Thoughts on Reading Usagi Yojimbo Role-Playing Game, 1st Edition (by Sanguine)

Note that this review is based on having read the game thoroughly, but not having played the game.  I hope to play the game soon, but as of this writing, I have not.  So take this for what it’s worth.
 
If you read my review of Sanguine’s second edition of this game, you know that I wasn’t overly impressed.  This version, however, I find much more intriguing, and I find the mechanics much more exciting. 
 
There is still the cumbersome section on the history, map, and culture of Japan, all of which were cut and pasted pretty much in their entirety from this edition to the second edition.  I was glad to not have to reread those sections as they are a huge information-dump without connection to rules, mechanics or gameplay.  The information itself might be useful but the presentation makes neither for ease of learning now nor ease of reference later.  In 2005, this failing would have been in line with standard RPG practices, so I don’t fault this book as much as the second edition, which had nearly 15 years of progress to learn from and chose not to.
 
Where this game really shines is its dice mechanics.
 
Each character has the same 5 “traits”: body, speed, mind, will, and career.  Each of those traits is given a die size: one gets a d8, one gets a d4, and the rest get a d6.  Career is a unique trait, insofar as its die size applies not to itself, but to the set of “skills” that are associated with that career.  So if you are a bodyguard like Usagi, you get your career die applied to the weapon skill of your choice, to the leadership skill, the literacy skill, and the observation skill.  In addition to the career die, you give skills “marks,” which simply mean that you have a point in that skill.  Those points are translated within the game into die sizes.  So one mark is a d4, two marks is a d6, three marks is a d8, four marks is a d10, and five marks is a d12.  If you go over five marks, you get a second die for the skill, starting with d4 and working your way up again until you add a third die, and on and on.  So if you have a the skill in observation from your career, that gives you one die, and you have an additional 6 marks in observation, then in addition to the career die you get a d12 and a d4.  So when you roll for your observation skill, you’d roll 3 dice to see if you’re successful.  We’ll get to what that means in terms of play in just a moment.  Beyond your traits and skills, characters get a set of “gifts,” which are either narrative advantages, combat advantages, or packages of additional marks in related skills.
 
Alright. Remember those three dice you get to roll for observation in our example character.  Let’s say their career is a d6, so when they make an observation, they have 3 dice associated with that skill: the d6, d12, and d4.  When skill checks are made, they are made using the skill dice plus the relevant trait dice. So if our example character is making an observation skill check because they are watching out for would-be assassins on the road, they might use their mind trait coupled with their observation skill, given them their d6, d12, d4, and let’s say a d8 for their mind trait.  All die rolls in the game are opposed die rolls, by which I mean your dice results are always compared to other dice results.  In this case, the GM might roll dice for the would-be assassin, taking, say, their speed trait (d6 we’ll say) and their stealth skill (let’s say it’s a ninja with the stealth skill career dice of d8 and 5 marks in stealth, giving them a d12). Both players roll their dice pools and compare the results.  The dice are not added up, but looked at individually.  If the player has the highest single die roll, their character sees the ninja before they attack.  If the GM has the single highest die roll, then the ninja is there before the PC can prevent it.  In the case of a tie, the game leaves it in the GM’s hands to make a “complication,” which means that neither side has a clear victory.

Once it’s decided how the contest goes, then you look at the remaining dice.  If everyone of your dice scores higher than your opponent’s highest die, you get an “overwhelming success.”  If, on the other hand, everyone of your opponent’s dice scores higher than your highest die, then you get an “overwhelming failure.”  It’s an elegant system that makes the roll exciting, easy to understand, but with just enough mental work to make the moment of comparison and evaluation exciting.  And this basic system allows for some neat variations.
 
