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).

(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. I may do some Moods too.
• 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.

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.

I now own a copy of Monsters! Monsters!. This is a game put out in 1976, designed by Ken St. Andre. It is essentially a variant of Tunnels & Trolls where you play as the monsters. (Here’s a rather detailed review). I had read about it in Heroic Worlds, and I got to play it at Origins ‘94 (though I didn’t do well since I wasn’t getting into the monster mindset), but the new edition the GM spoke of never materialized (I can’t remember where exactly, but I read somewhere that the publisher couldn’t offer the designer selected enough money for him to justify doing the work). However, it turns out that a company called Outlaw Games offers reprints of old T&T and related game material, and even new stuff. The copy of M!M! I got (through Noble Knight Games) is a reprint in perfect condition, though it’s a pretty much unaltered reproduction of the 1976 version, which was apparently done on a typewriter.

The game itself is even simpler than old-school D&D. There are some other bits involved, but combat basically comes down to rolling your weapon dice and adding your Combat Adds (based on how much certain attributes exceed 12). It includes brief descriptions of 52 different monsters (set up so you can generate one randomly using playing cards). I definitely want to play this, but I think I’ll need to carefully limit the selection of monsters. For example, dragons have a strength multiplier of 25. That means that you roll 3d6×25 for a dragon’s Strength attribute, and a dragon with merely average Strength would be making combat rolls on 25d6+213 from Strength alone.

Anyway, it’s an exceedingly fast and loose game, though it does have some little touches of brilliance. My favorite thing is how XP is awarded. Since they PCs are monsters, they get XP for doing monstrous things. Defeating enemies who are more powerful is worth more XP, but abducting particularly beautiful victims (Charisma 17+) is worth a full 500 (which would get you halfway to Level 2).

If playing it works well, I’m going to look into getting some more T&T books to draw on (since M!M! kind of glosses over certain things, including treasure), and in particular some books, T&T or otherwise, with fantasy towns and cities for the monsters to rampage through.

Monsters & Mayhem
I have a certain knack for starting new projects even though I have more than enough unfinished ones staring me in the face. That’s how I wound up starting (if not very seriously so) on two new games. One of these is (tentatively) called “Monsters & Mayhem.” I like the idea of using the old alliteration with an amperand in the middle style name though. Somehow, as awesome of a premise as M!M! brings to the table, no one else has ever actually tried it as far as I know. This will thus be my take. A lot of my new design ideas are turning out to be this weird mix of traditional, Japanese, and indie design influences, and this one is no exception. To create a monster you combine two Keywords (e.g., Seductive+Demon=Succubus, but Seductive+Slime=Slime Maiden), which in turn affect your monster’s attributes, powers, and aspects. (Aspects tend to get you into trouble, say by compelling you to eat a town guard even though his friends will come after you). They “Keyword” approach comes from Beast Bind: New Testament, where you pick “Bloods” to make your supernatural creature.

Although I’m thinking I’ll include support for some other things, the core/default gameplay consists of the players’ band of monsters going into a (demi)human town seeking fame and fortune. In essence, for them towns replace dungeons as the dangerous places to venture into. I’m stealing the awesome idea from the “Maidenrangers” Maid RPG scenario of using playing cards to create a board/map for the PCs to move around. Different cards represent different random encounters, though of course the GM can pick out cards and generally set things up however he or she likes.

Slime Story
I had the idea for this setting ages ago, and I wrote a short story for it a while back. Now I’ve finally gotten a good start on the RPG version I wanted to make. It takes place in a world where portals suddenly started dropping cute monsters (like something out of a Korean MMO) into an ordinary contemporary world. In the game you play teenagers who hunt monsters as a hobby–and for spending money. To create a character you pick a Class (which decides how your character hunts monsters) and a Clique (which determines how he or she fits into society). Fighting monsters is a fairly simple hack-and-slash affair, but each session players create “Quests” for their characters. These can range from simple monster-hunting goals (earn $300, kill a salamander, etc.) to tricky social goals (ask Rita out on a date, convince Alex to let me go hunting with him), but they have to be things that you can do around an outing to hunt monsters (try to find the right moment to ask Rita out while you’re looking for more monsters). It’s very strange trying to come up with a bunch of monsters while making sure that none of them are even remotely sentient.

