#1: What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it? How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become?
In middle school my friend Alan got us into Palladium’s Robotech RPG. From then through much of high school various Palladium games dominated my gaming, and I think the fact that every other RPG I looked at had better rules made me appreciate good game design where some people seem inclined to gloss over it on the basis that the GM can fudge a bad game into submission.

#2: What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?
It would be hard to narrow down to just one time. I guess I like the in-the-moment creativity of it.

#3: What kind of gamer are you? Rules Lawyer, Munchkin/Power Gamer, Lurker, Storyteller/Method Actor, or something else? How does this affect the kinds of games you play?
I ended up being the GM a lot, especially in the “middle” phase of my time as a gamer (early in my college years), so I like having a big picture perspective and not being tethered to a single character for too long. I have a love-hate relationship with immersion because while it can make a game more intense, it also means that if my character is having a bad day I kind of am too. This doesn’t translate well to any particular rules preference, and I’ve enjoyed a wide variety of games over the years.

#4: Are you a “closet gamer?” Have you ever hidden the fact that you’re a gamer from your co-workers, friends, family, or significant other? Why or why not? How did they react if they found out?
Along with being an anime fan, I’ve never hidden being a gamer. I don’t jump at the chance to reveal it to people, but it’s one of those things where if someone thought less of me for it, I would lose all interest in gaining their respect in the first place.

#5: Have you ever introduced a child to gaming, or played a game with a young person? How is gaming with kids different than gaming with adults?
The closest I’ve gotten to that is playing in a D&D Game Day session at the FLGS where one guy brought his elementary school age son. The lesson I took from it is that a 7-hour session of crunchy paragon tier D&D is a bad fit for a little kid, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. I don’t normally have contact with children these days, so it’s kind of a moot point for me, and will probably continue to be until one of my sisters gets around to having kids.

#6: Describe your all-time favorite character to play. What was it about him/her/it that you enjoyed so much?
Without a doubt that would be Octavia Vasconcelos, my human warlord from D&D4e. On the mechanical side, the warlord is the D&D class I didn’t know I wanted all along, able to wade into melee while influencing the entire battle through charisma, tactical acumen, and lots of shouting. Personality-wise, playing Octavia was cathartic for how she was boundlessly confident and always quick to cut through the bullshit.

#7: How do you pick names for your characters?
I use a mixture of generators and lists like the Story Games Names Project and Seventh Sanctum, obscure references, and stuff where I just like the sound of the name. I have enough hobbies that involve making characters that I like to think I’ve gotten fairly good at that.

#8: What’s the one gaming accessory (lucky dice, soundtrack, etc.) you just can’t do without? Why?
A printer. Any time I run a game I end up running off a bunch of stuff that’ll be critical to smoothly running the game. Combining said printer with basic cardstock is also incredibly useful at times.

I’ve mostly set aside superstitions about dice in favor of using GameScience dice for maximum fairness, and I’ve stopped using soundtracks because it leads me to excessively plan out scenes I want to force to happen when I should be playing to find out what happens.

#9: Have you ever played a character of the opposite sex. Why or why not? If yes, how did the other players react?
In the two gaming groups I’ve been a part of playing opposite sex characters is pretty normal, and no one even blinks when I or any of my friends play a female character. I usually end up doing so because I have an archetype in mind that to me becomes more interesting when it’s a woman. The warlord is a great class, but a warlord who’s a woman who wades into battle wearing silver chainmail over a white dress is too awesome to pass up.

#10: Have you ever played a character originally from a book/TV/movie? How did the character change from the original as you played?
I don’t normally do that kind of thing on account of it’s hard to find anything that everyone in my gaming group is sufficiently familiar with, but I did once play in a Firefly con game at Gen Con SoCal. The whole group was doing a really good job of being in character, and I like to think I role-played Shepherd Book pretty well. I don’t recall him ever cross-dressing to avoid enemies in the series though. It was also the game where Nathan Fillion visited our table, which was pretty insane.

#11: Have you ever played a character that was morally gray, or actually evil? Why or why not? If yes, did you enjoy it?
In D&D terms my PCs tend to range from good to neutral. Octavia is Unaligned because her priorities don’t quite align with normal morality (she values loyalty and dignity above all else) for example. I don’t really see the appeal of evil per se, though I like to think that as a GM I’ve managed a few good villains on occasion. Xian, the charismatic and amoral interdimensional trader would be a good example, and he was fun to have around.

#12: Do prefer collaborative or competitive games? What do you think that says about you?
I definitely prefer collaborative games. For the most part I’m just not a very competitive person, and when I catch myself going that way I don’t really like what results. It’s part of why RPGs are the only kind of tabletop games I really like.

#13: Who’s the best GM/storyteller/party leader you’ve ever had? What made him/her so great?
There’s a certain old-school style of GM who’s incredibly good at presenting a world and placing you in the middle of it where your actions have consequences. My brother-in-law Chuck is probably the best of those I’ve encountered, on account of my high school friend with similar skills had the problem that he never quite seemed to get that his complex intrigue games were basically aimed at a group of clones of himself rather than the people he was actually playing with. I’ve had some really good times with other kinds of games, but Chuck’s fantasy pirates game would be the one where the GM added the most.

#14: What kinds of adventures do you enjoy most? Dungeon crawls, mysteries, freeform roleplaying, or something else? What do you think that says about you?
I think my favorite overall is lighthearted improvisational comedy type games, which is probably part of why Maid RPG looms so large in my gaming career. I can and often do enjoy other kinds of games (including tactical dungeon crawl type stuff), but I think laughing and making it up as I go along are my favorite things in gaming.

