Two weekends ago I flew across the pond to Chicago to attend Anime Central, the third largest Japanese animation convention in the US. The convention has a surprisingly large tabletop games presence, with a whole corridor of conference rooms booked out for everything from Pathfinder RPG to Magic: the Gathering.

There’s a fair amount of overlap between fans of anime and tabletop RPGs, and nowhere is that overlap more direct than Maid: The Role-Playing Game. Japan has produced its own tabletop roleplaying games since at least as far back as the 1980s, but in 2008, Maid RPG was the first of those to see an official English translation.

It’s cartoonish, unpredictable, and sometimes—if you use the optional rules originally published in an expansion book—downright lewd. Critics have dubbed it “a joke RPG” and even the translator called Maid RPG a “goddamn weird game”.

And after some friends online convinced me to run a game over Google+, I wholeheartedly recommend that every D&D player and RPG designer play this game, at least once. Read on to find out why.

The Beast, the Robot and the Butler that Shouted or Maybe Didn’t Shout Love at the Heart of the World

When Google+ opened in June 2011, I was eager to be one of the first to test its suitability for tabletop roleplaying games. My friends from the anime community were early adopters of Google+ and I asked what they’d like to play. I assumed they’d pick some variant of D&D, but a certain other RPG topped the votes instead.

The Japanese have nineteen different ways to say, “I guess it can’t be helped.”

To understand what the anime community thinks of when they hear “maid”, watch a few episodes of a series like Hayate the Combat Butler. A wealthy master lives in a modern-day mansion with a staff of maids and butlers, who keep up a Victorian-era style of dress and manner of service that doesn’t exist nowadays outside of TV series like Downton Abbey.

The maids must manage assault from two fronts: unbelievable threats to the mansion like giant robot attack, and the impossible whims of the mansion’s spoiled master. Fail on either front, and you’re fired.

This is the core story of Maid RPG.

Why you should play it, at least once

Anime isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the hidden gem in Maid RPG is its simple, inobtrusive rules system.

It elegantly solves all kinds of problems that D&D players still struggle with. It’s beginner-friendly, but has enough optional complexity to keep players interested. Combat is quick, and rewards players for creativity and interesting character interactions.

The core gameplay, at least in the game as we played it, could be described as Paranoia meets Hayate the Combat Butler. Like Paranoia, the player characters are subject to the demands of a central NPC (the Computer in Paranoia, the Master in Maid RPG), and they compete with each other for his favour.

While nominally the maids are on the same side and must work together to fulfil the Master’s orders, in practice they’re rewarded individually and often arbitrarily, and sabotaging each other’s efforts is absolutely fair play. By the second session, my players were hiding their attributes and powers from each other, secretly poisoning food other characters made for the Master, and setting each other’s rooms on fire. At one point a PC literally decapitated another.

This brings me to one of Maid’s most excellent game mechanics. Instead of being killed and knocked out of the game when you accumulate too much damage, you suffer a “Stress Explosion”, a coping mechanism like “crying”, “alcohol” or “violence” which is randomly determined at character generation. For the duration of the Stress Explosion you cannot perform any action unless it somehow falls into the category of your Stress Explosion.

I utterly love this game mechanic, because instead of forcing you to sit the game out when you’re killed, you’re given the option to keep playing with a temporary setback that actually makes the game more interesting. What if all the bad guys are dead but you’ve still got ten minutes left on your “violence” Stress Explosion? Or how are you going to clean the mansion in time when all you can do for the next five minutes is “stealing”?

The core conflict resolution mechanic also rewards creative solutions. For any action contested by another player, you each roll 1d6 times any attribute that’s relevant to the action—say, Athletics for physical combat, or Skill for cooking. What counts as a “relevant attribute” is widely open to interpretation, and if you can describe to the GM’s liking how your character is winning a fist fight using housekeeping Skill to dump a barrel of laundry on the opponent, you can totally get away with it.

This is one of the great features of Maid RPG’s system: the player is rewarded for clever solutions, for imagination, and for interacting with the game world. There are no combat powers to pick from on your turn, so you’re free to decide your own actions intuitively instead of interacting with a thick layer of rules.

