TRPG Super Session Daikyouen

games

My Amazon Japan order came a LOT faster than I expected, so I have TRPG Super Session Daikyouen in my hands. I haven’t had a chance to do more than skim through the six games contained inside.

  • Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger: The aforementioned “Hero Sentai Justice Ranger.” Earth (especially Japan) is being targeted. There are heroes who will rise up to defend the world. But… defending the world isn’t cheap. Pleasing the sponsors earns you Sponsor Points, which are actually divided up by the category of sponsor, so you get different effects from using video game sponsor points versus foodstuff sponsor points. The four attributes are Courage, Strength, Gentleness, and Sponsorship.
  • Super Shounen Shoujo Comical RPG: Genki Zenkai!: A game about fifth-graders with super powers. The three attributes are Heart, Technique, and Body, and powers are determined by picking out archetypes (Android, Esper, Magical Girl, Scientist, Sueprhero, Ninja, etc.).
  • Monster Maker Senki: Road to Valhalla: I don’t know a whole lot about this one just yet except that it has a definite tactical bent to it. It uses paper minis and hex grid maps, and the back of the book’s slipcover is in fact a map and color paper minis for this game.
  • Survivor: Kotou Seikan: Of the six, yhis is probably the most “indie” in its concept. Ordinary people are stuck on a deserted island and have to survive and find a way to get home. There’s a good amount of little tokens and whatnot that give it a little bit of a boargame look.
  • Heroes & Heroines: Herohero Fantasy: The art for this game has a generically non-Western feel to it (kind of like some of CLAMP’s stuff), and it seems to be a fantasy RPG that makes extensive use of cards, to the point where it’s practically an RPG/card game hybrid. One page in particular has monsters, which look like diagrams of cards arranged to look roughly like the critter in question.
  • Burnin’X’mas: Tatakau Santa-san: I’m not sure what to make of this one, except that it looks crazy and nifty. Apparently the PCs are given the job of making Christmas happen, and you pick a Class (Santa or Reindeer) and Type (Perform, Assault, Stealth). There’s also a busty, scantily clad Santa-girl (I’m not sure, but I think it came out before Ken Akamatsu’s Itsudatte My Santa, which recently was made into an OAV), a mean-looking cyborg with a santa hat, and an array of wicked-looking yet holiday-themed weapons, plus a really blatant send-up to Initial D.

Also, for each game there’s a 2-page color comic introducing the general setting in the front, a fairly long replay (4-8 pages), and a B&W comic showing gamers reacting to the game. And although pretty, the cover has almost nothing to do with the contents. The interior art varies in quality, but it’s always very appropriate and relevant to the particular game.

Anyway, more on this when I’ve had a chance to read through more.

Status Report

projects, random

I dug into Tokyo Heroes again after not looking at it for a couple weeks, and it looks like the actual rules are mostly done now. I need to fill out the rules for making bad guys, finish writing up the sample characters, and the last of the fluffy flavor text. Hopefully once that’s done I can get back into working on Thrash 2.0 — which is also mainly a matter of grunt work at this point. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get done once school starts, of course. This semester is looking to be pretty intense.

On the TH inspirational stuff front, Tokyo Mew Mew has been getting really good lately (I’m on episode 37 right now), mainly by finding interesting things to do with the different characters. I watched the first few episodes of Genseishin Jutsirisers and was surprised by how good it was (especially after seeing the first episode of Sazer-X). It’s basically a sentai show, but it has its own distinct feel, separate from the Super Sentai Series. Similar to Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (but in different ways) it deals with what it means to be a “hero” with weird powers. Two of the main characters are high school kids, and they’re fighting in spite of their misgivings and fears about the whole thing. I also like how the girl character is on the school’s lacrosse team basically as an excuse for the characters to have a metal stick handy when mooks show up.

Last night we had our first session of Truth & Justice, though it was mostly prologue and roleplaying. The real super action hasn’t started yet, but the campaign is off to a good start at least. We’ve been playing mostly on Sundays at the FLGS, and the first time we played on a Saturday it was much more crowded than we’ve ever seen it before. It’s definitely encouraging to see that many people playing games.

