Anime Games I Want

Another issue I had largely dismissed as irrelevant until a friend pointed it out to me is that some people are put off by anime. Titles like Avatar are hurt as well as helped by the label. That’s another example of how it’s become a loaded word for some people. Some people who like Exalted like it because of its anime inspirations, others like it despite them and play up the Greek myth side more, and still others dismiss it entirely because of the anime slant. (And amusingly, Andy has mentioned that the Japanese publisher of WoD–Atelier Third–found Exalted just too overwrought for Japan).

My ideal model for drawing inspiration from anime and manga would be Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic, Scott Pilgrim. There are a lot of elements that are reminiscent of manga, but if he was inspired by Japanese comics, he’s fully metabolized them and he’s doing what he wants to do with them. No imitation, self-consciousness, just a kickass comic. (Also, Scott Pilgrim needs an RPG).

Anyway, this time around I’m going to post my thoughts on what things in anime I think would make for really neat RPGs. (Though there are some more that I’m going to save for future installments of “Role-Play This!”).

• Horror Heroes: While Japan does have a tradition of scary-as-hell horror stories, there’s also a genre of anime about good guys fighting the to protect us from the supernatural. These range from deadpan titles like Blood+ to the wackiness of Phantom Quest Corp.
• Miyazaki: Hayao Miyazaki’s animated movies are in many ways unlike mainstream anime–deliberately so–and they have captivated audiences of all ages. I’d love to see one or more games try to capture some of Studio Ghibli’s modern fairy tale feel. Yuuyake Koyake is probably the RPG that comes closest.
• Postnuclear: In Japan the atomic bombings of 1945 have been so politicized that no one has really made any effort to confront those issues directly in art. Instead, anime series like Yamato and Evangelion express the repressed feelings and urges while studiously avoiding real-world blame. Bliss Stage’s scenario starts with some of the same end of humanity nihilism, but I’d like to see a game that tackles these issues more directly.
• Sekai-kei: Sekai-kei is a genre that focuses on a relationship between two young people, juxtaposed with the end of the world. Jake Richmond’s The Year We All Died is very much based on Saishuu Heiki Kanojo, but The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Voices of a Distant Star, Iriya no Sora UFO no Natsu, and Evangelion are all considered part of the genre.
• Otaku: Dramacon, Akihabara@DEEP, Aoi House, Genshiken, and Megatokyo all show different ways that stories about obsessed fans can make for interesting characters. I want to see a game with the otaku troubleshooter agency angle of Akihabara@DEEP, and the zany, exaggerated, and deep setting sensibilities of Megatokyo.
• Sci-Fi Western: I want to see a totally over-the-top Western with sci-fi elements a la Trigun, and maybe some fantasy gun magic like in Kurohime.
• Shinigami: At some point someone needs to write a pretentious essay analyzing the Japanese fascination with shinigami, or “death gods.” In the meantime, I want to see an RPG that draws on stuff like Bleach, Death Note, Soul Eater, Shinigami’s Ballad, and so on.
• Super Robots: This is the other end of giant robots: cheesy, cinematic, and bold. The robot is an extension of the hero’s blazing heart. Gurren Lagann is the most recent example of the genre to make a splash.

What about you?

In Other News
The layout of Maid RPG has begun. I got to see a sample today. It’s directly based on the original Japanese sourcebooks, and I really like how it looks so far. Andy’s been plugging away at the editing too, so while there will be a lot of rushing around on everyone’s parts, it looks like things are on track. Also, I’ve been poking at my own Maid RPG material (tentatively titled “Maid RPG 120%”), mainly putting together a table of scenario seeds covering old west, reality shows, superheroes, and more.

I’ve started playing with WordPress’ “pages” feature. There are now pages for “About Me” and “My Games.” I didn’t realize I had SIXTEEN different games in various stages of design (from a mere idea to a more or less final draft). Sigh.

Thoughts on Anime RPGs

Over the past few days I’ve been working more on Zero Breakers (the tentative title for my fighting shonen manga RPG), though it’s mostly been filling in details I’d already thought of, and occasionally modifying parts to fit together better, so there isn’t a whole lot to post about. Though I did realize that part of what I’m doing with the game is taking stuff I do at the gaming table naturally and codifying it into rules.

