Review: Maid RPG

Once upon a time I told readers of my previous blog that I would find them and kill them if Maid: RPG fell through as a game and failed. Consider all your asses off the hook, because maid rpg does not seem to be going anywhere. Since I took down my original review on accounts of it being embarrassing for me to look back on, I decided to post another review of it. I expect it will go pretty much the same way – I will extol its virtues as a fast RPG that does anime-style gaming correctly, I will point you to the $7 dollar PDF which is an absolutely incredible price for the content, and I will try to dispel some bad rep the game has gotten. Then I will be insulted repeatedly over email and forums for weeks. It will be worth it.

Maid: RPG is a d6-roll-over-target-number roleplaying game that emulates a specific scenario explored in some romance comedy anime and manga. Namely, you play as a Maid serving some rich man or woman in a mansion and have to do crazy chores which lead to slapstick violence, awkward situations, blossoming romance and general smiles and laughs. You can play it a number of different other ways, toning down the comedy and upping the romance, nixing the romance and turning it into a saturday morning cartoon, or even introducing grim and dark stories and tragedies. It’s a very flexible game.

Making a Maid: RPG character is incredibly fast. In fact, there’s a character generator that rolls everything for you (note that this generator is unofficial and only creates basic characters, not those with any of the optional rules), generating random characters on the fly. That is part of what I love about Maid. You can get it up and running very quickly, and playing even short games can be very satisfying. It is a perfect game to keep around for when your party does not all show up to play, or just to goof around when you’re bored. However, it also works decently well for longer games, though it won’t ever be a “campaign” sort of RPG the way D&D and World of Darkness are.

The plethora of different options in the game allows you to put whatever spin you want on the theme. Maybe your Maids are actually serving a King in a fantasy castle, or they might be space explores in a massive shuttle serving the president of the united states in exile from a successful alien takeover. Or some other crazy idea. There are even optional rules that push beyond the romance comedy roots of the game into serious romance, or even dark tragedies. You could quite accurately reproduce the darkest, most melodramatic soap operas you can think of with maid: rpg, down to the illogical moments where character x seduces character y for no good reason (the seduction rules could be sprang on anyone)!

In fact I think Kamiya-sama’s maid Hizumi, who narrates the game book and participates in many of the gameplay examples to teach new players about the mechanics, best describes the premise:

The Master, his Maids, and the Mansion where they all live: These three “M”s are constant, and regardless of the world in which the game takes place, it’s about the everyday lives of these elements. In the mansion, everyday life has action, intrigue, rivalries, laughter, tears, bloodshed, and so on. In order for the maids to act out freely within this exciting and happy lifestyle, the most important thing is for the players to have is imagination.

As a player, you need to appreciate your maid’s appeal, and express that feeling through acting. If you can do that, a moving performance will result. Maybe. This is stuff that Kamiya-sama came up with, so don’t take it too seriously. In any case, I’m pretty sure there’s no other game quite like this one. And that’s important… Maybe.

Many of the things outlined above might not even happen, because character generation in Maid: RPG is random. You can pick traits, but it’s encouraged you generate something randomly and try to play it – half the fun is getting something weird you never would’ve thought about, like a Heroic and Heroic (yes, twice) demon maid who is secretly an assassin out to kill the master. Traits like your skill or affection as well as your backstory are generated randomly, and that’s why I say that the romance element may never even appear. If all your players are low-affection and some of them want to kill you, it’s unlikely you’ll get awkward lovey-dovey moments – unless you want them to appear!

Maids have a couple of interesting traits that shape play. For example, a Maid can roll any of her traits for any event as long as it can be explained in a fitting way (I have literally had maids who hugged the crap out of enemies because they were more affectionate than they were skilled or cunning), unless the Master asks that the maid roll a different trait. So you’ll usually be rolling your best traits, and you’ll pick a “core trait” that you use by default.

Maids also have Favor, which are points they gain as they get on the good side of the Master, or lose if they fail too much. A Maid with 0 favor gets fired from her job. A Maid can spend favor to increase her traits. She can also use it to cause a Random Event. This allows players to steer gameplay in their own way, though they have no real control of what happens, they do have control of when something happens (right now!)

