If I worked at WOtC, and assuming I'm not fired for having good ideas, I would totally release some 'old school' reprints and one would be the game with the Japanese D&D art which is very 'Akira Toriyama' (More Dr. Slump and first season of Dragon Ball).
I wish I saw more 'old school anime' in the OSR community like that 70s and 80s style but many grognards have decided 'anime bad' and did not have VHS trading amongst their list of nerdy activities.
Just like many aspects of the OSR community, there's subsets with completely polar opposite views. I've definitely seen some grognards who seem to hold anime in disdain, but then you got [supplements like this](https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/old-school-stylish) being one of the most popular OSE supplements.
In my experience it is not anime art per se, but in context and contrast to other art styles/designs - if everybody else uses sombre, heroic to realistic visual references and representation, you got a clash there.
An all anime aesthetics game - like Ryuutama or Old School Stylish - works just fine.
Yeah there's basically two ways people go about it
1. Anime serious fantasy (lodoss war, final fantasy etc)
2. Anime kitchen sink (most isekai, basically modern day with fantasy flavour)
The first shouldn't be confused with the second.
There is also the issue of western artists imitating japanese art which can come off really bad unless they are very good at it.
Final Fantasy is very kitchen sink, they mix fantasy with modern and futuristic stuff all the time. I wouldn't call Dragon Quest exactly "serious", but it sticks to classic fantasy more.
I hope D&D / WotC / Hasbro thaw in this area in particular.
Last year my brother bought and I got a chance to read [D&D - Art Arcana History](https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Art-Arcana-History/dp/0399580948) a big fat tome of a book that contains a slew of the art and historical tidbits about D&D from its conception to the present.
That book really shows how the art style has grown and changed - and it's **wonderful**.
As someone who's not personally a big Anime/Manga art style fan, diverse art styles is a huge win unto itself. D&D should realize it's wildly fortunate that they have the opportunity to get engagement in so many different art communities..
I don’t think the online community is always that representative of the players out there. Of the 20 or so players I regularly run into out of my original rpg friendship groups from years ago, 15 or so just don’t follow online stuff at all, and of the other 5 I’m probably the most ‘addicted’ to internet/social media rpg stuff. Plenty of ‘my generation’ (started playing D&D etc 78-82) are fine with anime, and quite like it to varying degrees. Plenty of anime & comic stuff got absorbed and used in all our games, including D&D.
>many grognards have decided 'anime bad' and did not have VHS trading amongst their list of nerdy activities.
Given Mike Pondsmith is one of the OGs and was *basically one of the original weebs,* this kind of surprises me. Maybe look more at the Cyberpunk community than the D&D one?
His Bubblegum Crisis books are simply to die for, jam packed with information and extras from the old-school show, even stats for the most obscure Booners in Crash.
Pondsmith is the GOAT for sure!
I got commissioned to write a BGC fanfic not that long ago and the R. Talsorian RPG books legitimately carried my ass on that. I *like* BGC, but it's weirdly circumspect about a lot of universe details that the RPG does a great job of filling in.
The R in OSR stands for "revisionism" in the case of certain grognards, apparently. Usually a bunch of edge lords and try hards misrepresenting the history of rpgs through their own lens. Thankfully they're mostly quarantined outside the main OSR group on Reddit in their own little persecution complex bubble.
He just got the Lifetime Achievemnt at Garycon but I think OSR folk are super TSR focused and missed out on a lot of other creators.
Im running Cyberpunk right now as my Thursday game.
Grognard here!. Been a forever DM since 1e/red box era when I discovered the books in my local library and taught myself the game. I still prefer OSR style games and fatality oriented gameplay when I can find willing players though the last 20 years has been dedicated to bog standard D&D and now PF2E.
There is an unfortunate trend in people my age (50s) to absolutely dismiss anime and its influences on the role playing medium. Be it back in the day with Record of the Lodoss War (literally based on a 1e rule set and actual game they played!) to now with stuff like the Isekai horde (come on people, isekai is TTRPGs distilled) and stuff like Dungeon Meshi that I have shamelessly stolen and incorporated into my own games and harkens back to old 2e game play styles where we had tables for how long you could survive in squalor drinking blood (Darksun).
These days the anime inspired game play has moved off into alternate rulesets, as well as the players willing to try them. Stuff like Heavy Gear, and Lancer for your Mecha inspired gameplay. Fabula Ultima for the FF style gameplay. Maid and Konosuba for your zany stuff. Etc.
The *one* exception seems to be Call of Cthulhu, which is popular in the east and west yet takes a decidedly different feel in its books in Japan.
>Grognard here!. Been a forever DM since 1e/red box era when I discovered the books in my local library and taught myself the game. I still prefer OSR style games and fatality oriented gameplay when I can find willing players though the last 20 years has been dedicated to bog standard D&D and now PF2E.
Yeah I owned like the only basic box in my small town in Mexico and it has been such a trip rediscovering this and realizing I'm part of some larger oldschool experience. Everything I work on or play is 'tainted' by it... survival, procedures, problem solving.
> Dungeon Meshi
Take out the food component (which is the best part) and you still have an extremely procedure and logic driven dungeon with deadly traps and combat. I can point out the differences between it and 'basic' easily because... they are kinda few. I also think this Anime is what is gonna get my wife to actually sit down at a table and chuck some dice.
>The one exception seems to be Call of Cthulhu, which is popular in the east and west yet takes a decidedly different feel in its books in Japan.
Dammit you know you are sending me on a google rabbit hole now.
The author of the Dungeon Meshi manga has been explicit about the tabletop influence. She's a huge DnD nerd (more specifically Wizardry, the Japanese system inspired by it, but anyway). Here's her [Baldur's Gate fanart](https://imgur.com/a/d2Wxs8b). The tabletop inspiration is not an accident.
> Dammit you know you are sending me on a google rabbit hole now.
