Who Ya Gonna Call?

games

Can you believe I’ve put up 80 posts on this blog so far? Anyway.

My order from Titan Games came in the mail today. Elton, one of my best friends doesn’t do birthdays or Christmas for religious reasons, so I constantly intend to get him something cool but forget because there are no calendar dates to force me to do something. But finally, at long last, I’ve gotten him a copy of the Ghostbusters RPG that was published by West End Games in 1986 (Wikipedia article, RPGnet review). I’m especially interested in it because (1) I’ve heard it mentioned a lot, particularly as an example of a perfect introductory RPG, and (2) S. John Ross listed it as one of the major influences on Risus, which is by far my favorite free RPG.

It comes with some inserts and cards, and two rulebooks — a 24-page Training Manual for players and a 62-page Operations Manual for the GM (“Ghostmaster”). Since Elton is going to be running the game for our group (that was one of the stipulations for me buying the game for him), I’m avoiding reading the latter, since it seems to consist mostly of adventures. (And while they’re not part of the original package, for some reason the box also contained two adventure modules!)

This game was literally published 20 years ago, yet it reads like a crazy mash-up of D6 Star Wars, Unisystem Buffy, and some crazy John Wick game (and InSpectres is definitely its successor). And one of the things I totally didn’t know was that it was published by West End Games, but the game was designed by Chaosium. Anyway, characters have four stats (Muscles, Brains, Cool, and Moves) rated 1-5, and one talent for each stat. You roll a number of dice equal to your stat, plus 3 if your talent comes into play. Each character has Brownie Points (20 to start with), that work a lot like Drama Points. The game doesn’t have any kind of hit points/wounds either; you either spend enough Brownie Points to convince the GM to let you off the hook (and you narrate how exactly your character does it) or suffer the consequences. Overall, it reminds me a lot of certain indie games, and for that matter some of the games I’m working on. On the other hand, there are elements of the design that are very old-school, and a few that are sort of board-game-like. It comes in a box, after all, and comes with all the dice you need, plus equipment cards and handouts. It also has a goofy sense of humor that very much fits the tone of a mid-80s humor RPG.

As an aside, each character also has a “Motivation,” which gives them an avenue for gaining Brownie Points. And to my surprise, one of these is Sex (which, naturally, is Peter Venkman’s). The game description talks more about going on dates with random partners for shallow reasons, but even today you don’t see the word “sex” in RPGs all that often.

The only thing that was missing from this used copy of the game was, unfortunately, the handout that supposedly explained the basic rules in the space of 2 pages. Although the rules are simple enough that it’s easy to imagine how they could fit in such a small space (it might look something like this), I’d really like to see with my own eyes how they did it. The other handouts have an example of play and some amusing handouts, so the GM can have players fill out their characters’ Ghostbusters International franchise paperwork, last wills, etc.

Especially considering how big of a Ghostbusters fan he is, I’m very much looking forward to playing when Elton runs the game.

Back to the video game thing, the other day I got Children of Mana for Nintendo DS. I haven’t played it much because I’m still obsessing over Final Fantasy IV Advance, but the thing that CoM does (which isn’t unusual or anything) is to introduce you to how to play the game a bit at a time, and through the characters in the game speaking to you. It can sound a little odd to have someone saying “Hey Tamber, you know you can press Y to use your healing items, right?”, but I wonder if a similar approach could actually work with the right kind of RPG, with an NPC (or just the GM as narrator) telling the players/PCs how to do things in the game, in the early stages of an adventure. Hmm…

Things I Learned From Video Games

theory

Of late, I can’t really call myself an “avid” video gamer. I have so much in the way of work and hobbies that other stuff takes up a lot of time, and it’s become rarer for any given game to really do it for me. The most recent game that I got obsessed with was Final Fantasy IV Advance, a GBA port of a game I played more than 10 years ago on SNES, so go figure. But still, I do play video games when I can (my Nintendo DS is helping save my sanity on my long train commute for graduate school), and pay attention to the industry. Although they’re in many ways a very different medium, I do think that RPGs could learn a lot from video games — and vice versa.

Story Genres and Functional Genres
Lost Garden is a really fascinating blog about video game development, and its most influential entry is about Nintendo’s innovation strategy with the Wii, its potential to engender whole new genres of games, and the life cycle of video game genres. One or more breakout games hits it big (Castle Wolfenstein and Doom), and there’s a growing demand for similar games which creates an explosion of popularity, and “genre kings” (Half-Life, Quake) emerge to dominate and define the genre, and over time the parameters of the genre get narrower and narrower, until they primarily serve a hardcore audience that looks down on games that deviate from their notion of what the genre should be (Halo), and eventually it becomes the realm of hobbyists (like what happened to turn-based strategy games).

