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>>51665003

>>51665003
Been done good, been done bad

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In its original form, where the girls are mostly like young witches that get into minor situations due to their magic, it's hard to use for a game, like most slice-of-life style series.

But, post Sailor-Moon magical girls, where the genre was combined with sentai conventions, it works fairly well, and the episodic formula is almost ideal for setting up and running game sessions.

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There are a lot of different flavours and everyone has their preference.

Mine is the Nanoha style, which is why I'm in an excellent ongoing Nanoha game and planning to run one after it ends.

Should have posted a better season, like any other.

Magical Burst, SW or GURPS. But not really GURPS.

>>51665195
Go back to /pc/ goprick.

>>51665144
>Nanoha style

Magical Girl+Gundam?

>>51665240
Technomagic I'm assuming.

>>51665210
>SW
What's that?

>>51665240
>>51665267

In the case of the game it's literally in the setting, with the PCs being officer cadets of the Time Space Administration Bureau (Magitech Starfleet with militarised Magical Girls and Boys).

But in general that style appeals more to me than most. Slightly more mature themes without getting into Madoka-esque grimderp, great fight scenes with good choreography and big flashy magical attacks (the recent Nanoha movies are the best for this) and a generally optimistic outlook where the most common end result of a huge magical superweapon is creating friendship.

Plus magical girls who function like mecha are pretty fucking cool.

Fun to imagine as a BBEG, without either party being actually evil.

>>51665789
Why would a Magical Girl ever be the BBEG? Futhermore, how do you make her the BBEG without making her a generic Dark Magical Girl?

>>51665789
>BBEG

Bleh

>>51665117

This.

I am currently running an x-over Princess, Mage, and Hunter game. It's going SWIMMINGLY.

The Princesses are blabbing about friendship to the Mages, the Mages are taking notes and preparing the vivisectors, the Hunters are seething with contempt for both, and since we're running it in Discord, I keep independent chats for ALL player combinations, so that nobody ever has the full picture.

>>51665210
Magical burst was pretty bad, last I checked.

SW and GURPS are up to taste. I'd definitely prefer SW.

Would add Strike! to the list, but only if you like your magical girls tactical fighting.

>>51665267
>>SW
>What's that?
Savage Worlds.

In terms of system, the Nanoha game I'm in actually uses Legends of the Wulin. It seems like an odd choice, but it works very well. The combat in Nanoha is very martial arts-ish anyway (Heck, the ViViD spinoff is literally a magical martial arts show), and the ability for massive attacks to impose emotional conditions on people rather than physical injuries mechanically supports a key conceit of the setting.

>>51665901
>Why would a Magical Girl ever be the BBEG?
Diferent approach to the same problem: monsters of the week.

>>51665347
>and a generally optimistic outlook where the most common end result of a huge magical superweapon is creating friendship.

That's because in the setting magic is always non-lethal

>>51665901
http://princesswod.wikia.com/wiki/Queen_of_Storms

>>51666193
What are each side approach?

>>51666202
Basically Batman's vs the Punisher's, the megucas being Batman.
One believes in beating up, then purifying it, the other in just shooting the motherfucker.

>>51666224
Purifying and redeeming are the cancer killing magical girls. Fuck monsters.

>>51666197

Not always. We see people dying as a result of magic more than once, so it is possible to make lethal magic.

In game, we treat it as a general TSAB policy. Mass based weapons and lethal magic are universally banned, and all devices must include limitations and spell restrictions to prevent them casting spells that might cause severe physical injury. Mass based weapons and illegal magic are generally used by criminal groups operating in or around TSAB space, or sometimes minor powers who've refused integration into the TSAB.

Weebshit that has no place in /tg/

Fuck off already you no life virgins

>>51667061
>Weebshit
>no place on /tg/
>when the very reason /tg/ was created (warhammer) is rife with literal, actual weebshit
No, you go back, /v/ermin.

>>51665210
There's a few homebrew systems in the magical girl general on /tg/ that work out well, too.

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>>51666239
It's not really a bad idea in itself, but it always seems to get overused and written in ways that just make it the cheap easy way out.

>>51665003
I like mahou shoujo. Madoka is my favorite by far, but I also enjoyed Nanoha and Fresh Precure, FW Precure, Yuki Yuuna. A lot of great stuff in the genre if you're looking for endearingly unrelenting love and naivete.

>>51665003
I'm running a pretty low magic and more "realistic" type of gamesystem with my party and didn't expect any surprises when we met for our new campaign. Normally I allow for crossplay because there aren't any magical realm moments in our games but when three balding guys in their mid thirties told me with a straight face they're all going to play teenage girls I was kinda surprised and sceptic.

So I looked at the sheets and noticed; All of them took about 1~2 spells and boosted them to the max so that they'really reliable in just one type of magic. Furthermore an absolute mastery in just one kind of weapon. This system allows for buying your own equipment and the start of the game and, oh wow, all of them took a really bright and flashy dress with ribbons and shit. Also something called a "friendship device".

"What's that?" I asked
All of them giggled.

You wouldn't believe me when I told you how my serious campaign turned out.

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>>51667061
>Fuck off already you no life virgins

A-Anyone wanna play a Mahou Shoujo game?

>>51668555
Sure.

>>51668555
I already play a few, but I'd love to be in another.

>>51667187
>when the very reason /tg/ was created (warhammer)

This is an old lie spun by 40kids with absolutely no truth behind it. /tg/ was made for traditional games, not for 40k (hence why it's not called /40k/), and there's absolutely not even a single scrap of evidence that moot

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>>51667061
>Fuck off you no life virgins

>>51665901
I don't want to say Nanoha because people keep saying Nanoha in this thread, but Nanoha.

>>51671522
Based Naoko Takeuchi had an entire generation of mothers explaining to their daughters why those "cousins" were so "friendly" with each other and why those "guys" transformed into girls.

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How do I get my players to start singing during combat?

>>51665003

They make for great, and very exotic, love interests. You have the whole plot arc of falling in love with the girl's alter-ego, then eventually learning to love the woman she really is.

It's a metaphor for growing up, in a way. Though the sex must be amazing, since you're basically loving two women at once. Or one woman who occasionally dresses up.

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>>51665901

Obviously, she's some kind of would-be demon queen with an outfit to match.

>>51672928

There should be a game where everyone's Tuxedo Mask, because actually playing as magical girls is a bit weird for four neckbeards.

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>>51665003
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this!

>>51672928

You're supposed to want to be them, not to want to fuck them.

>>51673272

Be honest, you're probably a guy. This is the kind of emotionally stunted thinking that plagues the industry, the longing for 'safe' relationships.

Kamikaza Kaitou Jeanne, for example, had sex with her love interest right before the final battle. Girl-on-girl is hot, but it's so that you don't have to worry about waifu getting 'tainted' from dicking.

>>51665144
>>51665240
>>51665347
I require the Bureau as the Federation fighting another faction as Zeon.
Two Thirds the original worth in bonus points if "Zeon" is Anti-Magic but still keep up with the Bureau by using alternative energy (such as plain electricity), possibly like the Numbers.

>>51673352
So the other faction is Belkan loyalists, then. The ones from Strangereal

>>51665003
That it's a genre of story (specifically a subset of superhero stories) that exists in real life and is predominantly found in Japanese media?

I dunno what you wanna hear anon.
It's a thing that exists mostly in this one place. What else is there to say?

>>51665003

Anyything besides The daughters of the emperor, a.k.a Sailor Celestimoon, IS HERESY!

as for the other /tg/, we have homebrews of it like magical girl quest

if the link is still alive on 1d4chan archive

>>51667061
>/tg/
>literally /touhougames/
>not weebshit
>not a traditional game

>>51674767
There's homebrews still being worked on in /tg/ now, too
see >>51567882

>>51671890
By doing it playing a bgm and doing it first for the opponents or DMNPC.

>>51673084
Not exactly a game but it fit in the mahou shonen genre: https://myanimelist.net/anime/27727/Binan_Koukou_Chikyuu_Bouei-bu_LOVE

>>51674867

>>>/v/ is other there yer 12 year old tryharder

>>51674901
>projecting this hard and outing himself as a retard
wew

>>51674933

>triggered

>>51673352
>>51674561

Weirdly, this is actually somewhat close to the plot of the Nanoha game I'm currently in (same poster from earlier in the thread).

Hyperion is an non-administered world that was nearly rendered uninhabitable after a disastrous war between them and Old Belka. Their forces wouldn't give up or surrender so Belka eventually resorted to obliterating their world from orbit, leaving it a blasted wasteland to this day.

However, the people of Hyperion did not give up, building bunker-cities and using whatever means they could to survive. The damage to their planet corrupted the manasphere itself, rendering all uses of magic unpredictable and dangerous, so they turned to an alternative- Mundane technology.

Today, Hyperion is an incredibly advanced world, with huge, densely packed dome-cities shielded from the barren, toxic environment outside, and armies of (mundane) cyborgs who dedicate their lives to protecting it.

Due to their history, they have a cultural distrust of magic, with its use being banned on Hyperion and all people with active linker cores being required to take drugs that suppress their mana output. This also keys into an extreme distrust for the TSAB, which they see as just another successor to Belka, a magical power trying to take what's they fought so hard to protect.

Hyperion isn't actually the antagonist, because why would a Nanoha style story be so straightforward? Instead our PCs are trying to build friendship and understanding with people from that world and fighting a conspiracy threatening to bring about an all out war between Hyperion and the TSAB.

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>>51666224

>>51675403
I don't get it.

>>51674561
>The ones from Strangereal
The Mids at some point go recover a secret weapon meant to be used by the Oseans as their final line of defense. It is Cipher and they are a Mahou Shonen in stasis.

>>51675403
Why did he replace Minako? He should have obviously replaced Usagi.

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>>51675747

The GM of the aforementioned Nanoha game is also a massive Ace Combat fan (along with SRW).

Pic related was a surprising discovery on a ruined feudal world we visited at one point. We had to hack it into functionality again to use it to shoot a God.

>>51675784
>shoot a God.
Why, what'd he do?

>>51675260
Oh snap, I remember this. You guys jammed Yuri into it and ruined the chances of me reading any further. I just want my Human Gundams in nice looking uniforms with Space Magic, man. Actually I hate Magic.

>>51675797

It's in the archives, but tl;dr one of the PCs accidentally released him from a thousand years of being bound in a ring. Turned out there was good reason for binding him in the first place.

>>51675848

It's a Nanoha game, man. The gay was bound to occur at some point.

Holy fuck, does nobody in this thread know about Princess the Hopeful?

