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Holy poo poo I want this game even harder.
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May 18, 2012 23:24
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Oh, the wonders of chart-born characters. 
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May 19, 2012 01:05
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Rasamune posted:uhhhhhhhhh yeah I can That game sounds like a mindfuck. It sounds neat and the combat really seems interesting at least for the body part damage but the setting is just kind of weird (and the preview replay posted here really kicks it up to 11 at the very end).
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May 19, 2012 01:50
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Ahahaha. I was reading that reply and enjoying it, while wondering if there was something wrong with me based on the comments in this thread. Even as I was nearing the ending it was like "Maybe it's just because I've been thinking of the characters as these undying cyborg--" and then that's when I got to that part.  The system as described sounds pretty boring, though. Every roll is a d10 and you want to hit a 6 or better across the board? That's almost like just flipping a coin each time. (I do understand the granularity is necessary for things like figuring out which portion of an enemy's body you hit) However, the parts system and finding out entrails are being removed or your legs and such sound like a pretty cool mechanic. For undying cyborg fighting machines who go mad unless they chat with one another anyway.And Mikan, that character sounds amazing. I have to ask, is "the party" mentioned in the final line all of the player characters, or does it refer to just Cyprus and his cadre of red-shirts?
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May 19, 2012 04:53
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Potsticker posted:And Mikan, that character sounds amazing. I have to ask, is "the party" mentioned in the final line all of the player characters, or does it refer to just Cyprus and his cadre of red-shirts? The whole party. When you write up the kingdom, there's a chart of Cool Things. You roll once per player + once for the DM. The chart has neat things like Arts and Culture effects for the kingdom or diplomatic bonuses or different monster bloodlines (so you can learn skills from monsters).
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May 19, 2012 05:00
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That's pretty neat. Meikyuu Kingdom seems like a huge blast to play. Or even just roll up random characters and laugh at the crazy monsters.
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May 19, 2012 05:05
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A short primer on the Yellow Submarine RPG shop at Akihabara If you find yourself in Tokyo and want to pick up some Japanese TTRPGs (as I did for myself and Mikan), hopefully this post will be of some assistance. Yellow Submarine has several shops in Akihabara, each specialising in different hobbies e.g. one only sells cards for trading card games like Weiss Kreuz and Chaos TCG, another sells model kits, etc. So make sure you know which one you want! In this case, the shop we're looking for is on the right of this map, highlighted in red on the 7th floor. Somehow I forgot to take pictures of the building itself but it's reasonably easy to find, just off the Chuo-dori main street. The initial view as you're about to step into the shop:  The tabletop games shop also sells translated versions of popular games such as Carcasonne as seen on the left. And yes, those are Cthulhu plushies on the right.  More gaming goodness, including Games Workshop stuff at the end.  Hey, that red box looks familiar   Popular stuff. Meikyuu Kingdom   More RPG books. Notable for its absence of Sword World 2.0 and Alshard GAIA   The service counter, where they also hold the brand-new copies of books (so you can get a copy of Meikyuu Kingdom in mint condition). Handy hint: if you want to take photos of a shop in Japan, ask for permission first! Privacy laws may be different to what you're used to, and anyway it's Just Good Manners.  I was also looking for a copy of Tenra Bansho Zero but it was out of stock, being an older book. I did buy Tenra WAR which is its successor; the book is a tome of decent heft, and has a bunch of colour pages at the beginning explaining the setting before getting into the nitty-gritty.
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May 19, 2012 06:33
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Cheap Trick is a bro among bros and I still owe him for the Meikyuu Kingdom books/shipping.
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May 19, 2012 06:40
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Potsticker posted:that part.  I don't want to know any more about this game anymore.