Ether Star RPG: Coming Some Day Maybe

ideas

Yet another RPG I want to work on is “Ether Star” (formerly “Star Sorcerer,” possibly to be called something else if I can come up wiht something better). I came up with the setting a while back; it basically mixes bits and pieces of Xenosaga, Phantasy Star Online, and a few other things, the result being an anime space opera setting with a big emphasis on “ether powers.” Ether is sort of a distillation of psionics and magic into a single scientific practice, and is heavily used in the setting’s technology.

The original Star Sorcerer campaign I ran used Fudge (with very loose rules) and was generally a big success with my group. Writing the actual book has proven to be more daunting of a task than I expected. Still, I want to sit down and try some time, and I do want to use Fudge still. One of the things I like about Beast Bind is that its character creation has a lot of “flavor” too it that generic point-based character creation lacks. There’s just something about picking the Full Metal blood and then the Gospel Engine art to go with it. I’m actually kind of starting to dislike noodly point-based character creation. Granted you don’t have to deal with it after your first game session, but I think a game system can go a long ways towards helping create interesting or at least pertinent characters. octaNe‘s archetypes kick ass on that front, and Weapons of the Gods lets you spend Destiny points on loresheets to give your character more plot hooks, and of course good old D&D’s classes give you iconic characters with pre-defined niches.

Although I was toying with using Five-Point Fudge, my idea for Ether Star is to go for more Japanese-style character creation and have players select a race (human, variant human, android, simulant) and two professions (or your can double up on one), plus a few levels of stuff to personalize attributes, skills, gifts, and faults. That’s the thing about Fudge; it’s basically just an action resolution mechanic and a list of suggestions, but most published Fudge-based RPGs just use the Objective Character Creation rules as-is, making character creation much like every other point-based RPG out there.

OTOH I do want to come up with some kind of HP type rules for Ether Star; the damage rules of Fudge work, but for me at least they’re a little clunky, plus a death spiral isn’t quite the right thing for an anime-style epic space opera setting IMO. And there’s the matter of vehicles/mecha and the actual ether powers too. But realistically, I think I’d better try to finish up a playtest version of Tokyo Heroes before I get into yet another RPG project.

Plus the major problem with Ether Star right now is that it doesn’t have a good answer to the “What do you do?” question. In Tokyo Heroes and Thrash it’s pretty obvious, but as it stands now Ether Star is a pretty wide-open setting, a big galaxy where there’s all kinds of neat stuff going on, but nothing so pressing that anyone can assume it’s about a particular thing. My campaign had a pretty clear focus, but it was based on keeping the PCs in the dark about a lot of stuff for a long while, so I’m not sure how effective it would be to have the secrets of the ancient Terran Empire be the answer to the “What do you do?” question. The lack of this kind of focus is one of the major things that keeps me from doing a whole lot with most of the White Wolf stuff I own. Solar Exalted are tossed out into the world to find their destiny, Dragon-Blooded are mired in imperial life, Sidereals mostly have to do stuff for Yu-Shan, etc., and all of that is pretty vague compared to “kill things, take their stuff, get stronger to kill stronger things” or “kill monsters and make people less afraid so the DeadLands disappear” or “fight supervillains for truth and justice.” (Though I’ve been hearing on RPG.net that the new WoD books tend to be chock full of plot hooks–like they should’ve been over a decade ago).

Housecleaning is pretty much done though, but then school starts up in about a week and a half, and my schedule’s going to be pretty heavy this time around.

Mundane Details

random

Argh. So, when I finally got the postcard about my order from Kinokuniya it was one of those ones that says the book is out of print. Amazon Japan says differently, though I probably won’t get my copy of TRPG Super Session Daikyouen from there until early March. I haven’t gotten much done apart from some housecleaning for the past week or so, but having a cleaner environment to work in does help some.

