Ryo Kamiya’s Maid RPG is many things; a comedy TTRPG, an anime game, the first Japanese RPG to be translated into English. It’s also one of the most divisive RPGs, but regardless, I don’t think any list of essential comedy, one-shot, and / or rules-lite games would be complete without Maid RPG. Allow me to tell you Maid RPG’s story; its history, its mechanics, and its reception, as well as the stories of a few other games that use the same system. But first, let’s address the fact that you probably already know of Maid RPG.

What is Maid RPG?

Most people probably assume Maid RPG is a niche game, but the numbers say otherwise; it’s a “Mithral Best Seller” on DriveThruRPG, the second highest sales ranking on the website. Maid RPG, as of 1/28/2024, was in the 0.48% highest selling products sold on the website. Once you remove D&D retroclones and popular modules from the equation, Maid RPG has to be one of the best-selling core rulebooks on the entire platform.

The first page of Maid’s PDF also mentions that the game has been widely pirated in the past, and the game was only listed on DriveThruRPG a few years after its initial release, which means that the DriveThruRPG numbers don’t entirely convey the game’s popularity.

I’m sure many of the people who own Maid RPG don’t love advertising that about themselves, though, which is understandable. It’s a comedy game, but many people assume otherwise.

Maid RPG, released into English in 2008, was the first Japanese TTRPG ever translated into English. It was originally written by Ryo Kamiya, a Japanese game designer described by English-translator Ewen Cluney as being an “iconoclast”. [My Life With Maid RPG pg 5]

The localization process began when Diamond Sutra, eventual publisher of Maid RPG, stumbled across a copy of the game while visiting the Yellow Submarine game store in Akihabara. Cluney, an acquaintance of his, heard about the game through him and purchased his own copy. Cluney translated enough of the game to run it for English speakers at GenCon, and the two decided to do an official localization after a few successful games.

Diamond Sutra contacted Ryo Kamiya, and publisher Sunset Games, to get the rights to produce a localization. Clueny translated the game, with P.H. Lee doing layout work for the book. Within a year the entire process had finished, with the game was completed in time for GenCon 2008. The rest is history. [Maid RPG pg 201 – 202, Yaruki Zero Podcast ep 14]

Maid RPG Basics

Maid RPG is a very simple rules-lite game. Almost every roll in the game uses a single D6 multiplied by an attribute stat, and the most complicated elements in the game, at least on a surface level, are more logistically difficult than anything [see: timers and Stress Explosions].

Maid RPG’s premise is simple; it’s a game about a Master [or Mistress] and their maids. Maids compete with one another to earn Favor Points from their Master. If a maid accumulates too much Stress from bad things happening or receiving damage, they go into a Stress Explosion, which means they engage in a negative impulse for as many minutes as they’ve exceeded their limit [examples include gambling, racing, shopping, and complaining].

Each game of Maid RPG starts with character creation. Character creation in Maid involves several D6 and D66 random tables [D66 means using one D6 for the tens place and the other for ones]. Players roll a “Maid Type”, attributes, and various “Special Qualities”.

Special Qualities in Maid RPG can get pretty wild. A maid can secretly be a member of a cult, a succubus, a shapeshifter, or an android, amongst many other things. Some qualities are hidden in sub-tables that a player refers to after completing an initial roll [e.g. Shapeshifter -> Snake].

Rolling up Special Qualities to design weird maids might sound like lazy lolrandom aughts comedy, but that’s a shallow read on how things really work in the game. The real humor comes out when a cyborg vampire has to start interacting with a few other equally unusual characters; things will happen that nobody could possibly anticipate.

This random element continues with the game’s random event tables. Whenever the GM gets bored, or a player decides to spend a few points, there are a handful of random event tables that can be referred to. These tables contain many possible events, most of which are fairly outlandish [“The mansion is attacked by terrorists!“, “A demon is unsealed!“, “A cursed laughing doll is in the yard!“]. There are specific tables for certain genres, such as fantasy and science fiction.

That covers most of Maid RPG, but there are many optional rules and different playstyles detailed in the core rulebook. A massive list of optional items is available for players, a butler option is available for people who’d rather not be a maid, and some included scenarios encourage a bit more grounding and less randomness than “normal” play.