I’m sorely tempted to write a lengthy essay on anime RPGs. The main thing is that for various reasons–among them that some people seem to set ridiculously high standards of authenticity–it seems like anime is not treated as just another medium that RPG designers can draw as much or as little inspiration as they want to, when it really should be. It comes back to that thing about how when people use a strict definition of “anime” or “manga” to exclude stuff like Avatar and Dramacon, they’re completely missing out on (1) the quality of the work, and (2) the fact that it does in fact have a lot of what makes the Japanese stuff appealing to people in the first place.

Of course, that’s just my impression from what I see on internet forums, which may or may not have anything to do with reality. The point is that we have insane amounts of anime (and other otaku media) available to us, and more and better techniques of RPG design than ever before, so there are vast stores of possible inspiration that remain untapped. I think this is the real reason why most of my RPG design projects wind up being about Japanese stuff; if people were designing as many games inspired by anime as they did from movies, novels, and comics, half the ideas I have would already have been done.

Here’s a list of every English-language anime-related RPG I know. The thing I notice about them is that there are (1) lots of mecha games, (2) lots of universal systems, and (3) lots of licensed games, and very few of these don’t fit into at least one of those three categories.

• Teenagers From Outer Space (a.k.a. the stealth Urusei Yatsura RPG)
• Mekton
• Project A-ko (Dream Pod 9 did a licensed A-ko RPG)
• Heavy Gear
• Jovian Chronicles
• Bubblegum Crisis (licensed game by R. Talsorian)
• Armored Trooper Votoms (licensed game by R. Talsorian)
• Tinker’s Damn (an obscure attempt at a universal anime RPG)
• BESM
• Licensed Tri-Stat RPGs include Sailor Moon, Demon City Shinjuku, Dominion Tank Police, Tenchi Muyo!, El Hazard, plus lots and lots of Fan Guides.
• Dragon Ball Z (licensed RPG by R. Talsorian)
• HeartQuest, a shoujo manga RPG, powered by Fudge.
• OVA (A nifty game that IMO does what BESM 1e wanted to do. Unfortunately OVA seems to be kind of floundering right now in terms of follow-up support or even distribution)
• RandomAnime
• Panty Explosion (Sort of; it veers more towards the Japanese live action side of things)
• Bliss Stage

At this point I don’t think anyone really believes that R. Talsorian is ever going to get the Gundam Senki RPG out in English. On the other hand, aside from all of the stuff I’m working on (or failing to work on, as the case may be), there are a couple of games in development that sound really interesting:

I just found out that Matthew Gandy is working on a game called Seiyuu, which as he explains it is something like anime’s answer to Prime Time Adventures.

Christian Griffen’s Anima Prime now has its own site and there’s a PDF of the beta version. I’ll have to read it when I have time, but it is a full 165 pages.

4chan is a place I don’t really recommend you visit, but it does have a “traditional gaming” board, which has produced some interesting projects. One of these is Trigger Discipline (I’ve found some blog posts about it here)/ The idea is that it’s a variant of There Is No Spoon about some kind of over the top giant robot anime, and you have to take the anime studio’s budget for the project into consideration as you do things. There’s also some other project called “necrololis.”

Maid RPG: Update 4

I’ve finished the last of the scenarios, which means the base translation (which will need plenty of editing) is done at long last. The last one I did was “Tales of Suspense,” though I can’t really explain what it’s about without spoilers. Regardless, the scenario file–about 48,000 words, 117 pages in a basic MS Word format–is off to Andy for editing.

Translating
One of the things that can be really aggravating about translating from Japanese to English is the use of the passive voice. In English you’re not supposed to use the passive voice because it sounds weak and weaselly. In Japanese, sentences often leave the subject implied, so effectively using the passive voice actually makes you clearer. In Japanese RPGs, this lets designers talk about the PCs or whatever without having to start every other sentence with “a character who” or “if the PCs.” But it also means that the translator (that’s me) gets to play detective trying to figure out what the subject of a sentence actually is, and then do a sort of written Rubik’s cube exercise to turn it into a decent English sentence. As much as I love Japanese, one of these days I want to learn and start translating, say, Spanish, so I don’t have to deal with this kind of thing.

