The RPG Review Books

I wound up looking at three different books that try to give an overview of roleplaying games and give recommendations for various specific games. These were published in 1990, 1991, and 1999, and they give an interesting glimpse into where the hobby came from and how it’s changed.

This is gonna be long.

Weirdness

Fear the Roach
My friends and I played The Shab-al-Hiri Roach last night, and once it got going it was really incredible, though we only got through the first two events (that’s what happens when we play on a weeknight). We very quickly had a bunch of backstabbing and subplots going, which seems to be right where it should’ve been. The cards were great at helping give people cues for their scenes, and the assignment of NPCs to players worked wonderfully.

Now I’m buzzing with ideas for how to mess with things to make my anime RPG project more interesting. I’ve been getting caught up on Bleach lately, and some of this stuff feels like it would be a good fit for how some anime is set up.

Nihongo
The other thing is that while searching to see if anyone had linked to this blog (thanks Guy and Fillip!) I came across a thread from the TRPG board on 2-channel (probably the single biggest BBS/forum in Japan). Since it’s over 1,000 posts, I haven’t read it all, but apparently my blog posts about Japanese RPGs became a side-discussion for a while. It has stuff like “How does this gaijin know about Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake? LOL” (Most of the really weird games I own I discovered through the internet, lately that’s been mainly via Story Games; in this particular case it’s specifically Andy K’s fault). There was even someone who thought I must be a Japanese guy living in the U.S. and fluent in English (I’m definitely caucasian, though I also know Japanese and work as a translator). Unlike when I had this blog on Blogger.com, WordPress doesn’t display a bio anywhere that I know of. At least it looks like I’m not totally screwing things up when it comes to trying to make generalizations about the hobby in Japan.

でね、直接聞いてもかまいません。っていうか、喜ぶわけですけど。日本語でもいいし、メールアドレスはnekoewen@yahoo.co.jpです。

24 Hour Otaku

I decided to try doing another 24 Hour RPG, this time a sort of otaku version of Don’t Rest Your Head. More updates as I get more done.

Update 1: It’s 11:40 p.m. I was never one for all-nighters, so I’m going to get some sleep. This game is going to be VERY rough in its 24-Hour RPG form, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to finish it at least. Right now it’s looking less like an original game and more like a mashup of Don’t Rest Your Head and WEG Ghostbusters, and that’s probably not something I can really fix in time.

Update 2: About 11:30 the next morning. A friend of mine wants to go to Fry’s to look at DVDs and whatnot, and I can’t seem to motivate myself to work on this project anymore. The basic game mechanics are about as finished as they can get in 24 hours, and anything I’d add would be flavor text at this point. I’m going to call it quits, and possibly work on it more if I get back home in time. I’m thinking the 24-Hour RPG thing is just a bad fit for how I do creative stuff.

Update 3: It occurs to me that this might’ve turned out better if I wasn’t trying to sandwich it between days of my intense school schedule. The problem is not doing that would’ve required waiting months to do this. Anyway here’s the file. I was too lazy to hunt down the software to make a PDF.

Library Books

While looking at books in games in general at the library, I stumbled across two on RPGs: “Shared Fantasy” by Gary Alan Fine (1983), and “The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art” by Daniel Mackay (2001). Fine is a sociologist who has also done studies of other small groups/subcultures, while Mackay looks at RPGs from a performing arts criticism kind of perspective. I found both of them very thought-provoking, albeit in completely different ways.

For the purposes of writing Shared Fantasy, Gary Alan Fine observed and participated in the Golden Brigade gaming club, going from novice to expert himself, and taking many interviews with the gamers there. The book was published in 1983, and the picture it paints of the hobby is very different from now, but also includes some things that remain universal.

