Anime Archetypes

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Wed May 11, 2016 11:48 pm

So I've been thinking recently about what classes and what kind of resource systems different anime archetypes would have in a tabletop system. What kinds of things do people like to see? I'm an anime fan but I definitely have my own preferred genres and stories so I don't think I can do everything justice by myself. I'll toss out a few to establish format, and then anyone who wants can post their favorite archetype or just one that hasn't been posted yet. So you've got:

The Brawler. Whether they use martial arts or just face punching, these guys solve all their problems with fists to various faces. Shows like Ranma 1/2, History's Mightiest Disciple Kenichi, Fist of the North Star, Yu Yu Hakusho. Probably uses some kind of rage bar, seeing as how they usually trade lots of attacks before going for their finishers.

The Ninja. More single characters than series (though a few exceptions) they often have supernatural sneaking skills and fight with daggers and tricks. Black Star (Soul Eater), Hanzo (various), Kaede Nagase (Negima), Levi Kazama (Trinity Seven). Maybe some kind of round to round refreshing energy? Or a mana bar if you're going full Naruto style.

Priest/Priestess. This one is kind of all over the place. They have purification abilities, but outside of that they have a grab-bag of stuff depending on their specific series. Rei from Sailor Moon has psychic stuff, Kagome from Inuyasha has magic and archery, Reimu shoots a lot of fairies in the face.

Big Guy is with Me. These people are special for only one reason: they have a bigger friend they can call on to fight for them. Narukami Yuu (Persona 4), JoJo (JoJo), Joey (Heroman). They're basically Pathfinder Summoners, and that's good because that class is pretty fun.

Esper. The Japanese are pretty big into psychic stuff, so a lot of anime has psychic stuff. Akira, Ghost Hunt, and a bunch of other shows are all about various takes on psychic abilities. Generally Japanese psychic stuff seems like at-will things mostly, you never really see an anime psychic "run out" of mental juice.

Obviously the list is missing a ton of other archetypes. Anyone else want to add a few?

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Thu May 12, 2016 12:04 am

Given that I've put an embarrassing amount of thought into this I'd say most anime characters are best simulated by a mix of at-will stuff plus drain for the big stuff. Anime characters rarely act like their basic abilities are a finite resources or that they are "unable" to pull out their big guns whenever the need to, they are hesitant to use those abilities rather because they are meaningfully weaker after they've used their best trick. That's why characters of equal power sometimes spend alot of time throwing lesser abilities at each other because the guy who lays down their trump card first is fucked if it doesn't work

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Thu May 12, 2016 12:10 am

It depends what kind of anime you watch, what with "anime" just being a medium and not a genre. So there's "Ninja" (which might mean Naruto or it might mean Ninja Scroll or it might mean Boobie Ninjas (two separate anime and I can't remember the actual names) or La Blue Girl and Karakuri Ninja Girl).

Then there's "Magical Girl", and the closest male equivalent is the Super Sentai thing (which is grounded more in live action) where you specifically have five people who have a group transformation less impressive than a Magical Girl one but they can summon robots. But even Magigirl covers a lot of different things from Madoka to Lyrical Naha to Sailor Moon to Boobie Ninjas (only one of the two shows, the one that gave them just about every type of power).

There's also Mecha Pilot, which typically is for anime that are about mecha pilots - you very rarely get an anime that is actually what BESM et al try to make available for a group of PCs, where one main character is a wizard and another is a kung fu master and another pilots a robot and another is a pokemon master. So usually if there's one mecha pilot, there are a bunch, and this covers a wide scale - Full Metal Panic! is the same size scale as Sakura Wars but a different power level. Mazinger and Getta-Robo and Gekiganger Z all work together. Gundam varies wildly between Gundam series. Then Gurren Lagann varies between "kind of silly" to "mine is biggest" within the same series.

...so basically, trying to make "an anime game" that covers "the stuff in anime" is not very useful. You should really look at a handful of specific anime that you want to recreate or steal from, then decide where to go from there.

spongeknight · Post by **spongeknight** » Thu May 12, 2016 12:21 am

Koumei wrote:...so basically, trying to make "an anime game" that covers "the stuff in anime" is not very useful. You should really look at a handful of specific anime that you want to recreate or steal from, then decide where to go from there.

All true, but Dungeons & Dragons gets away with drow and dueregar being completely separate and opposed races despite being the same actual thing, historically. I think you're underestimating how much people will mind caulk a kitchen sink setting into working how they want it to work. You just have to have something that is "close enough" to the kind of ninja they want to play and they'll fill in the rest.

