Category Archives: games

GenCon Indy 2007: Aftermath

events, games

I survived GenCon Indy. I put a long diary-type report on my LiveJournal, but here I’m going to concentrate on actual gaming stuff rather than complaining about how tired I was or commenting on the restaurants I went to.

I didn’t get all that much gaming in during the con. I’m actually sort of ambivalent about this because I feel like I should’ve gotten much more in (why else does one go to a gaming con?), but I was feeling too physically and emotionally spent to handle much in the way of roleplaying.

I did however run two sessions of Maid RPG as planned. I put together a fairly simple scenario, and had the players make characters and go at it for the remainder of the three hours. The first session was brisk, random, and fun. The second was the single strangest RPG session I’ve ever witnessed, and at times I had to put my head on the table and breathe deep to be able to handle it all. John Kim was there for the second one, so hopefully he can provide more useful commentary than my sleep-deprived brain could hope for.

I think I came home with a total of about 20 or so different books, a mix of indie RPGs and bargains, so I have entirely too much reading material now. I got all inspired to play more of these games with my friends, so I’m going to finally try to organize to play The Mountain Witch in the near future, as well as my neglected Fudge-powered Halo game. I also want to work more on my own games, and try to properly integrate playtesting into the process. Raspberry Heaven and Anime Dreams are actually relatively close to being testable, and I have a very solid idea what I want to do with the next revision of Tokyo Heroes (based largely on Filip’s advice, and in general trying to make it much less handwave-y).

I got to hang out with Andy K a little bit at the RPG.net meetup on Saturday, so in addition to meeting a bunch of cool people I got hooked up with Meikyuu Kingdom, Demon Parasite, and Baka Baka RPG wo Kataru. The latter is a collection of a Japanese gamer’s columns on weird American RPGs, including some indie stuff, and even Panty Explosion (about which he notes that there are only two explicit psychic powers — levitating and making heads explode — but for some reason nothing to make panties explode). Andy did a very short demo of Tenra Bansho there, and I have to say it’s made of pure unadulterated awesome.

I still have a lot of other stuff to post about, but that’ll have to wait. Notably, The Hobby Games: The 100 Best book from Green Ronin is amazing so far, I have lots of games to read, and I went through and wrote down the names of all the RPGs being run in official games that I hadn’t heard of (like Bounty Head Bebop, basically Cowboy Bebop with the serial numbers halfway filed off).

What’s your bliss?

games, musings, projects

I lost count of how many blogs I’ve seen this in. I don’t know if it’s my moe otaku tendencies showing through, but whatever. ^_^; I gave into temptation and pre-ordered by the way, so I’m definitely looking forward to this. :3

“I’m an Innocent Sweetheart!”

“People say that I’m too young to pilot an ANIMa, but I just want to do my best… for everyone!”

Personality: As an Innocent Sweetheart, you’re the youngest pilot, under-trained and inexperienced. But you make up for it with a heart of gold and an energetic spirit that just won’t quit. Although most people don’t have a lot of confidence in you, who can help but catch your infectious enthusiasm?
Advice: Believe in yourself more. You can do anything you set your mind to as long as you don’t let your self-doubt get in the way. Your greatest asset is the trust that others hold in you, so never forget your friends and loved ones. At the same time, it might pay to be more realistic in your view of the world.
Which Bliss Stage Pilot are you?
Bliss Stage

In other news, it turns out that Sunset Games is releasing a new RPG called “Moe-kei?! Gakuen: Aitsu wa Classmate!” I’m not sure how to properly translate the title, but it’d be something like “Moe-style (?!) Academy: That’s my Classmate.” According to the blurb on the website in the game your goal is to help out those who are troubled (“They’ll surely say to you: “Thank you.”) It’s slated for some time in the summer, so I’m thinking I’ll order it along with Mononoke Koyake (the Yuuyake Koyake sourcebook) after GenCon.

The other day I checked out some books from the library on educational role-playing. I’m currently reading The Effective Use of Role-Play by Morry van Ments, which is a nice overview of role-playing as an educational tool. I’ll be putting together a full post about it when I’m done reading, but the differences in goals and the emphasis on “debriefing” after the actual role-play is finished are striking. It’s helped me think a bit about the kind of atmosphere and approach I want for Raspberry Heaven, while Filip Luszczyk, Ben Lehman, and Fred Garber have all offered me very solid advice via the Forge.