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May 19, 2012 07:08
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So on a much lighter note, here's the first part of my overview of Arianrhod. F.E.A.R. is one of Japan's major TRPG publishers, and they're pretty prolific. Looking at their website right now I see just over 20 titles listed, and I know there are a few out of print ones besides. For a while now (well after Tenra Bansho though) they've been using minor variations on a house system, which from Alshard Gaia (a mashup of Alshard and present-day Earth) onwards they've made into an open-ish system called SRS, or "Standard RPG System." Arianrhod is one of those games, so Alshard and others are fairly similar to it. Arianrhod (named for a Celtic deity, though IIRC in the game it's the human God of Luck) is their cute fantasy game, in the style of CRPGs like Ragnarok Online and Dragon Quest. I have the old version of the 1st edition rulebook; they came out with a version with a less chibified cover, and then more recently they came out with a 2nd Edition that I haven't looked at yet.   The rulebook starts with an introductory mini-comic, the gist of which is basically "Yay adventure!" From there the introduction has an outline of the book and explains some of the very basics of RPGs, and includes the Golden Rule (a.k.a. Rule Zero). One common thread in Japanese TRPGs is that there's pretty much always a GM, and the rulebooks often play up the GM having supreme authority over the game. Character Creation Then comes the Characters chapter. It gives an outline of the ability scores, classes, and races, and then has the rules for making characters. Like most F.E.A.R. games, it has two methods of character creation: Quick Start and Construction. Quick Start means you pick an archetype and copy it onto your character sheet (or print out the PDF from their website), and Construction is more or less like a standard RPG. Let's go through the steps for Construction: First you pick your Main Class. Your options are Warrior, Acolyte (which is basically a D&D cleric), Mage, or Thief. Then you pick a Support Class. This can be one of the Main Classes (and you can double up if you like), or you can pick from Samurai, Monk, Summoner, Ranger, Alchemist, or Bard. The next step is to pick a race, and the choices are Hurin (Human), Eldernarn (Elf), Nevaf (Dward), Firbol (Hobbits, basically), Varna (which have animal features, so you can be a catgirl or whatever), and Duan (big bruiser types with horns). The ability scores are Strength, Skill, Agility, Intelligence, Perception, Will, and Luck. To get your ability scores, you start with your race's base scores. Humans have all 8s and 9s, but scores vary between 6 and 12. Varna are incredibly agile (12), while Duan are amazingly strong (12). Your main class and support class each add +1 to three different scores, and that's it. Some other F.E.A.R. games give you a handful of points to assign how you want, but in general the scores are determined first and foremost by your choices. Once you add them all up, you divide by 3 (round down) to get the number you actually add to rolls. Next comes Skills. In Japanese TRPGs "skills" almost always vary between a Feat and a Power in D&D4e terms, and F.E.A.R. likes to put them in little boxes too. For Arianrhod you pick 1 racial skill, you get the Automatic Skills of each of your classes, plus 2 skills from your main class and 1 from your support class. In the core rulebook there are 3 skills for each race and 15 for each class (including the one Automatic Skill). In this game most everything has an English (or Engrish) name written phonetically in Japanese, and some of them use somewhat obscure words (there's a Bard skill called "Busker" that lets you earn gold while in town by performing) or a little misplaced. Many (but not all) skills let you level them up by spending more skill selections on them. From there you write down your HP and MP, each of which is the sum of the values provided by your two classes (and these vary between 6 and 14), and your Fate Points (everyone gets 5 to start). Note than MP here stands for "Mental Points," which is why some martial type Skills have an MP cost. From there you get your items, and if you use the optional guild rules in the back of the book you set that up now. It also has guidelines for "personal data," basically some character bio type stuff, with optional charts you can roll on. This section also has the character growth rules. The GM hands out XP, which you can use to raise your class level (which means you increase your HP, MP, and attributes, and get one more class skill from either class), or you can spend it to buy more Fate Points, or you can spend it to change classes. So For Example I decide to make a Varna Thief/Thief. The Varna's base stats are Strength 8, Skill 7, Agility 12, Intelligence 6, Perception 10, Will 6, and Luck 8. Adding the Thief class bonuses twice gives me Strength 8, Skill 9, Agility 15, Intelligence 6, Perception 12, Will 6, and Luck 8. In terms of what I'd actually roll while playing that means I have Strength +2, Skill +3, Agility +5, Intelligence +2, Perception +4, Will +2, and Luck +2. I also get 18 HP and 22 MP. Because I can and you can't stop me, I pick Acrobat as my racial skill (which makes the character a catgirl) and adds +1 to Agility checks aside from Escape Checks. The automatic skill for thieves is Find Trap, which means that unlike those other suckers I can make trap finding rolls, plus I add my Luck modifier plus my level to the roll. Since I doubled up on one class my level for that skill counts as one higher, which means my total bonus for that at 1st level is +8, which is pretty amazing in this game. For my other skills I'll grab Envenom (4 MP to put poison on a weapon, which adds the Skill Level to hit and makes an attack that does damage also cause the Poison status), Streetwise (lets me roll to find info, and add +1 to the roll for every 20 GP spent), and Feint (4 MP to make two attack rolls and take the highest). I have 500 GP for items, so I get a Baselard (50 GP), a domino (200) and leather jacket (100) for head and body protection, a set of thief tools (50), an adventurerfs kit (10), and 2 HP potions (30 each), leaving me with an extra 30 GP. The Personal Data section has some life path tables. These are linear, not so complicated as in say Mekton Z, and use their "D66 ROC" method, which is to say you make a tens and ones roll with 2d6 or choose (ROC = Roll Or Choice). I'm gonna just pick based on what's easy for me to read without having to look up kanji, so I pick Lucky Star (you were born under a star of good fortune and get +3 to your base Luck score), Revenge (someone wronged you and you must take revenge!), and Rebirth (you will rise again, whether from death itself or the depths of despair). As an aside, the character creation method here is fairly close to other current F.E.A.R. games, but there are a few key differences. Beast Bind (which I think of as their "gonzo manga World of Darkness" game) lets you pick two "Bloods" for different supernatural properties (Spirit, Stranger, Fullmetal, Immortal, etc.) and figure out what your character is for yourself. In Alshard (whose version has become more the default) you start with 3 class levels to distribute (and you can go Level 3 in one, 2 and 1, and level 1 in three classes), and you gain more with XP. Next time: The rules chapter, which explains dice rolling, combat, and a few other things.
