“Koichi  is a new transfer to Atarashi High, eager to make friends but too shy to talk to anyone! What will he do when he becomes the object of affection of the schools three most handsome young rivals? Will he fall for the promising Young Athlete, the superstar Model or the school’s  most popular Teacher’s Assistant?  Guide Koichi through three dates and help him break through his shyness and fall in love for the very first time!”

G x B (Girl x Boy) creators Jake Richmond and Heather Aplington return with an all new yaoi tabletop role playing game  for 4 or more players!

Pete Figtree talks about playing G x B with the students of his high school gaming club. Looks like the game went over especially well with the non-gaming girls! Check out this short 5 minute podcast to hear all about it!

Panty Explosion Perfect is perfect for playing bloody high school grudge matches fueled by supernatural powers. Add in Zombies in place of the traditional demons and ghosts for a Highschool of the Dead style game!

Cannibal Contagion is built from the ground up for insane, zombie filled survival horror action, perfect for fans of Resident Evil, Dead Island or Highschool of the Dead!

Get both games now for just $26.

Jedi x Sith lets you play a quiet but resourceful Jedi Knight charged with rooting out Sith infiltrators in the Jedi order! This 3 page pdf includes a new jedi themed scenerio for G x B, rules and guidlines for playing and 4 character cards. You’ll need a copy of G x B to play, of course!

Cel*Style friend Xavier Raoult has taken the time to translate the Panty Explosion Perfect and G x B character cards into French. You can download both sets here. Thanks Xavier!

- French Panty Explosion cards

- French G x B cards

Back in 2006, for the first few months after releasing the original version of Panty Explosion, Matt and I were getting a constant stream of emails and posts asking us to publish a version of the system for playing… well… anything else really. People liked the game and it was selling well, but most players wanted to play Bleach, or InuYasha or Sailor Moon or Gundam or anything but pissed off psychic school girls. Most people wanted us to release a version of the Panty Explosion rules for generic anime play, something like BESM I guess. Matt and I talked about this for a bit and decided that we were totally against it for a few reasons.  We’re both big believers in purpose built games, games designed to do a specific thing or emulate a certain genre. Also, we already knew that Panty Explosion just didn’t work well for certain kinds of games, and trying to adapt it to play something like One Piece, Patlabor or Crying Freeman just didn’t seem like a good idea.  There was one really good idea that a lot of people kept asking for though, a yaoi game.

A yaoi version of Panty Explosion seemed like it would be a good fit for the specific reason that it would be a game built around a specific subject. As I said before, Matt and I are both believers in the idea of building games to do a specific thing. The more things a game has to do, the more kinds of stories it has to tell, play styles it has to accommodate and genres it has to emulate, the poorer it will be. We see this with Gurps, BESM and every other traditional toolbox game. Gurps can be used to run almost anything, but it doesn’t put much distinction between space opera and detective mysteries, and it doesn’t really do anything that well. BESM is great if you want a really generic, mid 80′s kind of anime feel, but the kind of games you get out of it emulate the kind of anime you wouldn’t really ever want to watch. You’ll never get a Cowboy Bebop, Spirited Away or Perfect Blue out of BESM. The system just doesn’t provide you with the tools for that kind of play. If you want something like Cowboy Bebop, you need a system designed to do just that.

So I mentioned to someone that we were thinking about doing a yaoi version of Panty Explosion, and pretty soon a few sites had published the news that our next game would be a yaoi game. The problem was that neither of us could come up with anything. Matt and I spent a few months reading manga and hanging out on yaoi boards and pretty much absorbing as much material as we could manage. We had decided right away that we didn’t want to just modify Panty Explosion, but we weren’t sure where to start on a new design either. The suggestions we were getting, and we were getting a lot, we’re… well… really, really awful.  Check this out:

Lets design a yaoi game!

1. Start by choosing a race (since all rpgs have races). You can be gay, or… umm… straight? I guess? Since we need to have more than one choice?

2. Choose a class! You can be a seme or uke, of course. We still need more options though, especially since we have straight characters. Maybe a sibling character, like an older sister or brother? Or a straight best friend? Or why not just create classes based on stereotypes! We can have the gay biker class, and the Bear class and the…  yes, I know this really doesn’t fit into the genre. So what?

3. We need plenty of skills and feats and advantages and whatever.  Uke are often portrayed as shy, vulnerable or naive, so those could be skills, right? And of course we want to make sure both characters can put skill points in beauty, or looks or something. Is Anal Virginity a feat or an Advantage?

4. We need a combat system, of course. All rpgs have one.

5. And monsters! Maybe a bitch co-worker who wants to sleep with the seme, or rapist after the uke, or…

And so on and so on. Does that sound awful? Does that sound like a game anyone would want to play? Does that sound like a game that does a good job of capturing the yaoi genre, or that would attract fans of the genre? No, of course not. And yet, that’s what almost all the suggestions we got were like. In fact, spend some time looking around the internet for yaoi table top rpgs and you’ll find people discussing games just like this, trying to adapt the D20 system, or Savage Worlds or Fate or something else to play a yaoi game. Why? They don’t know any better. These are players who only have a single tool to play with. They’ve been playing with a hammer for so long, it doesn’t even occur to them to try using a different tool. They’ve been sold on the idea that the hammer can be used to build anything. They’ve invested in this idea. Once you’ve spent months or years learning a game system and buying book after book for that system, a system that promises it can be used for everything… would it even occur to you to try something new? Would it occur to you that the same set of narrative rules that you use for murdering goblins and stealing their stuff maybe wasn’t the best way to approach exploring an intimate sexual and emotional relationship with another human being?

