Why is Call of Cthulhu so popular in Japan compared to more conventional systems like DnD?
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Why is Call of Cthulhu so popular in Japan compared to more conventional systems like DnD?
Why is Call of Cthulhu so popular in Japan compared to more conventional systems like DnD?
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It's a better game.
It's almost as if... his works are available in translation and are referenced in popular media frequently???
>his works
Sandy Petersen's?
Yes he is everywhere in Japan.
It's the tentacles.
Plus the e-girls. Seriously, so much of the art is e-girls (and sometimes maids).
Dumb answer: Tentacles
Real answer: they really like ”replays” of TTRPGs, where they’re told a story about a TTRPG in written form. They apparently have a lot of those in CoC, so it’s kind of like if they had their own Shadowrun Storytime (which got a lot of people into SR including myself).
Japanese TTRPG culture is much more about short term roieplaying in a relatively linear campaign.
Basically you pick a character archetype which is established for the campaign You are then expected to act within that archetype as the campaign is set up to accommodate variance with that role.
Therefore in the Japanese tradition you are more an actor in a preplanned performance who is allowed to ad-lib his lines on account of the inherent randomess of the dice but if one survives must still move onto the next scene, than the more freeform ways on playing we have in the west.
This is reinforced by the replay market as described by
All of this together plus the fact that D&D never was able to fully consume the market means that CoC as a game mainly focused on short vignettes due to high risk of death with strong archetypal characters is a natural conclusion.
Nip ttrpg culture sounds like it has some elements that would be useful to yoink. Like campaigns being actually tailored to certain character archetypes. I can't count the number of times when I've made a character, GM greenlighted it and in game half the shit my character is might as well not exist. Last time I was in a D&D game I specifically asked whether they need a party face, GM said yes and I made this con man archetype kinda guy. And it turned out every npc was a precanned quest giver or someone who basically couldn't be interacted with beyond small talk, and every encounter was fight to the death with no chance to even talk.
Encounters went literally like:
>GM: you see a bunch of dudes in ragtag clothes and armor approaching, they look like they've spotted you toi
>me: I yell a greeting "Hi travelers, where are you heading to?" or whatever
>GM: they shout and charge you, roll initiative
>campaigns being actually tailored to certain character archetypes
Isn't this the specialty of PbtA games?
A playbook is basically an archetype, and usually it comes with choices at creation that give the GM something to use as part of the story. There's still plenty of wiggle room to add more stuff, but the systems that add these connecting factors to the playbooks basically guarantees that some aspect of the story ahead is tailored to their character.
In Masks, this could range from a number of things like how you got your powers being a greater scope issue to having a past you're trying to make up for. In Avatar Legends, it's a handful of bits of fluff that can be called on by the GM to weave your character into the world around them.
>Yes, I'm a complete greenhorn, how could you tell?
That's not a western problem, that's a shit GM (who probably likes Bethesda games too much) problem.
Why are japanese so afraid of individuality?
They had their warring city state period which is essential for Classically Liberal ideologies to form, end before the necessary increase in tech to spread those types of ideas.
Then they had a 200 year period of stability removing the conflict factors needed to cultivate those ideas.
Then when a they got a taste of a individual based culture it was at the end of the barrel of a gun.
Exactly. It's first-mover advantage, same as D&D in the US.
D&D actually did have first mover advantage in Japan too - but TSR couldn't come to an agreement to license the replay series that popularized it (the Lodoss War B/X replays), so Group SNE went off and made Sword World instead. Shortly after the D&D distributor/licensor in Japan lost the license, and shortly after that TSR went bankrupt too, which created a long gap for D&D publications in Japan.
Another aspect that often gets brought up in regards to the Japanese TRPG market is publishing format - a lot of the most popular TRPGs use a manga-size pocketbook format (roughly B4) and are sold for pennies.
You could buy a lavish A4 size D&D sourcebook in full colour for 5000 yen, or a small B4 sourcebook for 300 yen. If you're a kid or student with no money but time and imagination, the cost/value proposition is pretty obvious, and this plays a big role in terms of which TRPGs get popular. The publishing format also explains why many fantasy manga and light novels often get spin-off TRPGs (ex. Goblin Slayer, Konosuba, Log Horizon) - it's just an extra volume.