Scenarios
I know I’ve posted about the scenarios already, but they both show what’s different about the game itself and in many cases show a novel approach to scenarios/adventures in general.

There are several scenarios that have a very tight structure. Very often these involve the PCs working towards some kind of goal (ranging from throwing a birthday party to conquering the world, depending on the particular scenario), and it very carefully delineates what they can do to work towards it, and how much. These scenarios allow for more freedom than you might think–especially for PCs who are willing to use the seduction rules to get what they want–but certainly not as much as you’d ordinarily expect. The furthest extreme is “Maidenrangers of Love and Justice!” which actually bills itself as a “Maid Board Game,” where you build up a 4×4 grid of playing cards (representing both rooms and random events that occur in them) for the PCs to move around in.

Owing no doubt to the game’s basic nature, there are a lot of scenarios that deal with social situations of one kind or another. The game still has plenty of room for the action-adventure stuff that’s more typical of RPGs (albeit with a spin that only Maid RPG can give), but there are also scenarios about competing to marry the Master, becoming friends with a ghost girl, helping little kids have a place to play, and so on.

There are also very few scenarios that you could use in an ongoing campaign without major retooling, though there are some that give advice for launching into sequels (”Miko RPG!” even advocates developing a new game), and in one case, there is a sequel provided (”Be Our Demon King!” is followed by “Rise of the Demon King”). Although there are some major Western RPGs available in translation in Japan (notably D&D, WoD, and GURPS), my experience with Japanese-made games is that they tend to focus on short-term play rather than long campaigns. In F.E.A.R.’s Alshard ff, “Campaign Play” is actually listed in a sidebar rather than being part of the actual section on styles of play. In Maid RPG you can store up Favor to raise your maid’s attributes (it’s one of the more expensive things to do with Favor), but the game’s text doesn’t really address the idea of running a campaign at all.

Maid RPG scenarios often assume a particular master, or at least a general type of Master (e.g., a young Master who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes), and won’t really work without him. On the other hand, there are also a lot of scenarios that leave at least some of the prep work up to the GM. This could be flexibility or laziness depending on how you choose to look at it, but there are scenarios where the fine details of the Master and/or mansion are left up to the GM to create.

There are still some scenarios that are fairly traditional (like “Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden”), and the game certainly holds up just fine with a traditional play style, or with no scenario at all.

Promotional Stuff
Wayne from Anime Expo’s tabletop gaming department has confirmed that Maid RPG is on the schedule for AX, Saturday at 10 a.m. Hope to see… someone there!

Random Thought
I’m sorely tempted to write a Maid RPG scenario to enter into Fight On! magazine’s contest. The rules say that entries have to make use of Otherworld Miniatures‘ products in some way, but otherwise they can be for pretty much any game. And Maid RPG has already gone to weirder places than involving Pig-Faced Orcs. The due date for entries in July 20th though, so whether or not I can even write something up depends heavily on what’s going on with work and whatnot.

Maid RPG Update 3

There are a lot of people who’ve helped make this project possible. Andy Kitkowski is the most obvious and important, since he’s doing pretty much all of the business side of things (me being so helpless and useless with that stuff). Ryo Kamiya not only designed the game, but has been really awesome about answering my questions. My good friend Mike S. has been evangelizing the game, and offering help in the form of editing and suggestions.

One thing that deserves special mention at this point is my Eee PC. I bought a green 2G Surf a few months ago at Micro Center (the only place in town that actually had them in stock, and just the color I wanted too). It has let me work on Maid RPG on trains and buses, at friends’ houses and at school, and (while the battery lasted) during yesterday’s power outage, sitting on the front porch as the sun set. It runs on a variation of Xandros Linux, and I’ve been typing stuff up in OpenOffice Writer and using Gjiten (which I’m finding to be a brilliant little program) to look things up. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever owned anything that was quite that much of a conversation starter. While I was using it at a local Starbucks (to work on Maid RPG, naturally), not less than six people asked me about it in the space of an hour. (And one guy jokingly asked if it was made by Hasbro) .

Right now I have about 30 pages of scenarios to translate, which comes out to six scenarios total. Just this morning I finally finished translating the very last scenario in the very last book, “Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden.” It’s epic, both in terms of its story and its size (12 pages, which is about 3 times the length of a typical Maid RPG scenario), and it takes the tropes established in the game and renders them on a worldwide scale.

