Another Random Game Idea

ideas

So, I got Wario Ware: Smooth Moves for Nintendo Wii. Like the other Wario Ware games it’s a collection of “micro-games” that are thrown at you rapid-fire, so fast that sometimes figuring out what you’re supposed to do is part of the challenge. I haven’t had a chance to try out the multiplayer stuff at all (because for some bizarre reason Nintendo felt it should be unlockable…), but the multiplayer on the GameCube version had some surprisingly meta-game stuff. Like, there’s a version where each turn a doctor tells the player to do something (“Stare At Player 2,” “While reciting a tongue twister,” “While yawning,” etc.) while playing the micro-game, and the other players tap the A button to applaud how well the player pulled it off. At the end, the score is actually based on applause, and success or failure at the micro-games is unimportant.

Anyway, I had this zany idea to do a “Game Thing” that sort of plays off of this idea in a tabletop format. The Host of the game has the players do weird little things with dice, a rubber ball, pencils, etc., that in turn determine success or failure at a main game, of which there are a couple different types, including a board game and a silly RPG. I’m tentatively calling this project “Neko Neko Wai!” on account of titles aren’t really my strong point. (Though if I do wind up keeping that title, it’ll be an excuse to get cute catgirl art for the game).

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.

Thinking About 2006

games, musings

First, a random thought, inspired by this:

I design games that I think will be fun to play with my friends. To the extent that I pay attention to games made by other people, internet forums, RPG theory, etc., it’s basically all in the hope of coming up with more and more interesting stuff that’ll help me have fun with my friends. While I like seeing other people making and playing games. I’m pretty sure that that falls somewhere between or outside of being either on the bleeding edge or having “sentimental reasons.”

I started up this blog in December 2005, not too long after going to GenCon SoCal and discovering indie games. Being the introvert that I am, I can’t really comment too coherently on stuff that happened outside of my own direct gaming experience.

  • I started buying Japanese RPGs on occasion, first Beast Bind, then an anthology called TRPG Super Session Daikyouen, and more recently Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake. They’ve given me neat ideas and a fresh perspective on RPGs.
  • Play in a friend’s Truth & Justice campaign, and kept an in-character diary (posted here). The game is probably going to, at a minimum, go on hiatus or something.
  • I created the thing called Mascot-tan, which seems to have a small following on RPG.net.
  • I started work on my sentai RPG, Tokyo Heroes, and finished a first draft (which needs to be worked on more whenever I can find the time and inspiration).
  • Worked a bunch on a Fudge-powered Halo adaptation, that I really should sit down and play some time soon.
  • Two game companies I’m a little ambivalent about — albeit for very different reasons — had financial troubles. Palladium pulled through, with much discussion on the net about it, while Guardians of Order went under, after many months of abject silence.
  • I did my first (and so far only) 24-hour RPG, Hikikomori RPG.
  • The internet side of the hobby had lots of completely idiotic and nonproductive identity politics arguments, as though the hobby hasn’t been big enough to encompass vastly different styles of play from its inception.
  • I made some considerable progress but never quite got around to finishing up the first draft of Thrash 2.0.
  • Wound up chatting online with Guy Shalev now and then.
  • Began regularly visiting the Story Games forum.
  • Purchased:
  • Ordered
    • BESM 3e (via Amazon)
    • Dictionary of Mu
    • Drowning and Falling
    • The Shab-al-hiri Roach

The main thing I’m thinking about, game-wise, for next year is going to GenCon Indy. I’ve got some crazy stuff I’d like to run, people I’ve interacted with online that I’d like to meet, and (hopefully) there’ll be plenty of awesome new games to check out.

Maximum Extreme Uber

musings

Last night we did my friend’s one-shot OVA-powered fantasy game, which (not for the first time) is turning into at least a 2-shot. He and I both own copies of the game, but up until now we’ve never used it for anything, and while the game session didn’t have all that much dice-rolling or anything, I was overall very happy with how it played. Mike’s “Breaker” system (a sort of free-wheeling take on Final Fantasy style Limit Breaks) also looks promising, but needs more development. He also brought along one of his coworkers, who as it turned out fit in with our group frighteningly well. And like just about everyone else I know, he absolutely wants to try Maid RPG. Now that I’m well into translating the replay, which has some very questionable content, I think it’s safe to say that America is not ready for this game, the only exception being the 4chan type crowd (like most of my friends) who are no longer capable of really being shocked by much of anything, and tend to be amused by content that would make average want to claw their eyes out. ^_^;;;;