>TSR went bankrupt
No it didn't. It was in debt, it paid off some, but it was sold to WOTC who paid it off. TSR never declared or filed for bankruptcy.
Also the one shot nature of most runs. Due to work scheduling problems, a game that make use of a lot of one shots is popular.
CoC is a good game system and the japs like good games
>japs like good games
Woah there, let's not say thing we won't be able to take back later.
Relatable real world setting as opposed to European fantasy
Longer established content
Easy to understand goal (don't die)
>Easy to understand goal (don't die)
You mean:
>(don't go insane)
Dying may be preferable to what some cults and entities would do to you.
>Not continuing to live despite becoming a raving mad lunatic
Pussies
The setting is honestly probably the biggest factor, especially in the 80s when Japan was in the middle of their economic bubble and there was a metric frickton of urban legends and spooky ghost stories, both about decaying and dying rural towns, and burgeoning cities with shadowy figures down every side alley. A lot easier for the Japanese to adapt Lovecraft to their existing urban legends and horror stories.
I wouldn't describe CoC as unconventional. But in general I get the impression Japan just has a healthier TTRPG ecology, with more players for a variety of both foreign and domestic games. In America it feels like most tabletop gamers just default to D&D and play little else.
Neither are popular, COC is much more popular by percentage, but relatively it's still extremely niche and this is driven solely by vtubers, it's not an organic scene having to due with cultural preference.
Actually kinda funny how the JP CoC replay scene only bloomed after vtubers happened.
You dumb, lying Black person. CoC and the replay scene has been a large part of the hobby there for decades at this point. That's like saying D&D wasn't the biggest game in the market until critical roll
Vtubers making it popular is an organic scene created by cultural preferences.
Products don't reach customers without adveritzement.
>driven solely by vtubers
Undoubtedly bullshit. CoC has been popular in Japan for decades. We've had threads like this discussing that fact for at least the last decade, well before vtubers.
Vtubers had nothing to do with early CoC popularity in Japan.
What impact they have now I can't comment on.
>driven solely by vtuber
I thought it was housewifes that played it
It's because those were the only game books from the West that the general public could actually afford. At the time, it was hundreds of dollars to get a box set for D&D and there was no local market yet. CoC gamebooks were priced just like any other book, and as a bonus, lent itself to very short runs of games. The Japanese don't have a lot of domestic living space and a cultural taboo against being too obnoxious or standing out too much in public, so the only place to game is in specific rooms in specific hobby businesses that have to be rented out. It's a lot harder to do that week after week rather than inviting 3-5 people over to your house or apartment (which the majority of the population does not have the space or the privacy to do.)
I seem to remember the original D&D translations to Japanese being poorly made.
As an additional factor to the things mentioned in this thread.
Sword world did well.
Dice other than D6 were also rare in Japan until more recent years. By what I know early editions of Tunnels & Trolls were also more popular than D&D in Japan back in the day for that exact reason.
I wish we can get more translated japanese scenarios, but the scene is already pretty deep in indie territory.
I still want to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness at some point.
Iirc d&d was like $300 while CoC was something people could actually afford to play.
good point. In booth, the popular scenarios are all under 1000 yen and some of them are even available for free
https://booth.pm/en/search/trpg%E3%82%B7%E3%83%8A%E3%83%AA%E3%82%AA?sort=wish_lists&tags%5B%5D=CoC%E3%82%B7%E3%83%8A%E3%83%AA%E3%82%AA
>Horror, Japan's favorite theme
>game is more about people talking than playing
>came before D&D, which is also the case in a lot of other countries where D&D isn't the dominant system
Going insane scares Japanese people far more than burgers who drink corn syrup.
I feel like everyone ITT is begging the question. D&D had a huge impact on the fantasy genre in Japan, because of things like Record of Lodoss War. Meanwhile, the Cthulhu mythos is wildly popular in the US, to the point where "Lovecraftian" is a waste of an adjective in some genres.
I'm not saying CoC isn't more successful versus D&D in Japan than it is in the US, but I don't think we've established that.
What are you trying to say?
Instead of
>Why is Call of Cthulhu so popular in Japan compared to more conventional systems like DnD?
