Assorted Things

So, apparently Malcolm Sheppard has decided to pull the plug on Opening The Dark, for some reason or other. Although strictly speaking I could still use it since it’s OGL, I think I’m going to stick with my original plan to use a ST-ish Fudge variant for Catgirl: The Storytelling Game.

A Certain Japanese Game I’ve been translating will hopefully be moving forward very, very soon. I will have news on it as soon as I am able to reveal such to the public. It’s gonna be neat. :3

For Adventures of the Space Patrol, I basically have the entire outline of the game figured out (it helps that most of it is made from stock parts, after all), though there will no doubt be new challenges popping up as I go along. I had to go in and give some more thought to the selection of archetypes, and finally settled on seven:

• Atomic Ranger
• DroidBot
• Plucky Kid
• Galactic Spy
• Space Trooper
• Astro-Jockey
• Altarian Engineer

The trick was to focus on what core roles to cover, and then to give them appropriately spacy-sounding names. I’m probably going to write up an appendix, PDF, or whatever of bonus archetypes (Cat Princess, Martian Barbarian, Pleiadeian Mentalist, etc.). More on all that as it comes along. In the meantime, here are some examples of the awesome artwork that so inspires me:

• Shane Glines
• Josh Howard
• Bill Presing
• Jamie Baker
• Blog Battery
• laceworx
• Punch Pants
• Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls

Role-Play This! Shonen Fighting Manga

This installment is a little different from the others, since it’s about a genre rather than a particular title, and a lot of it is about me trying to figure out how to go about designing an RPG for that genre. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled column next time.

What Is It?
“Shonen fighting manga” is what I’ll call a genre of manga (and related anime) that focuses on passionate characters engaged in epic conflicts. Most of the really popular titles fall within it (especially from Shonen Jump and its ilk), so as a genre it covers a whole lot of things that lots of people find compelling. These titles are not without their flaws, but they bring some awesome to the table in their own ways.

I could go on for days mentioning dozens of titles, but I’ll just briefly cover a handful:

• Bleach: A teenager named Ichigou Kurosaki inherits the powers of a Death God, and must protect his town from dangerous dead spirits. But the other Death Gods are now faced with a conflict that could destroy their Soul Society, and Ichigo will find himself at the very heart of it.
• Dragon Ball Z: This show takes a lot of flak, especially for its pacing (too quick in the manga, painfully slow in the anime), but it’s ultimately the story of a good man trying to fight tyranny while coming to terms with being an alien. It takes place in a fanciful world full of strange technology and stranger mysticism, where a car can fit into a capsule and seven magic balls and raise the dead.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha There are some people who consider this show to be derivative of every major magical girl show ever. This proves that they haven’t watched past the half-way point of the first of its three seasons, or else they’d know that once the Time-Space Administration Bureau becomes involved, everything changes. Nanoha is a kindred spirit to Galaxy Fraulein Yuna, a brave and cheerful girl whose real strength is rooted in her love for others. No other magical girl series I know of has the protagonist sit down for a frank talk with her mother about what she’s been doing in secret, and there definitely isn’t another where she becomes an elite career mage for a dimensional enforcement authority.
• One Piece: This juggernaut of a franchise takes place in a fanciful world of dread pirates, corrupt governments, and ancient secrets. Luffy, who ate the Gum-Gum Fruit when he was young (making him elastic, but cursed to be unable to swim), wants to become the next Pirate King. He and his crew — all people shaped by childhood tragedy — set out after the One Piece, the legendary treasure. Along the way, Luffy and his friends must put everything on the line to defeat the most vile opponents imaginable and make Luffy’s naive ideals of friendship a reality in a world of unrelenting injustice.
• Some others that come to mind include Naruto, Tokyo Underground, Shakugan no Shana, Gurren Lagann, Mahou Sensei Negima!, Rurouni Kenshin, and so on.

Why’s It Awesome?
Shonen fighting manga may be overblown and cheesy, but when it’s done well it can enthrall millions. Fights can stretch across entirely too many episodes, but they always Mean Something. They’re about some guys putting everything on the line for what they believe in, against all odds. A really good fighting manga story is packed with balls-to-the-wall conflicts and world-shattering revelations.