For example, if everyone of your dice is a 1, then you have “botched” the job and especially bad things befall you. In itself, that’s a pretty bland additional rule, but the beauty of it becomes apparent when you think of all the dice you are rolling.  When our example character rolled 4 dice to observe the ninja, there were very low odds that she could botch the roll.  If, however, the character trying to make the observation didn’t have a career that included the observation skill, and only had 2 marks in the skill, then they would be rolling 2d6 instead, which has a much higher chance of botching the job.  Or lets say they didn’t have the observation skill marked at all and only had a d4 assigned to their mind trait, then to make the observation, they would role a single d4, giving them a 25% chance in botching the job.  So where you put your marks and your career dice make a difference in both your chances of success and chances of failure.  Stylistically, that’s pretty cool.
 
The other neat variation comes in during combat.  When you roll to swing your sword (or fire your bow, or throw your shuriken, or whatever) you make the same kind of skill check: the dice associated with your weapon skill (both mark dice and career dice) plus the die associated with your relevant trait versus your opponent’s dice.  Only in this case, success means a single hit.  Extra successes, by which I mean additional dice of yours that are higher than your opponent’s highest die score, translate into extra damage and “criticals.”  Each weapon has a list of critical effects which you can apply your extra successes to.  So if you’re fighting with a chain, for example, you can use the critical to entangle your opponent.  What this all means is that the greater your skill, the more dice you will roll, and the more chances at doing critical things.  If you have no skill in the weapon of your choice and you are only rolling one die for your relevant trait, your roll, no matter how good it is, can never achieve more than basic damage.
 
This approach to dice seems to me inspired by Sorcerer, but since there is no acknowledgment of influences or inspiration, I can’t be sure.
 
In addition to these basic dice rules, the game has neat additional combat rules that determine how a character can react to attacks and how gifts affect the die rolls.  For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into them here, but the game’s rules make combat a narrative and tactical experience for which play slows down naturally into a slow motion unfolding of action and mayhem.  In fact, the text encourages you to use miniatures and a map to keep the game state clear during combat, and since the game cares about distances you can run, reach of weapons, and keeping tracks of whether you are “focused,” “reeling,” “flanking,” or whatnot, it seems like good advice.  And as a miniatures war game, I could see this being really fun.
 
But of course this isn’t a miniatures war game, but an RPG.  At no other point in play, however, do things naturally or mechanically slow down to create drama outside of combat.  In running the game, you can put all kinds of things that require skill checks, but its clear that the climactic points, by design, will always be combat, which brings me to the less exciting parts of the game.
 
Yeah, there are encumbrance rules, climbing rules, falling rules, rules for destroying property, and rules for making purchases.  None of these rules are bad in themselves, but they are limited to success and failure and have little to do with narrative drive or story creation.  Let’s look at healing as an example.  On the one hand, characters don’t have hit points, so that’s cool.  They have a set of conditions that mark how healthy they are, from scratched to wounded to crippled to incapacitated to devastated.  That seems concise and narratively-focused.  But to heal from one state to another, you need to make successful healing rolls. A LOT of healing rolls.  To move from wounded to no injury takes 10 successful healing rolls.  Considering that you can roll 4 dice at once, plus the person nursing you to health and roll and if you have a doctor, they can roll as well.  That might take you two attempts to heal.  How many successes do you suppose you need to heal from devastated to merely incapacitated?  1200.  Yeah, 1200 successes.  Who the hell wants to roll dice that many times or play out that many months of healing?  If you want to keep damage that real, then just say you need to jump 6 months of in-game time if you want to be like that.  Better yet, follow your original guiding star and make your game follow not the limits of physical healing but the nature of stories told in the Usagi comics.  Characters in Usagi either die or have a few minor injuries; that’s it.  In short. while the game’s design does a lot to create the feel of the comics, there are these odd hangovers from what an RPG “should” include.  I suppose it’s a predictable state of affairs for 2005 in a non-Forge-inspired game.
 
This is definitely my favorite version of the game, even for its shortcomings.  To play it, you just have to do what GMs have been doing since the hobby began; use your own energy and skill to make the game interesting and meaningful outside of combat.