OVA, The Anime Roleplaying Game: First Impression

I'm probably what you would call and 'oldtaku', that is, an anime fan that has been an anime fan for a very long time relatively speaking. I'm not so much of an anime fan nowadays. I'll pick up some manga or get into whatever good anime I hear about that's on one of the streaming channels that I subscribe to, but I'm not as avid of a consumer as I used to be. But I have attended a few conventions and delved deep into anime and manga to the point where it became a subculture for me and I'm pretty familiar with the tropes and trappings that come with it. That's not very important for this overview but I thought I should note where I am coming from when I got this product, OVA: The Anime Roleplaying Game.

So, I mostly play pathfinder and while there are many realms and genres that Pathfinder can simulate sometimes (often) jumping on that train is difficult or downright impractical, even when it's possible. So I've been opening up to some new games since I had a few games to run that needed something different and because of my background noted above some of those concepts are inspired by anime or are directly playing around with an anime setting. I wanted to toy around with modern settings and giant robots, magical girls, high school shoujo drama. All kinds of things that would make a fun game and an anime focused game seemed to be a good place to start.

Now this started with my wife wanting to run Sailor Moon after I discovered a copy of the Sailor Moon RPG from publisher Guardians of Order, so of course my first stop was Big Eye Small Mouth, a generic anime rpg from the same publishers. Actually sorting out what edition I wanted and getting a hard copy for a reasonable price proved more annoying than I wanted so I landed on something that usually came up whenever 'anime roleplaying' is discussed along with it being pretty rules lite. I came across it at my local game store and took a shot. But is it worth it?

Your Character

To make your character there is a list of Abilities and Disadvantages. Each of these have a rating ranging from +/-1 to +/-5. more often than not these add bonuses to your rolls but the numbers also represent different degrees of whatever the ability is. After that you write out the derived information for your attacks and get +40 Health and Endurance and you have a character. That's it!

Granted things are a bit more complicated than this, mostly because all the abilities are not strict bonuses and actually can do things. Your abilities are kind of your general stats and skills where you start off as a normal and untrained in your rolls and your abilities make you something above average in a category and your weaknesses make you worse. You can also add or subtract endurance costs using Perks and Flaws. There isn't a real base rule for how to dole these things out but it does offer several ways to go about it. You can make everything a sum zero situation where all your abilities are bought with equal amounts of weaknesses , you can give points and price each ability, you can set limits on how many abilities you can use. Its really more of a freeform flavor driven game and that's emphasized by two abilities, Gear and Transform. Gear is a zero cost ability that can have other abilities attached to it only it has the bonus of being able to be given to others and has the downside of it being able to be taken from you and you don't get it back. This isn't really an ability and more of an item and is in fact the only way to really get a new item since there isn't really a gear section or other way for gear to work. If you have players that find something like a magic sword in a treasure chest, there isn't a way to give them that item other than to grant them an ability that has the gear ability (or the weapon flaw). So the game is pretty abstract in what constitutes as an ability and the balance between them. Transform is less of an ability but an ability multiplier. You get to transform into some something that has a net total of abilities equal to twice the ability points you put into it. Its blatantly not equal to other abilities by that fact alone.

So for most contexts its a bad idea to hand over the book to players and just letting them use all the options build a character with whatever build limitation you choose because a number of them aren't balanced at all and are situationally appropriate. This is fine for the minimalistic approach but really I sure wish that these things were divided up a bit better. Gear, Vehicle and Weapon are really cornerstone concepts for the game that define any item that the players could come across that they didn't buy with an ability and its off balancing if you take it away or give out uneven prizes, and handing out items is fundamental in pretty much every game I know. It would have been nice to have more of a guide to it or at least have abilities like that scooted to a sidebar. Also Transform is one of those abilities where everyone has it or no one has it. But that's probably just me. I'm not often one for game rules that seem like nebulous blobs so I guess my only real beef is that these concepts aren't broken down enough in the book and they get passed over as another ability and even that is somewhat fair given the general lack of standard guidelines for even assigning abilities making the game made up of more suggestions than rules and being a generic system with this kind of framework means that you have to sort it out yourself anyways since we're trying to do Giant Robots and powerless schoolgirls in the same book.

