jordangreywolf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jordangreywolf) wrote2017-11-09 09:12 am
jordangreywolf) wrote2017-11-09 09:12 am
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[Anime] Re:Creators
Gwendel showed me a few episodes of an anime series that came out earlier this year, "Re:Creators." Certain elements reminded me of RPG campaigns from SinaiMUCK with a similar theme - Mirari, and Avatars, specifically, though I suppose my 'Wonderland No More' campaign might brush up against that category as well.
Anyway, here's some disjointed rambling about it. I don't know if there might be an interesting idea for a take on some sort of RPG setting. I can envision a situation where I let the players write up their own characters -- totally independent of any particular genre or setting (just pick what you want!) -- and then my campaign drops them in the "Real World." Power balance? Well, there are ways that can be achieved in how the character is "translated" into the Real World.
Re:Creators
Okay, so I'm not keen on the name. What is it with this trend of so many anime titles playing with punctuation these days? ;)
But never mind that. Roughly, this is an anime that presents us with the idea of a crisis wherein characters from a number of anime, manga, and Japanese video game franchises appear in the Real World, and that their mere presence might present some sort of threat to reality as we know it, as Reality struggles to "justify" their existence.
Or, at least, that's the gist I get. The characters in-story do a lot of philosophizing about how things might work, and if the story were much, much longer, perhaps all the potential could be explored, but as it is, we've only got 2 seasons of a half-hour-per-episode standard anime series. On the upside, the production values are pretty amazing, and the series seems intent upon focusing on the central story rather than wasting time with various "animation-budget-saving" measures that plague certain longer-running anime series.
One particular instance that struck me as a great example of this: The series calls for an awful lot of exposition and dialogue, and in one particular sequence, they made efficient use of this time by having the exposition running concurrently with a "montage" of the characters going through a number of events. It succeeded in illustrating how these characters from fantasy worlds might get better acquainted with how things work in the Real World in a remarkably efficient way, without spending time on several "goof-around" episodes as I might otherwise expect. And thus we were able to get on with the "good stuff."
This by no means is to say that it's a series that's all action-action-action. There's a LOT of talking, and there are lots of emotional moments. What strikes me, though, is that a lot of thought was put into this, and I think it shows. (In particular, there are numerous times during the series I found myself thinking, "Well, but what about THIS?" and then the story surprised me by actually addressing it.)
The Rules
Alas, the series doesn't go deep into the "rules" for how all of this works. Really, this strikes me as the sort of story that would normally require -- what -- maybe something epic like 4 seasons? But somehow it's been condensed into two. A lot just seems to be hinted at, and it really invites a lot of speculation. I can envision fans furiously putting together a Wiki and hypothesizing about filling in the gaps.
For instance, when these anime characters end up in the real world, they can do extraordinary things that are obviously not normal, but not all of their powers actually work as intended. Part of it is directly addressed in novel ways: A character from a "magical girl" series is alarmed when the big explosions and attacks she so casually uses in a conflict actually result in structural damage to buildings and people getting HURT. I liken it to how in certain superhero comics we just take it for granted that superheroes can be punching through walls and grabbing buses and smashing supervillains with them, and nobody is ever going to be ON that bus, or IN that building that just got trashed. (Okay, so now THESE DAYS that factor sometimes gets brought up, but I'm talking about the "archetypical" superheroic antics of once-upon-a-time.)
There are also cases where powers simply do not work ... and not always in the ways I would have expected to be typical. Conjuring fireballs and flying and such? No problem. But one thing that was telling (yet not terribly commented upon or followed up upon) was how one wizard character claimed that she'd get everything tidied up by casting a spell to restore everything ... but it DIDN'T WORK.
I found myself noting what did and didn't work, and the trend I think I could identify (yet was never actually spelled out as such in the series, as there seemed to be bigger fish to fry) was that certain "magical powers" really depend upon the universe to play along. Bringing your own giant stompy Japanese robot into the Real World is fine, blaster beams and all ... but you might start running into issues if you run out of fuel, or you need spare parts and filters for proper maintenance. Being able to draw upon your inner reserves of magical power to launch a fireball might work, but casting a "heal" spell would require some sort of magical framework that can record your "healthy" state so the magic knows what part goes where.