>>51675904

Given that it's been mentioned a couple of times, probably?

>>51674561
>The ones from Strangereal
>magical girls vs superweapons
>final boss is your buddy
YES

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>>51675889
>It's a Nanoha game, man. The gay was bound to occur at some point.
I'm more aware of this than you would think, man.
I'm still disappointed.

>>51673308
There's nothing 'safe' about the relationship between two girls, let alone two magical girls.

And you can have all of >>51672928 with a girl too. Think Tomoyo except she wins.

>>51665003
I like them

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>>51675260
Tell me more.

I had a similar thing in mind once, except the only reason the TSAB doesn't invade is because of the alarming number of US Marines on the ground.

>>51676188

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/48242575/ is the latest storytime thread we did, with links to the first two. I should poke the person who did the writeups to continue, the occasional anon does ask about followups but he's been busy recently, taking care of his third and newest kid.

>>51676109

The fetishic nature of a lesbian relationship overwhelms any character impact, though.

>>51674888

That's a yaoi series. Tuxedo Mask was heterosexual. In fact, he was fucking Queen Beryl. Why do you think he let himself get brainwashed so much?

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>>51676023
>Yellow 13: "who shot me?! Find out who's responsible for that shot."
>"Can't tell in this furball, all I saw was a ribbon"

>>51676413
*Insert Mania induced TAKAMACHIIIIIIIIIIIIII from the distance here*

>>51676330
Play it for realistic drama, then.

>>51676510

You can't get away from it. Also, a heterosexual relationship is more inherently interesting, since it can go wrong in more ways. When you have two lipstick lesbians, the blow is softened somewhat.

Also, there's the issue of having your PCs pretend to be lesbian schoolgirls, which is going to get fucking weird real fast.

I've run a game where one of the PCs (they were all magic knight-equivalents, with a lot of synergy) had a love interest who refused to transform back when she was around him. This was because she was crippled when she wasn't transformed, and she didn't want him to see her like that. Eventually he convinced her that he loved her for who she was.

>>51668555
Try the MGCYOA communities- they run games with their homebrew systems and there are occasionally threads here.

>>51668555
>>51676554
Also atleast try to tolerate a limited amount of the mischief the two communities are involved in toward one another, as well as the bitterness amoungst themselves. There's enough alright people in there. I should know, those people kept me in there for a while by making me like talking to them.

>>51676330
>The fetishic nature of a lesbian relationship
Then why are you making it a fetishistic lesbian relationship in the first place then instead of a normal one?

>>51676550
>heterosexual relationships can go wrong in more ways
What? How? Everything that ncan go wrong in a heterosexual relationship can go wring in a homosexual one and there's the thing about people that shouldn't have found out finding out. It's another layer of secrecy on top of the regular magical girl ones.

>lipstick lesbians
Why that and not actual, regular girls that so happen to like girls?

>>51676687

Why are you so intent on a yuri relationship, anyway?

The fictionnal concept of empowering female and giving them responsibilities is an abominable memtic wepon of mass indoctrination of the cultural marxist Social Justice Skeleton Warriors Jews, whom we should kill and destroy. Anyone mentionning "magical girls" should be destroyed.

>>51676605
Mischief is a tactful way to put it. I'm rather biased towards one side of the split and not saying which, but to any readers, I'd suggest just ignoring any of the arguing in the thread, trying both communities, and seeing which one or both takes your fancy. Both are nice places in their own way if you like mahous and like RPing or talking about mahou related stuff. Some good folks in both too.

Hope you drop in again sometime?

>>51676695
Standards must be maintained. It's like having a mecha show without giant robots.

>>51676711

Less than you'd think, because a lot of them are still perfectly feminine. Like, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne has the heroine admit that she's weaker than her love interest.

Her love interest is a normal high-school student with no superpowers whatsoever. She's perfectly happy with him being the 'strong one' in the relationship.

Hell, even Sailor Moon's world largely revolved after Tuxedo Mask. It's only recent shows that don't have male love interests as much. Even Precure has guys the girls are obviously crushing on.

>>51676711
Dude, I'm pretty right winged and even I think you're baiting.

>>51676719
>Hope you drop in again sometime?
My name is four letters, it starts with a T and ends with an A.I can't handle magic anymore, it is slowly killing me.

>>51676732

But magical shows traditionally had heterosexual relationships. >>51676742 mentioned Sailor Moon.

>>51676762
>But magical shows traditionally had heterosexual relationships.
Awww, the good old days... How I miss them so...

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>>51676711

>>51676776

To be fair, being a semi-lesbian is a phase a good Japanese girl grows out of, then she starts to date men and becomes a housewife.

>>51676762
>Sailor Moon
Also had a few lesbians, like Uranus and Neptune and I think Mars had something with Venus.

>Precure
DokiDoki. Also even in Futari wa the relationship between the MCs had more romanticism and depth than any crush the girls had.

>>51676776
The good old days never left, they just became better.

>>51676796
You know that Class S thing got debunked and thrown out a while ago, right?

>>51676188
>Earth vs TSAB
>TSAB is content to leave them alone because the earthnoids governments are willing to nuke everything to remove spacenoid

>>51676839
>The good old days never left, they just became better.
Back to your hedonistic, deviant hole you malefactoring miscreant.

>>51676839

Mars had that boy she liked, the kid who kept hanging around the shrine. I'm pretty sure Venus had a love interest too, in her spin-off.

>>51676977
>I'm pretty sure Venus had a love interest too, in her spin-off.
-and he was literally her soul mate. -and he died!

>>51676839
>DokiDoki was gay
This meme is like 4 years old now, let it go.

>>51665210
The thing about GURPS is that you really can do almost anything with the system, and do it well. It's not a blandly generic system and it's not a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none system; it really is a wildcard system that can do anything.

The catch is that it takes a LOT of experience as a GM and a lot of experience with GURPS to get to the point where you can simulate literally anything you want in GURPS. You need to know which supplements to use, which rules from those supplements to use, and how to make the game work using those rules. You'll also want a decent amount of experience with the genre you're trying to simulate in order to make the right decisions as to which supplements and which rules to use.

>>51676500
You know, if I were any more a degenerate it wouldn't be hard to replace Möbius 1 with the white devil, maybe in her early to mid-teens or something.

>>51678287

I'll argue that GURPS is always limited by its core mechanic. This doesn't mean it can't do stuff, but for people who really enjoy mechanical tone all the way down to the core mechanics, it can somewhat dull the experience.

But I've found this to be an extremely variable thing. Some people are really sensitive to the way a systems core mechanics are part of establishing its tone and theme, other people seem to not really care for it, so how much of an issue this is for you may vary.

>>51678476
GURPS certainly isn't always the best option, but nor is it never best option, nor is it ever a total non-option (which is more than most systems can say).

>>51678562
For something with a lot of arbitrary stuff like Maid RPG then I would definitely use the original system.

But GURPS does shine in a lot of departments, and can do games better than the actual game. A low hanging fruit would be Cthulhu tech. Straightforward setting with robots and creatures from the mythos (Easy to stat up), but terrible core mechanics (So you are better off using another system, like GURPS). I would say the same about things like WoD too. The rules have never been that great, but running Hunter in GURPS creates actual tension and really enhances the experiences.

For Magical Girl stuff I would honestly say that GURPS is a great decision. Partly because Magical Burst, Tokyo Heroes, ect. aren't that well made, but partly because GURPS works so well with all sorts of crazy powers and setting it up for that purpose is easy. Just use Alternate Form and tell your players to pick appropriate abilities and advantages for a little girl.

Should magical girls have swords

becuase my magical girl has a sword

she is very fond of her sword

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>>51679061

Depends on the style. The Nanoha universe says hell yes.

>>51675747

There is actually a lot more straight people in that game than in actual nanoha.

The main villain's entire motivation is based around the fact that her fiancee was killed by people from Hyperion

>>51679160

That was supposed to link to >>51675848

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>>51679102
>Not hammers
I shiggy diggy

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>>51679061
Of course they can.

>>51665003
I think there's a lot of potential with the concept both with established tropes/deconstructions and fresh ideas.

Granted, I'm a bit biased, since I actually tried to run a MG Quest on /qst/ a while back.

>>51679173

The Iron Hammer Knight Vita is the fucking best, I won't disagree on that one.

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>>51679061
Hell to the yes.

>>51679061
Swords are dashing and heroic.

Also knights of justice are best mahous.

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>>51679061
Some magical girls ARE swords

I once ran a campaign where one player was a 60's witch majokko (Mage), I was an magical idol from the 80's who could transform into people and do magical tricks (Rogue) and another person was a pseudo-Cure punching stuff and shit (Warrior).

It was fun.

>>51680425
And then S3 came and tossed all the subtext they've built in favor of her and Maria, and Chris was left to dry.

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>>51679247
>armored gauntlets, greaves and breastplate
>STILL sluttiest meguca

How can one magical girl be so bad? pic related is so best.

How gay is too gay for a magical girl? Mine has three girlfriends, but to be fair is from a vaguely polygamous culture (expected to onlymarry one but to be romantically involved with up to three-four other people as well), and has admitted that some boys have attracted her interest in the past but she is nto currently romantically attracted to any.

>>51683823
>too gay for a magical girl
No such thing. The sky is the limit.

>>51683823
To do it properly being explicitly gay is too much.

You just gotta imply it as heavily as you can without coming out and saying it.

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>>51684301
I fucking hate this.

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Sort of vaguely related, but the 1080p BD rip of Rayearth is out on Nyaa.

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>>51684334
Blame Japan, where pic related will happen if you explicitly say the girls are in love with each other.

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>>51684404
It didn't with Sailor Moon. They are just chickens, instead, they keep giving us mock marriages.

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>>51679247
>Sayaka
Best taste anon.

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>>51673308
>KKJ
Oh man, those were good times.

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>>51687213
Better version.

>>51665958
>>51666201

I've been reading the Princess book lately and my group has been considering trying it out, does anyone have experience with it?

The themes sound so great, pseudo-Exalted in WoD, and you get to be magical girls? Sign me up. But the rules look super clunky.

>>51674901
touhou belongs on /jp/, smartass.

How do you RP classical magical girls?

>>51690088
Depends on how classic you mean. Pierrot girls? Creamy mami? Bewitched: The teenage years?

>>51690288
Power of friendship, sailor moon type shit.

>>51690088

Like you RP anything else - watch some exampleds of the genre to get yourself into the proper mindset, think up a character concept informed by that, play said concept.

