2011 in Review

musings, , , ,

I’m apparently making a yearly review post a regular thing now. Also, I’ve been hugely inspired to blog over the past couple weeks, but then there have genuinely been a lot of exciting things going on.

Actual Gaming
This past year I did a lot of gaming with my Friday group, which has been going through a series of short campaigns for some time. Our longest game was also our best. We started off playing Smallville and then switched over to Primetime Adventures, which wound up working out incredibly well. The game was kind of a Smallville-ish thing, a present-day setting where people with superpowers were emerging (to the chagrin of the Greek gods), without any real DC-inspired elements per se. That was what inspired me to write Entanglements, which got its first test run as part of the setup for our “Ameripunk” Wushu game (my character was a bibliomancer trained by Mark Twain and entrusted with the Amerinomicon). I do still need to make some refinements to Entanglements, but it seems to work pretty well.

For a variety of reasons what had been my “main” group heavily dropped off gaming. We did get in some D&D and had a ton of fun with Gamma World, but we nonetheless went from gaming most weekends to someone maybe getting a bit of something together every other month. I think it has a lot to do with human factors more than anything. With working 40 hours a week, attending another game group, and hanging out with friends most Mondays, I’ve tended to spend the better part of most weekends writing and recuperating from the prior week. It also doesn’t help that our game of choice is D&D4e, which while definitely easier on the DM than 3rd Edition nonetheless takes a fair amount of work to run. I tried to run a Dark Sun game, but I kept ending up having plans slapped together an hour or two before the game started. I’m hoping to rope that group into playing Dragon World, because it’s a fun game I can bullshit my way through running, and because if our D&D games are any indication we can definitely get into the right spirit. We’re also getting back a member who’s been absent for a few years, and I’m hoping that will help reinvigorate our gaming.

Conventions and Whatnot
This year also saw the first time I ran a convention booth by myself, first at a tiny anime convention called Kin-Yoobi Con, and then at the Alternative Press Expo. Both were interesting learning experiences, though by the end of APE I was ready to swear of cons for a while. Anime fans are definitely more receptive to RPGs than indie comics fans though. Neko Machi had kind of a rough second year too, and we’re hoping to reinvent it somewhat (with a format change and such) and relaunch in early 2012.

Game Projects
I only did two Kyawaii RPG things this year, and one of them I started and finished yesterday. I still have like half a dozen unfinished ones that I’d like to work on and haven’t touched.

The anime series Madoka Magica was a massive thing in 2011. For me personally it was the dark deconstruction of the magical girl genre I’d been wanting for years, and it inspired me to design an RPG that I titled “Magical Burst.” I have far too many works in progress, but this is easily the most promising and most popular. I put the rough drafts of the game online just for people to read, and it totally took off, becoming a standard of the 4chan /tg/ crowd. I keep coming across threads where people suggest it, and in one case I came across an unfinished Black Rock Shooter game where the creators had thrown up their hands and said, “Just use Magical Burst.” I don’t know how much is my accomplishment as a designer (there are parts of it that make me wince) and how much is other factors, but it’s helping motivate me to actually get the game done for a change.

Dragon World is the other new game I started on, and it proved very fun to both work on and to play (when we did a 3-session playtest). The idea came from when I finally got around to reading the Dragon Half manga, and this “90s comedy fantasy anime” game also draws inspiration from Slayers and a host of other titles. It’s based on the Apocalypse World rules, though of course with plenty of changes for the game’s very different genre. I’m planning to put a “Dragon World Hack” PDF up for free once I get some more things done.

Golden Sky Stories is of course the Japanese RPG I translated and that we’re gearing up to do a Kickstarter to publish. I’ve posted a good amount about it already, but I’m really excited to finally get it out into the world. I’m also working on putting together an original replay that’ll be a free preview of the game in English. I have the rough manuscript and artwork all ready in fact, so I’m just waiting for a friend to tackle the editing and layout. For the game itself, Clay is still working on the layout, and for the Kickstarter I basically just need to wait for my friend to finish up tweaking the video and fill out stuff on the Kickstarter backend for the launch.

Gamer Culture and New Stuff
I’ve made a habit of lurking in the grognards.txt thread on Something Awful. It’s a collection of the most terrible things said by grognards, and is up to about 1500 pages now. It’s kind of therapeutic at times, and it’s helped me get a better perspective on how D&D has changed over time. Probably the biggest lesson from grognards.txt however is simply: people are at their best when they’re actually doing stuff they like instead of bitching about things they don’t like. There are OSR blogs that come off as obnoxious and curmudgeony (at best) when talking about RPGs published less than 20 years ago, and yet when they’re earnestly expressing their passion for old-school swords and sorcery I want to cheer[1]. I’m also contemplating doing a “grognards.mp3” podcast episode with dramatic readings, though with everything going on it’s been really damn hard to find time for podcasting. I have a whole solo episode recorded that I haven’t had time to edit.