#15: People often talk about the divide between what happens “in game” and “in real life.” Do you maintain that divide in your own play, or do you tend to take what happens to your character personally? Why?
I think there was a time when I did take stuff a little too personally at times, and it goes back to that thing about why I’m ambivalent about immersion. There have been times when Saturday rolled around and I found myself thinking, “Well shit, I have to be Hikaru today.” I’ve come to take more of an author/director approach to role-playing (which comes naturally from GMing so much), and that works better for me and keeps the game from being emotionally draining.

#16: Who was the most memorable foe you’ve ever come up against in a game? How did you beat him/her/it? Or did you?
The one that sticks out in my mind is the sand dragon we found on an airship in 4E, on account of the damn thing kept blinding everyone and we kept failing our saving throws. We finally beat it, but it took a good long while.

#17: What was the best reward you’ve ever gotten in a game? What made it so great? How much do you need tangible rewards (loot, leveling, etc.) to enjoy a game?
I can’t remember the exact name of the item, but Octavia got that holy chainmail artifact from the 4E DMG. Getting a gift from the God of Battle further reinforced her conviction that she’s awesome, and it was an incredibly useful item to have, what with being able to grant Resist 5 to basically any damage type in the game amongst other things.

#18: Have you ever “cheated” on a die roll/random chance outcome, or looked up a quest solution on a fan site? Why or why not? If yes, was it worth it?
I have fudged die rolls on occasion. Not really worth it. I’ve never looked up a quest solution online for a tabletop game though, in part because we’ve never done much in the way of playing from published adventures. I have looked up solutions for puzzles in video games, but that’s more because I’m pretty bad at the kinds of puzzles video game developers like to make and it’s better than stopping playing a game entirely.

#19: What’s the weirdest character you’ve ever played? How did you end up with him/her/it?
It’s hard to pick, since my PCs tend to have a certain baseline level of weirdness and not go too far above that. I guess Tasha, my vestiges pack warlock would be about the weirdest. She was training as a wizard, but made contact with all these ancient spirits that kind of broke her mind a bit. Portraying a character not quite in touch with reality was a challenge.

#20: What was the most memorable character death you’ve ever experienced? What makes it stick with you?
We haven’t tended to have very lethal games (I still maintain that death is one of the less interesting bad outcomes a PC can have), and my PCs that have died have tended to be decidedly non-memorable ones.

#21: What’s the best bribe you’ve ever given (or received as) a GM? What did you get (give) for it?
I can’t really think of anything like that ever happening in my gaming groups. The GM tends to be either impartial or already more or less on the PCs side.

#22: Describe the worst game you’ve ever played in. What made it so bad? Did your fellow players help, or make it worse?
I can’t really think of anything like that. We’ve had stuff turn out to be kind of lame and not work out, but I can’t think of anything that was just horrible.

#23: Have you ever experienced Total Party Kill (TPK), or been close to it? What effect did that have on you personally? On your group of players? Have you ever used retroactive continuity (retcon) to save yourself? Why or why not?
I’ve only ever experienced a TPK in one-shots and con games, where it was maybe kind of disappointing but not something I’d ever get bent out of shape over.

#24: Have you ever been to a game convention? What was it like to be surrounded by so many other gamers?
I’ve been to Gen Con Indy twice, and Gen Con SoCal once and one or two other gaming cons. There’s a nice energy any time you have a lot of people in one place for something they love (which you find at any good con, not just gaming cons), but I’m also enough of an introvert that I have a low tolerance for big crowds of people.

#25: If you game enough, you’re bound to run into someone being an ass. What’s the most asinine thing someone’s done in a game with you? How did you react?
The only thing I can think of is that a friend of mine twice threatened to leave our D&D game, while grinding things to a halt for over an hour. I tried to be conciliatory for as long as my patience held out.

#26: Who or what was the most memorable NPC you’ve ever encountered? Why?
As a player, I’d probably say Sir Leo. He was a ridiculously over the top shiny-good paladin in our D&D4e game, who came off as a buffoon but apparently was actually quite intelligent. Him colliding with our band of weirdos was always entertaining.

#27: If you were an Ent, what kind of Ent would you be?
What kinds of Ents are there? I guess an Ent who was of some unusual kind of tree who played against type a bit, like a willow tree whose flexibility made him quick and relatively interested in human affairs.

#28: Do you have any house rules when you game? What are they, and why do you use them? If not, why not?
I tend to either play by the rules (if at times in a fast and loose way) or go right past house rules and into designing new games or very extensive hacks of games. I think my tastes in game rules are broad enough that I seldom find anything small I’d want to tweak, but my tastes in content are eccentric enough that there’s a ton of things I want games about that no one’s done.

#29: What does the word “gamer” mean to you? Is that different than what other people seem to think it means?
A gamer is someone who puts some serious time and energy into gaming. There might be someone looking for excuses to withhold the title, but that would be dumb.

#30: What lessons have you taken from gaming that you can apply to your real life?
People stuff matters, a lot. Also, it’s important to be able to look at things from other people’s perspectives. Just as a game designer, GM, and player have profoundly different perspectives on an RPG, an applicant, HR person, manager, and employee all have very different perspectives on hiring.

#31: How would your life be different if you’d never gotten into gaming?
Through gaming I’ve done some really neat things (like publishing the first Japanese tabletop RPG ever in English) and met a ton of really amazing people. Maid RPG was part of why I have my current day job, and the gaming I’ve done and people and projects I’ve been involved with have enriched my life tremendously. Without gaming that same energy would have undoubtedly gone somewhere else (and I do write prose and comics), but I don’t know that I would have gotten as far as I have.

