Third day of PAX East today, but the main thing I want to talk about tonight is what we’ve been collectively doing for the past couple of hours: creating characters in Maid: The Role-Playing Game, an anime-inspired tabletop roleplaying game that I hadn’t even heard of this weekend.
Maid is a peculiar and hilarious game, heavily based on random generation. Of course, you can pick and choose the characteristics you want to customise things a bit more, but the true joy of character creation in Maid comes from rolling dice and seeing what on Earth happens.
For example, the character I rolled was a boyish lolita (who actually is a guy) with an overactive imagination who was born into a hereditary line of maids and who binge eats when she has a “stress explosion”. Another character rolled by one of our number was a super-cool blind ninja maid who wields a raygun (called Ray Charles… work it out) and who is actually a traitorous infiltrator of the master’s household. There’s a huge combination of characteristics, which make for some hilariously complex and deeply flawed characters.
We’ve spent about two hours creating characters and haven’t actually tried playing the game at all yet, but it’s been an absolute blast. From what I understand, it can be played in three different ways: purely based on randomly generated events, as a more structured “adventure” or in a competitive manner where all the maid players are attempting to win as much “favour” from the master as possible.
I’ve ordered my own copy of the game, since when I went to try and pick it up today at PAX it had sold out — apparently it’s been a popular product for the past few years ever since it first came to light. Fortunately, I found that Amazon had a copy for a pretty cheap price, so I’m looking forward to perusing it at my leisure when I get home. And perhaps — hopefully — convincing some of my more open-minded friends to give it a try at some point!
It’s a fine example of the creativity that you’ll come across if you head a little bit off the beaten track — not just in video games, but also in tabletop games and other media, too. It’s a gloriously chaotic game that doesn’t take itself anywhere near as seriously as some of the more established tabletop role-playing games — not that that’s anything negative in itself, but sometimes you don’t want the hardcore “weight” of a Dungeons and Dragons and just want to play something a little… ridiculous. And Maid certainly appears to cater to that.
Can’t wait to give it a proper try.
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