For a while now I’ve been interested in trying to expand the medium of RPGs in new directions, particularly in terms of components and presentation. I’ve talked before about looking into using board game components (and I still want an RPG that makes good use of a spinner!), and I love how (for example) Jake Richmond is making good use of comics to teach people how to play his newer games. In December I hit on the idea of making an RPG in the form of a smartphone app and designing it around that medium as much as possible, an idea that won the “Brain Full of Games” contest, which consequently has me starting on a design document for Raspberry Heaven (my Azumanga Daioh inspired slice of life schoolgirl game) as an “RPG app.” I’m already talking to some programmers, so things stand to get really exciting on that front in 2012.

I’ve come to be a bit irritated at gamers, at least as represented on online forums, for how they can come across as having desperately narrow tastes in RPGs. For my part there are things that don’t interest me (board games, horror, zombies… I could go on), but there’s almost nothing in the way of RPGs I wouldn’t be willing to play if a friend really wanted to run it. And yet, if you propose any slight deviation from the books and (standard) dice formula you’ll get a chorus of naysayers. But on the other hand I’ve realized that there are a lot of potential design elements that are uncommon in RPGs in part because they’re difficult to use well. I think part of why resource-based diceless games are rare (for example) is that they only really work when you depart at least somewhat from the traditional paradigm of rolling for success and failure. An RPG that’s totally ordinary except for having players spend points instead of rolling dice for action checks is creating a bunch of perverse incentives and substantially changing the basic flow of things in an awkward way. On the other hand Golden Sky Stories works as a resource based game mainly because the tone of it is so non-competitive.

When all is said and done my desire to mess around with the medium is driven not so much by a desire to find a blue ocean strategy that’ll be a giant success or something, but rather the tantalizing creative challenges. I’ve lost some sleep over ideas for the Raspberry Heaven app, in part because there are so many things I can do differently from an analog RPG that I find just fascinating. I’ve also just started reading up a bit on interface design and such for mobile apps, and given that these days I rarely have my iPhone more than a few feet away from me for any length of time, taking a closer look at this thing that’s so ubiquitous in my everyday life would be really interesting even if I weren’t looking to design an app. I’m hoping that if I can get the Raspberry Heaven app off the ground it’ll at the very least merit making more attempts at this newish kind of game.

At this point 2012 is looking to be a really exciting year of making stuff happen. It’s hard to say what stuff specifically, though I sure has hell want Golden Sky Stories to be out the door and into people’s hands.

[1]On the other hand any discussions of sexism anywhere near the context of gaming seems all but guaranteed to produce posts that are maddening or just depressing depending on how tired I am.

Kyawaii RPG Omake: Monday Afternoon Blues Audio Edition

anime, games

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while and finally got around to putting together. This is an mp3 you can use to play Monday Afternoon Blues, a role-playing poem I did a while back inspired by Stoke-Birmingham 0-0 (only with an anime convention spin because me and my friends know nothing about soccer). This new version consists of an audio introduction, 15 minutes of ambient airport sounds (thanks to Freesound.org), and an announcement that’s your cue to end the game. I’ve also included a set of character cards you can print out to make it a little easier to keep track of who’s who.

Monday Afternoon Blues Audio Edition (mp3)
Character Cards (PDF)

This file uses the AtlantaAirportAmbient.mp3 by jm Creative Commons audio sample.

Fantasy Flight Production Values

musings, ,

For the most part I don’t like board games, though I do occasionally let myself be dragged into playing one for social reasons, owing to the substantial overlap between RPG players and board gaming, not to mention my brother-in-law being so ridiculously into board games. For me it’s kind of like, why play a board game I feel like I’m playing an RPG where something important and essential has been taken out.

In any case, the other day we tried to play Mansions of Madness, an Arkham Horror derivative from Fantasy Flight Games. We actually didn’t get that far, in part because my friend who owns the game hadn’t actually even opened the box yet, and it seems to be the kind of game where you need to read the rules beforehand. What really struck me about it though, which was something that was also true of Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition, was that in some ways the very high production values of the game worked against it. Fantasy Flight apparently loves to have games with numerous components of various kinds, especially in that thick, colorful card stock you have to punch out before you play the game. Even more so than with Warhammer, this is a game that really would’ve benefited from dropping at least some of the tokens in favor of a more RPG style way of tracking things. For example, each character has separate skill cards, a character card, item cards, and can accumulate various tokens that can represent damage and madness. The Keeper has threat tokens, time tokens, a set of threat cards, three combat decks, and I think several other things that we didn’t actually get around to even using in the game. Looking at all that stuff, I can’t help but think that you could easily halve the number of components the game involves, which would in turn speed up play simply by reducing the need to sift through all the components to find the thing you need. On top of that, at least for Mansions of Madness, the designers seem to have been strangely reticent to label any given component according to its function. It would have been nice for example if the item cards had said “Item” on their backs, not to mention if the many, many kinds of tokens had given some indication as to what they are beyond a colorful picture.