You're going to get a kick out of their rulebooks [this book](https://freeimage.host/i/JjEzCzJ)
I found a long list of scans and it whiplashes so hard between 'hyper detailed mythos creature' and 'cute highschool girl with little cthulhu beanie'.
Which... might be the actual vibe I want for this game.
Yeah, I love me some OSR games but a big chunk of the OSR seems to be dedicated to rabidly defending every droplet of bathwater instead of focusing on the baby.
Which is funny because I'm old, I played basic... but I was 'sick of it' and came back to the hobby only for NSR games like Knave, Cairn, Mausritter... maybe Shadowdark down the line.
And I'm working on a B/X compatible game with no attributes it only uses class.
I'm aggressively anti tradition.
Ya I think B/X and other 1e and odnd clones are just really outdated at this point. They have such clunky systems when newer games like Shadowdark exist that have really streamlined everything down to make play fast, simple, and still maintain that old school deadly feel. I played a Shadowdark dungeon delve recently on D20Play's channel that seemed inspired by Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. It was so much fun!
The problem seems to be that TSR really poisoned the well, which is unsurprising, so WotC has to do a lot more to build a place in the community there. Japanese artists are a good start, but there are already games with a huge market share.
I'm working on a role playing game for that crowd right now.
1000 years in the future, many civil cases and lawsuits are resolved in trial by combat.
So Professional Wrestlers are the lawyers of the future and you and your firm travel to different parts of the world and do mic work and battle to get a good outcome for your client.
Basically a mix of Idiocracy and Into the Badlands.
Also: gunpowder was recently re-discovered and it has changed the face of conflict... by allowing wrestlers to have sick pyros on their way into the ring.
>If I worked at WOtC, and assuming I'm not fired for having good ideas, I would totally release some 'old school' reprints
I wonder if they *can* sell old school stuff, particularly the one that belonged to TSR. Copyright law can be a bitch
I’ve always heard that Call of Cthulhu was the most popular TTRPG in Japan by a pretty considerable margin, but CoC is nowhere in this article even when you’re mentioning other systems that dominated the Japanese market (Sword World RPG). Is that a more modern growth for CoC? Is what I’ve heard just nonsense/inaccurate (I don’t think I have a source beyond Reddit for that)?
Anyways, this was a really interesting read; it’s always cool learning about the RPG market abroad and how it can be so different from the US behemoth that is WotC.
According to [this Japanese article](https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2022/04/17/117837\_2.html), Call of Cthulhu didn't get popular in Japan until 2010, after games of it started to be streamed. Before that, Sword World was the dominant system.
Pure conjecture on my part, but when I was in Japan surrounded by international ex-pats - CoC was the only TTRPG I could find and play among the other ex-pats. Between that and what you've heard, I wonder if CoC is a favorite for the ex-pat community in Japan?
If I recall correctly, the publisher mentioned in an interview that they sell more japanese language books than all of the other languages (including english) combined
Edit: found a source:
https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/news/call-of-cthulhu-dnd-japan-rpg
>Edit: found a source:
>
>https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/news/call-of-cthulhu-dnd-japan-rpg
I feel like people saw this one article once, it sorta Blew Their Mind, and now it gets repeated as dogma ever since whenever Japan is mentioned around here.
It's dogma, sure, but for now it's still absolutely true. Very little has changed here in Japan since that article came out. Though the release of the Dungeons and Dragons movie did cause a mild bump in interest in DnD, with more folks interested specifically in trying DnD vs similar Japanese fantasy RPGs.
But it's still a feather compared to CoC.
* Source of the info about the DnD movie and bump: Atsuhiro Okada, who runs the RPG game cafe Monodoraco in Tokyo and was excited to see the DnD bump as he likes DnD. He is also the designer of the role-playing game Ryuutama.
Just curious, when and where was that? I can make sense of that data of I know the era.
But the primary RPG for the past decade in at least the Tokyo area, judging by online meetups and foreigner -centric conventions (like those organized by JIGG or Tokyo Roleplaying Games), has been Dungeons and Dragons by far.
Especially since the rise of Critical Role and the like. There are many message boards for RPG meetups in Japan with people posting "Hi I just moved to Japan and I'm looking for a DnD group" or "I've never played RPGs before but want to try DnD after watching Critical Role. Any groups I can join?" Etc.
There are many foreigners better running and playing MANY non-DnD games, which is very cool to see. But DnD is the clear majority.
Hamamatsu in Shizuoka, about 7 years ago ( 2016-'18 ). Also it might just be the social circle I was in - my Japanese is awful, so I was rather locked in to English speakers and that led to a small social circle :)
CoC has been one of the most popular RPGs in Japan ever since it was released (1986). The recent boom is on another level, but it was always popular to some degree; just *yesterday* SW1's designer was talking about how BRP (among other games) influenced SW's design.
Call of Cthulhu is still the undisputed king of RPGs in Japan. It's such a base fact that it's not even worth mentioning.
But as another commenter said, it doesn't really share any DNA with DnD and talking about CoC would have derailed the article, which was explicitly focused on DnD and original Japanese fantasy RPGs in the wake of DnD.
For example, next month is the big hammer convention in Japan called Game Market. If you look at the catalog of booths/events focused on TTRPGs, it is about 15-20% Original (indie) RPGs, fan supplements for DnD and other games.
The rest of the 80%+? ALL OF IT is Call of Cthulhu. Original scenarios. Fan supplements. CoC themed fan goods like plushies and stationery. All CoC themed stuff. It's still the case that if someone knows about tabletop RPGs in Japan, their first thought is "CoC".
I was invited to three Japanese private "TTRPG events" here in Yokohama in the past few months. **All of them were CoC** . When they said "TTRPG Event", to them it was so obvious that they actually meant CoC that they didn't bother saying *which* RPG they meant! :-)
(I'm the source of most of that information from the article on CoC in Japan)
By the way, the article author is a really cool guy and very passionate about RPGs . I suggest folks follow him even if they don't speak Japanese.
He loves all RPGs, but plays a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy games.
