An Unfortunate Nostalgia: the Robotech RPG
Mar. 3rd, 2018 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerReactions unfolded one after the other for me off a bit of news that a Kickstarter-funded project to make miniature Robotech models for an RPG wargame had run out of all the money I remembered seeing it had raised and wouldn't ship everything promised. First of all, of course, it was unfortunate for the people who'd paid into it. In the context I'd seen the news in, though, the added piece of information the sublicense for the Robotech RPG had expired with the project seemed most of all to have a lot of people looking ahead and reminding each other of a revelation from just a little while ago. The license that had made "Robotech" in the first place wasn't "in perpetuity" the way it had seemed when it was being assigned all the blame for official Macross products not getting outside Japan with any ease, but had an expiry date some time in the next decade. Something about that gloating anticipation does seem unfortunate to me. I do have to admit that after so long and so little, the thought of "cutting a Gordian knot" can seem to have some appeal; at the same time, though, I have come to think "blowing everything up" might not work either. I know that once, years ago, an effort to import transformable Valkyrie toys was derailed because of Harmony Gold's Robotech contract; hard reports of further efforts to bring anything else Macross-related out of Japan being squashed the same "if we can't make money off it, nobody will" way have always seemed elusive, though, and there are murmurs too part of the problem seems to involve the original overseas rights being sold to a subcontractor in Japan back when the original anime was being made (which I understand is also tangled up with some of the more infamously off-model episodes).
Behind even that, though, I did find myself thinking about the Robotech RPG itself. Whether it was through not having a large enough allowance or just dwelling on the early issues I wouldn't have had I started in the middle, I hadn't bought any of the Robotech comics. With the Robotech novels in hand but my hard information of what the show had looked like limited to the not always revealing covers of the novels and a few toys and old Christmas catalogue pages, the first volume of the RPG I noticed every so often in hobby shops seemed useful.
However unfair jokes about "the people who play RPGs" may be, I have to admit I was in that much more dubious a situation, not having any friends good enough to ask to sort the game out and play with. I did once go so far as to try and stage a battle between an "Excalibur" Destroid and a Zentraedi Battlepod; not having the full array of polyhedral dice the game called for, I put numbers on slips of paper and tossed them in a yogurt cup. My first "called shot" on one of the Battlepod's guns succeeded, only to leave me thinking once I'd calculated the damage that I could have just blown the whole mecha up that way; that was pretty much it for my playing career. I suppose a certain vagueness sensed to the whole thing (for example, being offered mecha speeds but no rules on how to have them move in relation to each other in combat) might not have helped.
Some years later, I happened on an RPG volume for "The Sentinels" in another hobby shop, and after quite a while of just having one RPG volume I started putting together a reasonable set of them, if in the process learning all my vague reconstructions of what the mecha of the two later "generations" looked like had been off. Not that long afterwards, I happened to see a preview of a "Macross II" RPG. There had been vague notes in the back of the first RPG volume about "Macross," as with the rest of the book perhaps expecting those who read it to have deeper knowledge I didn't have myself; this sudden suggestion the era that had made Robotech hadn't passed elsewhere in the world was downright exciting. In the end, though, I had several Macross II RPG volumes without any idea of how to see the Japanese animation they made more vague references to, as low an opinion everyone else wound up forming of Macross II anyway.
The calibrated disdain of the online fans I fell in with a few years later for everything spun off from the Robotech series extended to the RPG, with a detailed list of oddities in translation (including taking drawings of a "space destroyer" and supposing it a "space fighter" and apparently misreading the size of a mecha in "The New Generation" as if to link it to "The Macross Saga"), and I have to admit that when I was just using the RPG books as "source material" "fanworks" could be easy enough to fall in line with. I suppose I do daydream these days about general understandings of role-playing games that try to get away from "fussy rules" to promises of "cinematic action," something perhaps along the lines of "I drop in shooting through a half-arc, setting off the closest mecha like firecrackers!" and then making one simple roll for success with the awareness you might have to come up with something less successful if just as grandiose and a way out of that in turn. As I've said, though, with my connection to role-playing games having wound up with "just enough to embarrass myself," I may not be in the same unfortunate place as the people who don't have all of the models they paid for but I may not have any solid understanding of game design either.
Behind even that, though, I did find myself thinking about the Robotech RPG itself. Whether it was through not having a large enough allowance or just dwelling on the early issues I wouldn't have had I started in the middle, I hadn't bought any of the Robotech comics. With the Robotech novels in hand but my hard information of what the show had looked like limited to the not always revealing covers of the novels and a few toys and old Christmas catalogue pages, the first volume of the RPG I noticed every so often in hobby shops seemed useful.
However unfair jokes about "the people who play RPGs" may be, I have to admit I was in that much more dubious a situation, not having any friends good enough to ask to sort the game out and play with. I did once go so far as to try and stage a battle between an "Excalibur" Destroid and a Zentraedi Battlepod; not having the full array of polyhedral dice the game called for, I put numbers on slips of paper and tossed them in a yogurt cup. My first "called shot" on one of the Battlepod's guns succeeded, only to leave me thinking once I'd calculated the damage that I could have just blown the whole mecha up that way; that was pretty much it for my playing career. I suppose a certain vagueness sensed to the whole thing (for example, being offered mecha speeds but no rules on how to have them move in relation to each other in combat) might not have helped.
Some years later, I happened on an RPG volume for "The Sentinels" in another hobby shop, and after quite a while of just having one RPG volume I started putting together a reasonable set of them, if in the process learning all my vague reconstructions of what the mecha of the two later "generations" looked like had been off. Not that long afterwards, I happened to see a preview of a "Macross II" RPG. There had been vague notes in the back of the first RPG volume about "Macross," as with the rest of the book perhaps expecting those who read it to have deeper knowledge I didn't have myself; this sudden suggestion the era that had made Robotech hadn't passed elsewhere in the world was downright exciting. In the end, though, I had several Macross II RPG volumes without any idea of how to see the Japanese animation they made more vague references to, as low an opinion everyone else wound up forming of Macross II anyway.
The calibrated disdain of the online fans I fell in with a few years later for everything spun off from the Robotech series extended to the RPG, with a detailed list of oddities in translation (including taking drawings of a "space destroyer" and supposing it a "space fighter" and apparently misreading the size of a mecha in "The New Generation" as if to link it to "The Macross Saga"), and I have to admit that when I was just using the RPG books as "source material" "fanworks" could be easy enough to fall in line with. I suppose I do daydream these days about general understandings of role-playing games that try to get away from "fussy rules" to promises of "cinematic action," something perhaps along the lines of "I drop in shooting through a half-arc, setting off the closest mecha like firecrackers!" and then making one simple roll for success with the awareness you might have to come up with something less successful if just as grandiose and a way out of that in turn. As I've said, though, with my connection to role-playing games having wound up with "just enough to embarrass myself," I may not be in the same unfortunate place as the people who don't have all of the models they paid for but I may not have any solid understanding of game design either.