JRPG / TTRPG thread!

Good call. I don't know that it would occur to me to have brought up the defense part in particular. It's a more easily understood benefit for someone new to the game than the Concentration bit. I'll try to work on upping my sell on Concentration too. (Hopefully without making it sound like either Magic Types or Attack Types are the poor choices.)

Magic and Attack Types have very obvious benefits. That should not be an issue.

Not the guy you are quoting but I just told them "look at this cool thing, do you want to try it for a couple of one shots?"

The answer to that usually ranges from "No, thanks." to "Eh, I'd rather not."

Then you should play with another group.
A group that enjoys a specific game to the point where they refuse to give new things a spin are in love with the game, not with roleplaying as a whole, and will weigh you down in the long run.
If they're not interested in exploring new games and playing new characters in new settings, they have no passion for the medium and are just hooked on something they find "cool" - and that way lie 3aboos and hack-and-slash junkies who consider it magical realm to play anything else than a male human fighter in full plate.

I take offense to your immediate conclusion that my group consists of 3aboos. In fact, I am the only one in that group to ever have played 3.PF.
Every group I have been part of has played and enjoyed at least three different games, with little aversion to trying new systems.
But I have yet to find someone apart from myself who is not averse to trying out Tenra Bansho Zero.

Find a group of people that are into anime and RPGs and show them the book

I have.

Then your group is very closed minded I guess? I had no issues trying it with my group

What do you consider essential for capturing the comfy feeling of classic JRPGs like early Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest or Chrono Trigger?

Do you think it can be accomplished purely through tone and setting, or are certain mechanics must-haves?

tone and setting. You can use any system though I will say you probably want a simple one to make everything pretty comfy

>Apocalypse World
>Blades in the Dark
>Make You Kingdom
>Dungeon World
>Ryuutama
>mystery homebrew

I don't know where you get "close-minded" from.
Besides, I've found multiple other RPG groups at the local monthly anime con, but none of them have any interest in TBZ.

certified real bro right there!

>Card Ranker is still untranslated

Worse yet, it is still unscanned.
If someone were to scan it (not me, shipping quadruples price, etc.) a translation would follow not long after, especially with the draft of Shinobigami, a fellow Saikoro Fiction game, having been released already.

How much would all of this cost?

The book costs about 15 usd and another 12 to ship to USA (don't know about other countries) on amazon; cdjapan has cheaper shipping options and may still have it in stock.

Then you wait forever for someone to actually translate it, which you would hope would be free.

The realization that you got this worked up only find out after all that that it's actually an incredibly mediocre game, however, will be priceless.

>it's like 120 usd to ship it to my country

why did i have to be born in a shithole

So is it safe to assume the official Meikyuu Kingdom translation has gone tits up at this point?

>120

really? which counrty?

USA here, but i live in Montana

I may be exaggerating, but that was the cost of a doujin that I wanted to buy once. I live in Chile.

dude, Chile otaku are bro-tier. each one i've met.

glad to meet you, user!

>Chile
>Not living inside a chili in glorious America
Brah, what are you doing?

Everyone is an otaku over here, man. Most people would think it twice before showing their power level, but they love animu and mangos.

>implying my house isn't made of chili
>implying that the whole world isn't America

???????

But you aren't living in good America, you are living in inferior America if you need to pay this much to ship stuff. Come home brah

>implying there's an inferior america

It's okay to not have decent shipping costs as long as uncle sam wills it. I live in the land of liberty, that's the only important thing

I don't know how I would live life without the ability to import Japanese shit nobody cares enough about to scan.

>this thread.

>physical english ryuutama supplement releases next year
can't w a i t

About €15 for the book and €30 for shipping to Germany.

The official MYK translation went tits up the moment it was announced by some company that nobody had ever heard of before or since.

Last I saw - public post in an obscure group - the English translators for Meikyuu Kingdom hadn't heard back from the MK license holders and assumed they were being told silently to fuck off. Then one of the English translators for TBZ/Ryuutama/etc said he'd recently talked to the MK license holders and they mentioned *they* hadn't heard from the English translators and thought the English translators had given up. Which makes me wonder whether the English translators are really bad at communication or the Japanese dudes are trying to save face.

tl;dr - Pretty recent gossip, but who knows if it means anything will come out of it.

I am strongly inclined to blame the English translators on account of the Essen announcement being their only lifesign I have ever seen, even after several attempts at research.