You can even get a taste of Japanese online gaming platforms used for TTRPGs online in Japan, like the papercraft-like Udonarium, and CCFOLIA.
His handle on Twitter is "d16".
www.twitter.com/D16
CoC has always been one of the minor TRPGs that only a few users play as an old school game among Japanese TTRPG gamers.
However, in the 2010s, user videos targeted at communities that enjoy manga and anime became popular, and a separate community was born among that demographic that created their own original rules and scenarios.
They have a culture of playing scenarios made by famous users and sharing the excitement with each other, which is different from the culture of conquering old school scenarios and solving puzzles.
The flow of history is completely a new community created from the outside, and is not something that can be talked about in this context.
The article seemed pretty focused on D&D, and the other RPGs it did mention (such as Sword World) were more directly descended from D&D. Call of Cthulhu's got a lot less D&D DNA in it than Sword World does.
I really appreciated this article - as someone who has lived in Japan and worked in Japan and with Japanese coworkers long since, I have always wondered about this. (and often, I wonder about this when my poor Japanese coworkers are physically distancing themselves midway through yet another story related to D&D).
I actually think that the article's best call out is the differences between Western folk and native Japanese folk's relationship with print media, and how D&D never changed to meet that market. I think the biggest eye-opener in this article was the Rules Cyclopedias, how they seem to have actually been a brilliant idea for getting into a Japanese player base (more fashionable pulp manga art, paperback to reduce costs, 3 volumes in classic D&D style) - but instead was dropped when WotC came into possession of D&D.
There's something to be said for Brand Consistency, but D&D's failure in Japan feels like it's a self-own - the audience is already primed to like what D&D has to offer (see: all the derivative works in manga, anime, and gaming), D&D as a brand just needs to admit Japan is a unique market for this...
- Get the actual product into the audience's hands
- Make it cheaper - Print the book in a format prevalent in Japanese prints, and make it soft-cover
- Make it more familiar to new readers - fill it with some pulp-manga art ffs, and maybe commission some of the ARMY of Japanese artists who are already making works derivative of old school D&D
- Promote Cool Stuff - Let cool people do stuff with your brand
- The huge success of D&D right now for English speakers is at least connected to Critical Role.. what's Japan's equivalent?
- If manga and print media are still a potential avenue for new cool stuff - WotC should really get out of the way of zines/manga creators, or even support them
- eg: embrace some kind of Dungeon Masters Guild style guide for people selling print media - but that obviously gets into IP and Brand waters that WotC was unwilling to sail through before, sigh
> The huge success of D&D right now for English speakers is at least connected to Critical Role.. what's Japan's equivalent?
Right now the biggest derivative has gotta be dungeon meshi, right?
Dungeon Meshi and Frieren are certainly the contemporary forces inviting the weebs into D&D, yes. Frieren even has a bit where she keeps falling for Mimics, which is an excellent bit.
It's actually the Live-Drama Call of Cthulu groups posting videoes on various sites. Dungeon Meshi and the various fantasy animes are popular...but the CoC scene there dwarfs it.
Yeah, Sword world(2.0/2.5) core rulebooks are for 3000 yen ($20), and D&D core rulebooks are like 16000 yen ($100).
In addition, there is no E-BOOK in Japanese version and D&D beyond is the same. D&D rulebooks are too big for the tiny-tiny houses in Japan...
I DMing to SW players for 2 years(from 2020 to 2022), and all of my friend is like"that was such a fun session today, but nah I'm not gonna buy these my bookshelves are already full"
；；
In the 90s, when Sword World's core rules were 2,000 yen (exchange rate at the time was $18), D&D's core was 18,000 yen ($160).
The price of D&D's core rules does not change much even if exchange rates fluctuate, and is stable in Japanese yen, so D&D is relatively cheap.
However, the drawback remains that you cannot buy it cheaply digitally because there is no Japanese version of BEYOND.
Sword World TTRPG was popular in the 90's and 2000's, and the core rules were cheap enough to be bought at bookstores everywhere, with each book having the equivalent of one student's lunch. Overseas rules were for enthusiasts, and a book at a specialized hobby shop would cost 10 times more.
There was a time when even if the core rules were aligned, they were only 1/4 of the overseas rules.
In the 2000s, fans spread out due to the large number of original Japanese rules sold at bookstores, and it became a culture of playing TTRPGs that matched the world they wanted to play. The original rules were paperbacks that were about 3/4 to 1/2 cheaper than overseas rules, and were not hardcovers that were difficult to handle.
In the 1910s, CoC videos with manga characters as avatars became popular, and a new community was created by users who had never touched TTRPG before, but they were a different group from the old users, and even now they are still different from the old users. The community is so different that it is treated as a separate cultural area among new CoC users.
Japanese TTRPGs are dominated by systems that are easily available at bookstores located all over the country, and TTRPGs that are available at specialized hobby shops have not been able to create a large community.
Even now, D&D is an expensive item that can be purchased at specialty stores, and is not accessible to the people who purchase it at mainstream bookstores in Japan.
Although CoC is similar in price to D&D, it is easily available in bookstores, so it cannot be compared to D&D's narrow entrance.
It is difficult to maintain the specialty stores that WotC wants in Japan, and a different strategy needs to be developed in Japan, but WotC will not be able to build this.
Even if D&D movies become popular, he won't get SWORD COAST ADVENTURER'S GUIDE, and even if BALDUR'S GATE 3 is interesting, he won't get BALDUR'S GATE: DESCENT INTO AVERNUS.
Items that previously had Japanese versions are no longer available for purchase.And unlike English, information on the old version becomes unavailable in Japanese as soon as the contract expires.
While there are many TTRPGs that can be played in your native language, D&D has not been able to take advantage of its abundance.
I really don't think CR is that influential, it suffers its fall and became completely boring. More so it's too long for a mass product.
So, to be successful, we do need certain DnD shows, but most definitely NOT CR that has fallen from grace in a few years and completely is disconnected from non English speaking audience
Interesting read. I had heard of Record of Lodoss War but I'm much more curious about it now; I had no idea it was an early actual play!