 Playing the Game

Task resolution is 2d6 to do about anything. Only they aren't added up, you take the highest roll. If two dice are the same number then you can add them up and take that as the number you rolled. This is important because abilities you gain often add dice to this roll. For example; a + 2 adds two dice to the roll and you take the highest dice with like numbers combining. This takes a second to get used to but works out.  The bonuses you get are stackable when they cover the same subject but have a different source. For example if you be smart, and also have an encyclopedia that is also smart in a particular subject and combined they add a ton of dice to your roll.What you roll for what isn't always codified so this can be pretty abstract.

Combat works similarly. You roll initiative and get one action a turn. You add up everything that adds to your attack roll and roll off against the opponent's defense roll.  If you succeed then the difference subtracts from the opponent's HP. Some abilities multiplies this damage. If your HP goes down to nothing damage is dealt to your Endurance instead. If both go down to zero then you are incapacitated.  There's a bit more to it but its not very complicated. Where I do find things a bit complicated is the defense roll itself. How dice are rolled already involves some dice sorting and having two people people do that at every offensive action seems annoying. I really wish there was some kind of derived stat for defense. I'm sure it wouldn't' be too hard. The other issue I have is that if your initiative sucks you can reroll it to try to get a better position. That doesn't seem too bad but for me any time I run initiative I don't keep track of the original numbered rolled because that's annoying and usually useless to keep track of.

Conclusion

I'm usually not that big on games that are as abstract as this. I tend to get by on a bit more meat and crunch. At least a hard separation between items and innate abilities or how things equate to each other. But to some extent I do have to think a little differently to express my feelings for this game because although it is a generic system the range within the tropes it's trying to represent are really broad and goes from the mundane to the over-the-top. Its also not a game of strategy or even roleplaying, from the mechanical point of view. This can be seen as bad but I've never been a fan of game mechanics that tell me how to roleplay and the games I needed this to run aren't strategic fighting/war scenarios. OVA is somewhat roleplaying games at it's core. Its using limits and numbers to define what you can and can't do and from there you play pretend and its more of a skeleton of a game or a tool than a solid game itself.

Despite being light on the rules the game is pretty flexible and it does cover quite a bit of tropes that I wanted to play around with from anime. Its abstract to a degree but has a solid list of codified abilities that aren't so codified that ab-libbing and or guessing isn't a norm. Its useful for what I want to do but I don't see using this for very long campaigns because mechanically it isn't very interesting or have places to really explore and grow. For throwing together a one shot or a short campaign of anime-like subgenre like school romance, magical girl, sentai or mecha, this works out fine enough to hammer something out that you can quickly play and I find it useful for being really flexible in that regard so I expect to use it quite a bit, especially since it can go from slice of life mundane to extreme and overpowered. That and its the most adequate backbone for a pokemon game I've seen and I think I prefer it for specific weird subgenres compared to Savage Worlds or FATE because unlike Savage Worlds it has worthwhile social Abilities and Drawbacks that become really interesting and relevant and interesting and powerful things aren't stuck behind a wall of reality, and unlike FATE what exists and what works are abstracted but still has some definition and structure (and a way to make up stuff), instead of leaving you to your own devices. You're also allowed to get a bit more cartoony here with silly things like Gag Damage existing.

So if you want to do a lot of games a bit niche and are short to medium campaigns, I would highly recommend OVA. If you're going for something a bit more complicated and long but want to deal with these tropes I think you're better off with a more narrow game or system that deals with the subgenre you want specifically. Otherwise this is a useful tool that will save you a boatload of money due to how flexible it can be in very few words while still being stable enough to really get a handle on things.

The only obstacle is that the sample NPCs aren't entirely useful and there aren't any examples of equipment that is agnostic from the player. I wish there was a creature and item book or something.  The NPCs and example characters are more useful for understanding how you're supposed to build characters and how the rules replicate what you want and really I think that more time spent on elaborating things would have worked better because the system is way more useful than it initially appears once you figure out how to make things work. I think of it less as a system and more as a system builder like FATE only with less guesswork and making things up and that's probably because I'm not used to or am somewhat biased towards the newer age gaming systems that are more abstract and freeform. 


Of course I want to talk about this game a bit more but there isn't really any published support so the next I talk about it will be in the realm of play reports or things that I've found. Maybe at some point I'll make my own weapon list and NPC stat blocks that are more useful to GMs.

