Quote Originally Posted by A Rainy Knight View Post
I might look these over and see if I can get around to writing a new update one of these days.

While I'm at it, what do you all think are the worst offenders in terms of existing advantages? Ones that are too weak, ones that are too strong, ones that are worded poorly, ones that just aren't fun to play with? I already have my eye on Just As Planned and Multiple Personalities.
Oh, wow, I really was not expecting that to get your attention. That's awesome! Thanks for making this system in the first place, by the way - it's been surprisingly fun, and that's coming from somebody who's not really an anime fan.

As for worst offenders, well, it's not hard for me to point to what I think are the most potent currently: Just as Planned and Shadow Out of Time (from Eldritch Abomination) strike me as the most potent and frustrating of the 1/episode powers, and there was discussion about banning them back when I first joined Illven's game, although we didn't wind up doing so. For the unlimited-use powers, Poker Face (Kuudere), Connections (Iinchou), and School Queen (Ojou) are definitely the big ones - +2 to any type of roll with no limit on uses per episode, and all three seem relatively easy to use. Poker Face is perhaps the worst, because finding a way to make a lie relevant to the roll is rarely that hard. Connections seems harder to use, depending on how readily available authority figures are at any given time, but I've seen it used pretty dependably in the games I've been in. School Queen I have the least experience with, but it has seemed pretty easy to activate from what I have seen, probably easier than Connections. And even if they were harder to use, being able to apply them to all four types of rolls just makes them very potent from sheer flexibility compared to most other advantages applying to only one and only a few being able to apply to two.

The other issue I've noticed is advantages based on the outfit you're wearing - Maiden's Garb, Gorgeous Gi, etc. I'm guessing when you wrote those you assumed the game would take place in schools with a uniform, so most of them couldn't be used all of the time, right? That would explain why Boyish Charm, the only one that could be used all the time in that situation, only gives +1, while the rest give +2. In practice though most games seem to take place in American-style schools that don't have uniforms, so those advantages turn into always-on +2s that you don't need to do anything at all for. Personally, the only solution I can really think of would be to make it so that in games where the school doesn't have a uniform, all such advantages only give +1 instead of the +2 they'd given in a game where the school had a uniform. That would look a bit odd when written out in the actual rules, but it's what I've got at the moment.

As for weak powers, well, there's several I identified as near-useless in the archetypes I just posted my edits to. Besides those, hm, just skimming over the archetypes... Truant from Sukeban stands out, since whether the Protagonist would ever be outside school on a school day for the PC to run into is in the hands of the GM, and probably wouldn't happen more than once per episode, tops, so it would very rarely be usable. In Miko, Misfortune Talisman and Warding Talisman kind of run into the accidental problem that most PCs don't use Luck rolls very much, since good Luck bonuses are few and far between compared to the other three types of rolls. They'd be good if that weren't the case, but unfortunately, it is.

Oh, Shining Trapezohedron, from Eldritch Abomination, is a big one. Because really, as I said in my comment about Butt In in my changes to the Genki archetype, when is the GM going to tell a player that they can't be in a scene anyway? Neither the GM nor the players really want that to be a thing that happens, so that advantage is essentially useless.

Vampiric Drain is another one that's pretty darn weak. Winning opposed rolls is not an easy thing to do consistently unless you've got one of the big, probably-OP abilities helping you (Just as Planned, Shadow Out of Time, and a big charge on Down and Dirty being the three that come to mind), so it probably won't activate too often, and it's only +1 on the occasions when it does.

...and I really need to get some sleep now, so I should stop. I can look over more later, though, if you'd really like me to.