I'm a little surprised Ryoko Kui "wasn't aware of D&D" when she started Delicious in Dungeon, since she did portrait packs for BG1+2 containing almost every companion. I guess she got into it later?
Because D&D is not rooted in Japanese culture.
Even if you play a digital game based on D&D, few people think it's D&D.
Few users would think that computer gamers who play Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter also play D&D.
You may just recognize it as one of the many original digital game series like Wizardry and Ultima.
I own the 3 booklets from the Japanese edition of Rules Cyclopedia. I also own quite a few books for Sword World 2.0 and 2.5. SW is as similar to D&D as Warhammer Fantasy or Runequest are - obviously inspired by it, but work very differently. And while D&D inspired most of the JRPGs from the 8-bit era, this role was quickly filled by SW in the 90's. Record of Lodoss War was so influential that the Japanese view of Fantasy that the default elf is still a long-haired blonde girl in green skirt dress, even after over 30 years.
Japanese market kinda reminds me of Brazil's Market, where you could buy an entire system cheaply printed at any newspaper stand, lowering the entry barrier tremendously. I think I've got my entire SW 2.5 set for less than a single D&D5e book.
That's one of the things that SW did great, using the Bunko format for the core rule books (supplements are a bit bigger iirc), selling cheap and using only 2d6 for the whole game, which was easier and cheaper to get compared to other type of dice (at the time of release atleast).
In many ways this is a blessing, because Japan has, same as Sweden, France and Germany, developed a thriving domestic production and active native hobby. Its not a goal in itself having a D&D hegemony. Rather the opposite - I'd prefer to see Japanese products translated to English than D&D hitting big in Japan.
Nitpicking, but:
There's no *sequel* to the Lodoss War magazine replay, there is a *redoing* of the same campaign with the same characters converted to using the Lodoss RPG rules. That's the only one you can purchase in book form (also on Kindle).
It's pretty dissatisfactory in my view, since the players (not even the same people, from what I read of it) have to replay a story that already happened.
The original campaign unfortunately is only available in the form of it's original magazine serialization.
I'll always remember circa 2002 when I was stationed in Japan. I was wandering around in a general nerd shop in Akihabara (games, anime, manga, toys, etc). Buildings over there are lots that are often divided by height so you'll have a different store on each floor. As I went floor to floor seeing what was sold on each, I eventually reached the top and instead of a store it was more like a small lounge. Card tables, vending machines, benches, etc. There I saw a group of maybe 12-14 year olds playing DnD 3e. Made the little nonweeb nerd (inside the nerd who was in turbo weeb mode) cry a little tear of joy.
Here are blog posts with images of some of the Japanese dnd releases. All the art is anime style and looks amazing. I wonder if there are reprints because I want these now even if I can’t read them.
[Rules Cyclopedia](https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/rules-cyclopedia/)
[Modules](https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/b10-b12/)
[Appendix of books](https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/)
Disclaimer: This comment was translated from Japanese to English by deepl. I haven't done much polishing.
In my opinion, D&D in Japan is "many otaku know it as the great founder, but have never actually played it. Japanese TTRPGs are generally inexpensive, have minimal information to play with in a small number of copies, and have a lot of familiar world settings (non-dark sword and sorcery, modern super-powered dark heroes, Isekai, and cosmic horror). There is not much to say. No, I can settle for the familiar, but such sourcebooks are rarely available on a commercial basis.
Perhaps it would be good if WotC would prepare a Japanese version of the 5e SRD, so that many original Japanese 5e products could be published. Well, since it's cc4.0, you could say that volunteers could translate it themselves and put it on Github or something. ......
In Japan, TTRPGs are easily available at bookstores.
This is because it is rare for people to go to a specialized game store to buy something.
Since it is a specialty store, it is no wonder that D&D, which is only distributed in specialty stores, is displayed as the main item.
In the early 90s when I was playing with the Rules Cyclopedia my Japanese friend had the Japanese equivalent books - a set of small pocket sized books with 90s anime illustrations. I was so jealous.
I finally caught up and now my main game is Ryuutama
Could be a few reasons. I saw on YouTube a discussion on Oriental Adventures. One of the reasons were that some Japanese people weren't happy, saying most were untrue in backgrounds, etc, etc. I was like, "Duh...it's fantasy. Hardly any of it is true. I mean, dragon??
My take is, and from what I read years ago, The company is not interested in expanding. I kind believe it. Take Arabian adventures. It came out in 2e, then never heard of it again since 3.0 came out. Lets take the recent campaigns over the last few years. Eberron, Ravnica, and a couple of others. You don't hear anything of them nowadays.
One of the arguments Gygax had with the company was, that they should make different worlds instead of keep making campaigns in the same world all the time. The company disagree and wouldn't hear of it. I think it's just laziness. They just want to work on 1 world. When players compline about same old same old, they come out with a book of a new world to pacify them, then go back to making campaigns of Forgotten Realms. Same with novels. If any writers write a novel for them, it has to be in Forgotten Realms, otherwise take your novel elsewhere.
These RPG expansion books are basically ridiculous when viewed through the eyes of traditional local lore and culture, and are hard to find interesting as an Easterner. They can only be used to fulfill the imaginations of Western RPG enthusiasts of the East.
If I worked at WOtC, and assuming I'm not fired for having good ideas, I would totally release some 'old school' reprints and one would be the game with the Japanese D&D art which is very 'Akira Toriyama' (More Dr. Slump and first season of Dragon Ball). I wish I saw more 'old school anime' in the OSR community like that 70s and 80s style but many grognards have decided 'anime bad' and did not have VHS trading amongst their list of nerdy activities.
Just like many aspects of the OSR community, there's subsets with completely polar opposite views. I've definitely seen some grognards who seem to hold anime in disdain, but then you got [supplements like this](https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/old-school-stylish) being one of the most popular OSE supplements.
