Anime Fighting Game

A few days ago, I started thinking about anime (in particular shonen series focused on fighting) rpg, and I figured I’d write up a quick game using that theme and post it up before my attention drifted elsewhere.

Building a Character

Moves: You have 12d6 to build moves, with a maximum of 6d6 in any one move. The number of dice is also the cost in endurance. The three types of moves are attack, defense, and hinder. Characters can take multiple actions in sequence but only if each new move has more dice than the last, so varying the costs of your moves is useful.

Attack moves deal damage. If the damage equals or exceeds the target’s toughness, the target is hurt. A target can be hurt multiple times if damage equals or exceeds the target’s toughness multiple times (a fifteen damage attack hurts a character with 5 toughness three times).

Defense moves are used in response to other moves to reduce their effect (subtract the defense roll from the other move’s roll). Defense moves are used in response to other moves, so they don’t follow the normal combo rules.

Hinder moves prevent a target from acting until the target spends endurance equal to the move’s roll / 3 (round up).

Toughness: You start with a toughness of 7. An attack must deal at least 7 damage to hurt you, 14 to hurt you twice and so forth.

Endurance: You start each combat with endurance equal to your character’s toughness, and regain the same value during ever turnover.

Escalations: You start most combats with none of these. If an attack move does enough damage to hurt you, you can either succumb to the damage (dropping out of combat) or escalate. Escalating adds one to your escalation, which adds one dice to all of your moves and adds one to your toughness, but it also adds a dice to the post combat fallout roll.

You can also escalate as a "one dice" move.

Combat

Combat starts with one character (most likely the character that throws the first punch) with initiative. That character can use a move and then they can pass the initiative to any character.

A combo occurs when a characters passes initiative to or between themselves. Every move in a combo must cost more than the last. The only way out of the rising endurance costs is a turnover, passing initiative to an opponent rather than an ally.

After a turnover, every character regains endurance equal to their toughness and all combos end.

NPC characters will often have preselected values to determine how many times they will escalate before succumbing.

Fallout

After combat, roll each character’s escalations in d6 and consults below:

0-3: No Effect

4-7: Start next combat with 1 escalation

8-10: Start next combat with 2 escalations

11-14: Start next combat with 3 escalations

15-18: Start next combat with 3 escalations without the normal benefits for those escalations

19+: Lose 1d6 Toughness. A character that drops to 0 toughness or less dies.