Anyone here tried this shit out at all? I've been flicking through the book and it looks interesting, I'm not sure how I feel about the episodic, one-shot nature of it though. Advancement seems important in a game, I think.
Does Veeky Forums have any thoughts mang
I love the setting, I love the Kiai/Aiki economy, I find the combat system so frustratingly boring.
It has all the elements to be this amazing high action roleplaying experience and then the actual combat just devolves into dull roll offs with no actual strategy or decision making. It's such a damn shame.
I have played one session of it after excitedly showing it off to my group, specifically the Lotus Blossom scenario. My players couldn't wrap their heads around the Aiki/Kiai and were too hesitant to spend Kiai on some of the important rolls. The emphasis on one shots turned me off completely even though I gave it a try. Not enough time for my players to get into their characters or become invested in the story. They ended up slaughtered by a Kohngoki before the final scenes.
Man, that kinda sucks. I woulda thought that the Kiai roleplaying stuff would have made for interesting fights.
>They ended up slaughtered by a Kohngoki before the final scenes.
Even with player control over actual death? That's impressive.
My beef with it has always been character generation with impassive GMs - the way any physically inclined character will generally be better than kimenko armour, while meikyo armour is restricted to children unless you bend over backwards to accommodate a clean karma slate. Or the status of oni as native american standins. Or the way you basically can't take the shinto skill above 2 before the description starts making impositions on where your character can go. Etc.
Well I suppose that's the problem with those sorts of GMs.
Yah. I just wish I could find other people to play with.
I've seen people online flip TBZ on its setting's head - turn kingdoms into magocracies with oni at the top, etc. and these other ideas seem to flow better than the original.
Still doesn't fix kimen armour for PCs.
Is it really overpowered or what?
Standard characters split 40 points between attributes. Body, Agility, Senses, Knowledge, Spirit, Empathy & Station; 1-10 each. 3 is human average.
Armour gets 16 to split between Body, Agility, and Senses. 12 if you want something human-sized instead of mecha sized. Meikyo armour gets a flat bonus based on your karma; more = higher bonus, but you pretty much have to be a child to go this route. Kimen armour has more freedom, but you split that 12/16 three ways and that's it.
Ninja, magical samurai, etc all get ways to increase their body / agility / senses - usually all three at once. It's just a horrible choice between cool mecha stuff, being a completely naive child, and sucking like a supercharged vacuum cleaner.
>I'm not sure how I feel about the episodic, one-shot nature of it though. Advancement seems important in a game, I think.
But that's the whole point of TBZ. You get an entire campaign's worth of character development in a single session.
I just don't understand why so many people are opposed to one-shots anyway.
With how difficult it is to get a group together in the first place and then keeping it together being near impossible, I find not having one-shot capability to be a large disadvantage of a system.
>My beef with it has always been character generation with impassive GMs
You mean the thing that the system explicitly points out it doesn't support?
Kimen Armours are fully intended to suck. They're the mass-produced knock-offs of Meikyo Armours. If Kimen Armours could keep up with Meikyo Armours, it would contradict the setting.