Gaming It
It took me a while to realize it, but my efforts to design an “anime” RPG over the past few years pretty much boil down to wanting a game that excels at this genre. I haven’t found it yet, and I haven’t figured out how to make it myself. Whatever virtues games like BESM and OVA have, they’re essentially universal (action resolution based) systems with some nifty anime-inspired tweaks, and they don’t address what I think I really need for the shonen fighting manga style. The game I tentatively named “Anime Dreams” contained some important ideas that will likely be vital to my dream game if it ever comes to fruition:

• The heart of the game is a conflict resolution engine that allows for sacrifices, reversals, escalation, creativity, and at least some immersion.
• The group collaboratively creates and maintains a “fan guide,” a wiki or somesuch with details on the campaign and its setting, characters, and events.
• A power scale mechanic (kind of like mass/strength scaling in Fudge), to show overwhelming differences. Half of DBZ is characters trying to raise their power scale enough to stand up to the new bad guy.
• Series/setting creation as a group activity, with specific rules, and guidelines for adapting existing titles, since lots of people want to play something based on an existing anime series.
• At least one pre-made setting with quick-start rules and a replay included.

Aside from making it drip with anime/manga flavor as much as possible, I think there are basically two things the game needs to do, and they’re closely related.

1. Make conflicts — whatever form they take — interesting, intense, and consequential.

It may be that I just need to hack the hell out of an existing game with a conflict engine (TSOY, SotC/FATE, DitV, etc.), but I think I need to (1) play more of those games, and (2) really sit down and think about what exactly my dream game needs.

I originally wanted to make it diceless (”A character should only win by luck if he has a ‘Lucky’ trait on his character sheet”), but now I’m not so sure. The real issue is deprotagonization, which is separate from dice vs. diceless. My previous attempts at making it diceless seem to create paperwork without all that much benefit in return. Of course, now that I’ve got a much better grasp on how Yuuyake Koyake works, it occurs to me that a character’s passions and bonds could fuel one or two simple point pools (one for being proactive, one for rebounding maybe?).

From the source material, it’s pretty clear that most character development needs to happen through conflicts. Shonen fighting manga characters improve by leaps and bounds (or just reveal previously hidden tricks) when under duress.

2. Keep the players and their characters actively engaged in the story.

That’s the major challenge of running my current OVA campaign. The game system is good at some things, but it really doesn’t address this at all, and as the GM I have to try to keep an eye on things and make sure there’s stuff going on to involve all of the PCs. It goes without saying that there’s a limit to how much the actual rules can contribute here, but it definitely needs something.

Now, if you want to run a shonen fighting manga type game without either creating a new system or waiting for someone else to, there are some possibilities. Some have suggested using a hack of Dogs in the Vineyard to do Naruto, and for that matter Filip treated us to Gurren Lagann done with InSpectres/UnSpeakables. DitV is on the right track in terms of supporting play where characters tend to engage in individual conflicts (that’s how it usually seems to work in manga after all), and the use of escalation (If Super Saiyan isn’t enough, it’s time to risk it all on Super Saiyan Level 2!) and fallout.

The Shadow of Yesterday has some ideas that point in interesting directions, but there are elements of its paradigm (like how someone Unskilled can beat a Grand Master by pure dumb luck, if not very often) that to me are at odds with shonen fighting manga sensibilities. It and Spirit of the Century both reward characters for being passionate and irrational, but would need some major hacking to handle the power levels of a Super Kamehameha or Starlight Breaker instead of the pulpy action they were intended for.

Otherwise, the alternative is to use a more typical universal system (anime-flavored or otherwise) to try to simulate the particular setting, which (as the anime/manga character page of Surbrook’s Stuff demonstrates) can accomplish more than you might think, though again it leaves the conflict and character drama largely in the hands of the participants. That’s not necessarily a bad place for it to be, but personally I want a game that can do a little more.

Next Time: Oh! Edo Rocket

My Gaming Confession

I have a confession to make: I don’t like board or card games.

