dulydude wrote:we kind of de-reailed the campaign when a robot rocket punched another robot through a building, and left the appartment block in ruin
heh. First rule of GMing: No plan for the story survives contact with the players.
I somehow didn't manage to mention Tenra Bansho Zero. It's arguably scifi ('legends of the oni say that all humans on Tenra came from beyond the stars' and the original capital was 'a mountain floating in the sky, with a bridge reaching from it up to heaven'), but the world is much like the Japan of the (semi-) historical anime. Never-ending wars between rival daimyo, guns, ninjas, etc. The real scifi chunks are the Yoroi Armours (UK spelling intentional there), controlled by a young, innocent child, cybernetic replacement parts, and total cyborg conversions of the dead. Imagery-wise, think 'Samurai 7'.
One interesting feature of TBZ is that it's designed to tell a complete story in ~6-8 hours. It's not really intended for a regular campaign game, meeting once a week or even once a month.
The entire game system is based around ideas from kabuki theater, and you get aiki chits
from other players for spinning a cool scene (Kinda the opposite of Exalted or Scion, where the Storyteller gives you a bonus for cool storytelling). The GM can give aiki points as well, but that's usually for 'dragging' a player into a Scene, either as their own character or to fill in as an NPC. During the Intermission between Acts, the players can then convert these aiki chits into kiai points, which can be spent during the Scenes to buy outright successes, increase their skill level, take another action, or a couple other things that escape me right now. The catch is that every kiai point you spend becomes karma, and if you
exceed 108 karma points at the end of an intermission, your character goes nuts and becomes an Asura, driven by your desires. Yup, the GM takes the character away from you and it becomes a monster. To prevent becoming an asura, you need to sublimate your Fate(s), which is a mechanic that represents your character growing and changing driving goals of the personality (which happens during the Intermission). Oh yeah, and you start out with a good chunk of karma to begin with, usually between 60 and 90 karma.
A character with a high karma (~90) at the start of the game is stronger, can do more stuff, but can't spend much kiai to do epic badassery. A character with 'low' karma (~60) isn't as big a mover or shaker in the world, but can do a lot more to create their own legend during the game by spending kiai.
The catch is that there's a decent bit of math involved in the game in figuring your kiai score and then your karma. So if you can't do simple addition and subtraction in your head, TBZ probably isn't for you.Character creation involves selecting one or more archetypes. Each Archetype comes with a skill array (with pre-set skill levels) and at least one Fate, as well as a karma cost.
Game uses d6s, and potentially LOTS of them. One example from an actual game has a character rolling two attacks, one with
30 bonus dice(!) and the other with 20 bonus dice (example I'm talking about is on page 68 of the rulebook). Skills rank from 0 (noob) to 5 (legendary and then some), and your skill score is what you need to roll on or below to succeed on that die. Musashi has Swordsmanship 5. Himura Kenshin is 'only' Swordsmanship 3 (Skilled) or 4 (Expert/Master), but he spends a lot of Kiai in combat performing badassery. Your Attribute determines how many dice to roll (and you can add more dice to roll by spending Kiai).
I'm hoping to be able to run a game of TBZ sometime soon.
Posted: May 7th, 2014, 7:45 pm
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