 Howdy how's it going? My name's Daffy Chappy and today we're gonna take a deep dive into the world of screaming, bulging muscles and horribly aged Japanese humor. No, it's not Tuesday night at the Chappy Estate, we're taking a look at the granddaddy of shonen anime, Dragon Ball Z. Now, a bit of disclaimer, this episode of the Daffy Chappy show was ghostwritten by Stuart of the Loading Crew. You know, the guy who did the Pokemon video with me a little while ago, he's back and we're doing a bit of a collab, but not a collab. See, over on his channel he's got a video called How to Ride a Dragon Ball campaign, where he takes you through the process of how to capture the soul and feel of DBZ and put it in to D&D. Meanwhile, on the Dungeon Coaches channel, he's walking you through his Super Saiyan class that they made together for 5e. So you get three videos today, all Dragon Ball themed, how to write, how to play, and the history of Dragon Ball RPGs. Feel free to check those out once this is over. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, and if you wanna know how to write and how to play after you're finished listening to the history of Dragon Ball RPGs, then you can go watch their videos after this is all over. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, for those of you not in the know, Dragon Ball is a manga series created by Akira Toriyama in 1984 about a mystical monkey boy named Son Goku. The series started off as a gag and was meant to just play tribute to cheesy kung fu action films, and it drew heavy inspiration from the fantasy epic journey to the west. As the series evolved, it grew into a new show called Dragon Ball Z, which became infinitely more popular and it spawned tons of comics, spinoffs, video games, live action movies, really bad live action movies, and so many hashtag canon sequels you'd be forgiven if you couldn't keep track of it at all. I myself am not a very big Dragon Ball fan, despite the, hmm, obvious attractions. But I've gotten enough second hand knowledge of it that I'm pretty confident it's got like aliens in it, and some of the aliens are robots, right? That might make me look smart. Anyway, much like other non-D&D games that we've covered on the channel, there's a bit of a history to what we're gonna talk about. Lots of licensed RPGs have come and gone over the years, and some have received a great deal of fanfare, some give their honest try, but get forgotten by Snake Way, and some others come in, make a mess on the floor, and then leave without cleaning it up. The Dragon Ball Z game is somewhere near that last bit. The book series, and yes, it's a series, was written by Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the Cyberpunk campaign setting. Yeah, that's Cyberpunk with the game. The first book was printed in 1999, and it was called Dragon Ball Z, the anime adventure game. The ultimate martial artist battle for control of the cosmos! And that's just book one. About a third of the book itself is actually kind of useless, because if you're already familiar with the Dragon Ball world, the book spends a great deal of time talking about the start of the Saiyan saga, and talking to the reader as if they have no idea what the hell they just picked up. So once you skip the first third of the book, you get to the actual crunchy numbers of the game, and boy howdy captain, is there a bunch of crunch in this game. The system that is used is called the fusion system, with a Z, or a Z if you drive on the wrong side of the road. Fusion, TM, is a mix of Cyberpunk's interlock rule set and some early editions of Hero that Pondsmith used in a few of his games. There are two variations to Fusion, depending on how much math you wanted to play with. Total Fusion was the system default that was meant to make a character from scratch, and then Instant Fusion lets you pay a thousand life points to summon a monster from your deck. That's a little Yu-Gi-Oh joke for you. The fusion system focuses on four main stats, four derived stats, and skill stats. The four main stats are physical, how strong and tough you are, mental, how smart, willful, and perceptive you are, combat, you're a natural aptitude for hitting a thing, movement, how far you move per turn, and from those four main stats you get the derived stats. Defense is five times your physical, hits is basically hit points, which is ten times your physical, power up, which is how much power you can gather in one turn, also derived from physical, but also some mental, and power level, the source of a million YouTube videos. The weird thing about power level in this game is that it actually changes throughout the course of your campaign wildly, sometimes even turn by turn. The skills are derived from your stats, but you'll notice that physical is pretty OP, and combat is the secondary stat, while mental becomes everybody's dumb stat. Body is physical, anything involving non-combat, mind is mental using your brains. Evasion is for combat, dodging attacks, fighting is also for combat, making unarmed strikes and special techniques. Weapon also combat, but no one will ever use it. Power is either physical or mental, and it's your effective mana pool. Now I threw a lot of stats at you, so there's already a lot to keep track of, but it's hopefully not too much of your use to role-playing game. And once you familiarize yourself with the stats, you can start making your