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May 20, 2012 02:08
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Interrupting Ewen momentarily, this was linked on badwrongfun and applies here, I should think! Why every group should play Maid RPG once
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May 20, 2012 03:06
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Ewen Cluney posted:Arianrhod. Argh, these games sound so good and the odds I'll ever get a version I can read is so low.
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May 20, 2012 03:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:Argh, these games sound so good and the odds I'll ever get a version I can read is so low.
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May 20, 2012 03:54
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If I could think of a way to make, or to at least not lose money translating/publishing these, I would be tempted to try. But alas.
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May 20, 2012 04:17
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I want to play both Meikyuu and Giant Allege right now.
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May 20, 2012 04:29
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Ewen Cluney posted:Yeah, I can only do so much, and a game like Arianrhod is going to end up a lower priority than the likes of Meikyuu Kingdom. But if anyone is seriously interested in publishing Japanese RPGs, Andy and I will do what we can to help. On the plus side, the games that are in the pipeline to come out in English are pretty amazing. I'd love to help out, but outside of proofreading the translated text there's not much I could do. 
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May 20, 2012 04:47
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Ewen Cluney posted:Yeah, I can only do so much, and a game like Arianrhod is going to end up a lower priority than the likes of Meikyuu Kingdom. But if anyone is seriously interested in publishing Japanese RPGs, Andy and I will do what we can to help. On the plus side, the games that are in the pipeline to come out in English are pretty amazing. What is the rights acquisition process like? Are we talking a purchase, license fees, or what? Are there strange republishing issues, such as split ownership of art assets or anything like that? Maybe you should just email me 
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May 20, 2012 06:48
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I'm interested in this information as well.
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May 20, 2012 06:51
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Gau posted:What is the rights acquisition process like? Are we talking a purchase, license fees, or what? Are there strange republishing issues, such as split ownership of art assets or anything like that? Of course, from what I understand there are certain TRPGs (like Sword World) in the hands of traditional Japanese publishing houses, and dealing with them will make you want to claw your eyes out.
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May 20, 2012 15:36
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Nobody mentioned it in this thread, but Ryuutama is supposed to be out in English/French sometime around July or August.
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May 20, 2012 17:19
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When you get a contract to put out a game in English, and you're dealing with one of the semi-indie publishers, what kind of support resources do you get? Like, are you stuck with a blank template and some stock art, or do they send you their ready-to-publish files for you to alter as you see fit? E: Drox posted:Nobody mentioned it in this thread, but Ryuutama is supposed to be out in English/French sometime around July or August. Where from, and where will it be available?
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May 20, 2012 22:23
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Desty posted:When you get a contract to put out a game in English, and you're dealing with one of the semi-indie publishers, what kind of support resources do you get? Like, are you stuck with a blank template and some stock art, or do they send you their ready-to-publish files for you to alter as you see fit? In order to republish anything, you'd need access to the original publishing files. Depending on the age of the game and the professional level of the publisher, these could be anywhere from current InDesign archives to scanned/exported layout files from some deprecated Japanese-only publishing suite that had its last release in 1996.
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May 20, 2012 22:28
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The kind Mr. Cluney had this to say in grogs.txt:Ewen Cluney posted:Andy recently was on the Yellow Menace podcast to talk about J-RPGs, and he basically said that Ryuutama is coming in English (and French). I'm pretty excited about that myself because it looks really neat. The basic premise is that there are four seasonal dragons, and the lesser dragons try to guide humans through amazing journeys to collet stories to enrich the seasons. The GM plays a dragon (whose abilities shape the general kind of story, so if you want lots of fighting the GM should be a black dragon for example), and the players are ordinary people (one of the classes is Farmer) on the greatest journey of their lives. Ewen Cluney posted:I went and bugged Andy about it. They are indeed aiming for a simultaneous Japanese/English/French release, with the Japanese and English releases being mainly about a PDF version (which is pretty amazing considering how slow Japanese publishers have been to get into anything electronic). They're actually planning to aim more for JGC (Japan's main tabletop gaming convention) so around August, but there's no telling whether reality will let it actually happen on time. Andy hasn't decided whether to do a Kickstarter or just release it, but either way, it looks like Ryuutama could be in people's hands before GSS or Tenra. If you listen to that podcast, it's one of the last things they talk about, around 100m or so.
