Wise Turtle Publishing

I was wondering how much the game OVA would change if people were killed/knocked out at 0 HP instead of 0 HP and 0 Endurance. Each Time I ran OVA fights seemed to drag because everyone had Endurance points that had to be removed before going down.

Any thoughts?

That's NOT how it's done??? Oh. Oh dear. OK. Time to tell my friends...

I suppose this depends on the dynamic of the party, and how they use their Endurance. The Health/Endurance system I see as a pretty thematic part of OVA, after all, anime characters tend to take more of a beating than their bodies should actually handle.

Characters should still be taking a -1 Penalty for dropping below 0 HP or Endurance, which stacked on with any other nasty penalties the character has received. I had a character who received an Amazing Success Complication + Combat Complication + Health penalty, for a whopping -3 Penalty, because she managed to get an unlucky oneshot.

The book also offers the option of cutting the HP/Endurance ratio by half for more intense combat, if that solution helps.

sniffycrab wrote:I was wondering how much the game OVA would change if people were killed/knocked out at 0 HP instead of 0 HP and 0 Endurance. Each Time I ran OVA fights seemed to drag because everyone had Endurance points that had to be removed before going down.

Any thoughts?

One thing I do is fudge the stats. Unless there's a named villain who is at a PC level of development, I don't make sheets for baddies. They normally have an attack roll of about 3 or 4 and up to 3 DM. They also tend to be squishier than the players. While there is a target number for each enemy to go down, if someone lands a good hit on them that gets them close to the number, I'm totally okay with knocking the guy out as a reward.

Another thing I do, just like I reward for good things, I punish for bad things. If your endurance drops below zero in my game, you can't use your awesome mana-powered attacks. If your HP drops to 0, different bad stuff happens.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that OVA is not a crunchy game. Don't let the numbers get in the way of telling a good (and compact) story.

I don’t see any particular harm from unlinking Health and Endurance, since you would be affecting everyone equally. I think the only character archetype that gets really shafted is anyone who takes a few levels of Vigorous but has no Endurance-draining Abilities. But Vigorous remains useful for Tests of Stamina and the like, so as long as you were up front about the change, I don’t think it would be problematic.

Halving Health and Endurance, as Astraea points out, is another option, though this automatically makes Endurance a more precious commodity for attacks (while the previous solution makes it a more expendable one, since it doesn’t affect your ability to stay “alive.”)

In any case, the reason characters are hard to go down in OVA is based on the traditional anime ideal of one or two encounters per episode. OVA wasn’t designed like Dungeons and Dragons where there are concrete rewards for mowing down armies of monsters.

But if you’d rather more small encounters instead of a handful of big ones, either of the previous choices should help.