[Bliss] ANIMa console for easier handling

[cdr]

An idea others may find useful: at the bottom of the character sheets I made for Bliss Stage I put a row of nine 20mm boxes with the leftmost three labelled "Mission", "Pilot Safety", "Relationship w/Anchor", then five empty boxes for other relationships, and the rightmost "Bliss (+3 -1)".  As the Pilot equips her ANIMa the player writes down what relationship she's using, the intimacy, trust and stress values, and possibly a brief note as to what it manifests as (glowing wings, laser sword, etc) if she writes tiny.

I have a bag of small translucent plastic chips green, yellow, red.  A green chip is placed on the box to show it's active. The boxes make it very easy to add up and allocate dice at the mission climax, and I use red post-it flags to mark what's threatened (which requires two dice to be allocated, using the lowest), or two flags for endangered (requiring three dice). Dice are allocated, with left over dice going into the bliss box which has the handy reminder that + results give 3 bliss, - results 1 bliss.  Trust and stress are adjusted, and boxes that got a '0' allocated change the chip to yellow to indicate damage, and a '-' changes it to red as a reminder its broken and no longer provides dice or needs any dice allocated. 

It also looks neat visually, and you can tell at a glance how badly things are going.

When the mission ends any changed values for trust and stress are copied back to the relationship area and in the relationship area of other people's character sheets as needed, and all the flags and chips are removed.  In the next mission the pilot's player can erase any unused relationships, or just not place green chips on them if they're not manifested.

If the pilot equips more than 6 relationships they have to draw extra boxes in by hand.  (I thought about putting the boxes along the side of the sheet rather than at the bottom, which would allow more of them, but the risk of dice rolling knocking things seems high.)

It occurs to me I could make a mission record sheet as well where each mission action gets its own line of boxes, and the entire engagement could be recorded in exact detail for later analysis and handy reference during the recrimination phase, I mean interlude.  I'll experiment with that next time.

[GreatWolf]

When we played, we wrote all the characters on index cards.  Then, when forming an ANIMa, we would arrange the cards in the shape of an ANIMa.  The pilot formed the "head", the anchor formed the "body", and other relationships were arranged around these cards as appropriate.  It was like a HUD for the ANIMa.

I like the color-coded chips idea, though.  I'll have to borrow that next time we play.

Also, just to share, in our game, we put together an anchor console:

View 1
View 2
View 3
View 4
View 5

Not really any game effect, but it was fun for the anchor!

[cdr]

Neat!  In view 1, is she holding her hand above a glowing red "Mission Abort" button?  That would be fun!

Was the microphone recording, or just a prop?

The first small step on the path to Bliss Stage LARP, maybe...

[GreatWolf]

Neat!  In view 1, is she holding her hand above a glowing red "Mission Abort" button?  That would be fun!

Sort of.  We had a red die and a green die standing in as buttons.  The green "button" was the Launch button.  The red "button" was indeed the Abort button.  You had to mash it to do the eject.

Was the microphone recording, or just a prop?

Just a prop, sadly.