Seiyuu: The Big Three

Crossposted from Ready, Fire, Aim!

What is your game about?

Seiyuu is about anime - Japanese animation – where the players take on the role of seiyuu or voice actors. Each player speaks for one main character and possibly additional supporting characters, as those characters journey through the story of the movie, OAV (Original Animated Video), or full anime series defined during the first session.

What do the characters do?

The characters strive to resolve their issues – goals, motivations, or other factors that drive them through the story – as well as attempt to answer the central question of the show, the premise. Successful characters are likely to gain the closure they desire for their issues, as well as possibly reach a happy (for them, at least) ending.

What do the players do?

Each player controls the action of one main character and may control the actions of supporting characters over the course of play. Each player is striving not only to resolve their main character’s issues satisfactorily but also control who gets the final word on that resolution. Equally, players are trying to resolve the premise of the show, as a group, and define its resolution, as individuals.

These may sound a bit lame, and that’s to be expected – the Big Three are harder to answer for a generic game than a specific one. (I’d love to read Matt Wilson’s answers for Primetime Adventures, the single biggest influence on Seiyuu.) However, I feel pretty good about the grasp I have of what I’m trying to accomplish, as will hopefully become apparent in upcoming posts.

Please feel free to criticize or deconstruct my answers or ask follow-up questions.

Decommissioned

Decommissioned (D-Com) is my first game design. It’s a one night sci-fi game with a small number of players and a GM. I submitted the original draft as an entry for Game Chef 2007. It was fun to design and I like some of the core, but the game is very incomplete.

The Player Characters (PCs) are robots called Battlebots. They were manufactured to wage endless war at the behest of planetary corporations against other planetary corporations’ Battlebots. What makes the PCs special is that they decide to leave The Compound and stake out on their own, knowing this spells their doom.

Once a Battlebot leaves The Compound, the administrators of the facility, known as the Tech Masters, pop the Killswitch on that unit. Once activated, the target Battlebot begins to degrade quickly, giving it scant hours until they lose all functions and cease to exist.

Most Tech Masters take an extra step to ensure that the Battlebot is Decommissioned. They gather the Battlebot’s former team, advise them that a former must be destroyed, and pop the Killswitches of that team, promising to reverse the process for them once their mission is complete.

The game is created to last an exact number of hours or less, based on play.  I did this for a couple reasons: to give it a pick-up feeling to be used when nobody wants to get into a campaign but wants to play something in a short amount of time and to avoid the trap of players not wanting to create a character just to play through several sessions and watch them die.

The current questions I have about the game are as follows:

1. Difficulties for actions will be from one to ten (except completely insane actions, which would be an eleven).  That means if a GM wants to imagine how tough something would be, they just assign a percentage value to it.  That just doesn’t feel like enough of an explanation to me.  How should I give GMs and players good descriptions on difficulties?

2. The game will move very fast (there’s a version where you play in an hour).  What can I do to help GMs think on their feet and push scenes to quick resolution (not mech resolution, that will be a later post)?

3. What should my Battlebots look like?  A completely human looking android? Something akin to the Battle Droids of the SW prequels?  Maybe the robots from I Robot the movie?

It’s All About Me

Wow, Rich is a tough act to follow. Here goes!

The Basics

My name is Matthew Gandy. I’ve been watching the MM site on and off since shortly after GenCon, but I haven’t been in a position to jump in until now (more on that below).

I’m a 34-year-old software tester for a Yellow Pages publisher, and I currently live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I have a Master’s degree in LIberal Arts, which is really only useful for stuff outside of work, but all of my technical knowledge is self-taught. As I’m fond of telling my coworkers, I know just enough to be dangerous.

My Stress

At work, we are in the middle of a massive software release, and the company I work for has lost over 90% of its stock value in the last year, due to the economy and industry-wide problems. This translates less into worry for job security and more into realization that we have a lot of work to do in the next few months and no additional resources with which to do it.

Also, I am in the last few months of an amicable separation, leading to a divorce in July. I mention this not for sympathy, but because this and work are the two largest drains on my time and energy for the next few months. This is my stress.

Me and You

I’m a big fan of audio in general, and podcasts in particular. As such, I’ve listened to Have Games, Will Travel since GenCon ‘06, the Sons of Kryos for slightly longer, and more recently Canon Puncture and Master Plan. Indie Insurgency is in my queue, but I haven’t gotten to it yet, and I’ve a long backlog of Theory from the Closet. I’m hoping to start my own podcast on anime in the coming months.