Video games, by and large, are divided into genres not by the subject matter, but by how they play. Halo: Combat Evolved and Starcraft are both science fiction, but to video gamers the fact that they’re an FPS and RTS (respectively) is far more important. It could be argued that RPGs also have genres in the video game sense, with different ways of framing the overall experience. Of course, trying to create categories or define genres along this axis would inevitably lead to all kinds of annoying arguments over semantics, and it’s something that’s further complicated by drift — how an RPG’s rules can be interpreted or repurposed in play. When you play Halo, it’s going to be an FPS no matter what you do, but regardless of what is optimum Dungeons & Dragons can range anywhere from a tactical game to a court intrigue game. On the other hand, even in video games the divisions between genres are porous; you could easily make a continuum between third-person action and CRPG. These days action games routinely have some kind of RPG elements too them — stats that can be booster over time and such, and there are “action RPG” games like Jade Empire and Zelda too.

So, here’s my utterly non-authoritative, thrown-together attempt to divide RPGs into “functional” genres, whcih in turn wound up being sort of a continuum between D&D and story games. (It should go without saying that none are “better” than the others, any more than RTS games are “better” than CRPGs).

  • D&D’s class/level/kill things and take their stuff setup. It’s rarely imitated anymore.
  • GURPS, Hero System, and other crunchy, point-based universal systems.
  • “Non-interference” systems that provide a basic, generic framework and little else; BESM, Cinematic Unisystem.
  • Games focused on a specific setting or premise; World of Darkness, Cat
  • Highly thematic/story games; The Mountain Witch, DRYH, DitV, MLWM
  • Systems that primarily serve to distribute narrative control; PTA, octaNe
  • Games that are narrowly focused on a specific roleplaying type activity; The Shal-al-Hiri Roach, Breaking the Ice

In this respect, the fact that the functional genres of tabletop RPGs are so few and relatively rigid isn’t too surprising, but the fact that one game dominates the market so thoroughly is something unique to the English-speaking RPG hobby. On the other hand, it could be argued that within the microcosm of the indie scene, there are in fact genres and genre kings, of which Dogs in the Vineyard and Prime Time Adventures would seem to be prime examples. It’s also a small enough hobby that games that don’t have much staying power for whatever reason tend to fall by the wayside completely, if they ever existed, so it’s hard to come up with more crunchy/universal/point-based systems besides GURPS and Hero.

Independence
In some ways, I think the indie RPG scene represents some of where some in the video game industry feel they need to go, whether it’s Greg Costikyan who wants to tear apart the current order, or Alex Seropian‘s efforts to found a company that’s small and streamlined with lots of outsourcing, or just Will Wright using radically different programming techniques. It would be a mistake to discard the mainstream or to assume that the new hotness (procedural generation) is going to totally change everything rather than becoming part of the overall palette.

When it comes to video games the need for changes comes from the many trends that run counter to open creativity, and the production costs that are spiralling out of control. The demand for spectacular big-budget games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy won’t go away, but there have been plenty of break-away hits (Guitar Hero) and cult classics (Katamari Damacy) that make it clear that the big-budget approach isn’t the only way to go. For the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 there will be support for small, downloadable games. There’s still something of a walled garden thing going on, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction. Although it’s a lot harder than with tabletop games, it is still possible for a small number of people to make games in their spare time, and its exciting to think that there’s a place for a simple, fun, innovative $5 video game to be sold on a major console.

Accessibility
The major importance of the Wii is that it introduces wholly new ways to play games, by doing away with what has become the standard type of controller (a thing with 12 buttons and 3 directional controls) in favor of something more intuitive (handing someone a white remote control and telling them to just swing it like a tennis racket). Some look at this kind of accessibility as both a boon to gamers who are growing up and have less time, and a way to court non-gamers. In terms of RPGs, D&D is kind of the PS2, considering at a minimum you’d want to have three 300-page hardback books and six kinds of dice, and it involves its own special breed of Tolkienesque fantasy. In this respect, the casual side of video games represents where some from the indie RPG scene want the hobby to go: something that could be mainstream and accessible to everyone. There are zillions of housewives who play casual video games on Yahoo, and not a few who get together with their friends to play Bunco, so what if they started doing the same for, say, Primetime Adventures? The conundrum, of course, is how the hell to make that happen.

