Qin made the leap from French to English. There are many other good games out there (Alatriste and Aquelarre come to mind), but they lack an English translation.
Why not more translated games? Is it that expensive to hire a decent translator? Or is the licensing costs?
Also, what about PDF translations to other languages?
I have a hunch that some foreign language games don't get translated because the game it's self does not appeal to english speaking people enough to print.
Different languages create different scenes, different tastes make for different games.
Quote from: JongWKWhy not more translated games? Is it that expensive to hire a decent translator? Or is the licensing costs?
In my experience, it's a bit of both. On top of that, throw in "artistic differences" -- a game that appeals to players in one country may not appeal to those in another. Chaosium's
Nephilim leaps straight to mind, an immensely popular game in France that failed both to translate well to an English-language edition and to capture the attention of the English-speaking market. Other issues aside (yes, Chaosium's internal issues), it seemed like a good idea, but it lacked mass appeal.
Should mass appeal to new markets matter? Ultimately, yes. The game needs to pay for itself. It needs to pay for the licensing, it needs to pay for the translation, the editing, the art, the production costs, etc. It also needs to avoid or overcome differences in design philosophy and cultural sensibilities (something that
Nephilim definitely tripped over a few times). It's both a significant gamble and a bit of a minefield to navigate.
That said, bring on
Alatriste! I just wish I could bonehead my way through reading Spanish just enough to justify buying a copy. A quality translation into English would definitely draw my buying dollar.
!i!
To save a fellow poster from the chagrin of pimping his own project. (http://www.tenra-rpg.com/)
P.S. That marketing copy mentions it is the first Japanese -> English translation of an RPG.
Yeah, but if I recall correctly, Nephilim was considerably changed in the translation, the English version was VERY different than the French original.
I know that this was the case with In Nomine, which was a totally different game in English from the original.
RPGPundit
Quote from: blakkieTo save a fellow poster from the chagrin of pimping his own project. (http://www.tenra-rpg.com/)
P.S. That marketing copy mentions it is the first Japanese -> English translation of an RPG.
That's Andy K's translation project, right?
Quote from: JongWKThat's Andy K's translation project, right?
Yeah, and judging from the blog it looks like this is suppose to be a fairly close translation rather than closer to a rewritten game as were some of the others mentioned above. But with more background info for the NA/European audience that generally doesn't have quite the same level of knowledge of Japanese TV and myths.
Quote from: JongWKThat's Andy K's translation project, right?
Yeah, though frankly, I'm starting to disbelieve that it's ever going to come to fruition, and I'm also becoming increasingly concerned that it's going to come out leaning in a much more "storygames"/"Forge" direction, from the descriptions on the site.
Which will pretty much piss me the fuck off.
There's some very intriguing games available on the Japanese market, and I'd love to see them faithfully translated into English, but I'm starting to suspect that Tenra Bansho is not going to be an example of that.
Quote from: J ArcaneYeah, though frankly, I'm starting to disbelieve that it's ever going to come to fruition, and I'm also becoming increasingly concerned that it's going to come out leaning in a much more "storygames"/"Forge" direction, from the descriptions on the site.
Which will pretty much piss me the fuck off.
Some stuff on the website seemed interesting. Some other stuff... didn't.
I just talked to my girlfriend at work - she's a Japanese-English interpreter/translator, works for a Japanese engineering firm. She tells me that an agency will charge A$35, or US$25 per 100 words, to and from an Asian language to a European. From one European language to another is somewhat cheaper, "but never less than A$25." So we can call it US$0.25 a word.
"What about big projects?" I said, "Surely you get a discount if it's a whole novel instead of just a contract or something."
"Yes, but never less than twenty-five [Aussie] bucks per hundred words."
So, US$0.20 a word.
By comparison, roleplaying game companies pay from US$0.02 a word (smalfry pdf guy) to US$0.10 a word (large and "generous" company) to the writers.
Translating the thing will cost you two to ten times as much as it cost you to get it written in the first place. You'd be better off getting someone with a good grasp of the target language, and who could converse with you in the original language, talking to them about the rpg, and getting them to write their own version.
My girlfriend explained that translation is more expensive than writing, because when you write, you can write whatever you want, it flows somewhat; but when you translate, you have to use the words already there, and carry the exact meaning from one language to another without changing anything - it's harder.
Anyway, point is, if rpg companies barely manage to pay the people who write the games US$0.02 to US$0.10 a word, then they're sure as shit going to struggle to pay US$0.20 a word to get the thing translated.
Quote from: RPGPunditYeah, but if I recall correctly, Nephilim was considerably changed in the translation, the English version was VERY different than the French original.
I know that this was the case with In Nomine, which was a totally different game in English from the original.
I don't believe the translation from French to English changed
Nephilim that much, in the core rules at least. Later US-made supplements under a different editorial and creative team tried to knock it onto different tracks entirely, though. Claims abound from French gamers that Chaosium warped it into a game of "kewl powerz" à la the World of Darkness games, which applied to neither the original translation or the later US-made supplements. From what I understand about the core game, the mechanics and most of the text remained the same as the original (albeit in translated form), but that much of the French/European setting that was deemed essential was gutted and replaced with a very bland American/San Francisco backdrop. The real argument that emerged from this side of the Atlantic was that it didn't differ
enough from the original, which led to the aforementioned attempt to jump rails.