I think the question of the thread should be
>IS Call of Cthulhu so popular in Japan compared to more conventional systems like DnD?
>>IS Call of Cthulhu so popular in Japan compared to more conventional systems like DnD?
Yes
>DnD
>Conventional
It's pretty up there, yeah, especially as imports go. Plus, there's not a major need for D&D itself, partly because they already have D&D at home, called Sword World. So calling D&D a "more conventional system" is a bit of a loaded statement. D&D does not have the massive hegemony in Japan like it does in the west.
Wow, somehow this is my first time hearing about Sword World.
Sword World is the system they created to port Record of Lodoss War to after TSR told them to frick off.
>TSR told them to frick off.
>basically created their own competitor
That's some Books-a-Million energy right there.
They're sticking to domestic markets, though. Group SNE doesn't want to take the plunge into making Sword World international, because they know they would get creamed by D&D. Fortunately, that's what the Sword World translation project on r/SwordWorld is for.
>Sword World is the system they created to port Record of Lodoss War to after TSR told them to frick off.
And then, decades later, we got CR.
Why was TSR so stupid?
I mean, they were in the middle of going bankrupt at the time - they had enough problems trying to grapple with their domestic market issues and quite probably didn't have the energy or even capacity to understand what was going on in the international market (many retrospectives have noted they didn't even do basic market research); it's all well documented nowadays and is really another topic entirely. In many ways you see the exact same problems happening with WoTC nowadays in regards to trying to turn D&D into a brand IP; history tends to repeat itself.
There's a video on YT about the history Japanese TCGs where this guy talks about this game called Monster Collection. That's where I first heard of it, it's by the same company.
>D&D does not have the massive hegemony in Japan like it does in the west.
Imagine what could've happened...
Not much good, I imagine.
A continuation of the late 90s, most likely.
Are these sword world books translated by any chance
There's an English fan translation project helmed by r/SwordWorld on Reddit. They've been steaming along and gotten a lot done.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SwordWorld/comments/vw6dej/new_to_rswordworld_look_here/
They also run the "Guided by Cardia" YouTube channel, seen in
.
thanks freind
What is Sword World like?
See the linked video.
Anyone got links to these CoC Japanese replays?
I wonder if that really is the case though, considering how many fantasy manga were described by the mangaka as having been directly inspired by DnD campaigns they played.
>read fantasy
>surprised that mangaka played fantasy RPGs
You get the same thing if you read modern horror or thriller manga, though in general I think it's more common for book and screen writers to have played CoC. Nasu, Urobuchi, Narita, and Nagai all played CoC.
Nasu and Urobuchi also played D&D (They’re in a group with the DRRR writer), and it’s heavily implied by some stuff in Fate lore, not outright stated, that Nasu has played World of Darkness, specifically Mage.
>compared to more conventional systems
CoC is very much steeped in late 70s/early 80s RPG conventions, to the point it makes a bad fit for the genre it purports to be for.
>14 STR
>7 SIZ
This isn’t a little girl this is some kind of fricked up baboon gremlin
She can probably carry a load greater than her body weight while walking and climbing easy
As an autist about jap youtube replays, I'll give you context. For this scenario, the children are specifically allowed to allocate their stats according to a profession they want to be in the future (excepting SIZ and EDU), mainly because giving them actual child stats will frick them over in the course of the scenario (and being generally unfun for the players).
Are there any translated replays?
Unfortunately the scene is very strict about spoilers and clips are disallowed, so translations barely exist for the scenarios, let alone replays.
If you're still interested the session in OP pic is this one:
That's fricking bizarre. Why are they so "muh speshul club" about it?
Replays are a major source of content in the TTRPG space. It would be tantamount to spoiling a novel or movie if you spoil a replay.
So why not just play as an adult?
Most of the time I give players of younger child characters stats similar to ducks or halflings and full skills
Possibly an increase in dex pow or some other mental stat too
This has consistently worked pretty well
Kind of wish Beyond the Supernatural had made a bigger deal out of the alternate playstyle in the back of the book where you play normal horror movie victims rather than paranormal investigators. The example scenario was specifically 13 year old girls caught in a haunted house.
Define 'conventional'
Call of Cthulhu is popular in the west, too.
