Category Archives: projects

Thrash: Not Dead, I Guess

projects

After it coming up in an e-mail conversation, and being mentioned in this RPG.net thread alongside Final Stand, I think I got sufficiently embarrassed over the fact that I’ve been failing to work on Thrash 2.0 for 5 years that I got inspired, and came up with some new ideas for how to handle and fix some of the things that have been bothering me. I’m still keeping the majority of the stuff from my last big push to work on it (last year), but changing some fairly major things too.

The main thing is that I’ve come to dislike systems with lots of fiddly points to spend. Now, I admire what’s been accomplished with stuff like Hero system and Mekton Z Plus, but I just have a very low tolerance for dealing with that kind of stuff personally. The earlier draft had characters spending pools of points on Attributes, Techniques, and Everything Else. I’ve decided to nix that last category (for which PCs originally would spend a big wad of Character Points) in favor of something less granular. Characters get a set number of selections for Maneuvers and Supers (by default, 3 and 1 of each to start with), and a set number (10) of “Support Traits,” which are a catch-all for Edges, Skills, Maneuver Upgrades, Support Maneuvers (which are where you get your movement and defensive maneuvers mostly), and Story Hooks.

I’m still working out the details of Story Hooks, but I want them to be something like TSOY Keys and the whatever-they-were-calleds in Weapons of the Gods. Basically the player has an opportunity to “buy in” to storylines ahead of time, and get extra XP for it. I’m also thinking of brining back that “Fighter Nature” idea I had a while back, which is basically where you pick an archetype that represents your character’s basic motivation for being a martial artist and going out to enter tournaments and whatnot. I was originally going for more of a purely “gamey” design, but I think I want to also include at least some stuff that points the characters towards getting into fighting game/fighting manga style storylines.

I also got sick of dealing with so many fiddly bits for maneuver design, and decided to come up with the simplest system possible. So, although the game still has Action Points and whatnot, its maneuver design rules are more akin to BESM Weapon Attacks. You take a base maneuver, and add Enhancements and Drawbacks, up to a certain limit, to get what you want.

So, at this point the final version of Thrash 2.0 is looking like a crazy mashup of The Shadow of Yesterday, Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, and Cinematic Unisystem.

Raspberry Heaven: Playtest Version 1

playtesting, projects

So, with the game proceeding at a nice pace, I now have an initial playtest version ready to go. I may be doing my first playtest in the very near future. :3

Get the Raspberry Heaven Playtest Version Here

Writing up episode descriptions turned out to be WAY harder than I expected (though I am kind of out of it because of school starting up…). I’ll definitely have to work on that more as I go along. Anyway, any and all feedback is greatly, tremendously appreciated.

Ichigo Mashimaro Characters
Okay, here goes:

Chika
Diligent
Tsukkomi
Plain

Miu
Boke
Genkisugi
Space Cadet

Matsuri
Delicate
Naive
Timid

Ana
Complex (English)
Nice
(crap I don’t know what the third one should be)

Nobue
Lazy
Obsession (Cute Stuff)
Obsession (Smoking)

Raspberry Heaven: On The Act of Role-Playing

musings, projects

Now that I’m in a mood for game design, I’ll no doubt continue posting here excessively until I get caught off-guard by something else.

Right now I’m really liking how Raspberry Heaven is turning out. We’ll have to see if I keep liking it after I do some playtesting, but that’ll have to wait a little while. The game mechanics are actually very simple — with the possible exception of the descriptions of quirks they could probably fit on one page — but it’s more the attitude towards role-playing that game brings to bear that I’m liking a lot.

The other day I finally finished reading a book called The Effective Use of Role-Play, by Morry van Ments. It’s an overview of role-playing as used as an educational tool, and as I’d hoped it helped me reexamine some of the underlying processes of role-playing. Educational role-plays are generally bound by realism, and are carried out in order to either train students in sensitivity, or let them practice certain social activities (like interviewing). As van Ments presents it, there is a huge emphasis on “debriefing,” discussing the role-playing session and its implications with the students. He advocates debriefings that are 2-3 times as long as the actual role-play, and notes that they also serve to help the students leave their assumed roles behind. While of course I wouldn’t go to that extreme for a non-educational role-play, I find that a certain amount of cooling down (and warming up) is helpful and natural.