1. There was still a heck of a lot of crossover between FRP and wargames back then, and for a while there were wargamers who resented this new-fangled D&D thing’s entrance into their hobby.
2. The four games of note were D&D, Chivalry & Sorcery, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Traveller. In the case of EPT, Fine interviewed and even played with Dr. Barker himself, and the ways in which the players related to a world as complicated as Tekumel were interesting.
3. The entire section on “Women in Gaming” is just plain scary. The older players in particular used RPGs as a form of stress relief, and had no problem with running around raping female NPCs, so they felt a bit “restrained” when there was a woman in the room, much less at the table. On the other hand, the idea that RPGs back then were mostly male-oriented power fantasies goes some way to explain the other reasons the hobby was about 95% male.
4. “Dice animism” is apparently at least as old as RPGs.
5. For a long time it was the norm for gamers to spend an inordinate amount of time arguing over the rules of the game, to the point where it was a metagame and some groups spent as much time arguing as actually playing.
6. At the time, Fine found very, very few instances of players actually speaking in character.
7. Gaming groups, and especially GMs create a distinct underlying logic (“folk beliefs”) for their worlds. Many GMs create a world where life is relatively fair — where risk and reward are in roughly equal balance — and where good and evil are clear-cut.
8. RPGs as a subsociety still had a sense of hierarchy, based on age and prestige within the games. Some players were ostracized — albeit due to their bizarre behavior — and when the club saw an influx of younger players (thanks to a newspaper article), the older ones avoided having noobs in their games.
9. In an RPG people switch between acting as an actual person, the player of a game, and a character within the game, intuitively and seamlessly. People do this in other contexts — and to a certain extent role-taking is a basic part of human society — but for example an actor can’t afford to do it to the degree that gamers do. Not only that, but gamers tend to dizzyingly switch around who they’re talking to. If someone at the table addresses Rob they might be talking to him, or addressing his character Thor, or vice versa.
10. In any game of any kind, the rules have a certain amount of plasticity depending on the social context. This is extremely apparent in RPGs, but it also shows up in more rigid games like chess (can you take back a move you’ve made?)

Although published in 2001, the references in Mackay’s book only go through 1998 or so, and where Fine studied observed gamers in the Twin Cities area, Mackay is mainly doing research and drawing on his own experiences, particularly with regard to his own long-running Forgotten Realms campaign. He also uses a massive amount of performing arts criticism type stuff, to the point where I found some passages incomprehensible.

1. The rise in D&D’s popularity in the late 70s and early 80s can in part be attributed to fantasy being a big genre in movies at the time, where there had been virtually none before. It also played into the cultural landscape of the time.
2. D&D in particular created what he calls “imaginary-entertainment environments,” overall worlds/settings that went across several different media, and changed over time. Dragonlance, which had a reciprocal relationship between the game and accompanying literature, is a prime example.
3. He discusses Everway in detail, noting that it creates and stores character information in a more narrative form.
4. RPGs are unusual in that the “end product” is a narrative that exists mainly in the minds of the participants, and can’t be found directly in either the rulebooks or transcripts of game sessions. For games in general, narrative is “ergodic,” an emergent property. In a sense the player takes the events of a game — any game — and arranges them into stories, much like how we do in real life.
5. Gamers have a common geeky culture. Sometimes this can interfere with the game (Simpsons and Monty Python quotes), but it also forms a common starting point, and gamers take bits and pieces of it and recontextualize them in order to better communicate with each other.

I think I’ll have to do a similar write-up about Lawrence Shick’s Heroic Worlds (1991) and Rick Swan’s The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games (1990), both of which try to explain the hobby and then present a catalog of published games. Both are about 15 years old, though Shick’s is particularly exhaustive.

Hikikomori: Reviewed In Hungarian

So, I was trying out Google Blog Search, and I came across, of all things, a review of my 24 Hour RPG, Hikikomori, in Hungarian (here). I was very curious, but I couldn’t find an online translator thingy that would actually work, but as it turns out I have an acquaintance who’s Hungarian, and he was kind enough to translate. The review is surprisingly thorough, and probably more generous than I would’ve been.

Anime Dreams: Conflict Resolution

This will be the first (and probably most important) of a series of posts about my attempt at what I call a “melodramatic anime RPG,” tentatively titled “Anime Dreams.”

I have to admit, I’m not all that experienced with conflict resolution; I’ve only played one game (Panty Explosion) that really used it as a game mechanic per se (though my group’s most recent long campaign was with Truth & Justice), and I’ve certainly never tried to design one before. But, at least I’ve got something that could be workable.

In game terms, characters are defined almost solely by Traits. These can be good or bad (though occasionally a good trait will hinder you and vice versa) and they’re divided into characteristics (actual things about your character) and bonds (connections to the world; friendships, rivalries, beliefs, etc.), rated 1-5. If the campaign’s Sentimentality is Low or Medium, Bonds are limited in their effectiveness in non-social conflicts, but if it’s High then they become interchangeable with Characteristics.

There are action resolution rules, where you basically just compare your trait level to something to see if you succeed, but you can take Xs (i.e., temporarily lose trait levels) to boost your effective ability. Action resolution is used for small stuff, and also for specific types of actions that can be taken during a Conflict.

