to play naruto (spoilers!)

Following this, I am thinking on how good it sounds to play a low level Naruto campaign...

But better so, inspired by naruto, but my own thing. The main reason is because the actual anime canon is too good to manipulate in a meaningful way, and I don't want to doublecheck information on the wiki about clans, dates and facts. 

I have actually some sketch of the rules. You start doing low level ranked missions at the start, as members of a ridiculously small clan, village or reassembled group. The main catch is that I want your character to be expendable, and to have the "ninja village" grow during the game, in the style of Blades in the Dark. Better ninja villages mean better starting characters, and the possibility to play during an overarching plot. I want parties to eventually include ninjas of different tiers: masters, students, legends alongside rookies, focusing more on deceit and tactics than in shonen powerups. I am rewatching the series and I really enjoy watching the Akatsuki (like the baddest ninjas you can find) being still cautious about an ambush in the woods, or being mindful about the money (both personally like Kakuzu or as a group like Pain). I loved when Jiraiya turned a giant frog into a bar called Frog Club in order to set a trap for two minions. And I love the overlapping bijuus, cursed seals, elemental techniques, mantles, special eyes and all. All those concepts are great and I want to use them, but, in relationship with the appropiate canvas (a tabletop RPG), there are some points that are so broken:

1 The Sharingan. A "just opened" eye with the sharingan can see chakra and genjutsus, physical movements at any speed and allows the user to copy them instantly. Also has the power to cast illusions and compel targets who look at it. And this is all the first level of many broken shit (mangekyu, rinnegan, etc). Like what the fuck, its really hard to manage this shit for a  GM. 

2. Genjustu battles. D&D fixes this as "you are stunned for 1d4 rounds" or similar. But in naruto, genjutsus are special, each one of them and ask to be played in. Sometimes, at least. They allow the user to draw information from the victim, or to speak to them apart. There are whole battles in mindscapes. But finding out you are in a genjutsu is also part of the concept, and that becomes harder to do, mostly when they target one member of the party and you are narrating to all of them. 

3. Shadow clones. They are easy on the surface: create X clones, say what they do. You wait until an enemy strikes you to reveal that he attacked a clone and that the real you is attacking him... just to see that he was a clone too, and the real one is behind you. Repeat. Something inside me thinks that it would be better to play that in reverse: Do not care about cloning yourself before the battle: just spend something to reveal it was a clone all the time. Same for the NPCs. The whole anime seems to work on retroactive logic, actually. 

4. Battles sometimes become kaiju fights alongside person fights. More rarely, a person fights a kaiju. Maybe is not as hard to portray as it seems, and its just giving those crazy abilities and tons of HP, but still.

5. The most broken shit, hands down, is those scrolls. Fuinjutsu: the ability to seal any kind of shit, of any size or nature, inside a piece of paper (technically, sealing spirits or monsters is also possible if sealed into persons or other living matter). Stealing a 50x50x50 meters statue from a musemum is easy if you take some time to draw some seals, unfold a parchment and cast some jutsu (it will make an audible "poof"). This makes characters able to carry virtually anything they can come up with: a canoe, endless shuriken, 10 tons of water, a house; make a legendary object dissapear by sealing it into a roll and tossing it down the toilet... In the series, there is no limits on how much they can hold. The chakra is spent sealing the objects, but not releasing them, so you can use them all in the same battle, providing you spent downtime preparing them. And if downtime is in practice infinite on the inside, so are the potential scrolls. 

 Am I being too much a pussy? Am I too scared of it? Maybe. What do you think?

 

 

Catching pokemon in a pen and paper game

Related to this and this. If I am using tamed monsters as a magic system, there has to be a way to catch them. Or not? I am very confused about how to do it. 

On one hand I have the analogic ways:

Getting into the wilderness (aka the tall grass)  until a monster pops up, then catching them with a pokeball equivalent. This works perfectly on the videogames, but I see how it can become tedious on a tabletop. Grinding a place to find one pokemon that one player happens to want makes all the other players who dont have anything to do at that place just stop and watch the show. If I do it too easy so the pokemon is catched fast, its almost the same as giving the player the monster straight. 

An even more analogic version of this is if the monsters are not catch with pokeballs, but convinced to follow a leader by actually roleplaying and discovering the monster's motivations or personality. This is great to have sometimes, but having it as the main point of the game for sorcerers and not for the rest of the classes might make them absorb a lot of game time that is not spent doing teamwork. It is also difficult, as it might seem easy to bond with a pikachu in game, but other monsters can be a challenge for the GM to roleplay in this manner.

A middle option is to make the player roll their pokeball or do their talk no jutsu once per downtime or so, allowing retrys once some time has passed.