This is really interesting to me because for a while I’ve wanted to explore how RPGs can use different kinds of components in different ways, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there could be a point at which components become a burden. I’m not familiar enough with the medium of board games to know how much of this is a board game thing and how much is a Fantasy Flight thing, especially given that I even more seldom let myself get dragged into playing the more elaborate board games. However, looking at Mansions of Madness, a game with absolutely amazing production values and an $80 price tag, it’s weird to me that design-wise it falls behind some much cheaper RPGs in certain ways. My friend Grant owns several titles from Fantasy Flight, but where we’ve played them he’s inevitably wound up griping about the poor organization of the rulebook. I feel like board game players put up with things that RPG players would be quick to brand as heresy, and I’m not sure what that says about either group. Mansions of Madness has apparently gotten favorable reviews and even won a Golden Geek award (for best thematic board game), whereas Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition was massively reviled online solely on the basis of news of how it would use certain board game components and not be exactly like prior editions. Of course, to the extent that I would advocate using board game components and techniques in RPGs, I would not advocate using entirely separate categories of components for things that could much more easily be tracked on paper in the manner of a traditional RPG (the fatigue tokens in Warhammer being a very prominent example).

Of course, considering where I am as a designer (and to a lesser extent where RPGs are in general), making a game with so many components that it costs $80 isn’t really a serious consideration no matter what. I do kind of wish that RPGs could get away with that kind of thing more (look at just how much people freaked out over the price tag of WFRP3e), but then the $75 price tag is the main reason I don’t own a copy of FreeMarket. On the other hand, I do wish that people who play RPGs (or at least people who post about them online) didn’t come off as being so over-the-top purists about the kinds of materials that games can use. People freak out about things like the possibility of losing components from an RPG in a way that they just don’t seem to about board games. This is especially weird to me given that tabletop gaming in general has such a DIY streak that you would think that people would be quite willing and able to overcome any limitations imposed by materials on their own. Certainly people have no problem using just about anything imaginable as miniatures for D&D, and Wizards of the Coast probably ought to be taking a hint from all the fan made expansion for the D&D board games.

RPG App Brainstorming: Raspberry Heaven

ideas, projects,

The “How Not to Run a Game Business” blog by Gau/Fugaros from the Something Awful forum has been an interesting and controversial thing. I don’t agree with everything he says of course[1], but from what I know about things I agree with him more than not. Earlier this month he put on a “Brain Full of Games” contest, asking people to submit 250-word synopses of game ideas that could be game-changers. That’s a tall order no matter what, but I submitted my “RPG in an app” idea (outlined in greater but messier detail in an earlier blog post) to the contest. I was pretty confident that I was on to something with the idea, but I was still pleasantly surprised that I was one of the two co-winners. After checking out this blog he went as far as to put up another post and say of me “He likes good games and makes good games. That’s not strictly relevant, but it makes me happy.” and call me a “good-game broseph.” There’s going to be a $10 prize (woo), but the real prize will be actually doing something with this idea.

All of which has me much more inspired to work on the project for real even though I have way too many projects going on. (And as a consequence I’m writing this blog post of about 1400 words and throwing it out onto the internet, cuz that’s how I roll.) I initially had lots of ideas about what to do in terms of the format, but was totally drawing a blank about the subject matter of a game. When I sat down and brainstormed some ideas, Raspberry Heaven jumped to the top of the list. If you haven’t been following this blog, like, forever, it’s a game I’ve been failing to design for years now, inspired by slice of life schoolgirl anime like Azumanga Daioh and Hidamari Sketch. (And it’s one of the reasons I have such a ginormous collection of 4-koma manga.) Twice I built a complete game and decided that it was completely wrong, though for different reasons each time. It’s probably not the most marketable possible RPG app subject matter,[2] but it’s what excites me to the point where ideas for how to make it work are making it hard to sleep, so it’s where I want to be creatively at least.

The game will have a cast of pre-made characters, which aim to be very distinct and iconic in their personalities and looks. I’m thinking 5 or 6 schoolgirls, though I may make them American instead of Japanese for more accessibility and such. My current list of archetypes goes tsundere, space cadet, jock, beauty (I’m thinking of Miyuki from Lucky Star and maybe Hiro from Hidamari Sketch), quiet girl (something like Tooru from A Channel), and spazzy fangirl. The game would have a little “encyclopedia” thing with brief, digestible info about the characters and such that you can bring up at any time, and if you have the app but you’re not the one running the main game you can take advantage of the encyclopedia should you get lost.

When you start playing, each player picks a character and enters their own name for future reference (so if Mike is playing Rose[3], Mike’s name will show up next to her icon to help you remember). If you’re not sure what to pick there’ll be a Random button to let the game pick randomly for you, which will be a thing through most of the choices the game presents. When that’s done, you do the setup for the episode, picking out or randomly determining the general situation you’ll be dealing with. The app could also use the phone’s calendar and weather report to help decide, suggesting nearby holidays as well as characters’ birthdays and such.