Yup. That's my take on it too. The most signs of life I ever saw from the English translators was on a few Veeky Forums threads I found while searching for Meikyuu Kingdom information in the first place. They claimed several years ago that they were thinking of a G+ group since the TBZ/Ryuutama/Golden Sky Stories groups were so successful. As far as I know - and I've checked - they never got around to even doing that little. Never found even a Twitter account for them. They clearly should not be in charge of their own communications. Much less sniffing around for another translation project, like they were when they made the post I was referring to. (On G+ if you want to search around for the group.)

It would seem that incompetent people tying up interesting licenses is a problem with TRPGs, too.
See Double Cross.

What's the deal re: Double Cross? I know people complain about the books being a shit-show in terms of layout/organization and possibly sloppy translations, but at least they've produced results, so they have that much.

There's a board game called Millennium Blades, designed to be a "CCG Simulator", wherein you buy cards, build decks and play in tournaments, similar to playing a CCG. They're coming out with a roleplaying game for it sometime next year that uses the cards of the game as the main mechanic.

>but at least they've produced results
What kind of argument is that?
Fan translators have produced better results without charging a single cent.

The issue is that VBA is tying up the license, which is now dead in the water, and charges a pretty penny for a product that fails to meet pretty much any quality standard.

It doesn't take a design student to tell that the layout is garbage. Tons of whitespace, ugly, impractical page layout and catastrophic power formatting. There were plans to touch up the latter, but the previews showed that the redesign failed to even remotely address what made the formatting trash.
It is abundantly clear that the project has no editor because all of the books are riddled with both language and facutal errors. There is no comprehensive errata, either. There are two documents with different errata online, both of which require some digging to find, and the current pdf contains a number of corrections which neither document reflects. And there are still errors in that current pdf, such as the price of UGN Battle Armor, which itself is a questionable translation of an English term in the Japanese original.

Shite is what they've produced. Calling that "results" is something of a stretch.

That's a very different beast, isn't it?
Card Ranker only requires two six-sided dice, as opposed to a $80 card game.

Wouh. You are angry enough you missed I was making a dig at the Meikyuu Kingdom guys who have sat on the license for literally years officially and probably longer unofficially and have shit to show for it. The fan translator, iirc, said they stopped working on their translation because of the official one coming.

The Double Cross team clearly did a much shittier job than I'd heard and I'm not giving them a pass on it. I'm just saying they did a better job than the MK guys in that they have produced "something", even if it needs to be burned and started over from scratch.

Hello fellow weeaboo faggots. I am currently in Japan and I know nothing about JRPG/TTRPGs (I'm usually into 40k but that's beside the point), but I wish to get to know them better. I would greatly appreciate any help whatsoever and I'll love you forever

Thanks in advance!

>You are angry enough you missed I was making a dig at the Meikyuu Kingdom guys
Yes, I'll admit to that. Though I hope you can see why.

As for Lanternworks Unlimited, I can't even really be angry at them, because to my knowledge, they do not even exist.
Besides, judging from , I doubt it would be particularly difficult to obtain the license from the Japanese publisher after such a long time of nothing happening with it. Then again, I know nothing of the legal ramifications of licensing.

Why don't you ask the locals?
Most of our knowledge comes from fan translations, Ewen Cluney, Kotodama Heavy Industries and Google Translate.

Speaking of Double Cross "team":
As far as I can tell, that "team" consists of a single guy going by "KH Shu". He basically vanished some time ago after posting about health issues or somesuch. Meaning that no more work on Double Cross will be done in... well, probably ever.

Yeah, I get it. And it's got to be galling that because they fucked everything up, the likelihood of it getting an actually decent professional translation/packaging is almost nil now. If the first translation does shit, then the Japanese rights holders likely won't be interested in trying again and if it does well, then there's no real push to do better/revisit. Sucks all around.

What'cha looking for? Like the other user said, most of us are only familiar with what's out in English either via official or fan translations, but what we know about might be up your alley. If you just want a general overview of what's out in English, I'll bet someone can tl;dr the major games out.

I don't know of anything in Japanese that is particularly like 40k. The only thing that comes to mind is Nechronica and I somehow think that while dark and gritty and disturbing, you're probably not actually interested in playing zombie lolitas.

I am a sucker for hyperbole and downright hilarious (read:stupid) over the top settings. That Lolita zombie game might be up my alley. I also enjoy dark fantasy and post apocalyptic environments. Cheers dude!

Actually, it's more professional indignation than any sort of personal attachment. I am a translator in training (German, English, Spanish, without access to proper Japanese resources, so don't go expecting any fan translations from me just yet), so I can spot the work of a lazy and incompetent hack.

Assuming KH Shu only messed up details instead of fucking up entire rules, Double Cross is not a very good system to begin with. HP are meaningless, defense is useless, Encroachment is everything, Critical Value breaks combat, starting characters are severely limited, specialization is necessary, Red Servants are garbage...
I'm almost glad that VBA fucked up Double Cross instead of a better game.

