The initial – and persistent – concept for Death Frenzy was to create a role-playing game system that emulated Japanese swordplay period dramas (also known as chambara). After the better part of a year playing around with different iterations of the systems (combat and narrative), here’s what I’ve arrived at as a set of design goals:
Death Frenzy is about emulating films, not history. From the time I first conceived of the game until this point the design has wavered between simulationism and abstraction. At the onset, I immersed myself in weighty tomes about Japanese culture, swordplay, and martial arts. It quickly became clear that this was not the best way to go about designing Death Frenzy. Death Frenzy is about emulating a fictionalized version of reality, not reality itself. At one point in the design process I was heavily concerned with the mechanics of sword arcs and strike points and trying to apply the various minutiae I’d picked up concerning Japanese combat theory. It turns out that 99% of that stuff is completely useless when you’re trying to emulate the hack and slash action from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. It’s even more useless when you’re trying to engage players in the drama behind the hack and slash.
Two systems, one game. The fighting and narrative systems are designed to be self contained but compatible. Players who want a chambara swordfight card game can play just the combat system. Players who are only interested in role-playing can use only the story-game cards. If you want to roleplay with the option of grittier combat, use both. Those who choose the latter option will find that the two systems support and enrich each other mechanically (karma earned through roleplaying can be used to offset damage in the combat game, for instance).
Fast Play. As my gaming habits have matured I find that I’m less and less interested in being bogged down in 2-hour melee sessions against hordes of monsters, or spending needless time freeform roleplaying to get the party from point A to B. I want this game to get to the good shit quick. Combat should be fast and furious, with a suitably high mortality rate. Interpersonal dynamics, either between the players or the NPC, should be equally quick and decisive. Character creation – often an hour-long process in many traditional games – has been whittled down to a two-card draw in Death Frenzy, allowing players to get started in minutes. A game of Death Frenzy should last no longer than the films it emulates – two to three hours per session, from character creation to end of play.
Death is not the end. In a traditional roleplaying game, players are typically very death-averse. And why shouldn’t they be? They spend hours at the gaming table crafting elaborate back-stories for their characters and gaining experience. A typical RPG character represents a significant time investment on the part of the player. This leads to styles of gameplay which can be antithetical to the fatalism that often characterizes chambara film, where major and minor characters throw themselves into desperate situations left and right – often with little expectation of survival. Death Frenzy will support this in it’s mechanics in several ways: quick character generation (as noted above) and a karma system, for example. Dying in Death Frenzy simply means that you draw two more cards to generate a new character, allowing you to get back into the game quickly and seamlessly. Karma points accumulated during play will allow you to re-draw character generation cards, thus emulating the effect of reincarnation influenced by the character’s past actions. Characters in Death Frenzy can indeed die a ‘good death’, and be rewarded for doing so.
No setup. Death Frenzy is designed to be played as a ‘pick-up’ style game. You bring the cards to the table, generate a setting, theme, and characters and that’s it. Once the game’s initial state has been determined, the players and GM guide the story through their actions following a traditional Jo-ha-kyū dramatic structure. It’s this division of ‘acts’ which helps guide play and moves each story to a satisfying conclusion. There’s no need for a Game Master to spend his down time fidgeting with plotlines or NPC’s.
Campaign play. Despite being a ‘pick-up’ game, Death Frenzy will also be designed to work in a campaign structure where the plot of one game can carry over to future sessions. Metaplots can be developed and matured over several sessions (think of the Lone Wolf and Cub films vs. Seven Samurai, for instance). If the players liked the characters or setting from one session, there’s no reason not to keep the story going.
