Kamigakari thread

Is the storytime GM from the last two threads going to be here, you think? I was liking his stories.

I hear ya man. I'm losing track of how many times i've said "Ask kamigakari user" when he isn't even showing up.

Core 2.0 isn't really necessary if you wanna just try it as a one-off though. As it is right now it works perfectly fine, its just that there's some issues in specific translations, most of which we've figured out.

I imagine so. He's got a couple months worth of stories apparently, and he's only told up to episode 2. since we're on the subject i'll put the SS of that up.

I'm glad someone is enjoying my stories.

Back again with another episode of my campaign. This one's a bit different. as no mechanics were used during the making of this episode. Just good old fashion roleplay and character discovery. As it stands, this one will be a bit shorter (I think) and won't go into a huge amount of detail (maybe) since this is a thread about the game, and this episode didn't touch on rules at all.

Our episode begins with screaming. Particularly of the disappointed kind. Having left through the portal back to their own world, our heroes were almost immediately found and brought back to the principal's office to be scolded for skipping school for an entire day. Vice Principal Taisho, pic related, is ripping into them, talking suspensions, and possibly expulsion in Hayate's case since he's already a delinquent. The PC's haven't managed to get a word in, and what would they even say really? They have discovered that their mental link does in fact manage to work over in the real world for some reason, but they just don't have an excuse for where they could have been this whole time. And so, the Vice Principal continues to rip into them.

I'll be honest, i never expected a vote for divine talker so early in.

I'll be honest, i'm super interested to see where this is going. As a storyteller though, it may be prudent to space it out some throughout the thread. Give people time to digest some of it, make comments, what have you, before you continue on.

Probably a good idea. I'll start posting scene's together and then let the thread breathe.

As she finishes her rant, Principal Kantoko, pic related, lightens the mood a bit with some softer words and takes the VP outside to discuss something with her. The PC's are left to wonder for a few moments about what's going to happen to them as well as the ramifications of time's passage while they are in Haxia. The VP returns, more calmed down, but obviously not pleased. She informs the PC's that they're punishment shall be the restoration and cleaning of the school's old Gym, the same place that their portal to Haxia is. VP is obviously displeased with this as the students are still in school, but the principal has apparently spoken. So ends scene 1, with our characters now having an easy access back to fantasy land.

Dude, Roleplay is still gameplay. Its a roleplaying game after all.

if you are gonna tell a story, tell it to the best of your capabilities.

The PC's don't get away entirely scot-free, however and each of them is suspended for a solid week of school. Over the course of this week, each of our heroes is has a strange dream with an odd occurrence as they awaken. Ryuko, dreams of a memory when her singing instructor gave her great praise. Specifically telling her “you'll have a voice that no one won't hear, with a sound that will shake the Heavens themselves!”

Su dreams of a time she was with her grandmother planting flowers. She speaks of a story from Budda's journey where he was attacked and remained passive, his aggressors turning into flowers as they tried to strike him. “Sometimes,” she says breaking up the earth with her hands, “you're the Buddha, and sometimes, you aren't. But no matter what happens, find the flowers. And help them grow.” She takes a flower from the earth, wipes it down and places it behind your ear. “The world will look a lot nicer.” Su wakes up to the sounds of a chainsaw running outside her room. First time that sort of yard work has every needed doing.

Hayate does not have a dream but on the third day of staying home from school, distracted by something or maybe just in a haze about the last several days, he accidentally knocks over a vase causing it to shatter. He cleans it up as best he can but has to throw the thing away since it's shattered. When his parents get home he gets chewed out pretty hard for trying to throw away the vase. They accuse him of trying to get out of doing his chores, and that if he wanted to get rid of it he should have been smart enough to have just broken it. Puzzled, Hayate watches his father place the fully intact vase back on the shelf after pulling it out of the garbage can he placed all the pieces in. Rey dreams of a lesson his father taught him about helping others. (“...when you grow up, I want you to be able to help people.” You were young then. So excited to be like your father. “But there are a lot of ways to do that. You can't ever be just one thing. Helping people means, changing. And always being what you need to be at the right time.”) Rey wakes up to find his pillow missing, and spends most of the rest of the morning sneezing for some reason. Ruth dreams of a lesson her father once imparted to her when she was feeling down about slowly turning into the school bully. He told her that no matter what happens, you've got be able to keep rolling. While the telepathic bond stretches even as each character is away from each other in their house, none of them really decide to share their dreams. A week passes and they resume school.