In the year 20XX the “Maid Hazard,” a mental waveform sent through the internet blanketed the world, and caused a forced an evolutionary leap in a significant portion of the population. Countless people, men and women, young and old, became young, beautiful Maids. The Maids possessed superhuman abilities, but needed Favor from normal humans (Masters) to function. That’s just the start of the 50 years of the A.M. (After Maid) calendar covered in the back story. By the time the scenario actually begins, it’s the year 50 A.M., and the few surviving Masters are desperately seeking a way to stop the machinations of the tyrannical Maid Empire, lead by the Final Maid, Eve. The PCs are “Alternative Maids,” Masters who don special “Alternative Maid Suits” to gain the powers of Maids without falling under the Final Maid’s influence.

Anyone who knows the kind of fiction I write can tell you, this is the kind of awesomely screwed up thing I would think of. I seriously want to put together a prequel scenario about people enduring the Maid Hazard and its aftermath.

Lastly, in response to some questions asked, Andy has posted a bit about how and where we’ll be selling Maid RPG in the comments of Update 1.

Maid RPG: Update 2

Progress Report
At this point I have eight scenarios left to translate, and after that the project is pretty much in other people’s hands until GenCon. Ideally I need to get this done within two weeks or so, which means there’s something of a silver lining to the fact that my hours are becoming spotty to nonexistent for me crappy day job. After going through enough text to fill a largish novel, I’ll be entirely too glad to be done with this project.

That’s partly because it means I’ll have time to work on my own RPG projects, and partly because I’m looking forward to actually being able to play Maid RPG again, and enjoy all this material I’ve translated. I’m already picking out some scenarios and such to run with my friends. For that matter, every time I’m stuck away from my computer, I keep thinking up more and more original material for the game. I’m not sure I want to go to the point of actually putting together a book though. It’s possible, but it’s a long way off too.

Butler RPG
Anyway. There was a thread about Maid RPG on 4chan’s /tg/ board (if you don’t know what that is, you should probably stay away). There seem to be a fair number of people who are into butlers (and hey, they do have a few butler cafes in Japan), so I might as well tell you about the butler rules. Butlers are an optional character type, and as group of PCs can only have one butler. The butler has much higher attributes, but (1) automatically loses opposed rolls against the Master or maids, (2) must spend Favor to remove Stress, and (3) cannot spend Favor on Random Events. The “Maids at the End of the World” replay features a butler character, and demonstrates how although the rules theoretically limit how much they can cause chaos and such, they can still be part of the total wackiness of the game.

Seduction (Or, How To Cause Trouble)
The first supplement of the Japanese version is called “Koi Suru Maid RPG” (Maid RPG In Love). The Seduction rules are one of the main reasons it’s called that. These let characters make rolls to emotionally dominate others. If you seduce someone you can give them orders, but they can gain Favor and remove Stress through romantic activities with you. And that doesn’t prevent them from seducing you back. Calling “Seduction” was kind of a compromise. The Japanese word used is closer to “enticement,” but where it’s heavily used in some scenarios it can be bent into forming an emotional attachment in general. Based on the replays, it’s the kind of thing that would make some people uncomfortable, but it can also make life a heck of a lot more interesting.

Demo Games
I’m running two registered Maid RPG events at GenCon Indy 2008, one on Thursday (which still has 3 slots open!) and one on Saturday (all full). I and a couple of my friends who will be coming plan on running some more sessions at Games On Demand (something you should check out anyway if you’re attending). I’m also in the process of signing up to run a session at Anime Expo 2008, and if there’s interest I’ll be running a session or two at FanimeCon’s open gaming area. If you’re attending any of those, let me know if you want to play. :3

(Also, my friend Mike is planning to run it at KublaCon).

Maid RPG: Update 1

This is where I have to go all-out to get the translation of Maid RPG done in time, but I’m pretty confident I can pull it off, maybe even with time to spare. The last post on the game generated a heck of a lot of traffic, without me really trying to get it linked anywhere myself. This is all pretty exciting, especially when I look back at just how much I’ve now translated. Doing all three of the original Japanese books doesn’t look nearly so insurmountable anymore. In any case, I’m going to be posting about different aspects of the game leading up to its release.