When it comes down to it I would be pretty happy to keep on playing D&D4e. I’ve been saying for a while that I don’t feel any particular need for more material (I started feeling that way a bit before Essentials hit, though I did just buy Heroes of the Feywild), especially in the way of crunchy bits for characters, though going back to making 4e characters without the Character Builder would be kind of painful. Of course, there’s been choruses of “I told you so” and such from the anti-4E set too. I don’t know that 5E will be a repudiation of 4E’s design–especially without having seen any of what 5E will actually be like–but I’ve tried to avoid falling into the trap of investing my identity in the game I play. My weekend gaming group has stuck with 4E a lot longer than most any other game we’ve tried, but to me it’s ultimately just another RPG. It’s a particularly good fit for that group, but then it’s a pretty bad fit for my other gaming group too. To me there are absolutely things worth keeping (especially the Warlord class), but plenty of room for improvement too. Even sticking totally within 4e I could see a major revamp of rituals and skill challenges helping the game for example.

Mike Mearls has been talking a big game about bringing the disparate generations of D&D players together under one roof, apparently with a more modular game, and they’ve sure as hell got their work cut out for them. For me Dragon World and Slime Quest are both games that capture some of the things I like about D&D, and they’re pretty far apart. And that’s before we compare the old school fantasy Vietnam funnel dungeon approach and the modern epic adventure style. I can see a clear path to making maps and minis optional for example (selections of powers that are and aren’t movement-related) or adding a kingdom-building sub-game, but it’d be harder to include an OD&D power curve where 1st level PCs have HP in the low single digits alongside the more survivable PCs of contemporary D&D. I do find the modular approach interesting, and on paper it seems the most rational approach to pleasing such disparate groups. Certainly there are plenty of things some people want (like the stronghold-building aspect of early D&D) that don’t interest me at all, and stuff I like that other people would prefer to omit. Making all that able to work seamlessly together sounds like a pretty spectacular design challenge though. I like the WotC team as game designers (certainly more than I like their marketing and PR), but I don’t know that my faith in them goes that far.

One persistent question is what kind of license will be available for third-party material. That’s one of those things that people pretty much only talk about for D&D, and no one complains that, say, AEG and White Wolf are continuing to have standard copyrights on their games. Of course, D&D is the big dog and people have more economic incentive to ride its coattails, and I think the d20 STL/OGL in part served to formalize and channel what some publishers were already doing. (Another thing people seem to forget is how litigious TSR–or “T$R” as it often got called on usenet–was during the AD&D2e era.) I don’t think I have the right kind of information to pass judgment on how well the OGL experiment worked for WotC or the game industry in general. To me it feels like most of the good stuff that came of it, especially the stuff that’s had any semblance of staying power, was primarily independent OGL games that would be of no use to anyone playing D&D proper. Mutants & Masterminds is going strong in its 3rd edition, whereas I can’t think of a third-party D&D setting from the d20 era that’s still around. Certainly there are companies like Green Ronin that built their business around quality d20 material, but there was also a great tidal wave of d20 crap, and a huge number of products that were shoehorned into d20 without rhyme or reason. The system is more versatile than some of its detractors would’ve admitted, but it also had its limits, and the people behind Deadlands d20 and BESM d20 and so forth seemed to have rather pointedly forgotten that. To me the best thing about the OGL was that it popularized open content in RPGs, particularly when it came to FATE. Even after its revisions, the GSL was too restrictive for most publishers’ tastes, and what third-party material there was got hamstrung by 4E players’ heavy reliance on digital tools. I’ve thought about doing more extensive writeups for the races I created for Slime Quest, but it would be a considerable amount of work without all that much payoff beyond the satisfaction of tackling some interesting design challenges.

Another thing that the growing 5E kerfuffle is bringing to the fore is just how irrationally dominant D&D really is. At times people argue the relative merits of D&D editions so as to sound like they’re arguing over which kind of screwdriver is best for putting in nails. For pretty much anything where someone might find 4E lacking compared to 3.5, there are a dozen games that do it better than both.[1] I have a hard time sympathizing with people who get angry or hysterical over the current edition of D&D being dragged down to a level that’s still significantly above most other RPGs in terms of available published material and ease of finding players. You would be hard-pressed to find many other RPGs where it’s even possible to own 50+ supplements. I really wonder at people who worry over 4E not getting any more releases, as though they could’ve possibly exhausted the available published material.

As is usually the case when D&D nonsense flares up, this mostly just makes me want to get Slime Quest up and running so I have my own fantasy RPG with good tactical combat to play. It does have me thinking more about what I want out of Slime Quest, since in a lot of ways it’s meant to be what I would want for my own personal D&D. I don’t expect D&D to ever take on any real anime inspiration of course (not that I would particularly trust WotC to do it justice even if they wanted to), but I would like to see something like Skill Challenges only more fully developed. I also want support for non-combat stuff that’s roughly as detailed and interesting as combat, preferably set up so that PCs don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. This is still a very “big picture” thought, especially since I have so many other projects to think about, but I think an important one.

[1]“I want more freedom to make the character I want!” “Then why are you playing a game with classes?” “I want a game that’s like a simulation of reality, with as little abstraction as possible.” “Then why are you playing a game where HP is a giant jumble of fatigue, luck, and injury?” And so on.

I decided to put a rough version of it up on the site for people to enjoy and hopefully play a bit. This is the “hack” version, which lacks explanations of some of the basic rules, such that you’ll need a copy of Apocalypse World (or at least to be well-versed in the basics of AW) in order to play. It’s had a little bit of playtesting, such that I refined the basic moves and the Pure Sacrifice, Dumb Fighter, and Conniving Thief character types a bit, but there’s also a lot of stuff I finished up in one big rush over the weekend.

