So the Japanese Goblin Slayer RPG is getting a translation

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I’ll what I can dig up, if it’s a different system it is probably worth tracking down.

I think by and large the system is not the most interesting part of Ryuutama, although it does have some mechanics that go with the game's core themes.
 
Is that based on Sword World as well? If not I might pick it up to check out the system. As I have stated from a quick page through, not a deep read, the RPG doesn’t seem to have anything in it that is more offensive than what has been in Runequest for decades so I don’t see a read to toss this in the trash to buy a different Japanese RPG based on Sword World when I have this now.
No, Ryuutama's a completely different system - I'd think of it as the differences between Savage Worlds (Ryuutama) and D&D 3.x (Goblin Slayer).
 
It... looks like a class-and-level game, but it's actually skill-based.

What it calls "classes" are probably what we'd call "skills"; they get added to rolls where they're relevant, as well as unlocking skills for purchase, unlocking special abilities (Like the four different magic systems) and dictating what gear you can use. It's "skills" are closer to D&D3.x "feats", coming in various levels (5 or 3, depending on if they are combat-oriented or not), providing small bonuses when undertaking particular tasks.

When you've earned so many XP, you go up an "adventurer level", which gives you a bunch of skill points straight up, as well as dictating the maximum level your skills are allowed to be at. You can spend XP to increase your class levels or buy additional skill points.

Core mechanic is 2d6 + stat + relevant class level + adventurer level (Sometimes) + other modifiers against a target number. Combat is opposed-roll, with defenders being able to either dodge a blow (Harder but completely negates it) or block it (Easier, but simply reduces the damage done). High rolls tend to give bonuses to most things.
So basically it's Barbarians of Lemuria in mechanics with feats added and a combat system that matches an anime:grin:?

Sold:thumbsup:!
 
I read that Goblin Slayer is about the adventures of some D&D characters? As in, they're literally D&D 5e characters? Can anyone C/D?
 
I read that Goblin Slayer is about the adventures of some D&D characters? As in, they're literally D&D 5e characters? Can anyone C/D?
I would also like to know as reading through the book and the fan pages, it's got a LOT of tropes, even the trolls need fire and/or acid to kill or they regenerate, I've already mentioned that apparently the dragons have differing breath types (One of the Dragon Priest spells allows you to choose one of the breath types, poison, ice, fire, lightning and I forget the other(s)), Not to mention that they specifically list the Dragon inside the bestiary as a 'Red' which breaths fire...
 
I read that Goblin Slayer is about the adventures of some D&D characters? As in, they're literally D&D 5e characters? Can anyone C/D?
Pretty much. In the story they say things like “I only have 2 out of my 3 daily spells left”.

But they do introduce some neat world building. Like Dragonborn being ancestor worshipers (of the fossils of dinosaurs).
 
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They're not "literally D&D 5e characters" but it is explicitly a ttrpg fantasy world in the vein of D&D, with, as mentioned, various genre tropes such as spells per day and an adventurer levelling system (though the latter is expressed more as a function of advancement in the guild rather than a character suddenly going "DING! I got new abilities!"). The author often proletizes his readers to try fantasy ttrpgs in each novel's afterword, though he never pushes anyone to a particular system that I recall.
 
They're not "literally D&D 5e characters" but it is explicitly a ttrpg fantasy world in the vein of D&D, with, as mentioned, various genre tropes such as spells per day and an adventurer levelling system (though the latter is expressed more as a function of advancement in the guild rather than a character suddenly going "DING! I got new abilities!"). The author often proletizes his readers to try fantasy ttrpgs in each novel's afterword, though he never pushes anyone to a particular system that I recall.
I saw a post on Twitter (so may be BS), where someone claimed that the manga had pics of 5e character sheets in it.

Edit: found it
1658936761007.png
 
That's a visual Easter egg in one of the three forms of media this work has appeared in. It's very likely that the design brief said, "make it look like an rpg character sheet" and a DnD 5e one was the first to come up in the mangaka's Google search.

In the light novel this manga is based on, here's the description from the English translation of this scene:

It was an Adventure Sheet. Gold letters paraded across the light brown vellum.

Name, sex, age, class, hair color, eye color, body type, skills, spells, miracles... Such simple information. So simple it almost didn't seem right.

