Awhile back Mikko Rautalahti of Roolipelaaja magazine interviewed Matt and I about Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch. You can see the interview in Finnish here. I’ve included the full text in English below.
Thanks, Mikko!
Panty Explosion is obviously a genre game, but your choice of genre is somewhat unusual, particularly when compared to the range of games out there in general. What prompted you to design a game about Japanese high school girls? Do you have first-hand experience of the high school culture over there?
(Matt Schlotte) Mai the Psychic Girl. It was one of the first mangas I read as a young kid. It was about twenty years ago now. However there is necessary background to this answer. Jake and I were talking about how much we wanted a Playstation 3 when they came out while also knowing we were both not making enough money to buy one. So we decided we’d write a role-playing game so we could each buy one. (We do not advise writing role-playing games to earn money if you want any real amount of money) After having this not so brilliant idea we then bantered back and forth ideas of what the game could be about. I said “Mai the Psychic Girl” and that was the idea that stayed. Our giant rubber suiter monster dating sim is still brought up from time to time.
I personally don’t have any experience with Japanese high school culture. I have several friends from Japan and hosted a college age student. Mostly my information came from these friendships, from manga, anime and some live action movies.
(Jake Richmond) I don’t have any first hand experience with Japanese schools. We did a ton of research for the book though, and discovered all kinds of really fascinating stuff about the Japanese educational system. I’m also a huge fan of high school comedy Manga like Azu Manga Daioh. I don’t think the choice of genre is that unusual. Japanese schoolgirls are at least as mainstream as orcs and elves. It’s just a different audience. There are tons of games for people who like traditional fantasy, all kinds of sci-fi or super heroes. We wanted to do a game for people who were into other stuff…
(Matt Schlotte) And high school should be more recognizable then Greyhawk or Middle Earth.
Do you have a specific game design philosophy or credo that you adhere to?
(JR) Now? Sure. I didn’t at the time. Panty Explosion became a kind of education in game design for me. The game went through so many revisions and drastic changes; I had to develop a real work ethic and discipline for the project. It was very different from any project I worked on before. Now that we’ve moved on to new projects there definitely is, if not a design philosophy, then at least a desire to try new things. My goal now when I sit down work on a game is to try to create something completely unique. Panty Explosion was a first step in moving away from conventional games. Both it’s genre and play concepts are fairly different from anything else out there. For the games I’m working on now I’m looking for ways to push both genre and play even farther. I find that as both a player and a designer I want to try new stuff that is unlike what I’ve seen before.
(MS) Yeah. I’m not up on game theories or philosophies, so in the case of Panty Explosion and my new projects I am designing for a genre or a story I enjoy. Jake has really been taking on the mechanics used and has interesting concepts for setting. I’ve been struggling with designing a game that confronts something people often want to avoid and then how do you make that enjoyable.
And in the same vein, how did the design process on Panty Explosion work out in practice between the two of you? How did the division of labor go?
(MS) Well, the first two thirds of the design time was spent sporadically calling up each other and running to the others place to tell some new idea and would lead to three hour long conversations as we brain-stormed ideas. We went through so many different rule ideas, setting questions and information discoveries that it kept enthusiasm high and we had the other person to bounce ideas off of. It worked oddly very well.
Finally in the last two months we decided we should actually write a polished form of the game to be out barely in time for GenCon. I can’t draw so Jake had to do all the art and he did an amazing job. We split out sections of the book and worked on them. Jake did information on high schools and the mechanics while I did psychic and fluff, for instance. We never stepped on the others toes, instead it was very positive and we were both happy to see the others work because it was an aspect of this game we had been working on for a year. It helps Jake and I are both very laid back.
(JR) The whole book came together over about 9 months. We spent the first few months just hashing out ideas and determining what we wanted to see in the book and what we thought could be left out (like the option to play male characters). During this time we were both doing a lot of research for the game, and we had a lot of late night 5-hour phone calls where we would throw ideas at each other. Most of the core ideas for the game, like using the Junishi, Godai and Blood Types for stats and Traits and using Friendship to resolve conflicts and determine what type of dice players use, came from those conversations.
Bullying and the anxiety and alienation it causes are a pervasive social element throughout Panty Explosion — indeed, the game strongly encourages players to not only play those scenarios but also deals with consequences in unflinching detail. Is this a deliberate social commentary on your part, or was it merely an element that makes for an interesting game play dynamic?
(JR) Back before we started working on the game Matt had come across this statistic showing that Japan is the only country where bullying is more prevalent among girls then boys. When we started working on Panty Explosion we decided that this was going to be a big part of the game. Panty Explosion is all about role-playing the relationships between a group of Japanese high school girls. The psychic stuff is just the flavor. Bullying, peer pressure, alienation and stress are all a big part of that. Japanese high schools are really tough places, and the pressure to succeed, to get into a good college, is overpowering and leads many students to suicide, self-mutilation or other forms of abuse. The more we researched it the more really fascinating stuff we discovered, and we did our best to put that all into the game. The idea was to provide a unique role-playing experience full of challenges and consequences that would force the players to make tough decisions. For me that’s what a good RPG does.
(MS) PE (Panty Explosion) is a game about high school for us. It happens to have psychics, demons, government agents and such. High school simply by being an aspect of education that most people go through will be culturally and personally relevant to the players. As the players infuse their knowledge, which will probably not be of a Japanese high school experience, into their games the experience of the game will say probably more about high school and what it means to the players and Superintendent then we could have. So, I wouldn’t say we were making a social commentary, we were just hoping to open the door for everyone who plays it to make social commentary.