We ended up shelving the project.  Neither of us could come up with anything. The closest we got was a Gundam Seed style mech game, where the main character (the uke) was a gifted young mech pilot, and the opposing character (the seme) was an enemy ace, trying to seduce him during battle. It was a fun idea, but when we posted it on the forum we had created for discussing our upcoming yaoi game, the reaction was pretty negative. The players didn’t want pre-made characters. They wanted a toolbox style game where they could make whatever type of character they wanted.

See, the thing is that they were wrong. As I said before, a decade of gamer training has told us that what we want out of our rpgs is a tool box, a customizable system that allows us to play any kind of game we want and make any kind of character we want. It’s not true. Or maybe it is, but… well, fuck it. No, it’s not. If you want to play a yaoi game what you need is a game built to emulate the genre. Built to tell yaoi style stories with yaoi style characters. You don’t also need the option for playing Indiana Jones. Or Star Wars. Or Lord of the Rings. You don’t need stats for playing an elf. You don’t need a special rule set in case you’re playing pirates.You need a system that emulates the yaoi genre and gives you a platform to play characters and tell stories that meet the expectations of that genre. A toolbox style game simply gives players the illusion of freedom by offering tons of useless and unneeded options. Look, here’s stats to play an Orc uke. Here’s stats to play a Half-Tyranosaurus seme. Here’s rules for adapting D20 combat for sex scenes. Here’s how the Cleave feat works in relationship scenes!

Useless.

Build a simple game from the ground up that does exactly what you want it to do. Leave out everything else. That’s the right approach.

I wasn’t having any luck coming up with a yaoi game, but I was jetting along working on a shoujo style dating sim game with a simple premise. You played a young woman who has just moved to a new high school. You want to fall in love, but you don’t know how. You’ll go on a series of three dates, each with another player, and at the end decide who you like best. The game used a simple card mechanic and a rotating narrator. While player one and two were acting out their date, players three and four would be narrating. Then player one and three would go on a date, and two and four would narrate. The game went through a few major revisions, but it really came together when I decided to abandon the section on character creation and just introduce 4 pre-made characters. Here’s why: When you pick up the first volume of a shoujo manga, you can’t choose the characters. Often, the main character seems weak, childish, stuck up, naive or pitiful. Often the supporting characters and love interests are unlikable. At first. The entire point is that each character is a unique individual, and as the story continues they change and grow. Creating pre-made characters, each with a set personality, appearance and name forced players to accept the characters as whole individuals, complete with strengths and flaws. If they wanted to change who the characters were, if they wanted them to grow, they’d have to do so through play. Plus, and this is even more important, rpg players have a tendency to play the same characters over and over again. Denying them that choice and forcing them to play something new and unfamiliar creates vulnerability, awkwardness and uncertainty. Which is perfect for a shoujo manga story.

Here’s the thing. G x B (that’s what the game would eventually be called) would have four pre-made characters, and it was easy to choose the types. We had the shy, uncertain heroine who always tried her hardest, the nerdy student who was smarter than all his classmates, the bully with a heart of gold and the confident class president.

The class president was a girl.

As soon as I made that choice I realized that the game could work in reverse as well. It didn’t have to be the story of a shy young woman looking to fall in love. It could just as easily be the story of a shy young man, trying to choose between the three attractive guys who are totally into him. I finished up G x B (Girl x Boy) with artist Heather Aplington earlier this year, and we immidetaly started working on the follow up.

B x B (Boy x Boy) works for the same reason G x B does. Falling in love, and looking for love, and wanting to be in love, is universal. It’s something we all know. The game gives you a character and gives you a platform for falling in love. Or going on a first date, anyway. That’s it. The yaoi part? The part about playing beautiful young men? That’s there as well of course. It’s there in the premise of the game and the appearance and the description of the characters. The game itself though? B x B is a game about falling in love. It took me awhile to realize that this was what was missing from our earlier efforts to make a game. Yaoi is a genre, but a genre is only a platform for a story. Our game needed a story to hang on. This is the reason the mech game seemed to work when the others didn’t.  Looking at other genre examples it became pretty obvious. There’s yaoi detective stories, stories about struggling musicians, vampires, assassins, chefs, teachers and cave men. These are all stories featuring beautiful and passionate men having sex with each other, but each story is also about something else. So B x B is a game about a young man who wants to fall in love, but can’t choose between three suitors.

Anyway…

B x B is pretty much done. I’m just looking for a little free time to finish up some of the text, letter the instructional manga that Heather created for the book and do the layout. The game doesn’t exactly play like G x B. There are a few small changes to help the play experience stand on it’s own and stay fresh for fans of the first game. It’s also probably just not as blatantly sexy as some people would like. Too bad. Just like with G x B, I wanted to create a game that was more sweet and funny than sweaty and sexy. Anyway, I think you’ll like it!

Jake