Scenarios
You seldom see adventure scenarios in Western RPGs, so I have a hard time making a properly informed comparison, but I have noticed that Japanese RPGs are more likely to include at least one or two scenarios in a core rulebook, and Maid RPG adds a total of 15 in its two supplements. Compared to the very few I have read (like Gold Rush Games’ incredible Shiki collection for Sengoku), the scenarios I’ve translated for Maid RPG so far seem very constrained. They map out a very specific role for the maids in the story, such that you could easily make a flowchart of the events of the scenario. I suspect that in actual play it’s not quite as stifling as it sounds, but it’s definitely more constraining than your average Western gamer is used to. I would compare it to certain indie games, like The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, in that you’re forced to do certain things, but you get a heck of a lot of freedom within that context.

Regardless, there’s a huge variety of scenarios, from throwing a birthday party to battling other maids for the fate of the world. In between are a tokusatsu hero, a murder mystery, shrine maidens fending off an evil god, a marriage contest, a case of amnesia, and more.

Costumes
Of the many optional rules in the game, my favorite is definitely the Costume Change rules. Maids can spend Favor to cease being a maid, don a different outfit, and take on the role that accompanies it. Maids who change costumes lose their Maid Powers, but get some new powers related to the costume. This covers professions (doctor, secretary, scientist), fetishized outfits (school swimsuit, school uniform, nurse, shrine maiden, etc.), and anime references (plugsuit, Mobile Suit costume, tiger-striped bikini with horns, etc.)

Maid RPG Is Coming

Maid RPG is a role-playing game designed by Ryo Kamiya and published in Japan by Sunset Games. And, with some substantial help from Andy Kitkowski, I will be publishing an English translated version. We’re aiming to release it at GenCon Indy 2008, and I’ll be posting full details as we get closer to the con. Although we hadn’t really planned it that way, Maid RPG will be the first ever Japanese RPG to be released in English. However, Andy will also be releasing a demo version of Jun’ichi Inoue’s Tenra Bansho Zero.

In Maid RPG, the players take on the role of maids who serve a Master who lives in a mansion. That’s the basic setup, but what ensues is often an excuse for the most bizarre chaos imaginable. This is a game that embraces randomness. Characters have random Special Qualities, ranging from Freckles and Glasses to Stalkers and Cyborgs. During the game, characters earn points of Favor by pleasing the Master, and one of the things they can spend Favor on is causing Random Events.

The English version of Maid RPG is going to be a compilation of the core rulebook and both supplements from the original Japanese version. That means it’ll include not only the core rules, but optional rules for butlers, randomly generated masters and mansions, seduction, costume changes, and special items, plus a grand total of 17 scenarios and three replays, and more besides.

You might be tempted to think that Maid RPG is the kind of thing you’d put on the shelf and never play, but I can say from personal experience that it is a perfectly playable (if very weird) game. It has the potential to become very twisted (though you can use it for light romantic comedy too), but it’s a lot like an anime version of Toon. With everything we’ll be packing into the English version, this one book will be able to provide months and months of gaming. You can even play it “random style,” and do everything off the cuff to kill time.

We’ll be launching a Maid RPG website next month! Stay tuned for more news!

If you have any questions about the game, feel free to comment here.

3-Hit Combo!

Shatter The Wall Between Zero and Infinity!
I’ve well and truly gotten started on my fighting shonen manga RPG. I’ve tentatively titled it “Zero Breakers” (zero like “wandering the void between zero and infinity” and like Yaruki Zero Games). I’ve mostly been typing up the stuff that was already in my head and my notebook, but it’s going pretty smoothly so far. Assuming it doesn’t manage to completely come apart at the seams, I think I may be on the way to designing my dream game. And I think it’s starting to look more and more like a diceless technicolor cousin of Dogs in the Vineyard. OTOH I think it may actually turn out to be a great game for playing online (which I’ll definitely have to try once it’s ready).

And incidentally, I just found out that Christian Griffen is working on a somewhat similar game, called Anima Prime. I’ll have to find time to read through it, though from a casual skim its overall approach is a bit different from Zero Breakers (it uses dice for one thing).