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May 20, 2012 22:28
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Gau posted:In order to republish anything, you'd need access to the original publishing files. Depending on the age of the game and the professional level of the publisher, these could be anywhere from current InDesign archives to scanned/exported layout files from some deprecated Japanese-only publishing suite that had its last release in 1996. In any case they're definitely going to have to send you at a bare minimum the artwork in print resolution files, and I wouldn't want to work with someone who couldn't manage at least that. Kamiya has given me pretty much everything I've asked for, and had good reasons in the very few cases where he hasn't. For example, I'd like to publish the mouse henge rules they did as a special promo thing for GSS at some point, but he feels the design isn't up to snuff yet.
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May 21, 2012 00:13
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Cheap Trick posted:More RPG books. Notable for its absence of Sword World 2.0 and Alshard GAIA Apparently there's a new edition of the first SW 2.0 rulebook coming out in July, so you might be better off waiting until then to pick up the game anyways.
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May 23, 2012 06:17
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Ewen Cluney posted:
I wish I still had my character sheet from that game, because I'm pretty certain King Friday X3 was me. Second best con game I've had at Gencon.
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May 25, 2012 01:41
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Has anyone heard anything about the Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG line? My friend was mentioning to me that he stumbled across scans of it awhile back, but the site he found them on was shut down, and we were wondering if it was any good/how it played.
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May 28, 2012 20:32
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Randalor posted:Has anyone heard anything about the Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG line? My friend was mentioning to me that he stumbled across scans of it awhile back, but the site he found them on was shut down, and we were wondering if it was any good/how it played. Anyway, it's finally time for: Arianrhod, Part 2! The Rules Section In Japanese TRPGs what we call action resolution, making checks, etc. is koui hantei, which means something like "action judgment" or "action evaluation." In Arianrhod, like most F.E.A.R. games, you roll 2d6 and add your ability score bonus, plus any other applicable bonuses to get a result. If it matches or beats the target, you succeed. If you roll snake eyes it's a Fumble (critical failure), and if you roll boxcars it's a Critical. Spending a Fate point lets you roll an extra die, and you can spend as many Fate points as your Luck stat on one roll. It goes into opposed rolls too, which are entirely standard. After that is a section on how a game session goes. This is kind of interesting in that it spells out the overall process kind of explicitly, and doesn't have quite so much of the Western RPG assumption that it's okay to just let people puzzle it out. So, it starts with Pre-Play (the GM reads the book, plans a scenario, prints up sheets, etc., and when everyone gets together you make characters and whatnot) then goes on to Main Play (which is divided into scenes at the GM's discretion, though scene changes don't do much mechanically), to After Play (award and spend XP, clean up, maybe go to a coffee shop to talk about how it went). Combat! In light of D&D Next I feel I should mention that in Arianrhod every class gets the same number of Skills, so Warriors have every bit as good a selection as Mages. Samurai can take a "Spirit of the Samurai" skill to get a special badass samurai sword too, and upgrade it by putting more skill levels into it. I don't think it ever even ocurred to them to make fighter types less interesting to play. But anyway. To start combat, you determine initiative. Each character has an Action Value, which is the sum of their Agility and Perception, plus any modifiers from armor and skills. So if I'm understanding it right my catgirl's AV is 27 (15 + 12, and her armor has no modifiers). So unless you have something special, your value is static. If there's a tie, PCs go before NPCs, and if two PCs are tied the players will have to decide. When it's your turn, you get one Minor Action and one Major Action, in that order. Minor Actions include moving, readying an item, using certain skills (the catgirl thief's Envenom skill for example), and recovering from certain status conditions. Certain actions can also call for the target to make a Reaction. When you attack, you make a Skill check (and now I realize it should probably be Dexterity or Prowess), and the target can make an Agility check for Evasion. If the attacker wins, the attack hits. If the attacker gets a Critical, it takes another Critical to evade it, but a Fumble on an attack always misses. A successful weapon attack does 2d6 damage plus any modifiers from your weapon. (The catgirl's baselard gives -1 to hit and +3 to damage by the way.) The target's