I've also heard the stories about
In Nomine, though I'm unfamiliar with the specifics of the game. Every now and then I wonder if people conflate
Nephilim and
In Nomine, as they were topically similar games, both from France, and both translated hastily into English at the same time.
I suppose this is another potential pitfall of the translation business. Word gets out that there's a body of hot, untapped foreign-language games out there, already written, and just waiting to be marketed to a hungry English-speaking market. Seems like easy money. Just get some starving college student with a degree of fluency in the needed language to sit down and knock out a translation, pass the manuscript through a spell-checker once or twice, lay out the new text, and rush it to print. You don't need to invest in significant playtesting, obviously, since it's been a successfully marketed game in the home country for the last five years or more, and that'll just eat into your profits more. All shakey assumptions. All of which I believe had a hand in the production of the translated editions of
Nephilim and
In Nomine.
!i!
Quote from: JimBobOzMy girlfriend explained that translation is more expensive than writing, because when you write, you can write whatever you want, it flows somewhat; but when you translate, you have to use the words already there, and carry the exact meaning from one language to another without changing anything - it's harder.
One of the (monumental) editing tasks I had on a still-born RPG project I was working on once was taking a literal translation of a French-to-English text and making sense of it. Your girlfriend is dead right -- it was one of the more frustrating writing tasks I ever did. I'd look at the raw translation and try to figure out the context and subtext, and how to say it in fluent English, with nuance. Sometimes I'd just wing it and write passages that I felt captured the intent of the translation. Eventually the line editor told me to simply write my own version of the book (as you suggested elsewhere in your post).
!i!
Quote from: Ian AbsentiaI've also heard the stories about In Nomine, though I'm unfamiliar with the specifics of the game. Every now and then I wonder if people conflate Nephilim and In Nomine, as they were topically similar games, both from France, and both translated hastily into English at the same time.
The In Nomine that I know (Spanish translation) is a tongue-in-cheek black humor game. I've heard the US version was
very different.
Quote from: JongWKThe In Nomine that I know (Spanish translation) is a tongue-in-cheek black humor game. I've heard the US version was very different.
The most strident complaint I saw over and over revolved around the change in the original title:
In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas. People seemed to think that SJG chickened out on the "satanic" aspect of the game, which was essential to the black humor you mentioned. (Yes, yes, I know Nox. The point has already been made. Repeatedly.) Again, I'm virtually unfamiliar with this game, so others can speak to the issue better than I can.
!i!
My French friend living in Australia tells me that In Nomine was entirely different in French compared to the English version.
Croc (http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=2482), authour, according to John Kim's site, of many French and English-language rpgs - Bitume, Animonde, Bloodlust, Heavy Metal, Scales, Stella Inquisitoris, etc - wrote In Nomine in 1989; it appeared in English in 1997, with Derek Pearcey (http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=54) listed as authour. Given that Pearcey is listed as authour rather than "translator" of the English-language version, and is also listed as the authour of the WW magazine article, "In Nomine: A Designer's Perspective" (http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showarticle&articleid=207), I strongly suspect that his English version was based on the original French, not a strict translation.
I don't read French, nor have I seen the French version, so this is just surmise; but I suspect that the relative costs of writing and translation led SJGames to the same conclusion I've come to here - it's cheaper to get someone to write a new rpg based on the old one, than it is to get them to translate the old one.
Unless of course you find some enthusiastic fan who'll do it free or cheap... but the same goes for writing :p
Allow me to make my usual plea for companies trying to cash in on Japanophilia to hire Japanese artists and write their own product.
If Shingo from Heisei Democracy can insert himself into the Japanese fantasy artist subculture using nothing but his love for Warhammer 40K and hemaphroditic porn, any RPG company could do the same.
Uhhh.... ok?
Quote from: J ArcaneYeah, though frankly, I'm starting to disbelieve that it's ever going to come to fruition
It's happening. Check the blog off the main page for up-to-date news. It's been delayed because every person involved in it on the US side has a
real job (usually 50+ hours a week), but it's well along, and will be out by the end of this year. Also, the other hang-up is that we were well on our way to have GoO produce and distribute the book...
Quoteand I'm also becoming increasingly concerned that it's going to come out leaning in a much more "storygames"/"Forge" direction, from the descriptions on the site.
Which will pretty much piss me the fuck off.
Uh, you can go ahead and take that up with the original author. We're not changing the rules, sticking in new rules, converting to BESM or anything like that. We're translating the game as-is, adding more background detail, combining the data from a bunch of supplements into the core book, and adding sections of setting and text so that a western audience can jump right in, without suffering the Sengoku or Blue Planet "OK, there's all this data and background... but what the fuck do I DO with it?" effect.
But rest assured, if what you're seeing on the site is making you all bitter inside, that's the original game you're reading into there, so you will not like it. Seriously. If you smell "the Forge" on a game that was created originally six years before the Forge ever existed, and revised into its current edition two years before, again, the Forge ever existed, then you're really not going to dig it. And that's cool, different games for different folks. So concern yourself with it no longer.