If you mean as in mechanically, they're basically girly superheroes in a lot of cases (Pretty Cure being of course the most flagrant), so a game like Mutants&Masterminds can be used to play them quite competently.

>>51690373
That's actually the Sentai-type. Which to answer that, as a Power Ranger... With Magic Powers and you're a Early Teens Girl.

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Lesbians and lasers, what's not to love about magical girls?

The only magical girls I knew were ridculously dressed gangsters who kidnapped wayward boys off the street.

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>>51691710
Those are not magical girls, they're just gangsters.

>>51690088
Acquaint yourself with the classics. Try reading >>51673243

>>51690088
>>51690288
Teenage schoolgirl with attractive looks and horrendous algebra happens to have a life.

She continues to have a life even after meeting a talking supernatural critter with an important mission, discovering magical powers and having a messianic future revealed to her.

And she carries on with this life business even after meeting super-powered friends, her destined special person, and inter-dimensional tyrannical villainesses.

>>51665210
>Magical Burst
Having played and run this since v1, I can say with utmost confidence that it's a bad system full of bad ideas
The creator is really bad about feedback too, though he did change up manual Overcharge rules when my group told him about a PC we had that would turn herself into a nuke every combat by rolling ~11d6 per attack and exploding schools/cities with little resistance
Some of the fights got really shounen thanks to that, but it was a necessary fix- either way, unnecessary additions just made it keep going downhill from there, and now I can hardly stomach the genre anymore

There is, though, one campaign that's always had a special place in my heart:
It was set in alt-universe WW2, in a girls' military school where the PCs were part of a secret government project where teenage girls use pendants with unstable magic properties to fight airplanes
It was full of not-at-all-subtle Ace Combat influence, and the GM was a huge planefag himself so he'd go into almost autistic detail about the historic inspiration for the model of every bomber we fought
I'd wonder why he didn't just run a plane-vs-plane combat campaign, if not for the fact that he really played up the realism of the setting (magical girls aside) and had the PCs have "handlers" in Gunslinger Girl style- grizzled military veterans who had to be strict COs while managing typical emotional teen girls.

The whole thing was an experience, and he kept it going for multiple 'seasons,' all of which kept being mysterious and realistic even despite the mahou shoujo shit
I do believe it's been storytimed here before, though I'm not sure in how much detail

Anyone here play BESM? It's a whole anime themed system.

And there's a Sailor Moon sourcebook

https://missdream.org/raw-sailor-moon-downloads/sailor-moon-guardians-order-role-playing-books/

>>51676875
autism

>>51688713
Currently running Princess - Vocation Edition. It's going pretty well? We've only had 4 sessions so far, but my players seem to be enjoying themselves.

The game can get a little crunchy at unexpected moments, many of the powers and mechanics have separate types of rolls, but if your players make themselves a cheat sheet with all the roles they need for their specific powers, it goes rather swimmingly. The only issue I really have is that I find it a touch difficult to balance enemies. There's no real equivalent to challenge rating that I can find in Princess, but that might be because I'm not as familiar with nWOD as oWOD, and I may have just missed the section in the Chronicles of Darkness rulebook.

The game has fun fluff, interesting powers and character options, and with a group who gets how to balance whimsy with horror, it's a fun time.

>>51692317

Magical Burst is a game that makes me wonder if the creator actually understood the genre at all because it really doesn't seem so.

>>51694343
I strongly suspect that the only Magical Girl material they had ever seen was Madoka Magica, and they felt it would be vastly improved with the addition of 40K levels of physical mutation and psychic fallout at every stage.

>>51694379
>>51694343
I thought magical burst was specifically designed for running madoka style games, is this not the case?

>>51665003
I'm sure there must be something worse, but can't think of anything right now

>>51694343
>>51694379
From my interactions with him and the content of his blog, he's definitely super weeb and watches a lot of anime

But it WAS written at the peak of Madoka's popularity (before it finished actually, I remember gathering my campaign's players to livewatch the last episode together), so it was more like it was just trying to cash in on the current fad
He's a whimsical guy though, every update seemed to be "here's a copypasted mechanic from [hip new system I like]," which is bad design but it's not at all uncommon to see that in indie tabletop systems I guess

>>51665003
It's good, sometimes even great, but /tg/'s discussions get far too lewd about literal children for my tastes.

>>51695027
>literal children
They're not real.

>>51695196
You're right about that, they aren't real. Ideas are.

I'm less concerned about the fictional children than I am about the people lewding the fictional children. Kids shouldn't cause that kind of response in people.

Maybe it's the fault of those wacky Japs realizing sex sells and trying to get a few more people to buy their stuff, but that's no excuse for such shit taste.

>>51694764
If so, it isn't good at it. Magical Burst is good at running its own flavor of edgy mahous.

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>>51692317
I remember that game.

I didn't think anyone remembered that game.

I didn't even think anyone WANTED to remember that game. Except for the ad hoc military tribunal where the party had to act as lawyers. That was fun.

>>51695676
>You're right about that, they aren't real. Ideas are.
>You're right about that, they aren't real. Ideas are.
>You're right about that, they aren't real. Ideas are.

wow

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>>51696835
somehow I knew you'd post here

>the ad hoc military tribunal where the party had to act as lawyers
>PC grows wings, assaults a superior officer, escapes confinement
>mustache-twirling villain of a military officer has her court-martialed
>it turns into multiple sessions of Phoenix Wright
"fun" is an understatement, man

but,
>I didn't even think anyone WANTED to remember that game.
Besides all of us? It was far and above the best campaign we had in that shithole
>PC spawns a heartspawn that masquerades so well the player plays as it for multiple sessions
>adventures in the nuthouse with mahous who explode and/or are flat-out insane and predict the actual plot
>that FUCKING final battle while the magic-granting pendant turns into an eldritch abomination and engulfs an entire country

It's one of those I miss a lot and like to reflect on from time to time

>>51665003
We have a system for it called Magical Burst

>>51697079
I still am trying to remember how long ago that shit was. 5 years? Has it already been five years?

Are the logs still floating around, out of morbid curiosity?

>>51697091

Not really. Magical Burst is kinda utter shit for 90% of magical girl games.

>>51697112
October 2011 so 5.5, and yeah, they're on the same wiki

>>51697126
>October 2011
Shit I feel old.

And also like I want to try something less terrible.

bumping for justice

>>51697124
Maid then

>>51702431
Maid is more for comedic games.

>>51702431
MAID is fun for making characters and helping you set up a premise. The actual mechanics are horseshit. Wait, no, horseshit is at least useful as manure.

>>51703038

Are you kidding? Maids mechanics are fucking fantastic for its intended purpose.

It is an incredibly well designed game for supporting the kind of over the top ridiculous comedy it's meant for, and all the mechanics key into that. Heck, it's the only game I actually enjoy randomly generated stats in, because low stats can be just as funny, if not more so, than high ones.

In the context of magical girls? Yeah, I wouldn't touch Maid unless you were aiming for a zany shortform-anime sort of thing, but calling Maid mechanically bad is just wrong.

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>>51697079
Can I get a link to this storytime please?

>>51665003
I've been playing https://crisisheroine.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page
with my group.
It's pretty enjoyable.

>>51703601
https://warosu.org/tg/thread/S37414902#p37422710
Around there should work, though it was written by the other guy posting about it ITT and now that I look at it again, it's pretty much fucking nothing
And I could nitpick some stuff like
>Not-England as they fight WWII with Not-Germany
because Not-Russia was the main force we were fighting (and the one that got pendant tech), but a country that was essentially both France and Germany was one of their allies and would occasionally give us a hard time
I won't though, we used to bully that guy a lot and I know he tried his best

Honestly anon, if you really wanted I could just storytime it myself because I remember it all vividly
It could get wordy, though

>>51706137
Storytime sounds pretty interesting.

>>51704325
What the fuck.
Got any stories?

>>51706536
Sure then, I'll make an attempt

The campaign started with 3 PCs: A bookworm-type, an ex-circus performer raised by gypsies, and a part-Scottish(?) girl with an incurable case of the gay. The latter forced a lot of unprovoked girlkisses which I'll leave to your imagination instead of detailing, but mentioning it now just so that I don't have to mention it again.

They were all enrolled at St. Cheswhick's Academy, a girls' military school that, on the outside, was meant to rally patriotic spirits of not!Britain's youth, but was actually an undercover operation to give certain girls 'focus pendants' that allowed them to transform in traditional magical girl style and then send them off to stop enemy bombers.
Even with supernatural powers, being bombed by planes was still a huge threat, so there was a lot of focus placed on defending civilians, stopping aircraft before they get too close to their target, etc.
Also as a side-note, being Magical Burst, the planes couldn't take Overcharge (as they weren't Youma), but instead had some weird dice game they exclusively used to determine the damage of their attacks and such.

That said, the three had a "handler" at the academy, Major Lucas Westfield, who at the end of the day was just a military guy doing military work, but the GM's style played up how manly he was because our perspectives were that of young girls. He was a badass, CQC-trained officer, whereas the PCs without their magic were just teens.

Eventually, the main 3 were joined by a timid teleporter from another school who accidentally used so much magic that she wiped her own memory and a one-armed, one-eyed ex-child soldier from a third-world country who just wanted to shoot stuff.
I'm no storytime master, but of the events I remember the most:
>circus-chan goes nuts, gets court-martialed, other PCs act as her lawyers
>teleporter makes a heartspawn who kidnaps her own handler
>cyclops singlehandedly (get it?) kills the BBEG
Any preferences?

>>51706747
Circus story plox
Then cyclops

>>51706896
So it shall be done, I was prewriting that one anyway just in case

Elsa the Extraordinary - I guess I'll just keep calling her 'circus-chan' - was by far the boldest of the group.
I'm still not 100% how it worked, because the GM was intentionally secretive about the mechanics, but apparently she rolled so much OC during combat that she gained the ability to use her powers without a pendant, and rolled so many 6es on Sorcery checks doing that she could use stronger and stronger stuff untransformed. This was tied into a plot mystery about how pendant-users were selected because the pendants themselves didn't actually grant the ability to use magic, just amplified it- but that's a major plot thread that would last through every season and STILL not get explained. The players speculated that aliens were involved.

Thus, it goes without saying, that getting all that OC made circus-chan mutate the most, the most notable of which was when she grew wings. Massive phoenix wings, corresponding with her Fire element, that couldn't be hidden or made very inconspicuous. In the process she also set the school's courtyard on fire, attempted to strangle a pompous rich girl who tried to bully her for being a lowborn, and went out-of-control to the point where she asked Maj. Westfield to lock her up (while accidentally setting him on fire).
In any other campaign those things may have been waved off or taken less seriously, but in alt-universe WW2 they were a HUGE deal and the top military brass immediately got on her ass about the danger to the unit.