Another interesting game mechanic is the Random Event, where players can spend Favor (a limited XP-like resource) to roll on a random event table. This system has a lot of benefits: bored players can actually make something interesting happen, player characters in trouble can make a last ditch effort to escape, and players in general are given limited license to break free of the GM’s control of the game world.

Finally, as a system it’s approachable by newbies and veterans alike. Newcomers to RPGs will enjoy the lack of difficult choices in character creation (it’s entirely random) and in-game (there are few tactical options). There are no experience levels as such, so a new player can join an established campaign without a major penalty. It’s also very easy to learn: most of the 222-page book is optional rules, and the core rules could be condensed down to 20 pages, with most of that space taken up by the random character creation tables.

Is Maid RPG right for me?

Some people won’t like Maid RPG. They’re not secure enough in their masculinity to roleplay a female character in a frilly dress. They’re put off by the unrealistic anime-style setting, or the sample play-through where somebody steals another maid’s underwear, or the strange optional rules that let maids roll to seduce the Master for bonus XP.

Everyone else, I encourage you to spend $6 and buy the PDF of Maid RPG and run it at least once, even if only as a gag game for a change from Dungeons & Dragons. The lessons it has to teach us about roleplaying with our imagination instead of our rulebooks are invaluable.

If you’re actually one of the anime fans in the target market for this game, you’ll appreciate the mountain of included bonus content originally published in expansion books: rules for butlers (for squeamish insecure players), pages of random event charts (including “Mansion blasts off into space and the setting is now Science Fiction”), special items, alternate costumes, alternate settings, rules for random generation of masters and mansions, and really inventive scenarios.

If that’s not your cup of tea, with a little work the rules could be re-purposed to another genre, perhaps science-fiction or action movies. Just don’t let anyone say you aren’t man enough to roleplay a maid.

In this season’s Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, the Crawling Chaos of H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories appears as a cute grey-haired high school girl named Nyaruko who shows up to rescue a boy from a nightgaunt attack.

In episode 1, Nyarlathotep explains why she’s taken the form of a girl:

Mahiro: I’ve read Lovecraft’s books before, but I’ve always thought of you as more of a monster. Sometimes one with writhing tentacles, sometimes with a nauseating mist…
Nyarlathotep: If you’d like, I can take that form, but you’d lose your sanity.
There’s a closeup of percentile dice rolling on a Call of Cthulhu character sheet, and the character ticks off 24 points of Sanity.
Mahiro: I’d rather not lose that.

You can watch the first episode on Crunchyroll.com from Monday, or check out the Nyaruko animated shorts, Haiyoru! Nyaruani and Haiyoru! Nyaruani: Remember my Love(craft).

An alcove in the ruins of Nimrod Fortress, a mediaeval fortress in the middle east built in 1229. The bottom of this room is flooded with water.

Photograph courtesy of Uri Kurlianchik.

Shepard takes off his VR helmet and hands it to the arcade attendant.

“Thanks for playing Normandy! It’s one of our most popular VR games!”

Shepard nods and strolls back to his job at the food court.

You can’t easily recreate the same scene in 4th edition D&D. Instant kills are unpopular and combat tends to happen at short range. Still, it’s possible as a DM to create an encounter with long-range attackers.

Sniper as a warmage

The warmage was a concept formalized in third edition’s Complete Arcane. It’s an arcane caster who wears light armour and learns offensive and support magic through arcane military training rather than research.

Build such a creature by statting up a level 1 wizard with the war wizard build, using the quick NPC rules. Add some light armour to up his AC to around the average for his class.

The key here is to give him the Magic Missile spell, with an unusually long range of 20 squares or 100 feet. The latest version of this spell will only deal 2 or 3 damage, but they can use Stealth (given +6 from training and Dexterity) to hide immediately after they shoot, and a full level 1 encounter will have five warmage snipers working together for an automatic 15 total damage to one PC per round, enough to bloody a PC. If the enemies get close they switch to a spell like Stone Blood or scorching burst.