Mike bought a copy of John Wick’s Play Dirty for the GM of our regular Truth & Justice game (who also happens to be named Mike) , who finished reading it very quickly and then lent it to me. It was an interesting read, to be sure. How can I explain it? The tips and tricks contained in the book are really good stuff; from those I’d call the book “Game Mastering Secrets” (except that title’s already been done, though I would push the double entendre in the title just for fun). On the other hand, for the overbearing attitude and rhetorical style (“And with that in mind, let’s move on to this month’s topic. Twenty bucks says you can’t figure it out until we’re all done.”), I think it could to be called “XTREME ROLEPLAYING!!!1!” I’m being silly and using hyperbole, which I wouldn’t do ordinarily, ‘cuz that’s just not how I roll. There are some rhetorical questions that I found just distracting though. “If roleplaying games are supposed to simulate life, why are so many people obsessed with making them ‘fair?'” and I’m sitting there thinking “Who the hell said they’re supposed to simulate life? You said they’re supposed to simulate literature. I think it depends on the game.” when I should be paying attention to the really good GM advice (on character death) that follows.

There’s also some stuff that basically could be a major foundation block of a kickass indie game (like the Living City chapter) being presented as advice for mainstream RPGs. Of course, that comes back to the thing that (as someone smarter than me said on an RPGnet thread) a lot of the wacky mechanics in indie games came out of trying to hard-code techniques developed through gameplay. There are also some bits that remind me very much of the kinds of things I read in the oWoD Storyteller’s Guides. (As an aside: One of those offered up the idea of each player having a binder/notebook for their character, for the character sheet and notes and whatnot. We now do that for every long-term campaign, and sometimes my artist friends will whip up illustrations and covers for them to boot).

So, in short, I was not planning to pick this book up because the “attitude” it exuded put me off, but it’s got some real gems of advice in it, and I’m glad I did read it (albeit a friend’s copy, for free). My only caveat, more of a personal taste thing (which I told Mike — the T&J GM Mike — the other day) is that at a certain point the balls-to-the-wall in-your-face style of roleplaying will make the game become stressful for me, Ewen, in real life, and thus less fun. Just let me breathe now and then, and we’ll be cool.

Neat Stuff About Maid RPG

Japanese

As a sort of fun side-project to do over the winter break, I’ve decided to do a fan translation of Maid RPG, a 32-page RPG from Japanese publisher Sunset Games. I remember Andy K saying how the game does some interesting things, but I didn’t realize how much so until I was about 2/3 of the way done translating the book. I also didn’t realize just how messed up it was until I got to the play examples with Yugami tormenting her sempai Hizumi. Anyway, right now I’ve finished my rough translation of the character creation and gameplay rules, which leaves only a replay and two scenarios (11 pages) to go. I’m seriously thinking of trying to run this game at the next gaming con I go to, and of course with my usual gaming group.

One of the most important things is the way the game sets up the relationship between the master – the GM’s primary NPC – and the maids, the player characters who serve the master and try to keep him happy. If the play examples used to explain the rules are any indication, the game strongly encourages breaking the fourth wall and metagaming. I haven’t gotten to the replay included just yet (that’s next), but in the examples Kamiya (designer of the game, and in these the master) and his maids Hizumi and Yugami continually talk about the rules (“If only my Luck attribute was a little higher…”). I want to say it reminds me of HackMaster, but I never got around to reading or playing it, so I can’t. I think this kind of thing is usually avoided or at least overlooked, and certainly seldom turned into a strength.

Character creation is almost completely random. Seriously; I’m getting my programmer friend to whip up a random character generator program for this. Normally I don’t go in for random character creation, but this is one of those games where it seems very fitting to deprive the players of choices about their characters.

The game has no mechanic for physical damage at all. What there is, is Stress. Any time you have one character trying to force another to do something, you use the “Combat” rules, and the losing side in the opposed roll will accumulate some Stress Points. When a maid gets more Stress than her Spirit rating, she has a Stress Explosion. When that happens, the player has to act out the thing originally rolled up on the Stress Explosion chart during character creation—stuff like drinking, violence, sleep, gluttony, etc.—for a number of minutes in real time equal to the number of Stress points accumulated, after which all the Stress goes away.

How much each maid is in good graces with the master is measured in points of Favor, which the GM doles out whenever he feels like it, based on how good a job the maids do of pleasing the master. A maid who goes into negative Favor gets dismissed (removed from the campaign), but otherwise Favor mainly works like a combination of Drama Points (for boosting rolls and getting rid of Stress) and XP (for raising attributes). But players can also spend 1D6 Favor to cause a random event to happen. The GM has the player roll on the appropriate Random Event chart, and whatever result comes up is dropped into the story, centering around the maid whose player wanted the Random Event. The main rulebook has three charts (Outer Space, Modern, and Fantasy), and quite a few of the events are the kinds of things that can make the whole game swerve. The section on creating scenarios/adventures says that (1) rolling on the table can be a good way to come up with the basis of a whole session, and (2) it’s a good idea to come up with a table of 6 random events tailored to the particular scenario.

