For once the YouTube algorithm kicked out a banger.
If you're a Call of Cthulhu tabletop player you're probably aware the game has a huge following in Japan. What I never actually grasped is that Chaosium's creation effectively is tabletop roleplaying there. The Weird Place channel has a great look at some of the cultural quirks that made that happen.
There's a lot to digest here. I was vaguely aware of how important "Record of the Lodoss War" was to popularizing pen and paper RPGs, but never realized CoC campaign recaps were so insanely popular with the Japanese fanbase. More importantly, now I know why a Japanese schoolgirl and her friends pop up whenever I Google "Nyarlathotep".
2 comments:
ooh, that was an interesting find, thank you for sharing!
what the presenter mentioned about failure being more of an option in a horror scenario than in one heavily influenced by heroic sagas reminded me of something i read in andy kitkowski’s english translation of the japanese fantasy ttrpg tenra bansho zero (heavily paraphrased from memory): the game has a karma system based on concepts from japanese buddhism, where acting in the world makes the character more powerful, more apt to fulfill their goals or follow what drives them, but it also ends up increasing their karma, their rootedness in the world. if a character’s karma score goes over a threshold, they are consumed by their desires and rootedness in the world, and become a demon – no longer played by the player, but a hyper-powerful being gone rogue.
so the system basically has a tragic exit point for characters built in, that players can work to, if they so desire. (there are others also, but the system’s bottom line is: being an actor in the world implies a managed state of taintedness.) iirc, andy mentions the game ideal of ‘suffering beautifully’ either in the notes to the text, or i got it either from articles he wrote back then or from old chats with him on twitter. so there might be something cultural there as well that values other arcs than the prevailing hero’s, and in turn, makes CoC more interesting since it plays not only for that duality of vanquishing the big bad vs failure.
raphael
That's an amazing mechanic! I'm going to see if I can Google up more.
Now I have an urge to poke around and find out what other cultural quirks have influenced how American tabletop games get translated, in every sense, to other cultures. One factoid that's stuck with me is that the Japanese translation of classic black book Traveller became popular because robots were almost nonexistent. It was a huge difference from the Japanese SF of the time.
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