Also, I think at least one of the Boobie Ninja series you are thinking of is Senran Kagura.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Thu May 12, 2016 1:43 am

Here are the ones from BESM/Anime d20

Adventurer

Magical Girl

Samurai

Dynamic Sorcerer

Martial Artist

Sentai Member

Giant Robot

Mecha Pilot

Shapechanger

Gun Bunny

Ninja

Student

Hot Rod

Pet Monster Trainer

Tech Genius

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 12, 2016 2:05 am

What about the Lecherous Mentor?

Tannhäuser · Post by **Tannhäuser** » Thu May 12, 2016 2:12 am

Koumei wrote:...so basically, trying to make "an anime game" that covers "the stuff in anime" is not very useful. You should really look at a handful of specific anime that you want to recreate or steal from, then decide where to go from there.

This is exactly my problem with every "anime" RPG ever. And I think that's a problem compounded by the fact that generic RPG systems are abject failures of design. So instead of aiming to make "Anime, the RPG", or even "Shounen Fight, the RPG", someone should make something specific, like Bleach or Dragonball or Naruto, although with a setting and player characters that support the way that RPGs actually play out. And a system that encourages players to support the tropes of that genre.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu May 12, 2016 2:15 am

At the very least, you could probably make the Shonen Jump RPG, which tries to support the various things that Shonen Jump has. It's still more than a single genre, but it's less than "EVERYTHING IN THIS MEDIUM"

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu May 12, 2016 2:35 am

Prak wrote:At the very least, you could probably make the Shonen Jump RPG, which tries to support the various things that Shonen Jump has. It's still more than a single genre, but it's less than "EVERYTHING IN THIS MEDIUM"

And even that doesn't work because the series in Jump aren't just "grunt like you're constipated/punch people with phlebotinum" like most people think; you have homoerotic sports manga and gag manga, sometimes a romcom.

You'd have to do something specifically like the Jump All-Stars fighting games, which means a basic fighting series with Anything Goes Martial Arts and some people/character concepts locked to assists. Or you would have to pick a series to copy directly, which influences design choices. This isn't really difficult, as when most people say "I want an anime game," they're sniffing around "I want an X-Men cartoon level supers game, with school uniforms as the style instead of spandex".

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Thu May 12, 2016 3:30 am

I think you could definitely make a generic 'heroic shonen' rpg, since there are lots of commonalities across shonen franchises regardless of whether the setting is supposed to medieval, modern, 19th century, some weird parallel timeline, or futuristic. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to run Bleach, Blue Exorcist, D. Gray Man, and Naruto off essentially the same core system.

And yeah, such a system is basically a Superheroes game with certain cultural variations, most notably the whole issue of the powers themselves is usually totally ignored with the muggles relegated to complete irrelevance.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Thu May 12, 2016 4:28 am

So I've been thinking recently about what classes and what kind of resource systems different anime archetypes would have in a tabletop system. What kinds of things do people like to see?

I figure it's better to approach the archtypes based on the genre and personality type of the character instead of their 'occupation'. Say, a mecha pilot can be a hot blooded Domon that powers up via yelling or he can be a Bernie that meticulously plans out exactly how he's suppose to use an outdated Zaku II to take on the latest Gundam. Shikamaru and Naruto are both ninjas but Shikamaru has a "just as planned" thing going while Naruto is more "grind you down and outlast you". So a list like...

You could just take that "X types of resource management" list and apply them to anime archtypes

For example, you could have:

Assassin

Warm up is the name of the game here. You have various abilities, but they require time to activate. You can do your basic super crossbow shot by giving up movement for the turn, but if you want to do your death strike, you have to give up an entire turn.

Berserker

Someone gets to have a Rage Bar, and the Berserker is a good obvious fit for that. Power up your super moves by hitting people and taking damage. You could institute a limit on sacrificing chickens to the Berserker by having fatigue set in a certain amount of time after the ragebar starts up.

Druid

Druids have always been way overcrowded conceptually, being everything from spirit shamans to nature priests to lycanthropic fighting machines. Here, we're going for the more "deals with nature spirits" end of things and less with the "bear warrior". You have a number of spirits that can aid you and at any given moment one of them is available.