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.

Japanese RPGs!

games, Japanese,

After hearing what Andy K had to say about Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake, two RPGs put out by a small Japanese publisher called Sunset Games, I decided I really, really wanted to pick them up. Since they’re not listed on Amazon Japan or anything (unlike the stuff from, say, Enterbrain and F.E.A.R.), I wound up trying to email them directly about it. Shortly thereafter I got a reply, in English no less (even though I’d emailed them in Japanese…) asking if PayPal was okay.

So, today I got them in the mail. It’ll take a while for me to read through them (though the base rulebook of the Maid RPG is only 32 pages), but they both look really neat, and not just in terms of the nice artwork.

Maid RPG in some ways feels like it’s the otaku world’s answer to Paranoia, in that in the game the player characters are maids and the GM is their Master. Especially if you include the two supplements, it takes the concept and runs with it headlong into every genre and genre trope imaginable, and maids can range from a cute girl-next-door to a combat android. Character creation is mostly random, I think to reinforce the game’s general atmosphere (“Let’s roll… Looks like you’ll have blue hair!” “But I don’t like blue!” “Too bad! Blue hair it is!”). It uses many, many tables to bring all kinds of crazy anime stuff into the game.

Yuuyake Koyake feels a bit more artsy, and as I understand it is about girls who straddle the line between human and animal, childhood and adulthood. Even the character sheet is adorable.

More on these as I read through them. ^_^

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:

Cranium Explosion (Or, Thoughts On Character Creation)

actual play, games, musings

(Because Panty Rats would be just plain wrong…) Over the weekend I finally got around to running Panty Explosion, as well as reading Cranium Rats, and wound up pondering character creation a bit.

Panty Explosion
I first heard about Panty Explosion when Jake Richmond posted about it on RPG.net, and I instantly fell in love with the concept. I’m not sure what this says about me, but then I also really like superflat, so go figure. My tastes keep getting weirder and weirder, and especially in terms of what’s actually in the rulebook, PE is less shocking than, say, Narutaru or Alien Nine, much less Takashi Murakami’s Hiropon (I would give a link, but for some reason even the Wikipedia entry is NSFW…)

Creating characters went pretty smoothly, and the players were able to come up with fairly interesting characters to boot. The one issue that came up was one in no way specific to Panty Explosion, and one I think I want to look at more in RPG design in general. Since creating a character involves picking out elemental dice, blood type, and zodiac animal, none of which a beginning player can really understand the significance of just by looking at the names. As a result, making four characters at once was a bit cumbersome and required passing the book around a lot. Needless to say it was nothing compared to any number of other games I could name, but next time I think I’ll make some cheat sheets or something. Still, once it was done the players had surprisingly distinct and well-defined characters, from Haruka, the socialite kogal, to Kuromu, the creepy psychic girl who always tries to defuse arguments (and whose telepathic abilities cause nosebleeds).

One of the things about Panty Explosion is that the conflict resolution mechanics work best when the conflicts are decently long. We kept having overly short conflicts; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it means that the players often had no reason not to dump a bunch of dice on one or two actions. The way narration is distributed on the basis of Best Friends and Rivals took some getting used to, and some players wound up narrating much more than others.

In terms of getting the proper Panty Explosion feel I think I made a mistake in that I had the PCs all be from a school that was closed due to a mysterious fire, and were sent to another school. Hence, it created more of an us-against-them feel, instead of an us-against-us kind of thing, and made it so the PCs didn’t have many hooks into the setting. Though to be fair, I suspect my group isn’t used to playing RPGs in any remotely competitive way in the first place (need more Paranoia).

Unfortunately we only got about halfway through the scenario I’d planned, and Real Life™ interfered with our plans for playing more on Saturday. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to run the conclusion, but hopefully this coming weekend.

Cranium Rats
I probably would have overlooked this game were it not for Guy persistently asking me to check it out via AIM. His big thing is what he calls “CSI games,” and it being his baby he can explain it far better than me (and he will if you give him half a chance; his enthusiasm is impressive). I’m going to have to read it over again to really see how the pieces fit together, but I’m starting to understand why he’s so enthusiastic about it. It’s very “indie,” and it has elements of both narrative control distribution and almost board game-like competition. Given that I’ve seen none of the films he lists as inspiration, I don’t know that I’m the best person to comment on it. The essential idea is that you’re not playing a character, but one of three Aspects—Water, Dirt, or Rat—of a character. Ideally the group makes three characters, and in each scene one player is handling one of each Aspect, and each player plays every Aspect at different times during the game as it cycles through different characters.

The thing about it that I found exceedingly cool was the sort of “round robin” character creation. In CR it comes from the fact that each player is playing Aspects of characters, rather than the characters directly, and as a result it naturally lends itself to the different players having different kinds of input into the character.