"Oh," Guild Girl broke in, "you can leave the 'Abilities' and 'Adventure History' spots blank. The guild will fill those in later."

It's just her guild application form. It happens to be based visually on a character sheet that resembles 5e ones in the manga.

Now, granted, the RPG world they live in could be a DnD 5e homebrew setting. But it could also be any rpg with spell slots per day and magic scrolls. Which opens up any edition of DnD, as well as a host of others. It distinctly feels kind of OSR in its assumptions, but there's nothing to specify any particular underlying ruleset.
 
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So basically it's Barbarians of Lemuria in mechanics with feats added and a combat system that matches an anime:grin:?

Sold:thumbsup:!

This. Your Classes are your "proficiency" bonus for certain roles and then you just choose what ever "Feats" you want. Also the combat system is brutal in that the clock starts ticking once it starts because of Fatigue.
 
Including a limited number of spells available per day in this setting probably draws its first inspiration from something like Dungeons and Dragons, but I wouldn't say it intrinsically makes a setting function like it was an RPG since that idea for how magic works was itself inspired by the works of Jack Vance in books starting as early as 1950.
 
I think by and large the system is not the most interesting part of Ryuutama, although it does have some mechanics that go with the game's core themes.

I disagree and so do the designers of Red Giant and Fabula Ultima. It's a super light system with neat classes (abilities) and modified by your approaches (fighting, magic, ...)

I find each of the Japanese games has something very different from western games.
 
I disagree and so do the designers of Red Giant and Fabula Ultima. It's a super light system with neat classes (abilities) and modified by your approaches (fighting, magic, ...)

I find each of the Japanese games has something very different from western games.
One of the things I find really neat about Ryuutama is how it guides the players and gm in how to play a game and how to design an adventure. I Really like the travel system, the joint world building exercises, and especially all the tools it includes to help signal the type of game being played. It not only provides advise on how to structure an adventure, but actually provides worksheets to help with writing them. The GM having a "Character" who get's minor rule influences based around that characters theme to guide the story. It's an amazing game designed around helping all the players learn the basics of playing RPG's by giving them frameworks that are absolutely free to break once they feel comfortable and gives them so much structured guidance that a GM will quickly build a toolkit. If you just focus on the rules the game plays extremely fast, but that means there's plenty of time to roleplay the results of the dice and the game encourages it. Combat will be familiar to anyone who has played RPG's, but there's an additional mechanic where each player will state a random item or terrain feature present in the combat. They get a small bonus for using an item in the description of their attack. And each item can only be used once. I also love how the GM Character can technically hit epic levels and they gain abilities that are all just in jokes for more experience RPG players.

Ultimately it's a great game for teaching people about fantasy RPG's. It can be as exciting or as calm as you want it, but it really wants to be Miyazaki's Oregon Trail.
 
Every time the boyfriend comes along, there’s a fight (sometimes lasting several issues) and then they go on adventuring like nothing happened, until the next attempted rape occurs.
Unfortunately, that's not wholly unlike the dynamics in some real-life relationships.
 
I’m moving stuff around as we prepare for flooding, and a little while ago I found a box of several hundred manhua I bought back in the day to practice my Chinese with. Most of them are one series, a fantasy series which has a tone on par with the Power Rangers, except that every fifty issues or so one of the two protagonists tries to rape the other protagonist’s girlfriend.



Every time the boyfriend comes along, there’s a fight (sometimes lasting several issues) and then they go on adventuring like nothing happened, until the next attempted rape occurs.
...so why is the raping protagonist alive? What is that, the Big Mystery of the setting:shade:?
 
I’m slowly working my way through this, but I just finished the prologue chapter, so I’m not very far. It seems interesting. I did poke around a bit with the Sword World 2.0 fan translation to try to see what the differences between this and the base system are. Sadly, I doubt I’ll ever get to play this. I’m already running my own thing (and not likely to switch), and the rest of the group passed when someone tried offering to run Konosuba TRPG.

I honestly wonder how much of this is on Yen Press, who are clearly not experienced with RPG publishing, and how much is a faithful recreation of the Japanese product.
The Japanese website has character sheets available for download. There’s also a special site with some extra material (flows charts, sample characters, etc) including a pretty lengthy errata document. Does anyone know if the errata was incorporated into the translated version? It would also be nice if we got official english translations of the extra material (but I doubt it will happen).

