As to where this post came from all of a sudden? Allow me to explain:
I'm planning to attend MechaCon this month, and I'd recently expressed my hopes of catching an OVA game while I'm there. (For the record, all of my more recent RP'ing has been play-by-post or (more recently) IRC- & Teamspeak/Discord-based, so this would be my first actually-seated-at-a-table RP session in roughly twenty years. I make no apologies for being excited about this. :p) In the process of telling some of my fellow players about this, I was reminded of my first, and so far only, attempt to run an OVA game. (For the record, this fact isn't a reflection upon OVA, but rather upon the fact that I've a pretty full dance card, RP-wise. ^_^;; )
I'd backed the Kickstarter, y'see, and only just gotten the PDF in the same week that I'd discovered that some of my high-school/college era RPG books had survived Katrina after all. So in the interest of both celebrating this event AND testing out OVA 2ed, (NOTE: I owned 1ed, but never got to actually play it
), I trotted out a setting from GURPS Space Adventures and GURPS Space Atlas 4, using the latter to give my players an introductory adventure, then the former for the adventure proper.Note that these two were experienced players, skilled at finding & exploiting flaws in rules-sets, and house-ruling fixes for same. And as a result, I ended up with the following:
1) A teenaged Knight from a (resurgent) Jedi Order...despite this game being based on a future of the real world. This worked out better than it sounds: though knowing full well that their belief system was originally based on a work of fiction, this group of eccentrics with psychic powers decided that it was a perfectly-good framework for training their abilities anyway! :p (Note: I know these players well, and trusted them to push the system to it's limits. So I wasn't worried........much. ^^;; )
2) An Ex-Yakuza wearing a battlesuit. This wasn't much of a problem....until you considered that both the other PC and the NPC I gave them for support were teenaged and (both) kinda shy...meaning that Yakuza Vet took up the role of speaking for the party so that they didn't get steam-rolled, no matter what.
As supporrt: I geve them 1) a TSAB-trained healing & support mage (look up Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha for which setting I'm speaking of), and 2) Natsumi, modified ever-so-slightly to serve as the Espionage Party's handler. (The verbal sparring between her and the ex-Yakuza soldier alone were worth the price of admission, IMO.)
And though I didn't get to finish (RL issues; and when reminded of this game, and eager to complete it, I was reminded once again of everyone's schedules. Le sniff ^^;; ) I respectfully sumit that htis had the makings of an awesome game.
And so, I ask: has anyone ever tried anything similar with OVA? (That is: use it to run an old-school adventire?)