daikyouen. From what I've read it seems to be a little toungue-in-cheek, and pleasing the sponsors in order to get more toys is a major part of the game. Still, I'm definitely going to see about ordering a copy from Kinokuniya when I get a chance.

Neat RPG Blog Posts

Vincent Baker: But Even Better... (A new frontier in roleplaying games! Or a way to insult flamers. Nifty either way.)
The 20' by 20' Room: Minor Disconnect: A Range of Tastes (Using sex and food as analogies for people's tastes in games).
Rainfall: ACE (The beginnings of what could be a very promising mecha RPG).

[Actual Play] Mascot-tan: Tiny Aliens

2005-12-19T08:52:00.000-08:00

Admittedly Mascot-tan isn't the sort of game that requires really massive amounts of playtesting, but I did run a test session anyway, partly to look for any kinks and partly just because I thought it would be fun.

The setting I came up with I call "Tiny Aliens," which I describe as "Bottle Fairy meets Invader Zim." The PCs are aliens from the Planet Kyut, sent on a first contact mission, and I explicitly told the players to choose whether their characters were interested in peaceful contact or conquest and not tell anyone else, not even me. Also in this setting the -tan suffix of the game is actually an honorific for the Kyutian elites; the normal citizens have to use -chan, while members of the imperial family are called -chama or "Your Awesomeness."

Character creation had a slight hiccup because the players had a hard time coming up with a full four Gimmicks, but I suspect that's partly because of the alternative setting. (When statting up the RPG Girls I had a hard time limiting myself to only four). For that I'm thinking of just having a rule that the GM can "call time" and the players lose any Gimmick slots they haven't used up. And it might be amusing to have them be stuck with any Gimmicks they haven't finished writing on the character sheet. ("I don't know what a 'Special Atta' is, but you'll find out if you try to use it.")

The first thing I noticed was that, to my surprise, the Rock-Paper-Scissors-based resolution mechanic actually worked really smoothly. This was especially surprising because (1) actualy writing the rules put my brain in knots, and (2) we never play RPS normally in the first place. I also seemed to be really good at it, though that's partly because I would space out and do things like throw Rock three times in a row.

Handing out and spending "moe" tokens (I renamed Popularity, though I still haven't posted that revision to the PDF on the website) worked out well too. I'd gotten a couple things of those flat marble glass beads months ago (at Cost Plus where they're meant for plants and dirt cheap) and finally put them to use. Mostly I gave them out when the players were entertaining, though I docked Akido-tan for a reference to anal probes.

In keeping with the spirit of the game, I did my best to mess with the players a bit. I had them choose a number between 1 and 6 for the opening theme, though I was lying then because it was going to be "Birthday Cake" by Cibo Matto no matter what. At one point I announced that whoever bidded the least moe would be attacked by a housecat, and at the end when the fanboy's little sister found them, assumed they were dolls, and played dress-up, I had each player decide on the outfit put on the character of the player to their right. Then a 1-6 choice (for real this time) for the ending theme (Electric Light Orchestra - Twilight) and preview background music (Unsolved Mysteries), though Akido-tan's preview was kind of meh.

What threw the session a bit off track was that all three players made characters with a Smarts of 1; they'd decided to have stupid characters, and roleplayed accordingly. It was very fun and entertaining, but I basically had to abandon any hope of them actually completing the adventure's objective (them being so tiny, they were supposed to fend off a housecat).

Akido-tan saved me the trouble of having the ship be too damaged to fly. When they stepped out of their tiny flying saucer that had crashed in a strange world (some anime fanboy's messy room) and Genko-tan asked "How are we going to get home now!?", Akid0-tan grinned and said, "We're not!" and hit the remote detonator for the explosives she'd planted all over the ship.

The funniest part was when they got up on the desk; they found all these plastic figures of anime characters, and being cute, miniature anime characters themselves, the figures looked an awful lot like Kyutians. Genko-tan went off about how they'd become "plastonians" (gasp!) and Honeko-tan's question was, "WHY ARE THEY HAPPY?!" They also borrowed some (non-functional) armaments from the figures. The computer was on too, and Genko-tan briefly chatted with someone on AIM, and managed to mistake a casual chat attempt for whoever was responsible for the "plastonians" being on to them. There was also a brief bit of Katamari Damacy action with the ship's gravity core, and a moment when they managed to make contact with the Kyutian Empire's Second Crown Princess, who gloated about how she'd ensured they were stranded there, but Genko-tan didn't get it at all.

But anyway, it was a quick, fun, and zany game (I think we played for two hours tops), as I'd intended, though the players were a lot of what made it work.

First Post - What To Expect

2005-12-18T23:24:00.000-08:00

I've decided to try to separate my RPG-related musings from the white noise of my LiveJournal. I don't know how long I'll keep updating regularly, but right now I have the RPG bug unusually badly, so I'll probably be posting quite a bit for a little while.

Right now I'm working on two different systems -- the second edition of Thrash, and a new sentai RPG called Tokyo Heroes. Both are now going really well, to the point where having a version for playtesting is going to be mostly a matter of getting what's in my head and notebook into the Word doc, plus some grunt work (designing maneuvers) in the case of Thrash. Both are going to need plenty of playtesting, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

This evening we finished up a mini-campaign run by my friend Elton, using Fudge and based in the same universe (a science fantasy space opera setting that I really need to write a book for some day) as the long campaign I ran and finished not too long ago. Up next is my friend Mike's superhero campaign, for which it looks like he's settled on Truth & Justice. So, I'll be printing out the pdf (and Prime Time Adventures too) for further perusal, since I have a terrible time reading pdfs on a computer monitor. This is partly because for some reason people always do them in two or more columns, which makes the file just annoying to read when you have to either scroll up and down or make the page too small to read in the first place.

In the past I've had a really hard time wrapping my head around the stuff that's going on with RPG theory, but then I came across this page, which contains links to numerous RPG design and theory blogs. I used Plucker to take it with me to work on my PDA, and I found I was actually understanding most of what was said. I don't want to go knocking Ron Edwards' articles, but for various reasons they just don't do it for me. In the couple of hours it took for me to go through the various blogs I already felt like I was getting much deeper into understanding new concepts in RPGs, and it affected Tokyo Heroes right then and there.

So, while you shouldn't expect too much, I will be occasionally philosophizing about RPG theory here, as well as talking about where things are with my games and my experiences with actual play.