Wise Turtle Publishing

Hi, im new to OVA and running my first game.

One of my players created her character with mahou shoujo theme and as such picked transformation.

The rules state that you may spend double your level on transformation on new abilities, plus points gained through adding weaknesses.

However, the player wishes most of her character's strenght to come from transformation and would like to keep improving it as the game goes.

I was thinking of allowing her to spend experience as normal to add and/or improve abilities of her transformation, since this actually gives her less benefit than adding them as regular abilities (transformation having limited uses).

Would this work? Or is there a better alternative? Or would this somehow "break" the game?


This also brought similar question to my mind regarding vehicle ability, particularly if player has a mecha he wishes to improve later on past what the rules state.

Transformation caps at 5. So unless she starts with a lesser transformation then buys up new levels with xp, I would say no. But some GMs on here could do a house rule or work around. The problem is you only get to transform once per session and spend time as a civilian mode character with like 0 powers.

Vehicle is an odd duck. Yes, you can upgrade the vehicle whole sale by bumping the stat up to 5. But some important vehicles have mini character sheets of their own and you have the character spend his/her exp on the vehicle sheet to upgrade that instead of the character themselves. The exp spent spends the time needed to get parts and apply them. That method could be used to take transformation beyond the standard rules also. It can be done but the character must split their XP between two sheets with this method.

The easiest way to have Abilities like Transformation or Vehicle “grow” is to start the Ability itself at a low level (+1 or +2) and let the player improve their character over time. When Transformation goes from +1 to +2, that’s two more points to spend. Same for Vehicle. Besides being simpler, this also gets your player a 2 for 1 cost for improvement.

If you’re already capped at +5, arguably that should be all you can do (in the same way +5 is the best you can do for any Ability.) If you were to “break the cap” and allow +6 and up, I would still handle improvement the same way. Increase the base Ability with experience, not spend experience as if the Transformation/Vehicle were characters to themselves.