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Introducing magical girls to the World of Darkness to me just feels like a goddamn weird choice. Genius has its problems to be sure, but I have no trouble buying mad scientists as a game line in the World of Darkness, new or old, and the core themes are not bad. Magical girls, though... the whole idea feels out of place.
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May 18, 2015 18:29
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Cythereal posted:Introducing magical girls to the World of Darkness to me just feels like a goddamn weird choice. Genius has its problems to be sure, but I have no trouble buying mad scientists as a game line in the World of Darkness, new or old, and the core themes are not bad. Magical girls, though... the whole idea feels out of place. It's pretty easy to see why: WoD is, at its core, a highly cynical place. You do what you do to survive because the world is hosed up and if it's not the vampires it's the werewolves, and everyone is a little bit hosed up one way or the other and none of it matters because the Wyrm is just going to eat everyone anyway. The magical girl genre, by contrast, is idealistic to a fault. Triumph is had through friendship, love, and the magic derived from it. You fight for justice, not yourself, and you win by the strength of your friends in the end. Then you all eat cake.
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May 18, 2015 18:32
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Cythereal posted:Introducing magical girls to the World of Darkness to me just feels like a goddamn weird choice. Genius has its problems to be sure, but I have no trouble buying mad scientists as a game line in the World of Darkness, new or old, and the core themes are not bad. Magical girls, though... the whole idea feels out of place. In a thousand years the philosophers will answer this statement by just saying "The Parable of Fallout: Equestria" which will have become shorthand for "Obsessive fans will naturally attempt to convert everything they sort of like into the mold of everything they really like."
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May 18, 2015 18:34
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:It's pretty easy to see why: WoD is, at its core, a highly cynical place. You do what you do to survive because the world is hosed up and if it's not the vampires it's the werewolves, and everyone is a little bit hosed up one way or the other and none of it matters because the Wyrm is just going to eat everyone anyway. The magical girl genre, by contrast, is idealistic to a fault. Triumph is had through friendship, love, and the magic derived from it. You fight for justice, not yourself, and you win by the strength of your friends in the end. Then you all eat cake. Then... why not play Hunter with a DM willing to spin it idealistically? That's how my gaming group does it, triumphing over evil through teamwork, firepower, most people being basically good when not under the supernatural's sway, and an R&D budget of "yes."
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May 18, 2015 18:35
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Xelkelvos posted:Arguably, it's a subgenre spun out of another subgenre. Tokatsu specifically. Whereas toku is male oriented and features mostly science based or extraterrestrial based powers (at least initially), magical girls are the opposite with magical sources and female oriented. Both run off of some sort of emotion with friendship/camaraderie as part of it. Hot-bloodedness, courage and bravery in toku and love, kindness and hope in magical girls. They're both two sides of the same four colored and sometimes campy coin. This is all pretty true. Sailormoon, which was the first big magical girl series, shares a lot of similarities with Saint Seiya. Saint Seiya is pretty much magical boys and shares a similar team motif. There had been magical girl series before but they were more Kamen Rider-esque and more geared towards young men like Cutey Honey. Saint Seiya was one of the biggest series of the 1980's so it's not a shock they would copy some of the dynamics from them because everyone started doing it.
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May 18, 2015 18:35
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This is all pretty true. Sailor Moon wasn't the first big magical girl series. First big fighting magical girl series, but like I said last page, fighting girls are the 90s. Before that we got an entirely different breed of magical girl. Some of which is terrible and boring, but some of it's pretty good stuff. (I like Akazukin Chacha, Princess Comet and Super Pig.)
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May 18, 2015 18:38
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So in the end is it big enough to support a core book or is the genre easily covered by slapping sidebar about transformation sequences, togetherness, and villains based on negative emotions into a hero book? Eh, what am I even asking, Maid was big enough for a core book.
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May 18, 2015 18:40
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theironjef posted:In a thousand years the philosophers will answer this statement by just saying "The Parable of Fallout: Equestria" which will have become shorthand for "Obsessive fans will naturally attempt to convert everything they sort of like into the mold of everything they really like." Fallout: Equestria? Really? Really!? ...Why? Just, why? Cythereal posted:Then... why not play Hunter with a DM willing to spin it idealistically? That's how my gaming group does it, triumphing over evil through teamwork, firepower, most people being basically good when not under the supernatural's sway, and an R&D budget of "yes." Because some people don't get that themes, motifs, and subtext are what really make the work. This is especially true among nerds. They get wrapped up in the setting details, character back stories, and all the other macro-details and think that's what makes the story so awesome and cool. So, to them, if it isn't a game (or story) about Magical Girls, it isn't a Magical Girl game even if it has the same themes, motifs, and subtext as the genre does.
