"When it comes down to it, Maid RPG is a goddamn weird game."
— Ewen Cluney, the translator.
Maid RPG is a Tabletop Game created by Ryo Kamiya in 2004, and brought into English in 2008 by Ewen Cluney and Diamond Sutra. It revolves around the Anime concept of maids, and all its related tropes. The setting could be anywhere, from fantasy to present-day to cyberpunk to space, as long as there are the Maids (players), the Master (the GMPC), and the Mansion (where the adventures take place).
Players choose their character name and age, and roll for everything else. Apart from their Attributes, however, they may reroll anything they want (with the GM's permission), or simply pick and choose from the tables directly. However, the most fun is had when you are forced to randomly generate everything, as the results are often the funniest part of the game.
The English website can be found here.
The original core rulebook is less than 40 pages, but two expansions containing optional rules, Koi Suru Maid (Maids in Love) and Yume Miru Maid (Dreaming Maids) were released in 2005. The English version puts them all together into a book over two hundred pages long. The rules are presented with example skits featuring Demon Maid Hizumi, Perverted Maid Yugami, and Ryo Kamiya himself. Later optional rules include commentary from Mistress Nejiri, EB II, and Y.
Has the distinction of being the first Japanese tabletop RPG ever to be officially brought to the West.
Though there is little to no inhibition to playing as The Loonie like few other TTRPGS, it still allows itself to retain dark, dramatic, romantic, or horror-esque capabilities.
This game is also notable in that nearly any anime trope you can think of (especially character-related ones) are built into the rules somehow.
See also other works of Ryo Kamiya. The more violent Nechronica and the more heart-warming Golden Sky Stories.
Provides examples of:
- Action Girl: Most Maids are these by default.
- Anachronism Stew: Robots, spaceships, guns, bazookas, etc, all still work perfectly fine in Wild West/Edo/Medieval periods. On the opposite end, space age, cyber networks, and alternate planets still have a great supply of medieval swords and katanas.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: You work hard to please your master in all capacities, and one of the things you can spend Favor on? Clothes! However, they aren't mere Cosmetic Awards; all of them have gameplay effects of some kind.
- Armor Is Useless: Armor is one of the aforementioned ability changing clothes your character can have. Although it does grant some protection in combat, characters without it are actually safer from harm than characters with it. Unless it's Bikini Armor.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Several different whatevers, from giant killer robots to space monsters to maids.
- Author Avatar/Author Stand-In: Kamiya.
- Battle Butler: All butlers created with the optional rules tend towards this by default. Y is this from the start, though he doesn't tend to do much.
- BFS: The Big-Ass Anime Sword item.
- Biting the Handkerchief: In one of the example roleplays under Seduction, Yugami is seen biting the handkerchief over the fact that Hizumi is being seduced by the Mistress again.
- Bowdlerize: A few (extremely well-advised) examples. See Pragmatic Adaptation below. Interestingly enough, this is actually something that the Kamiya himself begged Cluney to do.
- Butt-Monkey: Kamiya isn't exactly well-liked, despite how he wrote everyone into existence. Hizumi gets to suffer a lot as well, usually at Yugami's hands.
- Chainsaw Good: One of the possible weapons.
- Chandler's Law: The Random Events tables run on this.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Yugami Aino. "Waaaah! My sempai is sullied!"
- Clothes Make the Superman: The Costume Change special rules allow the maid to wear other sets of clothes or uniforms, gaining the abilities of the relevant profession in the process.
- Clothing Damage: If a maid loses/dirties/damages any part of her uniform (but especially the frilly headdress), she gets penalties to her rolls. This is cumulative, and lead to Defeat by Modesty.
- Cool Old Guy: Y, well past his prime, is more than capable of kicking ass with a pistol and a katana!
- Corner of Woe: Kamiya is implied to wander into one after the maids confirm that he's a pervert.
- Crossdresser: Possible character traits are "Actually A Guy" for maids, and "A Girl" for butlers. Masters have "Crossdresser" as a possible special quality as well.
- Cultural Translation: The English version replaces all references to Neo-Nazis with Japanese Imperialists, thereby carrying over the mystique of foreign right wing extremists.