For both games I’m leaning towards using d20s, partly for what they’re referencing, and partly because isocahedrons don’t get much love outside of D&D.

If I’d thought about it, I would’ve posted this a while ago. I finally got around to playing octaNe a few months ago with my friends, and I wound up devising a couple of new roles. One was inspired by an artbook I picked up at Comic-Con, and the other is undoubtedly from my association with a certain RPG about maids. (Now if only the Japan sourcebook that it alludes to repeatedly had come to fruition…)

Role: Mariachi Samurai
Profile: You were once an ordinary mariachi, making your living using your guitar to make beautiful music with your friends. Then a man killed your friends, and your wife. Then another man offered you the means to take your revenge. You were trained in a secret dojo in the depths of a blasted cityscape, trained in the ancient hypersonic killing style of swordsmanship. And yet, unlike those who came before you, you use your sword to protect the weak. You sweep into town, right the wrongs, stop for a drink, and leave without another word.
Stomping Ground: New Texaco, The Wastelands
Quote: “Amigo, I don’ think you wanna’ do that.”
Mode: Psychotronic
Gear: Massive samurai sword, sixguns, sombrero, cigars
Styles: Daring, Might
Skills: Swordfighting, quick-draw, stoic

Role: Rogue Battle Maid
Profile: You were brought to the Maid School as a young girl, and every day they subjected you to a brutal training regimen. The only thing more perfect than your etiquette and housework is your combat prowess. You were taught to protect a rich Master, but when your last Master died you were left to find your own way. Now it’s up to you to seek your own destiny.
Stamping Grounds: Anywhere
Quote: “You’ve made a really terrible mess. And as usual, it falls to me to clean it up.” (Readies her machinegun)
Mode: Psychotronic
Gear: Dangerous-looking weapon of choice, maid uniforms, cleaning supplies
Styles: Daring, Charm
Skills: Fight like a girl, cook and clean, act ridiculously polite, seduction, protection

I think I’ve figured out what it is I like about Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. To me, they’ve managed to laser-focus on the things where D&D is in fact better than most other RPGs. They’ve turned it into a combat-oriented dungeon-crawling game par excellence. If it’s not as strong on role-playing elements as some prior editions, there are plenty of other games that were better than D&D at such things to begin with, and it was never part of D&D’s paradigm to stress such things mechanically. Basically, I’m looking forward to playing 4th Edition with my friends because it’ll be a novel experience for me. We played 3rd edition some when it first came out, but otherwise we’ve pretty much abandoned it, and playing such a “game-y” and clearly-defined RPG would be something new after playing long campaigns with Fudge, Truth & Justice, and OVA.

Reactions to Changes
I will admit to having engaged in what Judd calls 4enfreude — grim enjoyment of other people’s distress over the changes to the new edition. Pretty much the only RPG forum I go to that hasn’t had any to speak of is Story Games. From my perspective a large portion of the complaints seem a bit trivial. Admittedly, none of the races or classes I was ever particularly interested in playing got cut (for the aforementioned game with my friends I’m playing a half-elf Fighter, if a rather eccentric one), but then the changes to the selections of such things aren’t any more severe than in prior editions. AD&D 2nd Edition didn’t have any half-orcs, monks, or barbarians. 4th Edition is also aping MMORPGs (but I don’t want to explain why), doesn’t have enough items, will run over your dog, and completely fails at being 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 3.5 editions, much less white box or Rules Cyclopedia.

I’m not in any way attached to the prior editions–the very few d20 and AD&D2e books I have I keep around more for inspiration, or in the case of Planescape unbridled awesomeness–and unlike my friend Chris’ roommates I don’t have a long-running campaign that’d be impractical to port over. When 3e got rid of THAC0, I saw it as a major step forward in terms of being willing to discard artifacts of the earlier versions’ idiosyncratic design when something new would just plain work better. You can debate the relative merits of “balance” in RPGs, but I really, really like the idea of wizards always having something useful to do and fighters having more options than just swinging a sword.

