If someone suggested a magical girl game to you, what sort of things would actually get you interested in it?
What sort of interesting power theme's can you come up with? The usual elemental one is kinda cool, though a more weapon based system is something I'm personally quite interested in.
Awesome magic science, friendship lasers and copious amounts of hotblood. (Nanoha best Mahou Shoujo)
I actually haven't seen Nanoha, how does the science work?
When the little girls grow up and become operators.
They don't go into detail, but after its beginnings as a relatively ordinary magical girl show (although I'd recommend the movie over the original series, it tells the same story way better with excellent fight scenes) it takes a rather bizarre diversion into the existence of the Time Space Administration Bureau, who are basically magitech starfleet with a military of magical girls and an entire magic based civilisation.
An interesting power them would be tarot, but one that actually follows what the cards mean when used for divination instead of being a fancy aesthetic.
Not a lot of info is given but basically magitech with magical formulas with the magical weapons as casting items that the MGs channel magic through so they can cast the magic for them. There's also interdimensional travel but that's more or less glossed over.
Nice to see you're still around Nanohafag
Well, we get a decent amount on how devices themselves work. Magic is incredibly mathematically intensive, casting even simple spells takes a lot of work and effort. Device assisted casting basically automates a huge part of the casting procedure, the mage only needing to define the basic parameters (or, with precoded spells, just trigger it) for the device to run the process and cast the spell.
This is what I really loved about Nanoha. Magic is more or less equal to math and physics and only super smart people can cast magic (i.e. do math in their head) all on their own so they have devices help them do it. They just start the program/spell by saying the name of it or the incantation then the device does the rest. The other styles of magic (Belkan vs. Midchilda) just adds on to this as well.
Instantly interested.
Although it's worth noting that there's still a lot to learn as part of being a mage. An intelligent device can almost fight for you, as shown when Nanoha first acquires Raising Heart, but a greater understanding of and ability with magic, as well as developing your combat skills, makes you significantly stronger.
Well it's said in StrikerS that Nanoha is incredibly gifted with magic so she has more or less a leg up in that regard (same with Fate). But yes, more or less the best thing you can do to get stronger as a mage is practice and use magic.
Fate and Nanoha's innate talent is mostly in terms of their strong linker cores, which make them able to cast a lot of powerful magic. What I really love is that the show shows you in detail just how much hard work both of them put in to refine that talent into supreme ability.
From the simple stuff early on with Nanoha learning how to precisely control her magical bullets, obviously expending a lot of effort to master what might seem like a niche skill (which pays off in so many ways), to the later events in StrikerS when it's revealed she pushed herself to the point of near death in the name of getting stronger and protecting people.
Usually 'Oh they're so talented!' is annoying because it just lets the main character be super strong without any work, and I love how the Nanoha franchise utterly subverted that. Heck, it even pays off beautifully in Nanoha's eventual role within the TSAB, her official job, not being some sort of super ace fighter or grand propaganda icon... But a part of the training division, helping equip others with the same skills that served her so well.
This. Though how many people can you findthat actually know/have any interest in that shit.
>what sort of things would actually get you interested in it?
Variety.
It's fine to have Precures punching shit to death and Nanoha lazoring shit to death, but it'd be great to have both.
There's an anime about that running right this season.
>There's an anime about that running right this season.
Which?
Being fair, Nanoha also has more than its fair share of punchwizards. Heck, the latest iteration of the franchise is a martial arts manga.
Pic related, punchmage from our ongoing Nanoha game.
Urara Meirochou
punchmagicalgrills are best magical grills
I want that.
Nigga that ain't mahou shoujo that's CGDCT
Still, plenty of tarot.
Or if you want tarot megucas you can watch Genei wo Kakeru Taiyou or something like that.
I haven't ever been into Nanoha, how martial arts are we talking about? Do I need to read all the previous shit to jump on?