Do you think that Panty Explosion is a game that would work well in a long-term campaign game, or do you think it’s better suited for short one-shot games?
(JR) When we were working on the game I kept thinking of it as a short or single session game. I couldn’t imagine it being played for more then maybe 5 sessions in a row. Now that the game is out people seem to be playing it as an ongoing game. Which I think is really cool. I find that Panty Explosion works really well in “seasons”. Play a 3-6 game season, take a break for a while, and then come back for season 2.
(MS) Everyone kept commenting that Panty Explosion was a one-shot game back in the critique and play test phase and I kept thinking they weren’t getting it. Panty Explosion has always been a 3-6 episode game. It can work as a one-shot though and as a campaign. We have nascent campaign rules even, which never made the book due to time and lack of play testing.
You have a sequel called Classroom Deathmatch coming up, and it’s clearly inspired by the excellent Battle Royale. What’s the premise, how does it relate to Panty Explosion and do you think it offers a significantly different game play experience?
(MS) Well you got the premise, its basically Battle Royale. It has similar mechanics and stats to Panty Explosion but lacks psychics and other aspects. Classroom Deathmatch is quite different then Panty Explosion. There’s no character generation. There are 50 pre-made students that you pick from because chances are your character or at least some other person in the game’s character will die. When that happens you just get another one of the remaining students, which comes with new randomly generated weapon. Also your dice pools only refresh through “flash back” scenes.
It will be familiar enough to people who have played PE but provides a new style of play. More killing by average students. It will probably be more popular then Panty Explosion.
(JR) One of the big complaints about Panty Explosion is that it doesn’t have enough killing. People complain that there’s no combat system. They also complain that you can’t play boys. So Classroom Deathmatch is the answer to all that. Both Matt and I are really, really big fans of Battle Royale, but Classroom Deathmatch also draws inspiration from manga like Drifting Classroom, Line, Ikki Tousen and film like Volcano High and Heathers.
The goal with Classroom Deathmatch is to offer a really visceral role-playing experience that is similar but still very different from what you get in Panty Explosion. Abducted by their government and forced into a life or death struggle where only one student will survive, players are forced to make really nasty decisions. Can they betray their friends? Can they kill their fellow students? Do they have the personal strength to refuse to fight? Forcing players to make really difficult choices gives you a platform for some really excellent role-playing. Classroom Deathmatch focuses much more on player versus player conflict then Panty Explosion. In a game of Classroom Deathmatch only one character survives. The game certainly rewards characters for working together, but it also demands that players work against each other as well.
Panty Explosion has attracted some controversy, or so I gather — honestly, Google wasn’t all that willing to give me examples of that beyond comments along the lines of “I don’t like this Forge crap”. Some people also seem to find it annoying that the game isn’t more about the psychic powers. A lot of people also apparently decided that the game wasn’t for them based on the name alone. Do you think that people generally get the game? And if not, why not?
(MS) The gamers who would get the game, who are part of that core audience for, get it. However Panty Explosion as its written is definitely a small genre game with certain aspects written in that don’t make some gamers happy. Mostly the having to play a girl. Which by the way if you don’t want to play girls, don’t. There’s no special boy’s rules. If its okay with the group just play as boys or co-ed. No one is stopping you. Anyways, one thing we’ve been seeing is a number of people taking the mechanics and then using it for Ravenloft or other settings, so the mechanics seem to work outside of the setting we put them in.
If the setting had been generic fantasy or space adventure with our mechanics or if we simply had a combat system so you could kill more things it would probably have generated less controversy and who knows, maybe that would be more sales. I personally find it odd that playing male characters and being able to kill indiscriminately are what a good amount of people want.
There is one group of people we think our game isn’t getting to and that’s manga readers that enjoy the genres Panty Explosion lends itself to. However role-playing still carries a stigma that manga is losing. So how to get the game to those people who haven’t thought about role playing but enjoy reading Azu Manga Daioh, Kare Kano and 3×3 Eyes?
(JR) I think a lot of people get the game. My experience has been that anyone who takes the time to read the book comes away seeing the games inherent value. They don’t always want to play it (or even like it) but they recognize that the game itself is worthwhile. Most of the controversy comes from people who have only heard a bit about the game and have made snap judgments. There are people who find the name really offensive. There are people who don’t want to play a game where all the characters are teenage girls. There are people who don’t want to try the game because it doesn’t have a combat system or because it gives to much narrative freedom to the players. There are also plenty of people who don’t want to play it because it’s new. New ideas can be hard for people to assimilate. Especially people who have really committed themselves to one game or one system for several years. But that’s fine. We made Panty Explosion to appeal to a different audience. Panty Explosion is a game for people who want to try something different. For people who like Asian horror movies like Ringu or One Missed Call. For people who don’t care for orcs and elves but really dig Mai the Psychic Girl and Azu Manga Daioh. For people who want a social experience more then a dungeon crawl. For high school girls to play after class and for hardcore gamers to play after watching Battlestar Galactica. It’s certainly not a game for everyone. But if you like social drama, if you like creepy horror, of you like high school or if you like Japanese culture then Panty Explosion is the game for you.
Posted by Jake 
Posted by Jake 
Posted by Jake 