Well, there was also an incident in-between the assault on her CO and the court-martial where she was taken to a lab to have her wings hacked off by a nutty researcher but the other PCs broke in and freed her because it was inhumane conduct. The brass didn't like that either.

cont.

>>51707022
It's also worth mentioning that, for most of the campaign up to this point, Maj. Westfield's old buddy and military rival Reiker (aka "mustache-twirling villain") has been showing up with his own entourage of magical girls not to help, but to cause trouble and generaly be a pest. The girls themselves were bro-tier and acknowledged they were following the orders of a total douche, but treated him like a father even still. It was sweet.

But as soon as the breakout incident happened, he used it as an excuse to get circus-chan court-martialed to settle his grudge with his rival and be an overall dick in a court of law. Which he did.
As pendants were still new technology, they were kept under lock and key by COs and girls' powers were only to be used in enemy engagements, so being able to use powers untransformed at all was a huge risk and also something nobody knew was possible. Westfield and co. could get in BIG trouble if anybody found out, and so his rival opted to attempt to do exactly that using every underhanded means possible, even without proof.

Cue the sessions that went full Phoenix Wright. It was a serious campaign in tone and nature, so there were no witnesses with pun names, but the tension was real as Bookworm and Lesbo pored over documents of every past engagement they've had, considered questions for every possible witness they'd face of all the NPCs they met, et cetera.
I don't want to say "you had to be there" but it's a toughie to really replicate how intense it was with each question from the prosecution (Reiker, of course) potentially being one that could topple their case. I'll try though.

The players went through just as much effort as the characters getting their notes and facts in order so they could shut down any attempts to pry into circus-chan's powers. There were constant objections from both sides, and valid ones at that.

cont. again

>>51707032
It started with tame questioning, asking the school's headmaster about her conduct in class, and other harmless inquiries. It was when Westfield got called in that shit truly got real, as St. Cheswhick had kept detailed reports of the entire assault, wherein she sprouted the phoenix wings and set a lot of shit on fire.

Smug as could be, the mustache-twirling villain went on the full offensive trying to pry confessions out of Westfield, the PCs doing everything in their power to call him out on badgering, irrelevant questions, etc.
Finally, tired of multiple days of court proceedings, he popped the question: "Did Warrant Elsa use her powers without a pendant?"
With a firm smile, Westfield replied: "No."

Understandably, Reiker went batshit insane because he knew she was able to, but had no way to prove it. Then and there, his entire case fell apart and he did nothing but yell profanities and accusations for the rest of the trial.
Days later, judgment was finally passed, and on half the charges (assaulting a superior officer, refusal to obey commands, breach of OpSec, etc.) she was Not Guilty, the other half Guilty With Extenuating Circumstances. Meaning, she did get to keep her rank and her CO wasn't in hot water, but she DID have to spend some time in confinement. This ended up being in a crazy house with the nutty doctor and some of the best NPCs I've seen in any campaign I've played in, but that's its own story.

wew that was longer than I wanted it to be
enjoy that for now, though

>>51706896
Okay, here's the other one:
Ærendis Hojgaard, whom I've been affectionately calling 'cyclops,' was a simple character who joined over halfway through the campaign. She was (I think?) the youngest of all the PCs thus far and only had one arm, which was fine because her magical weapon was a handgun.

Before she joined, one of the major antagonists of the campaign had been Welks Merovin, the most blatantly Ace Combat character who was a Sachsen (aka not!German) ace pilot, also the son of a famous revolutionary according to the campaign's history, which was super detailed and I don't think I'm physically capable of typing enough to go into it in detail. He was a recurring enemy who would show up to cause trouble and bitch on the radio about 'witches,' which is what magical girls were considered to the rest of the world.

After Cyclops joined, the PCs finally had an engagement with him that he didn't escape from, and he was captured, but not before exchanging words with the aforementioned.
She was from Cimbria, a small country that was pretty much not!Denmark, and was a child soldier who had once been a sniper for the purpose of defending her homeland. The GM and her player actually got together and played out a detailed flashback where her childhood friend and spotter was killed in an Albaean (that's not!Britain, the PCs' country) ambush and she was taken in out of "goodwill" by, of course, Reiker the mustache-twirling villain when her half-dead, mangled body was discovered at the ambush site. It was handled really well and makes me cry every time I remember it, actually.

EIther way, Merovin the enemy ace was captured, and during the court-martial proceedings, Cyclops had nothing to do since she wasn't particularly law-inclined so she fumbled around the building until she accidentally discovered the holding cells. There he was, a single, lonely not!German ace, being kept as a political prisoner because of his lineage.

cont.

>>51707220
The girl herself had no real loyalty to the country she was working for at the moment, since she was essentially kidnapped anyway, so one thing led to another and near the campaign's climax, when Operation Big Wing was about to commence with the other PCs and finally turn the tides of war, she discovered that Merovin was set to be executed, mostly for morale reasons. By Reiker personally. She wasn't going to let that happen.

She made her way to the tent where the "execution" (I want to say it was staged but don't quote me on this one) was to take place, surrounded by heavy security consisting of hundreds of armed guards. Somehow she managed to sneak one of the pendants with her.

This is one of the moments that makes me look back fondly on this campaign, because I think most players would wait to see what the GM has planned, maybe play it safe.
Not this Cyclops. She immediately transformed and shot Reiker in the head. Taking her beloved(?) prisoner in the only arm she had, she flew away despite the assault by all the guards. Of course, not before shooting Reiker in both the legs too for good measure, just in case. Somehow (I'm pretty sure this was all rolled) they survived, and got away.

That was actually her epilogue, because they fled to a peaceful place and didn't participate in the war any further. Good for them, too, because some real eldritch shit was about to happen.

>>51707234
>because some real eldritch shit was about to happen.
I'd like to hear about this and the teleporter/heartspawn incident if you don't mind, anon :)

>>51707583
Can do, that part's pretty necessary to explain the end anyway
It's also far and above one of my favorite stories to tell, so saving it for last is for the best
Though sorry if my wordwalls have been a bit much, I'm doing this all from memory

So sometime after the first few sessions and engagements with enemy bombers, the initial 3 PCs discovered a rogue twintailed moeblob poofing out of nowhere on the battlefield, using her powers to confuse planes into crashing into each other and shit, and then disappearing. Her sentences would cut off and randomly rearrange themselves when she spoke too, making it clear she really wasn't in control of anything she did.

Eventually, after being a recurring guest in a few combats, she teleported into St. Cheswhick's dorm by accident, prompting the PCs to do some research on where she even came from. Eventually they got a name, Flaurentine, out of her, as well as the fact that she had amnesia. A few hours of searching around, and a few calls from their CO, they finally learn that she's part of another nearby flight and went missing with a pendant after 'scrambling' (that was her power) her own brainmatter to the point where she forgot how to get home.

Turned out her handler - Maj. Donalds - was a kindly old man, much unlike Westfield, but the two were old friends and she was happily handed over... or would've been, if she didn't disappear again. This continued for a while until, in the middle of an air raid by the enemy on a big city, she poofed out of nowhere. This time she at least knew who the bad guys were and offered to help.
This is where I'll mention that I was her player if it wasn't obvious, because initially she was supposed to be a joke-guest character and also an experiment on having the worst stat array possible in MB, which somehow went swimmingly because she was stupidly lucky.

cont.

>>51707921
The campaign continued for a while and kept building up on how affectionate she was for her old man and vice-versa, since she was supposedly an orphan he rescued in the aftermath of a war in not!Spain over a decade prior. She was also hyper when transformed and timid/shy without her pendant, which is pretty much standard magical girl behavior. But her powers were unstable, so sometimes she'd accidentally go amnesiac again and the PCs would offer to help her remember stuff.

This is significant because one day Maj. Donalds disappeared with no warning, and she had no memory of the past few days thus couldn't help find him. Westfield and co. were suspicious so the PCs kept watch over her. After an unsuccessful night with no leads, Caitlin (aka 'Bookworm') received a letter, detailing her mother had come down with pneumonia. Justifiably freaking out, she begged Westfield for permission to take temporary leave and visit her, which he permitted and sent the teleporter along too in hopes that something may jog her memory.

To nobody's surprise, enemy planes were sighted halfway through the trip they took by train, so because nobody else could do it they all transformed and fought them off. The battle was chaotic and the girls got separated, so on the search for their teleporter they found her... only, something was off. Her hair was black, and their companion was a redhead- same twintails and timid attitude and everything else, though. She was confused and scared, so they took her with them, only to find the 'original' was back and waiting for them.

Now is when I'll elaborate on the Bookworm a little bit- her element was Writing, meaning she could write words in the air with a magical quillpen and they'd turn into whatever was written, leading to some pretty clever usages. She also had the power to read minds to a limited degree: Surface thoughts would appear on the target's eyes like a ticker. Limited, but it had its uses when they needed it.

cont.

>>51707931
Cue a scene where they played 20 questions with the two confused clonegirls, learning they both had the same knowledge and memories for the most part. So Bookworm gets frustrated, as any one of us would, and uses her ability on the black-haired newcomer. Nothing but confusion and worry.
She could have stopped there, but decided to use it on the other one (who was being controlled as a PC, by the by) just in case: "-he'sminenobodyelsecanhavehimthere'snoways-"

Combat.
At that moment the GM and I switch characters, revealing he was NPCing the real one all along and I was the fake - possibly for ingame days/weeks - and the PCs fight the heartspawn as a boss. It ended pretty brutally too, but in the end the PCs triumphed, now even more confused than they were before. They completed their visit - which was really heartwarming and probably ANOTHER story, but I'll save it for now - and headed home, now confident that they knew who the culprit for Donalds' disappearance was but no way of knowing where exactly he was being held captive.

Another emotional scene where the teleporter tries desperately to regain her memories followed, and eventually she found her man chained to a bench by the shore, decently far away from both schools. They have a tearful reunion although he's almost starved to death, and he ends up reminding her about her past and where they first met. Unfortunately for the both of them, that's just one happy moment; not a happy ending.

I'll cliffhang you there though, anon, because I'm monopolizing this thread and should probably take a break for now anyway
but ending soon, I promise

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h-hello

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>>51707945
What is the meaning of this?

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>>51707968
magical boys and the power of love-making

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>>51708033
__________K.__________

>>51665240
So when one appears people would yell "It's a GunDame!" and try to run away.

