Level Up!

An integral part of any role-playing game is the growth of its player characters. But with a game like OVA this can be a tad problematic. Since the game doesn't shoehorn Players into creating characters of a certain power level, you can often see the green-behind-the-ears apprentice fighting side-by-side with the old hat magician. While it's perfectly feasible for a neophyte to rack up experience quickly and gain power exponentially, the grizzled sage should, if we listen to anime, not progress much at all. With the old experience system, there is some slow-down when you talk about higher level Abilities. But even if you're progressing from Level 4 to the ultimate Level 5, you can theoretically gain the appropriate number of points in two or three adventures. Obviously not ideal.

The Revised game gives the Game Master more control by applying one of three Experience schemes on the Players: Fast, Moderate, and Slow Growth.

Fast Growth is effectively the old system. Spend an Experience Point for every level of the Ability you want to attain, making sure to buy all levels in between. Going from 3 to 4 would costs 4 points. Going from 3 to 5 would cost 9 points – buying both Level 4 and Level 5 at a one-for-one basis.

Moderate Growth makes you multiply the cost by 5. Going from 3 to 4 would now cost 20 points. Characters will still progress, especially if they're just buffing up some of their weaker points, but they will no longer shoot up with wild abandon.

Slow Growth is, obviously, the slowest method, appropriate for games with experienced characters who you don't really expect to change much even after many adventures. The cost is multiplied by 10. Going from level 3 to 4 would now cost 40 points.

The Game Master may apply these schemes to all the PCs as a whole, or individually as appropriate to their archetypes/power level. The actual book gives more guidelines on doing this. I'm still tweaking the actual numbers involved, and using 1, 2, and 5 as multipliers might be more appropriate. Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts!

As before, OVA will also allow players to dispose with traditional Experience spending entirely with guidelines on simply role-playing it out. Game Masters can also choose to give "free" Drama Dice in the stead of (or in addition to) normal Experience. While these can obviously be used during the game, these free Drama Dice may be spent between adventures to influence the course of upcoming events – and just maybe justify the chance to role-play the upping of a character's Abilities. "I want to meet a master like King Kai and train!" And so on.

Natsuki has spent all her Experience Points on one rather massive addition, her power glove. It's so bad! While its massive heft prevents her from using it every attack, it adds a serious punch to her martial arts repertoire, and gives coworkers all new things to fear at board meetings. Maybe with this new weapon in hand, she can recover her precious pet project...MIHO!

The Deflection of Exception

A goal of the Revised Edition is to remove any unnecessary permutations of the basic way things work. OVA is already a simple game, but these little speedbumps, rules that, due to their uniqueness, force reference to the book for this chart or that quick note, rarely add something that can't be handled another way.

Armor is one of these. Before, this Ability would subtract a value from all Damage taken. On the surface this makes sense, but in practice it adds another step to combat. Nowhere else does anything add or subtract from Damage, and the Armor chart itself is not similar to any other Ability's progression.

So how is this fixed? Instead of subtracting from the final Damage dealt, Armor now subtracts from the attacker's Damage Multiplier by an amount equal to Armor's Level. If the attack has a DM of 4, and Armor is Level 2, then the attacker's DM is 2. It's very simple, very quick, and doesn't involve subtracting numbers from an ever changing amount of Damage.

The major effect of this change is that Armor is now a little stronger at low Levels and arguably weaker at high Levels. But considering Level 1 Armor used to subtract a pointless 2 Damage, it's not a bad change.

But what happens when the DM is reduced below 1? You may remember the Weak Weakness and the Unnatural Resistance Ability gave rules for fractional Damage Multipliers, with such nonsense as "one Damage for every three dealt." All that is gone. Instead, if your DM is ever reduced below one for any reason, treat it as 1/2. Or, if you find it simpler, treat it as normal and then half the final Damage. No complicated fractions, and your Damage output is still satisfyingly weakened.

Shadowman here is easily the most heavily armored character in OVA. His ebon shell is not only his protection and his source of power, but also the very thing that keeps him alive.

Stand and Deliver!

One of the most intrinsic parts of many characters is how they make things go boom. Anime is nothing if not rife with powerful heroes wielding magnificent weaponry, displaying fantastic martial arts, or otherwise decimating the landscape. The original OVA represented this through three completely separate Abilities – Weapon, Martial Arts, and Power Move – and none of these are handled in the same way. Weapon applies the game's perks in a manner completely different from Power Move, and Martial Arts forbids them entirely. To make things worse, I still see people from time to time using Power Move in completely oddball fashions. OVA Revised fixes this pretty simply.

By getting rid of all of them.

Yes, you heard right. In their place is the new Attack Ability. Attack is delightfully simple. Give it a Level, add that level to your Damage, and you're done. You don't have to do anything further. In the game, you can describe this in any number of ways. Energy blasts, roundhouse kicks, thrown furniture, it doesn't really matter. Damage is always the same.

This works great for quickly created goons and other badguys, or with newbie players, but leaves a little to be desired for most of us. If you want more detail, the Perks and Flaws are still here, and this time around, they always work the same way. Define a suite of specifically defined attacks, and then add Perks and Flaws. Perks always add to the Endurance cost, and Flaws always reduce it. It's sort of like Power Move used to work, only now there's not that pesky minimum Endurance Cost or the confusing Damage progression table.