Stating Things Clearly

games, musings

I’ve gotten a lot further reading Beast Bind (still need to get through the setting and GM chapters though). Apart from the way the game favors quick character creation at the expense of a certain amount of player choice, I think the main thing that separates BBNT from your average Western RPG is that there are a lot of things that are spelled out explicitly that would be left vague or unmentioned in a game from our neck of the woods. The book actually maps out the process of going through a game session, from “pre-session” (settling in, getting materials ready, episode trailer, etc.) to “on-session” (the actual scenario) to “after-session” (handing out experience points, other finishing paperwork, etc.), and it even goes so far as to suggest heading to a family restaurant (famiresu — basically Denny’s-like places) or coffee shop to relax and discuss the game.

I’ve also heard that Replays are a major part of the hobby in Japan. A replay is a transcript of a game session, including both in-character stuff and game-mechanic stuff, and they’re common on fan websites and even sold as doujinshi. Andy K mentioned that these were helpful to the hobby in that since it was even more of a niche thing there was an even greater need for people to be able to understand what it’s all about just from reading something. Actual Play threads tend to summarize more often than not, while a replay is a blow-by-blow transcript. This and the above makes me wonder whether play styles in Japan might be more homogenous than here. When you go back to the original D&D, no two groups really played it quite the same way, and it looks like each successive generation of roleplayers came to it with different games and different expectations.

The game also as divides the scenario up into scenes. Like in World of Darkness (which was probably in some ways an influence on BBNT) there are powers with “one scene” as the duration, but it also makes a big deal of figuring out which PCs appear in a given scene. Sometimes you can even make an “appearance check” (登場チェック) — a roll on the Society attribute — to see if your character shows up. It’s not a basic, vital part of the game like in Primetime Adventures, but it’s there. And the thing is, given its quasi-narrative nature an RPG session inevitably has scenes, even if the group isn’t conscious of them as such. In writing fiction you have the whole scene vs summary thing, and I think that shows up in RPGs too. Even more so than in prose, using scene instead of summary emphasizes things, so I wonder if deliberately using that kind of distinction might be a good way to keep a game more tightly focused.

Needless to say I’m playing with some of this stuff for Tokyo Heroes. A sentai show contains about 20 minutes of new footage per episode, all of it meant to appeal to hyperactive little kids (and to a lesser extend the geeky older fans). The added twist for TH is that in a battle scene where a teammate has been hit at least once you can spend a Hero Die to automatically make it to the scene to help out. (Of course, sentai heroes do run into situations where they have to split up, so coming to help out isn’t an option).

The aforementioned TRPG Super Session Daikyouen book I ordered should be coming pretty soon too — hopefully some time this week, but given that most everything Japanese grinds to a halt for new year’s, it’s hard to say exactly when. Hopefully Eiyuu Sentai Seigiranger won’t contain anything that has me ripping Tokyo Heroes apart completely and starting over. I already did that once… ^_^;

On the plus side, I finally made some progress with Kidou Sentai Dynaranger, my generic example sentai team. And it is a little generic; it fits the genre perfectly I think, but I doubt at this point they’d do another general sci-fi based sentai series. If nothing else it’d wind up looking too much like the Chouseishin series (which seems to have completely fallen from grace with Sazer-X).

2K6

musings

The Year 2006
2006 is upon us. There was a thread on RPG.net asking “What RPG products are you looking forward to in 2006?” Maybe I just don’t keep up on upcoming releases enough, but for both tabletop and video games there aren’t that many titles I’m really anticipating. For tabletop RPGs the list goes:

  1. Tenra Bansho Zero
  2. BESM Third Edition
  3. Anima Beyond Fantasy

And of the three, Tenra is the only one I’m strongly interested in playing. I just don’t have the kind of group where running a game as crunch-tacular as Anima seems to be is practical. We’ve been using Fudge for long while now, and our next game is going to use Truth & Justice.

What I’m looking forward to in 2006 (which is next week, come to think about it) has more to do with actually getting my own stuff up and running. I’m in the process of writing two different games, which will need plenty of playtesting (especially Thrash 2.0). I also have a habit of buying RPGs more as reading material than for actual play, when I really ought to be getting more experience with different kinds of games. And I have a considerable variety of games in my collection now, in part thanks to all the stuff I keep hearing about on RPG.net and the Forge. At some point I want to try out otaNe, OVA, Primetime Adventures, Cat, InSpectres, etc, and I have a few ideas for original settings (anime vampires, gonzo steampunk fantasy, etc.).