Just to be helpful:
Other games that will "piss you the fuck off":
*
All games by the company FEAR (the largest producer of RPGs in Japan), with the possible exception of "Alshard" or "Night Wizard", including:
Tokyo NOVA, Tenra Bansho, Terra the Gunslinger, Angel Gear, Chaos Flare, Inou-Tsukai, Nirvana, Double Cross, Beast Bind. Plus others like Infinite Fantasia, Shangai Noir, Savage Science, and more.
Other games that might not "piss you the fuck off":
* Alshard (high fantasy console-style game, same author as Tenra Bansho)
* Gehena (Japan's take on Al Qadim, anime style)
* Sword World (the first original Japanese fantasy RPG)
* Demon Parasite (new Action-Horror game written by a buddy of mine in Osaka)
* Rokumon Sekai (newer shlock-fantasy game with pretty original, but rather complicated, magic rules)
* Shin Megami Tensei game (another new edition was just released)
* Ghost Hunter RPG
* Any of the incarnations of the Lodoss War RPG
* and the original GURPS stuff produced in Japan (there's 3-5 original books)
You can find info about most of the above if you type it into yahoo.co.jp with "TRPG", or hunt for them directly on amazon.co.jp.
QuoteThere's some very intriguing games available on the Japanese market, and I'd love to see them faithfully translated into English, but I'm starting to suspect that Tenra Bansho is not going to be an example of that.
If you have a problem with the games as they were originally written, as it seems like you do (reading into the descriptions of the actual Japanese game thinking that they're all being "changed" from the original), then it really does seem a misnomer to say that "you'd love to see them faithfully translated". Instead, it seems that when you see the games for what they really are, you smell some swiney bent and get all bitter.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say, "You wish that some of the pretty art would be lifted from those intruiging, original Japanese games, and dropped into some sourcebook (sans rules, perhaps with a little bit of the original setting) for an existing US RPG?"
Sorry if I come off too harsh: I don't want to read too much into words on a BBS (that would be unfair), but I would hate for people to get the idea that the game is for them just because it has pretty pictures or whatever, when at its core the system and feel simply isn't something they're interested in. I've seen people try to pimp their game to
everyone, bending over to find exaggerated examples of things that might get them to buy the game; those people buy the game, read it, hate it (because they were duped, essentially), and become bitter folks with big mouths. I don't want to dupe people, no fucking way.
-Andy
Oh, and to answer Jong as the "Japanese RPG authoratah" or whatever.... :)
Quote from: JongWKWhy not more translated games? Is it that expensive to hire a decent translator? Or is the licensing costs?
Both. In Japan, licensing an anime or manga is relatively easy. Licensing a book? Fucking impossible, unless the author retains a lot of the copyright. The problem is that anime, console games, and manga and all is translated "as is" and sold. With literature and the like, the ancient Godzilla-like distribution/publication/IP-owning structure of Japanese middle-management tithe-takers steps in, and you're paying royalties out the fucking wazoo, and stepping through minefields of red tape to produce shit.
Remember those generally reviled GoO "Anime Guides", that basically gave you just enough information that
you would already know if you saw the anime, but didn't offer you, say, a single Adventure Hook, a single Sample Adventure, or even so much as a sample PC or NPC (in other words, anything actually useful to a gamer as a gamebook)? The reason is because if GoO did that, their contract would have changed from the "you're just translating a manga/anime without changing anything" contract, to "you're messing with our mega-conglomerate's Intellectual Property!! (for creating a SINGLE FUCKING STORY HOOK For real, I've seen it happen)", where there is no amount of money and fame worth the effort of wading through that money, time, and sould-sinking debacle.
The Battle Royale movie came out in English. So did the manga. It was a goddamn miracle that the original book came out, and that that project didn't die somewhere after folks realized what an utter beast Japanese IP/media property licenseing could be. It was much of this that killed the Gundam RPG, if much of what I heard is true (a lot of the "Oh, you rewrote the machine gun description on the Zaku II-A model's spec sheet? Then you need to have your whole book translated back into Japanese, and sent back to us for us to review and check for IP inconsistencies. Again.").
In the end, if I were to say, "Hey, this Japanese RPG is AWESOME. I want to translate and release it in English", and went through the normal process of doing so (including hiring out for the translation at normal rates, rather doing a majority of it myself or whatever), the simple price, time and work involved of producing the book would be about equal to producing an entirely new RPG that you designer yourself. And that's
before royalties.
Japan's a little different in that regard, though: The usual RPG freelance writer salary is about 1-2 cents per word IIRC, with more if you are "known". When I do side translation for "normal conversational stuff" (not my real job, BTW, just something I do on the side when I have time and want more money to play the market with), I get the industry standard
20 cents per word for J->E translation. When I do side translation for technical stuff (say, scientific, legal, medical papers or whatever; I specialize in computers, network and storage) I can expect to make up to a dollar a word or more depending on the speed the project has to be done, size, scope, etc. It is probably a much different playing field with French or Spanish or German, where I imagine that the costs are lower (especially for countries where machine translation is an option and actually works, unlike most asian languages).