SRS Basic

games, Japanese,

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but FEAR is trying their hands at an open system. For a while now they’ve been using variants of the same general system for most of their games, and they took the version from Alshard GAIA (the modern-day Earth version of Alshard) and created SRS (“Standard RPG System”). Since I have a couple of back-burner projects with a relatively mainstream bend to them, I decided to go translate it in my spare time. Here are my impressions:

SRS uses a very simple roll-over system; 2D6 plus whatever modifiers you have. It also has a very simple class-and-level system. You pick out a total of three levels of classes at character creation, and those mostly determine your attributes, add bonuses to your combat values (derived values for various things) and decide what Skills (special powers/shticks) you can select from. SRS is basically just a framework for creating games, so it lets you decide on what attributes, combat values, and classes you want. It’s definitely a toolkit for making games, rather than a game itself. With, say, Fudge, you can treat it as a complete game out of the box if you want to play it a certain way, but that’s not the case with SRS.

One interesting thing about it is the use of scene framing. It doesn’t have any particular meta-game effects (though the design notes say you can add stuff like that if you’re so inclined), but the rules call for fairly tight scene framing, over which the GM has substantial authority. The GM designates certain PCs as “scene players,” and other PCs are either left out, or can make some kind of roll to get into the scene.

The most glaring omission is that the SRS Basic rules have nothing for combat. This would seem very odd, considering most FEAR games seem to be fairly combat-oriented. However, their plan is to have the stuff in SRS Basic be required (or at least if you change stuff from it you have to acknowledge such in your game’s text). They’ve started to release combat rules in the form of “Plug-Ins,” though they’ve started with one on “Combat Movement and Engagement,” which I haven’t fully read just yet but seems like it’s actually SRS’ answer to Attacks of Opportunity. On the other hand, there aren’t really any limits as to what you can add to the game. Skills in a more traditional sense aren’t in SRS or a lot of FEAR games, but they do have them in Beast Bind, and they’re hardly unusual in Japanese RPGs.

The SRS Terms of Use are interesting, and they’re probably something that couldn’t be pulled off in the U.S. Essentially, they say that you can do anything within reason for personal use of SRS, but for commercial uses you have to contact FEAR and get permission and possibly pay a licensing fee. And they provide an e-mail, address, and telephone number to contact them directly. They also specifically mention that they’re only sharing things that have been explicitly released as SRS content, so material from Alshard GAIA (or other published games) is off-limits as per normal copyright laws.

Also, as Andy noted, FEAR is putting out a new game called Tenra WAR, apparently a crazy crossover between Tenra Bansho and Terra The Gunslinger. AFAIK it’ll be the first SRS-branded game, where neither of the games it’s based on used the proto-SRS that appeared in many other FEAR games.

So, as far as SRS is concerned, I think I’ll hold off on trying to do anything with it until there are enough plug-ins released that I wouldn’t have to build a combat system from scratch. On the other hand, along with the new Yuuyake Koyake supplement (Mononoke Koyake, which adds spirits, ghosts, and aliens into the mix), I already have a decent list of games to order from Japan when I have the money to do so. (I still have no idea how to get my hands on Meikyuu Kingdom though…)

Things I Learned From Japanese TRPGs

games, Japanese,

I’ll get into stuff for my anime RPG project hardcore soon, but first:

I’ve always been interested in how things are reinterpreted for different cultures, and in studying to become a translator I’ve wound up exploring many of the cultural differences that can be seen in Japan. RPGs in particular seem to develop substantially different subcultures in different countries, particularly when there’s a strong language barrier. Japan is relatively isolated in terms of language, and also has a sort of culture of reading and publication. From what I’ve heard there are many countries, especially those with many English-speakers (such as Finland) where American RPGs dominate the market, if sometimes in very different patterns from here depending on what it released and catches on. While a Japanese version of D&D are available, the Western games that have caught on there are ones like GURPS that were more thoroughly localized. Group SNE’s GURPS has crazy manga art, and they’ve produced some original settings and such.

