Games Aileen Would Never Go For, Part Two

[eskemp]

Okay, long car rides with the radio on led to this one.

I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to design your own anime-style game. Something explicitly "this could run in Japan," but not a specific knock-off of any one existing thing. Borrowing from piles of them, though: let's say, something in the henshin genre (because transformation

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[eskemp]

Everything would be voluntary, at least from the player's side of things. If a player wants to say that his character is ashamed of his Pulse and is trying to keep Master of Puppets in check all the time, only to have it explode out when there's need, that would be fine. Another player might say that she gets along great with Fire Woman, and the two are practically of one mind. Whichever's fun to play.

One of the tweaks of the setting would be, of course, that people don't actually know of the actual songs that the Pulses evoke. It would be a world in which most 20th/21st-century culture is lost (yeah, nobody knows who the hell Brad Pitt is or why anybody ever cared about him), yet somehow these Pulses persist and take these forms that are familiar to the players.

It's sort of like Bastard! in that (where sorcerers like King Dia-Amon cast spells like "Mega Death" and "Iron Maiden", but nobody knows about our world's King Diamond or Megadeth). Only there's a reason beyond "wink wink, nod nod" to the conceit.