So yeah, Tenra is
different, unusual, even "special", which is why I'm busting some balls to get it out to the English audience in its original form, expecting about nil profit (it will truly be a "vanity press game"). After this, I hope that other companies look into bringing over some games; stuff like Alshard or Double Cross would kick ass in the US, I think (both as games, as receptive audiences, and just fucking fun). But as I mentioned above, the average game company could write their own complete RPG, pay for art and layout and production, and still best the profits of trying to sell a Japanese game. I still really hope they try, though.
Re: "I have a hunch that some foreign language games don't get translated because the game it's self does not appeal to english speaking people enough to print." and "Different languages create different scenes, different tastes make for different games."
Absolutely true. Before Alshard, Night Wizard was the biggest selling game in Japan (even well over J-D&D 3e). But I don't think that the US/English market is into playing "cute schoolgirls in a magical/modern school environment"... at least not in the numbers that it would take to warrant such a tremendous project as trying to translate the game into English. Or even Sword World, which is a huge seller in Japan in its incarnations, and is historically probably one of the most well-played games ever in Japan (until recently; I suspect that Alshard and D&D 3e are more played now than Sword World was in its day)... but at it's core it's a simple schlock fantasy game: HP, classes, 2d6, yawn. It would probably sell less than Agone.
-Andy
Quote from: Andy K"You wish that some of the pretty art would be lifted from those intruiging, original Japanese games, and dropped into some sourcebook (sans rules, perhaps with a little bit of the original setting) for an existing US RPG?"
Is obviously.
Someone's going to wise up to that method and they're going to make money hand over fist on weeaboo RPG players.
Being, apparently, the only dude on here that has read BOTH the english and original (albeit in spanish, but a direct translation instead of re-creation) versions of the game; I can say unequivocably that the two games are NOTHING alike.
As Jong mentioned, the spanish version is a very black humour game, but played for definite laughs, about the crazy celestial/demonic beaurocracy.
The SJG version is a deadly serious game about being Angelic Powers with a very White-wolf-style game feel to it.
RPGPundit
Quote from: Ian AbsentiaOne of the (monumental) editing tasks I had on a still-born RPG project I was working on once was taking a literal translation of a French-to-English text and making sense of it. Your girlfriend is dead right -- it was one of the more frustrating writing tasks I ever did. I'd look at the raw translation and try to figure out the context and subtext, and how to say it in fluent English, with nuance. Sometimes I'd just wing it and write passages that I felt captured the intent of the translation. Eventually the line editor told me to simply write my own version of the book (as you suggested elsewhere in your post).
!i!
I attempted a similar project once in the past, trying to make sense of and rewrite a really bad translation of an homebrew Italian game called "YARPG", which was something of a rules light mecha game. I managed to get through the first chapter and then promptly realized that there was no way in hell I was going to finish it, because it would likely drive me insane.
I'm sorry if my commentary offends you, Andy. All I know is that the commentary on your site winds up making the game sound like "Storyteller 2.0" at best (and not just because that's the name explicitly used, but in the descriptiosn of the mechanics and the "amateur theatre" vibe). If you say that this is faithful to the original, then I can then say that based on those desccriptions I probably wouldn't like the original either.
I'm a little curious however, about your claim then, that this would somehow mean I'd basically hate every major game developed in Japan for the last couple of decades. I find this attitude a bit hard to believe, given that Japan has been one of the strongest overseas territories for GURPS, which is one of my favorite games, as well as what I would expect to be a strong influence from CRPGs like Dragon Quest. I would expect those to matter at least somewhat in terms of influences on TRPG development in Japan, but what you seem to be suggesting in your post is that basically every Japanese game I've ever heard of adheres to this same "storyteller" vibe that turns me off on your site.
Quote from: Andy KI get the industry standard 20 cents per word for J->E translation. When I do side translation for technical stuff (say, scientific, legal, medical papers or whatever; I specialize in computers, network and storage) I can expect to make up to a dollar a word or more depending on the speed the project has to be done, size, scope, etc. It is probably a much different playing field with French or Spanish or German, where I imagine that the costs are lower .
TWENTY Cents PER WORD?
Having worked in publishing, let me tell you that, yes, it is a different playing field. VERY VERY different. Makes all the difference, for obvious reasons, whether you translate Asian computer stuff or European RPGs (novels, poetry, scholarly texts...). Much $$$ will be reaped from the former; from the latter, not so much.
That said, America is eagerly waiting for Settembrini to translate the Midgard RPG. He's been working on it forever!
Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalDifferent languages create different scenes, different tastes make for different games.
Oh, and just one more anecdote I thought of on that issue (re: Cultural differences).
One of the hottest new games of the last year is "Yuuyake Koyake", by Sunset games. They're a small-press publisher of tabletop games, like those strategy games with the hex maps and stuff. They also happen to produce the Japanese version of Harnworld.
Anyway, their two biggest games are the MAID RPG, which admittedly a lot of people got for fun, maybe played a session or two of it, nothing long-term. But Yuuyake Koyake is seriously busting heads in the RPG world in sales and popularity.
http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/rpg_index.htm < Sunset's RPG Page
http://www.sunsetgames.co.jp/rpg/youyake/youyake.htm < Yuuyake Koyake. Check out the jpg links on the left, incl Character Sheet and town map, cover art, etc.