So the game's totally playable as is, retranslations or not?

Yes, that is correct.

There are certain talents and some bad wording that fail to convey the proper meaning sometimes, but 95% of the system is completely working.

In the pastebin there's a list of some of the errata, and in the FAQ in the other set of pastebins there's some questions about specific stuff thats been answered, like how shadow freerun does work with shadow breach.

The errata and FAQ have most of the answers to this kind of thing, though i will need to add one from last thread to the FAQ about Halve and Null Y Material effects.

Even then, its a very miniscule part of the translation overall.

School is back in session as our PC's come back from suspension, only to find a test waiting for them. Each of the PC's sits down and begin working when strange happenings occur. Ruth's pencil rolls itself all the way across the room. Ryuko's chair seems to keep rocking back and forth like one of the legs was shorter than the other despite is being perfectly fine. Su finishes her test to find a forest of Mold has grown on top pf her lunch. Tests start to get turned in. Rey's paper refuses to bend likely paper normally should and he has some trouble getting it off of his desk. Hayate turns his test in only for the teacher to ask him why he turned in a blank sheet of paper. As Ruth stands up to leave her desk flips over with her still in it. The PC's are thoroughly confused as they exit the classroom. Ryuko decides to stay behind for a second and looks at Ruth's desk, only to find that all the screws are twisted in extremely tight, enough to dig into the metal, yet none of the heads have been stripped. Confused the party finds themselves at the front entrance of the school.

The party decides to head to the gym as the goings on continue. Rey's hair begins to melt, Ruth's ankles twist out from under her. As the group walks, the grass behind them manages to grow two inches in an instant. Su begins to remember the dream she had as they arrive at the gym. Heading inside, Ryuko checks to make sure the gym floor isn't going to explode and send them to fantasy land again. As she calls out to the group, a basketball backboard begins to shake to unheard rhythm. She gets exasperated and yells for it stop, only resulting in shaking harder to the same rhythm. Hayate finally gets fed up with the thing and orders for it stop, causing the glass in the back board to inexplicable turn to sand. Every starts freaking out, and Ryuko, who is now more than worked up notices that rhythm earlier was in fact her heartbeat, which the pile of sand it now rhythmically following. Su brings up her dream, and the fact that a huge bit of yard work happened at her place that day due to plants growing out of proportion that night. Each PC reveals their dream and encounter as they slowly begin to piece together what's been happening.

Well shit. That escalated quickly.

Lack of understanding and control over something like that is a bitch.

Yeah, Ryuko almost got everyone killed that episode by testing her powers on a rock. She kind of exploded it accidentally while everyone was next to it. Luckily, Hayate's power works on people.

What followed was probably one of the best sessions I've ever GM'd. The next 2 and half hours of play time were spent with each player attempting to use, understand and learn their powers. They put a surprising amount of thought into seeing what they could do, how much control they had over each individual aspect, and how long and with how much effort they could do something. I had to make fast judgments when they asked a question I didn't have the answer for, but eventually, with no help from me as the GM, each player gained a basic understand of their power. Ryuko: Telekinetic control via sound that must follow some sort of rhythm. Hayate: Restoring items (and people) to a previous state of existence, (what qualifies remains vague to this day). Su : Ability to cause plants to grow theoretically exponentially. No control over where or what direction though. Rei, able to alter a matter's density and form. Can turn things from solid to liquid to air without worrying about temperature or pressure. Ruth: Ability to force anything to rotate on an axis provided it has one, indefinitely without effort or force, even when something else would act against it. At the end of their exploration of powers, the PC's can only theorize that this is due to crossing to the other world, and they need more information. With the afternoon ahead of them, and an excuse for slipping into the gym for hours on end, the PC's step back through the portal as the episode comes to an end.