When a full conflict starts, you have to determine the Scope (how many points worth of traits each character can use and how much Momentum a character can accumulate) and Stakes (what’s gained or lost at the end; success and failure may be enough, but existing and potential traits, amongst other things, can be part of the stakes).

Players take turns taking certain types of “conflict actions.” The most basic ones are Pushing (trying to either damage the opponent or gain Momentum) and Pulling (defending, or trying to reduce the opponent’s Momentum). Each time a character does a Push or Pull with a trait, that trait takes an X. However, Momentum points can be spent on Rest (to remove Xs), Effort (boosting your effective trait level for a Push or Pull), or a Finisher (spend lots, and try to finish off your opponent). There’s lots of leeway for how these things are narrated, so a “Finisher” doesn’t necessarily have to be an epic hisatsuwaza attack. Characters can expand the Scope of a conflict in progress if they wish, by raising the Stakes in some way.

There are a few other things involved, and no doubt plenty more I’ll have to figure out as I go along, but that’s the gist of it. Having traits take an X each time they’re used, but allowing Momentum to be spent to remove Xs, was the most critical thing, since I was thinking in circles trying to figure out how to make it necessary to mix up what traits you use while still allowing a given trait to be used multiple times. I still have concerns about this, particularly that it has the potential to get too drawn out, but that’s what playtesting is for.

Anyway, here’s some other things about the game, some of which I’ll post about in more detail later:

• Character Questions: Inspired by DRYH, and tweaked for anime, character creation begins by asking: What do you look like? Who are you? What do you want? What will you become?
• Power Scale: Originally inspired by the question of how the heck to model Dragon Ball Z in an RPG, Power Scale is similar to Fudge’s scaling rules, and adds a bonus to one’s effective trait rank when in a combat conflict with someone with a lower Power Scale. Very useful not only for DBZ, but for stuff like magical girls (where no one but them can stand up to magical monsters) and mecha (for obvious reasons).
• Character Development: Characters grow and change mainly through conflicts, either as part of the stakes or by “Exploding” in response to an opponent’s overwhelming Momentum.
• Series Creation: Devising (or selecting) a setting is an important part of preparing to play an RPG, so this game will have rules and guidelines for it, including formalized “round robin setting creation” rules, which in turn have a set of alternate rules for campaigns based on existing anime series.
• Stars: A currency in the game used for all kinds of metagamey stuff.
• Fan Guide: As mentioned earlier, it’s part of the game that for longer series the participants work together to put together a guidebook to their campaign. The GM rewards entries with Stars.
• Canned Settings: I intend to include three pre-made settings: Tiny Aliens (Keroro Gunsou, Bottle Fairy, and Invader Zim put in a blender), Angel Soul (sort of like a more mystical version of S-cry-ed), and Fullmetal President (the U.S. President and his VP and cabinet don power suits to stop a military coup. Very much inspired by Metal Wolf Chaos, the greatest Japanese Xbox game that never made it to the U.S. Each does some neat stuff with character creation.

Things I Learned From Japanese TRPGs

I’ll get into stuff for my anime RPG project hardcore soon, but first:

I’ve always been interested in how things are reinterpreted for different cultures, and in studying to become a translator I’ve wound up exploring many of the cultural differences that can be seen in Japan. RPGs in particular seem to develop substantially different subcultures in different countries, particularly when there’s a strong language barrier. Japan is relatively isolated in terms of language, and also has a sort of culture of reading and publication. From what I’ve heard there are many countries, especially those with many English-speakers (such as Finland) where American RPGs dominate the market, if sometimes in very different patterns from here depending on what it released and catches on. While a Japanese version of D&D are available, the Western games that have caught on there are ones like GURPS that were more thoroughly localized. Group SNE’s GURPS has crazy manga art, and they’ve produced some original settings and such.

As far as I can tell, the titan of the (very small) RPG industry in Japan is a company called Far East Amusement Research, or F.E.A.R. I now own three of their games: Beast Bind: New Testament, Arianrhod, and Alshard ff. These games are for the most part aimed squarely at otaku. They have lavish manga-style art, and crazy, exciting settings meant to appeal to fans of anime and video games. They vary a bit, but F.E.A.R.’s in particular tend to have fairly simple rules. Characters are created by putting together a 2-3 different templates (classes, races, or in the case of Beast Bind, “Bloods”) which determine attributes and provide a selection of special abilities to choose from. Assign 3-5 extra attribute points, calculate a couple of secondary values, and you’re pretty much done. Character creation is very quick, and results in characters painted in broad strokes, with lots of cool powers. To speed things up even more, these games also have “quickstart” character creation, where you take a mostly completed template, add a couple points, give them a name, and you’re pretty much done. DeadLands, and most of the various Unisystem games have done this, but not quite as effectively.