You play a half-human half-animal spirit that has adventures in a peaceful town. No killing monsters, no real "combat" per se. Rather you wander around the peaceful town helping people solve their problems. Sometimes evil spirits get in the way, but they're more of a nuisance than anything. And again, you don't pull out swords and slay them.
In Japan, people are totally into this kind of stuff. New gamers can get into it, and even die-hard gaming grognards have the sensibilities ("cultural love of Hello Kitty") to get into it. In the US, it would go from the shelf to the bargain bin in one motion as soon as folks opened the book and learned that the spirit-animal PCs don't battle demons with giant sword attacks. Cultural differences are too big to support a project like that as anything more than an oddity. But shit, it's a really beautiful game, from the interior art, to the peaceful feel, right down to the areas of the character sheet where you write down the friends you've made.
Oh, likewise, most Japanese gamers who know anything about White Wolf's Exalted laugh at the idea of people in Japan playing it (just the sensibilities are just too off). As far as I know, the company that licenses and translates all of WW's stuff into Japan to sell it are all over the new WoD stuff, but have not touched Exalted.
-Andy
QuoteI'm sorry if my commentary offends you, Andy. All I know is that the commentary on your site winds up making the game sound like "Storyteller 2.0" at best (and not just because that's the name explicitly used, but in the descriptiosn of the mechanics and the "amateur theatre" vibe). If you say that this is faithful to the original, then I can then say that based on those desccriptions I probably wouldn't like the original either.
No problem, sorry if I got spazzy. I can actually say that I don't mind that much if people hate it (because it's not my game; even though I do love it and play it myself, I'm not the rules-writer so you won't see game-designer level flames myself). I do get pissy about claims that it's not coming out, because that part IS me :) , and on top of that I can never seem to convey the, "We all have real jobs (50-60 hours in some cases) and families", so it takes much longer than a production house where a designer's full time job is to design. Frankly, the speed that WW can propose, then release, a game shocks the hell out of me, seeing how much time goes into writing and organizing a mess like this.
QuoteI'm a little curious however, about your claim then, that this would somehow mean I'd basically hate every major game developed in Japan for the last couple of decades.
Sorry if I sounded snappy, but that's not true and I didn't convey that correctly. If I had more time (which I will after Tenra) I'd have built up my //www.j-rpg.com site to showcase all these games so people would know what the hell I was talking about.
There's a few "major players" in the RPG world in Japan, maybe 3-4 companies. And the largest has about 7-12 full-time employees. So they're not big. Out of those, we have FEAR (the biggest: //www.fear.co.jp), and others like Altelier Third ( http://www.a-third.com/trpg/ ) that does WoD and the like, Group SNE which does GURPS, etc. There are only a few houses that try to produce original japanese RPGs rather than translate them from English. FEAR is the major one of those.
FEAR started out as a bunch of guys who wrote for TORG and Cyberpunk (the CEO of FEAR wrote a bunch of stuff in English for the Cyberpunk Pacific Rim sourcebook, frex). They decided to make all these distinctly Japanese-bourne RPGs, starting with a "Japanese Cyberpunk" (Tokyo NOVA), and pushing on from there. The only 'problem' (from a trad gaming point of view) is that in doing so, most of these games have elements which "smell" like "story gaming". Double-Cross, frex, is a great strategy/combat/intrigue focused RPG, a dark superhero game about late youths who were infected at birth with viruses that give them powers. It's really dark, really cool and has a lot of focus on the combat elements, cool powers, etc. However, it also has mechanics for gaining and losing relationships, and it has this element that looks like a postcard called the "Scene Player Card", which gets put in the hands of the person for that scene, act or adventure that the game "focuses on" for that round.
See where I'm going? Each one of these has distinctly RPG elements and coolness going for it... yet the designers naturally added some stuff to make the game work the way that they want it to work. To them, it's just another rule or whatever. But to us, we can look at that and say, "Hey, that looks like Fan Mail from Primetime Adventures!" in one game, or "Oh, that looks like it was inspired by the Town Creation System from Dogs in the Vineyard", even though it wasn't. That stuff appears in a LOT of original Japanese games, even really traditional-focused ones, and it's hard to, like, find a game devoid of those elements.
I came up with that list above that fit pretty close, though: Including one FEAR game, Alshard (the bestselling game in Japan right now, for a few years running). It's got a system that was tricked out to be accessible to New Gamers, and CRPGers (folks who had never seen anything but Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest), and yet involved enough for old hands at gaming to really find cool things to do. It focuses on that sort of thing, and there's really no "story rules" or "relationship rolls" or anything like that. So I thought that might fit your interest.
The other ones out of the list above that I'd highly recommend are Gehenna (because it's gorgeous, and again a fun take on Arabian fantasy from a Japense Anime-ish perspective, yet it's still darker and grittier than Al Qadim), and Demon Parasite (for the sole reason that my friend wrote it; but it too is a high-combat focused modern horror game, with very little in the way of those story-ish rules). If you have played any of the Shin Megami Tensei console RPG games, the TRPG of the same name is the densest thing you will ever put your hands on, but it's very traditional, all abilities, skills, demons and magic and no "love dice" or whatever.