I haven't read more than 1% of it yet but it has a ton of content (I'm guessing Japanese rpgs are one and done, not product lines), and full retail is $20, so it's much less of an investment than most games. So far, it doesn't meander nearly as much as most large books. For example, in the monster section, it's usually 2 monsters on a page.
There’s a supplement and a replay book available that hasn’t been translated. I don’t know what (if any) the plans are for bringing those over.
 
OK - I tried printing off my first character sheet attempt (it was just using a scanned image) - and realised just how unusable it was.

For my second attempt I'll try editing the japanese version using english text. I've identified one font as 'Caslon' which I'm pretty sure about, but having trouble with the second, closest I get with what I have is 'Ancona' (but the 'k' is wrong in Ancona). Will use these if no-one else can do better at (a) identifying them and (b) has publishing rights to the fonts.

What I do have problems with is the character sheet title - I want to make it 'Goblin Slayer TRPG Character Sheet' rather than 'Goblin Slayer TRPG Adventure Sheet'. Yes, if I'm making it I can go with whatever I want, but is it only me that balks at Adventure Sheet for a PC? Isn't an Adventure Sheet for recording things that happened on a particular Adventure?
 
OK - I tried printing off my first character sheet attempt (it was just using a scanned image) - and realised just how unusable it was.

For my second attempt I'll try editing the japanese version using english text. I've identified one font as 'Caslon' which I'm pretty sure about, but having trouble with the second, closest I get with what I have is 'Ancona' (but the 'k' is wrong in Ancona). Will use these if no-one else can do better at (a) identifying them and (b) has publishing rights to the fonts.

What I do have problems with is the character sheet title - I want to make it 'Goblin Slayer TRPG Character Sheet' rather than 'Goblin Slayer TRPG Adventure Sheet'. Yes, if I'm making it I can go with whatever I want, but is it only me that balks at Adventure Sheet for a PC? Isn't an Adventure Sheet for recording things that happened on a particular Adventure?
I just chalk it up to translation and possibly differences in the way the games are approached, I haven’t spoke to or read any in-depth interviews with Japanese gamers to see how they approach games as opposed to assuming it is the same as we do in the west.
 
I just chalk it up to translation and possibly differences in the way the games are approached, I haven’t spoke to or read any in-depth interviews with Japanese gamers to see how they approach games as opposed to assuming it is the same as we do in the west.

We could always try paging Paul Mason at Sleepyscholar of Shentian Sleepyscholar of Shentian if he isn't too busy, who has direct experience gaming in Japan
 
I'm only about 100 pages into my copy, but I'm already having questions about the class balance. So far it looks like the monk is completely superfluous since the scout gets basically all of the monk's things plus a ton more. I'm really hoping there's some benefit to taking levels of monk that I just haven't found yet.
 
What I do have problems with is the character sheet title - I want to make it 'Goblin Slayer TRPG Character Sheet' rather than 'Goblin Slayer TRPG Adventure Sheet'. Yes, if I'm making it I can go with whatever I want, but is it only me that balks at Adventure Sheet for a PC? Isn't an Adventure Sheet for recording things that happened on a particular Adventure?
An alternative would be to title it 'Adventurer Sheet' (as they're Adventurers, members of the Adventurers Guild). I wonder whether its a translation thing?
I'm only about 100 pages into my copy, but I'm already having questions about the class balance. So far it looks like the monk is completely superfluous since the scout gets basically all of the monk's things plus a ton more. I'm really hoping there's some benefit to taking levels of monk that I just haven't found yet.
Could be wht there are so few Monks in the series?! :hehe:

Just wait to you get to the part about 'Fate' points. I've got a huge problem with this section as the maths doesn't seem to make sense. This is one point where I think the Japanese language (which uses the same word for the singular or plural of a noun) may have made translation difficult.

The initial statement suggests that Fate points are given out individually, but later suggests that they are pooled. If you are given 7 points per player (with two players), then they pool to 14 which means that a roll can't suceed. Also as you are rolling over, why are you given more points for a difficult scenario rather than less, as Fate points increase with each attempt?
 
