I ran this tiny, half-assed Anima game expecting it would be kinda cool, but I realised that I actually learned a few things as a DM from it.

- First one is the obvious “I’m not comfortable if I’m not prepared right”. I don’t mean quantity of preparation, but quality. My prep was lackluster and I’ve clearly done better, even in one-shots. It had been a while since I’ve had to improvise around a bit and a few things I did were clearly wrong (having the bad captured mook resist torture. The right thing to do would’ve been to let the players have the location of the heretic base, but have them punished by their superiors for using cruel and dishonorable methods, or telling to both the characters with “See supernatural” that a strange psychic bug was latched on the back of his head, and so on).

- Second, there is such a thing has a system that encourages fluffy actions. 4E clearly does not. It’s a sad discovery, for I really really wanted to love 4E, but the more I reflect upon the nature of 4E, the more sadened I become. In Anima, it is done in 2 ways. First, every supernatural power source works in wildly different ways, but all remain pretty simple. It feels different. Secondly, there is the Style skill.

Style allows a character to look awesome, to have the wind blow dramatically in her hair, to, upon getting a “nearly hit” result, getting her clothes ripped in a way that makes it sexy and risqué, without revealing anything. It makes it so you can hear thunder and a horse’s whinny when someone says “Superball”. Of course, it’s still a novelty for the players so they use it as much as they can, but as everybody gets more comfortable with the game, I’m looking foward to see it used for more dramatic situations.

- People love when crits have hit locations. They thrive to see where it hits even if they completely murder the target. Hit locations are fun, period.

Now, there were a lot of things that went wrong with yesterday’s game.

First of all, I was half-asleep and in poor condition from an evening of videogame, beer and the wierdest sushi you’ve ever heard off (homemade “MAN” sushi. Steak, shrimps, barbeque sauce and tabasco). I was definitively not at the top of my DM-shape.

Second, my planning sucked. I had a rough outline but my game was poorly prepared and it showed. I should’ve worked a bit more with the npc’s motivation and I am overall quite dissappointed in my own performance.

But the players still loved it.

Anima is a great system, albeit a slow one. It is beautiful as it encourages cleverness in way some other, nameless RPG you probably never heard about who recently reached fourth edition, never will. A clever use of an area blinding attack during an hostage situation caused the fight to last 3 rounds, with no enemy being able to counter attack at all.  It was nasty and beautiful.

The players quickly murdered every bad guys before they could even try to slit some poor peasant’s throat. It was sad and I can’t say it showed off the combat system to it’s full glory. Although we did get to see the critical hit system quite a lot.

One of my merry players, posting here as Ophite mentionned that the system was quite cinematic so that he would very easily visualize the scene. That, I find sad, because I couldn’t get into it myself. I’m totally jealous.

All in all, I know what I have to do if I want to make this a regular game.

-Deal with it in the same way I would a World of Darkness game instead of like a DnD game. Violence gets people killed and it’s dangerous. And the players should be borderline suicidal for doing the job they do. I need to work on making combat dramatic.

-Get used to the big numbers. I’ve already figured out the basic idea behind the formula for calculating damage with the margin of success (rather easy, if it’s over starting at 30, does 10% of base damage per slice of 10. So a margin of 100 would deal full base damage. Armour cuts off 10% per armor rating. So you would need over 100 in Margin of success to deal any kind of damage to a AT 10 monster.

-Make my own list of NPCs, and maybe a few house rules. I want to set up a minion system instead of making full 400 or 600 point characters, making a very generic mook crew (something like 40+20 per level of defense and attack, deals 30+5 per level with whatever weapon they have and they die after one hit) And find out what’s interesting to fight for 5 level one characters. Hit the sweet spot.

-Get familiar with the ranged weapon system and the conjuration system. Those 2 things will be the bane of my players. Ranged attacks are very hard to dodge and they hurt like hell, and that will fuck the utility wizard and add a slice of necessary defense tactics (or a “Send the guy with +125 initiative after ranged dudes, ASAP). Conjuration will add a few interesting beasties. I also need to build a generic conjuration manual, with 6 or 7 different monsters per level (4-6 elementals and 1-2 other things, things with names like Doom Hounds or Holy Vessel of the Broken Note)

Finally, since it looks like this game might last (albeit with a few, post-one-shot concept modification and some background work) I’ll need to figure out a few ideas for a complete story line, perhaps hit “Records of the Lodoss wars” and “Slayers” for inspiration, I’ve been meaning to watch both anyways.

All in all, despite the fact that I believed I kinda sucked, I like Anima, and so do my players. It’s too complex a game to be efficient as a one-shot and is obviously more geared towards awesome one on one duels than bigger fights, but as we all get used to it, it’ll get faster, give us a few weeks.

Hey folks!

Like some of you might know, I’ve been working on a few character sheets for a Anima one-shot set in my Heroic Orchestra setting and I have to say I’m really enjoying the character creation. It’s complex but not at a  ”You need to be a computer to create a character sheet in under an hour”.