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May 18, 2015 18:40
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It's big enough for a core book but I don't know who could reasonably write one focusing on the earnest, Sailor Moon/Pretty Cure types all that well. And of course most gamer nerds would play it terribly. (Golden Sky Stories would do well in the job of being an 80s Magical Girl game.)
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May 18, 2015 18:41
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Mors Rattus posted:It's big enough for a core book but I don't know who could reasonably write one focusing on the earnest, Sailor Moon/Pretty Cure types all that well. And of course most gamer nerds would play it terribly. (Golden Sky Stories would do well in the job of being an 80s Magical Girl game.) Yeah, I don't trust the world to generate a book not called "Sailor: The Upskirt." Covok posted:Because some people don't get that themes, motifs, and subtext are what really make the work. This is especially true among nerds. They get wrapped up in the setting details, character back stories, and all the other macro-details and think that's what makes the story so awesome and cool. So, to them, if it isn't a game (or story) about Magical Girls, it isn't a Magical Girl game even if it has the same themes, motifs, and subtext as the genre does. This is my cynical view right here. That the reason people would make a Magical Girl rpg is because the current perfect books to run it that already exist don't have nearly enough micro-skirt schoolgirl uniforms in them and are therefore not authentic enough to run the genre.
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May 18, 2015 18:42
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theironjef posted:So in the end is it big enough to support a core book or is the genre easily covered by slapping sidebar about transformation sequences, togetherness, and villains based on negative emotions into a hero book? I'm sure you could, if for no other reason than at least hypothetically being able to really flesh out the details in a core book tightly focused on the theme, rather than retrofitting it onto an existing system. I'm sure it's great for marketing too, if you don't mind the niche being what it is.
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May 18, 2015 18:44
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Mors Rattus posted:It's big enough for a core book but I don't know who could reasonably write one focusing on the earnest, Sailor Moon/Pretty Cure types all that well. And of course most gamer nerds would play it terribly. I suspect Princess will also suffer heavily from being written by and for teenage-to-20s guys when most magical girl shows are aimed at girls and young women. quote:Because some people don't get that themes, motifs, and subtext are what really make the work. This is especially true among nerds. They get wrapped up in the setting details, character back stories, and all the other macro-details and think that's what makes the story so awesome and cool. So, to them, if it isn't a game (or story) about Magical Girls, it isn't a Magical Girl game even if it has the same themes, motifs, and subtext as the genre does. Fair point. I suspect some of my group's antics, like luring a werewolf into getting hit by a freight train and sucking a vampire into one of Air Force One's jet engines would distract some people heavily from the themes and subtext.
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May 18, 2015 18:44
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Cythereal posted:I suspect Princess will also suffer heavily from being written by and for teenage-to-20s guys when most magical girl shows are aimed at girls and young women. Nah, while I know super little to practically nothing about WoD, I'd think mortals having to resort to tricks and traps to defeat the nigh unbeatable monsters they face makes sense. It gives that Jaws/Alien feel that only careful planning and luck can defeat the monster (and, sometimes, that isn't even enough).
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May 18, 2015 18:48
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In nWoD, the best way for anyone to win is tricks, traps and ganging up.
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May 18, 2015 18:51
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Covok posted:Nah, while I know super little to practically nothing about WoD, I'd think mortals having to resort to tricks and traps to defeat the nigh unbeatable monsters they face makes sense. It gives that Jaws/Alien feel that only careful planning and luck can defeat the monster (and, sometimes, that isn't even enough). They've also just plain shot, blown up, and electrocuted a goodly number of monsters - they work for Task Force: VALKYRIE, and I billed the first session as "The president has been kidnapped by vampires. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" The tone of the game hasn't changed significantly since.  But enough of that derail, I think.
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May 18, 2015 18:53
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Cythereal posted:They've also just plain shot, blown up, and electrocuted a goodly number of monsters - they work for Task Force: VALKYRIE, and I billed the first session as "The president has been kidnapped by vampires. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" The tone of the game hasn't changed significantly since. I would play in this game. It sounds rad as gently caress.
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May 18, 2015 18:55
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Nessus posted:Also I'm gonna post about NIGHTBANE, the Palladium RPG, later. Believe that. Nightbane is possibly the most metal RPG setting of all time. The main opponent foot soldiers are black metal skeletons, and the "good guys" also look like something that a 14-year-old Metallica fan would've doodled on his school books. It's just a terrible shame that it's saddled with Palladium's poo poo system.