Nechronica does over the top, and it does it well.
The setting is so ridiculously grim that it passes past grim, into ridiculous and straight into that sweet spot where you don't know if it's depressing or morbidly funny - everything is ridiculously fucked up to the point of being gratuitous, but that's because that's the only entertainment the Necromancers have left.
The world is pretty much devoid of life and blighted down to the last stubborn bacterium, so the best thing the Necromancers have to do with their existences is to patch together the closest thing they can to children - things that remind them of life, but are still going to suffer horrible agony because there's barely anything left but starvation, madness and pain.
The best thing is that you can't overdo Nechronica, only underplay it. The more fucked your concept is, as long as it's an undead loli (or shota), the more it fitsthe setting.

You might also want to look into Meikyuu Kingdom too, then. (See the top of the thread.)

Meikyuu Kingdom is an over the top game that parodies dungeon crawls. The entire world has fallen into a labyrinth and the Ruler and his/her advisors must go out into the labyrinth and carve out a kingdom.

Features include: some minor PVP elements due to changing relationships, a board-game-y kingdom management sim element, and classes such as the Knight, Ninja, Maid/Butler, and Happymancer. You can fight monsters, attempt to recruit them to your kingdom as citizens, or hell - just turn them into rations and eat them. (Or recruit them as citizens and then later turn them into mounts to ride into battle. What else are kitsune for?)

Thanks for the recs. I'll be sure to check them out!

Is there anyone here that knows what's going on with TLwiki? A lot of JRPG rules and translations are there, but the site is always yo-yo'ing online and offline. I've started some amateur translations of my own and wondering where to host them.

No idea - but out of curiousity, what are you translating?

Just grab a Wordpress and Mediafire/Mega account or something similar

Nechronica. I've got all the books, I'm still learning Japanese, so I've been clarifying rules, parts and picking up bits that have been left out.

Actual translation of the entire books and scenarios are a while off. Kanji is the devil.

If I'm not entirely mistaken, the site sold out to JAST a year or two ago and removed a lot of fan translations for games that JAST had bought up the license on, and as is usual for them, most of those properties have ended up stewing for ages and not getting any work done.
People started leaving the community because fan translations were being purged and multiple underway projects were canceled, and by now the place is basically a shadow of what it was. They probably can't pay the costs for a proper webhost, considering that no one is willing to pump money into a site that gathers donations for a job that they never release because of a poke on the shoulder from a two-bit company that couldn't level a lolsuit without asking their parents for money.

Is there still a JTRPG Discord? I used to lurk and they had a channel for file storage. At least one person there was super into Nechronica, so I'd bet it'd be a good place to get immediate feedback, if not archiving.

If you like dark fantasy and over the top settings, you might get a kick out of Grancrest. It's basically a fantasy superhero game, crediting Berserk and Avengers as its big influences, and while it's pretty basic as far as RPGs go it's also fairly solid.

Shinobigami might also be a good fit. It's a modern day urban fantasy ninja intrigue game, but it highly encourages over the top descriptions bordering on the corny, old school ninja movie and battle shounen anime stuff.

Yup, there still is. I'm part of it and just musing about TLwiki's reliability.

>bottom right
>Insane 2 Dead Loop
Huh, something for Umineko/Higurashi/"murder mysteries that use the same characters repeatedly" fans. Neat.

I mean, Insane is just a generic horror game, I'm not sure why you have to qualify it with stuff like Higurashi. It could just as well be a Cthulhu game or whatever, if you want to make it that. The third book in the series is all about playing SCP teams.

It's my first time seeing it, and reading the summary, Higurashi/Umineko were the first titles I thought about, mostly due to the looping thing. Saw the SCP book too, didn't know it was popular enough in Japan for a book to be made for it.

Yeah because the licence was so in demand before VBA got hold of it. They arent "tying up" shit because nobody gives a shit about the licence. The layout isnt amazing, its fairly basic, but its not the shitshow you're making it out to be. Hadnt heard about the "factual errors" problem, any examples of the top of your head?

VBA, being a one man show, is MIA at the moment due to his health issues IIRC

Is there a scan of the original Grancrest available?

Yes, Shu is tying up the license because he's not doing anything with it and if anyone wants to pick it up, they can't because of him.

"Basic" is a good keyword for the layout, because it's the very basics that Shu fails at.
Centered text is garbage for anything that isn't a title.
Data points should be at fixed positions relative to the border so that they can be easily spotted and compared.
They should also make use of abbreviations or symbols for the same purpose.