Ryuutama: First Impression

Lets talk about Ryuutama: Natural Fantasy Roleplay

I'm not sure where to start with this one. Have you ever seen pictures of the Japanese translation of early Dungeons and Dragons and thought "Wow! this....

... makes regular D&D look outright grimdark.". Thats the kind of feeling I got reading this book. Its kind of adventury but also adorable anime-ish.

At first glance this looks like an adorable pseudo D&D but its really not. First of all, although there is a combat system in place and a full on bestiary at the end, the game doesn't really stress it. For the most part the game emphasizes environmental and traveling rules and the GM mechanics seem to lean the game towards teaching that table how to play roleplaying games in general than anything else.

Your Character

Four ability scores, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Spirit, that are defined by dice scaling from a d4 to a d12. For most interaction you're going to roll two of any of these to do anything. For example; Attacking with a heavy weapon is Strength + Strength, Attacking with a medium weapon is Dexterity + Strength, perception checks are Dexterity + Intelligence and so on. Often there will be some number to boost this from other character choices. Double the max number is a critical success. Double 1s is a fumble which gives you fumble dice, a kind of luck mechanic to compensate for failure.

You choose a class which is less like classes in typical fantasy RPGs and more like backgrounds and proffessions. These are things like merchants, farmers and artisans. these front load you a few abilities that often function as skills but also are just abilities that happen. almost none of them have any combat relevancy. Where you get something that's more like typical classes are when you choose a type out of Attack, Technical and Magic. Even then roughly half the abilities matter in combat. The Magic type lets you get spells each level which is split into low, middle and high magic. The magic itself has very few options and makes you less of a wizard and more of a magical housewife, with almighty spells like making someone mopey. Okay, sure there's some curing and a mystical bolt in there along with a few other combat relevant spells but you get the picture with this game. Not only are the images adorable but the general tone of most of the options add up to cutesy-wutesy adventures of traveling for miles to return the one puppy to it's mommy in Mount Cuddles and along the way you fight goblins that are also catgirls.

There are ten levels which net you some dice increases, extra types and extra classes. Not much else to say really.

Playing the game.

The item section has some abstractions but is surprisingly robust for the nature of the game. About the only part that's disappointing is that animals have no mechanics other than being an item that carries stuff and eats your food, and magic weapons aren't really elaborated on. Carrying capacity is a thing which means that your skills for traveling and strategy in doing so is actually pretty crucial since tracking food and water is important. Each morning you make a check to see how you feel so you better keep yourself healthy too. In fact where the game gets really hardcore in terms of how much foresight you need is the traveling rules. They're simple and obvious but you have to be careful about traveling in the wrong terrain without enough resources. If you just grab a few tents and potions you're going to die fast.

Combat exists but in a relatively minimalistic way. Its a little kinda almost exactly like a JRPG. You get initiative and gets one action a turn. The battlefield is enemies on one side and players on the other side. Each side has a back row, that can't be hit with melee attacks, and a front row that can. When there are no enemies on the front row, the back row becomes the front row. And that's basically it. Combat is actually a little discouraged and pretty lethal if you mess around with the wrong thing so it isn't that important so I can forgive it for being weird. Personally I think a simple closed/near/far combat distancing would go better and will probably be my house rule. But as I said, there's a pretty functional bestiary in there so you have something to work with.

The GM

The GM gets its own DMPC here. The Gamemaster controls a dragon that's basically some kind of guardian spirit that is overseeing the player's adventure for whatever reason. You get two sets of abilities that are blessings or dues ex machina for to help them out a bit, even being able to reveal the fact that you exist to them to help them. You have a limit on how often you do this because it drains your HP and really you're just as likely to remain a voyeur towards the party if they are getting along fine on their own.

Conclusion

I actually like this game. But I have to say that it is very limited. Travel is the name of the game here and you go from point A to point B with low key adventures and a few battles. Not much to it past that. The game feels like a slice of life fantasy anime than a grand adventure and I want to emphasize that I'm okay with that, its just kind of one note. That said, the rules are pretty solid. Some of the mechanics are actually pretty clever in how they handle the scaling dice. If you want to do anything that is at all complex with combat you have to put a bit of thought into it since it is beyond abstract. But that's the kind of game it is. Its minimal and does its job of having heartwarming adventures with very mundane fantasy humans and I'm just upset because I have a really difficult time finding anything to do in an RPG where something isn't getting punched in the face on a regular basis. Worse yet is that at it's skeleton its a pretty decent system that could use some more content to really get off the ground as more than just a kiddie romp adventure where you can easily die of dysentery.