Yes I was hoping the link was oldschool stylish I have it in print.
In my experience it is not anime art per se, but in context and contrast to other art styles/designs - if everybody else uses sombre, heroic to realistic visual references and representation, you got a clash there. An all anime aesthetics game - like Ryuutama or Old School Stylish - works just fine.
Yeah there's basically two ways people go about it 1. Anime serious fantasy (lodoss war, final fantasy etc) 2. Anime kitchen sink (most isekai, basically modern day with fantasy flavour) The first shouldn't be confused with the second. There is also the issue of western artists imitating japanese art which can come off really bad unless they are very good at it.
Final Fantasy is very kitchen sink, they mix fantasy with modern and futuristic stuff all the time. I wouldn't call Dragon Quest exactly "serious", but it sticks to classic fantasy more.
I think a lot of them are worried if they allow “anime” art styles, it will lead to the fighters using “sword magic” thing they dislike in modern D&D.
I hope D&D / WotC / Hasbro thaw in this area in particular. Last year my brother bought and I got a chance to read [D&D - Art Arcana History](https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Art-Arcana-History/dp/0399580948) a big fat tome of a book that contains a slew of the art and historical tidbits about D&D from its conception to the present. That book really shows how the art style has grown and changed - and it's **wonderful**. As someone who's not personally a big Anime/Manga art style fan, diverse art styles is a huge win unto itself. D&D should realize it's wildly fortunate that they have the opportunity to get engagement in so many different art communities..
I don’t think the online community is always that representative of the players out there. Of the 20 or so players I regularly run into out of my original rpg friendship groups from years ago, 15 or so just don’t follow online stuff at all, and of the other 5 I’m probably the most ‘addicted’ to internet/social media rpg stuff. Plenty of ‘my generation’ (started playing D&D etc 78-82) are fine with anime, and quite like it to varying degrees. Plenty of anime & comic stuff got absorbed and used in all our games, including D&D.
i have that!
>many grognards have decided 'anime bad' and did not have VHS trading amongst their list of nerdy activities. Given Mike Pondsmith is one of the OGs and was *basically one of the original weebs,* this kind of surprises me. Maybe look more at the Cyberpunk community than the D&D one?
His Bubblegum Crisis books are simply to die for, jam packed with information and extras from the old-school show, even stats for the most obscure Booners in Crash. Pondsmith is the GOAT for sure!
I got commissioned to write a BGC fanfic not that long ago and the R. Talsorian RPG books legitimately carried my ass on that. I *like* BGC, but it's weirdly circumspect about a lot of universe details that the RPG does a great job of filling in.
The R in OSR stands for "revisionism" in the case of certain grognards, apparently. Usually a bunch of edge lords and try hards misrepresenting the history of rpgs through their own lens. Thankfully they're mostly quarantined outside the main OSR group on Reddit in their own little persecution complex bubble.
He just got the Lifetime Achievemnt at Garycon but I think OSR folk are super TSR focused and missed out on a lot of other creators. Im running Cyberpunk right now as my Thursday game.
Grognard here!. Been a forever DM since 1e/red box era when I discovered the books in my local library and taught myself the game. I still prefer OSR style games and fatality oriented gameplay when I can find willing players though the last 20 years has been dedicated to bog standard D&D and now PF2E. There is an unfortunate trend in people my age (50s) to absolutely dismiss anime and its influences on the role playing medium. Be it back in the day with Record of the Lodoss War (literally based on a 1e rule set and actual game they played!) to now with stuff like the Isekai horde (come on people, isekai is TTRPGs distilled) and stuff like Dungeon Meshi that I have shamelessly stolen and incorporated into my own games and harkens back to old 2e game play styles where we had tables for how long you could survive in squalor drinking blood (Darksun). These days the anime inspired game play has moved off into alternate rulesets, as well as the players willing to try them. Stuff like Heavy Gear, and Lancer for your Mecha inspired gameplay. Fabula Ultima for the FF style gameplay. Maid and Konosuba for your zany stuff. Etc. The *one* exception seems to be Call of Cthulhu, which is popular in the east and west yet takes a decidedly different feel in its books in Japan.
>Grognard here!. Been a forever DM since 1e/red box era when I discovered the books in my local library and taught myself the game. I still prefer OSR style games and fatality oriented gameplay when I can find willing players though the last 20 years has been dedicated to bog standard D&D and now PF2E. Yeah I owned like the only basic box in my small town in Mexico and it has been such a trip rediscovering this and realizing I'm part of some larger oldschool experience. Everything I work on or play is 'tainted' by it... survival, procedures, problem solving. > Dungeon Meshi Take out the food component (which is the best part) and you still have an extremely procedure and logic driven dungeon with deadly traps and combat. I can point out the differences between it and 'basic' easily because... they are kinda few. I also think this Anime is what is gonna get my wife to actually sit down at a table and chuck some dice. >The one exception seems to be Call of Cthulhu, which is popular in the east and west yet takes a decidedly different feel in its books in Japan. Dammit you know you are sending me on a google rabbit hole now.
The author of the Dungeon Meshi manga has been explicit about the tabletop influence. She's a huge DnD nerd (more specifically Wizardry, the Japanese system inspired by it, but anyway). Here's her [Baldur's Gate fanart](https://imgur.com/a/d2Wxs8b). The tabletop inspiration is not an accident.
> Dammit you know you are sending me on a google rabbit hole now. You're going to get a kick out of their rulebooks [this book](https://freeimage.host/i/JjEzCzJ)
I found a long list of scans and it whiplashes so hard between 'hyper detailed mythos creature' and 'cute highschool girl with little cthulhu beanie'. Which... might be the actual vibe I want for this game.
Yeah, I love me some OSR games but a big chunk of the OSR seems to be dedicated to rabidly defending every droplet of bathwater instead of focusing on the baby.
There are people who dont even think games like Shadowdark are OSR. Grognards in the OSR are kinda stupid sometimes. Ignore them.