What makes these games interesting is how they’re presented. I talked about this a bit before (back when I first got Beast Bind: New Testament), but Japanese TRPGs are often written with the assumption that many people will be picking up the books (thanks in part to their shiny, attractive covers) and trying to play them without having ever met someone else who plays RPGs before. This is a major contrast to the American RPG hobby subculture, where it’s largely assumed that people should learn RPGs from other people who play them.

Replays – transcripts of game sessions – are the most readily noticeable consequence of this. Not all, but most TRPG books have at least one replay included, even the 32-page Maid RPG core rulebook. They’re also to be found on the internet, and doujinshi circles and even publishers put them out as small books. In the absence of a “mentor,” these can provide an effective example of how a game flows. Still, they also appear to have become a form of entertainment in themselves, enjoyed by people in the hobby both as reading material and something to create. The Ru/Li/Lu/Ra rulebook has a photograph of a game in progress in the introduction – something I’ve never seen in any RPG from any country before – and among the nerdy Japanese guys, drinks, poker chips, rulebooks, character sheets, dice, and so on, there’s a tape recorder. This penchant for recording also manifests in several RPGs having “session sheets.” These are forms included for the game, similar to character sheets, used to note down things like experience points for each character.

There is also a much greater emphasis on “scenarios.” The American RPG scene used to thrive on published adventure modules, but now even D&D seems to have relatively few of these, and many RPGs have no support of this kind available at all. Japanese RPGs seem to take scenarios very seriously, and while there are some rulebooks that don’t have any replays in them, I’ve yet to see one that didn’t have at least two scenarios in the back. Most games have a relatively tight premise, which no doubt makes it easier to write and use scenarios, but it’s also that these games are not aimed at long-term play, at least not in the American sense of a D&D campaign that goes on for multiple years. Alshard ff actually lists “Campaign Play” as an option in a sidebar, rather than as part of the list of gameplay formats (one-shots, pick-up play., casual play, etc.) in the main text. Some games don’t seem to even be particularly concerned with having continuing characters in the first place. The majority of the scenarios for Maid RPG are set up in completely different worlds from each other, and demand creating new characters.

Another thing that the F.E.A.R. games in particular do is make a very concerted effort to convey in the text how a game session should flow, from the GM devising (or selecting) a scenario, to the game itself, to cleaning up after, to suggesting going to a café or some such afterwards to talk about the game. Along the way, the rulebooks often have simple diagrams/flowcharts to help explain the games’ workings. While some of these are for things like clarifying the combat rules, there’s also some that cover the basic flow of the game. In page 120 of Alshard ff there’s two diagrams representing gamers sitting around a table. One shows the GM at the far end of the table with arrows going from the players to the center of the table, and larger arrow going from the center to the GM; it has a big X next to it, indicating this is wrong. The other shows the GM seated in the middle, with a double ended arrow between each player and the GM; this one has a circle, showing that it’s correct. I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in an American RPG. Also, the first diagram calls to mind what I’ve heard about old-school D&D players having a “party caller” who announces what the PCs are doing most of the time.

There isn’t an “indie scene” in RPGs in Japan the way there is in the U.S. (and other countries where people are into the same websites), but in some ways the categories have to be drawn differently in the first place. Japan has a massive doujinshi scene, where fans produce various works, some original but many derived from anime, manga, games, etc., and sell them at conventions. For example, I’ve seen a website for a circle that had produced doujins like “GURPS Cardcaptor Sakura” and “GURPS Galaxy Angel.” The scale on which these are sold is no doubt comparable to some indie games, but the “creator ownership” aspect isn’t a concern, and would be rather tenuous for something based off of a popular anime in the first place.

There are however some smaller TRPG publishers out there, though it’s hard to say whether they represent Japan’s equivalent of indie or the mid-tier publishing that’s become scarce to absent in the American RPG industry. I lucked out in that Sunset Games was willing to let me use Paypal to order Maid RPG and Yuuyake Koyake, two very unique games, both by Sakaya Kamiya. Neither is quite like any RPG I’ve seen, Japanese or otherwise.