>Capable of making something rotate on an axis regardless of effort, force, or resistance

Holy shit, her drill is the drill that could pierce the heavens.

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Obviously, this one and this one are the singled out versions from this pic here

Ruth's was the most interesting. By base, her power seems to be the least impressive (at least to the players). You've got, restoration and healing, matter alteration, controlling plants, telekinetic vibrations, and finally, spinning things. Ruth's power comes from something that her player and I are planning for the future, and I do plan on expanding powers slightly as they get stronger in Haxia by leveling.

Frankly speaking, hers is easily one of the most impressive just on basis of the applied usage of that.

And the last bit of official art i have.

The rest of it was posted last thread and is still in the archive, so if you want all that feel free to grab it as you please.

Actually, after having checked the twitter to be sure, i found two more images that i didn't have because i originally saved them in some other format.

So here those are as well.

And the last one.

I believe most of these images are intended to be actual characters in the setting, but i couldn't tell you which ones correlate to who.

I don't read da moonrunes, so figuring that out is beyond me.

Man, i like the idea of giving people vaguely described and limited powers like that. Its a good layer of suspense over just regular godhunters

It's a pretty damn cool power if you're creative, which I love.

Right? Vague powers like that have so much potential, and narrative wonder too them

LIVE!

well, if you've got art, you could bump with that

If I had art, I wouldn't bump a thread that I always check out for weird-ass animu art.

And what you've posted is fucking glorious, thanks. It even fits the campaing I'm currently running (using different game)

I had kind of given up a few threads ago, out of frustration and boredom, but there are still some things I would like to know about the system.

What are the combat system's emergent properties? How do the game elements interact to create these emergent properties? How do these properties deviate from the creator's assumable intentions? And what house rules can be used to fix any undesirable emergent properties?

Dude, i'm not a game designer. Nor am i a lawyer. So quit overthinking it, and wasting your own time, and just read the damn book.

You are using jargon that no regular person thinks about to try to get some super specific answer about the system, that i can't even fathom, and you've wasted at the least several threads worth of time doing it. Time you could've just spent reading the book and figuring it out for yourself.

Well, in that case i could post some art that i've saved up over the threads, see if anything of that catches your eye, if you want.

I recall this image was what drew me into one of these threads the first time.

That ones pretty good. Its one of the official ones, so if that drew you in then it did its job

Does that mean you are looking for similar stuff? or just overall neat looking generic anime shit?

So far we've got 12 votes, with legacy user still in the lead with 3. In second with 2 votes each are Dragon Carrier, Digital sorceror much to my surprise , and God Hand. After that with 1 vote each are Legion, Divine Talker, And Time Wizard.

I never expected Digital sorceror or Divine talker to get votes so early in.

....that's hot.

Oh fucking hell. I forgot to put Contractor on the fucking poll. I am so damn retarded.

I was wondering where it was.

Yeah, that was totally my bad. I thought i'd got all of them, but i guess i miscounted.

Well, have some more art then.

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Holy crap, the hilt on that sword might be more fucking dangerous than the sword itself, and gods help you if you try and do an overhand slice with it, you'll fucking brain yourself!

uh... what? You mean the tiny bits right at the bottom of the hilt? Because those ain't enough to accidentally brain yourself.

If you mean the guard, then that wouldn't come close either

Just to make people go

>Why?

I have read the damn book from non-existent cover to non-existent cover. But therein lies the problem of emergent properties: they're emergent. The can't be found in the book, because they only emerge in actual play. Like how 3.5 seems fine on paper until actual play reveals that half your group has invalidated itself during character creation and like how every class in 4e looks pretty much identical on paper until actual play reveals that even classes in the same role play very differently.

Usually, these emergent properties are fairly easy to discover from the particular discussion about and complaints leveled against any given game, but since none of the things I read about this game go beyond "I like the setting and the rules aren't ostensibly broken", I'm afraid I have to ask very specific questions to get a glimpse at some of the basic critical thought I want to see.

So you are asking then, what properties of the game are only glean-able from actually playing the game at length?

Well, my group fucking flaked 2 sessions in and I haven't been able to play in several months, but I'll try asking them for something, and see what i can get.

