What's the deal with Ryuutama?

What's the deal with Ryuutama?

It's comfy. That makes it very unsuitable for murderhobos. So for the Western audience, it's perhaps the most niche system besides Blue Rose.

It's cute and delightful. The combat is a little lacking, but whatever, just minimize the combat.

Personally I've considered running it like OSR style combat where you make up for lack of depth of mechanics with interesting monsters, terrain, and situations

The two main things about Ryuutama:
>It tends towards low-impact campaigns. It's mostly about a bunch of people just travelling around and doesn't have an overt focus on combat or similar.
>There is a system-mandated GMPC - a dragon who follows the party from the shadows to chronicle thier story and occasionally offers help to the party when they need it.

The dragon GMPC explains the name, since "ryuu" is "dragon" in Japanese.

I read it a while ago, but iirc It provides many cues for roleplay and directly asks people to roleplay using those, but doesn't really reflect that desire in the reward structure. So as for teaching and incentivising people to roleplay, i would say it falls behind games like mouse guard, tales from the loop, and game like that, that actually reward players for roleplaying aspects of their character.

It's ryuutama, dragon egg. The game is about adventurers nurturing a baby dragon with interesting stories. The color of the dragon influences the type of stories the party encounters.

I just started running this game and I've kind of fallen in love with it. That being said as other people have mentioned you kind of need the right group of people to play it enjoyably. Sort of like how a video game like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon (the older ones, anyway) are solid games that really appeal to certain people but a lot of people will find them boring or "pointless."

I would have to disagree with that, but you're not wrong. My interpretation of the system is that it puts control of rewarding roleplay DIRECTLY in to the hands of the GM/Ryuujin. None of the rewards the Ryuujin could grant are huge, but I really don't think that's the scope of the game.

>The color of the dragon influences the type of stories the party encounters.
What kind of dragon eats lewd stories?

When my brother approached me when he wanted to run a game, I read through parts of the rulebook to get a feel. I was very turned off when a big chunk of the book was dedicated to rules for the system mandated DMPC. Should I give ryuutama another shot?

Probably the blue one

It's fine as long as you can trust the GM

Blue

The dragon GMPC isn't as intrusive as you think. At worst, he provides small bits of help from the shadows when you need it. He mostly serves as an in-character narrator for your campaign as he watches you from the shadows.

It's unimaginative shit.

Play Golden Sky Stories instead.

Nigga please, there are hundreds of "more niche" games.

I forget, but the one associated with tales of friendship.
Honestly, it's not like the dragon is a PC, but more like a guide. It does get deus/diablos ex machina powers for "making the story interesting" though; spending energy to fudge die rolls into successes if you want to give the players a break, or give a monster better stats.

>trust
>deus ex machine powers
>making the story interesting
>fudging rolls
Yeah, these are pretty big red flags when it comes to my brother. Maybe I'll give it a shot if someone else wants to run it, but for now I'll pass. You guys have comfy fun, though.

How do you run comfy games? I'm so used to running combat heavy or WoD style shit for people, I love Ghibli and that sort of thing but doesn't it feel a little awkward running that sort of vibe?

Emphasize the human element and interactions.
Make sure to get across that combat isn't the only form of conflict out there.
Run low-impact campaigns - those that are low-risk, low-stakes and more local in nature, nothing very serious.

Thanks user. This seems like a good system to run for my GF/her friends. She's very much into tabletop and her friends are into anime etc.

It's comfy and great for beginners, both acting as a tutorial for GMs and players alike and having a tutorial for the tutorial.

Could you do a late post apocalyptic campaign? Less stalker more about rebuilding. Has anything like that been done?

The Ryuujin is more like a way to limit GM fiat than a GMPC. It's true that the Ryuujin's abilities could potentially sway things greatly, but you're limited on how many times you can use them per session. Not to mention the rule book stresses that less is more as far as Ryuujin intervention goes.

Not the user you're replying to, but I'm sure they'll love it. Just make sure to find ways to keep it engaging and not repetitive. I like to focus on the things that people love about Ghibli films, namely their ability to instill childlike wonder.

Dragon-people DMPCs, wizardry and seasonal magic, bestiary, item list tech level, assumption of social structure (Nobles) doesn't really fit for post-apocalyptic game. Unless it's so far removed that might as well be normal fantasy.

You'd probably have to homebrew a lot. But the mechanics of the system could work well for it.

Hell, the land was formed by dragons and in some of the flavor text for said dragons it mentions that sometimes they get in turf wars and end up changing the landscape. Maybe something like that cause the apocalypse?

Are you high? The combat is the most fun part of the system. Daily travel is the stupidest part of the game.

What's wrong with the traveling?

Objects are a dumb mechanic and it's stupid that you can't move past enemy lines to attack