My Entry and Thoughts

Maid RPG was the first TTRPG I ever played, or more specifically GM’d, which often surprises people. I guess I happened to fall into TTRPGs in a strange way, because I somehow found myself reading game design theory before I ever played a game. Some of the earliest TTRPG stuff I ever read was Ron Edwards talking about how systems matter and a few pieces from Vincent Baker’s website, and so I didn’t make the common mistake of trying to use D&D for something other than stealing stuff from monsters.

Somehow this led to me stumbling onto Maid RPG, a game that is both rules-lite and designed to facilitate maid-related play. As I discovered Maid I also read a bunch of translator Ewen Cluney’s thoughts on rules-lite games like Toon and Ghostbusters, which really informed my TTRPG-related sensibilities.

Anyways, I created a reference sheet for myself, and then ran a game of Maid RPG over Discord with a few friends and had a lot of fun. I still remember the first random event that I rolled; it was a demon appearing. I immediately froze up and didn’t know what to do, but one of my players, who’d rolled a cultist maid, said that they had summoned the demon. Things went very smoothly after that, and I still think about how magic that was. For me, that was a perfect RPG moment.

I do have some thoughts on Maid RPG that I should share. A mistake I made when first trying to play Maid RPG is having the Mistress of the house be a sexy Domme, which is not how the game is supposed to work. The Master or Mistress of the house should be a pathetic loser who sucks, basically. This is how most anime about maids work, but because those anime are niche it’s easy to mess up some of the genre-emulation aspects of the game. Cluney mentions in his zine My Life With Maid RPG that the Japanese maid fad that inspired Maid RPG passed years ago, which certainly doesn’t help.

Players can also have trouble getting the hang of Maid RPG. Ewen Cluney discusses this in the introductory chapter of the rulebook:

“In playing the game with Americans . . . I’ve noticed a definite pattern in how they roleplay their maids. Either they almost completely ignore the Master and run amok, or they’re ridiculously subservient to his every whim.” – Maid RPG, Pg 5.

A maid should do what is asked of them, but they should also put up some resistance and not do everything with a smile. This comedy dynamic is difficult to get a hold of for a handful of reasons; like I said before most people have not seen the handful of anime Maid RPG is trying to emulate. To the rulebook’s credit, the opening of the book does list a handful of anime to watch for reference, but obviously this implies that a group of players will watch an anime for the sake of what will most likely be a one-shot game.

As I stated earlier, action resolution in Maid is done by rolling a single D6 and multiplying it by a character’s relevant attribute. It’s a good thing that Maid RPG has very simple mechanics because it’s a surprisingly difficult game to GM; Cluney himself described it as being “the single most exhausting game to run”. The highly improvisational nature of the game means that it’s entirely possible for a GM to find themselves at a loss, like with the demon example I mentioned earlier. Rolling a handful of random events in advance in order to come up with names for random NPCs and such certainly helps, but only so much.

Constantly roleplaying as a Master in addition to doing normal GM things also makes things difficult; many games have quest-givers, but in most games the quest-givers do not actually follow the players around. It’s easy for a GM to get so busy with other NPCs and explaining succeses and failures that the Master gets lost in the shuffle and fades into the background.

Something else that can be difficult for both players and the GM is maid conflict. Players are supposed to compete with one another in order to earn favor points, but this means that the Master has to regularly give orders, and also that the players actually try to compete and undermine one another. Most TTRPGs don’t have dynamics like this, and so it can be difficult for a table to capture the right mood.

All of the things I described relating to GMing the game, having resistance as a maid, and the light PvP elements are “skill issue” things rather than problems with the game itself. But I do have some real complaints about Maid RPG, not including some problematic elements I’ll discuss later.

If a revised edition is ever released I’d love it if the random Special Qualities tables were divided into “deep” and “cosmetic” categories; a player who rolls an amnesiac fairy necromancer will have a lot more to work with than someone who rolled a character with freckles, black leather gloves, and curly hair. I always tell my players to roll characters with two “deep” qualities and one “cosmetic” quality.