Of particular interest to me was a section called “Beating the system,” which touches on issues that have become more and more pertinent in my own actual play. It’s impossible to fill in every possible detail no matter what kind of role-playing you’re doing, so to a certain extent it falls to the role-players to fill in the gaps here and there. In a highly traditional RPG (I know, I’m generalizing), the players have input through their character’s histories and actions, and everything else is the purview of the Game Master. In practice, my group has gradually blurred the line over time. This is especially true when it comes to whether a PC can do things “off-camera,” announcing an action retroactively, even if it’s something trivial and only impacts the “social flow” of the PCs. In a sense, this sort of fits with how some forms of narrative appear to flow, and I think it’s actually a pretty complex issue that merits exploration on its own.

For Raspberry Heaven, there’s no GM or other central authority figure to act as gatekeeper, and I’m not sure adding hard and fast rules to govern narrative input (as has been used very successfully in some other games) is really what it needs. Instead, I wound up with a set of principles guiding story input, aimed at both keeping the game on track in terms of genre (slice of life anime high school girls) and group consensus:

  1. This game lacks any kind of fantastic/genre elements. If it doesn’t fit into a normal slice-of-life high school story, it also doesn’t belong in the game. No one gets any magic powers or anything like that.
  2. Regardless of who has authority over a given aspect of the game, everyone should be willing to give and receive ideas and advice.
  3. The overall game/story belongs to the group. Elements that impact the big picture should be decided in accordance with a group consensus.
  4. The tutor has authority over the general contents of scenes he or she is running.
  5. The individual player has authority over the specifics of his or her character. Do not invent anything about another player’s character without consulting them first. Characters mostly start off as strangers and become friends, so there should be relatively little in the way of pertinent past events to invent in the first place.
  6. “Off-camera” action (things that take don’t take place in the context of an actual scene) should be minimal and inconsequential.
  7. Actions that are obviously difficult and/or have far-ranging consequences should be treated as challenges (i.e., where the dice are rolled) if at all possible, assuming they’re appropriate for the game in the first place.

Lucky Star Characters
Now, as I mentioned before, here’s the stats for the Lucky Star characters. It’s just the four main characters for now; once it gets going the series has a fairly large cast, actually. After that I’ll do Ichigo Mashimaro. ^_^

Konata
Obsession (otaku)
Physically Gifted
Lazy

Tsukasa
Innocent
Lazy
Timid

Kagami
Diligent
Tsukkomi
Tsundere

Miyuki
Busty
Genius
Nice

The Status of My Games

playtesting, projects, , , , ,

I have no idea who I picked it up from, but I came down with a cold the day after I got back from GenCon. On the plus side, I also came back feeling inspired about gaming in general, so it’s time to look at my various back burner projects and figure out where I am and what I need to do. The most important thing, unquestionably, is that I need to make much more of an effort to playtest the stuff I create.

Raspberry Heaven
Today I finally finished typing up the descriptions of Quirks. I need to fill in a few things here and there, but at this point the only thing I really need to to for playtesting is have a single episode write-up ready to play. I actually slipped some elements of this game into a weird dream episode of my Divine Machine campaign (a long-term dimension hopping game using OVA), but the rules never really came into play. I’m trying to do a “Bonus Indie Gaming Night” kind of thing with my friends, and I think the first real playtest of RH will come after The Mountain Witch.

Anime Dreams
I looked through what I currently have the other day, and I’m thinking that I’m closer to having it testable than I realized. Mostly I need to work a little on how I’m presenting what I’ve already got, and maybe do a little bit of trimming. The game is essentially a conflict engine, a diceless version of games like DitV, FATE, PDQ, TSOY, etc., and while the setting creation rules have the potential to be really interesting, they’re a distraction from getting the engine running.