I got to meet both Paul and Jeff Lower at that GenCon, although I don’t think I’ve roleplayed with either. (I did play Bang! with Paul.) Also at GenCon ‘06 I had one of the most painful dinner conversations I’ve ever experienced – with Clyde. (I am so sorry, Clyde; next time, let’s talk about games and not personal politics!) I think I’ve gamed with Rob at some point; I know we talked about early MY mechanics at Dreamation ‘07. At GenCon ‘07 Chris convinced me to let him playtest Seiyuu with Andy Kitkowski and Lenny Balsera, and it was the longest and most in-depth playtest of the game to date.

Chris and Ryan are also on my Gmail list. Since this is the only effective way for me to IM while at work, feel free to drop me a line or chat there – my handle on Gmail and LJ is semioticity.

My Gaming Pedigree

I started with D&D as a wee lad, before my parents forbade it, not for worries of demonic sacrifice, but because it was eating up too much of my time, even as a preteen. I came back to gaming a few years later via the Palladium line: TMNT, Beyond the Supernatural, and Robotech.

I’ve been gaming with Fred Hicks since junior high, and he got me started on Champions and later GURPS Supers. I wasn’t even a comic-book fan at that point – the game got me into comics, rather than the other way around. We lost touch during college and reconnected about five years ago.

In the meantime, I went the whole White Wolf route for most of the 90s, before I discovered I didn’t actually like vampires that much. My trad gaming culminated with Exalted, after which I broke up my dysfunctional gaming group and didn’t play anything consistently for about two years. During that time, I found indie games, and I’ve never looked back.

I’ve played two MMOs for the past few years – City of Heroes and World of Warcraft – and they’ve eaten a lot of my time. WoW is why I didn’t try to join MM earlier – I was in a raiding guild until last week and very busy for the past six months or so. I blame my lack of enthusiasm for trad games on WoW - when I sit down to play, I want a storytelling experience. If I want a tactical RPG experience, I can play WoW.

After GenCon ‘06 I decided I wanted to be more involved in the local gaming scene, especially as the Durham 3 hail from the city next door. There are a lot of excellent gamers in the area, and I’ve had the opportunity to game with most of them now. My only regular tabletop group is run by Andy Kitkowski, but I’m about to start another one, as well as get in some Skype gaming with Ryan and Lenny.

My Play Style

What I look for in most games now is the chance to make interesting choices, usually through the medium of a character. I’ve spent so much of my life GMing that I’m trying to (re)learn how to be a decent player. (Ask Andy how I’m doing on that front.) I think gaming can be therapy as much as escapism, but I don’t tend to connect my personal life or ideology to my characters as much as I just try to play them as honestly as possible. I dislike just playing through an environment – I want to get straight to the juicy bits: character interaction and conflict. Everything doesn’t have to be conflict, but I don’t want to feel like I’m in a computer adventure game, exhausting the dialogue options with the NPCs or waiting for the next cutscene.

My Game: Seiyuu

I am a gigantic fan of anime, which is why my game is about just that. “Seiyuu” is the Japanese word for voice actor, and in the game, you create an anime show (movie, OAV, or series), create the characters, and play through the story.

I haven’t addressed the Big Three with this game in more than a year; I might do so again soon. I’m hoping to have a very rough playtest draft ready in a week or so. As soon as I do, expect to see it posted.

Most of what I am looking for from other Master Miners is help with mechanics and structural problems. I know what I want out of the game, but I am very weak on designing mechanics, so I will be looking for ideas and suggestions to solve those sorts of problems with my game.

Currently, the game uses one deck of regular playing cards for all resolution mechanics, and most other elements of the game are tracked on index cards.

I anticipate the final product will be half game mechanics, so you can play the game, and half discussion of all the various intricacies and conventions of anime, so players have a big box of tools to build any anime they might want.

My Contributions

What I tend to bring to the table in terms of comments are conceptual and linguistic concerns. I worry when folks don’t have a solid sense of what they want out of their game or seem to be unsure about what their game offers players, as well as nitpicky focus on the naming of things. I think it’s important; feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

I try to be careful about how I post (again, linguistic concerns), because I am always trying to present constructive criticism. I’m fairly tough-minded, so don’t pull your punches with me, but if I’m not pulling them with you and it’s an issue, just let me know.

See you in the Mines!