>how martial arts
Plenty. Punching, kicking, different styles, the whole shebang.
>Do I need all the previous shit
You are lucky, as Strike requires minimal knowledge about who the characters are.
ViViD and ViViD Strike are pretty self contained, with mostly a new cast of characters. I'd still recommend watching the Nanoha movies though, they're really great shortened versions of the stories with amazing action scenes.
Curiously, both movies also exist in-universe as movies. There are in character commentary tracks of the 'real' characters talking about the movies from an in universe perspective. They're all technically canon, but the series are what 'actually' happened while the movies are basically propaganda pieces created by the TSAB.
It's kinda odd but fun. The characters we play in the Nanoha game I'm currently have actually seen both of the Nanoha films, in universe.
1. The magical girls are the reincarnations of famous heroes such as Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Herakles, and Karna.
2. The magical girls are actual magic users, practicing the arts of sorcery to defeat their enemies.
3. The magical girls are involved in a shadow urban war, go gritty and deconstructioney. Probably use Princess: The Hopeful, and lots of guns.
4. The campaign is an ultra-hammy homage to Super Friends and Sailor Moon, where the magical girls are public personas fighting ridiculous enemies in broad daylight and for some reason no one ever dies. At some point Sailor Mercury gives a rousing song of heroism.
5. The magical girls are famous characters from World War 2, doing battle against the Axis which is led by Loli Hitler.
If you've read Glory, the comic book by Joe Keatinge, I'd like something sort of like that.
If a tarot theme was used for the villains, what would be a fitting theme for the heroes? No Upside/downside up version of the cards.
Horoscopes come to mind first.
Hermeticism!
The girls are visited by the Thrice-Great Hermes Trismegistus who gives each of them one of the three pieces of his Thrice-Great philosophy!
Astrology, with mastery of the stars, future, divination, and energy attacks.
Theurgy, with the power to summon spirits, elementals, demons, and djinn!
Alchemy, with the power of transmutation and the manipulation of matter!
In addition to these powers, he also teaches them the lost arts of Hermetic magic, giving them wizard powers.
Also he sticks around and acts as the team's Zordon.
The magical girls are actually witches who are firefighters in medieval europe who are chased after by a quirky 'the bonnes' inspired inquisition team who try to capture them while they save witches and put out out of control fires.
How would you succesfully fuse super sentai with maho shojo?
Precure.
Princess: The Hopeful is pretty bad. I'd try Wild Talents.
Any power ability where you get to use fuzzy logic / X as concept is always good.
I've got one character who's based around memory; they now can't be percieved by normal people because she is constantly wiping herself from history and is capable of changing the past as memory -> history is memory of the world and then from history to the past.
That sounds incredibly cringe and fanfic tier.
I'm not particularly interested in the entire genre, so it would need to not actually include any magical girls.
Apologies for that.
Is Project Rebirth better than Magical Burst?
As far as I'm aware, Magical Burst in all favours is still pretty bad, and there's a better system for whatever you might want to do for magical girls.
How does ProRe hold up?
How about vaporwave magical girls?
Nanohafag here to chime in that Legends of the Wulin works pretty damn well for action magical girl fare. Also sharing a new bit of NPC art from the game, because why not?
"Cyborg on rocket boosted rolerstakes" isn't really a martial art but its still fun as fuck
Well, the character is also an antisocial asshole who is basically a neet; they spend most of theyre time either fucking about whatever hotel room they've wiped from history as their place to stay or just using the fact that people cant see her to go peoplewatching.
She is not exactly the heroic sort.
There's nothing wrong with GaoGaiGar-tan.
I really hope you realize how cringe worthy what you are saying is.
reddit.com/r/CringeAnarchy
I love this, but I crossed it into the whole 'mask' idea for a game seed that will likely not get off the ground.
