Ready, Fire, Aim!

I was thinking about tonight’s Tenra Bansho Zero game, run by Andy for the Wednesday night group. I was thinking that my character, a bad-ass Buddhist fighter named Shining Pool, is undermotivated. He has Fates to avoid fighting and follow the Buddhist precepts of his order, oh and something about redeeming Travis’ character, Click Dai.

Blah.

Then I realized he doesn’t want anything. I mean, sure, he wants to see Travis’ character redeemed, but I’m not even sure what that means. But not deeply or desperately. The taboos are about not wanting something, which is lamesauce.

So I think about the character sheet again. See, the character sheet should give you a direction for your character. In Tenra, Emotional Reaction Matrix + Fates = awesome. I want to see Click redeemed, and I have a fate to that effect, but I also look up to Tim’s character, Kogarashi, who is Click’s brother. Why? I’m not even really sure. I’ll figure it out. But I expect my character to be squeezed between gaining approval from Tim’s character, which will probably involve breaking my taboo against fighting, and redeeming Click, which will probably involve showing him alternatives to fighting. I want Shining Pool to succeed, rather than go for the old awesome of watching him fail, but I don’t want it to be an easy thing. I want it to cost him.

Now I’m looking forward to tonight’s session. I want Shining Pool to demonstrate that he is a good man, a role model for Click. I want to see Shining Pool tempted to solve problems with his fists, rather than using his hands for healing. I want to see him gain Kogarashi’s approval, in spite of not resorting to violence.  I care about him, and I care about what I’m doing with him. Perhaps that is the ninth fold of the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism: Right Roleplay.

High on my reading and gaming list is Mouse Guard. I’ve already read the Fall 1152 compilation, and I’m trying to hunt up the Winter 1152 collection, which seems to have gone out of print temporarily. Next I’ll be reading the game text itself, but in the meantime, I’m entertaining a few ideas for a small campaign.

I’ll detail the *first* idea in another post, but the one that’s intriguing me right now is the *second* one. I’m calling it “Mouserk,” because I look to combine the Mouse Guard setting with the bloody fantasy of the anime Berserk. (I’ll only discuss the anime, as I am unfamiliar with the manga.) Mice with giant bastard swords, cleaving their enemies in twain! Sounds cool, right?

Looking a bit deeper, I’m surprised to find the two match up much more than I would have thought. The world of Berserk is a medieval fantasy of warring kingdoms. Although the first episode is a flash-forward to a time where demons stalk the land and humanity lives in fear, the majority of the show depicts a humano-centric world of constant warfare. Slowly, it becomes clear that there are more powerful forces at work, around the edges of the conflict. Powers greater than those of humanity exist in Berserk, but they don’t affect much of the action of the story until late in the show.

Similarly, within the world of Mouse Guard, there are internal conflicts as well, but outside those lies a world of dangers. Mouse Guard, too, is full of powers greater than those of mice. Consider that almost every predator is larger and more powerful than they are: crabs, snakes, bats. Any one-on-one battle is one of extreme danger, and mice must stand together and in numbers against all that would destroy them.

Here, then, is the crux of Mouserk: mice-as-human-analogs versus an uncaring and dangerous world full of powers greater than mousekind. With lots of blood.

Sounds like fun to me, and the best thing is, it can probably be combined with my other two ideas. More on those anon.

No promises, but this site and my writing are not dead. I am not actively working on Seiyuu, but I am…passively working on it. It’s cooking on a back burner in my brain. I’ve been very burned out on gaming for a long time now, but I’ve only recently realized this. As such, I want to recharge my batteries in a serious way before continuing, rather than staying in the pattern of “make progress, burn out, recharge batteries, repeat.”

In the meantime, I’m working on a little something about things I’ve learned about anime, often from watching a specific show. More on that soon, I hope.

Here are recent additions to my Anime and Not Finished lists:

Anime List
Cardcaptor Sakura: The Movie
Cardcaptor Sakura: The Movie 2
Death Note
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Memories
Ouran High School Host Club

Not Finished
Claymore
Code Geass
Magic Knight Rayearth
Moribito
Shingu
XXXholic

Apparently, it’s been a long time since I posted. I must strive to rectify that situation.

I’ve been slow in my anime viewing, as well. I’ve updated my list – now over 150 titles – with a few I’ve finished in the past few months.

On the unfinished side, I can add Fruits Basket, Ouran Host Club, and XXXholic to the list. All of these, however, I do intend to finish.

More soon. 