I would be interested to hear comparisons between Konosuba and this RPG if anyone is familiar with both. Konosuba is a pretty cool fantasy system, that I think shares a similar base but seems a lot lighter, if based on page count alone.
 
Yeah, I am aware of the extra pages. Just wondering if it uses that extra page count to good effect. Konosuba already seemed like a pretty fulsome fantasy RPG and I liked the rules quite a bit.
The problem with Konosuba is the lack of world building. It tends to stick in the Axel region. While GS covers a lot more area, but is also a lot more broadly detailed. For example, Konosuba has two gods listed, with maybe a few more that MIGHT exist, but GS has an entire pantheon, lists holidays associated with them.

GS is in general more detailed, although that may be a bad thing for those who prefer rules light stuff. GS is a meaty system.
 
The problem with Konosuba is the lack of world building. It tends to stick in the Axel region. While GS covers a lot more area, but is also a lot more broadly detailed. For example, Konosuba has two gods listed, with maybe a few more that MIGHT exist, but GS has an entire pantheon, lists holidays associated with them.

GS is in general more detailed, although that may be a bad thing for those who prefer rules light stuff. GS is a meaty system.
So the additional page count is mostly additional setting material?
 
So the additional page count is mostly additional setting material?
I did provide shots of Goblin Slayers Contents pages in the previous page of this thread if you want to do some comparison

Things I immediately noticed regarding layout etc. - Far more monsters in Goblin Slayer, far more information provided for spells/talents etc. mainly because there are more levels of skill etc in Goblin Slayer. Was originally going to say that per page for spells/monster/talents Goblin Slayer presented more of them per page, but looking at it a bit more I think that Goblin Slayer actually has fewer per page (but it seems more because of the information contained therein).

Don't remember a fatigue mechanic in Konosuba, seems that there are more things to track in Goblin Slayer. Not saying its bad, but about the maximum I'd want to track (as I get older, im starting to prefer lighter systems.
 
So the additional page count is mostly additional setting material?
Definitely no. As burbles noted there is lots of crunch in those extra pages. Way more monsters. Those extra pages aren't just fluff to be discarded when you run it in your own world. There's a lot more going on and that Fatigue system is evil...by the time you realize you may be in trouble it's probably too late.
 
Definitely no. As burbles noted there is lots of crunch in those extra pages. Way more monsters. Those extra pages aren't just fluff to be discarded when you run it in your own world. There's a lot more going on and that Fatigue system is evil...by the time you realize you may be in trouble it's probably too late.
Sounds more and more interesting:thumbsup:!
 
Sounds more and more interesting:thumbsup:!

Ya, so you have Life Points (like HP), Fatigue and Attrition. Take twice your LP in total damage, you're dead. Fill in all 20 Fatigue boxes, you're dead. Every round you are in combat mark off an Attrition box. If it's a circle mark off a Fatigue Box. After 20 rounds every box is round. Your damage taken is more than your Life Points, all Attrition is Fatigue damage.

There is no grinding it out in this game. There are potions though...
 
Bear in mind, a round is a full minute, too. So you can last a while.

I have a player who wants to make a catboy pad foot. With grey ears and a tail. A dual wielding scout/fighter, named Mouser. I got the reference.
 
Bear in mind, a round is a full minute, too. So you can last a while.

I have a player who wants to make a catboy pad foot. With grey ears and a tail. A dual wielding scout/fighter, named Mouser. I got the reference.
And his sword is named Cat's Claw?
 
And his sword is named Cat's Claw?
That's his shorter sword, the main one is Scalpel. Although I'm pretty sure after I sarcastically suggested those names, that's when he decided that what they will be called. His wife also wants a catgirl... The third player hasn't decided yet, but if he's making a barbarian type fighter I'm going to throw wet sponges at the lot of them.
 
That's his shorter sword, the main one is Scalpel. Although I'm pretty sure after I sarcastically suggested those names, that's when he decided that what they will be called. His wife also wants a catgirl... The third player hasn't decided yet, but if he's making a barbarian type fighter I'm going to throw wet sponges at the lot of them.
I'd make a tall Northerner if I was him...a barbarian with Skaldic training:shade:.
 
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