>"Frog" is connected to "Medicine", being able to turn fluids she touches into various drugs and poisons
>"Lioness" is connected to "Sovereignty", and can imprint commands on things that 'fear' her (react to her presence, so she can kick a rock and make it fly in a zigzag and break a wall, for example)
>"Ant" is connected to "Improvement", meaning she can make herself and things around her better and more efficient
They basically get dragooned into helping some magical parasites track down seven 'demons' as part of an obnoxious shadow war over who gets magic powers. The other big thing I wanted to stress was identity; Taking on the powers is taking a new identity, so at first the costumes don't fit right, they don't know how shit works (the mentors don't either), etc.
Project Rebirth setting writer popping by. While I'm obviously biased, I've found that it holds up a lot better unless you're in it purely for whacky RNG shenanigans.
Mechanically, the only thing I could say I miss from Burst/Rewrite is specific "Roll ALL the dice!" builds. The amount of new possible builds from the larger amount of archetype and general options will keep me busy too long to mind, though.
The characters are "Vessels" of platonic concepts called down to earth, as an enlightenment-era experiment into finding Truth. It only works on teenage girls because reasons, and renders them sterile. Both sides of the French Revolution are scrambling to create and control as many Vessels as they can... And there's already a "Glory of France" on each side.
Is that Thomas the fucking tank engine in the background?
Throw the bloody fight, girl. You have no chance in hell of winning it.
No, that's just Charlotte.
Honestly, I think it'd be fun if the team was something of a mixup.
We all look like we were supposed to be on different teams, our powers and mascots have different origins and fuctions, etc.
Alternatively, being a gadgeteer who's able to convincingly fake being a meguca would be fun, if only until after I pull the IT'S ME AUSTIN trick.
Chess, maybe?
>something Type-Moon and JoJo run on
>fanfic-tier
Call it cringe if you want, but conceptual effects are a staple.
I think they were more referring to the specific example given
Magical girls work best as sexy, sexy love interests. As Veeky Forums shows, they're not really good at playing feminine magical girls.
Like, they're a perfect excuse to have stuff like the rapier-wielding maiden, the graceful ballerina-esque dancer with lethal kicks and other similar attributes. But generally, your typical gaming group can't manage that without making everyone a guy in drag. It makes more sense to work around it.
I don't know, maybe it's just a difference between groups, in the games I'm in the magical girls are pretty girly, with the punchmage above being the notably tomboyish exception.
Don't forget that men are a really big deal for most magical girls, too. Nowadays, shows try to avoid that for yuri teasing, but the whole point was a young girl getting a chance to experience what it means to be a woman for the first time.
I think it's traditional for the love interest to fall for her more glamorous alter-ego before eventually coming to love the real girl.
...
Poker cards. You could have each magical girl represent a suit and then steal the rest from Kamen Rider, too.
>But generally, your typical gaming group can't manage that without making everyone a guy in drag. It makes more sense to work around it.
Fucking this.
I met my current group playing magical girls.
They somehow talked me into running magical girls again. I cannot stress enough how little the whole "girl" thing comes in. It's practically just a super-hero game at this point, which I kinda prefer, but every moment of downtime where everyone pretends to be cute school-age girls is absolute suffering to slog through, because no one knows how to actually act like a girl, and it's pure suffering to watch.
Yeah, basically every PC is ultimately playing himself. This is why, even for other RPGs, it's generally best for them to go with characters who are ultimately similar to the players. Otherwise, in the heat of the moment, it's quite easy to forget.
It's simply more honest to make the NPCs, so you don't have the players trying - and failing - to pretend to be girls.
Well, my group has done it pretty well. It might factor that half of the players are female, and one of the male ones is pretty girly too.
The rest don't underperform though.
>Nowadays
Yes, I know the image is from Crystal. Point still stands.
Also, it's less stressful to the meguca's relationship to have her love interest be another meguca.
I have no idea how to adress the "they're playing men in drag" thing.
>the image in question
>I have no idea how to adress the "they're playing men in drag" thing.