This is like a Green Arrow WoF setup, where you randomly determine which spirit you get to use each round and that spirit comes with a fixed set of options. So if you get Thunder Spirit this round you can use any of the Thunder Spirit powers, and if you get the Oak Spirit or Wave Spirit instead, you get a different set of powers to choose from.

Hero

Someone is going to want a "simple" character where they can spam the same attacks over and over again if that is what they want to do. There does need to be an "everything at will" class, and I think the Hero is it.

Monk

Magical martial arts are based on the linking of stances and maneuvers. That is, you can spend an action to change to a new stance, which will give you a new list of maneuvers you can use. Kind of like a warblade, but the maneuvers you get each time you refresh are fixed to short lists, in order to make the mid-battle re sculpts take less table-time.

Necromancer

Incarnum was terrible, but many of the underlying concepts were not bad. Necromancers get a certain amount of Life Essence that they can route to various things. Basically this means that the army you can have gets bigger (and if you go for a big Diablo 2 style golem instead, that can be bigger) as you go up in level, and also that as your army (or bodyguard) gets more powerful you drain off your own ability to shoot black beams that kill people. Most importantly of all, it gives a solid in-character reason why your personal attacks are less level appropriate than those of the other characters when you have a skeleton army going.

Paladin

The new improved Paladin is basically a Crusader with more healing and protection wards. So you get a small deck-based WoF. Divine inspiration gives you a couple of choices each turn and you do whatever seems most useful at the time.

Psion

I am not a fan of spell point systems, but many people are. The Psion would get power points and use them to power their abilities. In essence, everything is available all the time, but there's a pretty short battery per encounter. Power Points would come back quickly with meditation. To balance this with the Wizard (see below), you'd give them less powers known and also give them few enough power points (and a steep enough cost curve) that they want to use their smaller powers sometimes.

Rogue

The Rogue is also nominally an "everything at will" class, except that all their tricks have trigger conditions (like Sneak Attacks requiring enemies to be flanked or denied their dex bonus). This means that while all of your tricks are theoretically unlimited, the actual class is fairly complex to play because you have to set up special conditions to use your stuff.

Warlock

You have big powers and small powers. The big powers all have Drain of various kinds, which makes you want to use them as close to the end of battles as possible. But you still have your eldritch blasts.

Wizard

The idea here is to do spell preparation, but to do so in a way that is less annoying than 3e's "prepare 30 spells and tough it out all day" version. With this you get a small pile of spell slots to prepare into, but you can prepare new spells between encounters. So it's like 4e in that you have what are essentially encounter powers, but unlike 4e in that that is all you have and that you can trade those out in a few minutes. When you run out of prepared spells, you can fallback on your cantrips and reserve spells.

Your "just as planned" observant genius type can use the 'assassin' mechanic where the longer you observe something (be they a person, place, organization, etc.) the more powers you get to use against them. This can be a criminal figuring out a way to evade the police or a ninja figuring out a way to lure his target to a battlefield he's already trapped to his favor.

Your hot blooded "communicate with fists!" character could be a hero if you want to keep things super simple, or berserker if you want them to have a transformation element, or use the 'warlock' drain mechanic if his ki blasts leave him exhausted.

Your student council president can have an array of minions to bring to the fight be they the reliable 'necromancer' mechanic, or the more random 'druid' mechanic.

This is really up to your preference as the game master and your player's preference as players. If it's a game of "everyone is a ninja" then you could have all 11 resource mechanics used to represent different kinds of ninja. If you have a hardon for power points then sure your Saiyans can use power point mechanics, if you hate power points then sure your Saiyans can use a drain mechanic, and so on.

Also note that Japanese tabletalk RPG's tend towards abstracted gameplay vs 'rules as physics'. Tenra Bansho Zero and Hunter's Moon/Shinobigami have more rules space dedicated players deciding the setting of the next scene and NPC attitudes towards them than "here's how to grapple vs large targets in the 6 seconds of a single combat round".

You can see an outline of how Hunter's Moon does it here:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56491

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Thu May 12, 2016 4:50 am

If you're talking shounen anime... dump classes, because the protagonist is THE EVERYTHING, and every PC at the table happens to be a protagonist (unless you're an ass and play favorites).

All shounen protagonists start with a "basic schtick" to angst over because they suck at it (they're actually generalists and will be able to do everything, they just don't realize this yet), and a "special snowflake schtick" which elevates them above their peers and marks them for greatness. Yes, this means The Protagonist doesn't play by the same rules as everyone else. So far, the only attempt at emulating this in d&d has been Pathfinder's Mythic rules, you should definitely check it for ideas.