The basic structure of the game I’m envisioning is kind of like Fiasco, where players take turns framing scenes in which you mainly do freeform role-play. The game suggests scene elements based on the episode setup, the characters, and what elements have been in prior scenes. I’m thinking it would be neat to have something or other that the scene framer could trigger once per scene or some such, though I don’t yet have any idea what that would be. At the end of a scene you pass the phone on to the next person (determined by volunteer or at random, and someone who hasn’t gone in the current round of scenes) and they evaluate your scene’s outcome for your character. They do this by moving around a couple of sliders (that say between things like “Fun” and “Annoying”) that the game puts in semi-randomly based on the scene’s subject matter and the character.

I’m thinking a standard Raspberry Heaven session would consist of 4 acts, with each player doing one brief scene in the first three acts, and then the aftermath is the third act. That may be too much, and I may take advantage of software and behind the scene calculations to smooth out how you apportion scene framing and evaluations (and perhaps have the app ask for additional evaluations where necessary). That way it can do a much better job of scaling the experience to the amount of time you actually have to play, which is kind of awesome when I think about it. In the final evaluation the game will take the scene evaluations and put them together, with each character having different evaluations weighted differently depending on their personalities, and then you do a short conclusion. I’d like to give the game something to help encourage multi-session play too, but right now I’m not sure how to go about it. Apps can store new data of course, but I worry about how to go about giving players the ability to satisfactorily back up/recreate said data.

The big question is how to go about designing, prototyping, and testing the game from here, since the software aspect invokes new complications I have little to no experience with. I have two friends who are programmers, but neither of them has any experience making mobile apps, and neither of them currently has a Mac for that matter.[4]. I’m probably going to have to get a very simple prototype done as a basic Windows program so I can test it to make sure the actual game design is sound. From there we have the issues of interface design and artwork. I’ll want to have artwork of the characters for a splash screen, for character profiles, and icons to use liberally to keep the images of the characters in the players’ minds. As for the interface design, I happen to know a great graphic designer in Clay Gardner, but I think I’ll have to read up on the subject all the same.

What’s really interesting to me about all this is how easy it is to think of things where letting a computer handle things lets the game be complicated behind the scenes in ways that would be difficult to handle elegantly using paper, dice, and human brains. I’ve got all these ideas for stuff based on random numbers (which always wouldn’t come from number ranges that fit into neat die types), big tables of story elements, dynamically adjusting probabilities, and so on less than 24 hours after seriously starting brainstorming for this project. That’s partly because the period of my life when I was trying (and miserably failing) to learn programming and the more recent time when I’ve started to kinda sorta understand game design have no overlap whatsoever. It presents a whole new set of freedoms and limitations, which I find just fascinating.

[1]This is especially true of the “Stop. Making. Games.” post, though I would agree with a milder version along the lines of “Stop making games that have already been made many times over.”

[2]“He also likes anime. A lot. A very, very lot.” –Gau (Guilty as charged.) On the other hand once the app is done it should be fairly easy to adapt the same framework to other subject matter. I’d like to do something more in the style of an American sitcom (one of the more clever ones like How I Met Your Mother or Community that is), and something with a very strong genre fiction element of some kind. I’ve been wanting to do something about the everyday lives of students at a magic school or magic shop for a while now, for example. OTOH I do want to try designing an RPG app with some kind of combat involved.

[3]I have a character I’ve been wanting to use in something for ages named Rose Valentine, a brave and good-natured heroine type character (who happens to have four older brothers who all but live in a karate dojo). Not sure if she’ll actually make it into this game though. Were you thinking of Rose Lalonde from Homestuck? A Homestuck-ish reality-bending pixel art thing is on my list of other possible RPG app ideas.

[4]I do want to do an Android version (though I don’t have any access to an Android phone at the moment), and possibly some kind of web app. Where we’d actually start will heavily depend on what’s most feasible.

Golden Sky Stories Update: Meet the Henge

projects, Star Line Publishing,

This is going to be the first of a series of posts previewing various elements of Golden Sky Stories leading up to the Kickstarter and then the full launch. I don’t have much new stuff to talk about on that front just yet, but we are indeed on track so far. I’m also in the process of putting together a free replay, and we’ve now set up a GSS Facebook page too.

The stars of Golden Sky Stories are henge, animals with a bit of magical power that lets them take human form and do a few other nifty things. They are animals by default, and staying in human form takes a little effort. On the other hand, they can use human speech even while in animal form, though this does carry the risk of scaring humans away. Each henge has only one human form (though raccoon dogs can also copy specific people they know), which will appear between 8 and 18 years old. The artwork in the book shows them with their ears and tails showing (or wings in Sarah’s case); they can hide these to look completely human, but it takes more effort. The book will introduce you to six representative henge, though of course in the game you can make your character quite different.

Suzune Hachiman is a fox henge. Although she looks like a young girl, she’s actually over 300 years old, and maybe a bit stiff and prideful in her age. Despite looking like young girl, she dresses in a formal kimono and talks like a stuffy old woman. Of the henge, foxes are the closest to local gods, and there’s a shrine to Suzune in town that provides her with offerings of food and money. She has many magical powers, and is well acquainted with the local gods around town.