- Curse: Among the many, many options in the Great List of Items are an assortment of unpleasant curses. Inflicting a delusion that turns the victim into an obsessive romantic matchmaker, summoning a Banana Peel whenever a Critical Failure occurs, and many ways of turning people into Otaku are among the least dangerous of curses.
- Cute Monster Girl: Hizumi Kokorono, demon by accident.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: All over the place in the expansions. We've got techniques that let you transform yourself into a weapon (without the proviso of changing back), ignore the effects of any one attack, and even cleanly and completely resolve any problems that might currently be occurring at the cost of the maid's own life.
- Dark Secret: Using the True Nature item gives the maid that uses a random special quality (as well as increasing one of their stats by 2). Depending on the quality gained, the secret might not be that dark.
- Determinator: By default if you have high Will. Alternatively, the Immune To Pain power. If you have both...well...
- Digital Piracy Is Okay: The translator has a note on the PDF version that says, in the "if you pirated the game" section, to give it a try, and if you like it, then shell out some money for it. He then compliments the people who bought it and supported the game, of course.
- Everyone Is Bi: "Heterosexuals" can have their preferences quickly overridden if the seducer rolls a higher die.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a Tabletop RPG about Meido.
- The Fettered: The downside of playing a Butler. You can't vent stress by making trouble, can't fight with the maids without being ordered to by the master, can't generate random events, and lose Favor if you take advantage of the seduction rules.
- Freak Out: The "Stress Explosion" mechanic, which occurs whenever a Maid's Spirit runs out.
- Gender Bender: A few random events in Fantasy settings involve some maids changing gender because of a spell/potion/accident/etc.
- The Chromosome Cream item turns any female character that uses it into a guy. If a male character uses it, they gain the "Even More of a Guy" special quality.
- Girl with Psycho Weapon: Knives, axes, whips, chainsaws, and then some. Craziness optional.
- GMPC: Required, in the form of the Master.
- Going Commando: On the upside, you're immune to penalties for having your underwear taken/destroyed/dirtied. On the downside, you're not wearing any underwear.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: EB II isn't a nice girl to begin with, but in the Afterwords she starts channeling Saw on Kamiya.
- Hilarity Ensues: A "typical" example game using only the core rules ends up like this.
- Ork maids, see Recycled In Space below.
- Actually name-checked when referring to a failing roll to remove another character's Adamantium Chastity Belt.
- Hollywood Healing: To ludicrous levels. Injuries (which invoke Stress, rather than actual HP) can be healed simply by being comforted.
- Honest Rolls Character: For attributes, they're rolled in order and that's it. For everything else, this is averted. You can reroll anything you don't like, but the rolling is supposed to encourage random wackiness.
- Humongous Mecha: One of the items a maid can acquire.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Enforced by the rules; Maids have much higher attributes than Masters.
- Improbable Weapon User: Most of the Weapons tables are weapon-like, but the rest are rather less so.
- Impossibly Cool Weapon: One of the weapons is Summon Magic. Another is a combat helicopter. Hell, they even have an Eva Unit!
- Intimate Healing: A character loses stress by doing lovey dovey stuff with their partner.
- Jet Pack: The Rocket Pack in the Great List of Items.
- Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Maids and butlers can gain favor from a source other than the master by being seduced. This is particularly powerful if two maids seduce each other.
- Lovable Sex Maniac: Yugami, despite her youth, is one of the most perverted characters of the examples in Maid, and fully epitomizes the Womanizer Trait.
- Love Makes You Crazy/Love Makes You Evil: The Tragedy Events.
- Manly Tears: One of the Butler powers.
- Meido: See the name? It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Miko: Besides having Shrine Maiden attire as a possible costume, the rulebook also has a scenario that cast the players as miko (instead of maids), who have to fight a Sealed Evil in a Can.
- Ninja Maid: Most of time players are Meido who're also ActionGirls. It's possible to avoid this trope if you really want to, though.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
- What the player characters tend to be, very easily. It's possible to be a perfectly normal and realistic maid, but it's even more possible to be something else entirely. Also, the example characters Hizumi, Yugami, and EB II.
- With random tables, it's possible to be something that completely contradicts itself. Like having brown skin and being an albino.
- No Fourth Wall: The example characters don't just demonstrate the rules, they roll the dice themselves and comment on the results in between roleplaying.