Circling back to my comments about Stress Explosions, if stress could be worked off by doing discrete actions related to the stress behavior instead of using a timer, that would be easier to manage without using apps or sand timers or whatever; I’m surprised it isn’t an optional rule already included in the book¹.

I also feel like the selection of Attributes is a bit flawed. This is maybe more of a reflection of the game of Maid I recently GM’d than anything else, because I didn’t remember having this complaint before, but out of the six Attributes [Athletics, Affection, Skill, Cunning, Luck, Will], I feel like “Skill” ends up getting used way too often. Granted, this may have been because someone rolled a scientist character and they kept trying to do science things, but it did feel like 80% of all the rolls in that game pertained to Skill. The fact Ewen Cluney changed the attributes around in the two Maid-derived games I’ll discuss later makes me think I’m right to have this criticism.

Those are all the negative things I really have to say about Maid, because everything else about the game is basically perfect. Everything in the rules is there to facilitate a specific end result, and the end result is fun and enjoyable. The kinds of things that happen in a game of Maid are usually outlandish and bizarre, and if the GM and players bring a modicum of emotional grounding it usually ends up creating very memorable stories.

Most of the people who are willing to approach Maid RPG on its own merits really enjoy it, but obviously there are some big hurdles relating to the game that a lot of people have trouble overcoming.

Reactions

When Maid RPG was released in English in 2008 it received a wide variety of reactions. Some people recognized it as a great game. Others had some valid criticisms relating to the content of the book. Many hated it just because it was an anime game.

There are things about Maid RPG that are definitely a bit questionable. Perhaps the most infamous part of the game is that one of the “Maid Types” is “Lolita”, right there on the first page of character creation. The book helpfully guides players to a glossary that points out lolita means something different in Japan than America, but regardless, you’d be hard-pressed to find a criticism of Maid RPG that doesn’t mention that lolita is one of the six character types. When I run a game of Maid RPG I always re-roll when a player rolls a lolita character. Ewen Cluney himself has regrets about not changing “lolita” to “cute” in character creation [My Life With Maid RPG pg 16].

There are some other awkward elements as well. “Actually a guy” is a Special Quality, which mostly feels a little tone-deaf [“You’re actually a guy (cross-dresser?). Or possibly a hermaphrodite”]. Having “brown skin” is a Special Quality instead of something the player can just choose, which is awkward. There are more questionable things in the book, but those are the most obvious ones.

There is some sexual content in the game I haven’t mentioned. Maids receive penalties for having parts of their uniforms damaged, or otherwise removed. When rolling special qualities characters can roll a “perversion”, which includes options like “nymphomaniac”, “masochist”, and, regrettably, “likes them young”. There are optional rules for seduction, and more than a few suggestive items in the aforementioned massive item table.

You might be wondering why I didn’t mention any of this earlier, and it’s because, maid uniform stuff aside, all of it is optional. The perversion Special Qualities table is an optional alternative to the much more PG “relationship” table, which instead has interesting relationship web-building entries like “sibling”, “mentor”, and “friendly rival”. And the aforementioned “likes them young” Special Quality helpfully informs us that “you can decide what age range this entails”. We all know what Ryo Kamiya meant by “likes them young”, but at least we can act like we dont!

On page 5 of the core book the localization team helpfully outlines that a game of Maid will, logically, be at a PG-13 level. I think this puts a lot of faith in the MPAA, but there’s also an element of truth to it; most of the manga Maid is inspired by were first published in shonen magazines in Japan [“shonen” being the younger male demographic]. I was a bit surprised to hear in a podcast episode featuring all three members of the localization team that they all mostly ignore the more risque optional rules. I myself have always kept my Maid games at a PG-13 level, because I’ve never played with players who wanted to go further; I’ve even GM’ed a handful of times for a sex repulsed player.

Obviously all of the sexual content is in the book, and running a PG-13 game does occasionally mean “censoring” things by re-rolling during character creation and such. I won’t pretend otherwise, but it does disappoint me that some people center the sexual content in the game so heavily when it’s really not integral to the experience of playing it. And, it should go without saying, disconcerting underage jokes aside, there’s nothing wrong with the rest of the adult content, assuming you’re playing with a group of consenting adults.