Riko is a raccoon dog henge. Raccoon dogs (also known as tanuki) are a species of canines found in some parts of Asia, and like the raccoon dogs of myth, Riko can transform herself into all sorts of things. She can become a copy of someone she knows, or turn into a giant monster or an object. She’s a bit of a klutz too, though she has a knack for using her clumsiness to lighten the mood. Riko is fairly young, but raccoon dog henge can life for a century or more.

Kuromu is a cat henge, and a stray black cat. She doesn’t mind when people give her food, but she prefers to just do whatever she wants. Japan has lots of myths about cats turning into monsters, and Kuromu is not a fan of them. Cat henge aren’t monsters, just clever, sleek, and all-around awesome animals. They do however have many powers that let them move about unseen, and they have a unique ability to look into someone’s heart and see what they’re thinking.

Koro is a dog henge. She’s actually someone’s pet, and to her the collar she wears is a treasured reminder of someone she loves. She loves to play and make friends, and she can be very protective of those she cares about. Dog henge have powers that let them protect, reassure, and comfort people around them. For Koro this is a natural fit, since she’s thoroughly good-natured and earnest. She also has plenty of dog foibles, including a tendency to chase her own tail. She’s sure she’ll catch it some day though.

Amami is a rabbit henge. Despite being so young, she’s already become very concerned about her appearance, and puts a lot of effort into making sure she’s dressed fashionably. Like most rabbit henge, she just hates being alone, so she’s constantly pestering people to play and spend time with her. Rabbit henge are good at drawing others to them, and they have a few magical powers that might come from the rabbit in the moon. A rabbit can make mochi to give as gifts, and every once in a while she can call upon the light of the moon to let people become animals and vice versa.

Sarah is a bird henge, a yellow canary. Birds spend much of their lives in the sky, hearing the songs of the wind, and the world of the ground is strange to them. Sarah sometimes seems barely aware of the world around her, but this is because she can hear the wind and everything it whispers. Her powers let her fly and hear the wind, and even give wings to someone else. Like a lot of birds, she has keen eyes but also has a hard time seeing at night (which by the way is an optional weakness that I don’t recommend if your game takes place at night).

A Note on Name Origins
In Japanese Riko is written phonetically (リコ), but it’s derived from taking an alternate reading of the character for tanuki (狸) and adding the character for child (子; commonly used in female names). The Kuro in Kuromu means “black,” and “koro” can mean “pebble.” Sarah’s name was written as Sera (セラ) in Japanese because Kamiya chose the name based on the Serra Angel card in Magic: The Gathering.

RPG in an App

ideas, musings,

Over on Story Games there’s been a thread about RPGs/story games going digital, and I had an idea I thought was really interesting, even if I won’t be able to do anything with it any time soon.

Dungeon World now has an iOS app, which is basically an enhanced e-book. It includes several reference features, plus audio commentary, and Sage is planning to add more functionality over time. Which is all really neat (especially since Sage is planning to make the details of how he put the together available for free), but I think barely scratching the surface.

There are two GameCube games that did really interesting things in terms of their interactions with the players. The GameCube version of WarioWare has a multiplayer mode called “Listen to the Doctor,” where a doctor character tells you to do something (sing a song, touch your nose, etc.) while playing one of the micro-games. Afterward the other players can tap A to “applaud” depending on how well they think you did. That shows that a video game can still have a social, human element. Pac-Man Vs. is one of the very few games that made effective use of the Game Boy Advance link cable. One player plays Pac-Man, while the other players are all ghosts. The ghost players share the TV, which shows only the areas of the maze immediately around each ghost. The Pac-Man player holds the GBA, and the screen on it give them a private view of the entire maze. When a ghost catches Pac-Man, the players of that ghost and Pac-Man trade controllers, and the new player gets to be Pac-Man. It would be a bit much to expect every player to have a GBA and link cable, so having it be a thing you pass around as a reward for good gameplay turn having only a single GBA into a strength.

Suppose we have an RPG in the form of an iPhone app[1]. I have two gaming groups, and at best half of each group has iOS devices, and no game no matter how awesome is going to convince the ones without to pony up for an iPhone, even assuming they could afford it in the first place.[2] So the first thing we do is be sure to make it so that you only need one iOS device, and have it either rest with one player who takes up a particular role, or make it part of the game that you pass the device around. (Maybe give the app some kind of “reference mode” or something for if a player has an extra device and wants to use it.) Since the screen is relatively small and not good for doing any great amount of reading, we keep the amount of text relatively small and in digestible chunks. This points to a relatively simple story game type thing, and admittedly the idea crystallized in my head after listening to the Actual People, Actual Play podcast on Ron Edwards’ game It Was a Mutual Decision, which sounds like it’s a powerful experience but on-rails structurally.

