Wise Turtle Publishing

In anticipation of the upcoming revised edition of OVA, I've been inspired to data-mine all of the information I can so far and put together a patchwork version of OVA revised. Part of that patchwork process was to attempt to apply the spirit of the upcoming rule changes that weren't explicitly put out in detail, such as how the only ability that will, by default, use Endurance in OVA revised is Magic, meaning that the other abilities that used to use Endurance, such as Invisibility and Time Freeze, no longer use them (which made for a great balancing mechanism).

I'd like to talk about my personal experience with running a patchwork version of Time Freeze, as well as an alternate ability I invented that may be a possible use of the revised Time Freeze, called Haste. The Time Freeze I came up with works as follows:

You have the amazing ability to freeze time or freeze others in time. If you want to freeze time for a specific period of time, roll your Time Freeze dice against the appropriate DN.

Trying to Freeze Time for…
- 10 seconds (out of combat): DN 2
- 30 seconds (out of combat): DN 4
- 1 round (in combat) or 1 minutes (out of combat): DN 6
- 2 rounds (in combat) or 3 minutes (out of combat): DN 8
- 3 rounds (in combat) or 10 minutes (out of combat): DN 10
- 4 rounds (in combat) or 30 minutes (out of combat): DN 12
- 5 rounds (in combat) or 1 hour (out of combat): DN 15

If you attempt to freeze time in combat, you can do nothing else for that entire round, but can act on your next round. When freezing time outside of combat, you spend one-third of your maximum Endurance when the time has elapsed, and this Endurance cannot be recovered until the end of the adventure or at the Game Master’s discretion. You can also elect to freeze a target in time in combat; the DN for doing so is one step lower than freezing time itself (so freezing a target for 3 rounds will have a DN of 8, rather than 10). If you can see the target, you can freeze him.


The Haste ability simply reduces the multiple action penalty by its bonus.

For my Jade Empire campaign, the main hero has Time Freeze +2 (the version I posted) and Haste +2. The Time Freeze in the setting represents the character's ability to go into "Focus" mode, which is similar to when time slows in the Matrix and you get to kick the crap out of someone because you're moving so much faster than they are. Now, one of my player's favorite strategies is to use Time Freeze (for 3 rounds, DN 10) in conjunction with using three attacks per round (which would be a -1 multiple action penalty, due to Haste +2). His attack dice pool is 5, but he can boost it up to 7 by sacrificing 2 dice from his defense pool (an additional house rule I implemented), and more often than not, he pulls that DN of 10. By the time all of his actions are done, whatever he was fighting (whether it is a "heroic" villain or a bunch of extras) is completely decimated, or on their last legs.

Just wanted to let everyone know that using Time Freeze like this, especially along with this Haste ability I invented, is a big red flag, especially when you mix in a method of modifying your combat bonuses by trade-off. To Clay, I don't know how the upcoming Time Freeze is going to be, but I hope you have a good balancing mechanism in place or that you've playtested the heck out of problematic abilities such as Time Freeze and Invisibility without an Endurance expenditure to reign it in.

Typically, I avoid posting the new rules verbatim, but since I wouldn't mind input on these matters...

Time Freeze - Time is constant…or was until you came along. You have the ability to slow or even freeze the flow of time. For each Level in Time Freeze, you gain an equivalent bonus in all tests of speed and quickness – or a penalty to those of your opponents’. While this Ability requires you to perform an action in Combat, you may offset the Multiple Actions penalty by an amount equal to your Level in Time Freeze.

Invisibility - Now you see you, now you don’t. You have the ability to obscure yourself, and whatever you are wearing or holding, from view. Attempts to spot, attack, or otherwise interact with you suffer a Penalty equal to your Level in Invisibility. At Level 1, you are not truly invisible, just more difficult to notice. It could be a mind trick or a form of camouflage. At Level 2, you are even harder to see. Perhaps you can transform into a shadow, or special gear bends the light around you. At Level 3, you can become completely invisible. However, others may still be able to discern your presence through sound or smell, or through interactions with the environment, like footprints in the sand or waves in the stream. At Level 4, you become invisible to other senses as well, including smell and hearing. At Level 5, you are completely undetectable, and do not even affect the surrounding environment – unless you want to.

[As mentioned, some Abilities and circumstances can help negate the Penalty Invisibility provides. Abilities like Heightened Sense, Perceptive, and Sixth Sense can offset some or all of the Penalty. Likewise, the Game Master may reduce the Penalty if the environment provides significant clues. Simply add the Appropriate Ability or Bonus to the dice rolled. Remember that when dealing with Level 4 and 5 Invisibility, this may no longer be the case.]

Invisibility seems pretty sound, but I'm afraid Time Freeze is still all kinds of wonk. Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts.

Will Time Freeze have a cost?

I'm thinking the offset to the Action penalty should be 1/2 level, rounded up. Otherwise, you have people taking 6 turns within one action, which can be a little broken.

The way I had done Invisibility was that for each level, you become invisible to one sense (normal sight counts as two senses), and you can't be invisible to touch (that would require Incorporeal Form). Unusual senses, such as x-ray vision, infra-red vision, "X" detection, each count as a sense as well.

As for Time Freeze, a big issue is with the name of the ability. For the current edition, Time Freeze actually froze time. The way it's written up now sounds more like Time Control. I can see the speeding up and slow-down of time, but not the freezing of it. And, from the way it's written, if you have Time Freeze, does this mean that you gain a bonus AND your opponents gain a penalty to speed and quickness? If so, that is quite, quite powerful, and looks like double-dipping. Other than that, the way Time Freeze is described sounds like how Jet Li (as Gabriel Yulaw) manipulated the flow of time in the movie, The One (but it was actually him moving super-fast).