I also want to come up with a more evocative title. In no particular order, here are some titles and bits and pieces thereof that I came up with:
Anime Stars
Defenders of Tokyo
Dreaming of the Sunrise
Round Zero
Zero Saga
Zero Requiem
Zero Spark
Sea of Miracles
Starlight Breaker(s)
Raging Heart(s)
S, R, J, Super, Z, A’s, Zero, 1/2, +
Soul
Striker(s)
Code
Sparking
100%
Unlimited
Infinite

Tokyo Heroes
I think I mentioned this before, but Filip sent me literally 8 pages of feedback. I know more or less what I want to do with the game — an overhaul to make it much, much less handwavey — but it’s going to be pretty time-consuming. The main thing is I’m going to delineate game session structure according to kishoutenketsu as mentioned before, which in turn will require retooling several other widgets in the game to match. In particular, I want to take a cue from the GUMSHOE system and put the emphasis on when and how PCs find clues, rather than rolling dice to see if they figure things out.

Slime Story
I came up with this setting idea ages ago (and even put it in an episode of Divine Machine), and I’ve been wanting to do it in RPG form, either as a setting or an independent game. Right now I’m thinking I want to create a game that uncomfortably marries simple hack-and-slash with hippie/story game stuff about the protagonists’ hopes and dreams in the face of a bland reality brightened only by the monster hunting hobby that they’ll eventually have to give up. It’s still very much in the preliminary stages, and I honestly have no idea how I’m going to tackle the latter part of the game’s concept.

Thrash 2.0
The eternally delayed, hope to do it some day second edition of Thrash. Every time I get even remotely motivated Real Life starts dumping stuff on me, plus my tastes have changed enormously since I wrote Thrash in my first year of college, and while I still want to make a game-y hand-to-hand combat thing, I find assigning lots of points to be bland and cumbersome. I’m thinking that characters should just have set selections of maneuvers (say, 3 Special Moves and 1 Super to start with), and applying similar simplification all the way through. I’ve lost count of how many total rewrites I’ve done, but if I go this route it’ll be yet another.

we are flat
This is intended to be an anthology of three short-form games inspired by Superflat: Moonsick, Magical Burst, and Black Hole Girls. Right now it’s WAY on the back burner. Each game is going to be radically different from the others, and require its own development cycle.

Raspberry Heaven: Quirks

projects

In terms of the game’s rather simple mechanics, Raspberry Heaven characters are defined by a set of three “Quirks” chosen by the player. So far it looks like I have a good selection of quirks figured out, considering it was pretty easy to figure out the quirks for the Azumanga Daioh cast.

Here’s the current list of quirks:
Baka, Boke (clown), Busty, Complex, Cool, Cute, Delicate, Diligent, Feral, Gaijin, Genius, Genkisugi (hyper-active), Innocent, Jock, Lazy, Nice, Obsession, Physically Gifted, Plain, Slow, Softy, Space Cadet, Timid, Tsukkomi (straight-man), Tsundere (here), Worldly

So, here’s my attempt at the Azumanga Daioh cast. Note that Kaorin is a “wallflower” character and is supposed to get less Quirks, and also that teachers are assumed to be good at whatever their main subject is.

Chiyo (Mihama Chiyo)
Cute
Innocent
Genius

Kagura
Baka
Jock
Softy

Osaka (Kasuga Ayumu)
Space Cadet
Slow
Delicate

Sakaki
Cool
Softy
Physically Gifted

Tomo (Takino Tomo)
Boke
Genkisugi
Baka

Yomi (Koyomi Mizuhara)
Tsukkomi
Diligent
Complex (Weight)

Nyamo-sensei (Kurosawa Minamo)
Diligent
Nice
Tsukkomi

Yukari-sensei (Tanizaki Yukari)
Lazy
Worldly
Boke

Kaorin
Obsession (Sakaki)
Plain

Next time, Lucky Star. :3

起承転結

ideas, projects,

Since it’s looking like it’s going to become an important part of two of the games I’m working on, I decided to write up a blog post about kishoutenketsu (起承転結). Kishoutenketsu is a four-act structure commonly used in Japan. Although it originally derives from Chinese poetry, it has been applied to all sorts of longer works, including novels and manga. The four stages are introduction, development, climax (or turn), and resolution. Just like the three-act structure (set-up, confrontation, resolution) more commonly used in the West, it is ultimately just a model, and it certainly can’t be used to explain the structure of every story out there.