character, and luckily for you, that is even more complicated. So unlike in 5e, where you can just pick a race in a class and your background, and then you're all done, this game has you roll for your races, and in the first book, there are only three. Earthlings, Saiyans, and Namekians. If you want to make a Saiyan, you got to roll 2d6, and you have to roll Snake Eyes. Otherwise, you are an Earthling. And if you want to play a Namekian, you got to roll a 3. If you get any other number, you're an Earthling. Congratulations. And notice how I said Earthling, not human. The Dragon Ball Z world is a surprisingly diverse place, and Toriyama's planet Earth is actually pretty creative. So this means that you can be a basic bitch human, a flying dinosaur that fires Play-Doh loogies, or a furry. So to that end, you're going to want to figure out what sort of Earthling you want to play. If you need help with that, you can check out Stuart's video, where he gives the most cutting-edge and expert advice into the Dragon Ball world. And he's also incredibly handsome. Wait a minute, Stuart, stop plugging your stuff into my videos. Anyway, you got 40 points to play with, and you can mix and match them in whatever of the four main stats that you want. Three to four points in anything is average, seven to eight is pretty strong, while ten is superhuman. You're allowed to go as high or as low as you want, but before you become giga-chad and jump all your stats into body, beware that these four stats will never ever change and will stick with you throughout the whole game. Once you're done with all that, you get 50 points to put into your skills, and then it's off to the dojo, where you literally just make up abilities and techniques to shout out when you make your characters. This is either an amazing part of the process, or a miserable one, as you come up with your own special attacks with DM, and you guys determine together what you want your moves to be. Most of the time, you're just rolling combat plus fighting plus 3d6 to determine how well you use that ability, and you can go as crazy or as subdued as you would like. But once you and your buddies have your characters ready, you can head out into the Dragon World and start getting into some fights. Combat is actually pretty crunchy and pretty unfun, mostly because this is Dragon Ball World and numbers are everything. If you're fighting, say, an android whose numbers are bigger than yours by any significant margin, then you're likely to turn your fist into jelly before you even scratch the clothes that they stole from the convenience store. As mentioned earlier, pretty much everything is done through a skill check of pretty much combat fighting 3d6. The total is then subtracted by the enemy's defense. At the end of the round, the enemy then regains hit points equal to their physical times too. If you have any general knowledge of how long tabletop combat can take you, then you might understand why five minutes in the show is suddenly stretched to 50 episodes. And there's actually even more crunch to it, but it gets to the finer points of combat, like blocking, getting up, or Piccolo's trademark dodge. And while these combat maneuvers do a pretty good job of emulating the DBZ feel on paper, once your numbers are getting so big that you're capable of destroying mountains and you're fighting villains to match, the numbers get so big that you might be wondering, what's the 3d6 gonna do? Well, once your numbers start getting any traction, you're gonna start multiplying those 3d6 by 10 and then 100, and then even 1000 if you're someone like Goku. Now, getting into the finer points of combat could take all day and it's a bit complicated, but if you've ever watched Dragon Ball, the battles are flashy and big, and they get big reactions out of everything. The people react, the environment reacts, the audience reacts. The game goes out of its way to describe as many of these interactions that it can between fighters, especially once people start throwing the Kamehameha's around. So overall, this system is flawed and kind of slow, but damn it if they didn't give it the good ol' college try. The book series is discontinued, but they did publish three different adventure books going from the Saiyan all the way to the Cell Saga. They really put their hopes in the fusion system and gave it their best, but then after a while, the numbers just get too ridiculous for it to even be understandable, or you might still want to look at the book because Pondsmith put cute notes on the side of the pages. Also, side note, according to book 2, Krillin's power level is so huge that he can, I quote, beat Superman with just his pinky. Of course, if you were an intellectual who watched Death Battle, then you would know the truth that Superman can destroy each and every person in this stupid universe. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to like, comment, make sure that you check out the other two videos in the series, one from the loading crew who's creating a Dragon Ball world in D&D, and the dungeon coach who's teaching you how to play a Super Saiyan class. You can find both of their links in the description below, as well as all the links to all of my social media. And maybe support me on Patreon so that I can eventually get around to watching Dragon Ball Z myself and not just looking up all the fights on YouTube. But yeah, Daffy out.