The writing in Cranium Rats is interesting in terms of how Guy uses and controls voice. This is something I find incredibly hard, to the point where I’m designing an entire RPG (Moonsick) around working the writing style. It’s really frustrating, since I don’t have the same struggle to control voice when I write fiction or poetry. CR has a mixture of a lot of different things, each “compartmentalized” in the text. There are “Legends” sections that set a deep, philosophical tone (“And Man and Woman tempt Snake – into coming and tempting them once more.”), fairly measured rules explanations, and footnotes that very much remind me of the virtual noogie giver I talk to on AIM (“Fuck that lie! Play for the win!”). This is one interesting solution to marrying the need to present clear and concise rules and the desire to give the game personality and teeth.

Creating Characters
One of the things I’m noticing is it seems like not too many RPGs give much thought to the circumstances in which characters are being created. Some make it much easier to create characters as a group than others (and to a certain extent it’s just page-flipping that makes this annoying), but the question is what kind of experience is born at the gaming table, and how it fits in with the aims of the game itself. Risus‘ roll-your-own Cliches make the book (all 6 pages) almost completely unnecessary, and there’s games like Toon, where if you know the basics, the character sheet has everything you need. For Tokyo Heroes you have to create characters as a group, and if my playtest is any indication the brainstorming was far more time-consuming than anything stemming from the game mechanics.

Of course, like not a few indie games the character creation in Tokyo Heroes is in part a codification of stuff my group tends to do during play. Ever since the first Mascot-tan playtest, where all three PCs had Smarts at 1 (and thus my original scenario fell apart under the weight of the characters’ stupidity), my group has been trying make characters that are as distinct from each other as possible. In the case of Panty Explosion, without any prompting from me they made a point of having no two characters with the same Zodiac sign or primary element. D&D encourages this kind of behavior to a certain extent, since a party can get into big trouble without a cleric or rogue (when we played no one really wanted to be the cleric though…), but you must have a copy of the Player’s Handbook to create a character. In the cases of Cranium Rats and Tokyo Heroes, the way the character creation process is carried out stems from the intended genre and such, but the end result is that both games strongly take into account the environment in which a group of players will be creating characters.

What published games do this particularly well or badly?

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 23-24

in-character

I feel empty, empty as a high school student. I should be feeling all kinds of things right now.

Raz and Sam left for Utah, intent on doing detective work or some such to find Raz’ mother. I went out for a long ride around the city, to clear my head. I took long enough that they’d already left. It was somewhere along the Embarcadero that the numbness set in.

It turned out Raz’ actions forced the monks to move up their schedule. We were teleported to a safe house, which was the ultimate in spartan living. Raz and Sam were brought there too, though they weren’t really happy about it. They’d apparently gotten lots and lots of guns from somewhere and, unsurprisingly, they turned out to be worse than useless. Worse, because for some reason Sam decided to shoot the tire of the van. I remain of the opinion that superheroes shouldn’t need them, and experience has yet to prove otherwise.

Anyway, our mission went relatively smoothly, considering. Raz went off on his own, which proved every bit as pointless as the gun and grenades he brought with him. We wound up side-by-side on the same stairway anyway, after all. He calls that his “insurance policy,” whatever that means.

The guards were just normal humans, and bored, tired ones at that. The real problem was in the office. It was Razmus’ mother, sort of. The woman there was definitely the one in the photo, except the she didn’t smile once. She threw a punch that sent me flying, and had no qualms about sparring with Raz, easily deflecting each and every attack he brought to bear, while the rest of us freed the imprisoned metahumans.

Then, this woman gave us more pieces of the puzzle, but unpleasant ones. She’s part of Project Perseus, and one of the Beast Race aliens, a Devourer. She’s working to help protect Earth, but apparently purely for her own selfish reasons. She showed us the true face of the enemy: she is cold, inhuman, and vicious. And according to her, everything Raz has believed was a lie. He and the others like him were created by fusing the DNA of Rekemi herself and a human, a living weapon intended to protect Earth from the invasion. He is unique only in that he is the pure, general-purpose model, while the other, of which there are over 100 remaining, have been more extensively modified. She feels nothing more towards him than she would a laboratory specimen. His childhood, his adolescence, that town in Colorado, everything until about 10 months ago, was a fiction.

I can’t imagine what he’s going through. What would it be like if everything I thought I knew about myself was a lie? I don’t know. He used me up, and I can’t make myself care right now. We’re as close as he’s ever had to family, and like a family there was little choice involved. Even now I can’t abandon him, but I also can’t be what he needs right now. Sometimes not feeling is convenient, but sometimes the yawning cavern of silence presses down too hard.

No future, no name, no hope. No choices, just someone else’s script.