>>51707234
>Operation Big Wing

God DAMN that was a frustrating mission. I remember expecting chaos from a magical girl fur ball but this was an entirely different level.

It wasn't a complete loss, since we got a prisoner swap and one of the enemy pendants (which rolled d8 instead of d6 for checks, but still took overcharge on 6 or higher - allowing for rather rediculous blowouts.)

>>51708158
They'd just blow up or be befriended.

>>51665003
I’ve seen dozens of magical-girl games, stories and roleplays made by Westerners over the years, and without exception all of them have been fucking terrible. For a fair while, though, I figured that it was just grognardism and that I was simply mad because I was a weeaboo – and now that I’ve actually thought through what I’ve learnt and experienced about magical girl series, I think I’ve pinpointed the reason.
The reason that Westerners usually can’t write magical girl anything for shit is the neglect of the background and the character conflicts – the main trait of the magical girl concept is that it explores the idea of a previously normal girl being given magical powers and set to work for a mysterious agency, and for that to have any kind of impact at all, there needs to be attention given to the magical girl’s background, that background needs to be mundane, the characters need to be played like young girls, and more importantly there need to be genuine themes of responsibility, growth, power at a price and other things that benefit immensely from a cast of realistically portrayed underage characters, instead of the japanese equivalent of superheroes.

>>51708770

That doesn't apply to all shows, though. The Nanoha franchise, as an example, somewhat has that concept in the first season, but after the first couple of episodes Nanoha ends up pretty gung ho about the whole magic thing, and by the time A's rolled around there isn't a trace of it left, it's all about the magic and interpersonal conflicts.

>>51708564
Also in case it wasn't clear, I was another player in that game - the "turbogay" pic the other guy mentioned (I did start trying to tone it down after a bit and it stopped being funny). In any case I have a couple storytimes of my own if anyone wants to hear.

>The chaos of Operation BIGGU WINGU
>saving the day through paperwork
>What not to do against anti-ship missiles

>>51673084
Neckbeards being reborn as a magical girls is a thing these days and it's pretty glorious despite being edgy as fuck.

>>51708934
I don't think we can properly call Youjo Senki as a magical girl series.

>>51708671
Ah yes, the dreaded befriended zone...

>>51708934
>>51709203

It certainly has magical girl elements, but they're all heavily subverted or totally inverted. It's a weird fucking show.

>>51709203
True, but it has magical girl with an origin that could be easily used to make more traditional magical girl campaign which wouldn't feel weird despite players being neckbeards.

>>51708820
>What not to do against anti-ship missiles
Whoa man, I did all this storytiming and you think you can steal my thunder by telling the tale of dumb shit MY PC did?

... Actually it probably would be funnier if you told that one, thinking on it
The others you'd have a good perspective on too so I'll trust you there, but I'll definitely come back tonight to do the part about the pendantmonster and circus-chan doing bullshit on such a high level even the GM wasn't ready for it
that one still gives me chills to think about

>>51709519
You only did the dumb thing at the end, the rest of it was pretty dumb as well.

But yeah, unless you wanty take on something else first I'll talk about that particular brand of crazy.

>>51708770
Not all magical girl series are coming of age stories. Some of best ones like Madoka are such, but then you have Nanoha saga which plays more like magical girl superheroes mostly and works out very well. Also there are magical girl series in which the magical girl was always magical, antihero magical girls etc

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>>51707968
>>51708144

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who here /mofu/?

>>51709972

Star Driver makes me sad. Such an amazing aesthetic and great character designs wasted on a mediocre plot and fucking awful fight scenes. Seriously, they were flashy but the show had no internal logic and it all came down to whatever new plot weapon they pulled out of their ass that week.

>>51709972
so, why magical boys as a genre isn't even remotely explored(unless it is and i know shit), while it seems like great fujoshi bait

>>51710031
Because das gay.

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>>51710031
Because boys are mostly relegated to sentai shows, albeit sentai shows tend to be more mixed with genders. Also because cute anime girls sell shit better than cute guys.

>>51710119
>implying

>>51710150
yeah, but i mean. magical boys for fujos, not magical boys for boys. sorry, but are you insane? what boy in the right mind would watch magical boys

>>51710031
>>51710150
/m/ here. Fujos already watch Sentai, and there's always 1-5 good shows in any given season that are also good fujobait, both animated and live action.

Hell, YGO still gets routine fujo traffic. The last MC was the straightest MC we've ever had, and there was STILL a good 60-40 lean of fujos to non-fujo content in the fanart and doujins.

Most of the time, there's at least one or two boys in a magical girl show, but the market's already fairly tapped in other departments (and the boy/boys are usually a love interest for one of the girls anyway), so there's really no point in having a magical boy anime.

>>51710150
Still sentai is more like magical (mostly male) young adults despite target audience being young boys. Mecha shows that have coming of age stories of young boys piloting big robots would be more like equivalent of magical girl stuff.

>>51710305
thanks for explanation kind anon

>>51710313
Toku and Mahou Shojou are basically the same genres with different skins. I think they even share writers periodically, but don't quote me on that.

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>>51710284
>>51710305
fujos are an insignificant minority of the market. Children and male NEETS are much much larger target demographic

>>51710492
>fujos are an insignificant minority of the market
The fact that any series featuring boys being gay selling like hotcakes regardless of quality says otherwise.

>>51710514
That is true but if you compare the sheer number of non fujo target shows with fujo target shows the difference is clear.

It also doesn't help that Japan by default is a culture that terrible in trying to innovate and deviating from the tried and true products.

>>51710492
>tfw when pic describes the post perfectly

>>51710454
I have only watched Kamen Rider, power rangers and random 80s sentai shows, but from that I would argue they're quite different from magical girl series. Superficially they're extremely similar, but like said heroes in them are far older and they usually aren't coming of age stories. Kamen Rider is closer to magical girl formula than most of them though.

Mecha shows on the otherhand feature usually boys of about same age as magical girls and often deal with issues of growing up while they're forced into adult world of fighting robots and responsibilites that come with it.

>>51710570
>It also doesn't help that Japan by default is a culture that terrible in trying to innovate and deviating from the tried and true products.
But that's not true at all. Japan has appropriated and innovated the fuck out of burgers and denim -- if you want the best in the world of either of those things anymore you go to Japan, not Germany or Italy. Japan loves taking other cultures' shit and trying to improve on it.

>>51710873
Newer sentai is definitely more in line with the typical magical girl plots than older sentai were, but point taken.

>>51667392
Try magical girl raising project the novels are pretty great

>>51710570
>It also doesn't help that Japan by default is a culture that terrible in trying to innovate and deviating from the tried and true products
They're not that different from Burgerland that way. Anime shows are a lot like large-budget Hollywood movies in that they are mostly derivative distillations of whatever was popular at the time, rife with adaptions, sequels, and remakes, but still somehow able to occasionally pull out either a surprisingly graceful and moderately innovative product that should have been the same ephemeral schlock as everything else or a solid gold adaptation of a good property that stands on its own. Beyond that, fits of honest-to-god innovation and creativity are few and far between and usually become the leaders for new generations of hangers-on.

Hollywood had, in moderately recent history, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (Good adaptations), the rise of the MCU (Subtle innovation within a genre), and Toy Story (An innovative work that laid the foundation for a new way of doing things). Meanwhile Japan has produced the likes of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Madoka Magica.

And in both cases a whole lot of tried and true mass-produced products that were profitable when they came out and now lie largely forgotten.

>>51711077
>the rise of the MCU
This reminds me that it's the best time to have a Gamma anime. Alas, the manga is over and they don't make anime out of finished series

>>51711077
>Madoka Magica
Madoka isn't innovative, it's a series of genre jabs and depressing tropes that tricked a generation of weebs into thinking they were watching an actual magical girl show and convinced them that this is how the genre normally acts.

It's done more damage to the genre than help.

>>51711523

Eh, I wouldn't go that far. I wasn't enamoured with Madoka, but I enjoyed it during its original run and it executed its premise well enough, although I've not bothered with the wider franchise and movies it's spawned.

What's bugged me is the glut of shitty grimderp magical girl stuff that has followed it, completely missing the point and the strengths of well executed dark storytelling.

>>51711523
So like EVA?

If anything, Madoka was the fresh breathe of air the genre needed.

>>51711580

Eva was influential but if you go back to the original it really isn't fun to watch. The best things about Evangelion are the iterations and remakes (which got progressively better, with Rebuild 1 and 2 being the best it got, followed by Q being a fucking disappointment), and the shows that responded to its deconstruction with awesome returns to form, like GaoGaiGar.

>>51708820
Still there, anon?

>>51712067
Yeah, still here. What do you want to hear?

>>51712099
BIGGU WINGU sounds like a lot of fun, but so does saving the day through paperwork. Honestly, I'd happily listen to any of this.

>>51708820
>>What not to do against anti-ship missiles
I misread this as "What not to do with anti-ship missiles" and thought you had gone full Planes and Mercs.

>>51711523
It is deconstruction of a popular genre nothing new there. EVA did the same thing, One Punch Man did the same thing, HunterXHunter did the same thing, in certain ways Yuri on Ice did the same thing.

>It's done more damage to the genre than help.
Why do you think so?

>>51712316
Alright. because I perfer the latter, let's go through "saving the day with paperwork."

Now, my character's thing in that game, at least the most relevant part in this situation, was that she was a master of improv. In fact one of her abilities was to reduce one of her stats by 2 in order to increase another stat by 2 - and not just her magical stats, but the mundane ones as well. Because of this, she served as the party's sane man, and actually got a commission to Lieutenant rather early on in the campaign. (right before the anti-ship missile incident, more on that in a bit)

>1/2 spam filter?

>>51711687
>The best things about Evangelion are the iterations and remakes (which got progressively better, with Rebuild 1 and 2 being the best it got, followed by Q being a fucking disappointment)

I'm so sorry for you, life must be miserable with such SHIT TASTE

>>51712958

The original Evangelion is fascinating but it is no fucking fun to watch. Going back to it is a drearly, depressing slog. It was nice to have a version of the story and the characters that was actually enjoyable for once. And then Q went back to the depressing slog.

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>>51711523
>convinced them that this is how the genre normally acts
But, it does. It just usually isn't this in your face about how bittersweet the coming of age story of a growing girl is.

You are right in that madoka isn't innovative and most of what makes it special is paint, but the rest of it makes no sense. The second part of your statement speaks directly against the first, in fact. And is wrong.