There are some very, very rare exceptions, like Uno and certain kinds of solitaire, but for the most part I just plain don’t derive any particular enjoyment out of them. That’s kind of a shame, considering that (1) some of my friends do like them, and (2) my awesome brother-in-law has a wall of such games, and regularly buys new ones. Some of it is simple burnout from the wrong kinds of games; Magic: The Gathering and Monopoly each went a long way towards ruining their respective genres for me. I’m also not all that good at such games, but a lot of that no doubt comes down to not feeling any desire to invest in them enough to develop such skills. Still, that doesn’t really explain it, especially since I like RPGs so much.

I think the real problem is that I don’t enjoy competition. I don’t like losing, and I don’t enjoy winning at my friends’ expense, but I’ve yet to encounter such a game that can really be fun even when I don’t play to win. It’s not a warm-fuzzy-hippie things either; it’s not “everyone should win,” but rather a dull irritation that rises up after a while until it becomes unbearable. Video games can be an exception at times. Even in multiplayer I can find ways to enjoy Halo (the glaring exception to my dislike of most FPS games) without worrying too much about winning, but I still prefer co-op, single-player, or even anonymous online multiplayer matches.

When I read or translate the part of an RPG’s text where it says that there are no winners or losers per se, unlike other kinds of games, my eyes usually glaze over from having read it so many times, but it really is an important distinguishing characteristic of the genre. On the other hand, I enjoy storytelling in pretty much any form—creative, passive, or interactive—and while some methods work better for me than others, there aren’t any I’ve dismissed outright. (Although there are some genres that don’t do it for me, and some combinations of genre and medium that I don’t care for. I only really like horror in prose form, and I have no particular interest in sexuality in tabletop role-playing).

That said, I do think that one of the ways we might innovate in and revitalize RPGs is by drawing inspiration from card and board games. Raspberry Heaven is a perfect example of that, considering it was Uno that helped redeem the game from oblivion, but that’s only one of a zillion different possible games to look at.

The other day I had the opportunity to look through my brother-in-law’s copy of SPANC (Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls) from Steve Jackson Games. It very much looks like the result of that approach in reverse. You create a crew of three characters, who are defined by four attributes (Space Pirate, Amazon, Ninja, and Catgirl, naturally). You can give them equipment cards to modify the attributes, and you basically throw them at challenge cards, picking a catgirl who tries to roll under the requisite skill (often with a modifier). You could turn it into a very simple RPG with no modification at all. Just let each player pick a character card, and have the GM use challenge cards or make up new ones on the fly, and you’re golden.

The Shab-al-Hiri Roach is a game that in many ways straddles the divide, and the one time my group played it (I do want to play again some time) it was surprisingly successful and won over the skeptics among us. Its basic structure is competitive, based as it is around accumulating influence tokens, but depending on how one choses to play it can be little more than a framing device. It surely has a good number of players who are interested in exploring the setting’s inherent perversity, and can do so to their heart’s content rather than worrying about “winning” the game according to the rules. The use of customized cards to keep things interesting is a definite board game touch, and it’s vital to the overall experience.

Then there’s Once Upon A Time, a “storytelling card game” that is more of a group storytelling exercise. It’s not an RPG per se (no one self-identifies with any of the characters, after all), and its use of cards is more of a way to introduce memes into the story being told and provide a way to win/end then game. Like the Roach, it shows how customized cards can be a vector for introducing information into the game’s fictional world. That’s one of the key concepts of that Moonsick game I’ve been neglecting. It also allows for a level of simplicity and abstraction not often seen in RPGs, and since (as the last post on Adventures of the Space Patrol illustrates) I’m interested in short, pick-up RPGs, this is something I think worth exploring.

Although of course there have been any number of RPGs that make good use of miniatures and maps in the style of the wargames from which the hobby originally arose, I haven’t yet seen any that take a cue from boardgames per se. If an RPG takes place in a limited geographic area, it could have a board, and the effects of different locations could be encoded into that board (this seems ridiculously common in board games). If the locations need to vary more, we could use mapping tiles (like in Zombies!!!), either randomly placed or set out according to someone’s wishes.