Market Type Stuff
I do wonder about D&D’s popularity and moreover its dominance in the hobby. Not because I think it’s a bad game–far from it–but simply on the fact that it’s remained such an overwhelming hold over RPG fandom as a whole for the entirety of its existence. Video games thrive on variety; each generation has at least two major consoles, and each console strives for a game library encompassing hundreds of titles in every genre available. There are people who like a narrow range of genres, and people who have some perennial favorite they keep on playing, but on the whole video gaming as an industry moves forward through new stuff. In particular, the video game industry has to invent new genres periodically, since the older onces become calcified and cater to an ever-shrinking hardcore audience. I don’t know board and card games that well, but my impression is that there’s new stuff coming out all the time, and even casual players (1) don’t stick with just one game, and (2) are occasionally willing to give new stuff a try. Wargames and MMORPGs have their dominant games (Warhammer 40K and World of Warcraft), but these are relatively recent games that essentially took the core of the established hobby and found the right mass appeal to take off.

Of course, if you look at the different editions of D&D as separate games (and certainly entirely too many people have a habit of decrying the latest version as not being “real D&D”), you might argue that TSR and WotC have managed to do just that. The so-called “kill things and take their stuff” approach is simple and accessible, and all the more so with the new edition’s emphasis on setting up encounters.

When I posed the question of why people play D&D exclusively on Gaia Online’s Tabletop Gaming forum, very few people actually said they did so by choice per se. There are a lot of people who just want to play some kind of RPG, and D&D is the only one they can find a group to play with… Which in turn sends me to the question of why it’s hard to find groups playing stuff other than D&D, which then puts me back where I started. “D&D dominates the RPG hobby scene because it’s the dominant RPG.”

But there are people who just refuse to give other RPGs a chance, and I still wonder how one can think that way. I mean, I seriously can’t think of an analogue that I can relate to. Even when I don’t like a genre, I can usually find something within it that I’ll enjoy (Shawn of the Dead, Uno, Halo, etc.), and even if I can’t, I’ll still give it a chance if a friend recommends it (hence although I’ve concluded that wargames do nothing for me, I have in fact played Warhammer 40K a couple times). When I do like a genre, I’ll go through periods of going all-out researching what’s out there on the internet and such (ask me about how I wound up doing a research paper on Godzilla some time). I seriously just can’t wrap my head around why someone who likes one role-playing game wouldn’t give any others a chance.

But What Is D&D Really Like?
One interesting thing that’s coming out of all this rumination on the validity of the new edition is that it’s harder than you might think to make assumptions about how people want to play the game. Part of why people are taking issue with 4e is its tighter focus doesn’t appear to mesh as well with how they want to do things. It’s hard to say anything definitive about early D&D because different groups interpreted and approached the rules differently, and houseruling was a way of life. Here are some different accounts I’ve gleaned from different places:

• Sociologist Gary Alan Fine reported that when he studied gamers in the Twin Cities area, he found relatively few people actually spoke in character, and many used the games as outlets for violent and even sexual urges.
• From what I’ve been reading in forums, one account says that Gygax meant for characters to use lots of hirelings and to move on to more of a leadership role as they rise in levels, yet he was surprised to find them remaining adventurers indefinitely.
• One person said that dungeon crawls were about avoiding combat as much as possible in favor of achieving a stated objective.
• Another recalls being docked points in a tournament game for using guile to deal with a monster rather than killing it outright.
• And when AD&D came along, Gygax wrote a long column in The Dragon about how if you play AD&D with house rules, you’re not really playing AD&D, likening it to trying to push a variant of chess into an official tournament. In general he seems to have done a lot of ranting about how TSR’s D&D was pure and gamers should avoid the bastardizations provided by APAs and such.
• By the time 2nd edition came around, Gygax was no longer with TSR, and from what little I know of that time the company seemed more inclined to deal with other companies trying to make D&D-compatible products with lawyers rather than snark (hence the “T$R” moniker used relentlessly on BBSes and usenet). 3rd edition came after White Wolf had already made its mark on the hobby, and you would routinely see people bragging about how they’d spend sessions of D&D wholly immersed in role-playing and intrigue sometimes (which makes one wonder why they’re using the D&D rules at all).