>Trying to work around the spam filter, sorry
>>51712954
In any case, this particular event takes place well into the late game, right before the big wing incident. Major Donalds has been found after going missing to find the other teleporting MG. She's assumed to be a rogue agent and terminated if found.

>>51710022
I'm not sure what that is.

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I already cannot wait to post this storytime on /tg/.

You guys have no idea what you're in for.

>>51712488
>Why do you think so?

I can kinda get what they mean. 'Being a magical girl is suffering' has kinda become the mainstream perception of them after Madoka. People seem to think it's the rule, not the exception.

But then, I didn't like Madoka myself. Mostly I felt like it was a kinda pointless deconstruction when there were already better ones out there that got the spirit of the genre better.

>>51713244
Most soldiers would write losing a unit (who'd been pretty flighty to begin with) off as a casualty of war. Instead, my character decided to create Operation Archangel, a solo mission for a deep cover operative to mess with the enemy without any official lines of contact. In essence, it's a complete "get out of jail free" card for the player as well as the Major, since it could be fluffed as a sentimental old man sending the girl off into the unknown.

>Okay, got the spam filter thing cleared. This is the last part.
>>51713360
There are a few problems with just making an op up. For one, she's being actively scrutinized by the Major so everything needs to be above board. For that, she needs an operational authorization form. But due to her natural skill for improv and some really dumb rolls, she manages to get one filled out in a way that seems professional enough, and signs off on it as the person green-lighting the op.

There is one more problem - any operation like this is sent to headquarters and authorized. So she has to find a way to steal a roll of telegraph tape, type up an authorization message, and stick that in the file, all without anyone asking questions as to why a 15-year old girl has LT bars on her shoulders or is carrying mission authorization documents.

We never heard if it was technically reviewed or scrutinized, but my character got another promotion to Captain at the end of the game, which was pretty cool. (at least when she didn't cause the medals to fly away - that's a different story.)

Last I heard, she had become the head of the not!British magical R&D department.

>>51713299
Wait, are you playing a Magical Girl Noir Quest game?

How is that quest doing nowadays, anyway?

And pls tell us more about your game!

>>51713759
Not who you are replying to, but that quest is ded. If I recall, it didn't survive the switch to /qst/

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>>51713759
Yeah, we've been working on a homebrew system for a while. It's pretty far along by now (got to be, the game already ran for a year), but not in a state where I can proudly present it to /tg/ and make a thread for it yet. Also one pretty significant change in core mechanics is coming along that will make me very slightly rephrase just about fucking everything in the doc, so just don't use it yet, I guess.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S1yVgpUMZZwcHnJBzCB8CkDtqlbyC1oxAwJGbckO0Ug/edit

Quest is alive, you can find some stuff that you may have missed on sup/tg/, though Deculture hasn't ran in a few months now. He hates /qst/ and anonkun both so it's hard to.

The system allows for various formats, but this is basically still set in MGNQ. The running theme thus far is that all of the characters are basically rejects and loose cannons that are allowed to leave and help with each other's assignments because their bosses want to keep them off their necks. They essentially got collectively sent on a suicide mission at the start, and by virtue of not dying got themselves involved in some serious shit. I honestly don't want to spoil anything about the actual story, because there's 100% going to be a big storytiem along the system release. I've been putting work into the game to make sure it's just about the best fucking thing I ever run, so there's a lot of Witches and assets and shit.

>>51714072
>MGNQ dying out

No...So much work was put into it.

Anyway, your game sounds fun. Looking forward to your storytime.

>>51711523
Madoka IS a real magical girl show. I don't know what kind of criteria you are using but in my opinion the real spirit of the genre is about the love, hope, and pure-hearted innocence of the characters, and not about how happy the story is or how often the story allows heroism to be a success.

>>51713412
>she had become the head of the not!British magical R&D department.
She just asked for a transfer to R&D, the GM never really elaborated
That said, I finally got it all down, and this one's gonna be a biggie

>>51707583
Okay, here's the tale of Why You Shouldn't Trust Magical Devices

As mentioned earlier, teleporter-chan went MIA after a mission- specifically, a mission to defend an aircraft.
Funny meta-story behind this one actually: Being an online campaign, combats in this went at a snail's pace and then some, so I was trying to adjust to an early sleep schedule when this one lasted till like, 3 AM
In a weird change of heart from his usual self, instead of botting my character or anything when I inevitably fell asleep after hours of nothing happening, he just had the craft I was supposed to protect get blown up. Instead of throwing a shitfit or anything, I rolled with it and asked the GM "Hey, would it be cool if she just teleported away and spent some sessions elsewhere because she has a complex about being a failure?"
And thus began her new adventure deep in the middle of enemy territory.

The GM and I did some idea-bouncing and a couple solo sessions,and it became established that port-chan had kept her power-access-granting pendant while poofing off to some church/orphanage in the middle of nowhere. She met a cute girl who didn't even speak her language and an old man who only kind-of did, deciding it would be a better idea to stay there and help them because they were near the heart of the war that was going on instead of going back and being part of the actual military. Mind she was like 13, so she had a super naïve view of things. Don't let 13-year-olds be wizards.

cont.

>>51714311
This was where the campaign ramped up a bit and magical girls from the enemy countr(y/ies) started to be greater in number, and one 'lightning witch' in particular was causing trouble. Maj. Donalds also ran away - hence the whole aforementioned 'Operation Archangel' thing - because he was convinced he could find his girl anywhere there was a church and possibly orphans. Which was actually a better idea than 90% of the ideas characters in this campaign tended to have, though it didn't seem like one at the time because he was an old man traveling by himself.

Teleporter-chan came face-to-face with the Lightning Witch herself - who later turned out to be the daughter of a major researcher in the enemy country who was responsible for designing their pendants - and was severely outmatched, having to rely on trickery and magic bullshit to lead her away from civilians and their city. Scrambling her sense of direction and such. This was when the other protags showed up, tracking the teleporter who was trying to do the same thing to them and mislead her from her trail- not for a genuine reason, just because "I'm too much of a failure to go back." Don't let 13-year-olds be wizards.

As things would go, they eventually ended up fighting together, but despite all their effort, the PCs' sort-of-PC target managed to get away again, telling them not to follow her. They went back and were sad and emotional shit happened. At this point the plot ramped up AGAIN, Operation Big Wing started, and circus-chan had met every magical girl in the nuthouse she was confined to, including a qt blind girl who would later end up working for her, some chick who accidentally explodes every time she gets into a fight (this one was a prime A+++ character), and Chelsea, the craziest crazy who ever crazied, who happened to be a magic user so powerful that she was permenently transformed, spoke in riddles, and never left a single tiny dark room she was confined to.

cont.

>>51714332
The staff was all scared of her, and for good reason; nobody but circus-chan ever bothered to actually talk to her, and when she did she spoke in subtle tongue-twisters that we later learned were spoilers for the actual plot. Good times.

I'll fast-forward and the other guy can go back to this part later, but suffice it to say, Big Wing is a major operation launched to fuck up the enemy countries for good and use a bunch of magical girls as portable nukes or something. Unfortunate for them, the enemy had the same idea. So, the small town in not!France that teleporter-chan was protecting ended up being the stage for the final battle. Dozens of NPCs from the rest of the campaign returned to help out, a lot of them died, and finally they reached a scene where they were about to be wiped out by the Lightning Witch and her allies for good, when a sudden VWOOP happened and the entire unit the PCs were in found themselves in a nondescript cellar. Standing them waiting for them was their teleporting friend, now much edgier and mysterious-looking on purpose, who tore open part of her costume and revealed a grotesque, monstrous figure fused to her chest. "We need to talk" is all she said.

That was the cliffhanger before the final session, by the by- All that setup was used to reveal that the pendants were actually parasites, and the one girl who managed to transform and fight without it was the one who actually had the right idea. Rightfully she was the first one to freak out at seeing the pendant's monstrous true form, as teleporter-chan had been using it and staying transformed nonstop, in an extremely dumb decision. 13-year-olds, wizards, etc.
What could have been a tearful reunion was cut short as she told the unit that she was going to offer herself to distract the enemy with her powers, which would probably overload the pendant and kill her in the process, but she wanted to be useful.

cont.

>>51714343
A CERTAIN PC took that chance to go "oh yeah use yourself as a nuke please" but the others held her back and told her that was retarded. Circus-chan had a better idea.

Nobody expected this would happen, not any of the players, and not the GM: Instead of anything sensible, the firegirl just asked her to get rid of her pendant and to trust her. It was literally fused to her chest, so the only way that would be possible would be by tearing out a bunch of her organs in the process- but she WAS a teleporter, and did come all this way for the embrace of sweet death, so she took up this offer. Lots of crying happened, but she vwooped the pendant into a corner somewhere and fell lifeless.
Now that the players were all going "What's the next step of your master plan," it started. The player started making a shitton of dice rolls with little explanation, and we soon came to learn that she was magicking shit so hard that she was about to pull bullshit that would make Gunbuster blush, making a 'heart' made of pure fire to keep her animated, Tony Stark-style. Then she used even more fire to cauterize the wound. It was reckless and completely ridiculous, but the numbers didn't lie, and soon after their friend was breathing again, now very free from the parasite that was eating her. "Magical Cancer" was the term the GM used for that when I asked him about it long before this session, actually.

Everybody else at the scene, it turned out, was not quite as safe from said parasite. As soon as the hype was over, everybody realized the monster wasn't just free, but it was expanding. It turned into a silvery, liquid-metal type of substance and rapidly flooded the entire cellar, swallowing the corpses of fallen comrades and maybe even some of the living ones. We were suddenly playing in a horror campaign.

cont., one or two more

>>51714362
Through this whole scene, too, the Lightning Witch had been zeroing in on the crew, encircling the building like a bird of prey, and even she was surprised when they all burst out, followed by a rapidly expanding what-the-fuck-even-is-that. It projected some kind of field that seemed to affect magic powers, and the remaining PCs (just the original 3, now) realized they were going to have to fight this girl sooner or later, so all of them flew straight up and had a final battle past the cloud cover and in the backdrop of outer space like it was some sort of JRPG.

But since Magical Burst's combat is a piece of shit I won't go into detail there, I couldn't even if I tried; what matters is that they won, and through nonlethal means at that as they snatched the pendant from her through a LOT of restraining and lucky rolls, capturing the very-non-magical girl to take home with them. But their battle wasn't over, as the pendant-monster was still expanding and nobody knew how far it would go. They had to fight it.... or so they thought. As they came down, the field it projected was snowing. Soldiers all around them were noticing their guns jamming, weapons breaking, et cetera- teleporter-chan's wish to end the fighting was so strong that it transferred into the pendant, and it expanded through the whole Occupied Zone they were fighting in. Its only effect was that it nullified hostile action- meaning that would be a really shitty place to be a schoolyard bully, but in the moment, it was a calming resolution to the climax.

