Maid RPG, of all things

You read that title right.

I successfully hosted a game of Maid: the RPG last Sunday. It was a strange and terrible thing.

Let me start by saying that I am not an otaku, or a weaboo, and I don't understand much about this strange anime-worshipping culture. I really don't. I don't see the appeal in discussing waifus or pillows emblazoned with anime girls or the obsession with pop music specifically from Korea or the prestige in watching cartoons specifically from one country of origin or the entertainment to be derived from arguing about one type of cartoon to the next.

I like Dragon Ball Z and Spirited Away and Samurai Champloo; I also like Aladdin and Wall-E and The Hobbit [1]. I like a lot of things. I don't see the need to obsessively devote yourself to one facet of entertainment; then again, I've squabbled over roleplaying systems for years now, so what do I know?

Anyways, since I don't understand or particularly like weeb stuff, I changed the setting. Instead of playing maids in a setting I don't understand, I decided they'd be playing temple attendents in a setting I do understand: the Fantasy Craft setting I'd been with them in for half a year now.

Instead of the Master, there was the High Priest- a 50ish year old sorcerer-priest.
Instead of the Mansion, they stood on holy ground; the great Temple and its Heart, always to be kept clean and in working order.
Instead of a maid uniform, they wore temple garb; robes, shoes, a hat, and a symbol of priesthood.

It worked pretty well, actually. The game itself is about attempting to flawlessly serve your master and be the "best maid" by accumulating the most favor, so it could ostensibly work for a number of settings; small military units, or pirate ships, or a necromancers' servants, or bureaucratic office drones or even standard adventuring parties, where the Party Leader is the master and the Mansion is the Dungeon and instead of keeping it clean they need to kill all the monsters and take all the loot.

The party dealt with:

1) Waking up late and a grumpy High Priest
2) Messing up the first attempt at a meal
3) A young temple attendant eating most of the food
4) A troublesome young lady who insisted on seeing the High Priest (who did not want to see her)
5) A surprise torture chamber discovery
6) One of the attendants (same one) playing with the implements and nearly getting a visitor hurt
7) Running out of bread and having to travel to the town to get food for the visitors before the High Priest finished his invocation
8) An irritating imp, who had to be abjured away
9) A dinner that was spilled on the ground and a small cake that was ruined

It was an eventful couple of hours! The rules are nice and simple and the action flowed, largely due to the way stress and abilities interact; every roll is 1d6 x your attribute and if you lose a conflict you take stress equal to their roll result divided by your attribute, so it really stacks up pretty quick and when you suffer your Stress Explosion (by getting more than your Will x 10 in stress), then for that many real-life minutes your maid must constantly be acting up. Some of them will become violent, some of them will race, some will go shopping... the list is tailored towards some sort of anime emulation but with a little inventiveness you can tailor the experience a bit more. I should have done that, now that I think about it.

So even though I know nothing about whatever sort of fiction it's supposed to be emulating, Maid RPG is a pretty tight little system, even if it is absolutely horribly written. [2] I'd play it again, but one of my regular players really wants to get back into Fantasy Craft, so we'll just dive back into Maid another time and see what happens at the end of the day!







[1] This one, please. Not that overblown ode to mediocrity that Peter Jackson produced.

[2] The "fluff" that takes up most of the pages is written by what I imagine to be some sort of 13 year old girl on a sugar rush from too much Pocky, one eye on Gaia Online and the other on Naruto. It's some of the worst published writing I've seen in my entire life and its purpose is a mystery to me. Nowhere in the lengthy fluff does it provide any useful examples of the matter at hand (which is simple enough not to need an example)- rather, it seems to be one long "session report" except that it is very clearly written by one person pretending to be multiple people. Did I mention it takes up more room than the rules do yet? Because it does. If you buy Maid RPG you are buying 1/3 fluff by volume, with the remaining 2/3s being largely random tables. If you cut out the tables and the fluff you are left with a one page RPG system.

Guardians of Middle Earth

Picked up Guardians of Middle Earth today, since it's free for those blessed subscribers of PS+. From what I understand, it's a Tolkien-themed "MOBA", which is cool. Wander back and forth an arena vaguely reminiscent of your standard fantasy landscape, beating down endlessly spawning hordes of goons while your enemies do the same. Sounds like a decent way to spend an hour or so.

Just a couple of things before I begin, though. One, MOBA is not the name for a genre, and anybody you've ever heard using it needs to stop. Seriously, it really needs to stop. This type of game is, according to your preference, either an action-RTS, an AoS (short for Aeon of Strife, one of the more popular custom maps in Warcraft III), or a dota clone. You're not allowed to make up genre names because you don't like the ones you've got. Metal Gear Solid claims to be "Tactical Espionage Action" but it's got a genre: Third Person Stealth. So fuck League of Legends for making up the worst genre name ever. Really? Multiplayer Online Battle Arena? Come the fuck on.

