The Old Sake Guy Gamer

Originally published at Tenra Bansho Development Journal. Please leave any comments there.

That was the tagline on the back of the book, when it was originally released in 2000/2001.  Today? Probably not quite as applicable, as there are more games on the market that aim to be “a complete campaign/story/gaming experience within one session”. But it’s worth a look at the intention behind that tagline.

When Tenra came out in Japan, sessions in Japanese tabletop groups were the same as in the West: Primarily really long campaigns that went on and on for weeks/months/years. The complication in Japan is that:

1) Most gamers in Japan only meet up for gaming on weekends. At least, that’s the common way to do it. For folks in school, they’re busy with homework, cram school and club activities on the weekdays, so weekends are their only free time. For folks in the workforce, doing anything other than “going out for drinks” after work on weekdays is hard to get more than two folks to commit to, especially for a multi-hour gaming session. So they usually happen on Saturdays, for sessions of 4-6 hours (then maybe dinner afterward).

2) …which also means that, if you’re a Japanese shmoe who was just introduced to gaming and are interested in pursuing it further, BOOM you’ve inherited a huge time-sink of a hobby. Unlike stuff like calligraphy, flower-arranging, martial arts, cooking classes… which you might do more than once a week even, but only for 1-2 hours a shot. There are not many “3+ hours required” hobbies in Japan, and traditionally it’s been a problem to keep folks coming back to the hobby, even if they seem to enjoy playing.

Junichi Inoue’s solution was to create a game where you could tell an entire story - Introduction, characters, climax, epilogue - Within the span of one single gaming session. Did you have fun? Good, you can come back and do it again, either with new characters and a story with a different location and setup, or with the same (or most of the same) characters.

Great idea. There’s some caveats, though.

* The single gaming session assumes a group including one gamemaster and 3-4 players, at about 4-6 hours of rather focused play (where everyone knows the rules). If folks don’t know the rules, or there are 5 players, the time can increase dramatically. Exponentially. Reducing the number of players from 4 to 3, or 3 to 2, can give you a solid and dramatic story in less time. Adding a fifth, because of the way all the characters interact with each other, can multiply the time required for everyone to get that fulfilling story by 1.5-2 times. That’s why the standard Tenra group size is one GM, 3-4 players.

* If you were to play on weeknights instead of a weekend block, you’re looking at 2-3 3-hour sessions rather than one long sit-down session to get the same amount of play time. I’ve run both the one long session game and the 2-3 session game, and found them both fulfilling.

* You have to jump straight into the action. Less of the aimless chatting with the faceless barmaid, and more cutting to get your character in front of the King, or the Antagonist, or the major background NPC.

* You can experiment with time a lot more: One session can span two days, two years, or two decades, depending on what the GM has in mind. If you decide to run a second session with the same characters, you can set that next session a few weeks or a few years later without a lot of dissonance.

* You won’t be as emotionally attached to your character as you would be in a Long Campaign Game. It just happens that way: Attachment happens over time. However, with the fast nature of the game, players are more willing to have their characters change, or die, as they see fit. The end of a session can sometimes be an explosion of changing emotions, self-sacrifice and shifting relationships.

All in all, there’s a lot of give-and-take with the fast nature of the game. You’ll see and do things that you haven’t done in your longer campaign games. You’ll also feel a lack of things in Tenra that you may get out of a longer-running game.

The cool thing is, even though the game professes to be fast, changing, episodic, and suited for “one-shot” sessions, it also contains solid advice for (gasp!) running longer “campaigns” as well, using the same (or mostly the same) characters from session to session for an extended period of time. It suggests a campaign set up as either wandering do-gooders like the Zatoichi movies or the Japanese classic drama “Mito Komon” (a high servant to the daimyo goes in disguise from place to place with his companions, sees evil, then at the end busts out his royal seal, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good); a stationary collection of do-gooders in a major city, like “Hissatsu Shigotonin” or “Baian the Assassin” (ok, in both shows the characters are all killers, but GOOD killers); or perhaps stage out a war epic, where every adventure the world changes little by little based on what happened in the last scenario.

You’ll be getting the best of a long campaign game: Long-term goals, attachment to characters, taking root in a campaign world. However, you’ll still note that from adventure to adventure your characters may change a lot more than you may see in your normal long campaign game: That change is written in the Karma rules. You’ll also keep the scene framing and “moving to where the action is at” (be it social action, physical action, story action) of the one-shot Tenra game as you play in this campaign mode: Rather than having one “adventure” broken up into a dozen sessions, you’ll be running a dozen “small adventures” - each with their own NPCs goals and antagonists - which tie into this larger “campaign”.

My recommendation: Try running or playing 2-3 single session games (or 2-session games) with your friends first to get used to the rules, the types of characters in the game, and the kind of stories the game creates. Then give that multi-adventure campaign game a shot once everyone is familiar with the game.