In a sense, the new edition does a lot more than the previous ones to divert gameplay towards what the designers felt was the optimum mode of play. More styles of play are left with little to no mechanical support (in the matter of the 3e court intrigue games), but the core style is supported exceptionally well.

On the other hand, the last two editions have done a lot more to remove some of the particularly Gygaxian notions about how the game should flow. Third Edition tossed out level and class limits for non-human characters. The argument was that it was a balancing factor intended to ensure that human characters would take center stage in the game despite demihumans having inherent advantages. This in turn relied on the assumption a group would play the game regularly for a very long period of time and characters would improve relatively slowly; if you were to play the game for less than a year, the level limits were unlikely to actually come into play in the first place. (Also, I’m one of the people cheering for the demise of Vancian magic in D&D).

In Conclusion
In conclusion, this turned out to be much longer and more rambling than I originally intended. I’m looking forward to playing the new version of D&D. It’s a very good game, but I can’t comprehend why anyone would consider it THE game. On the other hand, the haters are silly at best, and undignified at worst. This is doubly true of the ones who like an older edition, and triply true of the ones that like 3.5 and have no sense of the history of the game. (Guess what? Barbarians and half-orcs weren’t in AD&D2e either!)

For my group we’re going to start at 1st level (and one of the things I like is that 1st level PCs aren’t so goddamn weak), and we will be using maps and miniatures, albeit on the cheap (I have Chessex battlemats, one of my friends has a couple boxes of old pewter minis, and the rest will be cardstock I’m sure). On the other hand I totally want to get a special set of dice for the game, including a Crystal Caste metal d20. I will post a bit about my experiences if/when I have something interesting to post.

What Is It?
It’s been a while since I did one of these, but I started borrowing the manga from the library and got inspired. Anyway. Fullmetal Alchemist is a manga by Hiromu Arakawa, adapted into an anime series by Bones. The two versions diverge at a certain point because the manga was only up to volume 7 or so at the time, and the studio basically crafted a second half for the story.

It’s about two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric. They learned alchemy at an early age, and when their mother passed away they did the forbidden and attempted human transmutation to bring her back. They bore a terrible price for it: Edward lost his leg, and Alphonse’s body was completely absorbed. Edward sacrificed his right arm to bind Alphonse’s soul to a suit of auto-mail armor. Determined to get their original bodies back, Edward went through painful surgery to get auto-mail prosthetic limbs, and the two brothers set out to find the Philosopher’s Stone.

Why’s It Awesome?
FMA is good for traditional role-playing in that it has more world-building than your typical anime. We get to see the nation of Amestris and its military embroiled in conflicts, and (in the manga) contact with the distant nation of Xing. It’s sort of a steampunk setting too. Amestris is based on Europe during the industrial revolution, and it has trains, guns, prosthetic limbs, and so on.

However, the series’ approach to alchemy is probably the most unique thing about it. Edward is very clear that alchemy is a science. It has specific laws and principles, and represents a natural phenomenon, if a very powerful one that few people understand. The most important thing is that no one can violate the Law of Equivalent Exchange, and the Elric brothers’ biggest mistake in trying to bring back their mother was that they underestimated the value of a soul. Basic alchemy involves drawing a circle and thereby transmuting matter, but Amestris’ State Alchemists invariably have some kind of tricks to let them use some form of alchemy on the fly. Roy Mustang wears special gloves that heighten the amount of oxygen in the air and create sparks, earning him the moniker of Flame Alchemist. Armstrong (one of the most awesome characters in the series) creates massive spiked gauntlets for himself out of whatever material is handy. And Edward, called the Fullmetal Alchemist for his artificial limbs, can create a transmutation circle simply by putting his palms together. I’m not going to get too much into human transmutation, mainly because for the anime it would involve spoilers, and for the manga the issue hasn’t been settled yet as far as I know. Suffice to say that’s where it becomes apparent that the alchemists’ understanding is incomplete.