Anyways, Guardians of Middle Earth is a fairly standard DotA clone, with a couple of neat twists that I'm really enjoying so far.

First, and least important, is the grouping of the heroes into useful "Tactician, Warrior, Enchanter, Defender, Striker" instead of the tired "DPS, Healer, and Tank." But Nick, you might say, aren't they the same thing? Count again, my friend, and grab a seat while I explain.

Tacticians are a sort of supporty DPS. They have a lot of variety in what they do and how they fight. For example, Gothmog wants to utilize his seige equipment (catapult, battering ram) to smash his enemies. And he's got a bigass morning star to really bring the hurt. But Nori is more of a team player, buffing up his enemies with his abilities and debuffing his foes. He doesn't do much on his own. Felgrom is a tactician, too, but he's more of a direct "Let me explode everything" kind of guy. Using his abilities takes tactics because you'll kill yourself otherwise.

Enchanters, they're really more spellcasters than anything. You have Gandalf's generally melee-ranged buffs and debuffs, Lugbol's fiery effects, Ori's close-ranged lorecraft. They like to be casting spells and have generally poor melee abilities. Again, generally. Where Agandur has a pitiful strike, Gandalf's sword and staff are actually fairly good.

Strikers are your regular damage-dealing fighter chaps. Bilbo Baggins, Haldir, Gollum, and Legolas make appearances here. They're pretty straight-forward; they want to surprise you and then make you into a pincushion.

Warriors are incredibly variable and make up the largest category, being everything from Thrain's hammerfest to Ugluk's gentle ministrations of whip and sword. This is kind of the catch-all category for heroes, but I think it's fun. They all play extremely differently.

Defenders are like Warriors but they heal, usually. Highlights include the Witch King, and the Great Goblin.

Anyways, all of the heroes have a great art style. It looks a lot like the movies- thankfully more like the latest Hobbit movie than the 2000 Lord of the Rings trilogy. Check it out: Gandalf looks like Sir Ian McClellan, and Legolas looks like Orlando Bloom. Arathorn looks kind of like Viggo Mortensen, which is weird but it would be his in-character dad (I kind of look like mine, too) and also Viggo kind of looks like a regular dude anyways so that's fine. A land of Mortensens sounds reasonable enough. The Great Goblin is directly from the movie, which is really awesome and the Witch King is too, but it's done in such a way that everything kind of fits together. The bad guys are bright and colorful and mean looking, and the good guys are wearing vibrant golds and greens and everything looks great, even when scaled down massively to get everything on the screen. I actually wish that more guys from the movie were here, like that metal-handed dude that rode the wolf everywhere. You know what I'm talking about, you saw that movie.

Moving is left stick and aiming is right stick.It's really quite easy to use, and means that you hardly notice the lack of mouse and keyboard. Your ranges are shown clearly, and the weapons have a bit of AoE to them, meaning that you can cleave hordes of baddies with your weapon if you angle it right. It's extremely satisfying and it makes you wonder why it hasn't been done before.
The rest of the controls are similarly obvious, with shoulder buttons to smack people around, or use "commands" (read: summoner spells from LoL) and the face buttons use your spells. The minimap is kind of hard to make out,  but serviceable and the spell effects are actually pretty subtle. I really dig it, I can't lie, and the little touches like the scrollwork on the targetting circle and the stylized arrow symbol for the towers shooting is kind of fun. The bushes, while a little silly, are much less silly than in the obvious inspiration, League of Legends, since they're put in places that make sense and it's really more of a thicket than knee-high brush. If you gave me some shubbery roughly seven feet tall, I bet I'd be a bit hard to spot as well.

The towers are upgradeable and so are the barracks, and with the complete lack of money that means the only thing you lose is time and also the irritation of having to go back now and again to re-do them if somebody changes them or you level. Oh, right, did I mention that there was no money? There is a complete lack of that, which is actually really good in terms of play. Farming is important only for experience, and there's no double-dipping if you kill somebody. You slay somebody, you get experience and they have to wait to respawn and then run back. It means that there's always the possibility of coming back if you're careful and if you play well.

Matches are short and about as soon as they start to drag, they're pretty much over. I think that the monsters and shrines really help. If you've got nothing better to do, you can go beat up a beastie, get a boatload of experience, and be stronger. Or you can capture a shrine, to make the fight in that lane go a little easier.

Now the downsides. The servers are apparently pretty slow; I thought it was just my connection, but on the forums there are numerous complaints about it as well, so keep that in mind. In my time playing, I've already been dropped three times.