On the other hand, there’s the case of yon-koma (four-panel) manga. These are comic strips consisting of four vertical panels, and are more or less Japan’s version of our newspaper comic strips (which, possibly not coincidentally, are mostly three panels). When you examine yon-koma comics from the point of view of kishoutenketsu, more often than not the panels correspond exactly to the four-act structure, wrought in miniature. In case you’re wondering I learned about this through (1) a fan-translation of Welcome to the NHK, which mentioned kishoutenketsu in a footnote, and (2) a how to draw manga book I saw at a store and have never been able to find since.

Anyway, with Raspberry Heaven most of the source material (notably Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star) started off as yon-koma manga. Even when I come up with a good idea I usually need some prodding in the right direction, so it wasn’t until Jake Richmond egged me on that I came up with a good idea for how to use it in this game, and in a way that will hopefully make the game that much better. Essentially it’s going to be a part of the rules structure for how scenes are set up and run. The four phases are:

  1. Ki/Introduction: The player sets up and initiates the scene.
  2. Shou/Development: The group commences role-playing.
  3. Ten/Climax: The scene comes to a head, and a “challenge” (a thing that requires rolling dice) happens.
  4. Ketsu/Resolution: A little more to bring the aftermath of the climax into the game, and to close up the scene.

With Tokyo Heroes (at Filip’s urging) I’m also planning to use it, albeit on a different scale. As a genre, sentai has a relatively rigid plot structure, so the four acts could correspond fairly tightly to the stages of the story of a standard episode, with mechanical effects (or a lack thereof) appropriate to each.

  1. Ki/Introduction: The game starts, with the heroes doing something ordinary (for them) that, though they don’t know it yet, is going to lead into this week’s conflict.
  2. Shou/Development: The inciting incident hits. The heroes have to do whatever investigating is necessary to be ready for this week’s battle. For this I’m thinking of taking a cue from Gumshoe/Esoterrorists, and making it more about how the PCs find clues rather than if.
  3. Ten/Climax: The battle finally happens for real. The heroes go all-out and beat the monster of the week.
  4. Ketsu/Resolution: The game goes a little further, to establish what happens after the monster is defeated. The people affected by it turn back to normal, the girl it kidnapped is freed, etc. The heroes go back to base and things settle down. Credits roll. Preview plays.

Raspberry Heaven is coming together fast enough that I might actually be able to playtest it before the month is up. With Tokyo Heroes it’s kind of a different story in that Filip sent me a LONG e-mail (8 pages when I printed it out) with a blow-by-blow critique. It’s been tremendously helpful, but it’s required me to rethink some very basic parts of the game’s structure, and a massive rewrite is in order before I do more playtesting.

(Some day I’ll work on Thrash 2.0 again…)

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.

24 Hour Otaku

projects

I decided to try doing another 24 Hour RPG, this time a sort of otaku version of Don’t Rest Your Head. More updates as I get more done.

Update 1: It’s 11:40 p.m. I was never one for all-nighters, so I’m going to get some sleep. This game is going to be VERY rough in its 24-Hour RPG form, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to finish it at least. Right now it’s looking less like an original game and more like a mashup of Don’t Rest Your Head and WEG Ghostbusters, and that’s probably not something I can really fix in time.

Update 2: About 11:30 the next morning. A friend of mine wants to go to Fry’s to look at DVDs and whatnot, and I can’t seem to motivate myself to work on this project anymore. The basic game mechanics are about as finished as they can get in 24 hours, and anything I’d add would be flavor text at this point. I’m going to call it quits, and possibly work on it more if I get back home in time. I’m thinking the 24-Hour RPG thing is just a bad fit for how I do creative stuff.

Update 3: It occurs to me that this might’ve turned out better if I wasn’t trying to sandwich it between days of my intense school schedule. The problem is not doing that would’ve required waiting months to do this. Anyway here’s the file. I was too lazy to hunt down the software to make a PDF.

