Wise Turtle Publishing

In reading the OVA rules I have not been able to find any explicit description of at what point a character is killed by damage. Falling unconscious I can find. Death not so much. Is death in combat expected to be handled by house rule, GM fiat or to only occur when a player asks that their character be killed?

I like the flexibility I see in the rules, especially as I have little time to do prep work and I like game sessions to flow quickly. At the same time I think that some drama is added to a game when characters can actually get killed, fair and square, during combat. As it reads right now it sounds like Toon.

So, are there rules I'm missing, generally accepted house rules I didn't see while perusing this forum, or is "wing it" the actual case. If it is I can certainly make up some house rule for it, but I thought I'd see if there was something I had failed to notice.

The book talks about death in the character growth section under "Retiring a Character." page 88 I think. However, there are no explicit rules saying that when you go below a certain amount of hp you die or anything like that.

Retiring a character is a way that the players can have a say in how they die, that way it can be very epic and designed to fit a story-line.

On the other hand, I recently played a game where the I wanted to have explicit death rules, and filed it under GM discretion. How I played it was this: to die, your character must be at 0 endurance, and -40 health. e.g. if you take a massive amount of damage say, 120, then that would deplete your standard hp, deplete your standard endurance, and then still cause you 40 more damage ultimately killing you.

Likewise, if you are knocked on conscious using the normal rules (0 health and 0 endurance), a player could be killed if they are attacked while unconscious, compared to a defense of 0 (because the player is unconscious).

E.g. if a pc is knocked unconscious, and the villain and GM are wanting to be very mean, the villain can shoot the unconscious player, and chances are the player will die because the villain's attack is compared to a defense of zero because the pc is unconscious.

Just a little insight into how we have played it, two different styles, the retiring of characters and the hard coded death.

I avoided specific rules on death because, if you look at 95% of anime out there, death never follows any rules. Characters who fall into bottomless chasms, find themselves at the mercy of psychotic villains, lose gallons of blood, or otherwise exhibit misfortunes that very well should cause them to die live despite it all. On the other hand, characters who dramatically "sacrifice" themselves die via single blows after long, sappy monologues. Put simply, characters seem to die when it's dramatically appropriate.

That's not to say there aren't anime that don't kill off heroes randomly. But these same anime are also at odds with OVA's generous two-dice default for tasks and the rather exhaustive amount of Health and Endurance. Such things are going to need a bit of rules-tweaking anyway.

If you really want to put rules in for dying, perhaps you should create a third stat. For lack of a more original thought right now, let's call it Death Points and give it a value of 20. When Health and Endurance are gone, characters may choose to keep fighting, receiving a -2 to all actions, and all future damage is subtracted from these Death Points. However, if you reach zero, you die then and there. However, even if you don't reach zero and win the current battle, you still eventually die. Deciding to use Death Points is in itself a death sentence. But if a character wants to squeeze that last bit of drama out of a fight, that's the price to be paid.

If guaranteed death seems harsh, you can always make the risk of permanent death be the price for using Death Points.

Seems to fit the genre.