But a majority of the Japan-born sruff is pretty new in those regards. This game over here has relationship rules; that game over there has a scene structure; that other game over there has playing cards instead of dice. Over here, we see people go "Ohh Forge Smelly Boo Boo" or whatever, but over there it's just natural, and not 'gimmicky' either (usually the gimmicks, if any, are in the settings not the rules).
Other than that, there is a huge element of Japanese gamers that like to play what we look at as the traditional kind of game. They get that frm playing D&D 3E (and in no small numbers, IIRC D&D is #3 top selling RPG). Since gamers get that fix from imported games, the domestic games market make games for folks interested in those other elements.
QuoteI would expect those to matter at least somewhat in terms of influences on TRPG development in Japan, but what you seem to be suggesting in your post is that basically every Japanese game I've ever heard of adheres to this same "storyteller" vibe that turns me off on your site.
They were phenomenal to the origins of TRPG development in Japan: Sword World, Japanese GURPS, about a dozen other J-made games that came and went. In the early 90s (probably with the advent of the first Japanese Edo-era RPG, and Wares Blade the fantasy-mecha game) companies split into "the folks who translate and release US RPGs in Japanese" and "the folks who produce original Japanese RPGs". The latter group tends to be more experimental. The rest is pretty much history.
But as for the "storyteller" vibe (do you mean, like, "White Wolf Storyteller System there, btw?"), most of the popular, Japanese-born, pretty-art stuff tends to go the "experimental" route in at least some form, usually in setting and art, sometimes in rules.
-Andy
Quote from: fonkaygarrySomeone's going to wise up to that method and they're going to make money hand over fist on weeaboo RPG players.
There is a huge population of talented junior high school, high school and college-aged Japanese teen manga artist shut-ins. If I could harness their collective power somehow, I could produce the most gorgeous RPG ever (as long as you can stand manga art) for peanuts.
I've got connections in the dojin comic world, including some pretty famous folks (I hung out with Yonekura Kengo at the Comiket and the like before I really knew who she was, frex) in those circles. Unfortunately, I don't currently need any RPG art that features fist-sized dildos in gaping anuses, lolita schoolgirls being manhandled on a train, or abused nurses with 20kg tits. So I must look elsewhere for answers
-Andy
Hmm. Thanks for the informative post andy. I confess that most of my familiarity with the games, not being a Japanese speaker myself, is from what little info one can find in English. And you and I both know just how little.
And to some extent, you also do alleviate some of my own knee-jerk reactions too, because it sounds like these "storygame-like" features and things, it tends to be more a small part of a whole that's likely to be more familiar.
So I did get a bit knee-jerky, and accused you of something you didnt' really deserve, for which I apologize.
Honestly, though, I can enjoy some of this story focused stuff sometimes, I always kinda liked Wraith in that regard. But it also means that it's basically a freakin' hell of a lot harder to get anyone this side of the pond to play it too.
Something more like the heavily CRPG-based stuff I'd probably get more out of, and I've wanted to see the Megaten game since I first learned of it's existence.
Hell, I'm pondering my own project of late that's intended to be a tribute to Dragon Quest.
And yes also to the artists. There seem to be literal hordes of incredible amatuer manga-ka in Japan, and I've often wondered if there might be some way of capitalizing on this, even for the Western market.
The obvious solution is for RPG companies to troll 2chan and FFXI until enough hikikomori are under their sway.
There's also a staggering amount of output coming from Korea, where the professional market might not be so expensive as the inflated Japanese one.
These days the only RPGs being translated into Finnish are indie efforts like My Life With Master, The Mountain Witch and PTA... More expensive projects of the sort presumably wouldn't prove profitable since the majority of gamers are fluent enough in English to simply purchase the original books, and there already are a few local products which can serve as an introduction to the hobby. (Lately I've been thinking about translating Praedor into furriner-talk just for the heck of it.)
Quote from: RPGPunditYeah, but if I recall correctly, Nephilim was considerably changed in the translation, the English version was VERY different than the French original.
I know that this was the case with In Nomine, which was a totally different game in English from the original.
Actually, the English Nephilim was quite close to the French version of the game. The problem was that the french version of the game appeared with loads of very well written adventures straight off the bat so it was immediately obvious that we were in Cthulhu country for questions of tone.
The English version came out without an adventure, the supplements took radically different approaches to tone and content of game (ranging from quite inaccessible discussions of the occult to gonzo nazis in UFOs stuff), this was then compounded by a published campaign where all the episodes seemd to have been written separately resulting in the adventures moving from investigation to fighting flaming wicker T-rexs . The problems of tone were not improved by Chaosium then deciding to completely re-design the game through the supplements, adding a new magic system and changing the character advancement rules.
The problem wasn't with the game itself (in terms of rules The Chaosium Nephilim book is substantially better than the confused and confusing first and second edition french books) but with Chaosium's complete failure to communicate coherently what the game's possibilities were.