Anime Dreams: Conflict Resolution

projects

This will be the first (and probably most important) of a series of posts about my attempt at what I call a “melodramatic anime RPG,” tentatively titled “Anime Dreams.”

I have to admit, I’m not all that experienced with conflict resolution; I’ve only played one game (Panty Explosion) that really used it as a game mechanic per se (though my group’s most recent long campaign was with Truth & Justice), and I’ve certainly never tried to design one before. But, at least I’ve got something that could be workable.

In game terms, characters are defined almost solely by Traits. These can be good or bad (though occasionally a good trait will hinder you and vice versa) and they’re divided into characteristics (actual things about your character) and bonds (connections to the world; friendships, rivalries, beliefs, etc.), rated 1-5. If the campaign’s Sentimentality is Low or Medium, Bonds are limited in their effectiveness in non-social conflicts, but if it’s High then they become interchangeable with Characteristics.

There are action resolution rules, where you basically just compare your trait level to something to see if you succeed, but you can take Xs (i.e., temporarily lose trait levels) to boost your effective ability. Action resolution is used for small stuff, and also for specific types of actions that can be taken during a Conflict.

When a full conflict starts, you have to determine the Scope (how many points worth of traits each character can use and how much Momentum a character can accumulate) and Stakes (what’s gained or lost at the end; success and failure may be enough, but existing and potential traits, amongst other things, can be part of the stakes).

Players take turns taking certain types of “conflict actions.” The most basic ones are Pushing (trying to either damage the opponent or gain Momentum) and Pulling (defending, or trying to reduce the opponent’s Momentum). Each time a character does a Push or Pull with a trait, that trait takes an X. However, Momentum points can be spent on Rest (to remove Xs), Effort (boosting your effective trait level for a Push or Pull), or a Finisher (spend lots, and try to finish off your opponent). There’s lots of leeway for how these things are narrated, so a “Finisher” doesn’t necessarily have to be an epic hisatsuwaza attack. Characters can expand the Scope of a conflict in progress if they wish, by raising the Stakes in some way.

There are a few other things involved, and no doubt plenty more I’ll have to figure out as I go along, but that’s the gist of it. Having traits take an X each time they’re used, but allowing Momentum to be spent to remove Xs, was the most critical thing, since I was thinking in circles trying to figure out how to make it necessary to mix up what traits you use while still allowing a given trait to be used multiple times. I still have concerns about this, particularly that it has the potential to get too drawn out, but that’s what playtesting is for.

Anyway, here’s some other things about the game, some of which I’ll post about in more detail later:

  • Character Questions: Inspired by DRYH, and tweaked for anime, character creation begins by asking: What do you look like? Who are you? What do you want? What will you become?
  • Power Scale: Originally inspired by the question of how the heck to model Dragon Ball Z in an RPG, Power Scale is similar to Fudge’s scaling rules, and adds a bonus to one’s effective trait rank when in a combat conflict with someone with a lower Power Scale. Very useful not only for DBZ, but for stuff like magical girls (where no one but them can stand up to magical monsters) and mecha (for obvious reasons).
  • Character Development: Characters grow and change mainly through conflicts, either as part of the stakes or by “Exploding” in response to an opponent’s overwhelming Momentum.
  • Series Creation: Devising (or selecting) a setting is an important part of preparing to play an RPG, so this game will have rules and guidelines for it, including formalized “round robin setting creation” rules, which in turn have a set of alternate rules for campaigns based on existing anime series.
  • Stars: A currency in the game used for all kinds of metagamey stuff.
  • Fan Guide: As mentioned earlier, it’s part of the game that for longer series the participants work together to put together a guidebook to their campaign. The GM rewards entries with Stars.
  • Canned Settings: I intend to include three pre-made settings: Tiny Aliens (Keroro Gunsou, Bottle Fairy, and Invader Zim put in a blender), Angel Soul (sort of like a more mystical version of S-cry-ed), and Fullmetal President (the U.S. President and his VP and cabinet don power suits to stop a military coup. Very much inspired by Metal Wolf Chaos, the greatest Japanese Xbox game that never made it to the U.S. Each does some neat stuff with character creation.