It's easy to forget because D&D eclipses everything else combined, but it is extremely popular as far as non-D&D systems go.
I'm shocked that VtM and friends are so unpopular
I am not:
1. It's not the 90s/early 2000s anymore.
2. White Wolf went full moron.
This is Roll20 only, though. Maybe people use other services for WoD.
I wonder if/how that changed in the last year or so, with more attention being brought to PbtA systems like Monster of the Week and BitD
Having spoken with someone who was part of the group that put this together, its wasn't a very *precise* way to measure what is the most popular.
Basically any Roll20 game with more than one user and some small number of hours played I forget it if was 1 or 10, but it was quite literally that small was counted on this chart.
Explains the amount of 'uncategorized' and 'other'
At least I have 2-3 non-campaigns for every real one and they can gather buch of hours just because me and a buddy log in to check some system out, roll a character or two and leave the tab open while playing video games
Yeh, the guy remarked on how the data side of things was a "black hole" and there wasn't much meaningful data for them to parse. At most they had things like users, time played, the amount of assets in use, last time a game was launched…
They basically just came up with a scant few arbitrary numbers to qualify whether a game counted or not.
Some of the games I have sitting around unused for years would've counted because I'd launched them for a couple hours just to grab old macros and test new ones and little things like that.
> "Uncategorized" and "Other" make up 27% of the data
Kind of a shitty chart tbqh
I know you're being armchair statisticians here, but how would you want them to fill in Uncategorized or Other when every other entry in Other takes up less than 0.69% and every entry in Uncategorized is impossible to categorize because it wasn't logged?
I already addressed this. If over 25% of your data is unusable, then the collection methods aren't working, or the collator is lazy. I'd bet on the latter, since they were apparently able to identify any variant of Warhammer, WoD, PBTA, Star Wars, etc.
Look at picrel. You're telling me that CoC jumped nearly 6% in a single quarter? Bullshit.
Seconding
regarding the numbers, this chart is worthless. This is what bad data collating looks like.
Young Japs love horror to a degree Westerners can only guess at. They singlehandedly kept horror movies alive during the Hollywood jumpscare schlock era.
Iirc Japan actually plays BRP and calls it call of Cthulhu. I've seen actual plays where they just frick around, they get into winnable combats, and not investigate Cthulhu. It's their moldable Skyrim, their heavily homebrewed DND. If this board was Japanese we'd be asking have you tried not playing call of Cthulhu?
>If this board was Japanese we'd be asking have you tried not playing call of Cthulhu?
Japanese don't give a frick what others play. Or do in general, as long as they keep it private. They do give a frick what others think of them though.
>like Dark Eye
The Dark Eye started as a hack of Basic D&D with inverted math, allegedly made in two weeks when the authors learned their publisher didn't actually have the rights to publish a straight translation. It became an autism simulator when they added expanded rules for skills and introduced the dreaded 3d20 check, giving characters three times as many ways to fail.
The main reason to play it is the meticulously crafted setting of Aventuria. You don't have to be German to appreciate that part of it. And some of the more recent setting books have also been translated to English.
>They do give a frick what others think of them though.
Why?
It's the Japanese way of life. Don't be a nuisance to others and don't act in a way that brings shame upon you or people close to you. But what you do in private, nobody cares about.
It's the nature of a communal society. Don't rock the boat.
Tentacles + dark powers + 19th century Western setting (Anglosphere and/or straight europe) so they can use anglo/german/french/italian/latin name conventions in a victorianesque environment, AKA a fricking chuuni wet dream.
SCHWARTZSHIELD!!
Also, we all ignored works like Sword World, taking up the share that D&D until recently has just ignored in Japan. So blame it on Wizards being american first while the others simply exist
Sworld World just seems like Dark Eye, a fantasy system keyed for local tastes that's not worth getting into unless you live in the country and know the language.
I dunno, I've only skimmed bits and pieces but some of it seems really cool. For example, it's a default design element that large monsters have multiple pieces which get their own actions and can be individually disabled. I know some western RPGs do limb damage but I don't know any that give them their own actions.