In fact you can play the game pretty much entirely random. You can generate characters, settings and events randomly as you play from the myriad of random tables. It’s a whole “gameplay mode” that the game supports (and which I definitely encourage).

A Maid also has a Stress Explosion. A Maid’s Spirit stat determines how much stress she can take, and you accrue stress by failing. If you accrue too much stress, then for a certain amount of real time (which Hizumi points out you might want a stopwatch to track) you have to throw a tantrum as outlined in your stress explosion. For example, I had a maid who’s stress explosion was stealing things, including from other maids! The amount of weird combinations of personality traits you can create is staggering, which is partly why the random generation is encouraged. None of the traits have any inherent advantages in play – they just influence how you roleplay.

And there’s options for butlers but that’s for wimps.

Rather than trying to lure you into playing some monkeycheese abomination of schoolgirls with magic katana mechs, or any other abortion of a dozen conjoined anime cliches, it picks a small subset of anime tropes and it turns them into a quick, fun game that never gets stale and captures its genre extremely faithfully. This is why Maid: RPG is my favorite anime-style game.

Misconceptions:

From the game book:

Things you probably won’t need
● Shame: Feeling shameful about pretending to be a Maid? That kind of defeats the purpose.
● A maid costume: Not that you can’t, but it’s not necessary to play. And it might be a little creepy. Imagination and all that. If you look cute in one, feel free to send us pictures.

Maid:RPG‘s eccentricity is a product of its design. It was made by a Japanese author, based on Japanese tropes for a Japanese audience. It was then translated into English. In fact, it was somewhat “adapted” to be less weird and more understandable to Americans. If you don’t know much about anime, and probably even if you do, a lot of the things in the game will may offend. I’m going to try to explain why you shouldn’t take them seriously, as well as clear up other misconceptions. The game is only ever as uncomfortable to you as you want to make it – people who see it is an inherently sexual game are dead wrong. So here we go.

1. I heard that someone confused Maid: RPG with “My Life With Master.” Maid: RPG is a light-hearted comedy-romance game. The idea of maids and a master is used in a romance-comedy fashion. The tone of the game is in no way like that of “My Life With Master” and none of the excerpts, artwork or promotions even so much as hints of that sort of content. Maid might (for whatever reason) bring thoughts to your mind of bondage and humiliation…but those are your problems.

2. The Core Rulebook’s play examples contain things like skirt flipping, and breast groping because that’s typical romance-comedy humor in anime. If you’ve seen series like Ranma, Tenchi Muyo or Love Hina, this book is not even as sexual as those anime and manga are, and you are never made to play this way.

3. There are attributes for Innocence and playing child characters in the games. The ability to play a kid is just par the course for an anime game. Playing an adult that has “innocence” usually means “naive idiot.” The use of the term “Lolita” to describe a kid maid does instantly bring to mind Nabokov and set off warning bell, but as far as anime is concerned the term has just become something stock (and nowadays so deluded as to be meaningless) to call cutesy anime kids.

Sometimes Lolita characters are actually adults who look like kids. Sometimes they’re monsters who aren’t human at all. Sometimes Lolita is just used to refer to certain traits, like having a child-like face – an example of this is in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, where Mikuru, who’s pretty much the stacked girl of the series, is referred to in that way. I don’t think this warrants the label of “pedophile fantasy” that gets thrown at the game. Not only is it very damning, it’s disingenuous.

4. There are rules for romance, including seduction. These are entirely optional. And like everything in the game, they’re not even inherently romantic by themselves. They can be used for bugs bunny crossdresser-style humor as well. A lot of focus in bad reviews seems to fall on these elements, but nothing requires you to play them and if you’re that offended by them you don’t even have to read those sections or acknowledge them. In the same vein, there are “tragedies” and “complexes” that can make the game very dark, but they are optional. Maid: RPG is very flexible this way.

5. The play examples themselves contain romance and perverted behavior, for reasons that after reading all the above, should be pretty clear now. This is a matter of the audience being written for and the source material being drawn from. Above all else, I want to leave you with the message that the presentation of the game should not define how you play it.