Super Yakyu Taisen
Solo Project | Tabletop role-playing game about tokusatsu characters playing extreme baseball and arguing for their beliefs | Notepad, Breathless | All worldbuilding & narrative aspects, used Breathless and baseball as bases for rules
Super Yakyu Taisen (or “Super Baseball Wars” in English, shortened to SYT) is a tabletop role-playing game where players are “Runners,” masked individuals forced to play baseball for the fate of the world while monsters roam the city-sized playing fields, all while collecting little trinkets to power themselves up and debating other teams over their beliefs and worldviews. It utilizes the Breathless System created by René-Pier Deshaies-Gélinas of Fari Games, a system that increases game tension by decreasing players’ dice size whenever they perform an action that uses a particular stat. The game is inspired by things such as the Mario Superstar Baseball and Super Sluggers set of games by Namco Bandai, Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 (or Super Ultra Baseball in Japan) by Culture Brain, the tokusatsu medium and the “henshin hero” genre, and the now defunct TRIBE NINE video game.
SYT was created because I was really, really bored and was thinking about the current state of baseball games. I thought about how there were very little arcade-like baseball games in today’s day and age, with most of the spotlight shining down on the simulators (not to say that they’re bad). I got nostalgic over Mario Super Sluggers and playing it back when I was a kid and thought, “We need an over-the-top baseball game.” Making an actual video game about it, especially by myself, felt like it would’ve taken too long to realize its full potential.
So I turned it into a tabletop game.
Baseball is an extremely simple game. Someone from one team throws a ball, the other person from the other team hits it with their bat and runs a lap around the playing field while the first team tries to catch the ball and try to stop them. Running a full lap earns you a point, and the team with the most points wins. It’s a simple game.
As long as you don’t look further into it.
Baseball is an extremely complicated game. While simple on the surface, there are a lot of things under the hood that make it so complex. There are many things to consider when strategizing such as how strong a player is to bat or pitch, when to switch pitchers if one gets tired, who to send to the outfield and where they best fit, the batting lineup, down to comparing the handedness between batter and pitcher is taken into account. Even some of the tabletop games I’ve researched take this complexity into account when translating from physical sport to analog game.
A game this complex doesn’t mesh super well with a system as simple as Breathless. But it also shouldn’t be so simple to boil everything down to a roll of the dice. SYT wouldn’t work if it was too simple or too complex for its own good.
Simple & Complex Baseball
SYT needed to strike this balance. It needed to be simple enough so that it works with Breathless, but it needed to be complex enough to incorporate some amount of strategy that the actual sport brings. From the sport itself, the most important rules that are kept are:
Taking turns batting & pitching
Running around the field & scoring runs
3 strikes & you’re out, 3 outs & the teams switch
Foul balls & how they count as strikes, but can never out a player
4 balls & you move up a base
Beanballs (getting hit with the ball and moving up a base as compensation)
The game streamlines the process of baseball as much as possible while still maintaining its spirit. Players will place their characters on the field for their defense phases, and a map is included to help them visualize. Additionally, since dice size is what determines how good a player is at a specific stat, baseball performance also depends on how high they roll to match the general gameplay of the Breathless system: “On a 5+, you succeed. The higher the result, the better the effect.”
As mentioned earlier, SYT is a game where players must argue and debate others over their beliefs and ideals. A team of players made have differing individual beliefs, but they all share one big common ideal. It says so right here in the rulebook:
Debating on Debating
The whole thing about debates was inspired by the baseball sections of TRIBE NINE, where before every pitch, a player must select from one of several arguments against their opponent to gain some advantage in their game. So naturally, debating had to be some form of mechanic included in SYT. There’s a bit of a problem, though: how exactly do you make debating, making the act of talking, a game mechanic?
One answer would be to just make it a roll like every other in-game action. There already is a stat for it implemented specifically for talking and convincing and being charming. But there are two issues with this:
Making a roll feels disconnected from the purpose of actually standing up for what you believe in.
Leaving it up to chance also feels disconnected and also a little unfair because it’s out of your control.
So, rolling got scrapped. What’s the next best thing? Why, it’s actually roleplaying the argument! Arguably speaking, this one’s simpler than rolling. You don’t have to worry about anything besides how you play the character, which gives them plenty of control of how they argue. But despite how good the roleplaying angle is, there is a slight roadbump.
