Tag Archives: Madoka Magica

Magical Burst Update Number Whatever

Design Journal, musings, projects, , ,

Even though I have like a zillion other things to do, I got inspired to put in some more work on Magical Burst, which I’m sure a lot of you will be glad to hear. I have no ETA on when the next draft will be ready, but I’m in the thick of things working on it in any case. This post is a series of disconnected paragraphs on some of the different bits I’m working on.

I mentioned it in my last post on the game, but one of the big things I’m doing is more clearly writing out the procedures of play, which I think is really important. The big thing that I’ve kind of been groping towards is that the game and its source material are driven by “shocks.” In Madoka Magica the narrative has a constant escalation of shocking revelations, and in Magical Burst a lot of the rules are ultimately an engine for delivering similar kinds of shocks. I want to make it crystal clear in the text that this is the GM’s key tool for making things happen in the game. A whole lot of RPGs leave that kind of thing to trial and error, but I’m aiming for a fairly specific play style. There’s also the part about how my first playtest was kind of flat and I think not pushing the shocks was partly to blame.

In the 3rd draft I added Apocalypse World style moves to the game, especially for non-magical stuff. I did so kind of thoughtlessly, and now that I have some more experience with Apocalypse World (and Dragon World) I have a better idea what it is about the game that does and doesn’t work for me and the friends I play with.[1] The big problem I’ve had with moves is that players tend to want to treat moves as push buttons rather than role-playing towards them first. (Doubly so for moves that use a highlighted stat.) My solution is to treat moves a bit more as a thing the GM brings to bear, and to remove them from the player reference sheets. Moves don’t have to be secret from the players, but I do think the game could work better if the moves weren’t staring the players in the face the whole time. I’m also going to be rewriting them a bit to better fit this GM-oriented approach. I pared down the Normal Attributes to Charm, Insight, and Tenacity too, and let players assign points for them (but with fewer points and lower values than Magical Attributes). I still need to dig into moves and such to get a better feel for them though.

My philosophy for revising the rules for youma this time around is basically, “Make them fucking MEAN, and scale back later if need be.” My experience and pretty much all of the feedback I’ve gotten so far as been to the effect that as written youma tend to get wiped out pretty quickly, which isn’t anything like what I’d intended. It’s surprisingly hard to make good “boss monsters” (or solos in D&D4e parlance) that can effectively fight a full team of PCs, and I think that for the purposes of designing such enemies I need to ignore some of the kind of advice that I think of as good sense in other circumstances, like being stingy with extra actions in a combat round.

I renamed Appendix 1 to “Instant Magical Girl,” and I’m working on expanding the tables enough to make it possible to generate a completely random magical girl. I had intended for it to be more of an optional thing for people to turn to when they’re stumped, but it’s pretty clear it’s become core to how a lot of people play the game. The folks from the Empire Tabletop podcast (who previously did Maid RPG) did a Magical Burst AP episode, and their attitude was basically, “Why would you ever NOT make a character randomly?” For attributes I’m working on a d66 table that gets you one of 36 sets of attributes, and I rearranged the tables so that they follow the same steps as the character creation rules. When I mentioned that I want someone to make an online random magical girl generator on Twitter I got three replies almost immediately, so it’s pretty much guaranteed to be a thing that will happen. I may try to get the youma rules to the point where you can generate one totally at random too.

Update: Carly M. Ho put together a great little Magical Burst character generator!

Update Again: And then she went on to make a Youma Generator and a Tsukaima Generator!

I have a rough outline for a Magical Burst novel about Yuna and Makoto (from the intro comic script), though I’m struggling a bit figuring out how to get started and how to find the right tone. (Watching Brick the other day has me wanting to explore a stark noir style.) I like the idea of making it a tie-in with the game with game stats and info for the characters and such in the back, but first I have to, you know, write a novel and make it not suck. I’m actually worse at finishing novels than I am at games, if you can believe that.

I just finished re-reading Planet Guardian, a manga which hardly anyone but me seems to know. (Even scanlations haven’t gotten past chapter 2.) It doesn’t have all that much influence on Magical Burst, but I like it a lot nonetheless. The main character is Koyuki Kisaragi, a girl who got magical girl powers from a little critter named Pirosuke. Five years later there’s been no sign of the alien criminals that were supposed to show up, and Koyuki just wants to study hard and get a cushy government job (and Pirosuke has gotten so fat that he’s spherical). When the first bad guy shows up, Koyuki goes to fight it only after massive badgering from her brother Itsuki, who berates her for failing to be a properly cute magical girl like in anime. When another magical girl shows up it’s Ririka Saotome (real name: Yoshiko Yamada), an abject psycho whose desire to be the center of attention is potent enough to break the fourth wall at times. There’s also a boy named Shizuku, who treats being a Guardian as a serious duty, at least once he gets over his older sister’s attempts to dress him up in weird outfits. The story is kind of random and aimless, but I really like the differing attitudes towards being a magical girl (or boy) on display, as well as how Koyuki’s attitude evolves over the course of the story as she starts to take the responsibility of protecting the world seriously. But anyway. I may see about ordering the Madoka Magica novel, though it’s apparently over 500 pages.