The team that localized Maid RPG have always made sure to convey that, in Japan, Maid RPG registers as being an obvious joke game, and also that the game is not “normal” in Japan; the core rulebook itself says “Maid RPG is weird in Japan too” [pg 201]. Ewen Cluney elaborates:

I’ve likened Maid RPG to those used panty vending machines in that it’s the sort of thing some Westerners imagine is normal in Japan when it’s really a bizarre obscurity that most Japanese people either have never heard of or just shake their heads at. Thinking about it that way makes me feel ambivalent about having unleashed an English version [of Maid RPG]. [My Life With Maid RPG pg 6]

Some people, such as RPG.net reviewer Christopher W. Richeson, “got” Maid RPG immediately, and understood the satirical / ironic nature of the game. But many others did not; a user named hyphz in the RPG.net forums made a thread titled This is a little disturbing. The opening post of the thread concluded thusly:

I mean, all due respect for AndyK [Diamond Sutra] and the team’s translation efforts. And apart from this kind of thing [referring to the lolita stuff I mentioned earlier], there’s actually a lot of really good (or at least fun) things in Maid. But damn, did they have to make it a book which won’t just get strange looks from non-gamers, but could actually get you sacked, or ostracised? Is this really the message they needed to send about “the first Japanese RPG to be translated into English?”

The debates spurred by this thread lasted for 53 pages before being locked. If you spend enough time in TTRPG spaces, you’ll probably notice that a lot of players dislike games with sexual elements on principle. It’s not surprising that some people might feel personally uncomfortable with sexual subject matter, but as you might expect these aforementioned people sometimes make moralizing judgements on everyone who plays such games. You’ll probably also notice some sweeping generalizations relating to anime inspired games, not unlike middle aged comic book fans who are proud of hating manga, or Looney Tune fans who hate anime.

That RPG.net review and thread were from 2008. By 2012, the atmosphere around Maid RPG hadn’t changed much; Jonathan Drain of the D20 Source RPG Blog summed it up like this:

“Some people won’t like Maid RPG. They’re not secure enough in their masculinity to roleplay a female character in a frilly dress. They’re put off by the unrealistic anime-style setting, or the sample play-through where somebody steals another maid’s underwear, or the strange optional rules that let maids roll to seduce the Master for bonus XP.“

In 2016, Mike Sugarbaker wrote a somewhat presumptuous piece about Maid RPG, where he explained why he thought releasing the game was a poor decision, on both a financial and common sense level:

“The failure of cultural translation was utterly predictable with MAID – enough so that its publication, the first of an original Japanese RPG into English to make it to print, was neither a great business move nor a good strategy for opening American minds to Japanese RPGs . . . There’s no saving MAID in the Western market. You could possibly reskin the system and sell the conversion, but that’s not the same. And you could run and sell it at anime cons, but not outside anime culture.“

I already shared some sales information at the beginning of this post refuting this interpretation of events, and Ewen Cluney himself wrote a blog post in response detailing the success of the game and popularity of anime amongst younger RPG players.

[If you’d like additional contemporaneous reading about Maid RPG, here’s a link to a long writeup on the game from the Something Awful forums; I can’t view the original posts, but it seems this was written in 2011.]

A lot of people dismissed Maid RPG, and continue to dismiss it, specifically because it’s an “anime game”. Gamers have been complaining about anime games for as long as there have been anime games; in Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, Laws states “You may want to run an anime game, but if one of your most enthusiastic players tells you he’s not interested because Japanese animation is “weird”, you may have to resort instead to an old favorite” [pg 12]. That was back in 2002, but the attitude is even older than that.

TTRPGs and anime have a long, shared history in America. It probably helps that, for a long time, being into anime was about as nerdy as being into tabletop games. The first American TTRPG inspired by anime, Mekton, was published in 1984, a mere decade after TTRPGs were created with D&D. A Robotech RPG followed in 1986, and the designer of Mekton made a Urusei Yatsura inspired game, Teenagers From Outer Space, in 1987. 1997 saw the release of Big Eyes, Small Mouth, one of many anime-inspired TTRPGs to treat anime as a genre rather than a medium. The Sailor Moon TTRPG used slightly modified BESM rules, and in the decades since there have been countless magical girl TTRPGs.

