Category Archives: Japanese

Neat Stuff About Maid RPG

Japanese

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.

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. ^_^

"Beast Bind: New Testament" GET!

games, Japanese

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 8.5×11″ 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 3×3 or 3×4 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).

Japanese RPGs, Anime RPGs

anime, Japanese

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.