The Occupied Zone they were fighting in was now a totally new kind of Occupied, and this went down in the setting's lore for the next few seasons. 'Pendantmonsters' happened more times in some of the other ones, and were just as eldritch, but that's a tale for another time.

I don't storytime here often, but hope you enjoyed that one, anons

>>51709626
Theres Magical Girl Raising Project which is like JoJo but magical girls

>>51714362
>A CERTAIN PC took that chance to go "oh yeah use yourself as a nuke please" but the others held her back and told her that was retarded.

It wasn't "go use yourself as a nuke" so much as "if you're going to die, go out by mission killing her pls"

But yes. The BIG WING. A fight that will live in infamy.

Anyone who knows shit about air combat will know why this is a bad idea. And when I get back I'll get into explaining HOW bad it was.

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>>51714377
>>51714362
>>51714343
>>51714332
>>51714311
That's a pretty great way to work the weirder stuff in Magic Burst into a slightly more serious campaign, anon. Had fun reading that, thanks for the story.

>>51714158
Also, the real ending of series is pretty far from being depressing. I know 3rd movie undid it, but that was just excercise in retarded edginess that wasn't even approved by Urobuchi himself.

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>>51715220
>just excercise in retarded edginess that wasn't even approved by Urobuchi himself.

Ah, so you never understood Homura in the first place. Maybe this will help you out.

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>>51715220
>>51715249
Yeah, Rebellion is a strange one. I think it was generally a good movie (I had this shown to me on the /a/ threads after it first came out), but I can't handle how it undid some of what I love so much about the series. I usually prefer to think of it as an interesting character study rather than an actual sequel. The original series really is GOAT for me though, Rebellion or not.

>>51712488
EVA and OPM are deconstructions, but Madoka amd HxH are more like reconstructions. They follow traditions of their genre closely, but make those genres great again rather than try to undo them. Also, if you think "being meguca is suffering" is all that there is to Madoka then you missed the point of series.

>>51715402

The problem is that 'Being meguca is suffering' is what a lot of stupid people took away from the anime, which is why its influence is a lot worse than the show itself.

>>51715402
I didn't realize anyone referred to OPM or HxH as deconstructions. Isn't OPM more like a parody?

>>51715441

Honestly, I wouldn't call OPM a deconstruction. Mostly because it celebrates a lot of what makes superhero stories so interesting.

It's more just a comedic homage to the genre.

>>51715441
I hear HxH being talked about as a deconstruction a lot, usually as "the Madoka of the shounen genre" or something like that.

OPM is really more a satire, I wouldn't call it a deconstruction.

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>>51715249
Some people are content with looking just a skin deep and no further...

>>51715464
But HxH celebrates and highlights all those things that make shounen great such as sense of adventure/wonder, real friendship, crazy worldbuilding etc. Much more so than OPM.

Still, Madoka is similar to HxH in that both brought sense of danger and feels BACK into genre that has lost those long ago.

>>51711523

Madoka is a competently told story with a musical and artistic flair that blows 99 out of every 100 other shows out of the water. It's simply beatiful, regardless of whether you think it's a deconstruction or reconstruction or whatever nonsense is the popular circlejerk right now.

>>51715682

>Danger and feels back to a genre that had lost those long ago

Nanoha was out before Madoka was.

>>51715788

Admittedly, the first Nanoha series was shakey, and StrikerS suffered from severe pacing problems. But Nanoha A's and the movie remakes are my personal favourite examples of the Magical Girl genre as a whole.

I can see why people like Madoka, but I'd take Nanoha every time.

>>51715420
>'being meguca is suffering'
The responses to this, like YuYuYu, were fantastic. YuYuYu for example showed being meguca is suffering but also that there's no need to go quietly.

>>51715854

Never heard of that one before. tl;dr?

>>51715788
>>51715682
>genre lost its feels

I don't very well understand this complaint at all, to be honest. If you are asking about the most 'generic' title coming out in the mid-point between the shows, you end with something like Heartcatch Precure, which is in fact an awesome show. Most magical girl shows that ever came out are fairly decent. The only one I can think of that truly exemplified what I really dislike about the genre would be Tokyo Mew Mew, and that's probably still okay if you are nine years old.

>>51715788
I don't argue that it isn't good series and didn't have the feels in it (mostly in first series though), but it never broke off from old conventions quite like Madoka did. Also, it didn't bring back sense of danger at any point despite Strikers trying it very hard towards the end.

Greatest thing that Nanoha did was that it freed the genre from it's shoujo-only demographics allowing Madoka to born later.

>>51715934

> it never broke off from old conventions quite like Madoka did

Introducing magitech starfleet and having the later series based on a completely different premise isn't breaking off from conventions?

>>51715854
I like YuYuYu as well, but I feel that Madoka's style shouldn't be shaken off. A lot of the characters in Madoka get a straight tragic end as you said, but part of what the story was trying to prove is that heroism and acts of kindness are inherently worthwhile, and valuable, and beautiful. It's a message that can't be told truthfully without going to the very bottom of the pit with no brakes.

>>51715788
Nanoha is cool, though I disagree with the direction the series started taking with Strikers. We needed that innocence from the original and A's back.

>>51715934

Honestly, I find the story in A's a lot better than the entirety of Madoka. It told it's story a lot clearer and had a lot more of an emotional rollercoaster than 'Yep, everything is gunna suck forever' until the last few minutes.

Madoka really imo harmed itself by going too far that way.

>>51716042
The problem is that now you're just judging a show based on the happy/sad tone of the story. I have seen a great deal of people do this, in both directions, thinking that going the opposite way is a correct response when it is not.

>>51716090

No, I'm judging it on how well it told it's story. The core of doing a dark, morose story is to give people hope that it can be otherwise. A lack of hope makes people just give up and stop caring.

I feel like Madoka went too far on that front and thus ended up with a story that it's hard to care about as for most of the story there is no real hope.

>>51715906
Yuki Yuusha wa Yuuna.

Basically there's a Tree God. Basically Yggdrasil. The God protects the world it exists in and the real world from beings called the Vertex, which are basically fallen Gods.
To protect itself, the Tree God assigns a group of girls, called 'heroes' as Priestesses to defend it and kill the invading Vertex. The current iteration of this group (this will be important to remember) is the Hero Club, which the MC, Yuki Yuuna, is a part of.
When not fighting Vertex, the Hero Club goes around town helping people with random stuff.

In combat, the heroes can access a temporal powerup. This powerup comes with a cost: it is an offering to the Tree God, and in exchange for the powerup the God will take something from you. Your taste, your voice, your sight, it's random, but when gone it's gone. Every time you access that powerup you have to pay again.

Also, the tide of Vertex is endless. The girls are fighting a hopeless battle. The world they think is real ends a few miles beyond the coast. The rest is fire.

Hero teams have died in combat in the past. One of the girls, Tougou, was part of a hero team and one of its only two survivors

>>51716116
In my opinion hope doesn't mean anything without darkness, that just makes it fake. It is an emotion that saves people at their lowest point and that is why it's beautiful.

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>>51716125
>being a meguca is suffering
YuYuYu felt a little tryhard, and it does feel like a Madoka ripoff because the premise lies outside the genre an does not come to it naturally.

You might as well cut the middleman and admit that being is suffering.

>>51716223

But you need a balance of the two. If you lose hope completely you lose all engagement with the characters. Unless I believe there's really a chance for them to win or to make things better I stop caring about the result, because all it is is an inevitable slide into nothingness which robs the series of any tension just as effectively as it being too obvious the heroes are going to win.

>>51716247

Exactly. Which I really felt robbed Madoka of any real emotional weight and made the ending feel like an asspull.

On the vague subject of depressing anime's, I'm trying to compile a list of the most depressing anime's for a marathon run tomorrow. I'm thinking Madoka, Attack on Titan, and Grave of the Fireflies have to be involved at least, what's some other good options?

>>51715961
To be honest magitech has been traditional part of magical girl series. In fact it's so old that I have no idea where it came from first. Nanoha only took it bit further than the usual with things like cartridge system which is really cool despite being so blatantly ripped off from certain series of totally different nature.

However, Strikers (I assume this is what you refer as later series, haven't watched Vivio stuff yet) did genuinely break conventions, but it's kind of a failure as a series sadly. It could have been really good though.

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>>51716247
A hero isn't only a hero if he wins. And failure, even final failure, does not make his efforts meaningless. This is exactly what Madoka is about.

>>51716272
>In fact it's so old that I have no idea where it came from first.

That would be Cutie Honey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCX77Je16fk

>>51716299

That isn't really relevant to what I'm saying, though? I'm talking about viewer engagement in your storytelling. Without the right amount of hope, dark storytelling falls flat because people stop caring. I like dark storytelling done right, but the heart of it is always maintaining that sense of hope, the belief that things can be better.

At least for me? Madoka lacked that. When things really hit the fan I just kinda stopped caring, and the ending felt strange and contradictory to the show up until that point.

>>51716247

I am sick of whiny bitches like you complaining about madoka just because you don't like it. Making magical girl anime dark was a brilliant decision for making it more engaging and realistic. Madoka finally told a real story rather than just being pointless fluff.

>>51716360

Thanks for admitting you don't actually have an argument, just angry opinions you lack the ability to properly articulate, explain or justify.

>>51716381
You can tell that it ain't even the same guy tho

>>51716411

Yeah, but it's still nice when someone so clearly signals their complete lack of ability to participate in a discussion. It makes it a lot easier to ignore them from then on. Or possibly mock them and poke fun at them because their angry reactions are often quite amusing. One of the two.

>>51716332
It is relevant. This is about reality and not just viewer engagement. I'm won't pretend to you that I have anything less than an awesome life, which is a personal outlook that a character from that show is directly responsible for. But there are a lot of people in the world that do not get any happy ending whatsoever. I am not a believer in the afterlife, and so when they die, for me, that is it. It is a true tragedy, not even the kind worth making a story about. Madoka is trying to capture a bit of that with its narrative, even just a bit.

>>51716261
>AoT
that's kind of so ridiculous it's not depressing in the least. If you want something that is action-y but has sad endings, try Darker than Black. You can also only spend a few episodes on it.