RPGs as Creative Writing
Working on Tokyo Heroes has been an interesting experience creatively. I write fiction and poetry too (and I’ve dabbled in creative nonfiction too), and the more I got into literary fiction the more it affected my writing style. I used to write in a very linear fashion, starting with Chapter 1 and going on until the story ended. It wasn’t until I started writing short stories that I really got away from that, and my writing benefited. Nekomimi Land, the novella I’m still revising, took that a step further because even more so than before I was discovering what the story was about as I went along. There are a lot of elements that are very important to the story in its current state that I hadn’t the faintest idea would be in it when I started. I discovered them from reading other books, from digging into my own words, and entirely too often from random little epiphanies that happened while I was trying to sleep.

Tokyo Heroes hasn’t been anywhere near that intense to work on, but it has been a constantly changing creature, and there are a lot of important concepts in the game as it’s written right now that I never dreamed of before. I first concieved of the game in my hotel room at GenCon SoCal 2004 (just over a year ago), and it doesn’t look much like my early attempts at putting a game together. It looks a lot better. The process of experimentation and discovery is probably what’s making the game that much more fun to work on — which would explain why for the past few weeks I’ve been working on TH and neglecting Thrash.

Of course, part of what makes TH fun to work on is just that it gives me an excuse to watch lots of sentai and magical girl shows. Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch didn’t really do it for me, but I’m enjoying Tokyo Mew Mew more than I probably should. I also got caught up on Dekaranger, and started in on Magical Canan. I still seldom get through an episode without thinking up some new something-or-other for the game. Most recently it was the idea that instead of attacking you can “worry” an opponent, using your attack ability to harass them and keep them busy while doing minimal damage — something bad guys like to do to magical girls all the time.

The campaign seeds are proving to be a lot of fun too. For example:

Souzou Sentai Imagiranger
Keisuke is a young boy who feels crushed by his mundane, pointless existence. His life is overwhelmed by silence and boredom; his parents are always away at work, he has no siblings, and no one at school really likes him. What keeps him going is something inside his head, a place very much like the world he lives in, except that there he’s the Red Ranger, and along with his four allies he fights the forces of evil.

But maybe there’s more to it than just daydreams. There’s this new girl at school who seems like she might actually want to talk to him, and on the same day she transferred in a new Ranger–a female, Silver Ranger–invaded his daydreams all of a sudden.

"Beast Bind: New Testament" GET!

games, Japanese

Still have RPGs on the brain, still posting here almost every day. This morning I finally got my copy of Beast Bind: New Testament from Kinokuniya.

The first thing I noticed was that the book was definitely printed in Japan. The size is smaller than our 8.5×11″ format, and although it’s a softcover book it has a slipcover. Looking under the cover I immediately noticed they did something clever: the back of the slipcover is the character sheet. The artist who did pretty but vaugely loli art on the front cover did that and a very brief comic, while other artists did the interior art, which is actually surprisingly sparse. Only the first 16 pages are in color, while the rest are in black and white (an approach I haven’t seen in an RPG since Mekton Z). The layout was done by someone with definite skills, though it veers a little bit towards the cluttered aesthetic you see in Japanese magazines. The text is mostly in two narrow columns, albeit with lots of sidebars and diagrams, and the pages that list of numerous powers or other items are in vertical rectangular boxes arraged in a 3×3 or 3×4 grid. Western RPGs often have an example of play in the form of a dialogue showing what the GM and players say — BBNT has those throughout the book to illustrate the rules.

It’s going to take some time for me to read through it thoroughly — I can read Japanese, but I can’t really call myself fluent — but from what I understand the system is actually relatively simple. The game has some archetypes for quicker character creation, but to start from scratch you first pick two “Bloods” (though you can double up on a single one). These are Artifact, Immortal, Irregular (a person with superhuman abilities), Stranger (someone from another world), Spirit, Celestial, Demon, Beast, Full Metal, Magician, and Legend. Each blood gives you 3-6 points in each attribute (Body, Reflexes, Emotion, Mind, Society), and then you have 3 points to put wherever you want. From each of the attributes (which range from 6 to 13 at character creation) you divide by 3 and round down to get the number you actually add to rolls, and there are about 13 skills total (stuff like Melee, Machine Operation, Knowledge, etc.) that add directly to these for rolls (and between your Bloods, your Cover identity, and your free points you only have 10 levels total). There are some other derived values, my favorite being FP, which are basically HP, but “FP” is short for “Flesh Points” (or maybe Fresh Points…). Rolls are just 2d6 plus modifiers vs. a target number.

