Despite its minimal use of the client-sided objects, it contains many different skill-based obstacles. All you need is a group of friends to share the adventure and a set of dice to help you decide your fate.The Tower of Table Flipping (or ToTF for short) is a Low-Mid Intense difficulty, ascension-based tower found in Ring 2 made by IceNSalt. So whether you prefer your games to have a lot of rules and crunch or if you prefer them being fluid and fluffy, there are a number of systems out there for you to play to get your anime tabletop gaming on. OVA is a very fun, flexible system that needs a good GM to help run and keep everyone’s characters on the same power level, but with the right group it can be a blast. Failure is more about driving the story forward than seeing a character die. Attacks are made using six-sided dice and death is intended to be rare. Powers cost endurance, with more powerful attacks costing more endurance, and can be made up in the middle of a session to simulate the unlocked power that drives a character toward victory. Weird as it sounds, it worked shockingly well, making this one of my favourite anime tabletop games just for simple flexibility. I have played in a game that had a Saiyan, a Hidden Leaf ninja, a stand user, and a soul reaper all attending the same high school and fighting alongside each other. There is no canonical setting for it and it has the ability to incorporate tropes from almost any genre in the medium. OVA is a game designed by Wise Turtle Gaming with anime in mind. These systems are more loose and fluid and the experience will differ greatly between groups. Some even suggest building the game world together with the other players as part of the first session. These are games that take a lighter touch on the rules, allowing players and Game Masters to design their own attacks, powers, and drawbacks together. On the opposite end of the spectrum is what is called Fluffy systems. It can be a tough system to survive in, but the samurai aesthetic and the tension in the battle system create a very fun game. It’s a system that reflects some of the dangers of battle, as each wound taken poses a penalty to all future rolls, resulting in a potential death spiral. Players wield a variety of weapons and spells, attacking and defending by rolling ten-sided dice. Think of an anime in the style of Rurouni Kenshin, but with more magic and monsters and you’re on the right track. Legend of the Five Rings from Fantasy Flight Games is another crunchy system where players become samurai in a stand-in for feudal Japan called Rokugan, where magic comes from the kami and dishonour can leave a literal, visible mark on your soul. You will have to do quite a bit of math in order to make your attacks, which come with such fanciful names as the Peony Blossom Attack – a thousand cuts causing your enemy to scatter like cherry blossom petals. It lends itself to recreating the action anime style in a system that relies heavily on expressing your ever-increasing powers with an ever-increasing pool of ten-sided dice. Even low-level characters will be able to shoot with supernatural accuracy, punch through walls, and leap small to medium-sized buildings.
These powers start at ridiculous and work their way up from there. Players take on the role of the Exalt, individuals with the power of divinity flowing through them, giving them access to powers and abilities beyond those of mere mortals. They have strict battle systems that rely on balance between games and sessions, meaning you could take your character to any other group playing the same game and they would fit right in without much change.Įxalted is one of these systems. They tend to have rules for most of the attacks you can do and might even have them spelled out for you. Some, like the famous Dungeons & Dragons, are what I call Crunchy systems. Before I get to some of the recommendations, it’ll be useful to know how varied the different tabletop systems are.