Additionally, there aren't very many heroes around- not really a problem, since the ones that exist are so well designed, EXCEPT there are micro-transactions. So if you aren't willing to pay money (and an admittedly smallish amount at $2 per hero, but still, c'mon), you're locked out of half of the heroes. The Great Goblin, for example, and Bilbo Baggins. I can't imagine what they were thinking. I know it's not exactly a competitive game, but flat out disallowing heroes for no real reason is really annoying. Just make them really expensive and then give me the option of real-money unlocks, at the very least. I don't mind making 1.5 Middle Earth Bux per hour, because I'm playing anyways. I'd play if I wasn't getting "paid," because that's what you do when you like a game. But don't make me unlock gems and heroes and everything else and then go "oh yeah, by the way, you have to pay me for these ones." No, fuck you.

Seriously, the amount of unlockable things is a little silly. In another obvious "inspiration" from League of Legends, they've decided to let you customize your hero with Gems or Commands or potions that (you guessed it) get bought with the same money that you're trying to unlock new heroes with. I don't really mind, since at least this time you're actually able to unlock them with the money you get for playing the game, but it is, again, kind of annoying.

But, in case you can't tell, I'm kind of grasping at the periphery of the game here. The game itself is polished, fun, and really pretty. It was free for me (and for you too, if you have PS+), but normally it's $15 on the Playstation Store. If you have the XBox for some reason, I guess that's like 15 million MS Points or whatever. You do the math.

But I am recommending it. It's as good as you thought it was going to be. Maybe actually better.

DUSTFORCE

Last night I played Dustforce until my fingers started to ache. My wife had gone to bed, and I'd have stayed up playing if I could manage to flex my fingers fast enough to get to the next level.

I couldn't help it. I was in the game's grasp. I was in the zone. I was running upside down over walls, zooming through bizarre enemies and over spikes. My character, a blue-clad janitor with a corn broom, was engaged in a midair ballet that I was the sole conductor of.

Let me explain. Dustforce is a fast-paced speedrunning platform games from Hitbox Studios, released sometime earlier this year. And it's glorious.

It goes like this: You're in charge of cleaning up around here. The mansion is full of dusty gargoyles and filthy servants who wallow in their own muck, the forest is unruly with leaves, and there's an alarming layer of slime on everything in the laboratory. You've got to jump, dash, double jump, walljump, and cling onto the ceiling like spider man in order to reach that dust. In order to get the very best Completion score (rated from D to S, in typical video game fashion), you've got to get every bit of dust. Yes, even the stuff on the ceiling covered in spikes and only reachable by a split second double jump dash. That's the point. If it was easy, they wouldn't need the Dustforce after all; they could do it themselves.

But it's not just about being thorough. You have to be both thorough and fast- and here's where the brilliance comes in. You have a limited amount of time to keep your "combo" going. Each bit of dust you sweep up gives you a point, and each strike you land against your dust-animated foes gives you a single point. Take too long getting the next point, or get smacked by an enemy, and your combo goes down the drain. In order to get the highest Finesse rating, you're going to need to complete the entire level without missing a bit of dust, in a nearly continuous path, without getting hit or landing on spikes or falling down any bottomless pits.

Obviously enough, the game isn't designed to be easy. Completing any levels beyond the first few takes multiple tries, especially when you're getting to grips with the controls. You will take a dozen tries to get your first double S rating, and you will start getting mad at the game. But the calm, tasteful electronic background music helps. So does the gorgeous, clean visual style. So does the fact that you're well aware the level is completable, if only you'd have done better. And that's the real fun of the game.

Dustforce is a game that knows you can beat it. You've got all the tools, and you can watch other people beat the same level you've spent the last half an hour trying to get right. So you do, and you pick up a trick or two. Then before you know it, you've mastered half a dozen levels, it's midnight, and your fingers ache like the dickens.

The only problems I've spotted so far is a tendency to get a bit slow on some levels, without any real indication of why. Sometimes turning off graphics options helps, and sometimes it doesn't seem to do much of anything. Some levels do lag, even with the graphics options all off, but not all the time. It's probably a problem with my aging computer, I'll admit, which is why it's hard to bring up. But it's there, and if you experience it like me, there's not much you can do about it except suck it up and bear it.

In addition, there's not a single hint of storyline. I can presume that the Dustforce is a team of janitors, because that's what they look like and they are doing a suspicious lot of cleaning. But it's not readily apparent why the dust animates gargoyles, or why slime animates televisions, or why it's important to clean up the leaves in a forest. I mean, you'd think you could just leave those there- it is a forest, after all. But where some people may be frustrated by a lack of purpose, personally, I'm happy there are no cutscenes, or poorly written dialogs. The only characters in the game will state a sentence when you walk past them, and nothing else. There are no quests, no items. No important NPCs. No questgivers. Dustforce has a laser focus on what it does. And luckily for it, what it does, it does very well.