The neat think about this game is mainly just that it’s such an all-out gonzo manga take on the “supernaturals hiding in the modern day” thing. Among the included archetypes are not only a Rogue Vampire and Werewolf Cop, but a Magical Girl, a tokusatsu style transforming hero, and an android (well, gynoid) combat maid. It doesn’t have the Rune Blade archetype that was in the first edition, but you can make that easily enough, along with a zillion other things. The different Bloods determine what Arts and Hyper Arts you can take, and I find the fact that the Full Metal Blood has an Art called Gospel Engine too cool for words. (It lets a machine character have a soul in case you’re wondering). I am reminded not a little of Exalted’s Charms, but without the trees of prerequisites. Unlike Exalted the character sheet has spaces for the relevant data and more importantly a spot for writing the relevant page reference.

Most of what makes it seem different from Western RPGs is subtleties of presentation and aesthetics. It’s meant to be set up very much like an anime episode, with rules and guidelines addressing setting up scenes and whether a given PC can participate in a given scene, and it recommends doing trailers/previews for each session. Still, reading 272 pages in Japanese is going to take me a while. ^_^;

As a side note, when looking through websites for TRPGs I noticed that some of the art I’d seen in Masamune Shirrow’s Intron Depot artbooks was actually originally for some of the Asura System TRPG books. I definitely need to start making a (reasonable) list of TRPGs for my friends to look for when they take a trip to Japan (which in turn means figuring out where the heck they should go to find them; I think there’s a place or two in Akihabara).

24 Hour Hikikomori

ideas

Holy crap I’ve been posting a lot. But then I’ve been writing two RPGs and reading lots more (I’m about halfway through reading Dogs In The Vineyard, and I finished reading Primetime Adventures; more on those when I’ve had time to digest). Anyway.

I’d been thinking about trying my hand at the 24 Hour RPG thing for a while, and today I came up with an idea for one. I’ve been reading this weird Japanese novel called Welcome to the NHK (there’s also a manga adaptation, though AFAIK nothing published in English yet). It’s about a hikikomori — a guy who hardly ever leaves his apartment — and the bizarre adventures he has. It gets into some very weird territory, including religion, drug use, conspiracy theories, otaku, lolicon, and so on. I have no idea how this would translate into an RPG, but I figure that’s a good starting point for a 24 hour RPG.

The Other Side

ideas, musings

My friends and I had a Christmas party — remarkable enough in itself just because we actually got together for a special occasion for once — and one of the things we did was watching Kwoon. The actual episodes are hilarious, but the bonus features are actually funnier in a lot of cases. One of the longest shows Todd Roy, the main guy behind the series, promoting it at trade shows. Seriously, promoting the hell out of it. He’s got a really entertaining title and he really wants to get it on the air, and he hasn’t yet let up, even though each episode costs him thousands of dollars to make.

And I can’t help but think, I’m so not cut out for that kind of thing. I’m not that much of a people person, and while I do like to go to cons on occasion, I find them mentally draining. Both professionally and creatively I’m more interested in working hard at typing stuff on a computer, because to me dealing with lots of people starts fun but quickly goes to that place where it ranges from boring to irritating. Designing RPGs is fun and satisfying, and while it would be nice to get a little monetary compensation for my work, I’m not sure I’m the right sort of person to be trying to sell stuff, least of all as a one-man operation. Granted, I’m perfectly willing to do it without making any money so long as it doesn’t cost me much more besides time, and I think that’s the kind of people the RPG hobby needs more of, but there’s also something to be said for getting your work out there and having it experienced by people.

