OVA: a TTRPG Casual Review - Or - How I Disproved The Idea That You Can Have Too Much Anime in Your Life!

So, I needed to find a one-shot game to GM for my Kritfayle pod (not whales – just a good group of friends producing podcasts) and I wanted it to be anime flavoured. Kritfayle has been working super hard since its inception and in the last few years alone has produced dozens and dozens of actual play podcasts across at least a dozen different game systems. However, even a GM that loves telling stories to their players and entertaining listeners can benefit from a break. Thus I offered to fill in a gap in the schedule when one appeared.

    As the newest member of the group, a person might think I should just draw on my past GMing experience to run something I was familiar with, especially since there would be other GMs playing. Nope! My silly brain just snapped and I decided that since I had been in an anime mood lately, I would run an anime-esque style game. This would mean learning a new system of course, and I submit this as exhibit A for why you don’t need to be slightly insane to be a GM... but it helps.

     I had a few weeks so I looked at a number of tabletop role playing game systems including Konosuba: God's Blessing on this Wonderful World!, Fabula Ultima and Big Eyes, Small Mouth (BESM). These three all had merits, but some were too niche and some were way more complex system-wise than I wanted to digest for a fill in game. So, it was OVA: the Anime Role-Playing Game that I decided on and I’m glad I did. OVA was able to handle the flexibility of me throwing one-shots together in my own adhoc world, accommodated any concept a player was interested in running and was simple enough for me to learn fairly quickly. Essentially, it was rules light enough that it was easy to keep to the Kritfayle style of placing story and roleplaying ahead of tactical combat - perfect for an anime episode!

    I bought a copy of the rules, read through and decided that for busy people who dumped their creative energies into so many things already, playing one of the 10 pregenerated characters made sense. These all came with their own little backstories, and their stats neatly encapsulated within 2 pages. Easy to copy and have ready for each player to pick from.

    In OVA, a character has a concept (think of any anime character you know and the paragraph that would describe them) that makes them unique. Mechanically, this is then achieved through picking a balance of Abilities (powers) and Weaknesses. Those Abilities are then made more powerful or weaker through the use of Perks and Flaws that could then be applied to them. Incidentally, this is also how similar Abilities can be customized (think of making an attack that chain hits multiple people, or punches through walls, or that just knocks someone out). Much of how an Ability looks in action is also left up to the player so even the same Ability in the book can look different in action when different characters are describing them.

    The character is then kept from being too overpowered by the balancing – for example if you took an Ability with a value of +3, you would just need to find a suitable Weakness at or around a value of -3 that would also fit the character’s concept in order to balance it out (perhaps the character is a Combat Expert, but is easily Distracted... a smart villain could use that on the hero). Or several smaller ones. You try to get the character to balance out fairly close to a zero total... but the game doesn’t worry if you slop over a bit.

     Combat is a matter of rolling d6s from a pool generated by a base amount plus the Perks and minus the Flaws on an Ability. Then the character performs an action on someone or something with the Ability and applies the successes against that person or object’s chance to resist or dodge. Winner, hits and damage/effect is determined by how well the hit was made. If it was an attempt to cause damage then a multiplier is also used (determined from the perks/flaws put on an Ability/power).

    The only real complexity I found here was in figuring out the right Ability with its Perks/Flaws to use at the right time. In the pregenerated characters this was made easy by the handy little stat box each had on its 2 page description, things were nicely prefigured out. However, this is also easy to do for your own characters so in a situation you just have to describe and roll the dice which keeps the flow going.

     I also found some phrasing difficult to wrap my head around (like the way an “Attack” was applied to damage rather than the ability to make the hit land), but all games have their little quirks and it’s just a matter of playing a few times to smooth things out. A quick Google check also revealed some good advice and cheat sheets others had posted, making things even easier to understand.

    The game system obviously has more complexity if you want (including some things I didn’t pay attention to on first read through for just a one shot). However, for a storytelling game where the goal is for the players and GM just to have good ol’ anime-style fun - it seemed easy to get into and run. Like with any new system I made mistakes, but as we play more we will discuss things as a group and iron out any rules we need to. For fun – it seemed to be a success. Feel free to go listen to the episodes and judge for yourself.

-Kelly