armor reduces the amount of damage inflicted. The catgirl's domino and leather jacket take a total of 6 damage off, while a guy in full plate mail with a Cross Helm and Kite Shield would have a defense power of 17 (but -4 to initiative, and that would cost 1500 gold). For magic the base damage depends on the skill you're using (e.g., the Mage skill Fire Bolt costs 6 MP and does 2D6, plus 1D6 per skill level), while Magic Defense is separate from physical, and based on the character's Will stat (but there are items that can boost it). You can also spend a Fate Point to add 1D6 damage to an attack. If you get down to zero HP (it never goes below zero) you're Incapacitated, and someone can kill you with a coup de grace, which is basically just a standard attack on someone who's Incapacitated. Natural healing is very Final Fantasy; if the GM feels you've adequately rested and/or gotten treatment, you jump up to full HP and MP. These days every F.E.A.R. game has the "Movement and Engagement" rules with the same little diagram (see below). 13th Age actually has something pretty similar, but the basic idea is that in battle you can be in or out of an Engagement. You have to be in one with someone to do a melee attack against them, but to get out of an Engagement when there's a hostile there you have use a Major Action to use the Escape action. Furthermore, if you're in a closed space you'll have to make an opposed Luck check and not have any enemies beat you in order to successfully Escape. They recommend using colored board game pawns or some such to keep track of characters, putting them in and out of groups to show Engagements.  Other Rules After the combat rules it has a section on the nitty gritty of skill use, a combat example, and then a section titled "Other Rules." The first thing here is a section on exploring, which covers stuff like finding traps in dungeons (which requires the thief's Find Traps skill, and also putting yourself in an engagement with the trap). It also talks about detecting danger (Perception check), identifying enemies (Intelligence check), appraising items (Intelligence), buying and selling items, and how other random sources of damage typically do 2D6. There's just over a page reiterating how Fate points work, and then a section on "Spot Rolls," which basically explains tricky combat situations and what kinds of checks you make to get out of them. Finally, there's the surprise attack rules, which basically means that the ambushers get an extra Main Process each, not unlike a D&D surprise round. Up next is the world section, which has about 25 pages on the continent of Erindyll, followed by the GM section (GM advice, guild rules, monsters, and an adventure scenario).
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Jun 2, 2012 17:27
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Randalor posted:Has anyone heard anything about the Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG line? My friend was mentioning to me that he stumbled across scans of it awhile back, but the site he found them on was shut down, and we were wondering if it was any good/how it played. From what I've heard it is the game mechanics transcribed to paper. Think of a GameFAQs document detailing with tables the process of Demon Negotiation and you have a good idea of how it goes in a general sense. I cannot confirm or deny this, but it goes well with what Ewen caught wind of himself.
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Jun 5, 2012 09:37
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There's a Japanese site called J-Comi that Ken Akamatsu (of Love Hina fame) came up with, that distributes out of print manga and doujinshi for free. Now they're starting to post up OOP tabletop RPGs. The first of these is Bellfahle Magic Academy, a game from 1994 that I've never heard of before. (If you go to the J-Comi site, click the green button that says PDF to grab the free PDF.) Apparently more are coming, including the Golden Sky Stories supplment "Mononoke Koyake."
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Jun 5, 2012 15:39
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Ewen Cluney posted:These days every F.E.A.R. game has the "Movement and Engagement" rules with the same little diagram (see below). 13th Age actually has something pretty similar, but the basic idea is that in battle you can be in or out of an Engagement. You have to be in one with someone to do a melee attack against them, but to get out of an Engagement when there's a hostile there you have use a Major Action to use the Escape action. Furthermore, if you're in a closed space you'll have to make an opposed Luck check and not have any enemies beat you in order to successfully Escape. They recommend using colored board game pawns or some such to keep track of characters, putting them in and out of groups to show Engagements. How into depth does this go? Does it cover stuff like environmental hazards or ongoing area effect (are those even a thing? Them not existing could answer that.)
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Jun 7, 2012 06:11
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ProfessorCirno posted:How into depth does this go? Does it cover stuff like environmental hazards or ongoing area effect (are those even a thing? Them not existing could answer that.)
