Category Archives: musings

Moonsick Part I

games, musings, projects

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.

Character Playing Pieces

musings

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:

  1. 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).
  2. 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).
  3. 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).
  4. 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?

musings, random

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:

  1. octaNe
  2. The Mountain Witch
  3. Halo: The Covenant War
  4. octaNe (Psychotronic Mario Brothers)

Power and Consequences

musings

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

musings

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.

I am 3d6

games, musings

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.

Stating Things Clearly

games, musings

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

musings

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:

  1. Tenra Bansho Zero
  2. BESM Third Edition
  3. Anima Beyond Fantasy

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.

The Other Side

ideas, musings

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).

Writing Style In RPGs, In Tokyo Heroes

musings, projects

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.