Maid RPG: Update 8

Sent to me by Ben, whose girlfriend sent it to him.

Production
We’re now down to the wire for getting the layout done. The good news is that we’re just about there. The bad news is we can’t put all of the adventure scenarios into the book and still get it done on time. BUT, we’re going to make the remaining ones available as free downloads. (Just keep in mind that we put what we felt were all the choicest ones in the book). Everything’s getting to be last-minute, but it is looking to come together on time.

The other thing I’m happy about is that it looks like the book will be very reasonably priced. The three books from the original Japanese version cost 6720 yen (at the current exchange rate that’s about $65), but the US version is looking to be $23 or $24 at GenCon, and slightly higher (not more than $25 if at all possible) afterwards. (The estimate I posted earlier was off by about a dollar, owing to the complexities of calculating printing costs). The book will be about 200 pages (8.5×11 format), including all of the optional rules (butlers, masters, mansions, seduction, costume changes, items, etc.), three replays, and eleven scenarios. It is seriously going to be an incredible value for the amount of stuff you’re getting.

Anyway, as I’ve said before we’ll have a limited print run for GenCon. It’s hard to say how well it will sell, but it could go pretty quickly. After that we’ll probably start up selling from a proper print run around mid to late September.

Title Goes Here
The full English title will be “Maid: The Roleplaying Game” (Maid RPG is thus an abbreviation). It looks very nice on the cover, though being the creature of habit that I am I will still call it Maid RPG.

Well, Duh
The other day Ben Lehman pointed out something so blindingly obvious that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. One of the great things about Maid RPG is that it makes the GM’s role especially fun. I mean, you get to be the Master of the House, with a bunch of maids who have to fawn over you if they want to get ahead. You can play the Master however you like, but you’ve got to remember that the point of the core Maid RPG gameplay is that you’re the Master of the Game, and the game is rewarding you for it.

D&D 4e Actual Play: First Impressions

My group played D&D4e for the first time last night. We have a strange and quirky bunch of characters, but once we got into combat the role-playing part fell away almost completely in favor of figuring out how to use the rules. It was fun, but definitely not the kind of fun I usually play RPGs for.

Anyone who says that 4e characters are “superheroes” is totally full of shit. The heroes’ numbers are higher, but so far even the weakest monsters are consistently vicious and dangerous. Kobolds with slings were dishing out as much as 9 points of damage at a time, where my fighter has 31 hp (the highest in the party). And that’s before we mention the fire beetles. We really had to go all-out using powers, Second Wind, and other little tricks just to avoid a TPK. (Though it doesn’t help that the rogue has a sub-optimal build, something the DM will hopefully let him fix before we play again).

The logistics of playing the game are a bit more intensive too. We played the game with minis and a map, and after doing so I really can’t imagine playing it without them. There’s also the matter of referencing powers, which in turn has us wanting to make cards or worksheets with the necessary info. (This site has links to lots and lots of promising stuff) I found that just writing the page number down on the character sheet (a trick I got from some Japanese RPGs) helped ameliorate the difficulty somewhat, though even with 3 copies of the PHB we were contantly having different people trying to grab a copy to look stuff up. But regardless, the powers were consistently useful, though some more than others. I almost got to use Cleave once, but Sure Strike was very important tactically.

We got through two encounters, so apart from some initial role-playing and killing kobolds, not a whole lot happened that session. However, all my friends who’d played 3.5 marveled at how fast it went.

Update: We wound up playing D&D again and finishing the dungeon on Sunday. I had bought a pack of cardstock (why is it they sell packs of 250 sheets of white cardstock for $12, and packs of 100 sheets in funky colors for $10, but not packs of 100 sheets of white for $4-6?) and printed out power cards for everyone. My friend Tim brought card sleeves to go with them, and they definitely did help. Everyone is also getting to know the rules better and generally adjusting to the attendant paradigm and avoiding stupid mistakes.

The final battle was against a young white dragon. It first used its presence attack ability and its breath weapon, which hobbled half the party with status effects, but once we recovered enough the rogue got his Blinding Barrage off on it, the fighter and paladin flanked it, and we all generally pounded on the thing until it died (though the paladin took a lot of bad hits and was knocked out just before the battle ended).

Maid RPG: Update 7

(Updated the update on 7/10)

A short update this time. Things are basically moving smoothly. Kamiya-sensei and his friends were kind enough to offer some feedback on the English translation, which will hopefully help compensate for my inadequacies. Kamiya-sensei has also written an afterword/designer’s notes thing in the form of a conversation between him and E.B. II (the android maid with purple hair from the cover).

Maid RPG at Anime Expo
Although I wound up showing up about half an hour late, I ran a lively session of Maid RPG at Anime Expo on Saturday. I was too tired from life in general to plan out a scenario, so I just did a random event driven thing, though it was the first such game where the players didn’t spam the 1D6 Favor = Random Event button. At one point some Japanese people passed through the tabletop gaming room, saw the little sign that said メイドRPG and commented in Japanese that it looked like something perverted, but rushed off before I could comment back in Japanese. (Andy contends I should’ve told her it was perverted). It was satisfying in a way that the players would occasionally answer cell phone calls with “Dude! I’m playing Maid RPG! It’s awesome! My character is a cyborg fox spirit!”