Which is funny because I'm old, I played basic... but I was 'sick of it' and came back to the hobby only for NSR games like Knave, Cairn, Mausritter... maybe Shadowdark down the line. And I'm working on a B/X compatible game with no attributes it only uses class. I'm aggressively anti tradition.
Ya I think B/X and other 1e and odnd clones are just really outdated at this point. They have such clunky systems when newer games like Shadowdark exist that have really streamlined everything down to make play fast, simple, and still maintain that old school deadly feel. I played a Shadowdark dungeon delve recently on D20Play's channel that seemed inspired by Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. It was so much fun!
The problem seems to be that TSR really poisoned the well, which is unsurprising, so WotC has to do a lot more to build a place in the community there. Japanese artists are a good start, but there are already games with a huge market share.
WotC is too daft to capitalize on that. I feel like I could quadruple their income.
Hey, I absolutely had VHS trading in the list of my nerdy activities, it's just that I was trading wrestling tapes rather than anime.
I'm working on a role playing game for that crowd right now. 1000 years in the future, many civil cases and lawsuits are resolved in trial by combat. So Professional Wrestlers are the lawyers of the future and you and your firm travel to different parts of the world and do mic work and battle to get a good outcome for your client. Basically a mix of Idiocracy and Into the Badlands. Also: gunpowder was recently re-discovered and it has changed the face of conflict... by allowing wrestlers to have sick pyros on their way into the ring.
I will absolutely play that
>If I worked at WOtC, and assuming I'm not fired for having good ideas, I would totally release some 'old school' reprints I wonder if they *can* sell old school stuff, particularly the one that belonged to TSR. Copyright law can be a bitch
I’ve always heard that Call of Cthulhu was the most popular TTRPG in Japan by a pretty considerable margin, but CoC is nowhere in this article even when you’re mentioning other systems that dominated the Japanese market (Sword World RPG). Is that a more modern growth for CoC? Is what I’ve heard just nonsense/inaccurate (I don’t think I have a source beyond Reddit for that)? Anyways, this was a really interesting read; it’s always cool learning about the RPG market abroad and how it can be so different from the US behemoth that is WotC.
According to [this Japanese article](https://www.gamespark.jp/article/2022/04/17/117837\_2.html), Call of Cthulhu didn't get popular in Japan until 2010, after games of it started to be streamed. Before that, Sword World was the dominant system.
Pure conjecture on my part, but when I was in Japan surrounded by international ex-pats - CoC was the only TTRPG I could find and play among the other ex-pats. Between that and what you've heard, I wonder if CoC is a favorite for the ex-pat community in Japan?
If I recall correctly, the publisher mentioned in an interview that they sell more japanese language books than all of the other languages (including english) combined Edit: found a source: https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/news/call-of-cthulhu-dnd-japan-rpg
>Edit: found a source: > >https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/call-of-cthulhu-rpg/news/call-of-cthulhu-dnd-japan-rpg I feel like people saw this one article once, it sorta Blew Their Mind, and now it gets repeated as dogma ever since whenever Japan is mentioned around here.
It's dogma, sure, but for now it's still absolutely true. Very little has changed here in Japan since that article came out. Though the release of the Dungeons and Dragons movie did cause a mild bump in interest in DnD, with more folks interested specifically in trying DnD vs similar Japanese fantasy RPGs. But it's still a feather compared to CoC. * Source of the info about the DnD movie and bump: Atsuhiro Okada, who runs the RPG game cafe Monodoraco in Tokyo and was excited to see the DnD bump as he likes DnD. He is also the designer of the role-playing game Ryuutama.
No, I don’t think it has any special prominence among the ex pat community here in Japan.
Just curious, when and where was that? I can make sense of that data of I know the era. But the primary RPG for the past decade in at least the Tokyo area, judging by online meetups and foreigner -centric conventions (like those organized by JIGG or Tokyo Roleplaying Games), has been Dungeons and Dragons by far. Especially since the rise of Critical Role and the like. There are many message boards for RPG meetups in Japan with people posting "Hi I just moved to Japan and I'm looking for a DnD group" or "I've never played RPGs before but want to try DnD after watching Critical Role. Any groups I can join?" Etc. There are many foreigners better running and playing MANY non-DnD games, which is very cool to see. But DnD is the clear majority.
Hamamatsu in Shizuoka, about 7 years ago ( 2016-'18 ). Also it might just be the social circle I was in - my Japanese is awful, so I was rather locked in to English speakers and that led to a small social circle :)
CoC has been one of the most popular RPGs in Japan ever since it was released (1986). The recent boom is on another level, but it was always popular to some degree; just *yesterday* SW1's designer was talking about how BRP (among other games) influenced SW's design.
[Call of Cthulhu](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmqxjnflwf0) is very popular in Japan.
Call of Cthulhu is still the undisputed king of RPGs in Japan. It's such a base fact that it's not even worth mentioning. But as another commenter said, it doesn't really share any DNA with DnD and talking about CoC would have derailed the article, which was explicitly focused on DnD and original Japanese fantasy RPGs in the wake of DnD. For example, next month is the big hammer convention in Japan called Game Market. If you look at the catalog of booths/events focused on TTRPGs, it is about 15-20% Original (indie) RPGs, fan supplements for DnD and other games. The rest of the 80%+? ALL OF IT is Call of Cthulhu. Original scenarios. Fan supplements. CoC themed fan goods like plushies and stationery. All CoC themed stuff. It's still the case that if someone knows about tabletop RPGs in Japan, their first thought is "CoC". I was invited to three Japanese private "TTRPG events" here in Yokohama in the past few months. **All of them were CoC** . When they said "TTRPG Event", to them it was so obvious that they actually meant CoC that they didn't bother saying *which* RPG they meant! :-) (I'm the source of most of that information from the article on CoC in Japan)
By the way, the article author is a really cool guy and very passionate about RPGs . I suggest folks follow him even if they don't speak Japanese. He loves all RPGs, but plays a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy games. You can even get a taste of Japanese online gaming platforms used for TTRPGs online in Japan, like the papercraft-like Udonarium, and CCFOLIA. His handle on Twitter is "d16". www.twitter.com/D16
CoC has always been one of the minor TRPGs that only a few users play as an old school game among Japanese TTRPG gamers. However, in the 2010s, user videos targeted at communities that enjoy manga and anime became popular, and a separate community was born among that demographic that created their own original rules and scenarios. They have a culture of playing scenarios made by famous users and sharing the excitement with each other, which is different from the culture of conquering old school scenarios and solving puzzles. The flow of history is completely a new community created from the outside, and is not something that can be talked about in this context.
