Sometimes I Play Shitty Tabletop RPGs: Golden Sky Stories
This review is nonsensical froth. If you want the fleshy funbits, you should probably go read Nexus Academy's review. He did GM the damn thing.
I'm in probably the most incestuous tabletop gaming group ever. A player in one is a GM in another and vice versa and I GMed a game that a player made a sequel to so I'm playing in that. It's dice rolling cousin lovin' and it works out pretty well.
Occasionally the grand master of GMs, Tzelael, will go "HEY I FOUND THIS GAME. WE SHOULD PLAY IT BECAUSE IT PROBABLY SUCKS." To which we go "SURE WHY NOT." And that's how Golden Sky Stories entered the picture.
I'm a huge flaming animu fan girl furry so when approached with a cutesy tabletop game about anthro animals in slice of life Japan, of course I'm going to jump on this. No three hour combat sessions? All character building and intrapersonal relationship building? Holy shit! Is this guy psychic and came up with everything I want to do in a game? Well, no he's not.
Let's just start with character creation. I'm not really gonna touch on mechanics because I zoned out and others can talk about the nuts and bolts of play better than I can, but I build characters and that's my one shining quality.
Some games take entire sessions to build a character. White Wolf is the guiltiest party when it comes to this. This is annoying for entirely different reasons, but generally these types of games are ones where you're in for the long haul and these characters are gonna be around for a while. (Unless you're playing Call of Cthulu. If you haven't written your character's obituary during character creation, you must be new here.) So the amount of time you spend on them is almost worth it because you need to know a lot about your character.
Golden Sky Stories looked at this and went "how can we make the player less involved in character creation?" and made each race basically a half-built character you can name and maybe alter appearance. Even personalities are already dictated! Want to play a haughty dog with a chip on her shoulder? THE BOOK SAYS ALL DOGS LOVE HUMANS. Want to play a peppy kitsune eager to make friends? TOO BAD, THE BOOK SAYS KITSUNE ARE ARROGANT PRICKS. It's one thing to make generalizations ("Generally, kitsune are...") but it's another to outright dictate what personality traits you're allowed to have. And as someone who likes playing characters that break racial norms, this is suffocating to my creative process. Really all you can do is decide how much you like your party and maybe give your anime dog girl huge tits.
Oh yeah. You have to like your party. There is no option and I am not exaggerating for effect.
See, in all my years roleplaying both tabletop and in the dark back alleys of the Yahoo User Chatrooms (remember those?) I've found the most character development comes from characters trying to scratch each other's eyeballs out or having differing methods on solving a problem. Character A wants to negotiate peacefully, Character B is sharpening their knife asking which part of the monster bleeds the fastest, that kind of thing. Conflict is one of the most basic ways of defining a character's relationship with other characters.
YET IN A GAME ENTIRELY ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS THEY MANAGED TO CUT ALL THAT OUT.
It's actually mindboggling that the game maker added absolutely nothing about disliking other characters. I guess in fairness it presents a challenge in coming up with motivation as to why Fox that hates Dog would work with Dog in the first place, but isn't that part of the fun? Overcoming adversity, working with someone you loathe and maybe finding out they're not so bad after all and having the credits roll on a new friendship?
I'm not lying at all about the game maker leaving out the option to dislike another character, by the way. Here's the actual choices you have of which types of relationships you can have with other characters, the closest one to "dislike" being "Rival."
Well it does note at the bottom you can make up your own but they can't be negative. Wait what?
In all roleplaying games my favorite thing is playing out characters interacting with other characters. It's the most chickish thing to pick as a favorite thing for RPGs but it's true. Establishing relationships, trashing relationships, drunken nights singing vaguely misogynistic shanties with the NPC you love but will never see again, butting heads over the best way to break into a vault, it's those moments that build the road ahead for the game. Not every one of these moments is going to be positive, and that's fine! There are going to be character moments that make you sad or piss you off and that's part of what makes your character more human.
Why I've come to favor World of Darkness settings over Dungeons and Dragons is the huge opportunities for character growth. You can start out as the smarmy jock who knows everything and end the campaign with a shell of a man who has had reality as he knows is completely destroyed. Hell, I started one game with a naive, stupidly-optimistic Changeling that ended up as a completely lost, broken soul that probably got canned for threatening the Masquerade. I couldn't have predicted that was what was going to happen to him, and that's what made the game fun.
Golden Sky Stories takes this all away because you know what's going to happen. You're going to solve the problem with your circle of friends and ride off into the sunset for the next adventure. That works in anime but that doesn't work in a playable game with real people operating these characters. It's not realistic and the characters just don't feel human. I was freely given the opportunity to play a fox furry (when I usually have to fight or come up with a loophole because I'm a stubborn bitch) and it was boring as shit.