[1]AW style experience tracking pretty much just fails for us, though that’s more relevant for Dragon World. It’s also related to enough other things that rejiggering the rules to work differently in Dragon World is going to be… interesting.

Magical Burst 3rd Draft

anime, projects,

Update: The 4th draft is here now. Seriously. OMG.

It’s a little overdue, but here’s the new draft of Magical Burst. I’m not totally happy with it, but some things have definitely improved.

  • Added a set of Normal Attributes and Apocalypse World style moves. These definitely need some work before they’re fully ready, and they may have been muddled by the fact that I didn’t do the AW thing where only players roll dice. On the plus side, they rather eloquently dealt with certain things.
  • Made some refinements to the relationship rules, notably in how new relationships are formed (they effectively start with 2 Strain, so starting a new relationship isn’t better than fixing an old one) and how they’re used (I scaled back the benefits of sacrificing them, so that it’s not better than taking Overcharge).
  • I reworked the Change tables so that each attribute has a full d66 table. To do that I dropped the notion that Heart and Fury changes are mostly mental.
  • I changed the youma creation rules to make them scale to the number of magical girls they’re fighting. The idea seems sound, but it needs a little more work. I think I didn’t take magical girls’ special attacks into account, and was a little too stingy with the special boss powers the youma get.
  • Added a set of variant rules to for making the game more closely based on Madoka Magica to the appendix.

A few weeks ago I did my first playtest, which was kind of mixed, though heat and allergies did play a role in that. I’ve also been playtesting Dragon World, which has been a lot of fun, but has driven home the point that getting the moves right is really important. I need work more on how to better handle the investigation part of the game (which is my un-favorite and which I may need to find a way to sidestep or something). I also had this notion of having players take turns framing scenes, and it needs to either get developed more fully or be dropped from the game. I’m also not really happy with how the combat system has been playing out (even if I do like how the youma design system is going), and I may try to rethink it from the ground up again.

A couple of other random things I’m thinking about:

  • Tables/whatever for the origins and motivations of youma.
  • Making the magical girls just start with relationships to one another automatically. Also, clearer guidelines for adding new PCs after the game has started.
  • A turn marker that you move along the action cards in combat. It’s surprisingly easy to lose track of stuff.

In any case, this is where I start really seriously looking for feedback and generally trying to finish a damn game for once.

Magical Burst 3rd Draft
Magical Burst Character Sheet
Magical Burst Battle Cards
Magical Burst Overcharge Tokens

Magical Burst Development Update 2

Design Journal, Japanese, projects, , , , , ,

Matt Sanchez’s recent blog post on Adventure Planning Service‘s Saikoro Fiction[1] system got me inspired to finally sit down and read the rules of Shinobigami, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for way too damn long. It’s a really neat game, and the design of it makes me wonder how much is American indie RPG influence and how much is Kawashima just being that brilliant by himself. The rules are pretty short too–something like 70 pages including stats for NPC enemies and setting info–and about 2/3 of the book is taken up by a replay.

There are a ton of things I could gush about with regard to Shinobigami (especially where the combat system is concerned), but Matt’s planning to cover all of the Saikoro Fiction games in depth, so you can tune into his blog for more detail in the future. The big thing from Shinobigami that has me all inspired to work on Magical Burst after taking a bit of a break from it is the way it breaks the action into scenes. I’ve realized that on paper at least my problem with the current version of Magical Burst is that the rules do very little to guide the action. There are important bits of the narrative (like how the magical girls actually find the youma) that are pretty much handwaved. I know for a fact that the folks who’ve been playing the game have been able to work with that, but personally coming at the game I’m not sure I could actually do that good a job of running it.

Shinobigami is about modern-day ninjas, and while it’s possible to have the PCs all work together, the default assumption is that they end up in two competing factions[2]. With conflicting goals and secrets (established by the GM giving out Handouts[3]), the players basically take turns setting up scenes where they pursue information, relationships, etc. that can get them closer to their goal. You can also attack another PC on your turn, but you have to first figure out where they are. After a certain number of rounds of player-led scenes (usually 3), they arrive at the Climax Phase, which is typically an epic battle.

I think something similarly player-led is about what I’m looking for to make Magical Burst more like what I want. There can be other variations, not to mention a distinct possibility of failure or just ignoring the threat, but the base Magical Burst story is about the magical girls finding and defeating a youma and what it costs them to do so, so the kind of structure that Shinobigami uses makes a lot of sense for it. That’s going to affect how I approach a bunch of other things (especially relationship scenes), but we’ll see how it goes.