It seems pretty strong on its own merits. It's 2d6 using a power tables system to represent scaling strength/ability by giving you different results depending on the scaling asked for. Also, the skill system is such that multiclassing is STRONGLY encouraged.
https://www.ring-tail.com/shop.php here's my old game store in Japan
CoC yes
D&D no
tentacles
low iq low effort moron
D&D never took off in Japan because until fairly recently getting non-d6 dice required importing them yourself from the west. It simply wasn't worth the trouble.
It’s weird because polyhedral dice were fairly common even before D&D as they were used in classrooms. Gygax got the first set from like, a school supplies store.
And for the systems they did have that normally asked for other dice, they came up with a bunch of d6 workarounds.
>ywn have a qt jap girlfriend to play romantic 2PL scenarios with
What system is that exactly?
Call of Cthulhu, I guess, but what edition? I've played only the 7th and a character sheet would be way more complicated than that
It's 6th edition.
BRP is basically the metric system of RPG systems
the average STR value for an adult male is 12
In 7E they changed stats to be straight percentiles
assuming thats a list of skills, how did she get multiple skills above 70% during chargen?
Logistics, style of play, and demographics.
First off, D&D fricked itself mightily in the 80's for a lot of logistical reasons. Their books are too big and non-standard, so they didn't fit on Japanese store shelves. To this day, if you don't buy from a major retailor, you have to buy your D&D books on special order. They're also expensive for this reason. The number of books needed to play compounded on this problem, multiplying the cost. The dice were expensive due to Japanese import tariffs on gambling implements, so anything not a d6 was way more expensive to purchase. Despite all of this, the "replay" became popular, which is to say a retelling of a pen and paper roleplay campaign in serial format. One of the circles making these replays was Group SNK, and after their setting being rejected for Japanese publication by TSR and a number of other pen and paper publishers, they set out and created their own: Sword World.
Sword World was written in standardized Japanese paperback, and was a fraction the cost of D&D for this reason. It could also be kept on store shelves, right down the way from their popular replay volumes, with the official setting for that replay. To start playing, you only needed one book, with maybe two more if you wanted to go that far. WAY cheaper than D&D. The system also used exclusively d6 dice, and so was extremely accessible for materials. This kills the D&D.
Style of play is also important. The Japanese don't have the time or space to play long, protracted epic fantasy campaigns most of the time, so generally a campaign is much shorter, and sessions may be a bit shorter as well. D&D isn't really suited to that with its protracted leveling system. Modules are great, but with faster or one-shot systems available, both domestic and foreign, players gravitated further away from D&D.
(con't)
But that's all just why D&D isn't popular. CoC is popular due to demographics. Since replay books (and videos, etc) then and still are a large driver of tabletop interest, it attracts a lot of women, who make up half the current Japanese player base, and have for some time. Female players aren't too keen on hack-and-slash types of games, and instead favor games heavy on storytelling and roleplay, which is more of a focus in CoC. Thus Call of Cthulhu's popularity in Japan.
tl;dr, TSR fricked itself on logistics in the 80's, and what filled in the gap eventually lead to loads of OL's and housewives picking up CoC as a hobby.
While I can't comment on the "CoC appeals to women" bit, I can reinforce that replays are a big deal. To those still unaware, a replay is basically a gussied-up after-action report of a session/campaign, something you read after the session has ended; it's a counterpart to the actual play (a session you watch live). Replays are great as a demo showcase of how the system plays and can just be an interesting story in its own right - storytimes on /tg/ are basically another form of replay. It's not uncommon for a Japanese system rulebook to feature a replay right there in the book, to show off how the game moves in action and to set expections for the sort of campaign/session you might run.
>Oh, also, I failed to mention the famous replay/setting Group SNE wrote: Record of Lodoss War.
This was mentioned in
. The Record of Lodoss War was originally running in D&D, but after it failed to be adopted as an official setting and TSR told them to frick off, Group SNE decided "frick it" and made their own system. Thus, Sword World was born.
Replays are the end result of the "TTRPGs are a form of collaborative storytelling" paradigm.
>OL's and housewives picking up CoC as a hobby.
>ywn have a japanese milf to play ttrpg's with
why even live bros?
>Group SNK
You mean Group SNE. SNK is a different company in an entirely different field.
Fricking hell, thanks for the correction. That's what I get for doing this on a lark and in a rush. I typo shit.