One thing i guess can be said of the game is that it does try to downplay social stuff to a more rigid theatrical sense, a means to an end, rather than intending the roleplay to be in and of itself. It seems rather roleplay intensive at first, but you are somewhat expected to just nod your head along and give the generally considered "Correct" answer to keep things flowing. The only thing i can think of to fix that is just for the DM to be more flexible though.

In terms of rulesets and breaking characters, thats literally impossible because every style gives you one somewhat balanced ability baseline. There's no changing that, so breaking character creation requires you to actually try to do so. So character creation always works as intended unless you have one game-savvy chucklefuck that thinks it'd be funny to make a broken character.

It does have the same issue as 4e though. Its classes can end up seeming samey on paper, since its always 1 of 12 things and then 2/24 to start with. The combinations can seem extremely limited and you'll always notice some overlap. But once people actually start getting going you'll find they thought things out entirely differently, and even two people that start with the same 2 styles and race can end up varying wildly.

And just to be clear, i know these likely aren't the answers you are looking for. I'm gonna ask around and see if i can't find anything other people noticed. Thats just what i have for now.

user, you blind or clueless?

Since i forgot to put contractor into the actual poll, just reply to this with the word "Contractor" and i'll add it to the total tally.

And before anyone gets the idea to spam this post just to fuck things up, don't be that guy. This thread is slow as fuck so its easy to tell if someone is samefagging.

Even if these aren't the answers I'm looking for, you're making the first genuine good-faith attempt at answering my questions, and I appreciate the living shit out of you for that.

The token nature of non-combat in this system is just short of explicit in the rules, so no surprises there.

Numerical stats are never what makes or breaks a character creation system. It's the not purely numerical game elements and their intended or unintended interactions and combinations with each other. Merely having fixed stats is far from a guarantee that character creation isn't broken.

What exactly is the nature of that variance? Is it just the numbers that differ, with the general approach to combat being the same? Or do they differ in the fundamental strategies and actions available to them? With 4e, that distinction is much more obvious because it divides the classes into four roles with very fundamentally different approaches to combat and then varies each individual approach further with the different classes in that role. But Kamigakari makes no attempt at categorizing its classes or even laying out what approaches to combat it intends to feature.

In all due fairness, i've tried answering these types of questions time and again, i just never knew precisely what kind of answer anyone wanted. I imagine i came off as very irritable, and my apologies for that.

It does suck that social needs to be more or less freeformed to fix it, but its not like that's strange or unusual for tabletop.

Also, i never said anything about stats proper. Admittedly they play a good role in your overall ability, but when i said you can't break character creation i meant that no matter what, you automatically gain 2 of 24 specific abilities that are meant to be balanced and usable. No matter what, your character will have a fallback, Unlike 3.5 where your character can be fucked into obsolescence by bad choices. I've seen some shit that made characters near to useless in 3.5, and lemme tell ya. Kamigakari does none of that. Since your abilities aren't entirely decided on by things like weapons or talent choices, your character can never be wholly broken. There will always be a certain threshold you can reach.

I'm not sure i understand your question on the nature of variance though. Are we talking between 2 characters that took the same races and styles, or the difference between two groups of characters with seemingly similar characters?

I should mention, the game comes baseline with a talent retraining clause if you find out something didn't work how you want it too, so even if your character starts out being less than expected, fixing it just requires you to level up.

>you automatically gain 2 of 24 specific abilities that are meant to be balanced and usable
That is nice in theory, but says absolutely nothing about whether and how that works out in practice.

>Since your abilities aren't entirely decided on by things like weapons or talent choices, your character can never be wholly broken.
How is that any different from 3.5? A PC's abilities in 3.5 are also based on its class, and if you pick a wrong class, you're capital-f Fucked.

