Category Archives: projects

Here we are!

games, ideas, Japanese, musings, projects, random

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things

actual play, projects

I know there’s maybe four or five people who really read this (Elton, Guy, Mori, and occasionally Jake), but I’m going to go over where things are, admittedly more for my own benefit. This has been a very strange winter break for me, and I’m not totally sure I’m ready for more grad school in the spring, but we’ll see. My fan translation of Maid RPG has kind of gotten sidetracked on account of other, more pressing projects (like translation work that I get paid for).

Probably the biggest thing for me, RPG-wise, is Moonsick. This weird little RPG, inspired by Superflat surrealism, is a possible candidate for the next volume of Push, but it needs a major overhaul from my first draft. Surprisingly helpful thread on it here. Rethinking the game has been a wonderful challenge, and I think I’m moving in the right direction.

At some point I do still want to do the we are flat game anthology, but I’m thinking for that I’ll replace Moonsick with something deliberately aimed at looking at American otaku through a Superflat-like lens. One of the inherent limitations of this project is that I’m an American (if a Japanophile) interpreting these elements of Japanese culture. The similarities and differences between American and Japanese otaku are a source of endless fascination to me, after all.

We also finally had our first real session of Ghostbusters, run by my friend Elton, and it rocked. He honestly keeps impressing me with his GMing skills and creativity, and everyone else was unusually on the ball last night. And my character, an amoral technical guy named Art Griffin, is incredibly fun to play.

Clancy: “Yeah, I’ve flow before. Military vehicles.”
Oswaldo: “Don’t listen to him! He means he’s flown a jeep!“

Which leaves just about everything else being neglected. It’s been weeks since I had a chance to look at Tokyo Heroes, much less Thrash 2.0. Hopefully school won’t totally kill my free time.

Tokyo Heroes: External Playtest

actual play, projects

Mendel Schmiedekamp from the Story Games forum was kind enough to run a session of Tokyo Heroes the other day, and today he emailed me with the results. Not surprisingly, this was major food for thought, and it shows that as far as the game has come, it has a long way to go yet. I’m extremely grateful to have gotten this opportunity, since it exposed some stuff about the game that didn’t really come up with my group, at least not in the first session. I’m onto something (one of my friends called the game “addictive”) but there’s still plenty of work to do.

On the plus side, for his group character creation went very well, and became this sort of mashup of evil aliens and Iron Chef. (“the main villain being Apocalyptic Chef Andromedan – who is planning to cook Earth as part of his course for Theme Ingredient: Mortal Souls.”)

The major problem is that the combat rules need an overhaul. They don’t allow for a whole lot of variety, which makes whittling down the opponent’s Stamina a repetitive process, and initiative and attack power are the only things that really matter, and they can seriously overwhelm the opposition unfairly. It ought to reward creativity a bit more,

I really need to sit down and think about this, and try to get something new together for Mendel’s group and mine alike to try out, probably some time after winter break. For the moment my creative stuff is kind of hamstrung by finals and freelance work.

Also: we are flat
Just before that, I got a bit further on we are flat, my anthology of three crazy Superflat-inspired games. In particular, I’m finally starting to figure out what to do with Magical Burst, the over-the-top insane-o magical girl game that’s basically a reworking of my Magical World campaign setting, with its own set of rules. One of the major things I did was to go hog-wild with random tables, inspired by Maid RPG, and for similar reasons. There’s still lots of things I need to figure out, but the crazy random tables angle is definitely

The first draft of Moonsick is done too, but I suspect it desperately needs playtesting, and to at least be eyeballed by some other people. This is where I run into the problem that the way the game is set up, someone who’s read it all the way through would make a very poor playtester, and it’d be harder to get the full effect on someone who’s played it before. Shades of Paranoia and Cell Gamma (one of the games from the No-Press Anthology), not to mention The Mountain Witch having accidentally become a major inspiration.

