Power armor is absurdly cool, but having to suit up is always a pain. I've always wanted to run a Kamen Rider-style game, but honestly I always come up flat when we're talking about "So what do they do when they're not fighting the monster of the week?"
Kamen Rider thread I guess.
>So what do they do when they're not fighting the monster of the week?
What do jedi do when they're not fighting sith? What do adventurers do when they're not in a dungeon? etc etc
the setting needs to exist beyond the combat scenario
...What DO Jedi do? They're monks, that's always boring as hell when they're not on one mission or another. Wasn't that the point of them?
What are you talking about? Anakin was clapping cheeks, Obi-Wan was debating philosophy, and Mace Windu was creating a new lightsaber form. They were ALL doing political maneuvering on top of that. There's so much shit that the Jedi did outside of missions. THAT was the point. They were supposed to be a bunch of boring monks, but instead, they had become magic space NATO.
Accompany the non-jedi party members during their downtime and act as a funny stick-in-the-mud character foil for the scoundrel/soldier/other characters, of course.
Having the PCs be cops or reporters or maybe PIs in their day job generally works as well for Henshin as it does for western superheroes. Alternately you could go the more Japanese-y route and make the party all run a florist or cafe together.
Titanfall addressed this in vidya by having pilots with one skillset and the big robots with another complementary skillset.
As such, you could split into three broad classes of PC.
>Guy in power armour that's small enough to go indoors
>Guy in soldier gear with summonable BIG mech who can't go indoors.
>Guy in soldier gear with companion drone (big and high or small and close)
The half of a toku show that isn't fighting and action is usually a light, cheesy soap opera. Kamen Rider W had the detective hook, Build had the amnesia mystery to investigate, Geats had the reality tv show angle.
You need a good hook that gives the characters something to do and care about which will either encourage them to fight harder for the sake of others.
>So what do they do when they're not fighting the monster of the week?
Have you never watched a Kamen Rider series? They deal with their personal lives or investigate odd goings on that lead to a monster fight. Basically see .
Superhero stuff really works when there's a tension between the obligations of a person's daytime identity and the duties of their superhero persona.
Spiderman famously had to deal with girlfriend trouble, exams, paying bills, holding down 9 - 5 work gigs, dandruff and drama with friends. The reason everyone vibed so hard with Arrow as a TV series was because it wasn't all green suits and archery - that had it's place, but so did the lives, needs and dramas of Oliver Queen's friends and family. It's the difference between a multilayered, complex superhero and a 1 dimensional misfit like Rorschach.
The tension then gets ratcheted up when the heroes need to be on time for a job interview, but a supervillain is rampaging downtown. Or when the supervillain figures out their daytime identity and ingratiates themselves with the hero's family and friends - how do the heroes deal with that without outing themselves?
Finally, the big value in making your players care about the other civilians in their lives means they will really take it personally when those people are in danger. It makes the game feel more emotionally involved, with personal stakes.
>"So what do they do when they're not fighting the monster of the week?"
They're commonly bums.
In US terms, they're white kids on bicycles.
Also, here's my take on a Rider RPG, though I've been considering some tweaks to chargen, namely on how forms and powers work, with both Origin and Belt Type being things you choose at chargen, with maybe a power that lets you shift to a different type (i.e. Cross-Z > Cross-Z Charge > Great Cross-Z goes Build Driver > Sclash Driver > Build Driver) of driver for a form. It might be too much, I don't know. I also want to revise the powers a bit, add some more too.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cBdG7cWXVY4PB5aPfqgtdkr86y9nOCCQ?usp=drive_link
Gathering intelligence and detective work which leads up to the confrontation of the monster of the week?
>Power armor is absurdly cool, but having to suit up is always a pain.
That's why biopunk exists. The only biopunk power armor that takes forever to put on is Samus's.
>t "So what do they do when they're not fighting the monster of the week?"
Watch any Rider series. Agito/Faiz are the ones that come to mind particularly.
Those two series are completely polar opposites. Agito has a charming slice of life series about a man with amnesia and his desire to move on with his life and open a restaurant.
Faiz is just MISUNDERSTANDINGS with vapid, empty comments about dreams.