Regarding resource management. Unlike comicbook superheroes who never run out of juice, shounen anime heroes do have "power points" and can run out of power... HOWEVER, they are also prone to get instant refills of both HP and power points whenever the drama gets high enough to make you choke (or every 10 minutes if you're running Dragonball or similar series where the fights last for-fucking-ever).

You can keep levels, though, since shounen anime is all about zero-to-hero. Furthermore, as the protagonist advances in levels, the protagonist tends to either steal their supporting cast's schticks one by one or get obscene power boosts at key points of the story; in either case, the result is that the protagonist is bound to render all of their supporting cast redundant and turn them into their ugly friends whose only purpose is to make the Protagonist look cooler by comparison.

Hope that helps.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu May 12, 2016 5:45 am

I'm amused by the "anime protagonists always have easily spammable resources", since Outlaw Star's protagonist is a sci-fi series where the protagonist has a gun that runs on ancient arcano-tech bullets that nobody knows how to make anymore and thus are stupidly rare so he only uses it when shit gets real, and every episode has a subplot of he scavenging the planet's cities for more ammo.

spongeknight wrote:
Koumei wrote:...so basically, trying to make "an anime game" that covers "the stuff in anime" is not very useful. You should really look at a handful of specific anime that you want to recreate or steal from, then decide where to go from there.
All true, but Dungeons & Dragons gets away with drow and dueregar being completely separate and opposed races despite being the same actual thing, historically. I think you're underestimating how much people will mind caulk a kitchen sink setting into working how they want it to work. You just have to have something that is "close enough" to the kind of ninja they want to play and they'll fill in the rest.

Touhou kinda already aims towards that.

Shrine Maiden? Check.

Magical girl? Check.

Gun bunny? Check.

Ninjas? Time-stopping maid specialised in knives is close enough. Check.

Vampires? Ghosts? Zombies? Spirits? Check.

Unarmed brawlers and kung fu specialists? Check.

Psykers? Check.

Big Guy is with Me? Extra checked.

Gods? Check.

Giant robots? Check.

There's also Knight Run, that's technically a manga series where humanity must face super space bugs with everything from mechas to psionics to robot maids to space ships to sword porn. Lots of sword porn in particular. But at one moment the main bladewoman protagonist literally goes "That super space bug is flying too high for me too reach, anyone with guns mind bringing it down so I can stab it with my sword? Kthnx".

Also Kill Akame just got a giant robot as the empire's supreme trump card.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:05 am

I've seen enough rule34 material to definitively say that people want to have Dragon Ball characters play with Sailor Moon characters.

-Username17

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Thu May 12, 2016 6:35 am

FrankTrollman wrote:I've seen enough rule34 material to definitively say that people want to have Dragon Ball characters play with Sailor Moon characters.

-Username17

In those situations, the DBZ characters are clearly the dominant ones

But seriously, Magical Girls (in the post-Sailor Moon world), Toku heroes and Dragon Ball shounen protags can be modeled as superheroes, or at least with the same system. Hell, Luffy is a lower powered Reed Richards without the tech, Goku is Iron Fist with a Hulk mode (Oozaru/Super Sayajin), the Sailor Scouts are basically element themed X-men, and Toku heroes are basically Spiderman with a robot. Japanese Spiderman straight up *is* Spiderman with a robot. The biggest series in Jump currently is literally a superhero series with Jump bits; it even cops American Cape Comic style.

The question really still comes down to if you're making an anime champloo or if you're aiming for a specific style. The champloo could use one or all our alternate resource systems.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu May 12, 2016 7:07 am

Anime, as opposed to manga, is not just superheroes, it's superheroes television as opposed to movies or comics. As such it has certain narrative beats. The protagonists use a series of regular moves and then use finishers in the final act, which implies Rage Bar, CAN, or Drain. Meanwhile the villains open up with something big and brutal to establish them as threats and then fall back on lesser attack so the protagonists can catch up - which implies Charges, Cool Down, or Power Points.

If you expand to talk about characters like Goku or Sailor Moon in other media like video games or written fiction, the beats would be different and the implied resource systems would be different. But if you wanted to do Sailor Moon as she appears in the anime in an RPG, I should think that Rage Bar, CAN, or Drain would be your best bets.

-Username17

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Thu May 12, 2016 10:40 pm

maglag wrote:Touhou kinda already aims towards that.

Gun bunny? Check.