Download Dragon World Hack v0.1 (PDF)
Dragon World Hack Playbooks and Basic Move Reference Sheet

Other Ideas
I’m pretty happy with the selection of character types here, but I literally have about 30 ideas for others, plus I’ve found that the game very frequently inspires people to suggest new ones as well. If I publish a proper book, there’s a very good chance I’ll end up doing some kind of compendium of character types as a supplement. I’m also going to be working more on a few other possible things for the rules, and a section with setting and NPC ideas.

“Story moves” are kind of a neat little thing I came up with the other day but haven’t implemented yet. I’ve been reading through the Discworld novels from the beginning (which is why stuff like Failed Wizard, Oblivious Tourist, and Octogenarian Barbarian crept into my list of possible character types), and in the first two books there’s the thing about how Rincewind has one of the eight great spells from the Octavo stuck in his head and all the trouble it causes. A story move is a thing like that, represented as a special move that at turns helps and hinders the character, and also has an end condition of some kind, after which you lose the move and get a free advance.

Steven Savage suggested adding a wealth system, which would basically be a special stat shared by the group that would fluctuate depending on when they bought major stuff or found treasure, and there would be treasure with associated custom moves to make their lives more interesting. It could fit in nicely with Temptations and make room for some kind of merchant character type, but I’m still thinking about it.

Actual Gaming
This past year I did a lot of gaming with my Friday group, which has been going through a series of short campaigns for some time. Our longest game was also our best. We started off playing Smallville and then switched over to Primetime Adventures, which wound up working out incredibly well. The game was kind of a Smallville-ish thing, a present-day setting where people with superpowers were emerging (to the chagrin of the Greek gods), without any real DC-inspired elements per se. That was what inspired me to write Entanglements, which got its first test run as part of the setup for our “Ameripunk” Wushu game (my character was a bibliomancer trained by Mark Twain and entrusted with the Amerinomicon). I do still need to make some refinements to Entanglements, but it seems to work pretty well.

For a variety of reasons what had been my “main” group heavily dropped off gaming. We did get in some D&D and had a ton of fun with Gamma World, but we nonetheless went from gaming most weekends to someone maybe getting a bit of something together every other month. I think it has a lot to do with human factors more than anything. With working 40 hours a week, attending another game group, and hanging out with friends most Mondays, I’ve tended to spend the better part of most weekends writing and recuperating from the prior week. It also doesn’t help that our game of choice is D&D4e, which while definitely easier on the DM than 3rd Edition nonetheless takes a fair amount of work to run. I tried to run a Dark Sun game, but I kept ending up having plans slapped together an hour or two before the game started. I’m hoping to rope that group into playing Dragon World, because it’s a fun game I can bullshit my way through running, and because if our D&D games are any indication we can definitely get into the right spirit. We’re also getting back a member who’s been absent for a few years, and I’m hoping that will help reinvigorate our gaming.

Conventions and Whatnot
This year also saw the first time I ran a convention booth by myself, first at a tiny anime convention called Kin-Yoobi Con, and then at the Alternative Press Expo. Both were interesting learning experiences, though by the end of APE I was ready to swear of cons for a while. Anime fans are definitely more receptive to RPGs than indie comics fans though. Neko Machi had kind of a rough second year too, and we’re hoping to reinvent it somewhat (with a format change and such) and relaunch in early 2012.

Game Projects
I only did two Kyawaii RPG things this year, and one of them I started and finished yesterday. I still have like half a dozen unfinished ones that I’d like to work on and haven’t touched.

The anime series Madoka Magica was a massive thing in 2011. For me personally it was the dark deconstruction of the magical girl genre I’d been wanting for years, and it inspired me to design an RPG that I titled “Magical Burst.” I have far too many works in progress, but this is easily the most promising and most popular. I put the rough drafts of the game online just for people to read, and it totally took off, becoming a standard of the 4chan /tg/ crowd. I keep coming across threads where people suggest it, and in one case I came across an unfinished Black Rock Shooter game where the creators had thrown up their hands and said, “Just use Magical Burst.” I don’t know how much is my accomplishment as a designer (there are parts of it that make me wince) and how much is other factors, but it’s helping motivate me to actually get the game done for a change.

Dragon World is the other new game I started on, and it proved very fun to both work on and to play (when we did a 3-session playtest). The idea came from when I finally got around to reading the Dragon Half manga, and this “90s comedy fantasy anime” game also draws inspiration from Slayers and a host of other titles. It’s based on the Apocalypse World rules, though of course with plenty of changes for the game’s very different genre. I’m planning to put a “Dragon World Hack” PDF up for free once I get some more things done.

Golden Sky Stories is of course the Japanese RPG I translated and that we’re gearing up to do a Kickstarter to publish. I’ve posted a good amount about it already, but I’m really excited to finally get it out into the world. I’m also working on putting together an original replay that’ll be a free preview of the game in English. I have the rough manuscript and artwork all ready in fact, so I’m just waiting for a friend to tackle the editing and layout. For the game itself, Clay is still working on the layout, and for the Kickstarter I basically just need to wait for my friend to finish up tweaking the video and fill out stuff on the Kickstarter backend for the launch.

Gamer Culture and New Stuff
I’ve made a habit of lurking in the grognards.txt thread on Something Awful. It’s a collection of the most terrible things said by grognards, and is up to about 1500 pages now. It’s kind of therapeutic at times, and it’s helped me get a better perspective on how D&D has changed over time. Probably the biggest lesson from grognards.txt however is simply: people are at their best when they’re actually doing stuff they like instead of bitching about things they don’t like. There are OSR blogs that come off as obnoxious and curmudgeony (at best) when talking about RPGs published less than 20 years ago, and yet when they’re earnestly expressing their passion for old-school swords and sorcery I want to cheer[1]. I’m also contemplating doing a “grognards.mp3″ podcast episode with dramatic readings, though with everything going on it’s been really damn hard to find time for podcasting. I have a whole solo episode recorded that I haven’t had time to edit.