For the third one, Black Hole Girls, I’ve come up with some stuff that seems kinda sorta promising, but I really have to develop and playtest it in order to see if I’m even remotely on the right track.

Moonsick Stuff

projects

So, one of my weirder RPG design projects is called we are flat, an “anthology” of three short games inspired by the superflat art movement and what it represents for otaku culture. The first of these is an experiment called Moonsick, which is going to actually require some pieces of artwork to function. Here are the first few bits of artwork:

Go Go Tokyo Heroes!

projects

I’ve been watching the original Power Rangers. Yes, I’m serious. The things I get into because of roleplaying games. I just had to decide to make Tokyo Heroes more accessible to MMPR fans, which actually is looking to be easier than I thought — mostly a matter of tweaking some of the flavor text. Guy Shalev pointed out that I coupld pitch the game as “Remember how fun Power Rangers was before it started sucking? This game is like that.” I never watched it when it first came out (I was in high school… though I did still watch some cartoons), so it’s a new and rather surreal experience for me. I should sit down and watch Power Rangers SPD some time too.

Early MMPR is even more awesomely bad than sentai, partly because they’re trying so hard to make it kiddified, wholesome, and politically correct, hence most of the episodes I’ve seen so far have a blatantly obvious moral attached (recycling is good, deaf people can be cool). I also love how in the first episode Zordon says to Alpha 5, with a straight face, “We need to recruit teenagers with attitude.” That and every now and then they use footage of stuff that’s blatantly, obviously Japanese (like, you know, Tokyo Tower) and hope no one will notice.

…There’s also the thing that very few people besides me will find funny, that during WWF’s “invasion” storyline for a little while Stephanie McMahon started to sound a lot like Rita Repulsa. “Rhyno is going to defeat your pathetic Chris Jericho! AHAHAHAHA! Make my wrestler GROW!” (And now I just remembered JR saying how “the Million Dollar Princess has become a Dairy Queen”).

Tokyo Heroes: Bug Fixes

projects

I’ve gotten over the shock of starting graduate school, so I’ve been able to find some more time for stuff like designing games. I poked at Thrash 2.0 a bit over the past few days; I keep forgetting how much I like how it’s looking, but there’s also a lot of grunt work left to do.

For Tokyo Heroes, as mentioned before the first playtest was very successful overall, but revealed some things that need work.

One of the things that was a little problematic was how the villain seemed to always get screwed out of being able to defend. I just realized that there was a potential solution in the rules already; there’s a rule for Split Actions, where a character can do multiple actions in a turn by taking a penalty equal to the number of actions being performed. Hence, a bad guy like Hellion could’ve defended and still been throwing around attacks that do 5-7 points of damage. I need to try it out in play to find out if it’s actually a solution to the problem.

I also reworked the mook rules a bit. For each mook the GM rolls one die, and each Success is a potential point of damage, but each success on a hero’s attack knocks out one of those successes, and each success on a hero’s defense prevents two.

A friend of mine came up with a neat idea too. I hadn’t consciously intended it to be that way, but Tokyo Heroes wound up being set up so that the game involves lots of fun dice rolling. So, the idea is to have players roll for bonus Karma points. I’m not 100% sure how to set this up, but I’m thinking it’ll be something like the GM picks out an attribute each hero used for important stuff during the episode, and the player rolls that for bonus Karma. Either that, or players would roll as many dice as they earned Karma points, and each 6 would be a bonus point.

Of the issues I found in the playtest, that leaves the matter of how the derived stats (Stamina, Resistance, and Initiative) are figured. The variation of Resistance between 3 and 11 in the playtest characters is a concern, not to mention the fact that the totals of Stamina never seem to work out how you expect, and Pink characters seem to wind up having a lot. Of course, in the playtest the PCs haven’t yet gone up against a villain that’s really meant to test those stats, so I’m not sure how problematic it really is. If I do change it, I’m not yet sure what I’d change it to anyway, but having all of the heroes start off with the same amount of Stamina and Resistance (that can be increased later) is a possibility.