Some of the things such an app could do include:

  • Take input from players in any number of ways. One obvious thing would be to let a player enter a character name, and then the game can seamlessly put it into the text for the duration of play.
  • Reveal or conceal things to/from different players at different times, possibly including things input by various players.
  • Do random number generation electronically (and possibly behind the scenes), presenting players with just the results. These could come from an extensive table of random elements so that the players only need to worry about what’s been generated for this instance of play.
  • Make sounds and/or pictures a part of the experience.
  • Integrate any number of “analog” things into the experience, in addition to role-playing of course. In some ways it would be better to make it so you just need the app and some friends, but equally you could put in other elements, whether traditional RPG trappings (dice, paper character sheets) or totally off the wall stuff (Jenga!).
  • Likewise, smartphones have plenty of stuff like GPS, motion sensors, cameras, internet access, vibration, etc. that a game could leverage in various ways.
  • Provide players with built-in tools to tinker with the experience in various ways. Have settings that tweak numbers for pacing mechanics, if the game has something analogous to Fiasco playsets have a way to submit and download new ones, that kind of thing.
  • Let players just peel back the game’s facade and fix stuff if things are going wrong. Change numbers during play, force the game to skip to Act 3, etc.
  • Include liner notes and other reference material available in hotlinks.
  • Let players save the game’s current state to be resumed later.
  • Where multiple devices are available, they could link up via the internet or Bluetooth.

[1]An Android app would be fine too (especially since Android is apparently gaining a ton of market share), or a web app or whatever, but I happen to own an iPhone so that’s what I’ll use as an example.

[2]It would be nifty to have something where, say, you do tactical battles a la D&D4e and everyone has their own device for it, but it’s not gonna happen.

Yuuyake Koyake/Golden Sky Stories is Coming!

Japanese, projects, Star Line Publishing, ,

If you’ve been following this blog, noticing my forum posts, or talking to me in person, chances are you saw this coming.

Star Line Publishing is a joint publishing venture between me and my longtime friend Mike Stevens (with a few other people lending a hand), and I am very, very happy to announce that Star Line Publishing’s first big release will Golden Sky Stories, an English version of Yuuyake Koyake, a tabletop role-playing game by Ryo Kamiya, the designer of Maid: The Role-Playing Game.

Golden Sky Stories is a heartwarming role-playing game. Players take on the role of henge (pronounced “hen-gay,” like a chicken that’s happy, not a Celtic monument), animals with just a little bit of magical power, including the ability to temporarily take on human form. They live in a little town in rural Japan, where they help ordinary people solve problems and become friends. This is not a game that will replace all of your other games, but it’s a game you can turn to as a change of pace, to go somewhere warm and safe. It is a diceless, resource-based game, and it’s meant for game sessions to last between 45 minutes and two hours.

For Maid RPG we crammed three books worth of material into one volume, but for GSS we’re starting with a thorough and careful translation of the 120-page core rulebook. It introduces the base rules of the game, lets you play as six different kinds of henge (foxes, raccoon dogs, cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds), and includes a replay, NPCs with story hooks, two scenarios, and a guide to Hitotsuna Town. We’re aiming for a very faithful translation, and the only notable change will be the addition of several pages of cultural notes. The original Japanese version has three very excellent supplements (plus a doujin supplement for, of all things, Touhou), but the main book is wonderfully complete by itself. We very much want to put out the other material, to tell the full story of Hitotsuna Town and give you many other new kinds of characters to play and meet, but one thing at a time.

For various reasons it’s taken some considerable time to sort everything out enough to go public, so as of this announcement we’ve already been working hard on this project for some time. We aren’t yet ready to set a firm release date, but things are actually pretty far along. The actual translation and editing are already done, and our layout guy (Clay Gardner, creator of OVA) has already gotten started. We expect the book to be a little over 120 pages, and it will feature fantastic art by Ike, who has since gone on to find success with an excellent manga called Nekomusume Michikusa Nikki (Catgirl’s Wayside Grass Diary).

As with Maid RPG, I’ll be posting up previews with tantalizing details about the game and its workings leading up to the actual release. I’ll be writing about the setting, the game’s workings, and what you can expect when we do finally release the supplements in English.

If you would like to help make Golden Sky Stories a reality, we’re planning to do a Kickstarter to raise money for the first print run. We believe this is a wonderfully unique game, and we hope you’ll help us spread the word!

Retailers, distributors, and anyone else interested in this game are welcome to contact us at info@starlinepublishing.com.

A Further Update on Magical Burst

anime, Design Journal, projects

I think I’ve finally reached a point where I have a good roadmap for where to go from here with Magical Burst. Future iterations are going to be much more about refining what’s already there instead of ripping stuff out or bolting new things on.

After talking to a group of guys who’ve been playing MB on IRC a ton, I’ve realized that I’m not quite as dissatisfied with the combat system as I thought. It definitely needs refinement–youma are still much too easy to kill for example, and lots of people find specific crunchy bits unclear–but the foundation seems pretty sound. One thing I am going to add is an (optional) thing for narrating details much like in Wushu, as part of the general action resolution rules. I realized it could fit nicely into the existing game, and is easy to skip if that’s what you’d prefer.