For a while now I’ve been interested in trying to expand the medium of RPGs in new directions, particularly in terms of components and presentation. I’ve talked before about looking into using board game components (and I still want an RPG that makes good use of a spinner!), and I love how (for example) Jake Richmond is making good use of comics to teach people how to play his newer games. In December I hit on the idea of making an RPG in the form of a smartphone app and designing it around that medium as much as possible, an idea that won the “Brain Full of Games” contest, which consequently has me starting on a design document for Raspberry Heaven (my Azumanga Daioh inspired slice of life schoolgirl game) as an “RPG app.” I’m already talking to some programmers, so things stand to get really exciting on that front in 2012.

I’ve come to be a bit irritated at gamers, at least as represented on online forums, for how they can come across as having desperately narrow tastes in RPGs. For my part there are things that don’t interest me (board games, horror, zombies… I could go on), but there’s almost nothing in the way of RPGs I wouldn’t be willing to play if a friend really wanted to run it. And yet, if you propose any slight deviation from the books and (standard) dice formula you’ll get a chorus of naysayers. But on the other hand I’ve realized that there are a lot of potential design elements that are uncommon in RPGs in part because they’re difficult to use well. I think part of why resource-based diceless games are rare (for example) is that they only really work when you depart at least somewhat from the traditional paradigm of rolling for success and failure. An RPG that’s totally ordinary except for having players spend points instead of rolling dice for action checks is creating a bunch of perverse incentives and substantially changing the basic flow of things in an awkward way. On the other hand Golden Sky Stories works as a resource based game mainly because the tone of it is so non-competitive.

When all is said and done my desire to mess around with the medium is driven not so much by a desire to find a blue ocean strategy that’ll be a giant success or something, but rather the tantalizing creative challenges. I’ve lost some sleep over ideas for the Raspberry Heaven app, in part because there are so many things I can do differently from an analog RPG that I find just fascinating. I’ve also just started reading up a bit on interface design and such for mobile apps, and given that these days I rarely have my iPhone more than a few feet away from me for any length of time, taking a closer look at this thing that’s so ubiquitous in my everyday life would be really interesting even if I weren’t looking to design an app. I’m hoping that if I can get the Raspberry Heaven app off the ground it’ll at the very least merit making more attempts at this newish kind of game.

At this point 2012 is looking to be a really exciting year of making stuff happen. It’s hard to say what stuff specifically, though I sure has hell want Golden Sky Stories to be out the door and into people’s hands.

[1]On the other hand any discussions of sexism anywhere near the context of gaming seems all but guaranteed to produce posts that are maddening or just depressing depending on how tired I am.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while and finally got around to putting together. This is an mp3 you can use to play Monday Afternoon Blues, a role-playing poem I did a while back inspired by Stoke-Birmingham 0-0 (only with an anime convention spin because me and my friends know nothing about soccer). This new version consists of an audio introduction, 15 minutes of ambient airport sounds (thanks to Freesound.org), and an announcement that’s your cue to end the game. I’ve also included a set of character cards you can print out to make it a little easier to keep track of who’s who.

Monday Afternoon Blues Audio Edition (mp3)
Character Cards (PDF)

This file uses the AtlantaAirportAmbient.mp3 by jm Creative Commons audio sample.

In any case, the other day we tried to play Mansions of Madness, an Arkham Horror derivative from Fantasy Flight Games. We actually didn’t get that far, in part because my friend who owns the game hadn’t actually even opened the box yet, and it seems to be the kind of game where you need to read the rules beforehand. What really struck me about it though, which was something that was also true of Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition, was that in some ways the very high production values of the game worked against it. Fantasy Flight apparently loves to have games with numerous components of various kinds, especially in that thick, colorful card stock you have to punch out before you play the game. Even more so than with Warhammer, this is a game that really would’ve benefited from dropping at least some of the tokens in favor of a more RPG style way of tracking things. For example, each character has separate skill cards, a character card, item cards, and can accumulate various tokens that can represent damage and madness. The Keeper has threat tokens, time tokens, a set of threat cards, three combat decks, and I think several other things that we didn’t actually get around to even using in the game. Looking at all that stuff, I can’t help but think that you could easily halve the number of components the game involves, which would in turn speed up play simply by reducing the need to sift through all the components to find the thing you need. On top of that, at least for Mansions of Madness, the designers seem to have been strangely reticent to label any given component according to its function. It would have been nice for example if the item cards had said “Item” on their backs, not to mention if the many, many kinds of tokens had given some indication as to what they are beyond a colorful picture.

This is really interesting to me because for a while I’ve wanted to explore how RPGs can use different kinds of components in different ways, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there could be a point at which components become a burden. I’m not familiar enough with the medium of board games to know how much of this is a board game thing and how much is a Fantasy Flight thing, especially given that I even more seldom let myself get dragged into playing the more elaborate board games. However, looking at Mansions of Madness, a game with absolutely amazing production values and an $80 price tag, it’s weird to me that design-wise it falls behind some much cheaper RPGs in certain ways. My friend Grant owns several titles from Fantasy Flight, but where we’ve played them he’s inevitably wound up griping about the poor organization of the rulebook. I feel like board game players put up with things that RPG players would be quick to brand as heresy, and I’m not sure what that says about either group. Mansions of Madness has apparently gotten favorable reviews and even won a Golden Geek award (for best thematic board game), whereas Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition was massively reviled online solely on the basis of news of how it would use certain board game components and not be exactly like prior editions. Of course, to the extent that I would advocate using board game components and techniques in RPGs, I would not advocate using entirely separate categories of components for things that could much more easily be tracked on paper in the manner of a traditional RPG (the fatigue tokens in Warhammer being a very prominent example).