On a similar line of thought, a friend of mine was working on a kind of “limit break” mechanism for an RPG, which involved a 3×3 grid on the character sheet. Making use of location as a determining factor is possible even without an elaborate board, and it can accomplish all kinds of interesting things.

This is why I wish I did like board and card games more than I do (and it’s not like I haven’t given them a chance either). I really wonder what other neat things someone who’s actually familiar with a wide variety of of games could come up with.

Anyway. In another day or two I’ll hopefully be posting up the next installment of Role-Play This!, dealing with Fighting Shonen Manga.

Yet Another New Game: Adventures of the Space Patrol!

I’ve come up with yet another new concept for an RPG, albeit one I think I can bring to fruition without agonizing over how to get things done or letting it slide to the back burner for months or years. It’s (tentatively) called “Adventures of the Space Patrol.”

The original idea came from when I realized that Yuuyake Koyake was in fact named after a children’s song that perfectly describes its mood. I got to wondering what other kinds of games could come from children’s songs, and the first one that came to mind was “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” When I looked up more info on the song, I found out that there’s actually a version with a full five verses, and it speaks of the star as a benevolent light shining to guide travelers in the dark of night.

This line of thought met another halfway. Professional illustrators have a certain style of cartooning that’s at least as stylized as manga, but seldom makes its way into the mainstream (with Erin Esurance and certain Nicktoons being notable exceptions) despite being so dang awesome. I had picked up a book of Shane Glines‘ pinup art (NSFW) from Amazon, and the rather silly (in a good way) picture of a girl in a retro-futuristic jumpsuit holding a raygun got me to thinking in terms of “retro-cute sci-fi.”

I’m starting to think that in creating Yuuyake Koyake, Ryo Kamiya really hit on something important. Video games, especially the simpler ones, boil down to how the designers let you do one or more verbs. Some of the cleverest games come from picking an unusual verb, such as “eat” (Pac-Man) or “roll up” (Katamari Damacy) and running with it. Role-playing games are a little more complicated in that respect, but some really brilliant games have come from this same approach. In Yuuyake Koyake the verb is “help.” It makes non-violent role-playing practical, immediate, compelling, and easy to do. Aitsu wa Classmate (another RPG published by Sunset Games) does this too, and while Elite Beat Agents is a rhythm-action video game, its story is also all about helping people (and occasionally other things). I would really like to see more “good samaritan” games come along in the future, but of course the wonderful thing about RPGs is that if you really want something, you can make it happen yourself.

Put all that together, and we have the makings of a game that has the potential to be really moving, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a game where a girl in a silver jumpsuit and jetpack can comfort a girl whose mother was in a car accident.

Most of my attempts at game design revolve around a specific genre for which I can cite at least half a dozen specific works, and more often than not nearly all of those are anime/manga. In this respect Adventures of the Space Patrol breaks with that habit, which is probably good for me as a (wannabe) designer. Although I let some Japanese stuff creep in here and there, the game was inspired by a look and feel rather than a book or a TV show, and it’s up to those who play it to feel out how to put together stories, rather than trying to ape something from another medium.

So far the rules are not especially original. They’re rather like a mashup of The Shadow of Yesterday and Spirit of the Century, with some bits of Yuuyake Koyake, In A Wicked Age, and others thrown in for good measure. I’m less concerned with startling originality of rules than I am with making a quick and fun game that expresses the whole “retro-cute sci-fi” thing well. Characters are created by picking archetypes (Atomic Ranger, Martian Barbarian, etc.) and making a few tweaks here and there. It has SotC-style Aspects, but with the addition of “Bonds,” temporary aspects that define how your character connects with the current episode’s major NPCs. If I get it all the way done, I’m definitely going to include a replay and a couple of scenarios in the book, and do my darndest to get some good illustration-style art to go with it.

Another thing is that, although I really haven’t been trying to do it that way, I keep coming up with ideas for games that would be good for pickup play. (The other two are Raspberry Heaven and Dandelion Complex). I think even though I do tend to play long, convoluted campaigns with my friends, really want to be able to just throw a game together without having to worry too much about organizing a bunch of people week after week. Although it’s often rewarding, sometimes I get tired of being a cat-herder.

