Something that has been part of my routine in Japan almost since I moved here for the first time are my weekly RPG games at the Daydream games shop. People come and go, I leave and return to Japan, jobs change, but every Thursdays we’re there to talk and play different games.

Anyway, this week I was waiting at the shop for the others to arrive for our SLA game, when this thought came to me: A good thing of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition is that it makes it much easier to get together players who don’t completely dominate each other’s language.

A few weeks ago I ran a very simple dungeon for the group while our usual DM was away. To fill up his spot, the manager of the shop, a Japanese guy, asked if he could join in. The folks in the shop are really nice and helpful to us, so we said – sure! I was a little worried that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with us playing in English, and in part, I was right. He certainly had a lot of difficulty following the details of my descriptions, and how some parts of the story went. On the other hand, the mechanics description and the combats flowed very smoothly, because of the well defined Powers, Keywords and Status effects. Even if the names of some of those were quite different in Japanese and English, it was somehow very easy for us to understand each other when it came the time to pull out the dice.

This came about when I was thinking about offering to form a small Japanese group to play Sword and Wizardry (A 1st Edition D&D Retro Clone). After reading some game reports at ChattyDM’s RPG blog, I became very excited about trying it myself. However, as I consider the idea of DM’ing it in Japanese, I came to realize that it is a completely different beast than DM’ing 4E in a language I don’t absolutely master. While 4E has a bunch of ready made formulas that we can fall back to if communication fails, the strength of the free-form concept in older games also demands a lot more from the communication skills of the players.

So for now S&W will be limited to the online one-shot I’ll be playing this weekend with my legonian friends. Maybe in the future…