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Jun 8, 2012 00:22
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Sorry, sort of late to the party! My best friend somehow spotted this thread and pointed me at it tonight. Hell, it was the thread that got me to register here instead of lurk since, like, 2002. Cause, the thread is full of Interest and not Nut Cancer, which is awesome. I'm Andy, the dude who produced maid, translated Tenra Bansho, working on Ryuutama and another game, and run the crappy not-as-updated-as-I-thought j-rpg.com blog (boo; will get back to that once time permits). Ewen covered a lot of the good stuff. And Desty, Cheap Trick really know a poo poo-ton of stuff. But I'll chime off of random points if that's cool. Re SW2.0: Yeah, my friend Kitazawa Kei did SW2.0. Sure, based off the 2ch threads from grognards and all this version is a big pile of poo poo, but there's a lot of new players who dig it. Basically, the Internet Grognard players of old don't like it because of the anime, because TRPG == Gritty Western Fantasy, not J-anime crap. It's interesting, that the grognards in the US are all about complex rules, grognards in Japan may or may not be into complex rules, but to them it's all "dirt under the fingernails Western fantasy only, nothing Japanese". Maid: Yeah, nothing to say. Ryuutama: Actually, that's pretty funny, I introduce the game to folks as "Hao Miyazaki's Oregon Trail: The RPG." I always get "...can you die of dysentery?", and the answer is, "Almost: You can get dysentery which makes you really easy to hit and die in combat or..." Anyway, I alluded to it here or there, but it's coming out in English soon. There was just a kickstarter on the French Version of Kickstarter (I forget the site name) run by a friend; we were actually aiming for a three-country simul release in Japanese, English and French (it's the 'second edition', effectively), but it looks like we'll be late. But it'll be done and out this year, likely a kickstarter sometime in late August to coincide with the Japan Game Convention (JGC). Tenra Bansho Zero: That loving white whale is 99% harpooned. Finally finished all the text-based stuff, and the layout guy has one more pass of minor adjustments to make before all the kickstarter and blowjobs begin. It's kind of got a crazy thing about it that I noticed doing this last final editing pass, re its "rules lightness"... There's a lot, A LOT, of rules. I mean, the core rolling mechanism is simple, and the rest of the core mechanics and even exceptions can be totally taught in like 20 minutes. And I almost never make characters from scratch: The collection of sample characters are so brilliantly well-rounded that there is never, ever a need to go beyond "I want a different kind of sword, let me rewrite that part..." ...but, there are a ton of rules if you want to go deep into the game. Like, the GM doesn't need to know them. But say that you were a rules tweaking shut in and wanted to craft your own mecha: There's all these mecha crafting rules. They're still rules light compared to other mecha games, but they're still a hit on page count. And only really needed if the mecha rider wants to basically waste a lot of time effectively making their own mecha which is pretty much 80% functionally the same to the sample ones in the book. The same thing for samurai, ninja, annelidists, etc: Each of these has their own rules section that pertains to them (mostly for custom fitting). If you're not playing those characters, you can ignore whole sections of the book that pertain to them and never miss anything. But if you really wanted to get in there... the rabbit hole goes deep. It's kinda weird, I guess the closest thing I've seen to this is like if you always play fighters and thieves in D&D (raises hand) and thus skip over the wizard and priest magic sections. Golden Sky Stories: Kamiya Ryo made Maid, GSS/Yuuyake Koyake, another game, and Nechronica. Nechronica seems interesting, but to me GSS is his motherfucking magnum opus. Everything about it is pretty unique and refreshing, and the kinds of play it produces is remarkable. It's not my project, it's Ewen's, and he's really putting his heart into it. It can be difficult to Gm the first time, though: We're so used to Grimdark that it's really, REALLY hard to think of a feelgood story plot that doesn't involve DARK poo poo. One I come back to a lot, my stepping stone, is basically: * A little boy is crying. If you ask why, it's because his older sister is going to college soon, and thus leaving town. This is a good Honobono/Feelgood plot. What we have, brought up on "it's not going to have emotional impact unless you go DARK!", is a tendency to want to "make it deep", like: * The boy is crying because his sister's boyfriend beats her. * The boy is crying because he didn't say goodbye to his grandmother... and the boy is secretly a ghost who actually died the other day of cancer MIND BLOWN * etc Meikyuu Kingdom: I like it a lot, but holy poo poo it's a lot of work to make it playable, there's so much data/stats and stuff. But the dude whose artwork litters this book (and Satasupe)--H...something Rasenjin--has been really prolific recently in the manga world: He created an alternate history WW1 manga, and a large-form manga book collection of Meikyu Kingdom manga. More posty in a bit. Thanks for kicking this off Desty: This thread came just as I was living/working in Tokyo for a month for my company, doing the sarariman 12+ hour days, so I kinda had my head down and wasn't looking around the net to talk gaming.
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Jun 8, 2012 04:19
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DiamondSutra posted:And only really needed if the mecha rider wants to basically waste a lot of time effectively making their own mecha which is pretty much 80% functionally the same to the sample ones in the book. ... Why wouldn't you want to make your own custom mech? 
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Jun 8, 2012 04:29
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How did you and Ewan get into doing this stuff?
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Jun 8, 2012 04:43
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DiamondSutra posted:I'm Andy, the dude who produced maid, translated Tenra Bansho, working on Ryuutama and another game, and run the crappy not-as-updated-as-I-thought j-rpg.com blog (boo; will get back to that once time permits). I think this is how I originally found out about Yellow Submarine via a Google search some time ago, so thanks for that. Also for Tenra Bansho Zero  Also also, welcome to the forums.
