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.

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).