Are there any large mechanical, or thematic differences between Western made table top rpgs and Japanese ones?
I've been looking for something a bit different to play.
Thematically, they're all very animey. Heavy influence from JRPGs and such.
Mechanically, 90% use d6s only and they're often VERY gamey. Not necessarily crunchy, but very "rules centric" if it makes any sense, even the rules-light systems.
>>47587253
We have d20. They have SRS. Both are shit.
As for differences, it's rather difficult to evaluate, since only a scarce few JTRPGs have been translated.
From what I can tell, there is more of a focus on structured sessions, with less emphasis on player agency and more on everyone fulfilling a more or less predetermined role. So it's less about the "what" and more about the "how".
The JTRPGs we have are all very different, so it's hard to find any commonalities.
Tenra Bansho Zero has a very out-there setting, in-depth rules for various character archetypes and mechanics for going through an entire character arc in a single session.
Golden Sky Stories is diceless and eschews adventure completely in favor of solving little everyday problems in a quiet backwater Japanese town as animal spirits.
Ryuutama is another feelgood RPG. It's about regular travelers instead of adventurers and heroes and makes travelling just as dangerous as fighting a monster. Its special feature is a GM character with clearly defined ways of influencing the PCs' actions.
Make You Kingdom is a very game-y and wacky dungeon crawling game with Kingdom building elements. Rather formalized gameplay.
Maid RPG is... Maid RPG. It's a lot of madcap nonsense and never intended as a "serious" RPG.
Double Cross, Night Wizard and Log Horizon are all SRS games, if not in name, then in spirit. They each try to be different, but they all have poorly thought out rules, hyper-specialized characters and a power selection with plenty of repeats.
Not played most of these games, but I've read most of them.
Tenra Bansho Zero - Set up sort of like a kabuki drama and has an interesting thing that if you care "too much" about something, you go full on Darth Vader and turn to the Dark Side. So eventually, you're going to want to decide to "not care" about getting revenge on someone who killed your father. Meant to be OTT super anime awesome bullshit. I'm into the world, not so hot on the rules. One Shot did a game of this that's meant to be great.
Golden Sky Stories - I have a hard time thinking many people on /tg/ would be interested in playing this "properly". It's basically "My Neighbor Totoro: The Game". Probably great if your group was into anime and/or you might run games for kids and wanted something "safe".
Ryuutama - My personal favorite of the translated games. It's specifically created to help newbies learn to GM/play, so if you have friends who want to learn to GM or are turned off by your standard fantasy games, this would be a great one to introduce them to. Though it's "kid friendly", it's not a "kiddie" game. If you want to emulate something like Spice and Wolf, Final Fantasy (Crystal Chronicles and FFX are particularly on-point), or even Oregon Trail itself, this is perfect. The game is absolutely brutal in that sense. It's nicknamed "Miyazaki's Oregon Trail" for a reason. Even assuming you're not really into anime or JRPGs, it has no set-setting, so you and your group can build something more fitting of your taste - even if that ends up being grimdark.
Maid - Pure slapstick anime bullshit. (Lewd optional.) Random tables 5ever. Fun if you're in the mood for it, but it's generally KEK oneshot material. Pitch it as such.
Meikyuu Kingdom - Lots of random tables. Don't expect pure player agency, but if you don't mind the tables taking away your agency, it's somewhere between a parody dungeon crawl and a kingdom sim. Fun, but you have to know what you're getting into.
Japanese games today are probably about as diverse as Western games were up until the post-Forge explosion started really breaking open what games could do and how they could do it. For a lot of their history they could probably be best summed up as "GM-mediated freeform with a combat system," and which the flow of the game was largely influenced by a player understanding of genre conventions that they were designed to emulate. Very trad, though with an occasional outlier or really cool idea here and there. The majority of games were about setting-appropriate adventurers going on setting-appropriate adventures, and for the most part there wasn't much messing with that form for the first decade or so.