Try these, they are all shorter series:
Saishuu-Heiki Kanojo, though it can be fairly silly at times
Mononoke (the show) is fairly negative in conclusions, also a good marathon/party watch.
Haibane Renmei has a fairly rounded conclusion, but the meat of it is depressing as fuck.

for very slight change of pace, throw in Perfect Blue imo

>>51716440

But none of that matters if the viewer doesn't care.

Stories handling deep, meaningful topics is awesome and there are some excellent examples of it, but no matter how much of that your story has, none of it matters unless viewers are engaged and care about it. Unless people are still watching and finding the experience compelling, no message or meaning is ever going to reach them.

Did Madoka absolutely fail on that front? Obviously not, given the reactions to it from a lot of people. But from the also significant counter-reaction, I think it's fair to say that its handling of tone was far from perfect. I think the story could have retained just as much meaning but been a lot more engaging if it hadn't gone so far into brutally depressing and retained just a little bit more levity and, well, hope.

>>51716261
Here, Now, and There. AoT should not even be considered for such a list.

>>51716332
I think the problem here is that you can't appreciate a tragedy as a form of storytelling and that is fine because not everything works for everyone. Still, it's not fault of Madoka which is pretty much perfectly executed tragedy with a perfectly executed deus ex machina.

>>51716543
>I think the problem here is that you can't appreciate a tragedy as a form of storytelling

> I like dark storytelling done right

Come again?

>>51716527
But there is hope. There entire narrative was made to try and prove this, that there is still hope even at the very bottom. There is no point where a person has to say "this is too sad so I want to turn away", or "this is too depressing and I don't care what happens anymore".

>>51716260
>made the ending feel like an asspull.
It's even worse if you were watching it live and then the final two episodes get delayed for MONTHS before you get that asspull

More to the point, I also didn't actually like any of the characters. So when I finally got to the "payoff" which was just people where shitposting about madoka doing from the very beginning, it just felt like a huge waste of time.

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Alright kids. Gather round and let me tell you a story about the BIG WING Battle - aka "the biggest clusterfuck to ever cluster a fuck"

As anyone who knows anything about aerial combat, giant furballs are colossal messes. As students in a military academy whose handler was a history professor as his cover, the party KNEW that big wing was fucktarded. But the Colonel in charge of the assembled magical girls blew them off because "fuck you imma colonel" Given this, my character did the best she could to keep her unit (herself plus six others) close, even going so far as to give them all steel halos as a crude IFF method.

Everything changed once the furball actually started. To wit, any time I wanted to do something, there was first a roll to line up a single target, then the actual roll to attack, then a THIRD roll to see if an enemy spoiled the shot, and finally after all that, damage was rolled. Overcharge built up super quickly and there was no way to vent or mitigate it.

It took not even 3 rounds of combat before situational awareness was destroyed, and the flight had to bail, having one of the six NPC followers dead, a second missing, and a third unconscious. Two others had serious injuries that preventing them from using magic, and no sign of anything friendly anywhere close. The finale happened the same day in-game, with the bullshit scaled back since it was just 3v1 and not 7v7

I give the GM huge credit for how exhausting the fight felt, just from a text perspective.

>>51716261
>>51716542
>Now and Then, Here and There
fuck, I tried pretty hard to delete that from my memory. Watch that, anon, it is probably perfect for you

>>51716578

I didn't see it. Any time someone actually tried to do good it just made things worse sooner or later, up until the ending which fixed (almost) everything and still feels kinda dissonant with the rest of the series for me.

There were no small gains or minor victories to make me believe things could get better. Even if you thought one had happened, they'd always reveal how it was really meaningless and/or actually making things even worse. It just got draining after a point.

>>51716574
Yet you say that Madoka isn't dark storytelling done right because it is too dark and you stopped caring as a result of that. I think that's more like your personal opinion than an argument about quality of storytelling in the series.
>>51716578
Basically this and this is why Madoka isn't grimderp or edgy bullshit that some people claim it to be.

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>>51716303
Don't forget Limit-chan!

A cyborg of all things, and apparently more popular in Italy than in Japan. Goodness knows why.

>>51716700

>Did Madoka absolutely fail on that front? Obviously not, given the reactions to it from a lot of people. But from the also significant counter-reaction, I think it's fair to say that its handling of tone was far from perfect. I think the story could have retained just as much meaning but been a lot more engaging if it hadn't gone so far into brutally depressing and retained just a little bit more levity and, well, hope.

>>51716682
The ending is not dissonant, because the power of Madoka's miracle is made up of all of Homura's previous timelines, the collective effort of the magical girls across universes. And Madoka had only been able to understand what her wish should be by experiencing everything she did throughout the series. It is a great ending because it is able to tie in every part of the story together.

>>51716762

So, after a succession of attempts and failures, of negative on negative on negative on negative... Suddenly it all flips around into a massive positive.

And this isn't dissonant?

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>>51716620
The ending isn't an asspull. It's fine if you have personal opinions about the characters and such but I believe the writing is excellent and that Madoka is worthy of the praise it has gotten.

>>51716798
It isn't. It is hope, a miracle built out of the efforts and goodwill of many people.

>>51716841

In-universe, yes. From a storytelling perspective it's kinda an asspull.

>>51716899

It had all the subtlety and sense of a binary math error, a value getting so negative it looped around into positive.

>>51716672
It's really fucking weird series. Horrible and depressing, but still uses shounen tropes and has perfect shounen hero as main character who never falls to dark side. Also, post-apocalyptic dystopia with child soldiers that is unbelievably ridiculous on the paper, but is still executed so well that it manages to feel quite too real and resonate well with third-world conflicts of real life. Then just like in Nausicaa it actually manages to have quite interesting setting despite being so depressing except future here is FAR worse than Nausicaa and that says a lot.

And then there's the fact that it breaks TV censorship rules just to be edgy at one point, but series isn't really edgy at any point, but rather takes it's dark themes extremely seriously.

>>51716899
It's not. Madoka would not have had the power or the understanding to make her wish without everything that happened in the series. Her power had been foreshadowed as early as episode 3, and is directly tied into Homura's character arc and every event in the story that was trying to force Madoka into making a wish.

>>51716332
You see, you're totally right in abstract. However, the hope threshold is very subjective (as I think you realize), and two people may not even agree on which of two pieces of media had more or less hope in some cases, because their minds focus on different elements of it.

When I look at Madoka, I see a struggle over the value of a human life, with lots of different views represented. Kyuubey's looking for net good for the universe, and takes a big picture point of view in which any sacrifice can be justified if enough benefit is gained by someone. Homura sees events in a different light, and places all the value she's got on the individual, not caring about Entropy and Aliens. Even before the big reveals, the very setup of the story asks what wish is big enough that a character is willing to sacrifice her life for it, since even those more aligned with Kyuubey are willing to offer warnings about carefully picking your wishes. And other characters have other points of view. Kyoko, like Kyuubey, wants a net positive rather than no negatives, but she wants it for herself alone in contrast to the wish she made that went sour for everyone

So what do you take away from, say, Sayaka's fate? She seems doomed in every timeline, but the good she did... stays done A miracle was achieved and it cost her more than she thought she was paying, perhaps, but was it more than it was worth? Depends on who you ask. It was worth it to Kyuubey. Sayaka herself? Hard to say given the ending but not so much in the immediate. Kyousuke certainly comes off better, and through that Hitomi. And Kyoko sees an utter waste.

I won't argue that the presentation is more dour and damaging than uplifting, but I at least found enough balance to keep my interest and make me root for the characters. And in the end Madoka both gave and got EVERYTHING, which seemed a very fitting resolution to the quandary.

>>51716970

The other reason why that's bullshit? Up until that point, the wishes had been fake. Even if the results were technically true, each and every person who made a wish suffered for it, not getting what they wanted or having things go wrong in ways directly related to the wish they made.

And yet when Madoka did it, she got exactly what she wanted because... Plot, I guess?

>>51717031
The wishes weren't fake. They got exactly what they wanted, it's just that they made a wish for the wrong reasons or didn't think through their wish before making it.

Madoka's entire character arc is about finding the right wish to make for the right reasons. Her wish in Episode 12 is merely the culmination of that arc.

>>51717031
The ending isn't perfectly happy. Despair doesn't disappear, it just gets moved around, same as with the other wishes. And Madoka is not able to keep magical girls from dying, or from their wishes getting turned around on them. But she was able to save their spirit, which was the one thing she wanted to be able to protect.

>>51717031
Point is that Madoka's wish was special due to Homura buffing her magical power by time travel and it's nature (remove witches) broke that cycle. Madoka just figured out how to break the system.

>>51717180

More power should surely just make it go worse in an even bigger way?

>>51717148
But the intent stayed perfectly true, which still feels weird to me after everything else got so badly twisted.

>>51717080

I suppose I can understand the idea, but I didn't see it in her development. She went from idealistic to increasingly depressed to suddenly being able to solve the problem. The progression didn't make sense.

>>51717258
The wishes don't automatically go wrong though. Hell, the wishes themselves never went wrong.

Take Sayaka's wish. She wanted Kyousuke to be healed, and that's exactly what she got.

The wish didn't cause Sayaka to fall into despair, it was her own stubborn idealism and selfishness in wanting Kyousuke for herself. If she made the wish because she truly cared about him and wanted nothing in return, then presumably she would have been a lot better off. The whole soul gem thing still would have messed her up, but ultimately it was Kyousuke that tipped her over the edge.

>>51716899

Anon, it's not an "asspull" when the show was literally built around reality-warping wishes from the very first episode.

>>51717031
>Up until that point, the wishes had been fake.

The wishes are literally real. It's not QB's fault that the girls didn't always think their wishes through.

I completely understand that no show is for everyone, but the backlash honestly feels quite a bit forced out of the oft-seen need to appear superior by bashing a wildly popular show. It's simple fact that even when taken purely on the meshing of animation and music alone, Madoka would stand out from the pack.

>>51716247

I've never understood the complaints that Madoka was overly dark. The last episode is a triumphal tidal wave of hope crashing over everything in its path. It's not like NGE, where the climax leaves you as emotionally shattered as the rest of the show. It's catharsis. Only one of the characters even really dies in the end.

The show has a fairly even-keeled start, followed by maybe 4-5 truly bleak episodes, then finishes with a middle finger to fate and destiny to put even TTGL to shame.

>>51717258
>More power should surely just make it go worse in an even bigger way?

It's not a monkey's pawn, anon. Look at Homu's wish, for example. Sure, she suffered a hell of a lot as a result, but her wish spiraled out of QB's control from the very beginning - he wasn't able to remember who she was between loops.