Here’s how it works. First, you roll up your ability scores. There are eight of them, numbered between 1 to 10 but they can theoretically go up to 20. So you roll 8d10, reroll any score between 1 and 3, and replace your worst score by 9.

The ability scores : Agility (Speed and reflex), Constitution, Dexterity (hand-eye coordination), Strenght, Intelligence, Perception, Power (mystical potential) and Willpower.

Human average being 5, the method gives birth to truly incredible individuals, which is fine by me.

After the initial sorting of one’s ability scores, the player chooses a class for his character. Interesting fact : classes do not dictate a list of abilities gained as one levels up (although there are a few set boni) but gives varying costs for available abilities. For example, anyone can use magic if they take the appropriate advantages, but magic points (called Zeon in Anima, the currency used to cast spells) will cost much less development points for a wizard than it would for a Weaponmaster.

Classes are divided in 5 archtypes:

-Fighters : People with swords, axes, and various other hurty things.

-Domine : Masters of the most illustrious inner energy known as “ki”, think about anime martial-artist yelling the name of their techniques before the actual attack and you have it right. The ki system allows players to create a bunch of player-made techniques and is, overall, very very customisable without being overwhelming. It does require some bookkeeping on the players side, though.

-Psychics: They kill you with the power of their brains. They have very little limit when it comes to the quantity of uses of their powers, but can become fatigued after missing a psychic power roll and thus cripple themselves pretty badly. Even if their unlimited power use is impressive, they lack the versatility of wizards.

-Mystics: Those are the spell slingers. There are about 500 spells divided into 9 spheres (and some as “free access spells”, including the quite hillarious “Contraceptive Protection” spell). Mystics can either buy spells by getting levels in “Paths”, granting them every spell in that path up to the level they reach in it, or cherry picking spells for a higher cost. They have a pool of Zeon that regenerates at a rate of a few points per day (the book recommends getting a regeneration rate of about a tenth of one’s max Zeon) and need to concentrate (Accumulate Zeon) to move Zeon from their general pool to create a spell casting one that can be unleashed whenever. When a Mystic unleashes his magic, there are no limits to the number of spells she may cast, as long as she as the accumulated Zeon.

Novel: There is only one class in here, the Freelancer, who can buy everything for a medium-range cost. A little bit bard, a little bit commoner, he can be anything you want him to be and can change class for cheaper.

There are a total of 20 classes, each fitting in one or two of these archtypes (for example, the warlock is a Fighter-Mystic)

The character chooses 3 character points worth of advantages and may take up to three disadvantages to gain more Character point goodness.

Each character then as  600 Development points (not as much as it seems, I assure you) to divide amongst Primary Abilities (read: Stuff to inflict pain with) and  Secondary abilities (Read: Stuff you do other stuff then violence with). There are a few limitations (you can’t put more than 50% or 60%, depending on the character’s class, on the 3 groups of Primary abilities, for example)

And finally, you choose one of your secondary abilities and add one ability score modifier to it, for free. And you are done!

I’ve made 2 character sheets yet, for an Acrobatic Warrior and a Mentalist, am working on finishing up a Technician (Ki expert) and still have a Mentalist-Wizard (exactly what it sounds like) to create, and am enjoying the system, I can’t wait to try it out.

My only complaint up until now is the complete unintuitiveness of the official character sheet. Seriously, the thing is a mess. I’ve found a decent home-made french version of the sheet on http://projet.animajdr.free.fr/, a most amazing utilities/Anima-aide website.

I’ve been, lately, very much confused, when it comes to gaming. I feel the need to distance myself from the rigidity of 4E as much as I can, so I fool around, I chose experimentation.

My first (planned) foray into the wonderful world of non-modern DnD fantasy gaming will be a megadungeon campaign I plan on running between classes at university, using “Sword and Wizardry” as a gaming system. 

That did not stop my search, though, hence my discovery of Anima: Beyond Fantasy, a “Dark Fantasy” roleplaying game obviously inspired from epic fantasy anime and the most illustrious Final Fantasy Franchise (the world really feels to me as something between the fourth and the sixth game of the series).

The end result is a over the top, cinematic but still rather lethal, simple yet complex (both in good and bad ways). Here’s my review of the most impressive spanish roleplaying game.

Overview

The book is huge. And it’s gorgeous. None of this wimpy 100-200 pages craps, we are facing a humongus almost 400-pages monster, written in small prints. It’s also quite expensive. Cost me around $70, but could be bought for about $30-$40 if one would be smart enough to buy it off Amazon.com.

The book is covered in lovely anime-inspired art, even if a lot of those pretty pictures feel like they were stuck somewhere because the editors figured they had access to the art so they might as well use it.

The worst of the misplaced pics, in my opinion, was a girl resting on the ground in the “spells” section with the description “She uses *some spell* to help her rest”.

About two thirds of the book is dedicated to the game’s wide array of rules and a last third describing the games setting (although they never pressure the player into using the setting and in fact, encourage GMs to create their own a few times).

There’s a chapter-by-chapter review coming along soon, as well as a character creation post! Stay tuned!