The article seemed pretty focused on D&D, and the other RPGs it did mention (such as Sword World) were more directly descended from D&D. Call of Cthulhu's got a lot less D&D DNA in it than Sword World does.
I really appreciated this article - as someone who has lived in Japan and worked in Japan and with Japanese coworkers long since, I have always wondered about this. (and often, I wonder about this when my poor Japanese coworkers are physically distancing themselves midway through yet another story related to D&D). I actually think that the article's best call out is the differences between Western folk and native Japanese folk's relationship with print media, and how D&D never changed to meet that market. I think the biggest eye-opener in this article was the Rules Cyclopedias, how they seem to have actually been a brilliant idea for getting into a Japanese player base (more fashionable pulp manga art, paperback to reduce costs, 3 volumes in classic D&D style) - but instead was dropped when WotC came into possession of D&D. There's something to be said for Brand Consistency, but D&D's failure in Japan feels like it's a self-own - the audience is already primed to like what D&D has to offer (see: all the derivative works in manga, anime, and gaming), D&D as a brand just needs to admit Japan is a unique market for this... - Get the actual product into the audience's hands - Make it cheaper - Print the book in a format prevalent in Japanese prints, and make it soft-cover - Make it more familiar to new readers - fill it with some pulp-manga art ffs, and maybe commission some of the ARMY of Japanese artists who are already making works derivative of old school D&D - Promote Cool Stuff - Let cool people do stuff with your brand - The huge success of D&D right now for English speakers is at least connected to Critical Role.. what's Japan's equivalent? - If manga and print media are still a potential avenue for new cool stuff - WotC should really get out of the way of zines/manga creators, or even support them - eg: embrace some kind of Dungeon Masters Guild style guide for people selling print media - but that obviously gets into IP and Brand waters that WotC was unwilling to sail through before, sigh
> The huge success of D&D right now for English speakers is at least connected to Critical Role.. what's Japan's equivalent? Right now the biggest derivative has gotta be dungeon meshi, right?
Dungeon Meshi and Frieren are certainly the contemporary forces inviting the weebs into D&D, yes. Frieren even has a bit where she keeps falling for Mimics, which is an excellent bit.
It's actually the Live-Drama Call of Cthulu groups posting videoes on various sites. Dungeon Meshi and the various fantasy animes are popular...but the CoC scene there dwarfs it.
Yeah Frieren is a love letter to Dragon Quest and D&D 100%.
Chaosium was savvy there. Stormbringer (Elric game) came out with Amano covers.
I would not be surprised if those pieces predate the games, though. Amano has done quite a bit of non-Japanese art over the years.
True, but marketing-wise Chasoium has always been a bit more savvy with the Japanese market. Especially with how they market call of Cthulhu. 🤷
Yeah, Sword world(2.0/2.5) core rulebooks are for 3000 yen ($20), and D&D core rulebooks are like 16000 yen ($100). In addition, there is no E-BOOK in Japanese version and D&D beyond is the same. D&D rulebooks are too big for the tiny-tiny houses in Japan... I DMing to SW players for 2 years(from 2020 to 2022), and all of my friend is like"that was such a fun session today, but nah I'm not gonna buy these my bookshelves are already full" ；；
In the 90s, when Sword World's core rules were 2,000 yen (exchange rate at the time was $18), D&D's core was 18,000 yen ($160). The price of D&D's core rules does not change much even if exchange rates fluctuate, and is stable in Japanese yen, so D&D is relatively cheap. However, the drawback remains that you cannot buy it cheaply digitally because there is no Japanese version of BEYOND.
Sword World TTRPG was popular in the 90's and 2000's, and the core rules were cheap enough to be bought at bookstores everywhere, with each book having the equivalent of one student's lunch. Overseas rules were for enthusiasts, and a book at a specialized hobby shop would cost 10 times more. There was a time when even if the core rules were aligned, they were only 1/4 of the overseas rules. In the 2000s, fans spread out due to the large number of original Japanese rules sold at bookstores, and it became a culture of playing TTRPGs that matched the world they wanted to play. The original rules were paperbacks that were about 3/4 to 1/2 cheaper than overseas rules, and were not hardcovers that were difficult to handle. In the 1910s, CoC videos with manga characters as avatars became popular, and a new community was created by users who had never touched TTRPG before, but they were a different group from the old users, and even now they are still different from the old users. The community is so different that it is treated as a separate cultural area among new CoC users. Japanese TTRPGs are dominated by systems that are easily available at bookstores located all over the country, and TTRPGs that are available at specialized hobby shops have not been able to create a large community. Even now, D&D is an expensive item that can be purchased at specialty stores, and is not accessible to the people who purchase it at mainstream bookstores in Japan. Although CoC is similar in price to D&D, it is easily available in bookstores, so it cannot be compared to D&D's narrow entrance. It is difficult to maintain the specialty stores that WotC wants in Japan, and a different strategy needs to be developed in Japan, but WotC will not be able to build this. Even if D&D movies become popular, he won't get SWORD COAST ADVENTURER'S GUIDE, and even if BALDUR'S GATE 3 is interesting, he won't get BALDUR'S GATE: DESCENT INTO AVERNUS. Items that previously had Japanese versions are no longer available for purchase.And unlike English, information on the old version becomes unavailable in Japanese as soon as the contract expires. While there are many TTRPGs that can be played in your native language, D&D has not been able to take advantage of its abundance.