One thing that this game does seem to excel at without snark from the carebear-hating violent psychopath side of my brain is that its a pretty good gateway to other fantasy games. The game is simple to understand without being totally dumb, the GM mechanic teaches you how to run a game, basic concepts like items, spells, travel and adventure are pretty hardcoded in there along with foresight and monsters. As a 'My first D&D' the game works pretty well and that's probably why I really like it. Plus you get to slow down and really have a slice of life cutesy adventure where you can just have fun and explore without the game getting so abstract that exploration doesn't really seem worth it.

Ryuutama doesn't exactly have support in the sense that there aren't any published adventures or settings or anything like that so It'll be rare that I talk about it from this point on. But its on my play list so when I find fan material I like I'll talk about it and I'll eventually talk about what I wind up doing with it.

I'm done with Pathfinder

Sorry for the clickbaity title but this post came from really strong feelings that occured due to a breaking point. But really its not as bad as it sounds.

What do I mean when I say that I'm 'done' with Pathfinder? Well here's what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that I'll stop talking about Pathfinder on this blog. It doesn't mean that I'll stop writing reviews of third party material or ignoring news about it. It doesn't mean that I am angry at Paizo or Pathfinder. It doesn't mean that I'll stop playing Pathfinder.

What it does mean is that I won't be going out of my way to buy new Pathfinder material whether its third part stuff or Paizo stuff. I'll pick up some things that I wanted to pick up for a long time and things that are too good to pass up but I'm not thrilled with getting more stuff and will soon eliminate my Pathfinder budget. The Villain Codex will be my last hardcover purchase. The hardcover Curse of the Crimson Throne will be my last Adventure Path purchase. I do not intend to get new Player Companions or Campaign Settings. I have some third party things I intend to get to round out what I have, such as the remaining Spheres of Power supplements and maybe additions to the corruptions from Horror Adventures. But that's it.

Why?

1) I have enough stuff.

I have a shelf dedicated to holding all my Pathfinder hardcovers and the player companions/campaign settings. I have another shelf that holds all my print third party stuff. I have another shelf that's half full holding my adventure paths and modules. I haven't gotten the chance to even use all of it. I've only completed less than half the adventures I have, I have used bits and pieces of most of the other material but I haven't really used much of the options and classes and alternate rules that are on these shelves. The same goes for the gigabytes of pdfs on my computer. I'm pretty sure that I have enough Pathfinder material to last me a long while before I get bored, and better yet I have enough material to handle most concepts, settings, and styles that I can think of as long as they have some magic in it. I have material for outer space, cyberpunk, Ebberon-like dungeonpunk, and almost 200 different classes to work with. I'm good. I don't need any more. I can already do whatever I want now. For christsake, I have Ponyfinder, Thunderscape, and Aethera coming soon. I can throw ponies in space with magitech arms coming out of their backs that shoot lasers and they all fly through Stargates in a TARDIS to fight Galactus (LPJ's Crisis of the World Eater). What else do I really need at this point? Even the additions to the stuff I like are getting kind of unappealing because I'm not bored with what I have already. I have third party things that are expansive enough to represent things that will keep me busy for years but still have new things coming out of it. I was not actually ready for a Path of War 2. I wasn't ready for anything psionic past Ultimate Psionics. I already have so many things to do with that material.

2) Starfinder is coming.

