[In-Character] Truth & Justice, Episode 20

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

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.

Tokyo Heroes: Bug Fixes

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

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.

Regarding Mascot-tan

You really have no idea how happy this makes me. Definitely way more than it should.

(I don’t even actually post on RPG.net all that much — though I lurk like a madman — but I think this is the second time I inadvertently started a new meme over there).