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May 18, 2015 19:06
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Traveller posted:Next: let's see what an OSR guy has to say about gender roles, hm? I'm liking Red Tide so far, this should be very interesting. 
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May 18, 2015 19:20
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Traveller posted:Red Tide So that's what happens if the high-level PCs fail their last adventure. Tasoth posted:Playing the first generation of magical girls having grown into adults and still fighting for hope and love on the streets against people who have bent the big bads to their pursuits would be an interesting concept. Princess Streetfight wouldn't even have to be grimdark, just bare knuckle brawls in back alleys to protect your city and neighborhood. Because why make it grimdark if you can just make it awesome? Though I would imagine "mature" magical girls to use weapons (who may or may not look like they're made out of plastic), just in case they're running into a demonic pistol shrimp whose claw doubles as a wave motion gun. Mors Rattus posted:The theme of magical girl stuff and the stuff that empowers them is almost always love, hope, friendship, joy or something related to them. (Not always directly a power source, but 90% of the time a theme.) Adorable and often toyetic mascots are usually involved, as are kitschy transformation devices. Transformation is a big thing - most magical girls have no powers at all in their civilian forms. Often they work in teams, occasionally unable to do anything separately. Magical girls are almost always children or young teens - unsurprising, as most magical shows are aimed either at 8-year-old girls or 20-year-old men. Monsters are often drawn from within people somehow - usually formed from negative emotions. Not always, but it's really common. Villains are often focused on destroying or taking over the entire planet via nebulous magical means. Villains are typically themed together somehow and rarely fight on their own - they use monsters, and fight solo only for major confrontations. This is not exclusively the case, just very often. Typically, hatred, fear, doubt or other negative emotions are the ultimate evil to be fought. Unless we're talking about Sailor Moon the manga, where actual monsters of the week are rare and chapters seldom end without a human bad guy getting blown the gently caress up by a special move that consists of 2-3 random English words that may or may not make any sort of sense (with "Star Gentle Uterus" probably taking the cake). theironjef posted:So in the end is it big enough to support a core book or is the genre easily covered by slapping sidebar about transformation sequences, togetherness, and villains based on negative emotions into a hero book? I would probably make that book a Magical Girl / Tokusatsu double feature. It's pretty much the same thing, , except they have a different theme focus and one side has a somewhat higher concentration of giant robots. So I guess that would make Magic Knight Rayearth the middle ground. Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:28 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 19:25
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Nessus posted:Also I'm gonna post about NIGHTBANE, the Palladium RPG, later. Believe that. Nice, looking forward to that.
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May 18, 2015 19:26
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theironjef posted:What's the difference between a Magical Girl game and a superhero game? Like Magical Girls as a genre is just women with secret identities and superpowers, right? I would say - speaking verrry broadly - most Western superhero comics are often about how the hero solves a problem by being smart enough or tough enough, whereas a lot of magical girl stories are about having enough confidence or friends to help overcome adversity. Classic superheroes tend to be practical in nature while a lot of mahou shoujo stories tend towards the emotional. (If this seems a little sexist, bear in mind both genres have generally been aimed at a particular gender without much concern for progressive notions in that regard.) Obviously, there are more magical girl series aimed at boys coming out these days more focused on the fighting, and there are superhero books focused on relationships, but it'd be an oversimplification to call it just a difference in fashion.
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May 18, 2015 19:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I would say - speaking verrry broadly - most Western superhero comics are often about how the hero solves a problem by being smart enough or tough enough, whereas a lot of magical girl stories are about having enough confidence or friends to help overcome adversity. Classic superheroes tend to be practical in nature while a lot of mahou shoujo stories tend towards the emotional. (If this seems a little sexist, bear in mind both genres have generally been aimed at a particular gender without much concern for progressive notions in that regard.) Agreed. Likewise, to call toku and magical girl the same thing with different paint jobs...no. No, it's really not.
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May 18, 2015 19:32
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Mors Rattus posted:Agreed. Likewise, to call toku and magical girl the same thing with different paint jobs...no. No, it's really not. It's mostly a somewhat different power source and different stuff to talk about outside of the fights. They even made a live-action toku version of Sailor Moon, which ended up being the darkest adaption despite having Luna turn into an underaged catgirl expy of Sailor Chibimon for some reason. Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 19:47
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Only if you ignore literally everything about theme and what the show is actually about. Yes, I know about the live-action Sailor Moon. I'm still saying that they are different genres. Sorry, but they're really just similar on the surface - same way supers are.
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May 18, 2015 19:48
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Mors Rattus posted:Only if you ignore literally everything about theme and what the show is actually about. Saving the world with the power of friendship?