As far as I can tell, the titan of the (very small) RPG industry in Japan is a company called Far East Amusement Research, or F.E.A.R. I now own three of their games: Beast Bind: New Testament, Arianrhod, and Alshard ff. These games are for the most part aimed squarely at otaku. They have lavish manga-style art, and crazy, exciting settings meant to appeal to fans of anime and video games. They vary a bit, but F.E.A.R.’s in particular tend to have fairly simple rules. Characters are created by putting together a 2-3 different templates (classes, races, or in the case of Beast Bind, “Bloods”) which determine attributes and provide a selection of special abilities to choose from. Assign 3-5 extra attribute points, calculate a couple of secondary values, and you’re pretty much done. Character creation is very quick, and results in characters painted in broad strokes, with lots of cool powers. To speed things up even more, these games also have “quickstart” character creation, where you take a mostly completed template, add a couple points, give them a name, and you’re pretty much done. DeadLands, and most of the various Unisystem games have done this, but not quite as effectively.

What makes these games interesting is how they’re presented. I talked about this a bit before (back when I first got Beast Bind: New Testament), but Japanese TRPGs are often written with the assumption that many people will be picking up the books (thanks in part to their shiny, attractive covers) and trying to play them without having ever met someone else who plays RPGs before. This is a major contrast to the American RPG hobby subculture, where it’s largely assumed that people should learn RPGs from other people who play them.

Replays – transcripts of game sessions – are the most readily noticeable consequence of this. Not all, but most TRPG books have at least one replay included, even the 32-page Maid RPG core rulebook. They’re also to be found on the internet, and doujinshi circles and even publishers put them out as small books. In the absence of a “mentor,” these can provide an effective example of how a game flows. Still, they also appear to have become a form of entertainment in themselves, enjoyed by people in the hobby both as reading material and something to create. The Ru/Li/Lu/Ra rulebook has a photograph of a game in progress in the introduction – something I’ve never seen in any RPG from any country before – and among the nerdy Japanese guys, drinks, poker chips, rulebooks, character sheets, dice, and so on, there’s a tape recorder. This penchant for recording also manifests in several RPGs having “session sheets.” These are forms included for the game, similar to character sheets, used to note down things like experience points for each character.

There is also a much greater emphasis on “scenarios.” The American RPG scene used to thrive on published adventure modules, but now even D&D seems to have relatively few of these, and many RPGs have no support of this kind available at all. Japanese RPGs seem to take scenarios very seriously, and while there are some rulebooks that don’t have any replays in them, I’ve yet to see one that didn’t have at least two scenarios in the back. Most games have a relatively tight premise, which no doubt makes it easier to write and use scenarios, but it’s also that these games are not aimed at long-term play, at least not in the American sense of a D&D campaign that goes on for multiple years. Alshard ff actually lists “Campaign Play” as an option in a sidebar, rather than as part of the list of gameplay formats (one-shots, pick-up play., casual play, etc.) in the main text. Some games don’t seem to even be particularly concerned with having continuing characters in the first place. The majority of the scenarios for Maid RPG are set up in completely different worlds from each other, and demand creating new characters.

Another thing that the F.E.A.R. games in particular do is make a very concerted effort to convey in the text how a game session should flow, from the GM devising (or selecting) a scenario, to the game itself, to cleaning up after, to suggesting going to a café or some such afterwards to talk about the game. Along the way, the rulebooks often have simple diagrams/flowcharts to help explain the games’ workings. While some of these are for things like clarifying the combat rules, there’s also some that cover the basic flow of the game. In page 120 of Alshard ff there’s two diagrams representing gamers sitting around a table. One shows the GM at the far end of the table with arrows going from the players to the center of the table, and larger arrow going from the center to the GM; it has a big X next to it, indicating this is wrong. The other shows the GM seated in the middle, with a double ended arrow between each player and the GM; this one has a circle, showing that it’s correct. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in an American RPG. Also, the first diagram calls to mind what I’ve heard about old-school D&D players having a “party caller” who announces what the PCs are doing most of the time.

There isn’t an “indie scene” in RPGs in Japan the way there is in the U.S. (and other countries where people are into the same websites), but in some ways the categories have to be drawn differently in the first place. Japan has a massive doujinshi scene, where fans produce various works, some original but many derived from anime, manga, games, etc., and sell them at conventions. For example, I’ve seen a website for a circle that had produced doujins like “GURPS Cardcaptor Sakura” and “GURPS Galaxy Angel.” The scale on which these are sold is no doubt comparable to some indie games, but the “creator ownership” aspect isn’t a concern, and would be rather tenuous for something based off of a popular anime in the first place.

