千矢

[dorchadas]

A few days ago I posted on Facebook about Yasuke (弥助), an African man brought to Japan by the Portuguese who became a retainer under Oda Nobunaga, and thosesocks replied and asked if I had heard about the RPG Thousand Arrows (chiya, written as in the subject line), and I had not. I looked at the kickstarter page, and it looked interesting but I had some concerns, and on Saturday between Lunar New Year events we met for tea so I could hear more about it.

When I said I had concerns, what I mean is that I went to go look at the kickstarter page and it has a section that said:

Feudal warlords called "big names," rising from the knight caste, have carved the nation into warring states.

The kanji in 大名 (daimyō), the feudal lords of pre-Meiji Japan, do literally mean big or great name, and samurai and knights are pretty close in social function, but as someone who speaks Japanese (well enough) and lived in Japan I felt that elided a lot of the interesting differences. She told me that was something the designer put a lot of thought into and that his goal was to prevent falling into stereotypes as much as possible (elaborated more in a blog post he wrote). Most people who play this game are not going to approach this with experience of living in Japan, and going beyond that, almost no one is going to approach it with a deep understanding of the historical context of the Sengoku period. It was written for people who sign up for a game at a con or who think the game sounds interesting, who have no special experience with or understanding of Japan beyond maybe some anime and stereotypes picked up from American culture, and is designed to prevent offensive behavior as much as possible based on that audience.

One thing the two of us talked about, in terms of our different experiences in playing Japan-inspired RPGs, is Sengoku and Legend of the Five Rings. thosesocks asked me my opinion of L5R, and I brought up the "Rokugan is not Japan" sidebar and how it seemed more like an apology than an actual design principle since so much of Rokugan's setting is directly Japanese-inspired, and also that most of the Japanese used in the game was, if not wrong, not a usage that a Japanese person would recognize. Especially the place names, which are all nonsense. The capital is Otosan Uchi (お父さん家, "Father's House")? A desert called Yakeru yoni Atsui (焼けるように暑い, "You will sunburn because it's hot")? Come on. I mentioned the hundreds of pages of background information in Sengoku about the Sengoku era and how the people ate, dressed, lived their lives, talked to each other, fought, prayed, and so on, and she mentioned an L5R game where the GM ran it as though the players had memorized all of L5R's setting information and would automatically know what the colors of a courtier's robes meant, or what a particular turn of phrase implied. It's easy for me to want that in a historical Japanese game because I don't have to invest as much time in learning it all, but for a new player it's a significant turn off.

I brought up how I like the subtlety of honorifics and how they can be used in conversation, as someone who has been insulted (and witnessed other people insulted, either jokingly or not) by being addressed with the wrong honorific, but that I can't expect most people to know all of that without research. thosesocks agreed, and also said that Thousand Arrows was designed with the translation convention in mind--it's being played in English (or Spanish, or French, etc), so everything should be conducted in the local language without too much gratuitous Japanization.

It makes sense when it's put that way. Most of my attitude here is my past experience, with having conversations in mixed Japanese and English with people in Japan. Or in reverse, when I was at a bar with Anime Chicago people talking about my time in Japan and one of them brought up how odd it must have felt to be called sensei by people and I said that it wasn't odd at all. I wasn't in a shoujo manga, I was living in Japan and teaching English. Of course that's how they'd refer to me.

I had some other questions about playing Ainu, Portuguese/南蛮人 (nanbanjin, "Southern barbarians"), or non-samurai characters like merchants or craftsmen (or like Kikuchiyo from Seven Samurai). It sounds like they're planned for the future, which is neat. I immediately had an idea for a game involving a group of merchants in Nagasaki trying to survive against the increased trade brought by the Portuguese.

We talked a bit about the mechanics, since Thousand Arrows is Powered by the Apocalypse and I have very little experience with PbtA games, consisting only of listening to one let's play of Monsterhearts and one of Dungeon World. The very first question thosesocks asked was about my gaming preferences, and I talked about sandbox gaming and how my favorite part of tabletop roleplaying is emergent storytelling; that it's possible for a group to sit down without anyone knowing exactly what will happen and have a great story to tell after a few hours of playing (a principle I based my Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom game around). I had some questions about the mechanical interactions, especially about the bonds mechanic mentioned on the Kickstarter page, but unfortunately (in terms of answering my question) it sounded like the test games she had been in had been much more narrative-focused. She did remember that bonds made actions involving the bond easier but increased the bond to the point where it'd compel some obsessive course of action, the better to set up a tragic conflict between duty and desire, which is the basis for the majority of all jidaigeki plots out there.

I went in a bit leery but I came out of our conversation much more positive on it. I still probably wouldn't run Thousand Arrows yet, coming as I do from a background of rules-heavy sandbox RPGs, but I'd love to play in a game of it. I'll keep an eye out.