The more boring option is just to give the players pokemon on level ups just as if they were magician spells. They can select from a random heap of them (whatever invocation scrolls are available on the local library, or whatever local pokemon are on the nearby grass), maybe adding any monster they met on their adventures to the list of possibles. This removes the need of doing all the work in character, though still the first options can be used for legendary or special pokemon. But something feels bad about taking from players the experience of catching their rattattas.

This opens the problem of that players catching their pokemon diegetically advance more than those spending their level ups on them. Its easy to fix, though, by making those diegetical ones "temporal" until the next level up, and then requiring the player to spend the level up "keeping" them just as if they were their downtime catch. This can apply from cosmic monsters who manifest as spells to a plain dog who is an animal companion. 

As an addendum, there is something I don't like about Naruto's summoning: Servant animals are supposed to be someplace when you just "teleport" them into battle or whatever. This is ridiculously easy to break by PCs in order, for example, to send real-time messages through them as they dispell the summoning; and you run into the risk of summoning a sleeping dog at night or summon a giant toad at the moment he was sitting on the toilet taking a shit,

 

 

 

 

 

rpg design tips I heard somewhere.

 

 

1. Have a setting, as to write the rules around it. Do not be as lame as to make a generic ruleset and then put a setting over it. 

2. Evoke the setting. Make it as tangible as possible through description, implied descriptions, tables, clichés. Tangible is better than sensible. 

3. Do not write optional rules; make the effort to choose the best option yourself, you are the designer. GMs do not like having to decide that shit. Players in general are not dumb and will homebrew their own rules eventually if they don't like the established ones.

4. Make it so the players have either a long or short term goal right at the start. A good long term goal will make the players decide a first step towards it. A good short term goal will unlock new goals by its pursue and/or its resolution.   

just some album i made at home

in spanish :/ 

What binds the party together?

Over time, I've realized that there is a great advantage for everybody implicated on a campaign when the PCs party belong to an established group in-game, with an implied goals and sometimes, even a roster for backup PCs.

On our cyberpunk campaigns, it was the gang. Everybody starting as gang members gave you a drive and an identity instantaneously, leaving your character background story for whenever you wanted (or never). You never had to think about why your character was adventuring with the rest of the party (even though you could if you wanted). Blades in the Dark is built on that, too. On the game I wrote some days ago, PCs are assumed to form a group of Vampire Hunters.

They are not as evident, but Shadowrun and OSR D&D work nice for that, too: Your character starts as a gold seeker first, background second. It is very easy to work a game with no preemptive thinking as long as you start the game in the door of the dungeon (One of the best advice I've ever heard). By the time the party has reached town/downtime, the characters and the dynamics amongst them will be fleshed out organically. The world is designed so shadowrunners/adventurers are a thing running around the setting, so restoring a lost member is an easy task for the players.

Now that I think about it, on our Naruto campaign, we started as a team of three under the tutelage of a Jonin NPC, and our master started the game during a ninja exam. It was one of my first games and I roleplayed my ninja girl trying to go home until the teacher set a trap on her hahaha. 

On the opposite side, I remember the Usagi Yojimbo campaign I ran where I was fucking autistic trying to make sense of every single detail and had a session zero with all the players separatelly where we created the character, back when it wasn't called session zero yet. It was an awesome campaign that I wish I had made some kind of log. I used the old technique of putting the players on a tavern and dropping a hook and hoping they picked it. What got me in love with Pen and Paper RPGs back then was the idea of a Video Game with unbound freedom to do whatever you wanted, and if they had chose to ignore the hook and walk out the inn in the rain I was devoted to make it possible, but Im glad they didn't.

To summarize, the thesis is that the less background, and the more the characters are defined by their role instead of their personal idiosincrasy, the easier it is for the GM and players alike to start a campaing in a meaningful direction, leaving the rest for a second or third sessions where the inertia has already put the game in motion.

Crime Gangs, Esoteric Cults, Brotherhoods against a common evil and Public Officers of some kind are good examples of groups that work nicely (and D&D raiders count as crime gangs I guess). I'm set on running a fantasy game with no dungeons someday, playing into the medieval/court life part of medieval fantast, but I have trouble imagining what kind of elements for party cohesion can I make up, being that things such as a wizard doesnt fit into a group of knight retainers... IDK. Its not that its really needful: we are adults today and I can just make up missions, point my finger at the player and say: "take the hook, motherfucker" but you know, I always spend time thinking about things like that. 

 

 

 

VS THE VAMPIRE LORDS (a one page rpg)

 

Something I sent to this game jam to make me write a little. The game is here. You can see many of the last year's entries condensed in that single page, Of course, it is not tested, its written in just a couple of nights as a test, but I'm actually very happy with it. Google's AI helped me with one of the last letters, can you guess which one? Answer in the comments! 

Into the Odd + Pokemon = Into the Oddish

Something I found out that somebody else is doing,

 

 The only page I have seen from the rules. I love everything about this. 

 

 this third party blog is recruiting people to write the whole 151 pokemon + all the moves. I'll try to contribute if I get some time