So, I really have no idea what to do about it, but then it’s going to be a while before I have something finished enough that I need to worry about it.

Eternal Saga
I have some really awesome friends, for gaming with and other stuff. Between my various friends at the aforementioned Xmas party, I recieved two CRPGs for PS2 — Makai Kingdom and Dragon Warrior VIII. Where a lot of tabletop RPG gamers (online at least) seem to complain about CRPGs as overly limiting, I take them as what they are (an entirely separate genre from tabletop RPGs) and enjoy them a lot when I’m in the right mood. So, another project that’s been on the back burner for a loooong time (and every now and then I take it off, rip it apart, and put it back together again) is Eternal Saga, a generic CRPG-inspired tabletop RPG. I tend to get inspired to work on it whenever I play CRPGs, which is why the project never quite dies. It could wind up being another fantasy heartbreaker, and it is yet another combat-oriented gamist RPG (a friend of mine remarked that it’s a lot like a sister game to Thrash — being based on a video game genre and all). I still haven’t worked out the main resolution mechanic, but I did come up with a few neat ideas here and there:

  • I stole the XP system of the .hack games, where every level is 1000 XP, but how much XP a given thing is worth depends on its level relative to yours. (In ES I’m using this so that rewards for roleplaying and whatnot always count the same amount towards your next level).
  • There are three character creation options: classes (pick one class and stick with it; like old-school D&D or a lot of MMOs), jobs (gain levels in multiple jobs ala D&D3e and FF Tactics), and point-based (no classes, like a lot of newer CRPGs, just points to spend however you like to create a unique character).
  • Bonus Points are spent on advantages and disadvantages, as well as starting gear. If the GM ups the starting level, the value of BP relative to GP increases for buying stuff.
  • A lot of things are based around construction systems (so getting those right is critical to making the game work) to let the GM easily come up with new classes/jobs, items, monsters, etc., since even within the same series no two CRPGs agree on the stats and whatnot for things. (OTOH the game will have a healthy selection of samples).

Thrash 2.0

projects

With a project like Thrash 2.0, I can’t help but get nostalgic and whatnot. On the one hand, I can’t help but kick myself for taking so long to get this far — it’s literally been about three years, mostly taken up by distractions and procrastination — but then I’ve learned a lot about RPGs and game design in that time. I’m barely even looking at Thrash 1.8 as I work on the new version because every time I do I see stuff that makes we wince. Plus I’ve changed enough core concepts that the utility of looking at the old version is kind of limited at this point. Still, even though the rules were really wonky at that point, my Karyuu Densetsu (“Legend of the Fire Dragon”) campaign was the first really long, memorable campaign my group had post-high school. It was big and melodramatic and cheesy and the player characters were kicking ass all the time, when they weren’t too busy bickering. There was a really fantastic mishmash of mythical stuff, from Thuggee assassins (one of whom had a Grab/Life Drain/Choke Slam combo move) to a village of hybrids of humans and the Four Sacred Animals, to bring sucked into a realm in the astral plane where dragons roam free, to redeeming one of the genetically engineered bunny-girl clones, not to mention the elemental ninja clans.

Every time I start thinking I’ve left Thrash behind for good, I find myself wanting to go back, both because of those memories and because the game had its fair share of fans. At its height I was getting emails from gamers all over the world, and there were a couple different translated versions in the works. After reading and playing dozens of new RPGs, I feel much better equipped to make Thrash into the kind of game I feel it deserves to be. To do that I wound up pretty much tossing out the old edition and starting from scratch; clinging to old (bad) ideas and having no real focus for new ones is a lot of what was bogging down previous attempts at putting together 2.0.

Styles as a character trait are completely gone. That approach was full of flaws to begin with, and none of the alternative approaches I came up with were making things better. Instead, I wound up using the “Techniques” from Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game, minus having styles determine a character’s available maneuvers. The end result is that I don’t have to worry nearly as much about styles being accurate or inaccurate, and you don’t have to create new character traits to have a character whose style isn’t in the book. While in SFII they went to the trouble of listing a style for every character (even if some of them were odd or just plain made up, a situation that wasn’t improved when the game was localized for our neck of the woods), many fighting games don’t bother. Most of the cast of Soul Calibur just fights with some European weapon, and there aren’t many cool style names for that kind of stuff. It’s much easier to say that if you want to make a video game Tae Kwon Do guy you need to give him lots of big kick moves.

