The Gaming Den

If there has, please tell me what it is and why it's good.

If there is no good anime RPG, why do the ones currently out fail and what sort of things do you think is necessary to create a good anime game? Also, if "anime" is too broad of a concept for a single game, we can reduce the question to "what would be necessary for a good shounen-style anime game?"

I think Maid RPG is a successful "anime" RPG, if you don't mind the concept of basically being a harem anime. The mechanics work alright, work well with the conceptual space they're provided, and don't try to sell it as anything other than it is. That said it's not really suited for long-term games, as the end goal is to sacrifice your fellow maids to win Master's love, so you could consider it a failure on that point, depending on your yardstick.

spongeknight wrote:If there has, please tell me what it is and why it's good.

If there is no good anime RPG, why do the ones currently out fail and what sort of things do you think is necessary to create a good anime game? Also, if "anime" is too broad of a concept for a single game, we can reduce the question to "what would be necessary for a good shounen-style anime game?"

Maid RPG. It's a random-fueled MTP where everyone's an anime maid, and GM is your goshujin-sama. It's does a decent job of emulating a harem show one-shot, because no one takes it seriously from the start, and the entire game is basically MTP. You can still win or lose chargen (one PC is a childhood friend who's good at cooking, the other is a robot-necromancer), but no one's going to play it multiple times in a row.

Longes wrote:

spongeknight wrote:If there has, please tell me what it is and why it's good.

If there is no good anime RPG, why do the ones currently out fail and what sort of things do you think is necessary to create a good anime game? Also, if "anime" is too broad of a concept for a single game, we can reduce the question to "what would be necessary for a good shounen-style anime game?"

Maid RPG. It's a random-fueled MTP where everyone's an anime maid, and GM is your goshujin-sama. It's does a decent job of emulating a harem show one-shot, because no one takes it seriously from the start, and the entire game is basically MTP. You can still win or lose chargen (one PC is a childhood friend who's good at cooking, the other is a robot-necromancer), but no one's going to play it multiple times in a row.

Er... if the entire game is MTP, then it's not a game. By definition it's just magical tea party with some charts to generate things.

If FATE is a game, then Maid RPG is a game. If you don't consider FATE one, then Maid isn't. They have about an equal amount of mechanics.

Here is a list of ones I know of, but I haven't played them so I don't know how good they are:

Mekton Zeta
Fuzion
Sword World
Maid
Panty Explosion
OVA

I played Maid as a one-shot a couple years back, and can barely remember the mechanics. Everyone has a bunch of stats that range from 0-4(but IIRC at least one unless they take a negative modifier somehow), and actions are resolved by rolling 1D6 and multiplying it by whichever stat you can argue into being relevant, with a mildly difficult thing being difficulty 4. So courtesy of an online generator, I got a stoic raven shapeshifter with pointy ears who was really good at complex stuff and trickery and wielded a spiked chain and proceeded to spend the rest of the game as one of the small number of characters who mostly avoided harem-comedy shenanigans with the ten-year-old amnesiac archwizard with a drinking problem to fulfill the true purpose of the Astro-Criminology department trip to a museum (we had been watching Moretsu Pirates in the club).

Anyways, the default character generation tables do just toss out that kind of madness without intervention, and the mechanical system is acceptable for screwball comedy. Yes, characters can have numerical ranges of 1-6 or 4-24, but everyone is almost guaranteed to have a four in something, and the system means highly competent people do not fail on basic tasks.

Okay, so Maid is a good game for a comedy one-shot. That seems to be accepted. Are there any games that function for full campaigns with rules you actually care about?

Champions isn't specifically anime, but it works pretty well for shounen-style fighty-drama and you can run actual campaigns with it.

FATE, characters are driven by their ideals and beliefs, very shonen

In Nomine had a booklet for turning the Heaven vs Hell setting into an anime style setting.

It actually was pretty good. It built on a fairly solid game to begin with and intentionally added anime tropes and twists to the demons and angels.

If memory serves you got a bonus to hit someone if you shouted their name really loud when you attacked. It was so blatantly Akira that it was kind of awesome. It also covered turning In Nomine into a mecha war anime setting which to be honest kind of is a kickass idea.

There's a mutants and masterminds sourcebook called Mecha and Manga

No idea what it's like though.

3E D&D is pretty good for running some animes.

BESM?
Big Eyes Small Mouth
Or the recently reviewed Toyko Tank Police RPG?
The probability of there being a GURPS: Anime somewhere is pretty high as well . .

Hell, you could argue for shadowrun to be an anime RPG what with the cyberpunk/fantasy mix and surge giving you natural cat girls . .

ishy wrote:3E D&D is pretty good for running some animes.

Sure if you do Slayers

Stahlseele wrote:The probability of there being a GURPS: Anime somewhere is pretty high as well . .

It's GURPS Mecha specifically, although it does include material for some less specific anime tropes.

sigma999 wrote:

ishy wrote:3E D&D is pretty good for running some animes.

Sure if you do Slayers

I own that book: Slayer d20.

Koumei made one, and it works.
I have done serious math and shit on this and played it with people, and it works. There are only a couple moments when it breaks, and that is because it can't handle blood bullets from Kyoukai no Kanata, not because the system is bad. It is very simple, and it handles anime like a bitch in heat handles sex.

3e D&D is pretty anime, but it doesn't have throwing people through walls, and does not offer an option for leveling up halfway through a battle.

I don't know its rules well enough to know if it's broken or not, but I remember some fairly cool mechanics in Tenra Bansho Zero, which is pretty goddamn anime.

Negative Zero wrote:I don't know its rules well enough to know if it's broken or not, but I remember some fairly cool mechanics in Tenra Bansho Zero, which is pretty goddamn anime.

Want to try it out, love the artwork in it. The main criticism I've heard of it is it uses dice pools with variable TN's which makes calculating the odds for something get confusing.

Foxwarrior wrote:and does not offer an option for leveling up halfway through a battle.

I was thinking about that one time. If you wanted a shonen-anime-style resource mechanism, it might look something like:

* Characters have a level of skill / ability, but they also have a number of stages.
* At any time during a fight, you can go "up a stage", which will completely refill your HP, remove negative conditions, and give you large bonuses / better abilities. This might be a physical change, or it could be something like having a flashback and finding renewed determination.
* The amount of the bonuses depends on what round of combat you used it on. Someone who goes up a stage on round 5 has better bonuses than someone who does it on round 2.
* The bonuses for going up a stage are considerable; higher skill might, with luck, let you hold your ground against someone who's a stage higher, but not someone two stages higher.

So the to victory is mainly:
1) Having more stages than your opponent. Or ...
2) Having better skill/tactics and forcing your opponent to use up their stages before you use yours.

That seems like it would match how fights in that style tend to go.

spongeknight wrote:If there has, please tell me what it is and why it's good.

If there is no good anime RPG, why do the ones currently out fail and what sort of things do you think is necessary to create a good anime game? Also, if "anime" is too broad of a concept for a single game, we can reduce the question to "what would be necessary for a good shounen-style anime game?"

Tenra Bansho Zero is the most anime game I've ever seen and quite good in actual play too. It can't support more than 1-3 sessions depending on how long you play but that's a feature, really, because it makes character advancement blazing fast.

Leress wrote: I own that book: Slayer d20.

I've skimmed it. Didn't like it. They did some weird stuff with the magic system.