Breaking Molds
Adventures of the Space Patrol has been kind of an unusual project for me in that while I have a certain look and feel in mind, and although I’ve certainly been putting all the B-movie cliches rattling around my noggin to good use, it’s not particularly based on something from another medium. I’m wondering if I haven’t been too beholden to source material in the past. AotSP has been an unusually easy and fun project to work on, though it helps that the rules are like a mashup of FATE 3.0 and Yuuyake Koyake, off the shelf components rather than all-original stuff. Of course, I get so much inspiration from outside sources that I wouldn’t dream of abandoning that approach, but I think I need to be more able and willing to come to projects from other angles. This is especially true considering that I tend to latch onto a genre and spend an inordinate amount of time (and sometimes money) immersing myself into it. The number of hours of sentai I’ve watched for Tokyo Heroes is literally well into the triple digits, for example. AotSP could easily have had me trying to absorb and imitate endless hours of Buck Rogers and Commander Cody, and frankly there’s something to be said for not having to spend that much time, however enjoyable, to get things done.

Interstellar Skulduggery!
I have, however, started reading the Lensman series. It’s basically the first space opera epic, and the earlier parts of it came out in the 30s. So far it’s rip-roaring pulpy sci-fi action with dastardly villains, square-jawed heroes, and lovely damsels in a universe of ancient aliens and sometimes literally world-shattering technology. I really want to know why it was allowed to go out of print, though on the plus side I was able to get a hold of the books for relatively cheap. There was a GURPS worldbook for it (and for the longest time I never knew what it was), but I’d love to see a treatment of it with SotC or similar some time.

Role-Play This! Paul Robertson Animations

What Is It?
Paul Robertson is an Australian artist and animator who favors pixel-based art in a distinctive manga- and video game-inspired style. In addition to a host of random pictures and animated gifs, he’s completed a number of animated short films, most recently the 15-minute epic “Kings of Power Four Billion %.” These show of his amazing talents and awesomely twisted sensibilities.

Above is the trailer for KOP4B%. Below are links to all of the full videos I could find. He’s apparently working on a compilation DVD, which I want entirely too much.

• Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006
• Kings of Power Four Billion %
• Devil Eyes
• Do The Whirlwind
• Cadbury Commercial
• The Magic Touch
• Hyper Parsnip Bitches

(And incidentally, PersonaSama also does some great stuff, God Slayer being my favorite so far).

Why’s It Awesome?
When me and my friends first saw Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006, we quickly concluded that any video game company that didn’t want to hire the creator as an art director must be goddamn stupid. Robertson works wholly with video game style sprites, but he very deliberately subverts the medium. Pirate Baby has two heroes climbing the levels of a building fighting zombies to rescue a kidnapped girl, and along the way they face things like a giant octopus clutching four nude zombie women that vomit horrible insects as a means of attack. The heroes retaliate with super attacks featuring the ghosts of dead mosquitoes, the soldiers from Predator, and Christopher Walken. Kings of Power takes this to the next level, where the final attack requires the rebirth of the New Ultimate Jesus, and then the little girl from space… I don’t want to spoil it, actually. But there’s definitely nothing quite like it.

Gaming It
The other day Filip started this thread on Story Games, asking how to role-play Devil Eyes, right in between when I had decided to do the next column about Robertson’s stuff and when I got started writing. Anyway, the way I see it, there are three ways to structure one’s fundamental approach to this:

1. Traditional RPG
Run it as a traditional RPG. The GM has to be a very strange person, capable of hurling an endless stream of strangeness at the players.

2. Collaborative RPG
The idea here is that the game serves as a structure for the entire group to throw out the most insane things they can think of. The most obvious model for this is Jared Sorenson’s octaNe, which wholly hands over narration to the players at times. (Though I’d be tempted to add “Guro” as a Style…)

On a similar note, in the aforementioned thread Johnstone suggested what to me sounds like an RPG version of 1000 Blank White Cards, where each player draws weird things on cards, which become the basis of the game. There are two artists in my gaming group, and one of them likes to draw something basic, and then pass it around the room for people to add whatever details they want. To make that approach really work I’d want to corner all of the artists I know (four in all) and coerce them into playing.