I think the blanket disdain many people have for anime games boils down to two things:

1: A lot of people dislike Japanese media for a variety of reasons, and these don’t have anything to do with TTRPGs. Some of these relate to misconceptions [not all anime are puerile battle shonen], some are true and valid but often overstated [the amount of misogyny in anime], and others are also true but don’t really have anything to do with anime artistically [the low cost of licensing and localizing anime / manga having a negative impact on American animation and comic industries].

2: A majority of anime TTRPGs are quite rules-lite, and people who love crunch view anime games as being flimsy and unplayable. The quirks and deficiencies BESM had undoubtedly created a few anime TTRPG stereotypes.

It definitely needs to be acknowledged that the kinds of grognards who are very into crunch are also the kinds of people who often have a blanket dislike for anime; the venn diagram overlap between these two categories is very high.

Other M.A.I.D. Engine Games by Ewen Cluney

After translating Maid RPG into English, translator Ewen Cluney made some other games using the underlying system of the game [he dubbed it the M.A.I.D. engine, which stands for “Maniacs’ Asymmetrical Interactive Delusion”]. These include Retail Magic, Mascot-tan, Kagegami High, and Schoolgirl RPG, but I’m only going to discuss the latter two here.

[If Ryo Kamiya had made other games using the same system I would also be talking about those here as well, but to my knowledge he never did; certainly nothing that has been localized. Here are links to non-M.A.I.D. engine games he wrote that have been translated: 1, 2]

To people outside of anime fandom Schoolgirl RPG probably has an even more off-putting name than Maid RPG, but in actuality there’s nothing sexual about the game. Schoolgirl RPG is meant to emulate slice-of-life and “cute girls doing cute things” anime that take place in a school setting, with a surrealistic bent. The specific inspirations listed in the book are Urusei Yatsura, Penguin Musume, School Rumble, Nichijou, and Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei.

A big problem with Schoolgirl RPG is that its hook isn’t quite as strong as Maid’s. This is more or less all the guidance provided in the rulebook for how play is supposed to work:

Roll up a group of schoolgirls, then start them off on a typical day at school. Add random events as desired until things get completely crazy, and then bring the game to some kind of conclusion. [Schoolgirl RPG Complete Edition pg 27]

Granted, for people who are more into anime than I am, the lack of overt structure may be an asset. After all, Urusei Yatsura is definitely not what I would call a slice-of-life anime, and so it’s clear that Schoolgirl RPG is meant to cover a lot of ground. For a group of four or five genre-savvy weebs, there’s probably a lot of fun to be had here.

Even if the game knows its audience, I do still find some fault with the lack of guidance; if I were to try and GM Schoolgirl RPG, I would probably be at an almost complete loss. If a future edition included an appendix outlining how a Japanese highschool works in contrast to an American highschool, among other things, that would go a long way in helping people less familiar with the material the game is trying to emulate.

[Psst, hey! I made a cool game called Goth Witches, inspired by The Craft, that takes place in catholic schools. It has an appendix entry detailing things that distinguish a catholic highschool from a regular American public school! You can buy Goth Witches, and over 500 other TTRPG-related things, in this upcoming itch.io charity bundle for transgender people in West Virginia.]

Kagegami High is also about schoolgirls, except instead of using a generic Japanese highschool setting the game takes place on a mysterious island off the coast of Tokyo. The setting is more complicated and singular, but thankfully Kagegami High has much better tools for the GM and their players, such as two introductory pages that explain the basics of the settings and basic principles to keep in mind [e.g. “make normal things into strange things”].

Kagegami High also outlines multiple different styles of play. Instead of presenting the game as a vehicle only for random events like Schoolgirl RPG, it also says that scenario-based play, and even full campaigns, are equally valid. [Nothing about Schoolgirl RPG precludes it from being used for multiple sessions, but in that game such play does feel like an afterthought.]

