Smooth Criminals

While there are plenty of new Perks and Flaws, and a number of refinements to them, one a lot of you may appreciate is the revised Ranged Perk. What's so great about it? For one thing, it's free!

Well, sort of. Ranged has been split into two separate Perks. The first is simply Ranged, which does what you expect it to: allows Attacks and other Abilities to be used in a distant-y fashion. In the old game, this Perk tacked on a +5 Endurance cost. The most obvious consequence of this was it made making grunts with handguns problematic. They can barely afford +1 Abilities, much less be saddled with Endurance costs. But even for full-fledged heroes, I found you didn't get very much bang for your buck. Since OVA assumes that everyone in a given scuffle can reach anyone and deliver a beatdown barring some satisfying excuse (sniping from a building, dropping stuff from a zeppelin, or otherwise being justifiably far away), it just wasn't worth the Endurance expense for such a marginally useful Perk.

Of course, the new Ranged didn't get off exactly scott-free. It's now made expressly clear when you use this Perk that you do not get to add any Strong bonuses. Also, unlike hand-to-hand attacks, ranged fighting is guaranteed to mess up the surroundings, which pending on the locale, can be a very bad idea.

But if you like your attacks with a little muscle, you can purchase the Ranged, Strength-Powered Perk, allowing you to put your full might into it in exchange for the +5 Endurance cost. Overall this seems a little fairer, and it certainly settles once and for all what Ranged Attacks get to add Strong and which do not.

These two use the Ranged perk in both of its new facets. Ancel knows all about attacking his opponents from a distance using a grand arsenal of weaponry and his expert skill. Zurkrieg's raw power is evident in everything he does, but he certainly exhibits it when using his length-changing cane. But with their stylish suits and unassuming day jobs, you may not see the danger until it is much too late.

Master of Magic

The Magic Abilities, both Arcane and Witchcraft, are the only ones to retain an Endurance cost. Despite this, the rules here have also seen streamlining. Like elsewhere, Players can now use the Ability Perks and Flaws to alter the nature, and the Endurance cost, of each spell. No longer are there built in Endurance costs for casting without gestures, or even without words. All of these, if desired, are handled through the Perk/Flaw System.

The Endurance cost itself has also been simplified. Instead of annoying math like "pay half the initial Endurance cost each round" for keeping a spell in effect, there is no such extra expenditure. The amount you pay up front is the amount you pay, no matter how long the spell is in effect.

The rub is that this Endurance cannot be regained until the spell is relinquished. That 10 Endurance you spent is gone, no matter how much you rest, until you give up the effects of the spell. It's like a semi-permanent chunk of your character's fighting spirit is locked away within it. It's certainly easier to handle, and I think it is more thematically appropriate to the Ability.

Auren certainly knows his way around magic. But despite all his knowledge as a venerable sage in his world, nothing can prepare him for life as a Japanese teenager in ours.

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.

A Little Something for Nothing

Even though it's a change you may not notice right off, many of the Abilities have been reworked in one significant way: They're Endurance free!

That's right, no Ability has a built-in Endurance cost anymore – Well, except for Magic, but we'll get to that. While it worked okay in the original book, the way some Abilities cost Endurance and others did not begged an obvious question. "Why this one and not that one?" While there were a few cases that an argument could be made, for the most part there simply wasn't a good reason. Worse, in cases like Barrier and Heal, the exchange of Health for Endurance made them questionably useful. So problems like these have been eliminated.

This segways into another change observant readers may have already noticed, and that's the adjusted role of Perks and Flaws. Originally, these could only be applied to a select few Abilities, and mainly the Power Move Ability. The rename from "Power Perks and Flaws" to "Ability Perks and Flaws" carries with it the capacity to apply many of these to any Ability in the game. Of course, logic and common sense rule, but it's a change that allows much more versatility and a little less shoe-horning. That's not to say it's a free ticket, as some of the previous Abilities have been weakened a little to compensate. How do you get them back up to par? With Perks and Flaws, of course.

Magic still has a built-in Endurance cost due to its powerful nature. But it's an exception that seems to make sense. Magic is always tiring, after all. And the power to mimick every other Ability – or in the case of witchcraft, Weakness – is a power that needs some drawback.

Endurance also has some other new roles, but that's a topic for another day. For now, I leave you under the watchful eyes of Captain Jiro and Dr. Tomori. Between Jiro's compuslive work ethic and Tomori's network omnipresence, can you ever really be sure you're alone?

A Rose by Any Other Name...

It was a conscious decision to not refer to the new book as a Second Edition. While there are a handful of significant changes, you're not looking at the sort of wide-swept revision seen between 2nd and 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons (or 1st and 2nd or 3rd and 4th for that matter). By and large, a person with a copy of the 1st Edition of OVA and the new Revised Edition can carry on a conversation and even play a game together without confusing each other too much. While new rules and rule changes will be discussed in later posts, I am going to address the substantial number of name changes. Certain Abilities and terms in the original game were a bit unclear, ambiguous, or simply a little inconsistent, and I'm using the Revised Edition to repair some of that. Hopefully the following list will prepare you all at least a bit, though it fails to mention new, removed, or otherwise drastically altered Abilities and Weaknesses. The Original Edition version appears first, followed by the Revised Edition term in bold. Any notes on changes will appear in italics.

Damage Total · Damage Multiplier Damage Total was always misleading, as it was not really a total of anything. Damage Multiplier conveys its actual purpose much better.

Acrobatics · Acrobatic This will be one of many changes for more "description" oriented names for Abilities. I wanted, whenever possible, for character sheets to read like a description of the character. Oddball nouns like Acrobatics or Invention fail to do that well.
Armor · Armored
Charisma · Charismatic
Intimidation · Intimidating
Invention · Inventor
Occult Knowledge · Spirit Medium
Servant · Companion
Unnatural Resistance · Resistance

Airhead · Clueless
Strange Personal Habit · Strange Habit
Unnatural Weakness · Vulnerability

Power Perks and Flaws · Ability Perks and Flaws

Extra Knockback · Mighty Blow
No Attack Gesture · No Gesture
No Knockback · Feather Blow
Slow · Delayed Changed to prevent confusion between the Slow Weakness and the Slow Flaw

On the art front, everyone's favorite robo-girl Miho and her hapless savior Braun make their revised debut. The designs should be familiar to old readers, but there are quite a few new details.