Wise Turtle Publishing

I've been inspired by the PDQ system and how it handles damage. In PDQ your qualities (abilities) take damage instead of damage coming from a separate pool of points. So if you take a point of damage you can reduce your Sword Fighting quality by 1 rank.

Working the general concept into OVA, I'm thinking that for every 10 points of damage taken an Ability is reduced by 1.

Let's say you're in a mecha with Armor 2 and Sensors +1. A battle pod blasts your mecha for 10 points of damage. The damage total is deducted from Health or Endurance as normal but now you have to decide whether to reduce Armor or Sensors by 1 rank. Defender chooses.

I haven't play tested this idea yet but as part of my current project I'm testing various game systems head to head against a list of requirements. Anyways, the PDQ game was very engaging because tactical game play emerged through the damage system. Ricochet is a lot of fun but we didn't have quite the level of engagement hence the idea above.

Good Lord, I hated that in PDQ your qualities (abilities) take damage instead of damage coming from a separate pool of Health with a passion. I want easily to decipher HP bars! That is why I ditched PDQ and plan to run Ninja Burger with OVA.

zeth wrote:Good Lord, I hated that in PDQ your qualities (abilities) take damage instead of damage coming from a separate pool of Health with a passion. I want easily to decipher HP bars! That is why I ditched PDQ and plan to run Ninja Burger with OVA.

That's okay. Keep on keepin' on.

I'm looking for a way to combine to the two approaches in OVA.

Well the thing is it sounds good on paper but results in a lot of book work mid battle. Constantly recalculating your abilities. A Lucky shot or power move can defeat 30 hp that is 3 abilities gone and really hampers the character from that point on. You might fall into a whole downward spiral once you start losing abilities it comes almost impossible to break free and win.

zeth wrote:Well the thing is it sounds good on paper but results in a lot of book work mid battle. Constantly recalculating your abilities.

I don't think that would be a problem. The "constant" bit is definitely subjective and malleable. If it would need to be 20 points before taking an ability hit to find the mechanic sweet spot then so be it.

A Lucky shot or power move can defeat 30 hp that is 3 abilities gone and really hampers the character from that point on. You might fall into a whole downward spiral once you start losing abilities it comes almost impossible to break free and win.

That might be the point.

It's an interesting concept, and a similar idea is behind the whole "-1 when Health or Endurance hits zero" rule.

From what I remember from reading the freebie version of PDQ some time back, PDQ encourages fewer and broader Qualities than OVA does Abilities.

The problem from this is there are a lot of throwaway Abilities Players can start reducing first. Sure, being struck dumb and having a few points knocked off your Smart Ability could make logical sense, but it has no real, quantifiable effect on combat. Putting the decision of which Ability gets reduced in the hands of the Attacker can have opposite but equally unwieldy results.

If you want, you may simply want to apply broad Penalties. ie. if you lose 10 Health, you can choose to get a -1 penalty to all Attack rolls or all Defense rolls. Offer this choice for every 10 (or 20 or whatever number of) points of Damage taken.

I use the "Lose 10 health and get -1" on your rolls for some games when I run OVA to get a bit of extra grit.

What's driving my current exploration is the fact that whittling away certain Qualities/Abilities felt very dramatic and concrete. I was surprised to see tactile tactical game play emerge from such a simple system. To help with context a bit, I'm working on a mecha game where bits were being blown off the machines. Side by side we found that PDQ and OVA mecha looked pretty danged similar. Also, this whole notion originated at the players' request.

As far as throw-away qualities go in comparison to PDQ and OVA, I'm thinking that X number of points lost = Ability point loss would mitigate the potential issue of too quickly eroding an OVA character. To help players I'm thinking about marking or listing abilities that are implicitly erodible such as armor, sensors, etc. I'm going to do a bit more testing to see what I can come up with. The whole notion may or may not work out but I've had a lot of success porting ideas over to OVA.

Hmm! While I'm still not entirely sold on the idea for humans, it does seem a delightful nod to Battletech to include it for mecha combat. Very interesting! I'll have to keep that in the back of my mind.