Did I mention this is the same guy who made the creepy loli Maid RPG? That might be important.
I'm in probably the most incestuous tabletop gaming group ever. A player in one is a GM in another and vice versa and I GMed a game that a player made a sequel to so I'm playing in that. It's dice rolling cousin lovin' and it works out pretty well.
Occasionally the grand master of GMs, Tzelael, will go "HEY I FOUND THIS GAME. WE SHOULD PLAY IT BECAUSE IT PROBABLY SUCKS." To which we go "SURE WHY NOT." And that's how Golden Sky Stories entered the picture.
I'm a huge flaming animu fan girl furry so when approached with a cutesy tabletop game about anthro animals in slice of life Japan, of course I'm going to jump on this. No three hour combat sessions? All character building and intrapersonal relationship building? Holy shit! Is this guy psychic and came up with everything I want to do in a game? Well, no he's not.
Let's just start with character creation. I'm not really gonna touch on mechanics because I zoned out and others can talk about the nuts and bolts of play better than I can, but I build characters and that's my one shining quality.
Some games take entire sessions to build a character. White Wolf is the guiltiest party when it comes to this. This is annoying for entirely different reasons, but generally these types of games are ones where you're in for the long haul and these characters are gonna be around for a while. (Unless you're playing Call of Cthulu. If you haven't written your character's obituary during character creation, you must be new here.) So the amount of time you spend on them is almost worth it because you need to know a lot about your character.
Golden Sky Stories looked at this and went "how can we make the player less involved in character creation?" and made each race basically a half-built character you can name and maybe alter appearance. Even personalities are already dictated! Want to play a haughty dog with a chip on her shoulder? THE BOOK SAYS ALL DOGS LOVE HUMANS. Want to play a peppy kitsune eager to make friends? TOO BAD, THE BOOK SAYS KITSUNE ARE ARROGANT PRICKS. It's one thing to make generalizations ("Generally, kitsune are...") but it's another to outright dictate what personality traits you're allowed to have. And as someone who likes playing characters that break racial norms, this is suffocating to my creative process. Really all you can do is decide how much you like your party and maybe give your anime dog girl huge tits.
Oh yeah. You have to like your party. There is no option and I am not exaggerating for effect.
See, in all my years roleplaying both tabletop and in the dark back alleys of the Yahoo User Chatrooms (remember those?) I've found the most character development comes from characters trying to scratch each other's eyeballs out or having differing methods on solving a problem. Character A wants to negotiate peacefully, Character B is sharpening their knife asking which part of the monster bleeds the fastest, that kind of thing. Conflict is one of the most basic ways of defining a character's relationship with other characters.
YET IN A GAME ENTIRELY ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS THEY MANAGED TO CUT ALL THAT OUT.
It's actually mindboggling that the game maker added absolutely nothing about disliking other characters. I guess in fairness it presents a challenge in coming up with motivation as to why Fox that hates Dog would work with Dog in the first place, but isn't that part of the fun? Overcoming adversity, working with someone you loathe and maybe finding out they're not so bad after all and having the credits roll on a new friendship?
I'm not lying at all about the game maker leaving out the option to dislike another character, by the way. Here's the actual choices you have of which types of relationships you can have with other characters, the closest one to "dislike" being "Rival."
Well it does note at the bottom you can make up your own but they can't be negative. Wait what?
In all roleplaying games my favorite thing is playing out characters interacting with other characters. It's the most chickish thing to pick as a favorite thing for RPGs but it's true. Establishing relationships, trashing relationships, drunken nights singing vaguely misogynistic shanties with the NPC you love but will never see again, butting heads over the best way to break into a vault, it's those moments that build the road ahead for the game. Not every one of these moments is going to be positive, and that's fine! There are going to be character moments that make you sad or piss you off and that's part of what makes your character more human.
Why I've come to favor World of Darkness settings over Dungeons and Dragons is the huge opportunities for character growth. You can start out as the smarmy jock who knows everything and end the campaign with a shell of a man who has had reality as he knows is completely destroyed. Hell, I started one game with a naive, stupidly-optimistic Changeling that ended up as a completely lost, broken soul that probably got canned for threatening the Masquerade. I couldn't have predicted that was what was going to happen to him, and that's what made the game fun.
Golden Sky Stories takes this all away because you know what's going to happen. You're going to solve the problem with your circle of friends and ride off into the sunset for the next adventure. That works in anime but that doesn't work in a playable game with real people operating these characters. It's not realistic and the characters just don't feel human. I was freely given the opportunity to play a fox furry (when I usually have to fight or come up with a loophole because I'm a stubborn bitch) and it was boring as shit.
Did I mention this is the same guy who made the creepy loli Maid RPG? That might be important.