All the more so for some spell that's supposed to magically restore a broken object to its whole state; there's no inherent natural state of "not being broken."
I can imagine that if there were some magical power that could transform a human into a werewolf, that human would be in a lot of trouble if that magical power were suddenly removed from the universe. One might think, "Oh, he'll snap back to normal!" But if you really think about it, if this is taking place in the physical world, you would require some magical power that is going to move all those cells back to their original states and positions. There's nothing inherent about a magical form that if you squash and stretch it into the shape of a werewolf, it's going to somehow snap back like rubber bands into normal human mode. (If anything, you might be in grave danger if that "werewolf" form was in any way physically impossible, and required the presence of magic to keep it working. E.g., you probably don't get to keep "invulnerability to everything except silver.")
Skill Magic
And there was a strong implication that some of the characters, ripped from their day-to-day lives, underwent psychological changes because heretofore they'd depended upon things just always going a certain way -- not just because the Real World is a place "without magic" on a daily basis, but because things in stories HAPPEN A CERTAIN WAY, usually all centered around the star.
One thought that occurred to me (and which I haven't seen really explored in this series -- yet) is that it could be interesting to consider that certain characters you would EXPECT to have an easier time being translated into the Real World might actually be worse off in the sense of any kind of conflict.
For instance, consider Hercules Poirot, master detective. No super powers. No magic. Surely he'd fit into the Real World just fine, right? Well, maybe on a purely physiological basis, but he probably wouldn't be able to set his intellect to fixing all of our unsolved murder cases.
Why? Because that's just not how he works in the stories. Is Poirot really Poirot if he can travel anywhere and NOT have a murder happen right there on-site while he's there to investigate it? I mean, seriously, if I were genre-savvy AND somehow living in the same universe as Hercules Poirot, the first takeaway I'd get from his adventures is that I would never EVER want to invite him to a party, or even over to tea -- because if he's going to be there, SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE.
The same thing goes for a number of "skilled normal" heroes. Ostensibly, these are more "realistic" heroes than some superdude who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but all too often their awesomeness depends upon an endless string of amazing coincidences, opponents who keep making stupid mistakes, and bad guys who can't shoot straight. Without that happy convergence of convenience, the hero might actually lose now and again.
So certain non-magical attributes such as physical strength, amazing resilience, strong willpower, an eidetic memory, good looks (albeit very subjective), fast reflexes, etc., might translate rather well. More of a challenge would be the "brilliant scientist" because there it starts to depend upon just how brilliant the writer is. (Your amazing scientist who invented the secret to faster-than-light travel? Well, sorry, but just because that character got translated into this universe doesn't mean that we also imported the way light works in your universe.)
For very similar reasons, I could imagine that certain "superpowered" characters might not fare well, depending upon the source of their powers. A priestess calling upon miracles from her patron deity? Well, it would depend upon whether the importation package also included that patron deity coming along for the ride. A sorcerer who can speak to the spirits of the elements? Only useful if, in the Real World, there are actually elemental spirits to be spoken to.
...
Anyway, just some rambling. It's not as if I don't have enough ideas already for stuff to run. But it's a pretty neat series, and just got me to thinking back on some of the implications we toyed with about how fantasy worlds might "translate" into the "Real World" in certain MUCK campaigns. :)
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I do enjoy the general... Gestalt? of the premise, especially if it isn't a cliche 'modern high school kid gets shooped into fantasy world and somehow has All The Good Stuff' thing. While Avatars is definitely done, I could see plenty of room for similar games playing on the premise. Even tabletop gaming where the characters from your game somehow appear in the real world could work.
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I like that it toys with a lot of familiar tropes of anime/manga/JRPGs/visual novels but isn't beholden to them. I'd cite examples, but then I'm really getting into spoiler territory.
