
I recently started DMing Maid: The Roleplaying Game, the first ever translated Japanese TRPG. The same people were originally planning to translate Tenra Bansho, a samurai-esque sci-fi/fantasy high-drama RPG, but instead they went for a game about maids, which I think pretty much expresses how anime and manga fandom has changed in the last decade.
Maid RPG is an anime-style (optionally) romantic comedy RPG in which the players play maids and/or the master of the house which employs them. This has become a very common anime comedy trope, easily surpassing the “wacky high school hijinks” formula seen in the old 1980s American RPG Teenagers from Outer Space. The nice thing about a maids-and-master situation, relative to a high school scenario, is that is provides a much firmer structure for the game. In TFOS or Big Eyes, Small Mouth the characters are just free to goof off randomly, but in Maid the goofing-off is constrained (barely) by the need of the maids to keep the Favor of the master or get fired and kicked out of the house (the equivalent of dying). To earn the master’s Favor, the maids must spend time trying to please him, take baths with him, cook him nourishing meals, argue over who gets to change his clothes, etc. They don’t *have* to, but if they don’t, they won’t get any XP… I mean Favor.
In short, the nice thing about Maid RPG is that it formalizes the dominant-submissive nature of tabletop role-playing. However, despite what some TRPG-ignorant reviewers in the anime community have written, the GM doesn’t *only* play the master; in fact, in larger games a player may play the master, and the GM may just play side characters and so forth. Still, the master and the maids are linchpins of the game. Basically, you gain Favor (which, since it can be spent to reduce Stress, is a bit like XP and HP combined) by pleasing the Master, since “your powers come from your role as a maid.” However, using the optional Seduction rules, players may seduce one another; allowing the seducer to grant Favor to the seducee (but the seducee has to do whatever the seducer wants). The designers do comment on the potential squick factor and warn players to try to keep it at a PG or PG-13 level. Another concern that some players have expressed to me is that the game might get ‘creepy’ or ‘sexist’ if it has a male GM and nothing but female players. I solved this by roleplaying a female master, however.
The game is very random. It happily acknowledges the interchangeability of most anime & manga moe characters by forcing players to randomly roll up their characters, from their Maid Type (Pure, Heroic, Boyish, Lolita, Sexy, etc.) to their hair and eye color to their Special Qualities (which can be anything from “hair that comes down over one eye” to “actually being a monster/fairy/undead creature/etc.”) This is a silly game of quick reversals and madness, so there isn’t much effort at ‘balance’, but everyone has some sort of power. All rolls are handled with just a few six-sided dice. If you want even more randomness, you can randomly roll for items and costumes that show up (there’s a major cosplay element — but maids lose some of their powers when out of uniform!), for the statistics of the Mansion, for the statistics of the Master, even for Random Events. In fact, at any time in the game, maids may spend 1D6 Favor to trigger a Random Event from one of several Random Event tables! Most of the Random Events in the book are really extreme and can derail any plot (a UFO lands, etc.), so the GM is encouraged to make up their own Random Event tables for specific scenarios. The Random Events table can also serve as a way for players to describe their own events, for GMs who like a more cooperative attitude towards GMing. o_0
I myself have come up with a few Maid house-rules:
MY MAID RPG HOUSE-RULES
* Starting Spirit = 5xWill instead of 10xWill. In my test games, the characters rarely took enough Stress to have a full-scale Stress Explosion, so this rule should make characters more vulnerable to freaking out… and more in need of the Master’s favor! ^^
* Random Events: The characters can still spend 1D6 Favor to create a Random Event, BUT it must be a Random Event which is something ‘mundane’ and disruptive within the household (i.e. the stove explodes, the dog runs through the house, the laundry is ruined) OR something which is tied in to their character (either they or the GM can choose what exactly). Alternately, the characters can spend 2D6 Favor to roll on the Random Events chart. I make this suggestion because the Random Events chart is so incredibly crazy and disruptive that it might be better if its use is limited. Also, this encourages the players to develop their characters in the form of Random Events, something many players are otherwise timid to do. It might be a good idea to write up a Mundane Random Events chart. In any case, Random Events, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the character, must ALWAYS cause chaos to the household, thus incurring the Master’s disfavor… that’s the risk you run!
Maid reminds me a bit of another game I like, The Dying Earth, in that both games assume that the role of the player-characters is to cause chaos. The rules provide a way to channel that chaos and keep it under control, by Temptations and Persuasion in Dying Earth, and by Favor and Stress in Maid. In my experience, going wild is exactly what most players like to do while gaming, so I enjoy Maid for the chance to take that wildness and encourage it and strap it down in maid uniform ^o^ I can’t wait to play with Shesh!