Ryuutama: Frameworks / Red Dragon Story

Just getting these thoughts down so I can focus on my OD&D campaign (coming “soon”), and more importantly on my gainful employment.

Ryuutama is a cutesy Japanese RPG about normal people stricken with wanderlust. It is a lunch break RPG, designed to be played in shorter sessions 1-3 hours leaning toward less. The game expects you to keep a journal of the campaign as part of the gameplay loop, stopping just short of baking it into a progression system. There’s fine encumbrance mechanics and shopping rules, player characters are defined by a few strategy-changing abilities that work at wilderness scales rather than in combat, and the game promises a wilderness exploration procedure. It certainly has one.

Frameworks and Failed Frameworks

Ryuutama has interest in alt- RPG cricles. Noisms for example played and talked about it a few years ago and was not impressed. His criticisms are correct and valid, but I think they miss some of the context of the game and its intent.

Ryuutama’s travel procedure is four skill rolls, in order. Players roleplay responses, and failures invite the GM to introduce a vignette of some kind. Add random tables for failed rolls and its basically Forbidden Lands, or remixed D&D. If the travel procedure is the games framework, it is a failed framework.

But while it fails as a classic style RPG, Ryuutama was not meant to be played that way. Ryuutama is not cutesey D&D, it’s cutesy Modern D&D, 100% dependent on the GM writing a scenario full of characters to talk to and arbitrary skill rolls to pass. The framework for writing these new-school “tradgame” scenarios is one of the most robust I’ve seen. Ryuutama is the perfect game for running players through the most linear adventures you’ve ever fucking seen. The Ryuujin, a special half-dragon GMPC with gamebreaking superpowers, exists to guide the players onto the rails and use superpowers that replace fudging enemy crits. As Noisms said, “As soon as anybody tries to do anything interesting or intelligent, the system collapses and the GM just has to make something up.” Well, yeah, this is passivist railroad gaming. Trying to do something interesting or intelligent breaks the contract and marks you as a problem player.

And that’s even worse. Ryuutama as written is a future vision of hazard dice so overloaded that you don’t even get to play the game anymore. Its also a vision of a future where game design exists to remove options, depth, and strategy from games rather than expanding them.

How could we fix this?

Like any game based on jerking of the GM with your skill rolls, patching Ryuutama to play like D&D is as simple as porting over OD&D booklet 3. The resulting work and jank is more than if you just played OD&D in the first place, but it’s an option. But I was thinking about Ryuutama again and about the time I played it more or less on its own terms. I still used some rules from OD&D actually, but mostly I focused on the travel mechanics and it was ultimately an educational failure. I learned the importance of a good gameplay loop.

What I did was draw a map and fill it with roleplay scenarios. The descriptions were usually simple, like “pixie race track” or “Raul’s Trading Post” and expanding those to interesting scenarios was all on my future self. Most of those were fun, I remember them years later. These scenarios were the intended core of Ryuutama and that’s why it provides GM worksheets for writing them. The biggest difference in what I did, and what I recommend to anyone who will run a Ryuutama game, is I tied them to wilderness squares instead of a prescribed timeline. The difference in framing between “you go to a racetrack” and “you found a racetrack” is huge in practice.

I expanded the travel procedure to at least have rules, and noted that there were unwritten steps like description, encounters (truly important) both random and preplanned. Note the example of play in Ryuutama hints that you can choose to rest early, that would be a cool mechanic if the map was more granular than 30km squares. So use a map more granular than 30km squares.

In the end you could just play D&D instead. Even if you like wilderness travel that has baked in attrition, Forbidden Lands does that better.

Red Dragon War Story

I had a thought for expanding Ryuutama into a good game, with its own non-D&D identity and a real gameplay loop. There is an expansion for Ryuutama but I haven’t read it, the English translation is ghostly and probably is not the missing piece that makes everything work anyway.

What Ryuutama needs is an expansion of GM-facing rules and it might be interesting to do that by giving the GM an actual challenge to overcome. What if Ryuutama was a co-op RPG? A solo RPG for multiple players. I’d have to check co-op boardgames too. The Ryuujin would not not there to be a whimsical entertainer, but a gandalf figure who has important wizard business and is depending on you. Or go dark fantasy, the players are a mercenary band and the GM is their powerful but limited employer. And not just within the narrative, which would be easy, but within the entire mechanical framework, which is hard. Make a game that the GM can lose. Once you do that you would have a strategy-dense framework, challenges where the GM’s half-dragon mary sue is useful for more than keeping the story on the rails, and a goal for the entire group to work towards, that could be pretty interesting.

The campaign I’d try to run would be about a band of PCs working for the Ryuujin, with clear goals but broad ways to get to it. They’re people with ordinary backgrounds, as most soldiers are. Definitions like Fighter and Mage aren’t as important as whether you were a Merchant or M*nstrel before the war. There’s a domain level war going on and everyone has a part to play, but big battles are for the climax, and fighting in general isn’t the focus. Instead you’re worried about getting where you need to go, not being spotted, not running out of food or water, and not getting trench foot. These are things Ryuutama does engage with, just not on a deep level. On the other hand, it has less emphasis on conquest and pillage but still allows for it. The tone should feel more like Lodoss than a grimdark fantasy novel. To get to this point, should I build on Ryuutama, or D&D, or from scratch? I’ll have to think. There’s definitely benefits to presenting the thing as a campaign, not a new game ruleset.

Like any solo game it would be on the honor system, so it wouldn’t work at all for inherently dishonorable redditors and storygamers, who fudge monster HP as second nature, but for people it could be fun. I’ll look into solo wargames and Co-op boardgames and if I have to, solo RPGs and journaling games and think about if this is workable. Is there already an RPG like this? I just remembered the storygame Fellowship, which sucks but had the idea of pretending to pit the PCs against the GM who IS the dark lord, but that’s merely PbtA but honest.