Giganic and tiny; Money & Item; Modifier; Limit PC Quest

[Doc Halloween]

1- I was wondering if you could tell me how I go about making Godzilla & dinosaurs to rabbits, squirrels and mice? Could someone give stat examples as well?

2- How do I know how much money my characters start with or starting gear?

3- Page 75 talks about modifiers. Where is a sample list of modifiers? Stuff like behind partial cover or shooting in the dark?

4- Do you have suggestion, like BESM3, for character points for different genres?

[JuddG]

1- I was wondering if you could tell me how I go about making Godzilla & dinosaurs to rabbits, squirrels and mice? Could someone give stat examples as well?

There are a lot of ways to answer this question. The "scale" of any game assumes that the players are the average size and scale of the game world. If you have a game with all bunnies, then everything is scaled to that bunny size and it is humans who get the Godzilla treatment. If the game is about Giant Monsters ramapaging, then the scale is shifted up to that and normal people are treated as small and vunerable.

There is a disadvantage called "Size" that is used to reflect entities that are not in keeping with the baseline scale of the game, but mostly you will use things like "weak", "Armor", and adjustments to Health to reflect that something is more or less of a challenge based on size/scale.

2- How do I know how much money my characters start with or starting gear?

Use your best judgement. Things that do not skew game balance or do not have a game impact should just be assumed to be OK, unless the player has taken the disavantage that they are poor, at which point they are OK with being hassled about owning the basics of life.

3- Page 75 talks about modifiers. Where is a sample list of modifiers? Stuff like behind partial cover or shooting in the dark?

There are some samples listed below the header on that page, but what they are referring to mainly is the sum of your abilties and weaknesses that go into a roll. Things like cover or darkness would add to the difficulty of the roll, or would be a modifier to the attack or defense rolls of the participants (but not both!). Again, no hard and fast rules here, but I wouldn't give more than a die or two advatange for things of this nature.

4- Do you have suggestion, like BESM3, for character points for different genres?

Genres is not as much a factor in how many character points to give out as is power level. For most games, you will hover around an a top celiing of one or two abiltiies at 3. For more power, you can allow the scope to go a bit higher.

A good deal of OVA is left to the group's play flow. As an effects-based game there are not metrics set in stone. A willingness to allow a bit of abstratction in how you look at a game will go a logn way in finding a comfort level with games of this stripe. The first thing to do is to unlearn the idea that a game measurement has to have a defined real world measurement. What is the "average" in the game is not the avereage in the real world.

The midline changes based on what the average capablilities of the characters in the game are. A 3 in Weapons means very different things in a "Watership Down" game than it does in a "Dragonball Z" one - but only when compared to one another. For each, it represents something hovering around the average for the setting - a sharp bramble as opposed to a planet-melting device.

Not sure if I have cleared anything up, or just made it more fuzzy... Let me know.

[Doc Halloween]

JuddG,

I believe you answered my questions on 1-3 but #4 is still a bit fuzzy.

Let me get this straight on #1. If I wanted to have a game where the player characters are human but there are a few giants the PC are the same but give the giants "Heightened Sense: Smell", "Intimidation", "Strong", "Vitality" with maybe "Easily Distracted", "Bad Reputation", "Bizarre Appearance", "Sensitivity", & "Size". Maybe a few others to balance the NPC out. Right?

#2 I understand. Let the player’s characters have what they want within what I think their means would be. So a person with "Poor" would probably not have car or Playstation 3. A person with "Filthy Rich" could have a Bat-mobile and a mansion.

#3 I see the modifier section on page 75 but really no examples.

#4 I still do not understand how many points to give out, say for: Fantasy, Wild west, Pulp, Modern, Superhero, Near future cyber-punk, sci-fi space, or apocalypse type of games.

[JuddG]

#4 I still do not understand how many points to give out, say for: Fantasy, Wild west, Pulp, Modern, Superhero, Near future cyber-punk, sci-fi space, or apocalypse type of games.

Well, the number of point you give out mainly determines the power level of the PCs vs "normal" people in the setting. This is usually not a genre issue, per se (with the exception of Super Heroes, of course).

My rule of thumb is usually to use a cap of one level 4, 2 level 3s, and a balance factor of 5 (In other words, they can have 5 more ads over disads). This makes the characters a bit more “gritty” and realistic feeling. They also have to team up and specialize more. As you boost any of these factors (or lower them), you sort of tune in the power level you want for the game.

Most genre concerns will be ones of what abilities are appropriate. In a Western game, for example, I would leave out the magic abilities, transformation, etc. You would also want all special attacks to use a weapon of some sort (unless your game has Wuxia masters defending Chinese railroad workers or whatnot). This way, everyone is on the same page about what the game allows. No one makes a spell-caster in a game that doesn’t feature magic, no one makes a character with a jet fighter in a game about court intrigue in Edo period Japan.

Not sure if I am being any more clear on this. The best thing to do is make a few characters as NPCs for any game you are going to run to see if they come out with enough “oomph” and use them as a litmus test for what you end up using for the PC limits.

[Doc Halloween]

I appreciate your information. Thank you very much JuddG for your time and your help

[JuddG]

I appreciate your information. Thank you very much JuddG for your time and your help

My pleasure. Hope I helped a bit. I'm not sure I said was I was aiming for very well there. Maybe someone else can give some input to save my scrawling?

[Clay]

Well, if that's not a cue, I don't know what is!

To simplify what JuddG was trying to get across, OVA doesn't treat genres the same way, say, GURPS does, where a number of points is blatantly given to each genre (ie. 75 for fantasy, 150 for super heroes).

In anime, you're very often faced with fact that two shows, despite being of the same genre, can display characters with very different capabilities. Lina Inverse, of Slayers, can toss around spells like Dragon Slave, while Slayn, despite being regarded as a capable mage in Lodoss, cannot.

So think of it in terms of how powerful your want characters to be. You can have gritty science fiction where characters die at the drop of a hat as easily as you can have over the top Space Opera with characters deciding the fate of entire planets. Genre is really irrelevant to this decision.

[Doc Halloween]

JuddG & Clay,
Yes, you both did help. Thank you both for the information and you time.