Schoolgirl RPG already introduced some Ghostbusters influence to the M.A.I.D. system by adding “Plot Points”, which are like a mixture of Maid Favor Points and Ghostbusters Brownie Points, but Kagegami High takes this influence further by using more-or-less the same dicepool mechanic, and also by adding a “ghost die”, which here is called the “weird die”. As someone who is a big fan of Ghostbusters, I really love the hybrid M.A.I.D. / D6 system used here, especially since the “roll 1d6 and multiply” aspect of normal Maid could sometimes be a little too swingy.

There’s one change in particular to the Ghostbusters brownie point system that I really love, which is that instead of getting an extra 1d6 per brownie point spent, players get an extra 2d6. This is great because it’s not a massive statistical improbability that a player will buy an extra d6 and roll a 1 or 2, and if players are spending their points there should be a stronger guarantee that they will succeed. In some games the uncertainty / risk may still be desirable, but I think the increased likelihood of success is great for Kagegami High, which gives players very few points to start out with as a balancing mechanism.

Also, and this is a very small thing, but I appreciate that the character sheet for Kagegami High not only is a normal character sheet, but it also includes some important reference material for players. More games that only use half of a sheet of letter paper should do this, instead of just including two character sheets on the same page. At least include PDFs with both variants!

Kagegami High doesn’t seem quite as good as Maid RPG for one-shots, but I think I would prefer using it for something designed to last multiple sessions. The changes Cluney made to Kamiya’s original system all seem like improvements to me [at least for this setting], and the surreal school enviornment seems like a lot of fun.

The only complaint I have with the book, excluding the visual design, is that it doesn’t include any scenarios. There’s a ton of great setting information, including a list of clubs, a school calendar, and descriptions of various students. The game even has inciting incident and plot generation tables, as well as a morning announcement table designed to kick-off sessions. But none of those are the same as having a couple of great situations that the game designer felt encapsulated the game laid out for a GM.

Otherwise, I think Kagegami High is an incredible game, and I definitely plan on playing it at some point in the future. Even though I’ve never played it, I know it’s good because I know that Maid is good and I know that Ghostbusters is good. I can see the bones and I know they’re sturdy. There’s a lot of fun to be had with this one.

It’s also worth mentioning here that the Maid RPG localization team have thought about releasing original supplemental material for the game; Cluney thought about making Maid RPG 120%, and P.H. Lee has thought about making a collection called Maid in America. The way Cluney describes these projects, it sounds like they’ve been abandoned, but I’d love to see them if they ever come to fruition. [My Life With Maid RPG pg 24]

The Pantheon

There have been many classic comedy TTRPGs. Toon (1984) and Ghostbusters (1986) are the two most important early entries. Teenagers From Outer Space (1987) is another seminal game, in both the comedy and anime genres. Bullwinkle and Rocky (1988) is an obscure work of genius, probably due to the amount of physical stuff included with the game as well as its dated license. Risus (1993) is mostly a comedy game because it says it is, but obviously any discussion of comedy games would be incomplete without it. InSpectres (2002) is a highly regarded, more story-game-y version of Ghostbusters, and Ninja Burger 2E is the definitive PDQ comedy game.

Does Ryo Kamiya’s Maid RPG deserve to be recognized amongst these other great comedy games?

Of course; Maid RPG is about as close to being a perfect comedy game as a game can get. The core mechanics are simple enough to fit onto a single sheet of paper, but there’s still enough mechanically happening in Maid that gameplay will inevitably move in a desired, maid-relevant direction. Character generation is fun, and the random events keep things unpredictable. Maid RPG is not only a great comedy game, but also a perfect example of a rules-lite game. It’s essential.

After all this you probably know if you want to play Maid RPG or not, assuming you haven’t already. If you’re on the fence, I urge you to give it a try; you have nothing to lose but your shame.

You can find Maid the RPG on itch.io and DTRPG; PDF version for $6 on both, with a print-on-demand option available at DTRPG.

If you enjoy Sabrina TVBand’s writing, you can read her personal blog, follow her on BlueSky and Letterboxd, view her itch.io page, and/or look at her Linktree.

1. If I played my games IRL I don’t think this would be such a sticking point for me, because IRL it’s probably a lot easier to manage timers where everyone can see them and such. Playing games online, I just have an aversion to the concept of asking a player to turn on a personal timer that I can’t see, and as a GM I’m already too busy to be dicking with a digital timer. ↩︎