Aside from the aforementioned UGN Battle Armor, there were a couple of powers containing data points, formulae or descriptions that didn't make sense to me and which were different when I looked them up in the Japanese rulebooks 1 and 2. I don't remember which exactly and since I'm working with the book and there is no comprehensive errata, I have no idea whether those errors have been fixed in some version of the pdf.

This is true, 40 vs 80 is a major price difference, though Millennium Blades has a multiplayer card game on top of the Roleplaying game.

Where do you get $40 from? Card Ranker only costs only $15 and most people already have two six-sided dice at home.
And Millennium Blades's $80 do not figure in the RPG.

Doesn't seem like it.

The first link I found from google said 17 + almost 20 dollars shipping. If there's somewhere far cheaper, then I'm willing to accept that, but First Google Search was the most effort I was willing to put in for a discussion on Veeky Forums.

Whoops, meant to quote , not myself.

Akihabara

Roll & Role

profit.

>err, more like loose the wallet

If we're factoring in shipping, Millennium Blades is even more expensive for me to import than Card Ranker.

I live in the US, but coolstuff has it for a hair under 60 post shipping for US Shipping. Not necessarily advocating it instead, just as another source until (read: if) Card Ranker ever gets translated, I totally agree that actually having Card Ranker is probably a better solution if the base game of Millennium Blades doesn't interest you.

You wouldn't happen to be willing to buy and scan some stuff, would you?

Tying up the licence implies there is some demand for it, which is ludicrous. Your overly nit-picky objections to the layout are similarly hyperbolic, and poorly informed. Centered text might be over-used but there's nothing typographically wrong with. There's also the fact that the text in DX isnt centered. Its justified, the columns are centererd, so the problems with large blocks of centered text are avoided.

So you have one example and others "vaguely recalled". As for no comprehensive errata, a basic google search (or you know the link on the publishers website) would show the (overly extensive) 31 page errata from the mangled first printing (which I sadly own). All of which were fixed for the first official pdf release (and I'm sure thats the one you have and not the scanned version of the initial print run thats doing the rounds, right?)

No-one has to like anything, but the faux outrage is tiresome

Depends. Do I get a cookie?
I wish I could go there but I'm in Kansai

>Depends. Do I get a cookie?
You will get my eternal thanks

ded thred

You will get our eternal gratitude and a vastly improved chance at seeing those games fan-translatedm which is crucial if you ever want to play them outside of Japan.

Unless your friends all speak Japanese, I guess.

You guys convinced me. Is there any that I should look for?

Card Ranker, for starters.
Personally, I'd love to have マギカロギア, which I would definitely endeavour to translate myself.

Call of Cthulhu is really popular in japan, the number of Replay on nicovideo and pixiv is astounding.
But, instead of pure horror and grim atmosphere of the western playstyle, they're pretty lighthearted and funny.
Here's a manga of a replay (i'm thinking of translating it):
pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=59029339
Also here the douga version:
nicovideo.jp/watch/sm29660816

Anything of Shinobigami (except the base manual, that's already done.)
Kill Death Business - キルデスビジネス
also, seconding マギカロギア, it's only three volumes.

Actually, two of the books on the Magica Logia page are just replays. The rulebook alone, which should already contain a replay as the first half of the book, is perfectly sufficient.

I'll be able to go look for them this weekend. I'll try to find マギアロギア、card rankers and shinobigami then. Should I make a new thread then or look for one of these?

Hmmmm, everyone here will probably be highly anticipating new updates from you, try to make a new thread with a JRPG/TTRPG tag.

I don't think you need to bother with Shinobigami.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but the localized version draws from more than the base book. And again, the vast majority of books on the site are replays.
Anything labeled a replay, you don't need to bother with, especially for Saikoro Fiction games.

As for the thread, look for a thread with the apporiate tag and if there is none, make one.

>b-b-but i really like replays :( .........

He's right, save the money for rulebooks.

Yeah... was going to say, "I like replays!" - especially since no one seems to care to translate them. But in the battle of book vs replay, I think we know which should win.

On the subject of games to look out for, I heard someone recommend en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gear_Antique

Also Beast Bind, also from F.E.A.R.
I'm curious on this since i heard that Nitroplus based a VN on this setting.

I'll see what I can do for you guys

You are a gentleman and a scholar.

I am rather apprehensive about anything coming from F.E.A.R., thanks to the blight that S.R.S. tends to be.

It's not just SRS, there's really very little in the Japanese gaming scene that's interesting and unique enough to warrant the effort to translate it, and a big chunk of those already have been translated. That's speaking pragmatically, of course; if you're just a diehard weeb who needs to see the endless train of trash games they put out, then you should probably consider learning Japanese and buy them yourself.