Last summer, I got the chance to travel out and see one of my old roleplaying groups and join them for one adventure using the Anima Prime roleplaying system. Anima Prime was a new system to me, but it’s pretty straight forward and I wanted to share my experience with some of the roleplayers out there. The system is very concise, consisting of a one page character sheet, short to the point rules, fairly simple dice mechanics and an emphasis on creativity and imagination over number crunching. All together: pretty solid.
So first off, the character creation process and character sheet are very simple, a really good thing if you are looking at building a character quickly or want to ease someone new to roleplaying into the roleplaying experience. You character has a name, passion (more like a motivation really), three skills of your choosing, three personal traits, and nine powers. A background is highly recommended, but not required. Honestly, all of the information you need to play your character could easily fit on the front and back of an index card. I love simple, open character building processes, because it almost always puts more emphasis on how the player wants to play than how the system wants you to play it.
The dice mechanic is simple enough as well. You have three dice pools: action dice, charge dice and strike dice. Action dice go into maneuvers, which allow you to do more or less anything you want because they automatically succeed. The dice are only rolled on one of these to get 3’s, 4’s and/or 5’s, which turn into strike dice, or 6’s, which turn into charge dice. Strike dice let you make attacks and attempt achievements like crippling opponents or successfully navigating a maze, while charge dice let you use your character’s superhuman abilities, like raising your defenses, getting a bonus to your next strike and so on.
If you notice, all of this is open ended. “I stab him” is just as valid of a use of strike dice as “I leap over his head, tossing a dagger into his shoulder before pushing off the pommel and back-flipping behind him”. If you opt to commit the same number of dice to each of the above attacks, they will be just as effective, so how interesting your character’s fighting style is less up to what you have available to you and more determined by how much effort and creativity you put into your descriptions. Similarly, your effectiveness might be partially based in your choice of powers, but it is mostly determined by your own creative problem solving. One of our teammates redirected the enemy army by flooding a marsh with a well placed dam. All because she wanted to.
I think this is a great system, pretty well balanced, simplistic, and promoting of artistry. I do tend to think of roleplaying as an art of sorts. You are an actor without a script, a strategist with concrete numbers and odds. I love any opportunity to play up a character’s personality: I’ve stolen hats for a character’s collection, bathed myself in blood for psychological warfare, and even fought through a horde, knowing full well I couldn’t beat them all. Anima Prime lets that roleplaying spirit really come out and that’s what makes it such an excellent system.
Matthew Bryant, aka Baker Street Holmes, is an avid roleplayer who tries not to play the same race or class twice. If you wish to follow him on Twitter, you can find him at @BStreetHolmes or you can e-mail him at HMCrazySS@gmail.com.
For those interested in trying it out themselves, you can find the pdf for the system here:
The Red Shirt Crew Blog and Podcast Network 