>Those two series are completely polar opposites
So two different ways to see how they do the "what to do when you're not beating homies up". Maybe throw Build in there or another more plot-focused series and you have a clear idea on what to have the players do.
The other posters have addressed most of the points, so let's format it as some questions.
>Are the PCs part of some hero organization?
What does that organization do besides fighting monsters of the week? I guess that depends on the monsters' nature, so figure that out. Noncombat sessions could involve exploring/investigating, collecting samples of exotic materials, political intrigue within the organization, etc.
>Are the PCs people with normal lives that got rider'd against their will?
Take a page out of classic western capes. Downtime sessions are the PCs- who, for convenience, ought to know each other- trying to keep things together when they could be forced to drop it at any moment to go fight monsters.
>Take a page out of classic western capes. Downtime sessions are the PCs- who, for convenience, ought to know each other- trying to keep things together when they could be forced to drop it at any moment to go fight monsters.
I mean shit even Japan has a version of Spiderman, and spiderman's whole thing is suffering because he can't balance his shit. He's an honorary kamen rider as far as I'm concerned.
Sir, that's The Griffon.
>"So what do they do when they're not fighting the monster of the week?"
Have you even watched Kamen Rider?
I'll be honest, I've never seen even one Kamen Rider, but I've heard that Power Rangers shares a lot of DNA with the show, & I lived & breathed Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers as a kid. So I would say that you should assign every character a Nature, which is who they are no matter if they are in a costume or in street clothes. Then a human/street clothes Dream, & a heroic/suited up Drive.
You get points to spend for your Drive (i.e. you spend a resource to gain advantages that align with your heroic duty) by nurturing your mundane Dream (take actions on the street clothes side of things to make sure you have a life outside of combat & heroics, otherwise you become detached & more importantly, you loose your Drive to help people)
So out of the suit, you're gonna be pursuing things that are good life goals, like getting into a good school, asking out a cute girl, open a business, helping the kids at the teen center, working at a soup kitchen, repairing your relationship with your brother (who turns out to be a burnt out hero/Ranger/Rider himself!!! Will your actions even restore his Drive???) Etc.
Then in the suit, you are all about saving the day, fighting bad guys & when your actions align with your Drive, you can pull deep on your fulfilled sense of self to really send them packing. Just like in every Ranger's episode there is some sort of interpersonal conflict that then effects the actual conflict. Maybe a guy feels insecure or whatever, & when he finds confidence in life, he gains confidence in the fight. Kinda borrow from stuff like Fate, WoD, The One Ring, to give you some goalposts on that btw.
>I've heard that Power Rangers shares a lot of DNA with the show
Whoever told you that lied. The only way they're similar is that they're both technically Tokusatsu.
Kamen Rider is half J-Drama, half action show. Usually - at least in the best series - the two are intertwined. For example, Kamen Rider Drive follows a member of a Special Police Unit who becomes a Kamen Rider to fight monsters. The unit investigates the cases, and as the show goes on the main character stops hiding his identity from his peers and the two work even closer together.
Of course there are shows that split the two - Agito for example is a hard split between the J-Drama and the action - but generally speaking, Kamen Riders' civilian lives are secondary to their heroic actions or directly tied to them (i.e. Build's main mystery is the main character's amnesia which is hard tied into the main hero plot).
Shut up you fricking nerd. They are both live action shows about people fighting monster by transforming into a spandex & plastic costume by using a device thingy. Special weapons & moves & themes for each one. Go frick yourself with a cactus sideways. I don't care about your pretentious bullshit. This is /tg/ not Ganker feel free to comment on my post's suggested mechanics, but don't run your slawjawed fricking mouth about what counts as what you sniveling limp dicked frick.
>Whoever told you that lied. The only way they're similar is that they're both technically Tokusatsu.
It isn't really a lie. Both Kamen Rider and Super Sentai are sibling series born as monster of the week action shows in the 70s created by Shotaro Ishinomori. The J-Drama aspects only really gained primacy in Kamen Rider with the 2000 revival series Kuuga which intermixed police procedural with monster of the week. With Kuuga, Kamen Rider started being monster of the "double episode arc."
>but having to suit up is always a pain
So make a setting where it isn't?
I know, this is so hard to find solutions in hobby about playing pretend, but you should at least try, instead of making up problems to get pissant about instead