In addition to all the cool toys, FMA tells a story with deep themes. The Elric brothers are burdened by their sins, yet still hopeful they can restore their original bodies. However, they are confronted with the question of what price must be paid for the Philosopher’s Stone, and by whom. Likewise, Edward’s decision to become a State Alchemist gives him access to research materials to get him much closer to his goal, but the possibility of being ordered to do something he finds immoral always looms over his head. This is not a forgiving series; characters die, because of ambition, greed, or stupid, random chance.

Gaming It
The Elric brothers’ issues are fairly specific, and unlike a lot of anime this is a setting that invites further exploration in a relatively traditional mode. It would take a little work to put together a suitable system for FMA-style alchemy, but I could see it working well in Fudge, GURPS, BESM, Spirit of the Century, Savage Worlds, etc. The rest of the “stuff” involved would be the prosthetic limbs and making sure there was an appropriate selection of guns and such. You could put together a campaign with the PCs being state alchemists, Amestrian soldiers (Ep. 37 of the anime is all about Roy and his subordinates), Ishbalans trying to survive, human chimeras on the run, maybe even homonculi.

Going into wacky indie game territory means having a good idea what you want to do with the setting. For example, In A Wicked Age would be perfect with a well-made FMA oracle, and a game about military investigators or Ishbalan priests looking for signs of wickedness and alchemy could make for an interesting Dogs in the Vineyard variant. Primetime Adventures is a possibility too (the Elric brothers have one heck of an Issue).

Editing: Done!
Andy has finished the editing for Maid RPG, after which he has to get back into Tenra (AFAIK still on track for February 2009). He’s been going insane about editing, much like how I’d been going nuts with translating day in and day out, but that part is pretty much done. We did decide to change some things that seriously just went too far outside the realm of good taste (and it took a lot for a given thing to earn that judgment, honestly), and a few (especially in the item table) that were just too ridiculously obscure to Americans (like the references to Akumetsu and Patalliro). Regardless, Andy tried to be subtle about it, or at least find something keeping with the wacky and referential spirit of the original.

Anyway, that means that except for some possible last-minute fine tuning, we are well and truly into the layout stage. Exciting, huh? :3

Actual Play
I ran a scenario from the book, “Black Cat Mansion.” It went rather smoothly and surprisingly quickly. I don’t think I’ve ever once gotten through a game session in 2 hours before. In that scenario, the Master hasn’t shown up yet, so the maids need to use the seduction rules just to have Favor points to accomplish stuff. I got two interesting things from running the scenario. First, the two players who I expected to be the most skeeved out by having their characters seduce each other were the ones who went all-out doing so. The other thing is that the relatively simple, structured setup of the scenario helped the game laser-focus on certain things. That’s almost certainly why the session went by so quickly. It probably wasn’t as immersive, but then (1) being a wacky one-shot with totally random characters will do that anyway, and (2) it likely helped the players get their characters into seduction and shows of affection without feeling embarrassed. And they got the mega-happy ending, although one of the PCs had to get a good roll and then go crazy spending Favor to pull it off.

Mini-Maids
There are still some details to work out, but we’re planning to put together a free PDF (or some such) for paper miniatures of several maids, plus a handful of masters and butlers. The game in no way requires them, but (1) they’re fun, and (2) they would in fact be handy for the Maidenrangers scenario. Very silly chibi art, and I’m thinking of putting together full stats for each of the characters pictured.

The other day I was searching online for generic colored pawns to use for a Maid RPG scenario (and whatever else they might come in handy for), and I stumbled across all kinds of neat stuff for board game supplies.

I wound up ordering not only pawns, but a whole bunch of other stuff from Great Hall Games. I also came across the website of a company called Rolco, that does all kinds of molded plastics, albeit mainly in bulk. However, they have a “Kits & Bits” page where you can order, amongst other things, a “Game Inventor Kit” ($19.99) that includes a blank board and box, and zillions (well, about 170) of different plastic pieces. eBay also has a category for “Game Pieces, Parts,” where you can find stuff like this as well as replacement parts for mainstream board games.