- Nobody Can Die: Player characters cannot die, even from physical wounds. At worst this leads to their listed Stress Explosion, which heavily restricts their actions until all Stress is relieved. Some equipment or scenarios, however, will alter Stress Explosions into outright character death.
- Off the Rails: You can spend Favor to cause something to happen. The results are usually this. When the GM bursts out laughing after looking at the result you know it's good.
- Older Than They Look/Younger Than They Look: Possible character traits. Almost exactly as listed ("Looks Older" and "Looks Younger").
- Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Masami Onji, a scholarly genius in the replay "Maids at the End of the World".
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: A particularly unlucky roll can cause a Maid to have an initial Favor or Spirit score of 0. While this doesn't cause an immediate dismissal or Stress Explosion, this also means that the character has to be extremely cautious around losing Favor or taking Stress, as the slightest mistake will have strong consequences.
- Only a Flesh Wound: It's almost impossible to die in the game outside of plot mandation—injuries just give you Stress.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Nejiri, the "replacement Mistress" for Kamiya, is a lesbian Japanese vampire.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: The translator had to alter or cut several things due to being too creepy when translated directly, or simply too obscurely or weirdly Japanese. The changes were all documented in the "Nun-Approved Version" extra PDF.
- Rage Against the Author: The maids have a low opinion of Kamiya.
- Random Events Plot: The game can easily become this, especially if the GM or players make heavy use of the event tables.
- Recycled In Space:
- If anyone is hesitant to try this game, think of it as Paranoia, but with maids.
- Completely compatible with Dark Heresy, given some tweaking.
- Renaissance Man: Masami Onji, a scholarly genius in the replay "Maids at the End of the World".
- Robot Girl: Maid Robot Electric-motored Battle-maiden Code 0002, aka EB II.
- Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: One play style listed in the manual is "completely random", where everything, including the plot and player characters, is left up to the dice tables. Because this play style runs on a Random Events Plot, the manual suggests that the end point to wrap up a session is to be decided by the players. If you really need to wrap up a session quickly, it also suggests a spontaneous apocalypse to bring the session to a close.
- Self-Parody: Sample scenario Liberty: The Final Maid Maiden seems to be this. By justifying many game rules in the setting (only one butler exists in the whole world, maids are far more powerful than their master, using of favor, etc.), it ends up more like a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Shout Out: A great many, not all of which survived translation due to being too obscure.
- One is the item "Survive Card", which previously belonged to "a masked motorcycle-riding sentai hero".
- Sole Surviving Scientist: Masami Onji, the Master trying to restore the Earth in the replay "Maids at the End of the World".
- Stalker with a Crush: Yugami has "Stalker" as one of her traits.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: A couple of the powers for both Maids and Butlers are this or allow it.
- Sugar-and-Ice Personality: EB II. She has yet to have a genuine "dere" moment.
- Take That!: Cluney has some emphatic opinions on weeaboos, if the Desu Note is any indication.
- Technicolour Eyes: Eye colour picks are taken from the same table as the maid uniform colours (and hair colours if so desired). It's possible to have transparent eyes.
- Tender Tears: "Maiden's Tears", an Affection Maid Power, allows the user to make a request that cannot be turned down, at the expense of Stress.
- Theory of Narrative Causality: There is a wide variety of events; what happens and when is based entirely on the whims of the GM and the Random Number God.
- Three Laws-Compliant: EB II claims to be this way.
- Transforming Mecha: A result of the event table can cause the mansion to turn into one.
- Unusual Euphemism: In the "Nun-Approved" PDF:Translator Note: Vessel does not refer to a boat.
- Vapor Wear: Two words: Transparent uniforms.
- Wholesome Crossdresser: One of the possible Maid qualities is 'Actually A Guy' and one of the possible butler qualities is 'A Girl'. Also, the costume rules only rarely specify that they must be worn by girls, and usually add 'or at least androgynous.'
- Yakuza: Optional backstory or setting.
- You Lose at Zero Trust: Each maid has a certain Favor score, indicating how pleased the Master is with them. Should this score drop below zero, the maid is dismissed and will lose the game. However, maids about to be dismissed can reduce their ability scores for extra Favor to stay in the game. Doing so also makes them less capable of gaining more Favor on their own, possibly trapping them in a vicious cycle.