One of the things about video games, that’s very difficult but potentially valuable for RPGs to do is to make it possible to get right into the action with minimal preparation. There are very, very few video games where reading the manual is even necessary, and many games teach you how to play themselves through the early stages. The Ghostbusters RPG (still waiting for it to arrive in the mail) supposedly does something like this by teaching the rules through a series of three short adventures, and for that matter Cybergeneration also had a default introductory adventure. There’s also Deep 7’s 1PG games, which give you a complete beer-and-pretzels game in 13 pages, 6 of which are 1-page scenarios. I think it’s a really cool idea that I’d like to explore more, though from personal experience I know that introductory adventures can run into the problem of having a portion of the group that’s played through them before.

Random RPG Night

actual play

So, I’ve managed to coerce my friends into having a second weekly game night, dedicated to trying out new stuff in one-shots and mini-campaigns, which in practice will mostly mean a mix of crazy indie stuff and me subjecting everyone to playtests of my games. Hopefully it’ll also mean other people running stuff now and then (including but not limited to the Ghostbusters RPG I ordered for Elton), and maybe even new people (or old friends who don’t normally roleplay) joining us sometimes.

So, here’s the list of game’s I’m contemplating running. The first week is going to be the second episode of the Tokyo Heroes playtest mini-campaign (Shadow Hunter Akuranger).

My Games
Tokyo Heroes
Halo: The Covenant War
Thrash 2.0
Mascot-tan

Published Games
Panty Explosion
The Mountain Witch
Mister Lincoln eXperiment
Cat
InSpectres
octaNe
Prime Time Adventures
Schauermarchen
Dogs in the Vineyard
My Life With Master
Exosuit A-ok
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Toon

Games I’m Thinking About Getting
The Shab-al-Hiri Roach
Don’t Rest Your Head
Shock:
The Dictionary of Mu
Hero’s Banner
Faery’s Tale
Orbit
(Your Game Here, Maybe?)

Setting Ideas (To Be Paired With An Appropriate System)
Magic Shop (Slayers meets Are You Being Served?)
Angel Soul (Scryed, but with angels)
Kitsune (fox-spirits in modern-day Japan)
Full Metal President (inspired by Metal Wolf Chaos)
Black Hole Girls (normal schoolgirls with extremely powerful alien symbiotes)

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episodes 21-22

in-character

I don’t even know where to begin. Things are moving way too fast for me right now, and I feel like I’m about ready to snap and either kill someone or just curl into a ball and hide. And as usual, Raz has placed himself at the center of it. Caring about him drains me, and I think I’m just about dry. Every time I think he’s growing up a little and acting like a decent human being (though now that I think about it, from his genetic structure I doubt he could produce live offspring with a human, one of the most important tests of whether two organisms are the same species), he manages to turn around and find some way to be infuriating. One step forward two steps back. If not for him, I think even with the bad business with Ryo, the dark future and everything, I could handle this superhero thing. Right now it’s hard to be strong, much less civil.

Anyway, I should talk about what actually happened yesterday, with BAIN and all that, and how it gave me something new to worry about, more dark dreams pressing me flat against the ground, making it hard to breathe.

The battle against the giant robot that BAIN put together out of tank parts and such came down relatively easily once Raz got inside of it. BAIN himself, who resided at the center of it, was a whole other problem. His near indestructibility made it almost impossible to do a damn thing to him. I couldn’t even knock him over, much less immobilize him. And then the nonsense with the rocket happened. The warhead-less rocket was programmed to launch, presumably somewhere calculated to cause World War III. Raz wanted to put him in the top of the rocket, ensuring that he’d land in some foreign country and roam free (he later explained how he had a plan — one that couldn’t possibly have been carried out in time), while Jack for some reason decided to put BAIN under the rocket, making sure we’d lose track of him. In the end Glenn and I wound up doing our combination move — his acceleration to launch my Rider Drill — through the rocket. My suit normally protects me from motion sickness and loud noises and such, but it was still unlike anything I’ve experienced before. The pressure wave of the exploding rocket knocked all of my teammates unconscious, leaving me with a choice between (a) doing nothing at all to BAIN, or (b) taking steps to keep my teammates from dying of sunstroke and such. I went with B.

When we regrouped, they recovered relatively quickly. The problem was that BAIN had disappeared, and the satellite that had been tracking him went down somehow. I really didn’t want to come crying for help, but I wound up calling my grandfather for help. It turned out that what I thought had merely been interference to my sword had been a hacking attempt, and probably responsible for the business with the satellite. We wound up using it to locate BAIN, and having Raz use his super-strength — with a few wrestling pointers from Sam — to break BAIN’s internal mechanisms without too much concern about the invulnerable armor. In the end he managed to completely disable BAIN, but it kept staring at me.