3. Meme-Rich RPG
One RPG I’ve got on the back burner is Moonsick. It’s consciously based on Superflat aesthetics, with little girls going down to a radioactive Earth and becoming horribly mutated (and sometimes mutilated) while “onii-sama” (big brother) watches. The game uses cards to establish scenes and introduce mutations, and thus introducing pre-defined memes into the fiction is at the heart of what the game’s rules do. This is the approach that’s perhaps most in sync with how a video game works, and with something like cards you can have the visual elements readily accessible to the participants (which is a big part of why I went that route with Moonsick).

In any of the above methods, there needs to be a rule for doing a final super attack where you take a bunch of the cards/pictures/elements you used before and combine them into one spectacular, climactic orgy of violence.

More On Fighty Manga

Rob’s comments on my fighting shonen manga post, coupled with this thread on S-G have me thinking more about fighty manga and RPGs in general. I think in manga especially, fights are less about combat power, or even who wins or loses per se, and more about the costs and consequences that flow out of those things. Stories, especially melodramatic shonen manga type stories, have a certain flow to them, and a game that really wants to simulate them needs to be less about hitting or missing, and more about what kinds of consequences flow out of succeeding or failing.

I have no doubt whatsoever that there are people who like game-y combat in their role-playing (I mean, D&D. Yeah.), but while running my current campaign with OVA, I’m finding that the consequences of a given conflict are the more interesting part, for me at least. If a bad guy shows up and gets offed with little trouble, he might as well not have come at all. When the ship’s AI turned on the crew, and left Aleph severely damaged, Caden with one arm, Nameli with two out of five children dread, and everyone homeless and generally shaken up, it was what will likely be one of the more memorable moments of our involvement in the hobby. Whatever the outcome, the process of rolling to hit and to dodge and figuring damage and such just doesn’t interest me all that much, especially when it holds the threat of PC death. Danger can and often does make things more interesting, but in terms of playing a game around the table, having a dead PC is more often than not one of the most boring things that can befall a player, since (as noted in Nathan Paoletta’s recent blog post) the player’s input into the game drops to zero. Conflicts with fallout have less worry about deprotagonization and the incentive of making characters more interesting and (for this genre) possibly more powerful. (Plus fighting shonen manga characters hardly ever get around to dying for whatever reason).

Although it’s tempting to conclude that in anime a hero with sufficient motivation can accomplish just about anything, at least in the fighting shonen manga mode it’s more than a character has to have his motivations properly lined up in order to use his full power, and that power is what lets him turn his passions and principles into reality. As over-the-top and melodramatic as it is, the characters in Naruto have to find ways to use guile, cleverness, and sometimes sheer boldness to have any chance against what it otherwise a superior foe. However much Naruto wants to beat Neji for Hinata’s sake, just wanting to do it really badly isn’t enough. He has to put everything on the line, risk using the power of the Kitsune, and pull off something incredible with the Kage-Bunshin no Jutusu.

This means I’m starting to really see the shape of the system I want. In a conflict you would compare power levels, and commence a back-and-forth to try to push the advantage to one side’s favor or the other. The relative power levels determines “Standing,” which can go anywhere from a deadlock to a crushing defeat/overwhelming victory. In the end, both sides have to face a possibility of some kind of fallout, which can in turn create plot complications, from simple injuries to broken swords to a lengthy quest to prepare for a rematch. I’m thinking the final difference in power levels would become a pool of points that the two sides take turns spending on complications. (So that it’s in the player’s interests to come up with big but interesting complications so the other side has less to spend).

Characters would have a Resolve rating that could be helpful or harmful if it gets too high or too low, but its influence would be small compared to actual ability (unless a fighter’s Resolve gets completely broken and he loses the will to fight). I haven’t gotten far enough to decide on whether or not to use dice, but I know that randomness won’t intrude on the core of conflicts. There might be dice rolls for, say, trying to affect the opponent’s Resolve, but even that doesn’t feel quite right to me. I’m thinking there should be some kind of currency, as it would be helpful for moderating the flow of meta-game effects and character growth.

That still leaves a lot to figure out in terms of how to structure gameplay, how characters advance (for this genre they’ve got to be able to make major jumps in power level at times), and of course how to handle things that aren’t epic conflicts. And a name for the game itself. But I do think I’ve now passed the single biggest conceptual hurdle.