What if a player just isn’t good at debating? A player can make a character who’s a skilled orator, but if the game went with “arguing via roleplay,” it would be pretty unfair to that player who can’t really retort or fight back in any way because they’re not the best at speaking.
So, roleplay got scrapped, too. Is there even a good answer for this? Is there an actual way to make debate a mechanical thing without leaning too far into either side of “too little control, too much luck” or “lots of control, but depends on player skill”?
Well… Yeah, actually. And it came in the form of Skulduggery.
Skulduggery is a 2011 TTRPG by Pelgrane Press where the central mechanic for “combat” is debate. Players take control of pre-made characters with pre-made arguments of varying types. For example, a player can have a “penetrating” argument that insults someone, but another player can play a “purehearted” argument to disarm their meanness, but some other player can play an “obtuse” argument that completely ignores everything. Every argument is strong against and also weak against certain other types. It gives players enough roleplaying freedom to argue how they choose, but doesn’t put the onus of actually coming up with an argument or debating and be good at it, and players don’t even have to roll!
It was perfect. It was the perfect way to argue. And it’s this perfect way to argue that became the “GRANDSTANDING” mechanic.
Each stat had a different argument method. When a player chooses to GRANDSTAND, they are forgoing their right to roll so that they can monologue about their beliefs to someone or no one in particular to achieve their goals. Every NPC team would have a specific argument style that they would be weak against and another they would be strong against. If a player chooses the correct argument, they perform whatever action they wanted to do without needing to roll. Choosing a weaker argument makes them fail the action. All other cases don’t do anything, meaning that they would have to roll with their chosen stat.
And that is how you debate in SYT.
Keepin’ It Toku
On pg. 12 of the rulebook, I wrote a segment titled “Keeping It Toku” where I say the following:
Tokusatsu is the Japanese word for “special filming” and refers to a genre of film and television that uses lots of practical and digital special effects. Super Yakyu Taisen focuses on the “henshin hero” variety, where characters use a bunch of noisy children’s toys to have anime battles.
The most important part of “keeping it toku” is to be silly and goofy with your premises, but take them seriously enough to be earnest and straight about them. Have fun, but not at the expense of this game, anyone who plays it, or just the genre in general.
While this is primarily aimed at players, this paragraph is essentially a mantra for all of my games inspired by the tokusatsu genre. Whenever I make a game that has to take inspiration from it, I think about what makes something “toku” or a “henshin hero” piece of media, those being:
Transforming superpowered heroes (sometimes they might have multiple forms)
Monsters (already included in the game via the JyaQ)
Weapons & devices that look like marketable toys (at least for the bigger series like Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, Ultraman, etc.)
A completely straight-faced and earnest attitude towards combining silly motifs with serious plotlines and themes
Intense action set in big empty buildings and/or areas where explosions can be set off (included in the tables as “stadiums”)
So, how can anyone turn this into numbers and mechanics? Well, I decided that the biggest focus of SYT when it comes to “keeping it toku” is the loot/trinket system.
One of the strengths of the Breathless system is its “pick up & play” game feel. Character creation is fast, scenario setting is fast, finding loot is fast, playing the game is fast. A big part of that quickness is thanks to its tables that anyone can create when making a game that runs on Breathless. You roll a die and depending on what number you get, that becomes a detail of the current situation or the item that you find.
With these, players can find themselves in recognizable tokusatsu shoot locations like an empty warehouse or a rock quarry. Team and item motifs can also be rolled from a table. Of course, players can choose their own not on the table should they choose, but that’s beside the point.
The biggest focus is the trinket table. When players make their characters to play as a baseball team, after having chosen their motifs, they generate these little devices called “trinkets” that allow them to roll a dice instead of a stat. The specifics of what they do is mostly flavor that players can fill in.
Trinkets have different levels of strength depending on what is rolled, but each player has to roll to make their own trinket. Before every game, the Game Master (called the “Umpire” or “UMP”) makes their own trinkets for the opposing team, one per player, resulting in a number of trinkets that can be easily rolled on dice of any size.
2 players results in 4 trinkets and 1d4
3 results in 6 and 1d6
4 results in 8 and 1d8
5 results in 10 and 1d10
And so on.
And that is how you turn the “henshin hero” trope of multiple forms via small trinkets into a game mechanic!