The other major paradigm to emerge was a more structure-mediated kind of game, things that might be described as very boardgame- or video game-like, where how and when you are supposed to do certain things is governed by an overarching structure and a set of procedures that you are suppose to follow (at least ostensibly; there is still room for breaking with the structure as long as it makes things more entertaining). This may be most notably prominent in the games of Kawashima Toichiro (Satasupe, Meikyuu Kingdom, the Saikoro Fiction line), but also can be found in a lot of doujin games as well.
Total lack of druids.
>>47587555
>>47587963
>>47588815
Hmmm, fascinating. Does any one of these games dominate the market the way D&D does here?
>>47590774
In a way.
See the comparison d20 and SRS.
The major difference is that there is no "main game" of sorts for the SRS, so it's just a heap of half-cooked "original" games and licensed drivel.
>>47587555
>Ryuutama is another feelgood RPG. It's about regular travelers instead of adventurers and heroes and makes travelling just as dangerous as fighting a monster. Its special feature is a GM character with clearly defined ways of influencing the PCs' actions.
Tell me more about this, it seem super interesting.
>>47590774
Some old standbys like Sword World and Arianrhod definitely way outpublish other games, but probably not to the level that D&D is practically synonymous with roleplaying games in America for a lot of people.
>>47591423
"Tell me more" is such a broad thing.
What are you particularly interested in?
>>47590774
IIRC, the closest Japanese equivalent of D&D is Alshard, but none of the Alshard editions have been translated to my knowledge.
>>47591423
I guess I'll give it a whirl, then.
Ryuutama is a collaborative, RP-heavy kind of game. The gist of it is that a bunch of seasonal dragons gave birth to the land and the weather, and special dragons called ryuujin follow around travelers writing down their adventures as bedtime stories for baby dragons. Ryuujin have different types (game modes) with different abilities that they can use to make the game more interesting. I've had some GMs that narrate from the GM's perspective, others that include them subtly as part of the game, etc. It's my favorite mechanic in tabletop right now.
The flow of gameplay is very slow, but deceptively lethal. If you don't pass your check to travel safely? Lose half your HP. Don't pass your map check? You could end up in the same place you started that day, only you might not have enough food to make it to the next town. Every check is roleplaying time, too, so the majority of gameplay is comfy adventuring, like climbing trees and helping animals out of traps.
>>47588815
>The other major paradigm to emerge was a more structure-mediated kind of game, things that might be described as very boardgame- or video game-like, where how and when you are supposed to do certain things is governed by an overarching structure and a set of procedures that you are suppose to follow (at least ostensibly; there is still room for breaking with the structure as long as it makes things more entertaining). This may be most notably prominent in the games of Kawashima Toichiro (Satasupe, Meikyuu Kingdom, the Saikoro Fiction line), but also can be found in a lot of doujin games as well.
The way sessions tend to have a formal structure can actually be a big help in encouraging good practices which many DMs never learn, in encouraging communication between players, and ensuring that no one hogs the spotlight.
At least, that's how it looks in Tenra Bansho Zero. Most JRPG fan-translations don't make this stuff very clear, or skip large sections of the books entirely.
>>47595723
That sounds great! Where can I score an English PDF of it? Also, what's its learning curve like? Could I pick it up, and have a gaggle of players able to play it that afternoon?
>>47590774
What's that pic from?
Please tell me there's an English pdf for Log Horizon.
>>47599153
mega dot nz / #F!KA1DHRRL!MGkoDoBdnehHG7D2iXOwXQ
>>47599153
If you want to pay for it, you can get it from their webstore http://kotodama.bigcartel.com/ or DriveThruRPG. They're great guys (both the two English translators and the Japanese dude who created it) so if/when you can, support 'em. The Japanese dude was able to finally marry his girlfriend (one of the artists for the game book) because of the English translation, and that hit me in the feels.