Of course, considering where I am as a designer (and to a lesser extent where RPGs are in general), making a game with so many components that it costs $80 isn’t really a serious consideration no matter what. I do kind of wish that RPGs could get away with that kind of thing more (look at just how much people freaked out over the price tag of WFRP3e), but then the $75 price tag is the main reason I don’t own a copy of FreeMarket. On the other hand, I do wish that people who play RPGs (or at least people who post about them online) didn’t come off as being so over-the-top purists about the kinds of materials that games can use. People freak out about things like the possibility of losing components from an RPG in a way that they just don’t seem to about board games. This is especially weird to me given that tabletop gaming in general has such a DIY streak that you would think that people would be quite willing and able to overcome any limitations imposed by materials on their own. Certainly people have no problem using just about anything imaginable as miniatures for D&D, and Wizards of the Coast probably ought to be taking a hint from all the fan made expansion for the D&D board games.

All of which has me much more inspired to work on the project for real even though I have way too many projects going on. (And as a consequence I’m writing this blog post of about 1400 words and throwing it out onto the internet, cuz that’s how I roll.) I initially had lots of ideas about what to do in terms of the format, but was totally drawing a blank about the subject matter of a game. When I sat down and brainstormed some ideas, Raspberry Heaven jumped to the top of the list. If you haven’t been following this blog, like, forever, it’s a game I’ve been failing to design for years now, inspired by slice of life schoolgirl anime like Azumanga Daioh and Hidamari Sketch. (And it’s one of the reasons I have such a ginormous collection of 4-koma manga.) Twice I built a complete game and decided that it was completely wrong, though for different reasons each time. It’s probably not the most marketable possible RPG app subject matter,[2] but it’s what excites me to the point where ideas for how to make it work are making it hard to sleep, so it’s where I want to be creatively at least.

The game will have a cast of pre-made characters, which aim to be very distinct and iconic in their personalities and looks. I’m thinking 5 or 6 schoolgirls, though I may make them American instead of Japanese for more accessibility and such. My current list of archetypes goes tsundere, space cadet, jock, beauty (I’m thinking of Miyuki from Lucky Star and maybe Hiro from Hidamari Sketch), quiet girl (something like Tooru from A Channel), and spazzy fangirl. The game would have a little “encyclopedia” thing with brief, digestible info about the characters and such that you can bring up at any time, and if you have the app but you’re not the one running the main game you can take advantage of the encyclopedia should you get lost.

When you start playing, each player picks a character and enters their own name for future reference (so if Mike is playing Rose[3], Mike’s name will show up next to her icon to help you remember). If you’re not sure what to pick there’ll be a Random button to let the game pick randomly for you, which will be a thing through most of the choices the game presents. When that’s done, you do the setup for the episode, picking out or randomly determining the general situation you’ll be dealing with. The app could also use the phone’s calendar and weather report to help decide, suggesting nearby holidays as well as characters’ birthdays and such.

The basic structure of the game I’m envisioning is kind of like Fiasco, where players take turns framing scenes in which you mainly do freeform role-play. The game suggests scene elements based on the episode setup, the characters, and what elements have been in prior scenes. I’m thinking it would be neat to have something or other that the scene framer could trigger once per scene or some such, though I don’t yet have any idea what that would be. At the end of a scene you pass the phone on to the next person (determined by volunteer or at random, and someone who hasn’t gone in the current round of scenes) and they evaluate your scene’s outcome for your character. They do this by moving around a couple of sliders (that say between things like “Fun” and “Annoying”) that the game puts in semi-randomly based on the scene’s subject matter and the character.

I’m thinking a standard Raspberry Heaven session would consist of 4 acts, with each player doing one brief scene in the first three acts, and then the aftermath is the third act. That may be too much, and I may take advantage of software and behind the scene calculations to smooth out how you apportion scene framing and evaluations (and perhaps have the app ask for additional evaluations where necessary). That way it can do a much better job of scaling the experience to the amount of time you actually have to play, which is kind of awesome when I think about it. In the final evaluation the game will take the scene evaluations and put them together, with each character having different evaluations weighted differently depending on their personalities, and then you do a short conclusion. I’d like to give the game something to help encourage multi-session play too, but right now I’m not sure how to go about it. Apps can store new data of course, but I worry about how to go about giving players the ability to satisfactorily back up/recreate said data.

The big question is how to go about designing, prototyping, and testing the game from here, since the software aspect invokes new complications I have little to no experience with. I have two friends who are programmers, but neither of them has any experience making mobile apps, and neither of them currently has a Mac for that matter.[4]. I’m probably going to have to get a very simple prototype done as a basic Windows program so I can test it to make sure the actual game design is sound. From there we have the issues of interface design and artwork. I’ll want to have artwork of the characters for a splash screen, for character profiles, and icons to use liberally to keep the images of the characters in the players’ minds. As for the interface design, I happen to know a great graphic designer in Clay Gardner, but I think I’ll have to read up on the subject all the same.