When we got back, my grandfather’s teleport didn’t work at first, and once it did, I was unable to contact him. He also had some odd news about future Ryo’s memories being scrambled, remembering things that never happened. So, something else to worry about, something that could change everything.

And then Jack’s churchy friend showed up with a mission, and it turns out that the facility they want to raid to free metahumans who are being used as guinea pigs apparently has Raz’ mother. Hence Raz is determined to go off half-cocked and run off to Utah, never mind that even Jack hasn’t been given the location and such, and that a coordinated raid with actual intelligence will probably do his mother more good than detective work and a smash-and-grab. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to know one’s mother is being held hostage and experimented on. I mean, I really can’t imagine it; at the moment I don’t have enough left in me to be capable of that kind of empathy. Am I turning into High School Hikaru again?

Web Search II: Electric Googleoo

random

So, once again I got bored enough to do some ego-googling, and I actually found some interesting stuff.

On an Italian RPG message board there’s a thread about Mascot-tan, including illustrations for D&D-tan and SeventhSea-tan.

On Wikipedia there’s something that’s just pain odd. The list of fictional expletives article mentions an RPG by yours truly called F.U.N.C. (Furutistic Urbanized Needless Combat). The thing is, I don’t actually remember putting it out on the net or anything anywhere. It was something I made back in high school — cynical, satirical, ultra-violent cyberpunk with bits of Robocop and Project A-ko thrown in. I’ve toyed with the idea of reviving it, but it’d need to basically be redone from the ground up. I’ve gotten that much more cynical, and I’ve got a lot more sources of inspiration to draw on (Metal Wolf Chaos, for example) and topics to explore/satirize (violence in video games).

(BTW, it turns out that, not surprisingly one of my friends stuck the FUNC reference into Wikipedia…)

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”).

[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 20

in-character

Okay. So. The Super Mentors hooked us up with a lawyer who’s very experienced in dealing with metahuman cases. And it doesn’t look good. One of the things I like about Japan is that people aren’t nearly as litigous. The brainy part of me wants to point out that tort reform is a very complex issue. Anyway, Razmus continued to react with his usual machismo BS, and apparently was serously thinking of trying to defend himself (fool for a client and all that) basically because the lawyer told him stuff he didn’t like.

And in the middle of it, Sam got all weird in the head and was drinking insane amounts of water even for him. We took him to the hospital, but… he just went back to whatever passes for normal for him a few hours later.

Which was just as well, since Glenn’s General friend asked us to go on a mission to find the guy. It turns out that there was this android called BAIN, created to end the threat of nuclear war. It’s
just that BAIN’s methodology involves obliterating humanity. It’s like a sci-fi B-movie plot, except that we have to deal with a virtually indestructible monster for real. All the military guys they sent in never came back. Then Glenn didn’t come back, until the general sent us out and we found him unconscious inside of a suit of power armor that was running on autopilot. Rescuing him was a step in the right direction, to be sure, but now we’re confronted with a massive humanoid weapon built from all the tanks and such that failed to come back from confronting BAIN. No sign of the soldiers yet.

We’re in for a hell of a fight… And there’s a possibility he could control my armor, like he can most machines. Hopefully its partly organic nature and alien origins will let me function normally. Otherwise I’m going back to the base. If Raz thinks I can be of any use to anyone with a gun (i.e., the exact opposite of a superhero’s weapon), he’s even more delusional than I thought.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Swan said she’d call off the lawsuit if Raz apologized on national TV? I find it completely hilarious that he doesn’t want to do it because it would mean she’d “win.” Words almost never mean anything to him — actions speak louder than words, but that doesn’t mean words are mute, and most of Raz’ words say that he’s a jerk — but when his idiotic pride is at stake, suddenly “I’m sorry” becomes worse than a bullet to the head. I have seriously never known anyone who has tried quite so hard to make me not want to care about them. I must have really seriously inherited my dad’s heroing streak to not have completely given up on him. Or something.

Anyway, giant robot to fight. Gotta go!

[Actual Play] Truth & Justice: Gatekeepers

actual play

I thought it’d be a good idea to write a little bit about our T&J campaign out of character, partly to give some perspective to anyone who might be reading this blog who isn’t part of the campaign, and partly to take some time to examine how the game is playing. To those who are participating, please post comments and call shenanigans if necessary.

Continue reading [Actual Play] Truth & Justice: Gatekeepers →

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.