If I can, I’m going to try to get a version ready for playtest in the next couple of weeks.

Role-Play This! Metal Wolf Chaos

What Is It?
It’s a truism in video games that the Xbox did very, very poorly in Japan, and the Xbox 360 only somewhat better. Despite that, for the very few people who owned Xboxes in Japan, there were in fact some rather interesting exclusive games that never made it to other markets. One of these was Metal Wolf Chaos. I’ll be perfectly honest, having seen a video of the game I wanted it, but could only get it by torrenting the disc image and playing it on a friend’s modded Xbox. It’s too bad it never was released in the U.S., because I and most of my friends would definitely have bought copies of it. It’s not impossible to get a legit copy, but it’s not cheap either.

The basic premise of the game is the kind of thing only a certain kind of Japanese game designer would come up with. The Vice President of the U.S.A. stages a coup, turning our great country into a military dictatorship overnight. With much of the military siding with the VP’s tyrannical regime, the President himself must don a power suit and blast his way to restoring liberty and freedom. Along the way you get to visit (and more often than not blow up) major American landmarks, upgrade your weapons, and see cut scenes with awesomely cheesy English/Engrish dialogue (”Suck my missile punch!”), until you finally get to have an epic confrontation on a space station.

Why’s It Awesome?
The President is in a presidential mecha, blasting the crap out of America’s enemies. The White House become an armored, mechanical monstrosity: The Fight House. It’s Independence Day plus Full Metal Panic, minus any and all shame. If you want a taste, check this out:

Gaming It
Most any reasonably customizable mecha game — Mekton Z, Exosuit A-OK, etc. — could handle the mayhem of MWC, though you could easily use a more generic system that can do mecha (BESM, OVA, etc.). Another option would be to go for a more descriptive system that concentrates on cinematic action, like Wushu. (And for a blast from the past, I might just dust off my copy of the old Project A-ko RPG…)

As an RPG scenario, MWC’s setup would probably need to be tweaked for more than one protagonist. The way I would handle this is to have the players campaign and vote (naturally) for who gets to be the President, and assign other cabinet positions from there.

MWC is not a thematically deep game by any means, but what depth of story it does have comes mainly from the President’s ties to others–a VP he’d thought he could trust, former comrades from the military, etc.–being tested by the present circumstances. A little bit of this can help keep the story from becoming nothing more than an excuse to blow stuff up, and a lot could make it either more of a serious drama, or crank the melodrama up to 11. In the latter case, my as-yet unrealized dream of a fighting shonen manga game would be idea if it existed, and the former case it starts to sound like a weird Dogs in the Vineyard hack might be the order of the day.

Up Next: Fighting Shonen Manga

Role-Play This! Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

What is it?
Higurashi is a series of independently produced visual novel games, which have since been adapted to several other media, including an excellent anime series. It takes place in the summer of 1983, in a small town called Hinamizawa. When the government wanted to build a dam that would destroy the town, it bitterly divided the people between those who wanted to preserve it and those who wanted to take the government’s money. Every year since the end of the Dam War, there have been murders on the night of the town’s Watanagashi festival.

A teenaged boy named Keiichi Maebara has just moved to Hinamizawa, and he becomes friends with Mion, Rena, Satoko, and Rika, four girls who have a club where they play games, usually with dares over embarrassing costumes. The story unfolds through a series of alternate versions and re-tellings, which gradually reveal more and more of the town’s dirty secrets, and the kids wacky hijinks are often juxtaposed with horror and brutality.

Geneon was releasing the anime in the US, but then they sort of closed down all of their North American operations completely, so the license is kind of in limbo. There are fansubs out there, but they’re hard to find at the moment.

Why’s It Awesome?
SPOILER ALERT. All through the first season, Hirugashi keeps you guessing as to what is actually happening, and the audience can only wonder whether it’s really something supernatural at the heart of all this, or something else. At the end of the first season Keiichi remembers himself brutally murdering Shion and Rena, and doing so pulls him back from the brink of disaster. We also learn why little Rika switches between her bubbly little girl persona and a much more mature self. She has endured nearly a century of reliving the same life over and over. In the final story arc, she uses the knowledge gained from so many lives to rally her friends together to thwart the sinister forces threatening Hinamizawa and move on to a brighter future together.