Seiyuu is currently in pieces. I’ve ripped out the old conflict resolution system (yes, the “bingo” system), and I’m looking at retooling most of the individual components of the game, to make sure they do what I want them to do and integrate properly with one another. I made a decent number of notes going into GenCon, but I haven’t allowed myself to work through them yet. I expect that to change a little bit once I get through some reading I’ve currently got on my plate – in the next week or two. The playtest at GenCon was a mess, but a mess that’s convinced me I’m slowly but surely moving in the right direction.

Once that’s happened, I think Lenny and I will start a very limited playtest – possibly just the two of us, possibly one or two others who can commit to a regular Skype call and have the expertise and interest required. No, please don’t ask me – it’s way too early for that, and I promise there will come a time for open, external playtest where anyone who wants to will be able to test. The idea behind such a playtest is to create a stable core of elements (participants, a show, and the necessary support structures) in order to test and retest the various resolution systems and endgame mechanics, until at least all of the pieces are there. Getting them to all working together is the step after that.

I really think the game is going in the direction that I want it to, but it’s a slow process. Slow for two reasons: first, I haven’t been devoting a lot of active effort to it, and second, because I find I’m still learning a lot about designing and game theory as I go. I incorporate each new revelation as it comes to me, but that’s a lot of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back progress.

I’m hoping to write a “State of the Game” post about once a month, just as a progress report on the design.

I haven’t been watching a lot of anime recently, which is a problem I intend on correcting soon. However, I have started two new shows:

Record of Lodoss War (TV series): I understand people get upset about the continuity problems between the OAVs and the TV series, but it’s been long enough since I watched the OAVs that I’ve forgotten all the details that might have confused me. I’ve watched the first seven eps so far, and I’m enjoying it. It’s always been very D&D, and given that I’m slowly reading my way through 4E, it makes the show that much more fun.

Cardcaptor Sakura: I’ve loved most of the Clamp animated series I’ve watched – Chobits and Angelic Layer in particular, X (TV) not so much – but Sakura is what really put them on the map. The characters and premise are delightful, all the more so by deliberately commenting on the magical girl genre via the character of Tomoyo. (I’ve grabbed two quotes from her for the magical girl section in Seiyuu.) Kero is also ridiculously cute, especially with an Osaka accent. Watching the series in Japanese with subtitles puts me in mind of rewatching shows I own in that way, to give the original seiyuu a listen and to immerse myself that much more in the language I really should redevote myself to learning. Sakura will be a long haul – 70 episodes – but I want to watch it before diving into the recent Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles and XXXholic.

In anime-related news, I’m watching the last season of Avatar, now that it’s all been broadcast, and I have Batman: Gotham Knight, the Batman franchise’s answer to The Animatrix, in from Netflix.

It took us a little while to get back in the groove, but once we did, things ticked over nicely. Shane commented on how there was enough to engage with, in terms of what was going on. That made me happy, as I had planned little more than a handful of bangs. (For a trad game, Reign has required very little planning on my part, for how we’re playing it.) He also commented how his character had gone from a nice, unambitious guy to a scheming bastard, out of necessity. I liked hearing that as well, not so much from a sense of GM power imposed upon player’s character, as seeing the distorting effects of power and circumstance upon character, in the sense of a Shakespearean history. The fact that there was general consensus on the balance between reacting to new circumstances and carrying out plans regarding old circumstance also made me happy. It was a satisfying session.

This after a second session which was mostly us wrangling over the system and getting it to do what we felt it should. I realize I haven’t posted about that session. It’s not that it was painful – although it was – it’s that I needed the intervening time to process what we came up with.

From a mechanical standpoint, we got the game to work by doing the following:

1) Removing the 10-die cap on rolls. Yes, this allows for guaranteed matches, but the whiff factor, even on die pools in the 7-10 range, was aggravating before.

2) Streamlining and connecting character action to company changes. At the end of any scene where a character was trying to temporarily improve a company quality, using the methods suggested in the book, that player would roll the stat+skill combination that was most relevant to the action performed, regardless of other rolls made during the scene, and the widest set was used, usually against some sort of defense roll on my part. We modified the bonuses and penalties chart from the book, which only vaguely connects character action with temporary changes to companies, making it like skill buys: 1 success for a +1 on the next company roll using that quality, 1 success for an Expert Die on the next roll, and 5 for a Master Die.

3) Making company rolls less frequently and more judiciously. There was some talk of company rolls at the end of the month, but this didn’t work with our game’s timeline. Instead, we tied them to major events in the story. It looks like the final session will culminate in an attempt to frame the Senate as traitors during the coronation, with the House of Thalmir (the PCs’ company) “conquering” the Senate (in a mechanical sense), in order to assure stability for the city of Vigil. Everything up to that point will be setting up or furthering that goal.