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Jun 8, 2012 04:51
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Okay, so here goes moar: clockworkjoe, you'll get one, this year! Also, I might be putting together an honest-to-god English replay of a Ryuutama session to show how it plays. --- Speaking of Ryuutama and playing it a bunches, when I was in Tokyo last month I played with the designer at his RPG cafe in Kanda (Cafe Daydream). I played a noble, which is always a fun one because they are less than useless, which is really interesting: https://picasaweb.google.com/106430054160848801055/Japan2012#5736461263512999010 I've got to get around to posting about that session, I'll likely do it over on Story Games or j-rpg.com and will link back here when I do. The basics: * The GM made it a blue dragon GM character, which symbolizes honobono/feelgood-style play. * We suffered natural setbacks on our way to a mountain hot springs resort. * The healer had a Loud goat (you can have qualities for animals and objects which make them cheaper to buy or more expensive/higher quality: Frex, I had an Uncool and Creepy Tent, but Beautiful Torches). * I played a noble, basically a rococo-era Frenchman in peticoat "from a faraway land" (so I interjected some classic "gaijin-isms" as I played the game) * We almost had a TPK because we fought two four-level bees: Only me and the Minstrel were standing. One of the characters was literally one point away from character death, saved ONLY because "he had a really delicious meal last night", which granted him a +1 to his Condition for that day(!!! DELICIOUS FOOD SAVES YOU FROM DEATH). There was a great/comical scene of the char, who had eaten boar stew, basically be pushed away from the river styx by the boar he ate, saying "It's not your time, scram!" * There was a new RPGer, she had never played before, but totally loved it. She took to it well. * My nobleman had a collection of powdered wigs for different occasions and moods. Later, we found out that they were bolted on. * We were beaten and bruised, and thus as players opted to really really really really try hard to talk our way out of the final boss encounter, which was clearly set up to be a boss fight of sorts (we appealed to the nature of the blue dragon). And the GM took that and ran with it; didn't make it easy, but we overcame the spell of a vampiric rose bush, and saved the town's hot springs industry. --- Re Touhou Flowers: Yeah, the designer realized his math was bad, there was a lot of corrections/errata for that one. Nice guy tho, and the layout/design of the thing was goddamned gorgeous. --- Oh, I forgot to follow up on a point re SW2.0 from my post above: Basically, while the internet haters gonna hate, I personally love the new SW2.0: The feel, the ease, the play, the speed it takes from reading to playing. But I talked to a friend I made over at that tabletop cafe about it, and he mentioned he liked the old one better (so it's not just the internet warriors, reasonable people don't like it for reasons as well): Basically, part of the play he really liked with playing SW back in the day is that character death was always on the table: If you rolled bad dice, or didn't plan well, boom you could die. In SW2.0, it's much much harder to die by default (basically appealing to owning a character for a longer time, growing with them, etc rather than worry about being punked to death in Act 1 of an 8-hour game). That made sense. Plus, I had just run FIASCO for this dude in Japanese, so I knew he wasn't like an anti-roleplay anti-social whatever, he was extremely into very social "get into character" play, so I really respected that opinion. "Ahhhhh," I said: "Let me tell you about this thing that's happening in the West, called the OSR movement..." (he really seemed to dig that style of play, I sold him on Lamentations of the Flame Princess) --- Shinobigami: ...is one of my favorite games, period, in English or Japanese. It's basically a cross between FIASCO-with-ninja, and a German board game. --- Alshard: Alshard has slipped in popularity a little, because Arianhrod, which uses the same system (and has a tie-in game to Etrian Odyssey based on the Arianhrod core) has swapped places with it, popularity-wise. Both are still pretty huge, but it looks like Arianhrod has edged out the other. That's in sales (and admittedly what I saw played at stores and cafes), mind: But there's not many games that truly feel "dead", and that's cool. --- Re: Differences between SW1 and 2: Mainly: * That bit I mentioned about easier to die in 1 than 2 * More races, including Tabbit and Nightmare * An anime-ish makeover (at least for the cover art and main character sketches, not that the books are dripping with art, it's mostly text) * Some new classes, like the Gunmage * FEAR style "most characters are actually two or more classes, with usually one starting at level 2" (Tabbit Gunner is a Gunmage 1 and a Shooter 2, frex). This is probably the big change ruleswise * Hand to hand combat guy ("super martial artist") is a viable choice --- Chart-born characters: I hated even the concept of this until I played Maid. Now I love it, especially for one-shots and mini-campaigns. Most of the good ones also do "Roll or Choice", meaning: Hey, at least try to roll on these charts. It might inspire you! But if not, you're not married to it, feel free to pick what you want. But at least we put that spark in there, which may have gotten you to think a little about your character. It's crazy effective. --- Cheap Trick: Yeah, TBZ is pretty much only available on Yahoo.jp Auctions, and only occasionally. Also, great walkthrough of Yellow Sub. Incidentally, I've so warmed up to the Role and Roll Station (store) also in Akiba (about 2-3 blocks away, nearly across the street from the huge AKB-48 themed Donki Hotei), mainly because of all the effort the owner puts into his blogs and stuff ( http://rrstation.blog40.fc2.com/ ), that I've recently switched out my Go-To store from Akiba's YS to R&R (but poo poo, they're so close together that I'll go to both anyway, as there's a few things that YS has that R&R doesn't; it's just that R&R has Prima Noctae on my wallet). I even made an f'ing point card there. Plus, they had a copy of English Maid on display! Rock. --- Re: "Has anyone heard anything about the Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG line?" ...unfortunately, IMO it was the product of "let's have hundreds of pages of demon stats, replicate the "the computer does the math in the console" mechanics for you for the table, and make you want to die of boredom by the second round of combat" style of games of the mid-90s. It couldn't do Persona if you hosed it wearing a demon mask. I suggest, honestly, Any Other Game to use to play Persona (if like me you are a huge fan of Persona, that is, more than SMT classic). I'm not one to randomly plug poo poo, but my friends had great success with the freely available "Archipelago 2" rules and the freely available (but also purchasable) "Anima Prime" rules. But honestly, whatever side of the "hippy mechanics" fence you're on, Your Favorite Game can probably run a truer version of SMT than the SMT game can. (was that too harsh? I was just utterly disappointed in it, and was a Sorta-SMT fan, and a HUGE Persona 3 fan). Anyway, if folks have more questions feel free to hit us up.