I think moves and normal attributes just need general rejiggering. Some attributes are under-utilized, or very easy to under-utilize depending on how you play your character, and some moves (especially Sorcery) just need to be fixed up. I’ve just barely started working on this part, so while it’ll follow the same general concept, I can’t say how it’ll go exactly.

Feedback from playtesters has led me to reevaluate how Fallout will work. The IRC group strongly prefers for the GM to tailor fallout to the circumstances, which is totally the kind of awesome thing you think of while playing the game. I had originally intended for Fallout to purposely be senseless and random, but I think explicitly stating that fallout can be more deterministic and tailored will help encourage better play. With Changes in particular there’s the problem that it’s too easy for a random Change to be something a character can brush off.

The whole thing about Changes dovetails into the matter of what for lack of an established term I’ll call “character safety.” Magical Burst isn’t a very lethal game, but Changes can “damage” your character concept. I wonder if the fact that some people have expressed concern over that sort of thing is a difference in subcultures, but regardless it’s something to at least address in the text. I suspect that relatively few indie RPG types would be too concerned about character safety, whereas from what I’ve heard of the freeform RP scene it’s of paramount importance to some people. I think this is another thing to address textually rather than mechanically, both because it’s a social contract issue and because it’s trivially easy to (for example) re-roll a random Change that a player finds particularly problematic.

I’m also working on reorganizing and rewriting the text to better reflect the intended style of play and hopefully to be more accessible. I think the thing I was groping towards with Secrets was along the lines of the Bangs in Sorcerer, stuff that forces the PCs to react. Secrets, the presence of a youma, and Fallout are all ultimately aimed at pushing the story around. Madoka Magica basically runs on a succession of shocks as the characters learn what’s really going on and struggle to cope with its implications. That’s something I’ve done informally as a GM before, and I think that a big part of why the playtest I ran was kind of flat was that I didn’t particularly try to make the shocks happen.

You may have seen the picture of a Magical Burst character named Sumire by a very talented Taiwanese artist who goes by Len. His Pixiv gallery has tons of impressive artwork of his RPG characters (going by his artwork he seems to play a lot of GURPS and a fair amount of D&D), and he’s part of the group that’s doing a Chinese translation of the game. Torbadomy got in touch with me the other day, and it’s worked out that Len is going to be lending his considerable talents to producing artwork for Magical Burst.

Magical burst – Sumire by Len on pixiv

I derive far more amusement from meduca meguca than I really should, and I’m planning to write up something called “meguca borsht,” though I realized it’ll be surprisingly hard to do on purpose. I think it’ll look something like D02: Know No Limit though.

Another Magical Burst Update

anime, projects

I’m still just amazed at how far Magical Burst has gone already as an unfinished free PDF. I think some of that is that there’s a very solid niche of anime fans who want RPGs of stuff that the RPG industry just doesn’t understand or cover. It’s not hard to find forum threads where people are trying to start up a magical girl game, but pre-Cel*Style it feels like with a couple exceptions the RPG industry’s forays into anime have basically been BESM and mecha stuff. I think it really lends credence to my contention that anime inspiration is vastly under-utilized in tabletop RPGs, and too many of the efforts that have been made have been tone deaf about anime as seen by people who actually care about and understand it. I don’t know how the numbers really line up, but if there can be a Leverage RPG, there sure as hell can be a Madoka Magica RPG.

Although I do want to make a pretty book out of Magical Burst (and try to capture some of the amazing artistic style of Madoka Magica’s witches and such), I’ve decided I’m also going to take a cue from Christian Griffen’s Anima Prime and keep having a free version of the game available. If I’m going to be spending money getting lots of art and such done I will need to make some amount of money from the whole thing, but I’m realizing that getting the game into people’s hands is the more important thing. In that respect this is a really successful game already, and it’s given me a lot to think about with regard to how I pursue RPG design in the future. I tossed up a rough draft with parts that make me wince (though I like to think it has some good ideas in it regardless), and it’s getting tons of actual play, with people invariably pitching it as a Madoka game. Also, with people already doing things like adapting the rules for Persona[1] I most definitely want to encourage hacking.

I’m reminded of something I once said at a panel, which is that the guy who’s always hiding his game and making people sign NDAs and getting copyright paperwork done and stuff doesn’t usually produce anything worthwhile, while the guy who’s running around showing his game to people and thereby making it better is much more likely to have a great game in the end. Now that I think about it, that’s something I need to try to live up to more. Certainly Magical Burst wouldn’t be anywhere near as far along without all the feedback I’ve gotten.

