Post originally by Drew Stevens at 2004-05-11 10:23:16
Converted from Phorums BB System

Would something like Bonds, or Trollbabes Relationships, or Unknown Armies Madness Meters (except revised to monitor more normal emotions, and not so hard to move the pointer about) be inappropriate?

Hell no! They'd have been totally appropriate, and a way to really focus the game aspect of the roleplaying game on that very difference.

Saying that a system destroys storytelling is both a traditional assumption and incorrect. It's akin to saying that Vampire would be a better game if, instead of a Humanity rating, there were essays about the horror of losing oneself to the Beast.

Now, that isn't to say that the essays aren't useful. Again, I gave them props. But without mechanics underlying and highlighting the differences between shoujo and shonen play, it's fluff and very difficult to adjust the normal mindset.

System serves the story, by underlining and highlighting the Important Bits. Especially the system in play- it doesn't matter how cool your chargen system is at recreating the feel of a shoujo character, if that doesn't carry over in play, it's wasted effort. This is the same criteque I carry of BESM, by the way- wonderful looking, falls down in play by being too generic.

You say that shoujo is more about a character's psyche and relationships than about questing and fighting? I don't see that on the character sheet; I see a spread of abilities and attributes, including some superpowers. In my experience, most play will actually revolve around what's on the sheet, with a substrata of mood and theme from the fluff.

Hell, why even make fights that are actual fights? Could you portray almost all problems in shoujo magna as actually being a contest of the character against themself- the difficulty of which to overcome is based entirely on psychological and internal factors, not how the monster powders stone when it hits.