Other than that, there’s still some parts that need more pure writing, and that’s before we get into editing and whatnot. But still, while the actual play was different than I expected, I think I’ve got a fun game on my hands.

Lotsa’ Games

musings, projects

Darnit. I had yet another idea for an RPG to design. Time to go over the ideas I have cooking:

  • Thrash 2.0: The long overdue second edition of my fighting game RPG. I really need to get my crap together on this. I’ve got a lot of the work finished; mainly I need to fill in the rest of the maneuvers and commence playtesting.
  • Tokyo Heroes: My sentai/magical girl RPG. The first playtest went pretty well, and I have plenty of stuff to work on.
  • we are flat: A trilogy of short games inspired by the “superflat” art movement, which means really weird, twisted anime/manga-inspired stuff. The first game, Moonsick, is actually coming along pretty well. It borrows a lot from The Mountain Witch, and it’s weird as all get-out.
  • Nekketsu! Battle Stars: The idea (which came together over the past few days) is to put together a general, light system for melodramatic, manga-style battles (as seen in titles like Bleach and Naruto), and present three radically different settings with freely tweaked rules. Nekketsu (熱血) means something like “hot-blooded” in Japanese, and refers to crazy, over-the-top fighting heroes.
  • Distorted Futures: “A Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG.” Like Neo or Violet or V, you can make the world a better place, but what will you sacrifice?
  • I Hate You: “A Cartoon CSI Game For Two Good Friends.” Coyote vs. Roadrunner, Tom vs. Jerry, etc., as a competitive RPG.

Also, from the world of video games, Prof. Henry Jenkins of MIT was interviewed for GameDaily.biz, and he had a lot to say about the medium’s growing and changing identitiy. On the one hand, the industry is facing all kinds of idiotic criticism, but on the other hand it’s caught up in its own notions about what a video game should be:

HJ: Let’s be clear: the word, game, as used in the games industry, seems to mean anything you do on a computer for fun. The game industry lumps together a variety of different things, sports, games, design tools, toys, role play, stories, which we might keep separate in the real world and calls them all games. This is powerful from a marketing stand point.

Then, on the other hand, they use the word, “games” rather narrowly to repel outside competitors and block new ideas. When Brenda Laurel tried to develop a girl’s game movement, the recurring response was that these were not really games. The same response has from time to time been directed against educational games, serious games, and casual games, that is, anything that doesn’t fit their marketing model or that might allow people outside the core industry to expand our understanding of what their medium could do.

Tokyo Heroes Playtest! (and a couple other things)

ideas, playtesting, projects

The playtest of Tokyo Heroes is now well under way. Last week we made characters and such, and this week was the first session. The players seemed to have had a good time, and I’m finding the results of all this incredibly useful. I’ve started a thread in the Forge’s Playtesting forum about it. For this game I have a lot to think about and a lot to work on now.

I’ve also put the current draft of the rules online for people to peruse.

As a total side tangent, it’s worth noting that Greg Costikyan and company recently got Manifesto Games up and running. This is the thing he’s been talking about for a while, a site that sells quality independent computer games (so it’s sort of the video game world’s answer to IPR), and even though I really need to hold off spending money I’m sorely tempted to go buy some things.

The other day I had another random idea for a game that I probably won’t get to for quite a while. Toon was the first RPG I ever bought, and not many people seem to notice that it was basically set up as a light, silly version of GURPS. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, and the Toon-ified versions of Car Wars and CoC and whatnot in the Tooniversal Tour Guide book were actually really neat. But having been exposed to all this new indie stuff, I have to wonder what an indie take on Saturday morning cartoons would be like. The game idea I came up with was to do a game based around the sort of “predator vs. prey” cartoons, stuff like Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry. And it occurs to me that I may have just come up with an idea for a CSI game. There would be two players, and while the predator character would pretty much always lose, the players would be competing, probably to be the ones who make the predator’s failures more interesting. And it would be called something like “I Hate You: A Cartoon CSI Game For Two Good Friends.” So, that goes right alongside Distorted Futures: A Dystopian Ass-Kicking RPG on the back burner.