Aside from that, the things I’m looking at in this stage are going to be relatively small until deeper analysis and/or playtesting suggest otherwise.

  • I’m planning to make youma stats scale with the number of magical girls. It’s become a thing for me with both design and actual play that finding the right balance in terms of opponents that can challenge an entire group of foes while not being burdensome for the GM to keep track of is a big deal. On top of that, in Magical Burst a youma is (in D&D4e terms) normally a solo, and even the guys at WotC have had a hard time getting those right. This is mirroring some of the stuff I’ve been working on for Slime Quest, and I think “solo” type monsters need to scale not only stats but capabilities in order to keep up with a growing number of PCs.
  • In general I need to do a more rigorous analysis of the math to keep things on track. Luckily today a fan pointed me to AnyDice.com, which I think will become a very useful tool for that kind of thing.
  • Obviously, the Change tables need some work. Since I made the decision to switch from Magic uniquely producing Mutations to all three kinds of Overcharge producing Changes, I want to have three full d66 tables instead of one giant table and two half-size ones. I’ve tried to make the Heart and Fury ones be more derangements, but I’m thinking I’ll let them get more into the realm of mutations. Plus, I can prune the Magic Change table considerably, since I’m sure there are results in there that are at the far end of what I got from wracking my brains.
  • The magical girl creation tables were one of those “stumbling across the finish line” kind of things, and I do need to revise them some. The costume table in particular has a bunch of elements that belong (or are duplicated) in the weapons table. Plus I think “Key” is in there twice. (Did anyone catch on to how the names table is mostly taken from names of magical girls and other anime heroines?)

A Couple Other Things
Jake Richmond is going to be on the Yaruki Zero Podcast at some point to talk about the new Cel*Style games and such, but in the meantime you can listen to him on the Found in the Alley podcast. Jake and the podcast hosts are really entertaining, and I got really inspired listening to him talk about the new games. There’s also the full Panty Explosion head-punching story (amongst others), and it seems Jake is even worse than me for having his eyes glaze over from long rulebooks.

I’ve also been brainstorming for a new iteration of Raspberry Heaven, my heartwarming slice of life Japanese schoolgirls game. There will definitely be some other things at play, but it seems like it’s going to look a lot like a cute, happy version of Fiasco that uses playing cards. I really like Fiasco’s subtlety, and I think the trust it puts in the players is one of the things that Raspberry Heaven really needed. I have half a page of notes so far, but I’ll have to get into things to get a better idea what’s what.

Also, Raspberry Heaven is another project where I’d want the final product to have manga rather than anime style art.

[1]“Saikoro” means “dice,” and the logo on the back of the books abbreviates the name to “Sai-Fi.”

[2]The book also offers Battle Royal as a scenario setup (but warns it can be time-consuming) and hybrids of the various types.

[3]It’s an increasingly common thing in Japanese TRPGs that the GM gives players “handouts” that set up where their respective PCs fit into the story. I’m sure it would get mixed reactions from Western gamers, but it also seems like it’s one of the things that would make Shinobigami sing in actual play.

News Post Trio

anime, games, , , , , ,

It turns out a bunch of news about a bunch of really neat stuff popped up all at once, so here’s a post about three different things that I think are really awesome.

Madoka Magica
The broadcast of the last two episodes of Puella Magi Madoka Magica got delayed because of the earthquake and tsunami (the relief efforts are still ongoing, and our Maid RPG charity thing is still going on for a few more days by the way), but they’ve announced that those episodes will be airing at long last on April 21st. Not a few fans, myself included, are going to be relieved to finally see the conclusion of this exceptional series.

I feel like I ought to try to get the second draft of Magical Burst done by then, but I’m not sure if I can actually pull it off. Thanks to the recent thread on /tg/ and other people offering feedback I have a laundry list of great ideas to try to implement in the game, on top of all the stuff I already wanted to do myself. (Plus I’m significantly expanding the mutation table, which means lots of time consuming brainstorming and such.)

Atarashi Games x 3
Jake and the gang at Atarashi Games have THREE new games just about to come out, all available for preorder:

  • Panty Explosion Perfect: A major revision of AG’s flagship psychic schoolgirl adventure game, full of instructional manga and other neat stuff.
  • G x B: A shoujo dating sim game for four players. One player is a shy girl named Momoko, and the other three are her potential suitors.
  • Tulip Academy’s Society for Dangerous Gentlemen: A “romantic adventure” game in the vein of Ouran Academy.

Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
Daniel Solis’ new storytelling game, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, has launched its Kickstarter (and already met its goal!).

The game is about pilgrims, young people in a world with kind of an Avatar: The Last Airbender vibe, who get in trouble, help people, and have adventures through a fantastic world.