Get better players.
>Everyone I know can't act for shit so no one can
Nanoha is a neat middleground in anime. Its scientific and magic, it treads that line in mahou shoujo anime of "Girly as fuck" and "Dark as fuck", its got fairly good animation, and characters are taken pretty seriously.
All in all, its just an interesting anime solely on basis of where it puts itself compared to other anime.
Vivid and vivid strike are both more martial than the initial series. that said, in the initial series, the girls were 10, one of them only just getting abilities.
In vivid strike though, its full martial arts. Vivid is somewhere inbetween, mixing things to a great degree.
Vivid strike also has the most brutal instance of revenge on bullies i've seen in a long time.
The martial arts in ViViD Strike were a mix of "hard" striking styles like Muay Thai, Karate and Bājíquán.
Sailor Moon is the fusion of color-coded sentai and classical magical girls.
I'll just leave this here too
> Also, it's less stressful to the meguca's relationship to have her love interest be another meguca.
That's yuri goggles talking. Remember that Sailor Moon's love interest was Tuxedo Mask, who had vaguely-defined superpowers of his own.
Obviously, a magical girl's boyfriend needs to be a Kamen Rider-type. (Generally, only a few manga does this because otherwise you get the problem of 'wait, whose show is this?)
>Obviously, a magical girl's boyfriend needs to be a Kamen Rider-type.
I require this so bad.
>wait, whose show is this?
Both of theirs, the best kind of couples show.
If there's no yuri it's not real magical girls
This honestly just sounds like a case of bad players.
For myself and the groups I play with, playing characters very different to ourselves is often the most fun and interesting, exploring a different perspective on the world.
Naked transformation surrounded elemenrs fire/water/wind/plant gives me a boner
You perv.
That's only because the tourney the girls participated on didn't allow grappling.
Same here, unless you're a girl this is ridiculous. You're giving a bad name to a hobby that's already stigmatized.
>bwaah I'm insecure about my masculinity and a bad roleplayer, stop liking things I don't like
Genre RPs are some of the best shit.
>western magical girls
It's better that they be left unmentioned, as they seem to be hellbent on the outdated and ill-received Disney method of "MUST HAVE MALE LOVE INTEREST AT ALL COSTS, NO MATTER HOW SHOEHORNED"
4 girls manipulating strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational interactions. Team would be called "great unification".
completely wasted quads
I see useful stuff for all but the strong force.
...
If you wanted to do mechs in an MG game somehow, how would you do it?
The MG theme is mecha musume
Not to labour the Nanoha train, but that series does this. It's full of Super arobot Wars references, and in the game I'm currently playing we've faced the Alt-Eisen and the Grungust. I can poke the GM for more details.
That would be actually pretty cool.
Oddly enough, those two combined is the basis behind the NPC here. Sephia Sirocco, Gravity-themed Mage.
She's also a blatant homage to the Granzon from SRW and it's pilot. Pic related.
>But generally, your typical gaming group can't manage that without making everyone a guy in drag.
What makes a character a 'Guy in Drag'? As I knew a lot of girls growing up who were super into rugby and hiking.
Combine magical transformations/weapons with mech themes and its easily do-able. Sorta like powered armor-tier shit
Nanoha has a lot of robot callbacks without quite going to 'Power armour'.
So i've actually been planning a magical girl session with my group. Nice to run into this thread.
I'm using dnd 5e since that's what the group's used to. The idea is that monsters are leaking from the "magical world" and into the real world, and the characters have been selected to transform into powerful adventurer archetypes to banish them back. If it goes well, I might plan on running more sessions afterward.
Has anyone done something like this before? Does anyone have any suggestions on mechanics or challenges to put my players through?
A Mahou Shoujo game has gotta be GAR as fuck. Precure-style cutesie stuff just wouldn't work.
Men can't play women convincingly. They shouldn't, too, because you're getting into some extremely weird territory.