Three Things I Like About Tokyo Heroes (so far)

projects

Last week I went to the mall, basically to do some stuff by myself and clear my head. I was especially thinking about getting more of my creative stuff off the ground. One side of that has been harassing my artist friends to get my T-shirt design project seriously under way, but over lunch I pulled out my laptop and wound up rereading the unfinished manuscript of Tokyo Heries, and I realized that I really liked what I saw. Which is why I wound up dropping everything else I was doing (writing/RPG design-wise) for the moment to work on this game.

Continue reading Three Things I Like About Tokyo Heroes (so far) →

Thrash 2.0: Agility

projects

More Fighting Games
I’ve gotten over the crazy obsessive playing of fighting games (which is good, since my carpal tunnel syndrome will start creeping up on me otherwise), but still, I’ve been playing a lot of them. I even borrowed my friend’s copy of Tekken 3, despite the fact that I don’t really go in for the series (though it does have some of the coolest extras of any fighting game). I also keep forgetting just how many King of Fighters games there are now; the first one was in ’94, and the main series alone has had one game for every year since, not to mention a zillion spin-off games like Maximum Impact (3D for PS2), Neowave (for Atomiswave, ported to PS2 and Xbox), EX (GBA), Kyo (quasi-CRPG thing for PSX). Plus the epic storyline that kicked off in KoF ’95 has so far been the first of three. I kind of need to get caught up on all of that. I also went and ordered a copy of Cyberbots (does anyone else remember this game?) for Sega Saturn off of eBay, along with the Samurai Shodown CRPG. I’ve mainly been concentrating on the hand-to-hand stuff, but at some point I’ll need to mess around with the more weapon-based fighting games to try and figure out what I need to include for the weapon maneuvers.

As For Thrash 2.0…
When I got back into Thrash 2.0 last month, it felt like I mostly just had a big morass of maneuvers to write. Fortunately, I was wrong about that. The design process is proving to be interesting and creative, which it needs to be both for producing a better game and for keeping me interested.

Thrash is noticably more complex than any other game I’m designing right now, and I don’t necessarily think it’s playing to my strengths even, but I’m having fun doing it all the same. (And if I wasn’t, I have more than enough other things to distract me). An important part of what I’ve been doing is trying to make sure all the pieces fit together nicely, which means answering questions like, “What happens if you want a Mega-Attack version of a Multi-Kick?” (I haven’t got a good answer to that one yet, but I know roughly what I want to do). A good example is the rule for variant maneuvers; if you want to buy multiple versions of a maneuver with different modifiers, you get a discount on the base cost. This is 1 point off for each version after the first, to a minimum of 2. For balance reasons, I wound up having to create a special rule that modified Basic Maneuvers have to go off of a starting cost listed in a table in the Modifiers section.

I think I may have come up with a workable solution to the “Agility as god-stat” problem. In a nutshell, since originally Agility was added to every combat-related roll, mechanically there was no particular reason not to have Agility be as high as the game allows. And yet, in the source material Zangief is about the opposite of what people think of when they hear the word “agility,” but he doesn’t have much trouble hitting things. My idea is sort of a mashup between BESM and WWE: Know Your Role, where different attributes are averaged to get a set of three new stats, which I’m calling “Combat Proficiencies,” to represent the character’s accuracy with different kinds of moves. Right now they’re called Force (for big moves that overwhelm the opponent), Finesse (for technical moves that are effective because they’re skillfully executed), and Aim (for moves that are effective because they’re accurately hitting the target, or a part thereof). Each would be an average of two (three?) attributes. Going through the maneuvers and replacing Agility with one of the three for each turned out to be easier than I expected. There are a few where the player gets to choose between Power or Finesse (including the basic Punch and Kick), and Aim is a little underused, but since they’re not traits the player has to invest points into directly, I think it’ll be okay.