See the comments for a sketch of the PCs that one of the players commissioned from Persona!

Website
We have a placeholder up for the Maid RPG website, but we’re hoping to have the full thing up and running in the next couple of weeks.

Maidenrangers of Love and Justice
I ran “Maidenrangers of Love and Justice” the other day, which I’m also going to be running in a scheduled game at GenCon (already full in case you’re wondering). It has this neat board game element where you set up a grid of 16 playing cards, which also represent random events. I was lucky that the generic pawns I ordered from Great Hall Games arrived about 2 hours before we started playing. My only complaint about the scenario is that because the PCs are searching rooms for items, and in some cases they’re rolling up to 5 times on the item table, it got exceedingly cumbersome at times, and I was getting a sore throat just from reading off item descriptions. I decided to make a set of item cards for myself. First I tried gluing printouts of the items to index cards, and the result is just plain massive and labor intensive. I then got micro-perforated printable business cards and just printed them out. The result was much better and altogether more managable, but it’s still a deck of 214 cards, with no coating whatsoever, so they’re awfully hard to shuffle. I’d like to be able to provide something like that to people, but (1) printing cards is expensive, especially for an accessory for a game we’re selling on a relatively small scale, and (2) making a PDF of the cards complicates matters a bit, since that’s about 20 pages of copyrighted material. (Of course, owners of the book, or the PDF, would still be able to make their own if they’re so inclined).

If I can swing it, I’m going to have paper miniatures and pregens and such for when I run it at GenCon (since playing with random characters resulted in having some PCs be at odds with the scenario’s goals), and some kind of tokens to mark when someone has searched a room (since only one search is allowed per room).

For this scenario the order in which PCs act becomes important, especially when you have 4+ characters. I think I’m going to implement some kind of initiative rule.

Original Stuff
I keep poking at what I’m tentatively calling “Maid RPG 120%”, which would be a collection of original material for Maid RPG. The “120%” indicates excessive completeness, since in its Japanese incarnation it was a 32-page game with 200 pages of supplementary material, and here I am trying to add more stuff.

• I’m turning two of my original characters (Kurumi and Kitty) into maids so that I can write Kamiya-esque dialogues to demonstrate the new rules and such.
• Rules for playing “stewards,” basically butlers, but with a power level more in line with maids. I have a draft of the rules finished, though apart from the Steward Types I sidestepped making any new random tables in favor of using ones from the rules for making butlers or maids.
• Another costume table, and another item table. I have the costume table all planned out, and I have a little over half the number of item ideas needed to make a new D666 item table.
• New worlds — Gothic (good for castles, vampires, zombies, etc.), Superheroes, and Bizarro (looks Contemporary, but stuff is truly weird and random under the surface). Combined with the ones from the core rules, this would let you roll a d12 for the World. Also, two new moods: Melodrama (for overblown soap opera stuff) and Intrigue (for conspiracies, assassination attempts, etc.).
• I have way too many ideas for scenarios. So much so that I’m putting together a table of 36 scenario seeds so I can include some of the ideas that are very by-the-numbers to set up and run (like the one where the Master buys android replacements for each maid, and they have to prove they’re better). There are still some scenarios I want to do full-length writeups for, including multiple prequels to Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden. I also want to put together some scenarios that make good use of the optional rules both from the Japanese version and that I’m working on.
• I’m planning to try my hand at putting together at least one replay.

If this ever does come to fruition I want to be able to take submissions from fans (who may well produce better material than me), though if it turns into an actual book it will then take actual money to produce, and we’ll have to limit the quantity of material to a reasonable amount.

Catgirl: The Storytelling Game – Progress

So, I got all inspired to work on Catgirl: The Storytelling Game again. I’m not really sure why, though reading D.Gray-Man probably has something to do with it.

For the setting, I played around some more with the different types of Awakened (supernaturals). In addition to the kemonomimi (catgirls and others like them), shinigami (Death Gods), and mascot girls, there are the Empowered (humans with special powers, such as sorcery, miracles, or psionics) and the Blooded (quasi-vampires, not unlike in Tsukihime). To the major types of enemies I added Dominators (humans with the power to enslave Awakened), the Syndicate (the real Men In Black, who want to create a mundane and static reality), and the Lost (corrupted and damned souls, not unlike the Hollows from Bleach).

For the rules I started off with a Storyteller system inspired variant of Fudge, but I’ve come up with some things that I think are kind of neat:

• Partially reversed death spiral. When a character is hurt, she gets -1 to intellectual/rational type actions, but +1 to instinctive, bestial actions.
• Rather than giving you a flat bonus for flashy narration, a stunt lets you use one skill or attribute in a creative way to possibly get a bonus on another.
• You can spend multiple Charm selections on the same Charm to upgrade it. You can do two upgrades, and these usually make a it more expensive to use.
• Characters have to start with a “Crisis,” some incident that puts them on the spot. (Basically a Kicker but with a more Japanese name).

The further along I go, the more I like what I’m coming up with. Although strictly speaking I could still use Opening the Dark, this is turning more and more into a game I really want to play. This really is turning into more and more of a runaway project.