Maid: The RPG overview

I found this RPG supplement on TV Tropes, and just went… “Wow, this has to be the weirdest looking core rule book I’ve ever seen” Seeing that I haven’t written about any pen and paper RPG’s for a while, and that this might be fun to investigate, since the heavy anime influences make it quite suitable for this site. (What’s that? Articles about Ancient Greece have nothing to do with anime? SHUT UP!)

This forced me to acquire it immediately. I could tell this was going to be interesting when in the “things required to play” section, it lists that you probably should leave your shame at home.

Also, it uses the term “roll 1d666,” or roll three 6 sided dice.

My first impression is that this looks like a great game to bring to an anime convention or a forum meet up (Play with my regular Dungeons and Dragons/ World of Darkness Group? HA!) for a possible play-by-post or something. Obviously, I’d be willing to do a LARP (Live-Action Role Play… a bunch of people in costumes playing a game like this) with a bunch of sexy females in maid outfits calling me master.

I do like the table for determining special qualities for your character. These are things that set you apart from your peers, such as wearing giant glasses, being an albino, or being a dude (!!) Other fun qualities include having a weird fetish, a weird accent, always wear sunglasses (even at night) or have a strange tendency to enjoy stabbing people. All of these traits are rolled randomly, ensuring that this game is as much of an improv act as it is an RP

Rules for this game are relatively simple, and can be kept on about one page. You have a bunch of attributes, you roll a dice and multiply it by that attribute, and your enemy (or obstacle) makes an opposed roll. Whoever gets a higher roll wins. The loser takes damage (or stress in this case) until they reach there limit and have a breakdown (they player is then forced to act in a specific manner, such as binge drinking or being a jerk for an amount of time, in minutes based around the damage they took) I presume that rules were kept light for the sole purpose of keeping the game playable while drunk.

In order to increase insanity, the dungeon master has stats and is subject to insanity to. Also, to make things easier, there is a rather large table detailing random encounters. It requires you to improvise, but any dungeon master worth his salt can do that. This table includes all the staples you’d need to get the creative juices flowing such as rolling the dice to find out the mansion has had a zombie outbreak, or if Cthuhlu has decided to make a quick visit.

Although I do not believe that this book is very suitable for a serious role play,(Hey, if you want to do a game with a bunch of killer maids, almost any system will do.) it looks like it would satisfy boredom for a night. The majority of rules take about 10 minutes to learn, and are incredibly easy to teach to a newcomer. Most importantly, it appears that if your adventures don't turn into a chaotic mess where hilarity ensues, your probably playing the game wrong. Simplicity works for and against this book in that regard. The real meat in the book is the flavor text and the random tables, which are top notch. I may wind up using some of the random event tables in my next Dungeons and Dragons game, just to give it a shot. Unfortunately, I haven’t field tested this book yet, so I would need to do a follow up report on how the actual game plays…. I’d be willing to do a play by post, or I’m willing to meet a group at any major convention I attend...

Oh yeah, the book isn’t available on Amazon, so you have to order it from the company website. Seven dollars for the PDF is pretty nice, but the physical book would be necessary to use it at conventions.

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