The new AP system is probably the most important and radically altered aspect of the system, and it seems to fix several of the combat system’s biggest problems in one fell swoop. All characters get 3 AP per turn, and unspent ones are actually saved up, to a maximum of 6 (taking a cue from Xenosaga). Combos, counters, and so on are all so much simpler this way. Improvised combos are just doing multiple moves in a turn, and combo maneuvers let you commit a certain amount of AP to do a set number of moves that would ordinarily use slightly more AP. Very few tabletop RPGs actually use any kind of Action Point system — the closest I know of is Shadowrun, and they may have changed that in the new edition — so I’m doubly curious to see how it works out in play. I’m definitely going to put those glass beads to use for tracking AP.

Maneuvers got a lot simpler too, just because I decided they should mostly be a character’s special moves (the ones that, in fighting games, take a controller motion). There was a lot of confusing and unnecessary variety in maneuvers, especially throws, and paring down that selection looks like it’ll benefit the game substantially. It’ll probably be a little harder to make a realistic martial artist, but then this is Thrash and that’s not a bad thing.

I also dropped the idea of doing a unified point-buy system. It was Mutants & Masterminds that convinced me to do this. I’ve heard good things about M&M and when I picked up the book and read it I was inclined to agree, but when creating a character it’s hard to get a good sense of point scale, and it’s just time-consuming. (Which is part of why we’re probably using T&J for our upcoming superhero campaign). For a superhero game it makes sense that you’d need to be able to divert points towards attributes if you feel inclined to make a super-strong guy, but starting Thrash characters have a narrower range anyway. Right now I have Thrash set up with three pools of points at character creation — Attributes, Techniques, and Everything Else (Edges, Flaws, Abilities/Skills, and Maneuvers).

Tokyo Heroes definitely has a bit more of an “indie” vibe to it than Thrash (insofar as you can when your game is based on a massively popular formulaic institution of Japanese television), but Thrash is where it needs to be. The thing that did the most to help me work on the basic mechanics was finally reading Unisystem (in the form of the Angel RPG). It actually uses a d10+Attribute+Skill mechanic just like Thrash’s Interlock system roots, and it even has maneuvers (though they’re a little different, more a quick-reference than a character trait). To the limited extent that I understand GNS theory, Thrash is basically Gamist. I’ve been trying to give the game a little more tactical depth (to the extent I can). I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I did wind up dropping a “Fighter Nature” mechanic (where you pick an archetype of why your character fights and you get a minor special ability and a way to earn more Karma points) because it doesn’t fit with the general direction the rest of the mechanics are going. While I wonder what a more Narrativist anime martial arts game would be like, I think if I do another system I’d like it to not be about characters who fight constantly.

Just as I’ve been watching sentai and magical girl shows for Tokyo Heroes, for Thrash I need to get back into playing fighting games. Most of the time when I get inspired to work on Thrash it’s because I was playing some fighting game that I really enjoyed. Party’s Breaker and Eternal Fighter Zero helped with that in a big way at one point, and I really need to get around to playing Melty Blood at some point. Doujin games seem to be the last bastion of good 2-D fighting games these days; even SNK is trying to go 3-D. For whatever reason there aren’t a whole lot of fighting anime around though. King of Fighters: Another Day looks *really* cool, but it’s only sporadically released shorts, Fighting Beauty Wulong isn’t being subbed (I should watch the raws anyway, really), and people online act like I’m crazy for liking Air Master (and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha for that matter). I think my Dreamcast died though (and I never got very far in DiGi Charat Fantasy either…), so I’d have to borrow a friend’s or something.

It’s good but weird that now when I watch sentai and magical girl shows I find myself mapping things out in terms of the Tokyo Heroes game mechanics (though I’m still not sure how exactly the Dekarangers’ SWAT Mode is going to translate into game terms). Hopefully it’ll work that way for Thrash as well. ^_^