I dedicated a lot of effort to collecting material to bring Pathfinder into outer space and making scifi or sci-fantasy adventures. Now Paizo is putting out an entire game where it's on a silver platter, and given the space Pathfinder game I'm currently running it'll probably go smoother than what I'm doing right now because I'll tell you right now that it is difficult to manage even with all the scifi crap that's out. Depending on what it winds up looking like I'm either going to discard or convert the scifi material I have because I know that Starfinder is going to wind up becoming my go-to Sci-fantasy game leaving Pathfinder to handle the straight fantasy stuff. That's an entire realm to be explored now that there is going to be a dedicated corner of Paizo working on it. And that's when we already have a shrinking new idea pool in Pathfinder itself that we take a huge chunk of territory to handle and just shoot it over to a new game. Plus its a new game to learn that's probably less crunchy than Pathfinder but likely more crunchy than Dungeons and Dragons. Either way given my enthusiasm for Space stuff in Pathfinder I'm all but guaranteed to buy Starfinder and Starfinder is pretty much going to talk over quite a few grounds that I use Pathfinder to cover because of it's nature. And its not just Starfinder.

3) I've been playing other games lately. 

So here is the list of games that I've been getting into lately and will probably talk about more on this blog. Ryuutama, Savage Worlds, Dungeons and Dragons, OVA, Golden Sky Stories, and Fate. Now I have assorted feelings about each of these but most of them have a place and a mode of play that Pathfinder doesn't really reach or does not reach easily. I think that if I want to run a module or one-shot from Pathfinder, I'd much rather do Dungeons and Dragons than Pathfinder because its faster to make a character and conversion is very easy. Pathfinder doesn't do low fantasy very well and I suspect Starfinder won't do 'hard' scifi very well so I've been getting into Savage Worlds. Same goes for anyone who is fairly mundane like college students  and stuff like that is hard to do with Pathfinder because even 'mundane' classes get super sturdy quickly. Some games I really need to represent something obscure or deal with entire campaigns where fighting just isn't a thing so I have the other stuff.  Its not that I'm tired of medieval fantasy or whatever Golarion is, I just have some other stuff to play too and in some cases they are absorbing some aspects that I was using Pathfinder for due to campaign length or complexity. And really once that happens the more I don't need new Pathfinder stuff. I already have what I need to represent medieval fantasy to renaissance steampunk with airships, but I also want to play around with contemporary settings with normal people or a high school drama, or fighting Nazis on a land of the lost. I just have some other stuff to play and I don't want to deal with Pathfinder to do it because Pathfinder is kind of complicated. Which leads to my next point.

4)  Pathfinder is kind of huge, bloated and unbalanced. 

Over the course of collecting third party material I think I've found ways to handle pretty much any general balance issue that exists in the game. If magic in general is overpowered, just replace it with something more far reaching and more balanced. If martial options are too week there's stuff out there to make them better from just better options or entire rewrites or replaces the weaker classes. Skill distribution is unbalanced? Just introduce rules from Pathfinder Unchained. But that's the way that Pathfinder is 'unbalanced'.  Pathfinder is unbalanced starting from its very premise just by the fact that it is very possible to have a badly made character and very possible to make a very well made character and the gap between that is huge. that the Strategy Guide exists is somewhat proof of this and that it starts with the core rulebook. Because of this as the game releases more and more options this gap gets wider. Now it is entirely possible to restrict books so that things aren't overwhelming but that kind of makes it seem like the complexity, the glut of options and the growth you experience by being able to make a 'good' character is a bad thing when that's one of the best parts about the game. It gives choices meaning, it makes you think about your character and it makes just the process of making a character an exciting experience. Not only that but having to look up stuff, crunch numbers or make builds just adds to the amount of hours being involved with the game and if that is fun for you, then its just more hours of having fun and the fun extends past the table. However there's a consequence to this and that is that new players that don't want to or can't look deeper into the rules because they don't want to spend the time or don't have the time or don't find it fun just kind of fall behind. It is possible to come to a table and your character just sucks and the rest of the party has to carry you or ignore you whenever combat happens, or even worse, the other players have to reign it in because one or more player can't hack it and start to resent not being able to do anything because its overpowered by comparison or use interesting options because it's restricted to another book.  When everyone is on the same page Pathfinder works beautifully even if everyone is a new player just learning the game but I personally am starting to resent everyone when they aren't on the same page. I have to tell some players to tone it down because other players aren't up to speed and the gap is so huge that they need to basically break a leg to get in line. I have to spend an entire session to teach players how to make a character, even though they have played the game before, while the players that know what they're doing either have to twiddle their thumbs or just not attend session zero. I have to check character sheets so that players aren't running around with vanilla Rangers with 10 wisdom (which has happened before) or that they aren't geared towards making an army of summons or clones. I have to adjust the difficulty of NPCs so that they have to be able to handle the guy with a million AC but not be capable of immediately killing the guy that still doesn't know how Power Attack works. Its actually less work when everyone is overpowered because I can throw whatever I want at them and I don't have to check character sheets or explain things. Its also easier when everyone sucks because I don't need to look at stat blocks that look like essays because NPCs don't do anything more complicated than run up and attack, plus everyone is learning and growing together and getting into more and more advanced options and ways of thinking. But for now, since I actually like perusing and using the huge list of options I perfer to play or run Pathfinder when everyone knows what they're doing and leave everyone else to Dungeons and Dragons.