As for In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas, I've read and run the original french version and own a couple of editions of it along with the SJG version. Clearly SJG wanted to make a WW style game featuring angels and devils but effectively removed all the humour and satire from the original game. To a certain extent this isnt that huge a problem as different editions of the French game have been more or less satirical. There's always been a slightly mocking tone, treating the bureaucracy of heaven as being a lot like... well... french bureaucracy with the nepotism and short-sightedness that comes with it but the game's real reputation was forged, weirdly, by the flavour text included in the second edition.
With each angel or demon prince you'd have a little short story of maybe 500 words and what really worked was the idea to not hold back AT ALL. Any idea the writers had could be written up. The result was a story in which the pope is depicted as a coke-snorting chronic masturbator who hates black people but loves soap operas, there's another story about fist-fucking children and then jokes about rape, murder, racism, porn cinemas, white supremacy and infanticide.
The main difference between the SJG and the Croc version was that while Croc wrote about a celestial bureaucracy and made it clear that he thought that bureaucrats were wankers, SJG wrote about a celestial bureaucracy and depicted it as a noble thing modelled on classical music. You were never going to get a US version of the French second edition (I mean, I don't think I've ever seen the word "fuck" in an RPG let alone the kind of jokes that would get you banned from RPGnet) but the second edition effectively distorts quite how vicious the game was over its multiple editions.
Quote from: Mr. Analytical...this was then compounded by a published campaign where all the episodes seemd to have been written separately resulting in the adventures moving from investigation to fighting flaming wicker T-rexs.
Ready for a shocker? They
were, in fact, written independently of one another. Stranger still: The introductory adventure that appeared in the Gamemaster's Screen? Written before the authors had a working copy of the actual game mechanics.
So, another couple of
caveats for potential translators. Decide well before you even begin translation what your game plan is for the line. Is it going to be a direct translation, or a "work inspired by"? Give yourself plenty of time to get it ready and fine tuned for its new market. Have playtested adventures/supplements, not in the pipe, but in the wings and ready to go within a month of publication.
!i!
I remember being on the old Nephilim Mailing list and it was interesting how even as the game was going out, there was no sense of a centralised direction. You had people involved in the writing of the game arguing with each other as to whether or not the game was this exclusive study of occult practice or a gonzo occult thriller game.
There was also no sense that they were in effect rebuilding the game through the supplements though that's clearly what they wound up doing.
That was probably a result of the changing of horses in mid-stream -- changing line editors from one who saw the game as a spiritual allegory to one who saw it as occult conspiracy, and heading the creative team with someone who saw the game as his personal expression of real-life occult practice. It was a bit of a sad mess. You'd be hard at work on editing a translation of a hardcore old school flash-bang French supplement one day, and the next you'd discover that a new magic(k) system had been released that featured totally subtle and coincidental effects that were wholly at odds with the book you were working on and to which you were expected to conform. Yeah, and then there was the bickering about theme.
Ah, well. A dog best let lie.
!i!
Yeeees... Liber Ka. Very clever, did anyone ever actually play with it?
What supplement were you working on out of interest?
The Selenim book. At first I was just supposed to edit the translation, but then the whole project was offered, with license to re-write as needed or seen fit. Let's just say that Liber Ka had little -- very, very little -- in common with the Selenim. Alas, it never came near seeing light of day anyway, and my files have since been lost to changing computers and corrupted floppies. I still have the hand-written translation from French to English, though. :)
!i!
(P.S. One of the strangely sad things about this affair is that I still don't know which one of the French fellows did the translation that I keep in a box. There it is, a couple of months of hard work and devotion, all in very personalised, ball-point, hand-written print, on graph paper no less. All dog-eared and smudged here and there. It's a little chunk of someone's life, and I don't even know whose it is -- like when you find an abandoned postcard on the street. Makes me a little wistful in a way.)
Ah yes, I remember you mentioning Selenim before.
To be fair to the guys at Chaosium, the tonal problems really were present in the french too.
The first adventure they put out (the one which, I would argue defined the game much like the power behind the throne did for warhammer) was this incredible sandbox adventure that was amazingly french and full of little satirical jokes and weird twisted ideas. It was full of investigation and weird conspiracies and is probably my favourite ever adventure. It's actually so good that I've run it twice and am considering running it for an english audience with a different set of rules.
So they went from that to things like incredibly painstakingly researched historical pieces about the history of the Rosicrucians and a completely unreadable book about the philosophy behind the Mystery Cults.
It was always a bizarre game but the French kind of took the weirdness and carried it with a certain degree of whimsical charm but the Americans just took it and imploded messily before panicking and attempting an in-situ rebuild of the rules.
Quote from: J ArcaneHmm. Thanks for the informative post andy. I confess that most of my familiarity with the games, not being a Japanese speaker myself, is from what little info one can find in English. And you and I both know just how little.
Sure, but on that latter point: I do not swing the cock when it comes to my exp with Japanese and the like. I speak with 'authoritah' or knowlege or whatever, but if there's one thing that bugs me more than mites it's J-goobers who are knowledgable and yet have that "God Compelx" of "I know more than you; I am the font of all knowledge". Pisses me off. So I didn't want to come off like that. :-)
QuoteAnd to some extent, you also do alleviate some of my own knee-jerk reactions too, because it sounds like these "storygame-like" features and things, it tends to be more a small part of a whole that's likely to be more familiar.