To answer your question, though - Yeah, I'd say you could get a game going the same day. It's pretty straight forward and easy to pick up. There's a Roll20 series of it on Youtube that's pretty good if you want to see it in action. (There are also more game play videos too, most of which are good.)
Anyone here played Shinobigami yet? (I know the translation isn't official yet. Still asking.)
>>47601015
Waiting for the final product at this point
>>47599282
There's a fluffless translation here - I suspect the project is dead so don't hold your breath for the fluff though.
http://log-horizon.wikia.com/wiki/Log_Horizon_TRPG
>>47601716
Yeah - I can understand that. The only "rough draft" I've played is Meikyuu Kingdom. And only because that could be solo'd relatively easily.
>>47587963
Did meikyuu kingdom get translated?
>>47604620
There's an English fan translation, yeah. Should be the first result on Google if you search for "Meikyuu Kingdom fan translation". And I know the Japanese books are in the wild of 4chan because that's where I picked them up myself.
Not sure what happened to the official English translation. But am on the lookout for them getting things all sorted so I can buy legit.
>>47599153
The learning curve is the best of any RPG I've seen so far. The two sample scenarios are designed specifically to introduce the game mechanics to both GM and Players step by step.
>>47604800
The official English translation consisted of an announcement at Essen and then nothing.
As far as I know, the company that made the announcement doesn't even exist, because the only mention of them to be found anywhere is that one announcement.
>>47605866
These are just rumors, you understand... but based on rumors I heard the Japanese company that owns the Meikyuu Kingdom license was dragging their feet over approving the English translators' translation draft. So they're stuck in limbo. That's the last news I heard and I heard that like a year ago.
>>47605941
But why are there only rumors? Why does Lanternworks Unlimited have no presence whatsoever? Why has there never been so much as a single life sign?
>>47605999
No idea about why they haven't even bothered setting up a Twitter account. I know they've hung out on /tg/ before to answer questions - that's how I got most of my info about the translation at all. It's really freaking weird. I don't even think they hang out in the translators group I look at. You'd think they were ghosts.
>>47606036
>only information comes from anonymous imageboard
Yeah, I have a distinct, inexplicable feeling you might have been rused.
>>47606117
Could have? They were fielding a sort of Q&A over a couple of threads. I guess someone might have been bored enough to pretend to be Lanternworks and make up information about the translation and their tentative plans for Kickstarter, a G+ group, printable minis, whether or not certain loli-type images would be in the English version; etc.
>>47590774
Not a .jp but Call of Cthulhu is REALLY fucking popular over here right now.
>>47600841
>The Japanese dude was able to finally marry his girlfriend (one of the artists for the game book) because of the English translation, and that hit me in the feels.
He's great. Been to his place in Kanda, Nice play space. (room with tables you rent to play RPGs and other games).
>>47606260
Considering our community, I definitely wouldn't rule that out.
Got links to archived versions of these threads?
>>47606036
Most of the people supposedly involved are self-important circlejerking SA forum members. For a while they would cryptically post about it there but even that thread went dead a while ago I believe.
>>47606385
I found one of them here: https://warosu.org/tg/thread/27941565
Pretty much passing out right now, so too sleepy to bother digging more.
I just remember in one of these threads there was a serious shitstorm over the idea they might change the art, even if they commissioned the original artist for the new pieces.
>>47606502
Also - not entirely surprised. I never got the impression they had their shit together and them hanging out on SA as opposed to a more open platform sort of underscores it a little.
>>47606289
>right now
CoC has pretty much always been popular there, which, given the circumstances, makes sense, but still never fails to elicit a little bit of surprise from me.
>>47606729
The big thing that makes me annoyed is people left in this limbo of "Should I start fan-translating any more MK content because what if it actually comes out"
>>47607641
It's never going to come out, just like we can't expect any more DX3 books. There is no real uncertainty.