>Are we talking between 2 characters that took the same races and styles, or the difference between two groups of characters with seemingly similar characters?
We're talking between two characters that took different styles.
A good example of variance (in style) is 4e. Not only does each role take very different actions in combat, each class within a role does something different to fulfill its purpose. All Defenders are there to keep the most dangerous enemy from killing the other party members. A Fighter does it by locking the enemy down next to him and not letting them escape. A Swordmage does it by marking the enemy from a distance and punishing them if they don't chase him down. A Paladin does it by passively punishing and following the enemy around while still being capable of dealing with other threats.
A bad example of variance (only in details) is Double Cross. The book identifies four different playstyles, three of which are actually one and the same style consisting of stacking as many bonuses as possible and then spamming your strongest attack over and over until the enemy is dead. The other one just stacks even more bonuses onto the first three, the same way for all three of them. As for which class does what? All classes do one, two or all of the first three and three classes do the last one. Sure, they use abilities with different names and slightly different mechanical details, but they end up doing exactly the same.

>How is that any different from 3.5? A PC's abilities in 3.5 are also based on its class, and if you pick a wrong class, you're capital-f Fucked.

There are enough non-class based factors that a freshly made character cannot be useless out of the box. Your average damage when completely unarmed is 5 even with the lowest possible STR. Your health can be an absolute minimum of 34 assuming 1 str and 1 will, and you will always have at least 2 working and usable talents. All of them allow you to do your job properly for that style. The stats are set up so that you will always ALWAYS be good at something.

Unlike 3.5, its not possible to do literally 1 damage due to not having enough str or having negative str. Its not possible for a light breeze to push you down because you have negative con mod and only have 2 health at level 1. Its not possible to choose a slew of talents that do literally nothing for you. Its not possible to accidentally drop your weapon and end up doing non-lethal damage. Its not possible to choose monk and be useless as fuck.

So basically, the difference is between starting at 10 of a stat and allowing negative modifiers, and starting at 1 of a stat and having that be a sheer baseline, as well as having specific non-character dependent modifiers for good measure. All the classes are more or less balanced with eachother to a greater or lesser degree, so there's no outright class disparity like with 3.5. There's no great gulf between casters and martials, as an example, because japan isn't fucking autistic about retardedly inane verisimilitude.

As for the abilities in practice, from what i've seen they all work perfectly as intended. The design goal seems to have been to use these as a solid starting point and going from there.

I'll see about getting to the class diversity thing after while, i need to sleep.

One thing i will say though, is that i do not have the foggiest clue how this will play out in high level play. I don't think any of us do. For that matter, there aren't even any mononoke of a higher level than 15, so i have no fucking idea about high-level balance or play.

I can figure around 1-10, maybe a bit towards 15, but after that is anyones guess.

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Any of these doing anything for you all?

I am in need of Taoist wizards, got anything Veeky Forums?

Okay, I'm Back and not on the verge of a sleep deprived coma.

Kamigakari has around 6 "Categories" that each style fits into. Their "Focus" if you will. Damage, Tank, Buff/Debuff, Healer, Battlefield control, and Spirit fixers. These are what can be called the main focus of each class. I wouldn't say the book "identifies" them this way, but its easy to categorize them as such.

From what i have noticed in reading the talents and seeing them in use, there is little to no overlap In the style's abilities. The largest overlap seems to be in Arc slayer A and legacy user A, but that seems to be an intentional design decision.

As an example, while legion B and Dark hunter B would both be "Battlefield control" types, how they go about it is entirely different. One focus's on making obstacles and using them for attacks, hindering the enemy and harming them simultaneously, while the other focus' on controlling where the enemies are standing directly. Mechanically the two do so in entirely different ways, but both would be "Battlefield control" types

Basically, 3.5 had classes only have their very key specific abilities, and had an endless slew of generic options that anyone could take if they meet the prereqs. Kamigakari does it the opposite way, having very few generic options like ambidexterity and letting the styles breathe and function unto themselves. Each style adds in its own specific rules and abilities that aren't in the game baseline as needed, allowing for more variance and less overlap, unlike 3.5 or double cross apparently . Because everything is self contained, it made it easier to make each style more varied. At least, thats how i see it.

I have this one, but so far as taoist stuff overall, i don't seem to have a great deal.

Actually, scratch that, i might have a couple more.

Actually, scratch that. Those are the closest i've found in my folder.

I've got more shinto and christian stuff than i do anything else regarding religion.