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May 18, 2015 19:50
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Kamen Rider, at least, is often more about the nature of power or strength in some way, or the meaning of humanity. I don't know toku nearly as well as I do magical girls, but magical girl stuff is, yes, friendship and love and joy - but in a way that is almost always making them the focus far more than any violence. Magical girl stuff is almost never an examination of the nature of strength or power - rather, the girls are chosen because of their emotional qualities, and their power is an outgrowth of those. Hell, there's been magical girl stuff in which there was literally no villain or threat to the world which are core genre staples. Cardcaptor Sakura, most notably. It is a formative show and it doesn't have a world-ending threat or evil villain. It has antagonists and threats, of course. But can you name a toku show anything like that, especially one core to toku?
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May 18, 2015 19:56
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I think what Mors is communicating here is that while the tokusatsu link is real clear for Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon is not the be-all end-all of magical girl shows in all their various forms. It'd be sort of like taking Shadowrun (which I imagine is the most successful cyberpunk TT RPG setting in this century) and going, well, cyberpunk's gotta have elves and orks and so on, I mean otherwise it's not cyberpunk, right?
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May 18, 2015 19:58
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Mors Rattus posted:Kamen Rider, at least, is often more about the nature of power or strength in some way, or the meaning of humanity. I don't know toku nearly as well as I do magical girls, but magical girl stuff is, yes, friendship and love and joy - but in a way that is almost always making them the focus far more than any violence. Magical girl stuff is almost never an examination of the nature of strength or power - rather, the girls are chosen because of their emotional qualities, and their power is an outgrowth of those. Hell, there's been magical girl stuff in which there was literally no villain or threat to the world which are core genre staples. Cardcaptor Sakura, most notably. It is a formative show and it doesn't have a world-ending threat or evil villain. It has antagonists and threats, of course. But can you name a toku show anything like that, especially one core to toku? True. Kamen Rider isn't really a team-based show (usually) unlike Super Sentai (which is all about "we are more than the sum of our parts"), so it has a different focus. But then you have something like Kuuga where the hero's driving force was "I don't want to see anyone cry anymore". While Sailor Moon is not the only kind og magical girl show, it has pretty much eclipsed the other sub-genres. Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:09 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 20:06
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It hasn't, actually. If you want to talk the biggest magical girl show ever? It's Pretty Cure. Pretty Cure is massive. It is bigger than Sailor Moon, bigger than Cardcaptor Sakura, bigger than Nanoha, bigger than anything. The year there is no new Precure is the year Japan's economy has collapsed.
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May 18, 2015 20:09
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Mors Rattus posted:It hasn't, actually. If you want to talk the biggest magical girl show ever? It's Pretty Cure. Pretty Cure is massive. It is bigger than Sailor Moon, bigger than Cardcaptor Sakura, bigger than Nanoha, bigger than anything. The year there is no new Precure is the year Japan's economy has collapsed. Maybe someone should do a writeup of that old Guardians of Order Sailor Moon RPG guide.
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May 18, 2015 20:13
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Oh yeah, over here it's Sailor Moon, no question. None of the others lasted very long over here, even Cardcaptor Sakura got hosed up and rebranded with the male lead as a focus to appeal to a wider audience. But America's not really the target audience. We've got some of our own homegrown stuff, but it's exceptionally rare and doesn't usually do so well.
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May 18, 2015 20:15
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Mors Rattus posted:It hasn't, actually. If you want to talk the biggest magical girl show ever? It's Pretty Cure. Pretty Cure is massive. It is bigger than Sailor Moon, bigger than Cardcaptor Sakura, bigger than Nanoha, bigger than anything. The year there is no new Precure is the year Japan's economy has collapsed. But Pretty Cure belongs to the same sub-genre as Sailor Moon (aka the only sub-genre most people think about when hearing "magical girl"), and is in fact even more sentaish, probably because its the unofficial third entry of the Super Hero Time block (aka Super Sentai + Kamen Rider). Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:23 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 20:21
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Valatar posted:Nightbane is possibly the most metal RPG setting of all time. The main opponent foot soldiers are black metal skeletons, and the "good guys" also look like something that a 14-year-old Metallica fan would've doodled on his school books. It's just a terrible shame that it's saddled with Palladium's poo poo system. It's strangely of a piece with, of all things, Marvel Super Heroes. Both are games where the random chargen is likely to give you some kind of animal mutant instead of what you were expecting. And when they released supplements with more chargen options and powers, your chance of rolling an animal mutant, like, tripled.
