[Anima Beyond Fantasy] Slight change to Quick Reflexes Advantage.

[Kyuu Himura]

Hello, to the like 3 people beside me who play this game.

Some background, me and my friends are changing our manga campaign from BESM d20 to Anima (and good riddance) and were trying to "tune" the game for adaptation.

I was thinking, if you changed the Quick Reflexes advantage to give +5 Initiative per level instead of a flat +25 and did not allow anyone to take it multiple times. How would that affect the gameplay? Too broken? More or less the same?

[Tome]

Most likely a lot worse in the early game, and potentially a little unbalancing in the late game (I've not played in quite a while, and even then I tended to prefer caster types).

The value of increased initiative is weird and kind of exponential, as I recall. The more of it you have, the more useful it is to get more of it. A +25 per point is a decent advantage at any level, but a level 8 initiative build with a +40 over where they would be could be more effective than intended, at least for how much it costs. Meanwhile, the level 1 character with the Advantage is getting effectively zero benefit from it.

[Kyuu Himura]

In the time it took for someone to respond (which I seriously, seriously appreciate, thanks Tome, you rock) I managed to study enough to ace a test and run a simulator with 500 initiative rolls between a Fast Character (a guy with a 10-initiative-per-level progression, plus the modified advantage) vs a slow character (a guy with 5-initiative-per-level progression, no advantage).

Both level 10, dressed and equiped with the same things, same dex and agi, so that stats, armor and artifacts do not make "noise" on the data.

The fast guy, at level 10 got surprise on the slow guy 75 out of 500 times, so 15%, this number could be increased using powers (pshychic, ki, magic, whatever) or items, but I think that would be creating a specialist, and there are ways to counter surprise.
I do believe that if a player builds a specialized character that gets surprise on the slowest enemies some 50-60% of the time by level 10, then the advantage is not really broken.

If Tome or anyone else cares to keep this going, I'm listening. Thanks in advance.

[Tome]

That doesn't seem like a very accurate test.

A Weaponmaster, a Warrior and an Acrobatic Warrior are going to have different characteristics they prioritise and wear different armour.

The Acrobatic Warrior, for instance, is going to prioritise Agility far more than the normal Warrior. They're also likely to choose a fast weapon and wear lighter armour. The Weaponmaster probably wears the heaviest stuff he can find and damn the initiative penalties. You need to account for the cumulative effect.

Not quite sure why you'd even want to change the Advantage in the first place mind.

[Kyuu Himura]

I wanted to change it to better adapt the old characters to the new system, which meant having 2 "tanks" with really high initiative... considering their party role anyway. As I said, to better adapt. Also, as a gift/small thank you to my players who put effort in their characters in a system that I couldn't take anymore.

While equipment does come in play, I've found that high quality armor with enough Wearing Armor skill (Is that how it's called in english? I only have the spanish books) greatly reduces initiative penalties, which leaves weapon modifiers, but those aren't all that significant (10-20 in any one direction). I did test it to see if the new advantage by itself was enough to grant surprise against the most enemies, most of the time. When I look back at it, it's not the be-all-end-all brokenness test, but it's a start.

Going beyond that, I wanted to see the ramifications of this, I mean, things start getting dangerous by level 10 (and again, only for the fastest guy vs the slowest guy), but by my estimates, everyone should have some way of mitigating the surprise or the penalties that come with it by then (a level 10 mage will probably be surprised by "the Flash's" initial assault, but I don't think a level 10 mage is not walking around with a Perfect Shield with Automatic Projection Zen).

You know, I just thought about this:

Fast Reflexes

Benefit: Your character gains +5 initiative per level in slow classes (5 ini per level clases). If they have no levels in such classes, they gain a flat +25 to initiative, that does not increase with level. You may only take this advantage once.

Cost: 1 Creation Point

Yeah, more complicated, but if you ask me, less so than playing a Psychic Wizard.

Also, thanks for taking the time, not a lot of people play this game.