>Jiji (old man) written DNKY style on his briefs.

It's the little things, sometimes.

Holy shit, i never noticed that

thats hilarious

Double Cross had some Syndrome unique rules: Stoker's pet, Chimera's Therianthropy, Black Dog's cyberware, the expansion Syndrome's everything.

Also the designers assuming feats were end all-be all in 3.5 is why the Fighter sucked so bad. One of the many, many reasons.

Every class always has some unique rules, thats the point of a class, but what i mean is that the classes seem to have been designed to be outright additions to an already solid battle system, rather than the classes being part of it outright.

I guess what i mean is that the battle system was laid out first, and works the same for anyone, and then the styles came second and alter it on basis of existing. I dunno if that makes sense or not.

And for the 3.5 thing, yeah. There was a clear design intent for feats to be the be all end all, but they tried to hard to make every single thing unique or have insane requirements. Everything was gates, red tape, and trap options. Then add in the caster martial divide due to the double standard on verisimilitude, and it was just a cluster fuck. Luckily, japan views martial/caster balance wholly differently than a bunch of sweaty beat up nerds from an american high school. They embrace retarded shit, and i love them for that.

I could give ya some touhou taoists, but i'm fairly sure that isn't what you want.

Why is the contractor so cool? For some reason the thought of riders arouses me.

To be fair, the idea of using a steed or ride to slam into people as an attack is a pretty metal concept in and of itself. I can see why people like it.

My bad for not putting it in the poll.

Huh. I've got a distinct lack of people with rides.

Thats pretty sad.

I mean, i guess this is close?

she could probably ride that thing

I get what you're saying; Kamigakari classes were each designed to have unique interactions with the combat system, while DX Syndromes were designed to have the same basic options, given its attempt at modularity.

And JTTRPGs duck versimilitude arguments by making everyone "magical" in fluff, then having all classes work off the same resource management and power design systems. Unless it's TBZ; the gap reappears, but anyone can buy up magic in play.

To be fair, magic is simply that which can't be explained by science. Stuff that breaks the laws of reality.

At a high enough level of physical bullshit, it may as well be magic. At a high enough level, the difference between the two is rather moot. Basically just a matter of semantics.

The west has a very strict view on magic and casters and how they should work, but japan doesn't really hold that illusion. Magic over there is just harnessing energy to achieve seemingly impossible results.

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Is there a reason you just posted the cover of the book?

Thread was on page 9 and the art is cool.

Sorry, i worded that badly, i meant is there a reason you posted that and didn't say anything.

Still, question answered i guess.

It's cool.

frankly, i'm just happy to see people bumping thread besides me.

It means we have at least a couple regulars with an interest in keeping things alive, which is always good.

I'd be commenting more but I have enough trouble getting a group together for ONE regular game, D&D, so trying to get them sold and scheduled on another has been hard. I may try to work something up for the holidays, since I game with family.

I feel ya on that.

My group sorta fell apart because they are a bunch of drama inducing faggots.

>drama inducing faggots.
I'm so sorry user... and I thought constant scheduling conflicts were bad

So at level 1 i get 1 main and 1 sub class and i get both their starting talents and 2 talents have to be picked from their list or the common pool. Am i getting that right? Can i get more subclasses later? Can the main and sub class be the same class but different typed (arc slayer type a main, arc slayer type b sub, for example)?

That is correct.

At level 5, 10, and 15 you can get a high talent in place of your regular one. One of them allows you to grab another style wholesale.

And yes, the main and sub can be the same class by different style there-in

Yeah, i had to hound my GM about it, and he wouldn't tell me we weren't playing because he was trying to duck one of the other members for being "That Guy".

Didn't find that out till nearly a month later.

What kind of games are usually run with the system?

I'm not sure if this is the answer you want, but it focus' on monster of the week type shenanigans more than anything.

Thing kamen rider or power rangers, stuff like that. But with more variety in abilities

Oh wait, i found another one in my folder i overlooked

I'm not sure if I keep skipping over the part by accident or its something else entirely.

Wheres the Time wizard style? Can't seem to find it in the pastebin.