One of the main aspects of this game, and most other roleplaying games, is
conflict. In most cases, this manifests as battles between the PCs and others. The
joy that players get out of these battles can come from different player goals and
interests, and among those are being challenged, being badass, and being involved
in dramatic storytelling. Other playstyles certainly exist, but for the purposes of
improving your Anima Prime experience, I just want to talk about the ones I
personally know well and enjoy, in part because they are actively supported by
these rules.
Please keep in mind that, like all playstyle issues, these are not absolute: most
players like to do several of these to some degree, at various times, even during a
single play session. When I talk about “this kind of player,” it’s just shorthand for
“a player who has this interest at this particular moment of play.”


Three Broad Categories
Players who are interested in (A) challenges like to prove their skill at something.
They enjoy having to work for a payoff. If you are the kind of person who plays
video games on the highest difficulty level, working on your mastery of the game
until you finally get the reward of beating it against all odds, then you’re very
familiar with the thrill of challenge-based playing. I love to play this way, and our
previous game Beast Hunters was built specifically for this playstyle.

Players who enjoy (B) wish fulfillment like to be successful in the game. They like
their characters to be not just good, but undeniably great at what they do. They
don’t mind if the difficulty of the game is low, because the payoff is being able to
pretend, just for a little while, that they’re unstoppable asskickers who can reliably
make a difference in the world. I used to play Werewolf: the Apocalypse partly
for this reason: it allowed me to be a badass who can tear apart anyone in his way
while fighting the corruption of our modern world.

Players who enjoy (C) drama in their stories like to put their characters through the
wringer. They are not thinking in terms of how they as players can beat the
challenge, and they definitely don’t want their characters always to come out on
top. Quite to the contrary, they understand that the most dramatic stories involve
loss, sacrifice, defeat, tragedy, and other ways of suffering. They may act contrary
to their characters’ interests in order to make the outcome of a conflict more
dramatic, and they purposely set up stories to lead their characters to the toughest
choices they could possibly be forced to make. More often than not, this is the
kind of play I enjoy.


Here’s an example. In the movie Die Harder, terrorists have taken over an airport
and messed with the landing guidance system. The hero runs out onto the
runway and tries to warn the incoming plane. However, the plane crashes and
burns, and hundreds of innocent people die. You could look at this event, if it
happened as a conflict in an RPG, in different ways. You could say: nice effort on
his part, but not good enough; I would have done x, y and z (that is, you think of
the situation as a challenge to be solved). You could feel bad that the hero didn’t
succeed and think that the story’s worse for it; maybe you were in the mood for
something uplifting and not all this death and suffering. Or you could be excited
at the dramatic impact of the hero who tried his hardest and failed, and imagine
the potential for how that will play out during the rest of the story.