Although Higurashi is situated in otaku culture, it is anything but typical, and it defies cliches at every turn. Amongst other things, it is willing to deal with social and government issues. Even in mainstream culture, Japanese entertainment always seems reticent to depict for example a courtroom scene, but Higurashi features a protest outside the local child welfare office. The characters, from busty Mion to Lolita Rika (who won the 2007 Saimoe Tournament), have a definite moe aspect to them, but they live in a realistic world and problems such as Satoko suffering domestic violence at the hands of her uncle, are not easy to solve. Unraveling a government conspiracy that could (and in many worlds does) destroy the town is the ultimate test.

Gaming It
There are many possible ways to approach gaming Higurashi. You could stick close to the original, or use the general premise with different characters, or even in a different place entirely. Higurashi is ultimately about the townspeople’s relationship with a unique virus that could redefine how we understand human behavior. it meshes well with a Japanese town with its own cult-like variation of Shinto and run by powerful yakuza families, but it’s not hard to imagine an insular town in the deep south with its own sinister variation of Christianity.

Sorcerer is probably the existing game that would fit best. With a little tweaking, the virus/curse that afflicts everyone in Hinamizawa could be defined in terms of a Demon, with Humanity loss representing the spiral of paranoia, insanity, and death that results from its full activation.

The fact that it uses multiple realities to reveal the mystery raises all kinds of interesting possibilities, regardless of what system one uses. For a shorter campaign or a one-shot the GM might give the players index cards with scraps of memories from the other worlds. Rika is the main one doing this remembering, but the others get occasional vague impressions, especially towards the end of the story. This would require lots of preparation by the GM, but it would be the best choice in terms of maintaining immersion.

On the other hand, especially if you want the mystery to be undecided at the start, it could be neat to do a troupe-style campaign where the players take turns being GM and inventing story arcs, which could be either new or examine an earlier one from a different point of view.

Next Week: Metal Wolf Chaos

New Feature: Role-Play This!

This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a month or so now, and I decided it was time to finally get around to starting. “Role-Play This!” is meant to be a regular column where I discuss things in other media that I think could inspired interesting role-playing experiences, campaigns, or entire games. This is necessarily going to be about stuff that I like, which means an awful lot of it will be anime-related or otherwise Japanese, but by no means all.

Each installment of “Role-Play This!” will have three parts.

• What Is it?: This is a quick rundown of the thing in question, including the specific medium (or media), genre, and style it’s in, where one might find it, and most importantly, what it’s about.
• Why’s It Awesome?: This is where I let my fanboy drool show through, and explain why it is I think the thing in question is so awesome that I want to do something RPG-related with it.
• Gaming It: Finally, I’ll throw out some ideas for how exactly one might go about running a game based on it. I intend to concentrate on using or modifying existing systems, but I definitely won’t shy away from pontificating on what an original game might entail. Here more than anywhere else I’d appreciate any and all feedback.

I definitely can’t promise I’ll actually get around to trying out all of the ideas that result from this — getting my gaming group together once a week is a herculean task as-is — but I’m definitely going to try to follow through where I can, and post the results up here.

Below is a tentative list of things I want to cover here, though of course I’m open to suggestions. I will of course be concentrating on things that interest me, though I’ll specifically avoid things about which I’m already working on games (like sentai).

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (anime, etc.)
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (anime/light novels)
Metal Wolf Chaos (video game)
Futurama (animated sitcom)
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (anime)
Scott Pilgrim (comic)
The Dare Detectives! (comic)
jPod (novel/TV drama)
Empowered (comic)
Akihabara@DEEP (Japanese TV drama)
Shounen Fighting Manga (as a genre)
Oh! Edo Rocket (anime)
Bamboo Blade (anime)
Keroro Gunsou (anime)
.hack (anime/games)
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna (anime/games)
Super Mario Bros./Paper Mario (video games)
Dennou Coil (anime)
Q-ko-chan (manga)