The sheer versatility this allows is extensive. Instead of simply giving a character Martial Arts, he can now have a plethora of moves that achieve different things. A character can have a saber, a chi-strike, and a fireball attack without having to go through the drudgery of buying three separate Abilities and learning three different ways to handle Perks and Flaws.

And that's the basics of it. Something I still wrestle with is the name, though. I just know people are going to try to add Attack to their Attack Roll, which should never be done. But yet, try as I might, no other word is as all-encompassing as "Attack." It works for everything from guns to rapiers to waves of fire. Feel free to comment with your thoughts!

Shou here is all about attacking. He'll start a conflict for no reason other than it seemed like great fun at the time. And to him, it is.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Anime Gaming

One of OVA's greatest strengths is the diverse ways in which rules can be applied. With this diversity, however, comes the price of ambiguity. It's good and well that a given rule can be applied in many ways, but that fails to help if you cannot figure out how to represent a particular idea with it. To guide you on the way, the text is now sprinkled with new Expanded Notes boxes. Instead of explicitly clarifying rules or giving examples of the rules in action, they supply specific ways of how the rules could be used. Next to Scale, an expanded notes box gives tips on how to apply Scale to a mecha campaign. Transformation gives several wildly divergent applications of the Ability to cover everything from henshin transformations to power armors. And an extended description of the Attack Ability describes exactly how to create offensive techniques ranging martial arts, firearms, and energy blasts.

Wait, Attack Ability? What's that you say? You'll have to find out next week!

An Entry to Endure

As hinted at in the previous post, Endurance has a significant new use; it now represents a character's ability to endure. This seems self-evident, but it can't hurt to have some explicit rules on the matter!

Before I can fully explain, I have to clarify what constitutes a round. In the Revised Game, a round is a nonspecific period of time, one that can be represent the seconds between a furious exchange of blows or minutes of lengthy expository dialogue as heroic adversaries size each other up. All a round is, then, is time enough for everyone to perform an action, and it is no longer a chronological division limited to combat alone.

Whenever a character is attempting to do something strenuous over an extended period of time, they spend Endurance to do so. How much depends on the task, and specific Endurance costs are further explained in the actual book. The effort is split up into rounds.

A classic example is the party's resident muscle-head holding up a collapsing building as others attempt to escape. Each round everyone takes results in the strong character losing 10 Endurance. So what happens if everyone takes too long and Muscle-head runs out of Endurance? He may simply give up, allowing the building to collapse and trap others inside as he steps to safety. But that isn't very heroic, is it? Instead, he may choose to press on, and begins to lose Health instead. If Health is exhausted, the character immediately falls unconscious and has no option of saving himself. The building collapses with him inside. Can he still be rescued? Well...I guess you'll have to see in your game.

Endurance also covers actions like holding your breath, resisting dangerous gasses, and other tests of stamina. No need to keep in mind hard to remember formulas or having to account for minutes in an otherwise abstract representation of time. It's all very simple.

Acacia here is certainly capable of conjuring all kinds of obstacles to test the Player Character's Endurance. Her devious witchcraft can cripple even the most stalwart of heroes, but her unrequited love for her partner Saspar could prove to be her undoing.

The Question of Man Versus Mecha

One of the recurring questions I see about the original OVA was "how well does it handle mecha?" Surely, giant robots are an integral part of anime, so it's a logical concern. But I've never honestly understood why mecha automatically follow a different subset of rules than any other character in the game. I have seen other RPGs devote entire new chapters for mecha, but at the end of the day, the only difference is one part of the book refers to an advantage as "speedy" and in another as "enhanced engines." It's unnecessary. Mecha are characters too, just a little bit bigger and with a pilot for a brain.

That said, there has been a glaring omission that makes running mecha games more problematic, and that's the question of scale. In OVA, everything is relative. The idea of an Ability ranked at +3 being excellent is compared to what would be average for that character. And what is average for a human being has very different implications than what is average for, say, an automobile. Even a slow, rattletrap truck is considerably faster than a marathon-running athlete.

To resolve this, there is now something called the Scale Advantage. Whenever these is a conflict of scale, the Game Master rules that one side or the other has a Scale Advantage. That side gets a +5 bonus to their roll. To use our previous example, a truck with -1 Slow would roll one pitiful die in a test of speed, while our marathon runner with Quick +3 would get 5 dice. But with the Scale Advantage, the truck can now muster 6 dice. A more fair comparison, surely.

However, in OVA, scale is a dynamic consideration. It's not possible to simply create a mecha scale, a starship scale, and a Death Star scale. If we revisit our example again, imagine our truck and runner both trying to navigate an alley way riddled with tight turns, heavy dumpsters, and obstructing buildings. Clearly the marathon runner is much more nimble than the hulking hooptie. The truck would have no Scale Advantage. In fact, if the surroundings are especially difficult to traverse, the Game Master may give the Scale Advantage to the runner! It's a quick, easy calculation, and requires no conversions, complex math, or other game-bogging considerations.

The idea of Scale Advantage being on a case-by-case basis, instead of a permanent part of a character, also allows different cinematic treatment of mecha. In Evangelion, Gundam, and other typical giant robot shows, mecha would have Scale Advantages for everything from Quick to Armored. On the other hand, these mecha can be torn to pieces by human combatants in shows like Project A-ko, and should receive few, if any, of these things.

Someone else familiar with scale is the mischievous kitsune Nazo. While perhaps not on quite the same level as towering mecha, Nazo's ability to alter her appearance and size makes her a dangerous adversary indeed.