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Jun 8, 2012 05:02
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For a thread that's pretty much right up my alley, I don't have much to say. Thank you for some insightful reading, though! Really looking forward to GSS. Don't really get why folks are going bonkers for Meikyuu all that much. Ah well. DiamondSutra posted:Re Touhou Flowers: Yeah, the designer realized his math was bad, there was a lot of corrections/errata for that one. Nice guy tho, and the layout/design of the thing was goddamned gorgeous.
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Jun 8, 2012 05:51
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Zereth posted:... Why wouldn't you want to make your own custom mech? Well, it's mainly because the ones that are pre-made are already so useful that I personally didn't see the need (when I played the game): At the most I was like, "Okay, I want to have like this one extra piece of gear, I'll pay a little more to add that to this pregen mecha". The rules are there if you want, I just didn't find myself wanting. I guess mainly because: 1) The pregens just have a solid all-around mech 2) At the end of the day, the abilities of the mech (bigger gun, treads instead of feet) can be mitigated by simply in play spending a lot of "Kiai points" (think of them like fate points to boost rolls). And plus, the focus on the drama means that the mech design rules aren't super strategic. Like, in mechwarrior/battletech, I'd sit there for like 30 minutes trying to figure out how I can drop an extra PPC cannon on my mecha without having to stand in a lake to fire it. But with Tenra, the mech creation process is about 4 minutes: "animal head, 6 arms, 2 legs, hmmm... these four pieces of gear, this big sword, those two guns, and... done." Not a lot of balancing required (some, but not the careful excruciating balance of like Battletech or Jovian Chronicles). So for me, sticking with the default characters or just tweaked a little, and then making them my own, has always worked in play. But the cool thing is that there's all these other options if you want to go in deep. But that's added to the pagecount, though. :-) I guess my end point is, "The book has a smaller form factor, plus all those optional rules, so don't freak out that there's several hundred pages in the book; you only need to read about 6 in-book comics and a further 20 pages to actually play." :-) mikeycp posted:How did you and Ewan get into doing this stuff? For me, it was: * Been a fan of RPGs since way back. * Started learning Japanese in college (as a minor). * Got better and better until traditional study wasn't doing it for me anymore: I needed something more to read and do, not just anime and crap, but... * ...newspapers: Too hard, dry. Novels: Too long. Short stories: Just about right. * ...oh, but there's Japanese RPGs? Really? That might be right up my alley, given my history of playing RPGs. * (and they were) I started Tenra back in 2004 or so, yeah it was totally my Duke Nukem/white whale. I met Ewen online later. We laughed at Maid: The RPG. Then, as a lark, he translated and brought it to a GenCon I was at. It turned out to be super awesome, so using some conenctions and stuff I got the license, released it in a (brutal) year. It was a great move, actually, because I saw a lot of potholes and learned a lot about self publishing, so that I wouldn't make those mistakes with Tenra, and Ewen with GSS. Cheap Trick posted:I think this is how I originally found out about Yellow Submarine via a Google search some time ago, so thanks for that. Also for Tenra Bansho Zero Oh, sweet. The circle is complete! Heh, no need to thank me for TBZ Until It's Finally F'ing Out! :-) Dang, it feels so good to be nearly done, but it's been a few years of rough work! DiamondSutra fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jun 8, 2012 |
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Jun 8, 2012 06:07
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bahamut posted:Don't really get why folks are going bonkers for Meikyuu all that much. You're a monster.
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Jun 8, 2012 06:45
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