Who here's played games using the Nemesis system?
There apparently used to be a community for it, but the site's dead and I haven't found it anywhere else. What does Veeky Forums think of the One Roll Engine?
Also, any alternative rules-light systems with high-impact modern day combat?
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The home site for the publisher.
rpg.net
A review of the system.
One of the best games out there. Its relevance somewhat diminished with UA3 and CoC7, still right up there.
Never played Nemesis but I've been playing a weekly Wild Talents game for about 2 years now. The One Roll Engine is by far my favorite system of all time.
High praise!
What would you say are the systems' main weaknesses?
As a universal system, ORE doesn't do very well with handling traditional dungeon crawling. This is in part because no-one has actually made an ORE dungeon-crawler yet, so it's still feasible.
The bell curve is weird. You only need a dice pool of 4d to get even odds of baseline success, which is extremely easy to get. Diminishing returns hit really hard past 6d, where at 7d you have a 93% of getting some kind of success.
This is by design; the advantage of having a bigger dice pool is not that you have a better chance at succeeding, but that you are better capable of succeeding WELL and that you can more easily cope with more complex actions and penalties. Once you get used to it it's extremely intuitive, but a new GM can easily come to the conclusion that his Players will just always succeed.
Combat is very aggressive and strongly favors the attacker unless armor is made common-place. There's no passive defense system; unless a character declares that he's going to block or dodge, he doesn't. This is mitigated by the first hit rule-- if you get hit before your attack lands, you lose a dice from your Set. At lower levels of power, it's almost a sure bet that your attack will be foiled if that happens. So usually the best defense is a good offense. This contributes to making the game very fast paced and kinetic, but building a defensive character isn't super intuitive. It can still be done, and infact a well build defensive character is infact extremely powerful due to how defense works, it's just more complex.
Adjudicating combat with a large number of people involved can be daunting, but it's still much, much, much faster and exciting than just about any other system I've ever experienced.
Those are pretty much the universal problems across all ORE products. Each individual system has its own faults as well, along with its own strengths.
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This is a true post. I'm currently working on a hack of REIGN customized for sci-fi space adventures, since StarORE is pretty strongly focused on Star Wars in particular.
Like with any game, you really have to get into the dynamic of the mechanism.
If you don't understand how the dice pools interact you will just get your actions knocked out of your round and that is frustrating. A DnD attitude of everyone takes their turn, rolls damage, and then waits for the spotlight to come back around will fail horribly. In an ORE combat round there's more moving parts than a newbie can track or predict. The dice results deliver detailed story effects beyond damage or not. And unless all players embrace that and roll with the punches it will roll over them without them knowing what just happened.
In short: it takes invested players. The mechanics are easy, but the dynamic they develop has complexity and requires some understanding. You can't tell how an encounter will end just by looking at health and damage on each side.
Planetary Romance, Space Opera, or gritty Low Fantasy SF?
Because Reign is a great base for Planetary Romance, but for more modern character structures I'd start with Wild Talents or Nemesis.
Space Opera primarily.
The final product is most definitely a hybrid of REIGN and Wild Talents, primarily where it comes to constructing unique extraterrestrial abilities and technology.
That sounds very interesting, especially since there is no fully fleshed out Scifi ORE as of yet. Will you make us a PDF?
Completely. It's all in pieces right now, and the initial tests that I've done with the system (via a light Star Trek one shot) exposed numerous areas where improvements can be made.
It's for homebrewing. You won't find monster stats in the book (I think there's 3 examples in the back). It won't instruct the reader how roleplaying works. It doesn't handhold players through creating story with the mechanics they are handed and leaves character background or inner tension up to experience.
So the GM should have played and understood horror before to be able to take all the strings the mechanics hand them and connect them to a plot.
It has no setting, just a horror slant expressed mainly in the Madness Meter and the fact that trump dice are reserved for magic, which isn't in player hands.
So if you expect a game to feature a tutorial adventure, an explanation of the genre it was made for, or a step by step chargen chapter at the end of which any inexperienced player will have a functional character for the story, then Nemesis is not your game.
If you have played UA and wish you could use its dynamic for games in another setting, if you enjoy mechanism design and motivating players with rules to tell a story that follows genre conventions, or if you have a horror idea that requires more structure than Dread or Dead of Night but don't want all the gaming traditions of CoC or just need more dials to fine tune the crunch than skill list and luck buying options, then Nemesis is your best friend.
Well I for one can't wait.
Well I hope you're around when I get around to assembling the second draft of the primary crunch.
If you want a sense of the kind of stuff I'm working on, here's the first draft write-up on the Marvels system. Marvels are basically a mix of Wild Talent's Miracles and REIGN's Sorcery, repurposed for creating advanced technology and biological traits.
Nice looking so far! I'll keep an eye out.
I'm using a system kind of like this in a campaign based on Into The Odd's health and stats system.
Thanks for posting that.
It looks very detailed.
On a first glance I am reminded of my attempt at making a setting much like The Expanse ten years ago with the fallacy of calling the characters Space Marines. I spent all my time explaining how it isn't 40k, a game I have no involvement with.
All I'm saying is that there's a Marvel Super Heroes system...
I'm not worried, since Marvels are just a small part of the larger system, which is currently unnamed.
sry, looked like a title