Of course, I won't really know for sure what to think of the series as a whole until we reach the end, but we're not quite there yet. And even if the ending COULD turn out to be a dud, at least the journey so far was interesting.
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There was one blatant "fan service" episode in the second season that felt like a rather jarring distraction from the "save-the-world" pace of the main storyline, but ... meh. Again, not enough to spoil the entire series.
I'd list all the things I LOVED about the series, but that would be too spoileriffic.
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In other words, there was no formal character creation system, in the conventional RPG sense. I gave the players some questionnaires earlier on, asking for details on what sort of character they'd play in, say, a normal modern-day campaign, what sort of power they'd have in a supernatural setting, and a bunch of red-herring questions meant to obfuscate what I was finally going to do, and then I just declared, "Hey, you know what? Before we start the SERIOUS stuff, I've got all these HeroClix minis. Howzabout we run some silly four-color-comics-style punch-fests with custom superheroes?" And then I delved into the responses that the players gave me on their characters for "other" settings in order to fill out a backstory for what the character was "really" like (if applicable). For those players who actually gave me more detail to work with, I tended toward, "Well, you have -- or HAD -- an identity in the real world before you got 'stuck' in this game," whereas for those who were far more scarce about the particulars, I tended toward, "You were a background NPC AI who achieved sapience and free will!"
That game really worked in a way that I don't think I could easily replicate. Moonwolf was still in our group, and a big creative driver, and brought in maybe 4 or 5 of the players who were in the campaign (as a whole or in "special guest-starring" roles). Gwendel hadn't yet become such a recluse, and actually played and contributed. HeroClix and Mage Knight minis were abundantly available on the cheap in "grab bag" deals at local comics/game stores (and there used to be more of those than there are now in the area) and I happened across a useful tool online that would let me generate customized stat wheel labels I could use to insert into those turn-click bases for custom stat lines. (So, if there was some model with a set of powers that I thought would be really useful, but I wasn't about to shell out $20 for that special rare model, I could just use some random mook dial, proxy some other model -- in my setting, I could just just about ANYTHING as an adversary -- and insert a custom dial label. Voila!)
That, and back then most of the projects at work were local (in the Florida office) rather than requiring me to fly out to Ohio or Texas every few weeks (or several weeks in a row). But even so, prep was a lot simpler: All I needed, really, was a vague outline of a story, some "plot points" to reveal, some cheat sheets on notes about the characters, and a bin full of random superhero and monster minis to dig into. Encounter balance wasn't terribly important, because even if the PCs were overwhelmed and "KO'ed" early in the campaign, the worst that'd happen is that now they're strapped into easily-escapable-death-traps in the lair of the Evilmeister, with ample opportunity to cause shenanigans while he's busy monologuing. And any rules lawyers had a rough time rules-lawyering me, because there WAS NO RULEBOOK. We basically had a cheat sheet for the Clix combat, and for noncombat skills, many times it'd just be hand-waved (You're a mechanic. Given the time and tools outside combat, you FIX THE THING.) but where there was any stress involved (You want to fix the thing DURING COMBAT, and someone stole your wrench set.) I'd set a difficulty number, the player would roll 2d6 and add it to a flat value representing the skill level, and that was that. Pretty straightforward.
It got more complicated later when I tried shoehorning in the classic Deadlands system (this was before I discovered Savage Worlds) to handle how the characters would work in the "real world." (A primary driver for why I did that was really because I was getting pushback from players who were missing some sort of "character advancement" system, who were used to their characters improving stats and gaining new powers over the course of an adventure, even if in-game, only a few hours or days are passing at most. My system required that I "eyeball" the stats and give everyone a "balanced" setup, and tweak things behind the scenes if I felt that one player was handicapped compared to the others. But eventually the players wanted to chart their own course to get skills they wanted but didn't start with, etc. So, I needed a more conventional framework, and Deadlands seemed flexible enough.)
Not that I needed to get into that much detail just because you mentioned "Superior City." ;) I just kind of go overboard sometimes. Digital_Rampage was new to our group back then; I think he's the only player in my current group who was in that campaign.