5) I have far too many adventures to run. 

I like making adventures that are interesting or quirky or play around with genre. I also have a lot of published adventures. And really I find it difficult to get through them all and part of that is because I primarily focus on Pathfinder. One thing you'll notice is that the list earlier of RPGs I'm getting into is full of non fussy and easy systems. These aren't the only RPGs I own or that I like,  but I only have room in my heart for one really crunchy system and the list is full of simpler games for expediency and price. I want to be able to run more concepts as one shots or short campaigns and I'm tired of doing that with Pathfinder because it is option heavy and front-loaded. If you bother to make a character in Pathfinder using a bunch of options and stuff I imagine that you're in for the long haul. At least 12 levels of campaigning that can take about a year. Because that character took work and investment compared to the 5 minutes it takes to make a character in Savage Worlds, Dungeons and Dragons, or FATE. So those adventures that take a few levels or five sessions to complete seems like a waste of time. Worse yet, I have trouble keeping a Pathfinder game going for long before somebody has a baby, or gets a new job or some other obligation and nobody can agree on a new time. The only adventure path I personally saw from start to finish had 12 different players go in and out, and only two of us (not including the GM) were there from the start. I have several Pathfinder Adventure Paths and actually got to play about half of them due to this. And again, I love having an invested character built from a ton of options in a long game but sometimes I can't do that or I only have a certain range or a certain power level of ideas. Sometimes I just shorten them out so we can get something done that has an actual conclusion. This is why the primary new games I'm getting into is FATE, OVA, and particularly, Savage Worlds. For a low price I can get a lot done really quick and the range is wide. Heck, I don't even like FATE all that much but its a game that builds other games instead of a game that has a very narrow focus so I'm good with it enough to need it for obscure concepts rather than having to pick up a whole new game that can only handle it's own specific type of play. And despite the difficulty to maintain group long enough to complete an adventure path apparently I have a lot of people in my area that want to play and like my campaigns so I just have a lot on my hands and Pathfinder doesn't go through it fast enough.


So that's why I'm done with getting new Pathfinder stuff. As I said before this doesn't mean that I will stop posting new reviews of third party stuff. I have enough of a backlog to go on with that for a long time. I also won't stop playing and running Pathfinder because I do really like the system. Some would say 'with it's warts and all' but in my case I really like the warts. I'm like a troll from Elfquest, that stuff just gets me off. I just have had my fill of it in the sense that I have more than enough to do quite a bit and lately I've been getting into things that can handle whatever Pathfinder can't handle without getting too much in the way. I just hit a wall where new Pathfinder stuff isn't really useful to me anymore so I'm just going to stop.

As it stands now, here is my RPG list and what I use for what.

Pathfinder: Heroic Fantasy and Dungeonpunk for long campaigns.
Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition: Heroic fantasy for short Pathfinder modules or string of modules.
Starfinder: Mostly speculation but, heroic sci-fantasy for long campaigns.
Savage Worlds: Contemporary fantasy/horror, gritty fantasy and dungeonpunk, hard sci-fi, superheroes, and anachronistic pulp for long or short campaigns.
Ryuutama/Golden Sky Stories: For their intended purposes (they have very narrow modes of play). Particularly for young players.
OVA/FATE: the remaining weird stuff that needs abstract or very narrow sets of mechanics like high school romance or replicating a linear subgenre. Particularly non-action or non violent subjects.

FATE, D&D and Savage Worlds has the most support so I'm going to talk about those on this blog the most after Pathfinder and maybe Starfinder when it comes out. Of course this is pending my overview of each of those games as a whole.