Talk to Ashiel About Anything Mark II

[Tels]

Define "types" for me?

Well there's the type directed at young teens, like Dragon Ball Z, Fairy Tail, Sailor Moon or Ouran High Host Club, then there's the ones directed at older teens - college age, like Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Paradise Kiss or Velvet kiss. I'll ignore the anime made for young children. I know there are specific names they use for these (like shoujo and seinen) but I have no idea which is which.

Then, of course, there's the different genres, slice of life, action, comedy, supernatural, sci-fi, horror, romance etc.

If I had to guess, I would imagine you would prefer the older teen/college age, as you've mentioned your some favorites in the past that were more mature and had darker elements. But you also enjoy your Outlaw Stars from time to time.

Not as often as I'd like. I'm literally years from being caught up.


I think there's a tenuous balance between too many and too few. Even among my think-tank on Discord, there's sometimes discussion about trimming the number of skills down and consolidate more skills, but (perhaps to the frustration of some of my friends ), I've been fairly resistant to trimming what I think may be too much. We are going to consolidate a number of skills for sure, though I want to retain things like Craft, Profession, and Perform, albeit with some tweaking. I think it's all about finding a nice mixture of enough skills to give variety without needing a skill for everything from flying a plane to tying your shoes.



Depends on where you're looking for inspiration. Virtually any medium from anime to video games to comic books can be used to get conceptual ideas for things like adventures, settings, or even tones. For example, I'm a huge fan of the Vampire Hunter D movies (the original 80s film was one of my favorite movies as a child) and it has permanently colored my views on vampires and that reflects in the games that I GM.

If you mean mechanically, well, similar story. If you see something you like thematically, you can try to capture that in a mechanical sense, though this is notably more difficult since you have to translate those things into a mechanical sense but it's not impossible. In fact, quite frequently, when I'm writing mechanics I think about what thematic elements it is supposed to convey in game and write towards that end.

If you're looking for anime that have close ties to RPGs, I'd recommend Record of Lodoss War, an old anime that I really enjoyed and was actually based on a D&D campaign by the writer IIRC.

To further expand on this, anime is such a broad term that it covers literally everything you could see on TV, but animated. There are anime focusing on people who just live their life and deal with things as they come (like a sit-com), anime focused on cooking, except with more bewbs (see Food Wars). There are action and adventure anime, coming of age anime, romance anime, anime that is really popular yet also extremely hated (Naruto, Sword Art Online).

You can find inspiration for RPGs in nearly any anime, because there are so many ideas and stories and plots you can adapt or steal from. But if you're looking for anime that specifically deals with games... There's a genre of anime in which people get trapped in a game, and has shows like .hack, Sword Art Online, Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, Log Horizon, and to some extent, No Game No Life. Many of the different action adventure stories have plots or things that can be a good resource for inspiration, like Hunter x Hunter, Fairy Tail, Naruto, One Piece, Outlaw Star, Trigun, Yu Yu Hakusho etc.

It all comes down to what inspires you, and what you're looking to adapt. I mean, I know that many people hate Sword Art Online as an anime, and they have many good reasons, but there are also some gems as far as inspiration for class mechanics in there (or, at least in the light novels anyway). A show like Grimgar could help you better paint a picture of what it's like to be an adventurer at low levels, while Log Horizon can show examples of how to challenge god-like powerful PCs with other things than simply combat. Attack on Titan is a good show for showing what it's like for humans to deal with giants, while shows like Trigun, Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star are all more space-western adventures.