8.4 Abilities

Many stories tell us about a character’s journey to greater power. The need to acquire that power is often tied into the story seeds, such as in Avatar, where Aang has to master all four elements to battle the Fire Lord.

In Anima Prime, the way in which a character can become more effective is through the accumulation of additional powers. All other abilities are either details (which the player can figure out on her own during descriptions and maneuvers) or can change in what they look like, but not in how effective they are (such as the ability to use traits for rerolls).

In many other roleplaying games, it is assumed that every single conflict brings some experience with it that accumulates over time until the character suddenly rises in power. That approach works well for many of those games, but Anima Prime benefits from a more story-based approach. The particular approach, however, depends on what kind of story you want to create.

The following is a list of suggestions for how characters in your story can acquire additional powers. Use them as a springboard for how you want to handle it in your game, and make sure that everyone in the group is involved in figuring this out before the game starts.

Whichever kind of system you use for acquiring powers, no one character can ever have more than one power more than the character with the lowest number of powers in the group. With this rule in place, you can even use a different approach for each character; maybe one of them is looking for teachers while another can absorb the power of certain fiends.

Seed-Based Development

There are three kinds of story seeds in this game: character seeds, group seeds, and setting seeds. These provide story fodder and some possible destinations for where the story is going. At some point, one or more of them will be resolved.

If you select this option for power development, then the PC whose character seed is resolved, or all PCs if the group or setting seed is resolved, gains a power at that point in time (and then it’s time to create a new seed).

Knowing when a seed is resolved is an intuitive thing that’s hard to put into any kind of rules. If your group seed is that you’re all out for vengeance against the same enemy, once that vengeance is fulfilled, your seed is obviously resolved. Others might be a bit more vague than this, such as character seeds that deal with an issue of the character. But the players who created the seeds are also the ones who determine when it’s run its course.

Letting characters gain an extra power at the conclusion of a seed could happen often and fast, or rarely and slow, depending on how the seeds play out in your game. It can prompt players to actually address their character seeds as much as they can, but it can also lead to a point where the gaining of the power overtakes the importance of the seed for the story. You’ll have to see how that works for your group.

Teacher-Based Development

This approach shows up in many stories. The student needs to find the right teachers, and each time she does, she learns a few things and progresses. Examples are Aang, Katara and Sokka in Avatar: while Aang is looking for all kinds of bending teachers, Katara learns new powers from waterbending masters (including the evil bloodbender, indirectly) and Sokka learns from a swordmaster.

In many of the stories, finding a teacher is also a story seed, so you could consider this a subsection of the previous approach. It is common enough, however, to talk about it in detail, and I quite like keeping character seeds more interesting than just “Find the next teacher” all the time.

This approach puts more control over the ability development of the PCs in the hands of the GM. If you’re comfortable with this, and your story fits the teacher-based mold, this is one of the easiest approaches to implement and balance.

Adversity-Based Development

In our previous game, Beast Hunters, the PCs are tribal warriors who set out to slay magical beasts that threaten their people and ravage their lands. After a Beast Hunter kills a beast, she uses its blood as ink for a tattoo carved into her skin by her elders, which bestows upon her a part of the beast’s power. While the game also has other ways of making the characters more powerful, the tattoos of power are the core concept of the character’s path of slaying more difficult beasts. This is one way of implementing adversity-based development.

I would not suggest using a system in which characters gain points for every single conflict they enter. That would be too much bookkeeping for a spontaneous system and takes some focus off the story you’re telling.

If you create an adversity-based system in which the PCs gain powers from certain creatures that they defeat, you have to figure out the following parts:

• How often can the PCs do this?
• How difficult are the creatures?
• Which powers can be gained?
• Are powers to be gained specific to the creature?
• Can multiple PCs gain a power from a creature or only one?
• Do you make the creatures up on the fly or have a prepared bestiary?
• Is the game and/or setting all about the hunt of these creatures or are they just a means to an end?

I will create a premade setting that uses this approach for the full version of Anima Prime, where you’ll find it in the setting chapter under Soultakers.

Changing Powers

Sometimes players will realize that one or more of the powers they picked for their characters either don’t fit or turn out to be much less fun than they thought. At other times, characters could change through events in the story in a way that is best expressed through a loss or exchange of powers.

In either case, I would let players slowly change their characters’ powers over time. That is, players can choose to lose a power at any time—after all, they could just decide not to use it anymore. Once they have lost a power, they can later replace it. The pace at which this happens is up to you, but in order to keep the game somewhat consistent, I would suggest not changing more than one power per game session. If the character lost her Soulbound Weapon and its associated 4 powers, for example, it might take her a while to learn how to get along without it and develop new abilities. The player might even want to go on with fewer powers for a longer time, if that makes sense for the story and the character.

Overall, this ties directly into having fun with the game. Players shouldn’t have to work their way through a bunch of less-than-fun sessions only to “earn” having fun with the game again. If you and your players will have the most fun by changing powers around at will, by all means, go with that.