Oh, honestly? Yeah. I don't know (or care) about people litmus or limits on the "swiney scale" (cause everyone is different and hard to measure without filling out a survey or someshit), but even all the FEAR company games I mentioned that 'you might not like' have A Single GM of Traditional Authority. There may be "story game elements" that you can sniff out here or there (especially about relationships and social stuff and the like), but they all pretty much have the standard GM. So, heck, you *might* like them after all, hard to tell.
QuoteSomething more like the heavily CRPG-based stuff I'd probably get more out of, and I've wanted to see the Megaten game since I first learned of it's existence.
You could kill a child if you dropped the Shin Megami Tensei RPG (any edition) on her. There's also an RPG based on "Star Ocean: Till the End of Time" which has a simple combat system that was half-pulled from the RPG, and looks a tiny bit like the Usagi Yojimbo RPG. That might be your speed. Also, I gotta plug Alshard again, because it was created solely to be The Tabletop Game That Feels Like a CRPG, Without the Bullshit.
Oh, the other thing: There's a new 'version' or 'iteration' of the Tenra Bansho world coming out next month in Japan, called "
Tenra WAR" (no official site, etc yet: Japanese game companies suck in that regards; no fanfare, just a website and info once the game is in the stores, not before): If you click on the link at the Tenra site ( //www.tenra-rpg.com ) and go to the blog you can read more about it. Basically, it's where in the future the world of Tenra fights the Steampunk-Western world of Terra (on the other side of the planet). I really have no idea what it's going to look like, though I have seen the author's miniatures series based on the idea ( http://pony-hp2.web.infoseek.co.jp/TENRA.htm ), and there were things like "battle catgirl maids" and shit (even more "gooey anime feel" than previous works, which is a little weird). I'm totally buying it, but I can't guarantee the quality until I see it with my own eyes...
...point being, and this is interesting: Alshard, as I mentioned, is the best-selling game in Japan for the last few years. FEAR decided to take this system's backbone, call it the "Standard RPG System" (SRS), and basically make it into the Japanese version of the d20: Open license, etc. And Tenra WAR, unlike using the system of Tenra Bansho, or Terra the Gunslinger, is going to use this new SRS system. If it's anything like Alshard, I can guarantee that you will like it: Trad, trad, more trad, with pretty art, cool combat, trad GM role, no frilly story-tweking elements, etc. I'm really looking forward to it (I <3 Alshard and the games based off of it), and will try to drop a line or two once it's in my hands in 2 months or so.
QuoteHell, I'm pondering my own project of late that's intended to be a tribute to Dragon Quest.
Dude, if you finish it (in English), I will
so fucking buy it that you might as well create the Paypal button right now.
-Andy
QuoteDude, if you finish it (in English), I will so fucking buy it that you might as well create the Paypal button right now.
:D Well that's certainly encouraging. Thing is, it was actually intended to be my NEXT project, after the one I've theoretically been working on for 10 years, but I've been in such a DQ mood lately (finished DQ5 last week), that it's pretty well been consuming my brain.
I spent most of yesterday trying to deduce a decent combat mechanic that still kept the stats in the game mostly recognizeable. But without making the game too over complex. I'm trying to go one roll, actually.
And I've got kind of a nifty seed of a back story in my mind for something I think will fight right into the sort of fairy tale romantic fantasy that DQ5 had to it.
Something I just remembered: (http://www.fanprogames.com/?p=58)
Quote from: FanPro's 2006 Year in ReviewAll of the above books have also been released in German by FanPro GmbH, and Shadowrun, Fourth Edition, was published in French this year by Black Book Editions. In 2007, Arclight will be publishing SR4 in Japanese, bringing Shadowrun back to Japan for the first time in ten years! Other licenses relating to the Shadowrun RPG are forthcoming, but we cannot spill that paydata just yet.
Andy,
Are you familiar with Daikatsugeki?
The entry from John Kim's fantastic website is as follows:
A Japanese-language historical RPG, set in the Edo period. It is based on various TV samurai dramas. This is a fairly stable period, so adventures are about fighting crime and solving mysteries rather than war. It uses a dice-pool system: roll (skill) d20's where each die over the difficulty is 1 success. Character creation is point-bought attributes and choice of two packages: surface profession (omote) and real profession (ura).
Which I think just sounds too cool for school (well, the concept, the system sounds about as cool as a chemistry class with a teacher frustrated that they ended up teaching bored adolescents).
The idea of a real and a surface professions is a great piece of genre emulation.
The system sounds gash though... roll several D20's? FFS.
Quote from: BalbinusAndy,
Are you familiar with Daikatsugeki?
Yeah, it's an interesting piece: It was one of the first attempts to make a "Japanese Themed" RPG in Japan:
(http://homepage2.nifty.com/zuityou/trpgdate/img/daikatugeki.jpg)
It came out in something like 1992/93. Never played it though. And unfortunately, because it's so old, I can't find websites, better box cover pics, etc of it (it was a boxed set game).
-Andy