No question about it: Dustforce is one of the best games I've played this year. Pick it up. You won't regret it.

SUMMARY:

GET IT IF: You like platforming games, speedrunning, or challenging gameplay
PASS IF: You're looking for plot, don't like platforming, or are easily frustrated
LI RATING: 9/10. GET IT.

Dungeonslayers! A Review

Last night I ran (and tonight I will run again) a rip-roaring session of Dungeonslayers. It's a great game, and I highly recommend it for your rules-light fantasy roleplaying needs. It's about 10 pages long, with a handful of 2-4 page supplements that flesh out the game rules in beautifully worded and laid-out text that is both concise and interesting. It's available for free from http://www.dungeonslayers.com/, as a pdf download.

When you cut out the portions of the rules that deal with Equipment and Spells (a single page each), or the introductory adventure in the back, you have a game that clocks in at perhaps five pages. I printed it out, read it over, and we started making characters.

The character creation is both differentiated and meaningful, with players choosing one of three races and of three classes, both of which are easily modifiable. The races have a tiny handful of advantages and a +1 to one of maybe three abilities each, so the difference in play is miniscule. It doesn't seem like Dwarves get enough of a benefit in my opinion, but nobody's really power-gaming a system like this to get the Elven +1 to nimble things racial trait, whatever it's called. If you want to be a Dwarf, then be a Dwarf. Furthermore, Dwarves can't use two-handed weapons or longbows which upset one of my players, who chose to be a Dwarf Spellcaster. No quarterstaffs? What, they only come in one size? We decided that he had a Dwarven Quarterstaff, kept exactly the same stats, and went on our ways.

Classes are similarly easy to understand. You're a Fighter, Scout, or Spellcaster, and you get another +1 in a related ability. Your class affects what talents you have access to and when, and what abilities are easiest for you to level up. Your Talents are little perks that you gain access to as you level, like having a Familiar or getting a bonus to damage. All the Talents are flavorful and interesting, with only a couple of relatively lame ones that could be easily modified (What do you mean Familiars can't be scouts?) to suit your own personal preferences and desires. That's the point of the game, right?

Characer abilities are seperated into Attributes (which are Body, Mind, and Agility), and Abilities (which fall under the headings of one of the attributes, two each.) Your scores for things like Hit Points are Body + Toughness + 10. It's quick and easy to set up your character's abilities. The system is roll-under 1d20, say, Body + Strength to succeed at knocking down a door. A single die roll does just about everything.

Picture not related.

Combat is quick and painless, with a lot of missing on either side, at least for starter-level characters. I ran a combat last night where the goblins all missed, every time they attacked but it didn't really matter. Each goblin got a single roll, each player got a single roll, and that was that. Goblins aren't exactly known for their toughness or durability and, truly enough, they were all dispatched with a single successful attack. The really interesting thing is the way damage and attack are rolled on the same die- you want to get as high a roll as possible, but still under your ability so there's always a feeling of "Oh, I just missed em!" which is exactly like real fighting. When you go for the haymaker, you'll either knock 'em flat or whiff hard, and that's what it feels like. It's breezy, exciting, and visceral.

And I think that's Dungeonslayers' greatest strength: Things move extremely quickly, but satisfyingly. Everything is one die, rolled underneath your Attribute + Ability, with all the trappings of D&D but with the complexity of every edition filed off. This game moves extra, extra quickly, and that's great if you're the kind of spontaneous, seat-of-your-pants kind of guy that likes a light system that breezes through everything. It's all just one roll, the same roll, all the time. By the end of the night, my players were guessing what rolls they had to make to do things, and then making them before I even said anything, and that's yet another strong suit.

The other thing I really like is how much easy to digest crunch is in the game. Some rules-light systems feel to generic, like there's nothing weighing it down- the stats aren't interesting, or the rules don't click together in that nice way. Dungeonslayers knows who it's targeted at, and it shows. Spells feel Vancian without being Vancian, fighting is quick and dirty with lots of room to improvise (want to make a flying jump off that bandolier? Sure, roll your Body + Reflexes + Attack Value instead of a regular attack and we'll see what happens). In short, it's a truly excellent game that I wish there was more of. The expansions, also free, add a couple of interesting wrinkles, and the only bad thing I can say is that there really isn't enough of this tightly-designed, truly exceptional game. And did I mention it's free? Download it today. You won't regret it.