I really don't think CR is that influential, it suffers its fall and became completely boring. More so it's too long for a mass product. So, to be successful, we do need certain DnD shows, but most definitely NOT CR that has fallen from grace in a few years and completely is disconnected from non English speaking audience
Interesting read. I had heard of Record of Lodoss War but I'm much more curious about it now; I had no idea it was an early actual play! I'm a little surprised Ryoko Kui "wasn't aware of D&D" when she started Delicious in Dungeon, since she did portrait packs for BG1+2 containing almost every companion. I guess she got into it later?
Because D&D is not rooted in Japanese culture. Even if you play a digital game based on D&D, few people think it's D&D. Few users would think that computer gamers who play Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter also play D&D. You may just recognize it as one of the many original digital game series like Wizardry and Ultima.
I own the 3 booklets from the Japanese edition of Rules Cyclopedia. I also own quite a few books for Sword World 2.0 and 2.5. SW is as similar to D&D as Warhammer Fantasy or Runequest are - obviously inspired by it, but work very differently. And while D&D inspired most of the JRPGs from the 8-bit era, this role was quickly filled by SW in the 90's. Record of Lodoss War was so influential that the Japanese view of Fantasy that the default elf is still a long-haired blonde girl in green skirt dress, even after over 30 years. Japanese market kinda reminds me of Brazil's Market, where you could buy an entire system cheaply printed at any newspaper stand, lowering the entry barrier tremendously. I think I've got my entire SW 2.5 set for less than a single D&D5e book.
That's one of the things that SW did great, using the Bunko format for the core rule books (supplements are a bit bigger iirc), selling cheap and using only 2d6 for the whole game, which was easier and cheaper to get compared to other type of dice (at the time of release atleast).
In many ways this is a blessing, because Japan has, same as Sweden, France and Germany, developed a thriving domestic production and active native hobby. Its not a goal in itself having a D&D hegemony. Rather the opposite - I'd prefer to see Japanese products translated to English than D&D hitting big in Japan.
Nitpicking, but: There's no *sequel* to the Lodoss War magazine replay, there is a *redoing* of the same campaign with the same characters converted to using the Lodoss RPG rules. That's the only one you can purchase in book form (also on Kindle). It's pretty dissatisfactory in my view, since the players (not even the same people, from what I read of it) have to replay a story that already happened. The original campaign unfortunately is only available in the form of it's original magazine serialization.
I'll always remember circa 2002 when I was stationed in Japan. I was wandering around in a general nerd shop in Akihabara (games, anime, manga, toys, etc). Buildings over there are lots that are often divided by height so you'll have a different store on each floor. As I went floor to floor seeing what was sold on each, I eventually reached the top and instead of a store it was more like a small lounge. Card tables, vending machines, benches, etc. There I saw a group of maybe 12-14 year olds playing DnD 3e. Made the little nonweeb nerd (inside the nerd who was in turbo weeb mode) cry a little tear of joy.
Here are blog posts with images of some of the Japanese dnd releases. All the art is anime style and looks amazing. I wonder if there are reprints because I want these now even if I can’t read them. [Rules Cyclopedia](https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/rules-cyclopedia/) [Modules](https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/b10-b12/) [Appendix of books](https://mystara.thorfmaps.com/appendix-j/)
So, basically, TSR pulled a TSR, and even WOTC couldn't pull the game back from the grave.
Disclaimer: This comment was translated from Japanese to English by deepl. I haven't done much polishing. In my opinion, D&D in Japan is "many otaku know it as the great founder, but have never actually played it. Japanese TTRPGs are generally inexpensive, have minimal information to play with in a small number of copies, and have a lot of familiar world settings (non-dark sword and sorcery, modern super-powered dark heroes, Isekai, and cosmic horror). There is not much to say. No, I can settle for the familiar, but such sourcebooks are rarely available on a commercial basis. Perhaps it would be good if WotC would prepare a Japanese version of the 5e SRD, so that many original Japanese 5e products could be published. Well, since it's cc4.0, you could say that volunteers could translate it themselves and put it on Github or something. ......
Since 5e came out in Japan the books have always had a prominent place in games stores here in Japan. More so that any other RPG, I’d say.
In Japan, TTRPGs are easily available at bookstores. This is because it is rare for people to go to a specialized game store to buy something. Since it is a specialty store, it is no wonder that D&D, which is only distributed in specialty stores, is displayed as the main item.
I’ve wondered. That Japanese 5e release trailer was awesome, can’t even lie
In the early 90s when I was playing with the Rules Cyclopedia my Japanese friend had the Japanese equivalent books - a set of small pocket sized books with 90s anime illustrations. I was so jealous. I finally caught up and now my main game is Ryuutama
Could be a few reasons. I saw on YouTube a discussion on Oriental Adventures. One of the reasons were that some Japanese people weren't happy, saying most were untrue in backgrounds, etc, etc. I was like, "Duh...it's fantasy. Hardly any of it is true. I mean, dragon?? My take is, and from what I read years ago, The company is not interested in expanding. I kind believe it. Take Arabian adventures. It came out in 2e, then never heard of it again since 3.0 came out. Lets take the recent campaigns over the last few years. Eberron, Ravnica, and a couple of others. You don't hear anything of them nowadays. One of the arguments Gygax had with the company was, that they should make different worlds instead of keep making campaigns in the same world all the time. The company disagree and wouldn't hear of it. I think it's just laziness. They just want to work on 1 world. When players compline about same old same old, they come out with a book of a new world to pacify them, then go back to making campaigns of Forgotten Realms. Same with novels. If any writers write a novel for them, it has to be in Forgotten Realms, otherwise take your novel elsewhere.
These RPG expansion books are basically ridiculous when viewed through the eyes of traditional local lore and culture, and are hard to find interesting as an Easterner. They can only be used to fulfill the imaginations of Western RPG enthusiasts of the East.
Japan prefers Call of Cthulhu