The comment Joe Mello made on having people take 6 turns within one action and it being broken is a reference I made when describing the Jade Empire character who possesses Haste.

As for invisible, these are how the levels seem to me: Level 1 is the equivalent of a chameleon effect, Level 2 is the "Predator" camo effect or MGS "stealth camo", Level 3 is classic invisibility, Level 4 includes a masking of human-range smell and hearing, and Level 5 is complete undetectability, including unusual senses. What CAN detect Level 4 invisibility, to differentiate it from Level 5 invisibility?

Just fully offsetting the multi-action penalty seems overpowering to me. My though is to be able to offset a number of penalties equal to your level in Time Freeze. Example, if you take two extra actions and have Time Freeze level 2 instead of taking -2 on each action, you can take -1 on each action or no penalty on one action and -2 on the other. Time Freeze would also reduce the multi-action penalty on defense rolls by you level in Time Freeze.

Also, another change I would make is make the multi-action penalty -1 for every action above the first and not -1 for each action taken. For me this just makes more logical sense and makes take multiple actions more viable without Time Freeze.

Yes, Time Freeze is definitely wonky in many ways. Largely, the problem is representing such an oddball Ability in mechanics, and doing so without being greatly overpowered. I'd really like to avoid "The effect is equal to half your level" type formulas as it's not use anywhere else in the book. That said, as is is not satisfactory either.

Perhaps the Ability should be dropped, and left to players to define when needed.

In any case, the idea of the penalty for total actions taken is so that it is not a viable option unless you greatly outclass your opponent. Else everyone with a smidgen of skill would be effectively doubling their combat output every round.

What if you rolled your Time Freeze against a DN to get an extra action in the round? Exact difficulty to be determined. Does have the discomfort of adding an extra roll to every round.

Another possibility is to say that time freeze offsets multiple action penalties as a unit rather than per action. When you take two actions, you lose 2 dice per action -- which is four dice. Time Freeze +1 can offset one of those dice, not one die per action, so you take one action at -1, and the other at -2. +4 offsets all those dice, you take both actions at -0. In between, you can distribute the dice at your leisure. -5 would be useful if you're trying to take three actions in a round. It's very difficult to describe in text but plays swiftly once you get the concept. The question here is how to handle defense rolls, which as written suffer the same penalties, but that doesn't seem fair to our time stopper. Maybe the penalty to defense is equal to the smallest penalty of any action you chose. So a +3 Time Freezer taking three actions could have the first at -0, then -3 at the other two, and suffer no penalty to defense. Or he could take each at -2 and suffer a -2 to defense. Or take the actions at -1, -2, and -3, and suffer -1 to defense. Again hard to describe in text but plays swiftly -- there are few enough combinations that you'll have all of them memorized before your third combat.

And, non sequitur, it's a pet peeve of mine how invisibility is slowly becoming nigh useless in our cultural conception. Invisibility used to be a power guarded jealously by the Gods and to claim it was to become nigh unstoppable. Now it can be defeated by radar, infrared, cantrips of detection, flour, soft earth, a well trained dog, or, worst of all, sensitivity training. The Art of Invisibility, nominally mundane, is much better protection from interference than actual invisibility.

Despite the number of methods that could detect invisibility, Invisibility is still a bad-ass ability. People aren't normally prepared for invisible characters, and all of the things you mentioned also effect Art of Invisibility, a.k.a. stealth.

As for Time Freeze, that's a godlike ability, if there ever was one. Even in supers games or universal systems that had such an ability, it was handled as a sort of paralysis at a huge area of effect or was incredibly expensive to acquire. To use Hero terminology, Time Freeze is definitely a "Stop Sign" ability, meaning that this ability had the potential to be game-breaking, or at least highly unbalanced in comparison to other abilities, and should be used with the greatest of care.

As I stated before, the only balancing mechanism OVA really has in relation to ability power is an Endurance cost, and since that will be removed for all abilities (except for Magic), we've yet to see how these super-power abilities will be balanced with the more mundane ones, if that is a design goal at all. OVA, however, is designed to create a character that matches his concept first and foremost, and balance within abilities is a secondary or tertiary concern.

If there was a section in OVA Revised that specifically stated, "The abilities available at character creation is solely up to the discretion of the GM", that would be great.

Another option for Time Freeze is to remove its ability to give you extra actions in combat, and instead make that part of Time Freeze a Power Perk.

+X (10? 20?): You can use this ability after having already acted in the round, at no penalty for multiple actions.

I have a player whose character has a gun blade (yeah, yeah...) built exactly this way. He has Time Freeze +3 and Suppressed Power -3: Can only use time freeze when he hits someone with his sword, and can only use it to fire the gun. It's effectively a +10E: Can fire gun in same round he hits with sword.

Yeah, I'm steadily thinking Time Freeze should be relegated to a special case Ability defined by Players and Game Masters instead of one explicitly described in the game. If I keep it at all, I'll probably change the name and make it a general extra-actions type Ability.

The Perk idea is interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind, Ox.

bushido: I think this is stated under "Step 0" of character creation. If not, I'll make sure it's more explicitly stated in the revised edition.

I wonder if Invisibility should be reworked to be "Undetectable" and be more ambiguously worded as "invisible to one sense" at lower levels and multiple at higher. This way the same Ability can be used for someone who can become absolutely silent, or odorless, or other such things. But maybe not.