Anyway, here are some specific game components, and thoughts on how they might be useful:

• Pawns: Pawns are a very generic way to keep track of location. I decided to buy some because of the Maidenrangers of Love and Justice scenario for Maid RPG, in which you build up a “board” out of playing cards that represent both a room and the random event that happens there when the PCs enter (which also has the benefit of making sure random events are never repeated). Pawns also come in different varieties, and there are little plastic stands for cardstock figures as seen in many commercial board games. There’s also stuff like the Icehouse pyramids, which are colored, vary in size, and are stackable.
• Boards: Boards might be a little harder to make, though I think it would be relatively easy to, say, print our two pieces of cardstock and tape them together to form a decent-sized board. Boards can contain a crapload of information, and can provide locations (physical or otherwise) and information on them. Also, boards can be modular, either used at different times (like how there are wargames with a strategic-level main board and a tactical-level “battle board”) or assembled together to form a map. I’m thinking of putting together a Maid RPG scenario that involves a board representing the mansion, and my concept for that “Black Hole Girls” game involved making a board representing a neighborhood, which would affect certain things in the game.
• Cards: I’ve posted about cards before, and I’m working on three different games that use them in different ways, so I won’t retread all of that here. Regular playing cards are even more readily available than six-sided dice, and cards in general can contain all kinds of information, including text, colors, and pictures. On top of that you can do all kinds of things with placing, stacking, holding, and shuffling them. Also, apparently Guild of Blades has indeed launched their POD cards service (while I wasn’t looking).
• Spinners: The only RPG I know of that used spinners was TSR’s Bullwinkle game (and I have a copy I got off eBay for about $12 BTW). The thing about a spinner is that as a game designer you can use it as a random generator for pretty much anything. You can throw together a template in Illustrator in minutes, print it out, paste it to cardstock, and attach a spinner that costs 50 cents or less, and you’re good to go. You can put numbers, symbols, colors, pictures, and so on, and you can put more than one kind of thing in the same spaces or in concentric circles.
• Play Money/Poker Chips: I’ve never seen an RPG that uses Monopoly money (or a Cheapass equivalent), but there are games like DeadLands that have used poker chips to keep track of certain things in a game. Play money feels more like you’re dealing with actual money, while poker chips have the advantage of being available everywhere. When I went into a drugstore the other day looking for something I might be able to salvage for generic pawns, I saw packs of poker chips.
• Sand Timers: Using real-time stuff in an RPG is tricky, but if you do it for the right reasons it could be neat. I’ve noticed that for whatever reason FLGSs often stock small sand timers.
• Scrabble Tiles: The wooden chips from Scrabble are like playing cards in that they contain multiple kinds of information (letters and the frequency numbers), and on top of that you can form them into words. One of /tg/’s flashes of brilliance was the idea to make a superhero game where you form scrabble tiles into “POW” and whatnot for extra power.

Using this kind of stuff in an RPG would be a turn-off to some people, but sufficiently creative uses would more than justify the effort. Some of these are things where it’s a toss-up whether gamers would have them on hand, and they’re just enough out of the way to be a little annoying to get a hold of. I know I don’t have a roulette wheel or a Jenga set on hand, and with spinners you have to either order from a specialty shop or raid a very kiddy board game for parts. Looking at boardgamegeek.com, I stumbled across Piecepack, a sort of public domain standardized collection of parts, made by a few different manufacturers. It’s meant to be a board game set similar to a pack of playing cards in that you can buy it and use it for tons of different games, and along with the aforementioned Icehouse pyramids and Stonehenge (which looks like it’s a good deal more elaborate).

Although it’s almost certainly impossible to change the hobby in such a way as to make more board game components a standard in RPGs, there’s a lot of unexplored territory here, and apparently if you know where to look it’s dirt cheap to explore it. (Manufacturing might be another matter entirely, but still). There’s always going to be the risk of people calling the game a “gimmick.” Of course, you’re going to get that just for doing anything remotely interesting with dice anyway, but it is good to ask the question, “Does this do something that more conventional materials can’t?”

Lastly, some other places that sell neat stuff:

• Spielmaterial
• PlainCards
• PerforatedPaper.com
• Koplow Games
• Gameparts
• Chessex
• Wholesalers USA
• Meeple People

Update: Some more nifty things.

• Blank Dice With Labels. Only $4.95 for a set of 12.
• Spinners. These give the equivalent of a 2d6 roll.
• Poker Dice.
• Sparks Dice. S. John Ross’ free PDF some assembly required dice. Includes 6-sided, Fudge, and blank dice.