>>47607875
In that case, I'm annoyed that it deprived us of a better fantranslation with the fluff translated and perhaps the splatbooks content because it made the original fan-translators lose tempo
>>47607939
Welcome to the world of localization.
Just be glad we didn't get something like Tales of Hearts R.
throughhim and Kajitani were merrily working on a translation of the original ToH for the NDS, then we got an announcement that ToHR for the Vita was coming to the West.
The people working on the project were all like "can't interfere with an official localization" and put it on hold.
And what did we get?
Complete and utter shit.
Bamco outsourced localization to some cheap fucks who translated the whole thing from a spreadsheet without touching the game, knowing anything about the series or even just giving a fuck about internal consistency.
Every skit contradicts the main story and the written dialogue contradicts what's happening on the screen and a few seconds later even itself. When it came to gameplay, they were just making wild guesses.
And because of that shit, we can't get a proper translation of the game.
Gonna quote an old archived post for that one:
>the design of many Japanese TRPGs is informed by an extremely important fact which is often lost on Westerners: the Japanese don't have time. They're just too busy. They cannot afford to spend an entire evening playing TRPGs, at any point in their lives. While at school they need to study, when out of school they need to advance their kiroshi so they can get a heart attack at 28 and leave the life insurance to their wife.
>This is why Japanese TRPGs make such heavy use of pregenerated characters. This is why they're so railroady. This is why their adventures tend to be so short. This is why so many books include mechanics to regulate PLAYER TO PLAYER interaction, which is considered so avant garde in Western games - without a mechanic to limit the number of Monty Python jokes around the table you're consuming precious, precious playing time.
>That, and filling half the rulebook with replays. No idea why the Japanese do that, but it's a big thing there.
Let it die.
>>47587253
Being cute has large bonuses, those who are not moe, kawaii or yaoi/yuri-bait receive large penalties
Another important difference is that, until recently, Western RPGs assumed people would be finding them through the medium of fantasy literature. It's only fairly recently that they began operating on the assumption it'd be through video games (and thus changed some details in order to appear more approachable to gamers).
In Japan, it's always been the default assumption that you're gonna get into TRPGs through DragonQuest. Hence the similar mechanics, setting, character concepts, etc.
>>47608233
>This is why so many books include mechanics to regulate PLAYER TO PLAYER interaction
I've never seen a single game that does this.
>>47608457
Have you read a SRS system? Double Cross, for example, has Loises, and that's a completely central part of the game. Loises regulate both player-player and player-NPC interaction, and it's pretty unambiguous.
>>47608457
Ryuutama gives dragonlords an entire list of "semi in-universe" spells to basically fuck with players who disrupt gameplay (stuff like "if a player falls asleep during the session, their character discovers that last night they lost their wallet" or "if a player makes a stupid joke a fairy comes out of the nearest bush and slaps them for so and so damage"), Maid RPG has a lot of mechanics interacting with real life (Stress Explosions are timed using an actual stopwatch, for example), TBZ and GSS have mechanics requiring the players to be nice to each other, Blade of Arcana (IIRC) requires the player to physically throw another player a token/card which has to be caught if they want to transfer XP, etc.
>>47608469
>>47608545
Right, I guess I should have said I've never seen a GOOD game that does that.
>>47608595
>I was only pretending to be retarded!
>>47608595
What is a GOOD JTRPG by your definition then?
>>47608595
Double Cross, in spite of having messy rules and a bad translation, is a pretty enjoyable and coherent game. There are a lot of power overlaps, and it's very gamey, but if that's what you like, it's a fun game.
The combat system is solid and the setting gives a lot of opportunities for different types of games - it gets downright CoC (as expected of the Japanese) if you get into the higher power levels, and even at the lower power levels, it can be played as everything from Civil War over Darker than Black to a Silver Age DC comic.
It might be that you're buttmad at the idea that the Japanese make games that dare to be different from the games you're used to, but some of us do really enjoy things you don't like.
