What is... Defenders of Tokyo 3rd Edition (3D&T) 3D&T is primarily a game about powerful heroes. It is based on video games and anime (Japanese cartoons). It is a game of magic weapons, robotic armor, monsters that devour buildings, tournaments that decide the fate of worlds, and martial artists who can manipulate energy in their hands. This is always true, but 3D&T can also have sub-genres: Medieval fantasy (as in Magic Knight Rayearth, Records of Lodoss War, Slayers ...), martial arts tournaments (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dragon Ball ...), science fiction (Aliens vs. Predator, Megaman, Macross ...), horror (Darkstalkers ...) and even humor (Pokemon, Ranma ½ ...). Some game's rules seek to simulate reality as much as possible. Not 3D&T. Here, the most important thing is that you can throw fireballs, destroy a wall with a burst of snow, or knock out a villain by beating him with an electrical towel - and we don't need to explain how that can happen. We're not trying to be logical or realistic here. It is meant to be epic, fast, cosmic, mind-blowing ... all that stuff we love from video games and anime. Part 1 - What is RPG? RPG comes from Role-Playing Game, and means "Character-Playing Game". Playing an RPG is like "playing pretend": you pretend to be someone else; she acts like she would act and thinks like she would think. It's a kind of theater, but with no script to follow. The story just happens. RPGs are games of make-believe, games of storytelling. The adventure unfolds as players make decisions, acting out their roles in imaginative worlds. Sitting around a table, taking notes and rolling dice, they experience epic adventures, exciting trips, and terrifying dangers! Playing an RPG is like watching a movie or reading a comic book, but YOU participating in the story. Yes, forget the comfort and safety of the chair: in this world of adventures and dangers, YOU must fight to survive. YOU must decipher the puzzles, find the exits and fight enemies. Who Wins? No one and everyone. An RPG game does not end with winners and losers. Winning or losing is not important. Not really. The only major goal of playing RPGs is to create a fun and engaging story, in which players take on the role of the main characters. In other words, RPGs are just meant to be fun. And that is no small thing. This is a game of cooperation and teamwork. In a n RPG, we have a group of players(PCs) and a Master. The Master offers a challenge, an adventure, and players must solve. An RPG game never needs to end. The Master can continue forever, adventure after adventure, with the same players How to Play? To play RPG you do not need a board, computer, or video game console. You just need this book, pencil, eraser, a given common six-sided ... and a group of fun friends. This game supports four to six players, or even more if the Master can handle it. One will be the Master. Others will each fill out a character sheet, showing the hero that will be used during the adventure. The sheet has numbers and information that will be explained later. You prepared? Yeah, you are! RPGs can be different from all the other games you know, but it will also be familiar. At some point in your life you've played to make-believe, which is almost the same. The only major difference is that in the RPG, there are rules. Playing an RPG is like living another reality, participating in adventures in a world that exists in the imagination. In this world you can be a great superhero, an armored warrior, a mysterious magician, a martial artist... whatever you want! You design your hero. And much of the fun is just inventing this character. Origin This type of game was born in the US in 1974. The world's first RPG was called Dungeons & Dragons ("D&D"). It was a medieval fantasy game, with swords and magic, knights, elves and wizards exploring caves and ruins for missions, challenging monsters, and glorious treasures. The D&D world is much better known in Brazil through the cartoon Caverna do Dragão (same as the American Dungeons and Dragons cartoon), which perfectly illustrates the game. A group of heroes fighting evil in a fantasy world. Medieval fantasy has always been the most popular genre in RPGs. D&D evolved and became AD&D, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and is the most popular RPG world. However, with time there were many other games based in other genres: science fiction (Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, Invasion...), horror (Vampire, Werewolf, Dark, Call of Cthulhu ...), humor (Paranoia, Toon ...) and even RPGs about Brazilian themes (Desafio dos Bandeirantes, Era do Caos...). Part 2 - The CHARACTER The players in an RPG pretend to be someone else. They pretend to be a character. So to play an RPG, first you will need a character. The character is the hero who will participate in adventures, obeying the commands of the player that controls it. He is like a video game fighter who preforms moves when you press the buttons. The difference is that instead of pushing buttons, you say aloud what your character will do. What the player speaks, the character does. If the player says "I'm opening the door," actually is not him, but his character, trying to open the door. Character Building Several 3D&T modules published to date have various characters ready to play. Using a ready character saves the player some work and lets people start playing faster. However, much of the fun RPG is actually to create your own hero. Next you will learn rules about the process we use to generate a character - but it is you who will provide the most important material: your imagination. Anyone can make accounts and fill out a form with information, but this is not enough to have an interesting character. The first thing to do is come up with a concept, a basic idea. What will your character be? A barbarian warrior with a magic ax and a panther skin thrown over the shoulders? A sorcererous vampire hunter? A street fighter seeking revenge? A bionic ninja crime fighter? You can be all that and anything else you can imagine. After choosing a concept, the next step is to fill out the Character Sheet - a type of form that you'll find at the back of this book. You can print the page or just copy your information separate paper. When completed, the sheet will function as a record of the things your character can do. This information will be important in the game: you will need to have the sheet around during the adventure. You have some freedom to fill the sheet, but not complete freedom! The sheet measures the power of the character, and there are limits to that power. To make your hero, you get 12 character points: these points will be used to "buy" powers for the character. Features The features are the most important information about your character – they are numbers that tell you how good he is something. The higher the feature's rating, the more powerful it will be. They range from 0 to 5, but certain characters and powerful creatures can have even higher features. The features are: Force, Skill, Toughness, Armor, and Firepower. They may also appear abbreviated as F, S, T, A, and FP respectively. Normal people almost always have 0 in all of these characteristics; a value of 1 corresponds to the maximum possible for "normal humans". Any value above 1 is already considered heroic or superhuman - which is very common for 3D&T adventurers. When you build a character, each character point buys a feature point. You can, for example, use 12 points to buy 2 Force, 4 Speed, 1 Toughness, 2 Armor, and 3 Firepower (2 + 4 + 1 + 2 + 3 = 12). Pencil in the appropriate "dots" on the Character Sheet. A newly created character can never have any feature greater than 5, no matter how many points he has to spend. Hit Points (HP) Hit points, or HP, are the "vital energy" of the character, like your energy bar in a video game. The more hit points he has, the harder it will be to kill him! Normal humans have only one HP, but a player character might have 6, 10 or even 30 HP. You do not buy HP directly; they depend on the Toughness rating of the character. We'll explain the specifics later. Advantages and Disadvantages Advantages are powers or special abilities that each character has. Disadvantages are their weaknesses, things that hinder your performance. Each character has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Further on, you'll find a list containing several advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are bought with points. Instead of spending all points on features, you should save some to have things like an Ally, a Special Attack, Invisibility, or other things. Each has its own cost, usually 1 or 2 points. You can buy as many benefits you want, if you can afford them. You can also take Disadvantages to earn points. Each Disadvantage gives 1, 2, 3 or even 4 extra points to spend on features or benefits. Masters will have a limit on how many points you can gain from Disadvantages. Finishing Touches Now that the character is almost ready, stop and examine everything. Do his Features, Advantages, and Disadvantages make sense with the concept that you have chosen? What is the origin of its Firepower: rays, knives, arrows or something else? If he is a knight in armor, why can he use Medicine? If you are a warrior-robot, why can he use Telepathy? We're not saying it's forbidden to do things like that - video games and anime are full of characters with powers and absurd abilities! But, it will always be more interesting if there is a reason for it.