There are however some smaller TRPG publishers out there, though it’s hard to say whether they represent Japan’s equivalent of indie or the mid-tier publishing that’s become scarce to absent in the American RPG industry. I lucked out in that Sunset Games was willing to let me use Paypal to order Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake, two very unique games, both by Sakaya Kamiya. Neither is quite like any RPG I’ve seen, Japanese or otherwise.

Maid RPG takes the otaku maid fetish and uses it as the basis for what amounts of an anime version of Toon. Like Toon – only more so – it embraces randomness as a path to comedy. Characters are almost completely random, and tend to have odd traits glommed into them for no good reason. Hence when we played the other day my character was a pure lolita catgirl with blonde hair, an eyepatch, and a revolver, whose family broke up and who was enslaved by the master. In my opinion the single most brilliant thing about this game is that players can spend points to trigger random events.

Yuuyake Koyake (which means “Sunset”) has “Heartwarming Role-Playing” as its subtitle. It’s a diceless game about henge – animals with minor magical powers that take on human form. They live on the edge of a town in rural Japan, and the game is about them generally being friends and helping out the people of the town. Forming connections to people is a vital part of the game, and necessary for characters to get the points they need to use special powers or boost their attributes enough to accomplish especially hard tasks. It also has the single best use of controlled writing voice I’ve ever seen in an RPG rulebook; the entire time it feels like your grandma is reading it to you.

Here we are!

games, ideas, Japanese, musings, projects, random

Yay! My first new post on WordPress! I’m still working on getting acquainted with the interface and whatnot. Anyway.

In case you’re wondering “yaruki zero” is Japanese (やる気ゼロ) for “no motivation.” It’s an “extreme in-joke” (meaning I’m the only one who really gets it and finds it funny); when I and some other students were forced to do a skit for a Japanese class, after the ordeal was over I was thinking, “Well, that’s what happens when you have a group made of up people who didn’t want to do this in the first place. We’re ‘Team Yaruki Zero!'” Like my Go Play keychain, it’s also a reminder to myself to actually do stuff.

My package from Amazon Japan came in the main on Thursday, so I now have shiny new copies of Ru/Li/Lu/Ra, Alshard ff, and the bunko version of Arianrhod. I will post about these more when I’ve had a chance to really read them. At the moment I’ve been distracted by the manga I ordered along with them (new volumes of Genshiken, Yotsubato! and Rozen Maiden), plus I want to finish reading Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy, which is a sociological study of RPGs from 1983, before I have to return it to the library.

Although the setting of Alshard looks fantastic, the underlying system is very, very similar to Beast Bind and Arianrhod (and part of why I picked up Ru/Li/Lu/Ra was just to make sure I picked up something not from FEAR). Interestingly, FEAR has taken the basic rules from Alshard (specifically the version from Alshard GAIA) and created what appears to be an open system, called (heh) the “Standard RPG System” (SRS for short). I’ll have to sit down and read/translate it, and see just how much they allow people to do with it. I’m wondering if they’d be amenable to an English translation to it, especially since it would be perfect for some of my more mainstream RPG project ideas (notably Ether Star and Catgirl: The Storytelling Game).

I also got the newest issue of Role&Roll, Japan’s main RPG magazine, and was inspired to post about it on Story Games herehere. Admittedly in posting it I was sort of crossing my fingers and hoping, but I was still (pleasantly) surprised when Tad Kelson posted saying he was going to try to put together an indie gaming mag.

I’m also hard at work on my anime RPG project (I still don’t know what to call it; I’m using “Anime Dreams” as a placeholder). I have a small notebook I use to write down stuff when I’m away from my computer, and I’ve literally filled up about 40 pages just with ideas for this game. Right now I’m mainly working on the conflict resolution rules — which will be at the heart of the whole thing — and it’s taking a heck of a lot of work. I keep catching myself staring off into space on the train and thinking really hard about it. I’m exceedingly happy with how this is turning out so far, but how well the conflict resolution rules work is going to be the main test of how good a game it turns out to be. I’ll be posting more about the gritty details soon, when I’ve got my tentative version a bit more straight in my head. At the moment it’s looking like the game will be diceless and resource-based, which in turn means I ought to go look at Yuuyake Koyake again.

Random Stuff

actual play, games, Japanese

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.

Thinking About 2006

games, musings

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:
  • 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.

Japanese RPGs!

games, Japanese,

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. ^_^

Cranium Explosion (Or, Thoughts On Character Creation)

actual play, games, musings

(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?

Who Ya Gonna Call?

games

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…