Maid RPG takes the otaku maid fetish and uses it as the basis for what amounts of an anime version of Toon. Like Toon – only more so – it embraces randomness as a path to comedy. Characters are almost completely random, and tend to have odd traits glommed into them for no good reason. Hence when we played the other day my character was a pure lolita catgirl with blonde hair, an eyepatch, and a revolver, whose family broke up and who was enslaved by the master. In my opinion the single most brilliant thing about this game is that players can spend points to trigger random events.

Yuuyake Koyake (which means “Sunset”) has “Heartwarming Role-Playing” as its subtitle. It’s a diceless game about henge – animals with minor magical powers that take on human form. They live on the edge of a town in rural Japan, and the game is about them generally being friends and helping out the people of the town. Forming connections to people is a vital part of the game, and necessary for characters to get the points they need to use special powers or boost their attributes enough to accomplish especially hard tasks. It also has the single best use of controlled writing voice I’ve ever seen in an RPG rulebook; the entire time it feels like your grandma is reading it to you.

Here we are!

Yay! My first new post on WordPress! I’m still working on getting acquainted with the interface and whatnot. Anyway.

In case you’re wondering “yaruki zero” is Japanese (やる気ゼロ) for “no motivation.” It’s an “extreme in-joke” (meaning I’m the only one who really gets it and finds it funny); when I and some other students were forced to do a skit for a Japanese class, after the ordeal was over I was thinking, “Well, that’s what happens when you have a group made of up people who didn’t want to do this in the first place. We’re ‘Team Yaruki Zero!’” Like my Go Play keychain, it’s also a reminder to myself to actually do stuff.

My package from Amazon Japan came in the main on Thursday, so I now have shiny new copies of Ru/Li/Lu/Ra, Alshard ff, and the bunko version of Arianrhod. I will post about these more when I’ve had a chance to really read them. At the moment I’ve been distracted by the manga I ordered along with them (new volumes of Genshiken, Yotsubato! and Rozen Maiden), plus I want to finish reading Gary Alan Fine’s book Shared Fantasy, which is a sociological study of RPGs from 1983, before I have to return it to the library.

Although the setting of Alshard looks fantastic, the underlying system is very, very similar to Beast Bind and Arianrhod (and part of why I picked up Ru/Li/Lu/Ra was just to make sure I picked up something not from FEAR). Interestingly, FEAR has taken the basic rules from Alshard (specifically the version from Alshard GAIA) and created what appears to be an open system, called (heh) the “Standard RPG System” (SRS for short). I’ll have to sit down and read/translate it, and see just how much they allow people to do with it. I’m wondering if they’d be amenable to an English translation to it, especially since it would be perfect for some of my more mainstream RPG project ideas (notably Ether Star and Catgirl: The Storytelling Game).

I also got the newest issue of Role&Roll, Japan’s main RPG magazine, and was inspired to post about it on Story Games herehere. Admittedly in posting it I was sort of crossing my fingers and hoping, but I was still (pleasantly) surprised when Tad Kelson posted saying he was going to try to put together an indie gaming mag.

I’m also hard at work on my anime RPG project (I still don’t know what to call it; I’m using “Anime Dreams” as a placeholder). I have a small notebook I use to write down stuff when I’m away from my computer, and I’ve literally filled up about 40 pages just with ideas for this game. Right now I’m mainly working on the conflict resolution rules — which will be at the heart of the whole thing — and it’s taking a heck of a lot of work. I keep catching myself staring off into space on the train and thinking really hard about it. I’m exceedingly happy with how this is turning out so far, but how well the conflict resolution rules work is going to be the main test of how good a game it turns out to be. I’ll be posting more about the gritty details soon, when I’ve got my tentative version a bit more straight in my head. At the moment it’s looking like the game will be diceless and resource-based, which in turn means I ought to go look at Yuuyake Koyake again.

Anime and Roleplaying, Part 2

Continuing from my last post, some more on how to represent anime in RPG form. The Culture Clash section was inspired in part by an exchange with Nagisawa Takumi on RPG.net. I doubt we’ll ever agree as to what “anime” means (for reasons you’ll see below), but I came out of it with a much better understanding of what I mean by anime, and how it relates to roleplaying games. The second section was inspired in part by reading Daniel Mackay’s book The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art, as was the earlier one on allusion.

Anime and Roleplaying, Part 1

As I’ve mentioned before, I think I’ve accidentally wound up starting on an anime RPG. What follows are some musing on anime RPGs, past, present and future, and some of the ideas that are looking like they’ll become the foundations of this new game.