What’s really interesting to me about all this is how easy it is to think of things where letting a computer handle things lets the game be complicated behind the scenes in ways that would be difficult to handle elegantly using paper, dice, and human brains. I’ve got all these ideas for stuff based on random numbers (which always wouldn’t come from number ranges that fit into neat die types), big tables of story elements, dynamically adjusting probabilities, and so on less than 24 hours after seriously starting brainstorming for this project. That’s partly because the period of my life when I was trying (and miserably failing) to learn programming and the more recent time when I’ve started to kinda sorta understand game design have no overlap whatsoever. It presents a whole new set of freedoms and limitations, which I find just fascinating.

[1]This is especially true of the “Stop. Making. Games.” post, though I would agree with a milder version along the lines of “Stop making games that have already been made many times over.”

[2]“He also likes anime. A lot. A very, very lot.” –Gau (Guilty as charged.) On the other hand once the app is done it should be fairly easy to adapt the same framework to other subject matter. I’d like to do something more in the style of an American sitcom (one of the more clever ones like How I Met Your Mother or Community that is), and something with a very strong genre fiction element of some kind. I’ve been wanting to do something about the everyday lives of students at a magic school or magic shop for a while now, for example. OTOH I do want to try designing an RPG app with some kind of combat involved.

[3]I have a character I’ve been wanting to use in something for ages named Rose Valentine, a brave and good-natured heroine type character (who happens to have four older brothers who all but live in a karate dojo). Not sure if she’ll actually make it into this game though. Were you thinking of Rose Lalonde from Homestuck? A Homestuck-ish reality-bending pixel art thing is on my list of other possible RPG app ideas.

[4]I do want to do an Android version (though I don’t have any access to an Android phone at the moment), and possibly some kind of web app. Where we’d actually start will heavily depend on what’s most feasible.

The stars of Golden Sky Stories are henge, animals with a bit of magical power that lets them take human form and do a few other nifty things. They are animals by default, and staying in human form takes a little effort. On the other hand, they can use human speech even while in animal form, though this does carry the risk of scaring humans away. Each henge has only one human form (though raccoon dogs can also copy specific people they know), which will appear between 8 and 18 years old. The artwork in the book shows them with their ears and tails showing (or wings in Sarah’s case); they can hide these to look completely human, but it takes more effort. The book will introduce you to six representative henge, though of course in the game you can make your character quite different.

Suzune Hachiman is a fox henge. Although she looks like a young girl, she’s actually over 300 years old, and maybe a bit stiff and prideful in her age. Despite looking like young girl, she dresses in a formal kimono and talks like a stuffy old woman. Of the henge, foxes are the closest to local gods, and there’s a shrine to Suzune in town that provides her with offerings of food and money. She has many magical powers, and is well acquainted with the local gods around town.

Riko is a raccoon dog henge. Raccoon dogs (also known as tanuki) are a species of canines found in some parts of Asia, and like the raccoon dogs of myth, Riko can transform herself into all sorts of things. She can become a copy of someone she knows, or turn into a giant monster or an object. She’s a bit of a klutz too, though she has a knack for using her clumsiness to lighten the mood. Riko is fairly young, but raccoon dog henge can life for a century or more.

Kuromu is a cat henge, and a stray black cat. She doesn’t mind when people give her food, but she prefers to just do whatever she wants. Japan has lots of myths about cats turning into monsters, and Kuromu is not a fan of them. Cat henge aren’t monsters, just clever, sleek, and all-around awesome animals. They do however have many powers that let them move about unseen, and they have a unique ability to look into someone’s heart and see what they’re thinking.

Koro is a dog henge. She’s actually someone’s pet, and to her the collar she wears is a treasured reminder of someone she loves. She loves to play and make friends, and she can be very protective of those she cares about. Dog henge have powers that let them protect, reassure, and comfort people around them. For Koro this is a natural fit, since she’s thoroughly good-natured and earnest. She also has plenty of dog foibles, including a tendency to chase her own tail. She’s sure she’ll catch it some day though.

Amami is a rabbit henge. Despite being so young, she’s already become very concerned about her appearance, and puts a lot of effort into making sure she’s dressed fashionably. Like most rabbit henge, she just hates being alone, so she’s constantly pestering people to play and spend time with her. Rabbit henge are good at drawing others to them, and they have a few magical powers that might come from the rabbit in the moon. A rabbit can make mochi to give as gifts, and every once in a while she can call upon the light of the moon to let people become animals and vice versa.

Sarah is a bird henge, a yellow canary. Birds spend much of their lives in the sky, hearing the songs of the wind, and the world of the ground is strange to them. Sarah sometimes seems barely aware of the world around her, but this is because she can hear the wind and everything it whispers. Her powers let her fly and hear the wind, and even give wings to someone else. Like a lot of birds, she has keen eyes but also has a hard time seeing at night (which by the way is an optional weakness that I don’t recommend if your game takes place at night).

A Note on Name Origins
In Japanese Riko is written phonetically (リコ), but it’s derived from taking an alternate reading of the character for tanuki (狸) and adding the character for child (子; commonly used in female names). The Kuro in Kuromu means “black,” and “koro” can mean “pebble.” Sarah’s name was written as Sera (セラ) in Japanese because Kamiya chose the name based on the Serra Angel card in Magic: The Gathering.

Dungeon World now has an iOS app, which is basically an enhanced e-book. It includes several reference features, plus audio commentary, and Sage is planning to add more functionality over time. Which is all really neat (especially since Sage is planning to make the details of how he put the together available for free), but I think barely scratching the surface.