Oh, also, I failed to mention the famous replay/setting Group SNE wrote: Record of Lodoss War.
The dice were easier to get. TAKE NOTE, DISNEY AND EDGE STUDIOS!
It's been a while since I played a Disney game but weren't their weird dice just d6s with different markings? When I played one of those Star Wars RPGs they put out we just assigned each of their symbols a number and rolled regular d6s.
It's Genesys dice with slightly different symbols. I have EoE but I refuse to play it with silly conversion tables simply because they can't figure out how to make dice for a game they designed around dice.
The Narrative Dice System, used by FFG Star Wars and Genesys, is a very recent thing by comparison, never mind being proprietary dice. Japanese dice availability in the '80s and contemporary dice availability are not the same thing.
Either way, this is shifting the topic, so let's drop it here. Here's R'lyeh Antique, part of one of the more famous CoC replay series.
They've actually finally reprinted those.
they were literally selling d20s d12s and d8s in train stations (right next to the darumas and the prefectural keychains) back in the 2000's, the myth of "japs aint got no dice" is absolutely shit
I've already posted my local game store, which has been operating for at least 20 years. Gale Force Nine has more of a shelf prescence than wotc trash
Up to a point, they had no dice.
The context of no dice is talking about the 80s.
The truth of the matter is that D&D only really has the market share it does because it came first and marketed itself really hard while squashing domestic competition for years.
In international markets where people could learn with tabletop concepts thanks to D&D but had the resources to make their own more domestically oriented shit or developed the hobby space according to domestic tastes (see why Shadowrun is a very different and much more polished and supported game in Germany).
TSR or its agents screwed the translation of AD&D which killed a lot of the popularity that Basic D&D had had for a few years. When WotC bought TSR in 1997 they stopped localisation of 2e which killed their market share. They didn't translate D&D again until 2002 and they re-established market dominance.
Then Manta Aisora and Koin released the Lovecraft inspired manga Nyaruko: Crawling with Love which spawned an anime series. That became popular and the popularity spilled over into Call of Cthulhu.
Japanese like the replays that come from CoC more than a lot of other systems and CoC replays were made into videos often with vocaloids which made them even more popular. That's why Sword World is the most popular Japanese made fantasy because it has better replays than D&D.
You guys are making jap games sound really comfy.
Come home after a hard night slaving away at a desk job you were lucky to even get, sit down with your friends and a hot cup of sake and some shitty instagram slop food and just roleplay a firm handed old professor babysitting your friends victorian e-girl characters while investigating Hastur's Home for Wayward Ghouls?
Where do they play online? Where do I sign up? I want to play too...
>Where do they play online?
Their roll20 ripoff called CCFOLIA, VC via discord.
>Where do I sign up?
Rummage the #trpg募集 or #trpg好きと繋がりたい hashtag for a start.
Another VTT that seems to be taking off is Udonarium, which is a neat open-source application that presents a 3d tabletop, with tokens rendered in 2d (approximating paper stands). Along with CCFolia it feels a lot of their VTTs really come at things from a very different paradigm - most Western VTTs feel like Roll20 (or rather FantasyGrounds) clones.
If CoC is so popular why the frick is it so hard to find a game. Every other game has massive Discords where you can find players easier then gays find sexual partners in a californian public toilets, but finding players for CoC feels like you gotta be a detective. I get it, the game is about mystery, but I dont want the mystery to be where the frick do I find players.
Why are people so interested in japanese TTRPG's? What makes them so difference from western RPG's?
The culture informs the game design. Japanese games can tend to be rather narrow in scope much of the time; it's not often you see a "universal" system of theirs. For example, this is Card Ranker, a game that is essentially "Yu-Gi-Oh the RPG". It knows what it wants to do and sets out to do only that.
They really are very focused. Nechronica is more focused on its subject than any DnD campaign I've ever played, that's for sure. That's not a bad thing, though; I skimmed the PDF last night and felt ready to play a game inside of an hour. The first time I played 3.5 it took me all evening to make my character.
Actually been reading into Sword World 2.5 the last few days seems like fun.
The 3 tiers of combat system is really cool though Advanced seems like a bit of a shitshow.