4) Mark inadvertantly cheating like crazy. It didn’t guarantee he won every time, and his dice were certainly nicer to him, but it reduced whiff and made for an excellent story. I think the fact he and the others were pulling out all the stops to incorporate all the bonus dice possible overrode any concerns about bad math.

Can Reign work? Absolutely. Can it work as written? Not really. It relies too much upon assumptions regarding what a reader might already know about how to play an RPG. It’s definitely the product of one person’s mind, and it shows. If there was more explicit discussion about how characters and companies interact and less content about martial arts and giant monsters, Reign would be a much stonger game.

Regardless, we all seem to be enjoying our game, and I think we’ll be able to draw all the threads to a satisfactory conclusion in our fourth and final session in two weeks’ time.

2006 was the year I really got back into tabletop gaming. It was the year I played my first indie games and went to my first GenCon. Since then, I’ve played with a lot of awesome gamers (although not as many as Ryan Macklin), and I’ve played a lot of games. However, I’ve realized there are a lot of great folks out there I haven’t had the chance to play a full game with, and there are a lot of games I haven’t gotten the chance to play yet. (Demos don’t count for either.) As such, I’ve put together a list of folks I’d like to game with and another list of (finished) games I’m looking to play. This isn’t to say I don’t want to play with folks I’ve played with before – I sure do! – and there are a lot of games I want to play again (and again and again), but variety is definitely the spice of life – and of gaming.

If you’re on this list and want to game with me, give me a shout and tell me what you’d like to play (and it needn’t be on the list below). I’m starting to get into Skype gaming more, so that’s always a possibility. Another is GenCon – I’m not currently scheduled for anything, and I won’t be, except for some possible playtests (of Seiyuu and others’ games).

If you’re not on this list, tell me who you are and what you’d like to play (again). Thanks!

Gamers (in alpha order)
Vincent Baker
Rob Bohl
Storn A. Cook
Ewen Cluney
Ron Edwards
Ken Hite
Judd Karlman
Jeff Lower
Steven Marsh
Nikki Marsh
Joshua A.C. Newman
Clyde Rhoer
Rich Rogers
Josh Roby
Jared Sorenson
Brennan Taylor
Paul Tevis
John Wick

Games (in alpha order)
Breaking the Ice
Burning Wheel
Capes
Dirty Secrets
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
Full Light, Full Steam
Grey Ranks
Houses of the Blooded
Inspectres
Mortal Coil
Mutant City Blues
Princes’ Kingdom
Shock: Social Science Fiction
Sons of Liberty
Steal Away Jordan

Those who know me know I have a love/hate relationship with superheroes, so you can imagine my discomfort with Hancock. If you haven’t seen it yet, I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice to say, the film has a bigger identity crisis than the protagonist. I’ve read about last-minute rewrites and reshoots, and it shows. I want to like this film, and I think the leads perform quite well, given the material they have to wade through, but ultimately it’s a very conflicted film.

Reading about it has made me think of something, though – something to hopefully deal with my own conflicted feelings about the film: I want to run or play a PTA game about superheroes, with one major caveat: no onscreen superpowers. I want a PTA game about the issues of superheroes, where all of the incredible powers stuff happens off camera. I want a game about what happens after the Justice League saves the world and has to go back to their secret identities – or better still, what happens after they come home having been unable to save everyone. I want a game where powers can’t save you from yourself or how you relate to other people.

My question for you is: who’s interested in doing this with me?

For some time now, I’ve really wanted to design a logo for Seiyuu, something I could use as an icon for journal entries, if nothing else. I considered just finding a suitable font and putting together something simple, but yesterday, I took a different approach.

First, I played association games between what the game was about and what the title implied – things that have to do with being a seiyuu. Then I tried to represent what that meant with a simple image. I had a little sketch of a voice actor’s head in front of a microphone, with the word “Seiyuu” traveling between the mic and a picture of a face on a screen (the character being dubbed). Although I liked that, I just don’t have the art skills to realize that vision, and I’m not in a position to pay anyone for such a drawing right now.

But that lead me to consider incorporating some of this imagery into the actual lettering of the word “seiyuu.” Bingo! The “i” becomes a microphone stand, with the “dot” being the actual mic itself, and the “y” becomes a voice actor with arms outstretched, performing into the mic. I have the roughest of rough sketches in front of me now, but no real way to scan it and post it, which is probably good – I can try to mock up something more professional before I post anything. I think I’ll make the figure chibi/super-deformed, with anime hair (wild hairstyle and odd color like blue) and upside-down u’s for eyes (that anime style indicating eyes squeezed shut with a smile). The rest of the lettering would be rounded and three-dimensional – puffed up but not fat – in a bright color (probably red), like the Japanese characters for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya title.

If anyone would like to take a crack at this before I maul this with my limited artistic skills, let me know!