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May 18, 2015 21:24
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Halloween Jack posted:Nightbane's gotta be in my top five "want to save this game from the people who made it." There's a Unisystem conversation floating around... If I remember correctly from my own copy, part of that is because the character tables you roll on included a "Ursine/Bear guy" powerset that was not included in the book anywhere. Granted my copy is also called Nightspawn, so who knows if they fixed that later.
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May 18, 2015 21:31
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And I believe that C.J. Carella is the person responsible for Nightbane. Oddly enough, while he was at Eden Studios, he started work on Beyond Human. It was supposed to be Unisystem much like AFMbE with no defined setting and rules for creating things from scratch. The focus was going to be on super/para/abhumans. But it's been in limbo for 10+ years at this point. Unisystem Nightbane would have been rad.
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May 18, 2015 21:49
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Yeah, doing an initial review of the first, uh, twenty pages, this book is amazing.
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May 18, 2015 21:51
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Nessus posted:Yeah, doing an initial review of the first, uh, twenty pages, this book is amazing. The best part is where you can tell exactly where old Kev took over because after a whole book of crazy filthy BDSM motorcycle monsters vs. black terminator skeletons and vampires, there's suddenly a section on good guy aliens made out of pure good guy that have no sleaze to them at all and just exist to flit around blowing up evil they can sense. It was like it hit the desk and he just sniffed it and said "oh, you forgot to include space paladins." theironjef fucked around with this message at 22:27 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 21:56
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Can someone give a breakdown of Zir'an? It sounded interesting but there's not much out there on it. Zir'An is a game that would be decent ported to a different system. It's also a great example of why you don't go too elaborate with your book layout. One sentence summary: Zir'An is a lot like Eberron but with actual WWI levels of technology: automatic weapons, biplanes, etc. More detailed summary: setting Basically the world is caught in a perpetual war against continents of generically evil monsters. The tech level is roughly WWI with automatic weapons, trains, airships and planes. The aircraft in particular are actually magi-tech (using magically strengthened paper or balsa wood in place of metal to create exceptionally light and durable frames). This basically allows the aircraft design to get exceptionally impractical looking. It suffers heavily from the "our races are the same as other races but they're more special and have different names" syndrome. Humans are called Ianer, Dwarves are Dolnarri, Elves are Zhalanti, and so on. There are also chocobos. System Confusing. I've tried reading the game a few times and honestly I still haven't had the willpower to actually learn the system. It's impressively dull and unintuitive It seems like it wants to allow for "epic" level play but honestly there's no indication that it's really possible. Magic Conceptually, the magic is kind of neat, there's two types: Rune Magic and Shadow Magic. Rune Magic is relatively traditional magic but it involves using magic stylus' to create elaborate rune mandalas or ofuda-style paper strips. Shadow Magic is heavily themed abilities that sometimes resemble super-powers a bit more than spells. But since the system is so dense I haven't really grasped the depths of the magic system. Layout/Art More than anything else, this is what killed the book. The book has lots of "behind the text" artwork and symbols (especially runemagic symbols) that were in a light gray...except the ink was a reflective silver-gray. This means that entire chapters are practically unreadable. the whole thing was probably extremely expensive to print and certainly is what killed any chance of the game being a success. Basically, it's got some cool imagery and a few neat concepts in the middle of a lot of uncreative drek with weird names. Play WWI era-Savage Worlds with magic and fantasy races and you've got a much better version of Zir'An.
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May 18, 2015 22:09
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Tasoth posted:I do agree the that WoD is not a good place to put any kind of magical girl game, even if they have grown up. But I think exploring the choice to keep fighting the war you did as a child or give it up for the handful of things that make the world really matter to you could lead to some interesting stories. Especially if you leverage the Things That Matter into sources of drama and extra reserves. Do you choose to die for something you believed in as a child or do you give up and live out your life with the things you've come to truly care about? Nessus posted:Also I'm gonna post about NIGHTBANE, the Palladium RPG, later. Believe that.
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May 18, 2015 22:21
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Mors Rattus posted:Kamen Rider, at least, is often more about the nature of power or strength in some way, or the meaning of humanity. I don't know toku nearly as well as I do magical girls, but magical girl stuff is, yes, friendship and love and joy - but in a way that is almost always making them the focus far more than any violence. Magical girl stuff is almost never an examination of the nature of strength or power - rather, the girls are chosen because of their emotional qualities, and their power is an outgrowth of those. Hell, there's been magical girl stuff in which there was literally no villain or threat to the world which are core genre staples. Cardcaptor Sakura, most notably. It is a formative show and it doesn't have a world-ending threat or evil villain. It has antagonists and threats, of course. But can you name a toku show anything like that, especially one core to toku? MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 22:38 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 22:22
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