There are two GameCube games that did really interesting things in terms of their interactions with the players. The GameCube version of WarioWare has a multiplayer mode called “Listen to the Doctor,” where a doctor character tells you to do something (sing a song, touch your nose, etc.) while playing one of the micro-games. Afterward the other players can tap A to “applaud” depending on how well they think you did. That shows that a video game can still have a social, human element. Pac-Man Vs. is one of the very few games that made effective use of the Game Boy Advance link cable. One player plays Pac-Man, while the other players are all ghosts. The ghost players share the TV, which shows only the areas of the maze immediately around each ghost. The Pac-Man player holds the GBA, and the screen on it give them a private view of the entire maze. When a ghost catches Pac-Man, the players of that ghost and Pac-Man trade controllers, and the new player gets to be Pac-Man. It would be a bit much to expect every player to have a GBA and link cable, so having it be a thing you pass around as a reward for good gameplay turn having only a single GBA into a strength.

Suppose we have an RPG in the form of an iPhone app[1]. I have two gaming groups, and at best half of each group has iOS devices, and no game no matter how awesome is going to convince the ones without to pony up for an iPhone, even assuming they could afford it in the first place.[2] So the first thing we do is be sure to make it so that you only need one iOS device, and have it either rest with one player who takes up a particular role, or make it part of the game that you pass the device around. (Maybe give the app some kind of “reference mode” or something for if a player has an extra device and wants to use it.) Since the screen is relatively small and not good for doing any great amount of reading, we keep the amount of text relatively small and in digestible chunks. This points to a relatively simple story game type thing, and admittedly the idea crystallized in my head after listening to the Actual People, Actual Play podcast on Ron Edwards’ game It Was a Mutual Decision, which sounds like it’s a powerful experience but on-rails structurally.

Some of the things such an app could do include:

• Take input from players in any number of ways. One obvious thing would be to let a player enter a character name, and then the game can seamlessly put it into the text for the duration of play.
• Reveal or conceal things to/from different players at different times, possibly including things input by various players.
• Do random number generation electronically (and possibly behind the scenes), presenting players with just the results. These could come from an extensive table of random elements so that the players only need to worry about what’s been generated for this instance of play.
• Make sounds and/or pictures a part of the experience.
• Integrate any number of “analog” things into the experience, in addition to role-playing of course. In some ways it would be better to make it so you just need the app and some friends, but equally you could put in other elements, whether traditional RPG trappings (dice, paper character sheets) or totally off the wall stuff (Jenga!).
• Likewise, smartphones have plenty of stuff like GPS, motion sensors, cameras, internet access, vibration, etc. that a game could leverage in various ways.
• Provide players with built-in tools to tinker with the experience in various ways. Have settings that tweak numbers for pacing mechanics, if the game has something analogous to Fiasco playsets have a way to submit and download new ones, that kind of thing.
• Let players just peel back the game’s facade and fix stuff if things are going wrong. Change numbers during play, force the game to skip to Act 3, etc.
• Include liner notes and other reference material available in hotlinks.
• Let players save the game’s current state to be resumed later.
• Where multiple devices are available, they could link up via the internet or Bluetooth.

[1]An Android app would be fine too (especially since Android is apparently gaining a ton of market share), or a web app or whatever, but I happen to own an iPhone so that’s what I’ll use as an example.

[2]It would be nifty to have something where, say, you do tactical battles a la D&D4e and everyone has their own device for it, but it’s not gonna happen.

Star Line Publishing is a joint publishing venture between me and my longtime friend Mike Stevens (with a few other people lending a hand), and I am very, very happy to announce that Star Line Publishing’s first big release will Golden Sky Stories, an English version of Yuuyake Koyake, a tabletop role-playing game by Ryo Kamiya, the designer of Maid: The Role-Playing Game.

Golden Sky Stories is a heartwarming role-playing game. Players take on the role of henge (pronounced “hen-gay,” like a chicken that’s happy, not a Celtic monument), animals with just a little bit of magical power, including the ability to temporarily take on human form. They live in a little town in rural Japan, where they help ordinary people solve problems and become friends. This is not a game that will replace all of your other games, but it’s a game you can turn to as a change of pace, to go somewhere warm and safe. It is a diceless, resource-based game, and it’s meant for game sessions to last between 45 minutes and two hours.

For Maid RPG we crammed three books worth of material into one volume, but for GSS we’re starting with a thorough and careful translation of the 120-page core rulebook. It introduces the base rules of the game, lets you play as six different kinds of henge (foxes, raccoon dogs, cats, dogs, rabbits, and birds), and includes a replay, NPCs with story hooks, two scenarios, and a guide to Hitotsuna Town. We’re aiming for a very faithful translation, and the only notable change will be the addition of several pages of cultural notes. The original Japanese version has three very excellent supplements (plus a doujin supplement for, of all things, Touhou), but the main book is wonderfully complete by itself. We very much want to put out the other material, to tell the full story of Hitotsuna Town and give you many other new kinds of characters to play and meet, but one thing at a time.

For various reasons it’s taken some considerable time to sort everything out enough to go public, so as of this announcement we’ve already been working hard on this project for some time. We aren’t yet ready to set a firm release date, but things are actually pretty far along. The actual translation and editing are already done, and our layout guy (Clay Gardner, creator of OVA) has already gotten started. We expect the book to be a little over 120 pages, and it will feature fantastic art by Ike, who has since gone on to find success with an excellent manga called Nekomusume Michikusa Nikki (Catgirl’s Wayside Grass Diary).

As with Maid RPG, I’ll be posting up previews with tantalizing details about the game and its workings leading up to the actual release. I’ll be writing about the setting, the game’s workings, and what you can expect when we do finally release the supplements in English.

If you would like to help make Golden Sky Stories a reality, we’re planning to do a Kickstarter to raise money for the first print run. We believe this is a wonderfully unique game, and we hope you’ll help us spread the word!

Retailers, distributors, and anyone else interested in this game are welcome to contact us at info@starlinepublishing.com.