Sniper as rogue

The rogue (scoundrel) class can take the Sharpshooter Talent class ability, which grants +1 to attack and increases the range on a crossbow to 20 squares, or 40 at penalty. The advantage over the warmage setup is that they gain 2d6 bonus damage when they have combat advantage from being hidden, and they can hide every round after firing. For a rogue with 13 Dexterity, the average damage of 1d8+2d6+1 is 12.5 per hit.

The thing is, this might actually be very unfair. You’ve got an opponent 20 squares away that you can’t see, perhaps a team of five rogue snipers, and they’re hitting you for a third to a half of your HP per shot. The NPC rules allow it, but monster rules tend to hold to a certain balance.

Sniper as a monster

There’s no reason in 4th edition D&D to limit yourself to normal character rules for building opponents, even if your snipers are human. Simply start with any artillery creature of the appropriate level and work from there. Look for one that strikes at a very long range, and give it helpful terrain like a position atop a cliff. Count the terrain as part of the encounter XP budget, if it gives a strong advantage to the opponent.

Here are my top five problems that you want to avoid to make your site better than WotC’s D&D website.

Keep page load times to a minimum

Opera web browser has a little-known feature that shows you how much data. WotC’s site takes a whopping 2MB to load. If you felt like their site was slow, it’s because it’s transferring five to ten times more data than a normal website.

Even in this age of broadband internet, keep your webpage below 500KB, and ideally below 200KB.

Keep design uncluttered

In the late 1990s, the trend in website design was to cram as much content into the top of your page, on the mistaken belief that users don’t scroll down. The result was cluttered websites that make it hard for the user to find what they’re looking for.

Modern “web 2.0″ principles recommend a minimalist layout that helps the user find what he wants, rather than what the publisher wants the user to find. Nobody comes to a website to read advertising billboards.

Let your users stay logged in

When I visit the D&D Compendium to look up some monster stats, it logs me out after a day or two and I have to enter my username and password again. This is a very short time to keep a user logged in. Many popular websites allow you to stay logged in after a month or even more.

If your site has a login, let users stay logged in for at least a month, unless you’re running something high-security like a bank.

Readability is key

In 1999, the trend was to use small fonts, because they looked neat at low resolutions. Now, the average screen resolution has doubled and anti-aliasing makes bigger fonts look good. The average web user is older, and not all of us have perfect eyesight any more, but WotC’s using an even smaller font size than their own website 13 years ago.

Make sure your main article text is well-spaced, has good margins on either side and is an easy to read font size.

Group Initiative
Make a single initiative roll for the opponents’ side. Use the initiative modifier of the opponents’ leader or whoever has the highest initiative modifier.

Make individual initiative rolls for each player character. On a forum game, the DM can make all the initiative rolls to save time.

First, any PCs who beat the opponent in the initiative take a turn. They can act in any order.

Next, all the opponents take their turns.

Next, all the PCs take their turn, even PCs who acted before the initiative. Again, they can act in any order. Once all PCs have taken their turn, the opponents take their turn, and so on.

Advantages
On a forum game especially, you don’t have to wait for the person ahead of you in initiative order. Waiting is a bottleneck. When a player is ready to take his turn, you don’t want to make him wait, or he might not be ready when his turn comes up.

Characters with high initiative bonuses are still valuable, because they get a bonus turn at the start of each combat. This is really what happens anyway in normal initiative.

A character can wait for an ally to coordinate their attacks in the same turn. For example, a fighter can wait for the cleric to heal him before he attacks.

Drawbacks
The enemies all get their turn before any PCs can react. This can be dangerous if they gang up on one target.

Certain rules expect normal initiative, and you’ll have to improvise. For example, some D&D 4e monsters take extra actions ahead of their normal initiative count.

Feedback
What’s your experience with group initiative rules?

Then there’s this problem:

Woe betide the fool who ascends to godhood at a family reunion. Does your family worship you now?

“Please pass the green beans, Sun Lord.”

Awkwarrrd.

Link: 10 Epic-Level Problems Nobody Thinks About, via Critical Hits