The other day Ryan Macklin put up a blog post titled “Action Sequences are Conversations,” which I think points at the heart of where I’ve been dissatisfied with the combat system in Magical Burst. In dealing with fight scenes in RPGs in general I’ve often felt trapped between the extremes of a tactical sub-game (which is what I have in place right now) and noodly stuff that takes a lot of GM and player finesse to actually work well. I do enjoy throwing down with some D&D4e[2], but I feel that tactical combat just isn’t the right fit for a game like Magical Burst where the point is to build up to a certain melodramatic mood. Ryan Macklin’s post is about having action sequences be a conversation with rules that serve to moderate that conversation, and I think that’s the mental model I was missing while trying to grope towards what I want out of battles in Magical Burst. I want the conversation to be the primary thing, and for this game I don’t want a fight breaking out to yank you out of the normal flow of conversation. I think that’s what I wanted to do all along, but I didn’t know how to articulate it, much less design it. I don’t know how these ideas will really shake out, especially since when I try to figure stuff out in my head every time I move one part of the rules a bunch of others start to shift and look precarious. The fourth draft may end up looking pretty different, but then I’m realizing that that’s just how I design games.

Today I’m starting re-watching Madoka Magica to try to get a better feel for how the action flows. Reading Macklin’s ideas for Gun n Fuck I knew specific ideas inspired by Jason Statham movies weren’t what I needed. I want something that gets people narrating stuff like Mami going to town with her magical flintlock rifles or Kyouko’s spear splintering the concrete. Over on Google+ Ben Wright pointed out that the flow of action in Hong Kong movies bears very little resemblance to the turn-taking that’s all but universal in RPGs. I don’t know if I have the design chops to make that notion a part of Magical Burst, but I think it rings true in how fights typically work in anime too. Engaging an opponent means more than just taking a potshot at them, and characters don’t always get a chance to act, especially if they’re fighting an overwhelming opponent. I’m not yet sure what this is all going to look like, but I think fights in Madoka Magica have a rather small number of exchanges to them, and are present exactly as much as needed to drive the story.

Also on my to-do list is to formulate better advice and play procedures to help give the game the kind of mood and style it calls for. In large part that means the GM needs to come up with different story elements to use to mess with the PCs, and put them in at the right pace, in a manner very much like Kickers and Bangs.

So, that’s where I’m at right now. I’m getting really excited about this game all over again, and I’m about ready to dive back into intensive design work.

[1]Persona seems to be another one of those properties where a solid tabletop RPG is something of a holy grail for a whole lot of people, with or without the serial numbers filed off. (And now I move “Finally play Persona 3” up a bit on my to-do list…)

[2]And it’s the kind of thing I aspire to create myself with Slime Story/Quest. I could probably write a whole other blog post on why I like 4e’s combat despite not liking most board games or war games, but in short I think that both the “no winners and losers” thing and putting the “game” part into the context of an ongoing story are vitally important to me.

A Small Update

musings, projects, , , , ,

I’ve kind of been all over the place lately, and getting creatively obsessed with different things at different times. I’ve done three playtest sessions of Dragon World (it’s getting there), then got into working on my UFO Girl novel, then started having a creative crisis over Neko Machi, then we went through a bit of a shakeup at work, and now I have a cold. I’ve been meaning to record and post up a solo podcast for ages now, and thinking of trying to do them as kind of a regular thing. Somehow I haven’t been able to find the time to even get started, and with this cold it’s not gonna happen this weekend.

Kin-Yoobi Con
I had a booth at Kin-Yoobi Con, and sold Neko Machi mini-comics and buttons, plus Maid RPG. It taught me some interesting lessons about the anime crowd, most notably that when it comes to art those folks gravitate much more strongly to characters they already know. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use that kind of appeal for RPGs but on the level of fan art seen at the artists alley at an anime convention.

Mascot-tan
A while back I had an idea to do new games based on the Maid RPG rules, which I would call the M.A.I.D. (Maniacs’ Asymmetrical Interactive Delusion) Engine. I decided to start working on a new version of Mascot-tan that’s basically a Maid RPG hack. So far it’s sticking fairly close to the basic Maid RPG rules, the main difference being that (by default) the group rolls and agrees on one mascot theme (bands, fighter jets, game consoles, RPGs, whatever), rolls up random stuff for their characters, and then each player picks which specific thing their character is a mascots of. Also, I started writing up new tables for most everything from scratch. Funnily enough even for anime maids I’d end up changing some things if I were to write up a Special Qualities table today, on account of anime has generated new kinds of cliches since Maid RPG’s original publication in Japan.

There’s also something else cooking for Maid RPG. :3

Ambitions
I want to bring Magical Burst or Dragon World to fruition in the next 6 months or so. Lately I’ve had kind of a love-hate thing going with Magical Burst, so it’s been hard to muster up the desire to actually look at it, but I have gotten some more feedback. (Plus I’m not good at balancing creative projects. I tend to work on one thing to the exclusion of others.)

Shout Outs

  • With Neko Machi I have the privilege of collaborating with C. Ellis, a woman who is very dedicated to creating comics. She’s doing a webcomic of her own (We’re All Star Children), is a contributor to the Womanthology project (which looks all kinds of amazing), and does plenty more stuff besides. I really do know a lot of amazing people these days, and she’s high on the list.
  • A while ago I translated a short story for Kizuna: Fiction For Japan, a charity fiction anthology for Japan tsunami relief, and it’s now available as a Kindle e-book.