Wise Turtle Publishing

I hosted a game on rpol using OVA. My players were confused completely by the weapons rules. Also the fact you have to bring both Energy and HP to zero to knock a opponent out annoyed them.

I know the revised issue will fix this. But is there anything I can do NOW to make OVA more playable?

When I play OVA, I completely forget about NPC Endurance and have them KOed at zero health. Just remember that the rules are guidelines. And what exactly about the weapon rules caused confusion?

I imagine it was the "free" Perks and Flaws that caused confusion, though usually it's the much more complicated Power Move that throws people for a loop. My only suggestion is is to use the Attack ability as described on the blog, or ignore Perks and Flaws entirely for the sake of simplicity.

In any case, Bushido's example should work fine, though I'd personally write up the baddies so they half half as much Health and Endurance, giving PCs the ability to impose a -1 "I'm out of Health" penalty on their enemies.

One thing that confused people was power move. The fact that you could have different moves under one PM as long as they had different qualities confused them.

The fact Martial Arts does not improve your ability to hit enimies. You must buy combat skill or Hobbie Martial Arts. They understood that and thought it was stupid.

Also they thought using abilities like barrier or power move was stupid when they could just do normal attacks and save there energy as bonus hp. Upon realizing this the combat became dull and uninteresting.

In my Jade Empire game, my solo player doesn't use any of his alternate attacks; he just uses the standard attack. What he likes to do is to use multiple actions (since he has a custom ability that negates the multiple action penalty by its level called Haste), along with Fighting Aggressively (a house-rule option where you can trade up to two dice from your defense rolls and add them to your attack rolls). He doesn't bother with the Entangle attack he has, or the area effect knockback only attack that he has, because they cost endurance and delay the loss of Health (and, thus, the defeat) of his opponents. He also likes to spend his endurance solely on gaining Drama Dice.

Of course, we're using a patchwork post-regular, pre-revised version of OVA I worked up.

I ditched barrier in favor of the revised Armor (directly reduces an attack's DM). For people that just want to use the most effective tactic possible all of the time, combat does become dull and uninteresting. Perhaps that's why D&D 4e is set up the way it is, but that's another conversation for another time.

But yeah, ditch Power Move, Martial Arts, and Weapon and just use Attack. It makes things a lot simpler. Other than that, different strokes for different folks.

OVA is not for everyone. There are some friends that I will not run this system for, because they just won’t get it. It’s not because the system is too complicated but rather it’s too abstract. It’s like 1st edition BESM. It’s a game for role-players not roll-players. If your players are more incline to create characters “by-the-numbers” and min/max for optimum dice pools then this is not the game for them. This is a system for players who can describe their characters in a paragraph and apply abilities and weaknesses based on those descriptions in spite of the urge to powergame.

^Hence why I present character sheets fluff-side up