I don’t have any news that’s directly related to Maid RPG, but at FanimeCon I attended an interesting panel called “Butler Cafes Exposed,” hosted by some ladies from Yaoi-Con’s Cafe Verfuhren (which means “to lead astray” in German). I took some notes, and hopefully I didn’t get anything wrong. It’s interesting as a cultural thing in general, and it provides some insight into why people are so into maids and butlers.

Maid cafes are taking off in Japan (and popping up here and there in the U.S.), and with more and more women otaku out there, it was only natural that someone would try to make an equivalent that appeals to them. Butler and maid cafes have somewhat different aesthetics–black and wood grain versus white and pink–but they are both essentially a place where customers go to spend time in a safe environment and enjoy viewing a fantasy. Although interaction between the customers and staff is an important part of the experience, there is a very prominent divide. Despite the gimmick, these establishments have a proper client-customer relationship in place. Maid/butler cafes are not host clubs. In a host club, a customer is essentially paying someone to be their date, but in a maid or butler cafe the customer is just a customer at a cafe with some added flavor. Maid cafes still outnumber the butler cafes probably by a ratio of 4:1 or so, and in both cases these businesses come and go.

Each cafe creates something of a distinct brand, and the staff creates their own personas for the cafe. They use assumed character names, and build up a personality to play while they’re at work. In a sense, they are drawing on anime, manga, etc. to create a fantasy experience grounded in the media that the customers enjoy so much. The customers are coming home to an English country home, where handsome servants welcome them and wait on them hand and foot. This is a factor in all of these cafes, but in fact butlers are more often than not women playing the part of men. This calls to mind the Takarazuka Revue all-female theater group, and indeed it does create a greater feeling of safety. They tend to push the BL angle and build up a story more than the cafes with actual male staff. Amusingly, there’s also at least one butler cafe with English-speaking Western men for the butlers, and being able to practice your English is one of the selling points.

Maid cafes may be a little different, but the customers of butler cafes are mainly women in their 20s and 30s. I get the impression that the female fans (”otome”) tend to live relatively normal lives and work ordinary jobs, and go get their fix of BL manga and spend time at a butler cafe once a week or once a month. Many of them do serve alcohol, and all of them are fairly expensive. They also don’t allow photography, but will be happy to sell you signed pictures, along with other merchandise. Surprisingly, the women on the panel saw a lot of men at butler cafes. This is partly because a lot of maid and butler cafes are run by the same people (as with Pinafore and Checkmate), and in some cases there would be (for example) a special opening of a butler cafe where you have to buy something at a given maid cafe to get tickets. For that matter, maid and butler cafes alike often have theme nights, and some maid cafes will actually have “butler nights” where the girls who are normally maids dress up as butlers.

The panel also touched on the experiences setting up a butler cafe at an American con. There were the inevitable difficulties with unions and convention center policies getting in the way of doing things that should by all rights be relatively simple. It was also an explosive success the first year, to the point where they were running out of food to serve people, to say nothing of what happened when they lost the hot water. The second year they worked things out to be in a better space, to serve better food and even alcohol, and so on. Also, at some point the owner of Eighty Plus One (a Japanese number pun on the syllables of yaoi, in case you’re wondering) visited the cafe. Some people even said that Verfuhren provided the only decent food they’d eaten all weekend. (Which makes me appreciate the variety and quality of food available in downtown San Jose during Fanime, if nothing else).

So, as I’ve mentioned before, Maid RPG’s butler rules require you to have one single butler among the maids, who is a badass and an island of calm in a sea of chaos. I want to put together rules for “stewards” (the Japanese word, 執事/shitsuji, can mean either), junior butlers who are more on par with maids, though I think I’m going to need some input from fans of such things if I’m going to get it right. Even among the 4chan crowd, there are people who want to do a game purely about butlers, whether because they’d be more comfortable with it, because they’ve been watching Hayate no Gotoku, or just because they really like butlers. In terms of They Are My Noble Masters, the existing butler rules would be perfect for creating the Colonel, and I want to make rules for creating the likes of Ren.