/ore/ Wild Talents and One Roll Engine General

This is a thread for discussing Wild Talents, Reign, Monsters and Other Childish Things and any other games built on Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine.

>***The System
Roll some d10s. Find matches. The number of matching dice is your Width. The number ON the dice is your Height. So a Set of [5,5,5] has a Width of 3 and a Height of 5, written as 3x5. That's it. Width and Height tell you a lot about your action, such as how fast it was, how strong it was, how precise it was, etc. Everything in the system is built around this fast, simple mechanic.

>***The Games

>Nemesis
A game about cosmic horror that invented the Madness system that would later be used in Unknown Armies. It's available for free on ArcDream's website here: arcdream.com/pdf/Nemesis.pdf

>Godlike
Superhero roleplaying during World War II. Fight supersonic Nazis and invisible French knife maniacs in a brutal setting where you're equally likely to be killed by a mortar blast as from a supervillain.

>Wild Talents
The sequel to Godlike, blowing the doors of the system to let you create any superpower you can imagine. /tg's favorite ORE game.

>Monsters and Other Childish Things
You're a kid with an imaginary monster friend who's real, and you have adventures. Converts nicely to Jojo and Persona.

>Reign
High fantasy roleplaying in a crazy world that would need to have an entire post just about it.

>A Dirty World
Noir at its best. Relentlessly focused on character growth and psychology. A much lighter system than the others.

>Better Angels
You're a supervillain whose power comes from a contract with a demon. Try not to get dragged to hell.

>***Pastebin
pastebin.com/EBjEPYyg

Other urls found in this thread:

arcdream.com/pdf/ore_mecha.pdf
pastebin.com/BC6YQhDV
pastebin.com/uv2Es1hG
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I stated up Yondu in last week's Stat Me thread. I think it came out rather nicely.

Yondu Udonta

STATS
Body 3d Coordination 3d
Sense 2d Mind 2d
Charm 3d Command 4d
BASE WILL 7

SKILLS
Athletics 2d (4d), Brawling 3d (6d), Block 2d (5d), Endurance 1d (4d), Dodge 2d (5d), Drive (Ravager Vessel) 3d (6d), Stealth 3d (5d), Weapon (Firearms) 2d (5d), Perception 2d (4d), Empathy 2d (4d), Scrutiny 1d (3d), Navigation 3d (5d), Streetwise 3d (5d), Lie 2d (5d), Persuade 2d (5d), Intimidate 3d (7d), Interrogate 2d (6d), Leadership 4d (8d), Stability 3d (6d)

LOYALTY: His Crew (2), The Ravagers (1), Peter Quill (3)
PASSION: Getting Paid (1)

WHISTLING ARROW (10 pts per die) 5d+1wd (90 pts)
Attacks Range+1 (Delicate Focus-2, On Sight+1, Go First+1, Spray+4, If/Then-1(each Spray set must be applied to different target), Locational-1, Penetration+3)
Useful Speed
EFFECTS: Yondu's Whistling Arrow is a deadly ranged weapon inflicting Width+1 in Shock and Killing. It has a thermally charged arrowhead capable of piercing up to 3 layers of armor; exceptional speed allowing it to strike targets as if its Width was 1 greater for timing purposes; and precise guidance, which adds +4d to Yondu's dice pool and allows him to use each Set he rolls as an attack against a different target. The arrow has an effective range of 320 yards and can be guided to targets even through transmitted images, such as through a security feed.

Yondu controls his arrow by means of a fin-like apparatus attached to his cranium. It has 3 hit boxes, and striking it requires a Height of 10. A blow to the head is also capable of breaking Yondu's concentration, nullifying any unresolved Sets for that round.*

In a pinch, Yondu can also grasp the arrow in his hand to use it to slow his descent as a sort of makeshift parachute.

*this last element is a bit dodgy since it doesn't ACTUALLY happen in the film, but it seems a fair trade-off since this is a ridiculously lethal weapon

>What house rules or systems have you cooked up with the ORE?
My group has largely redone how healing works in Wild Talents. The RAW system is good but kind of punishing (it takes forever to heal damage and you can actually hurt yourself worse if you roll badly), which is great for very gritty games. Here's out lighter alternative:

>Roll Mind + First Aid to heal Width in Shock
>If you roll a Width of 3 or greater, you can convert 1 Killing to Shock
>If multiple people are healing you, you can combine their Widths
>Each time you're healed with First aid you use up one of your First Aid Checks, which are equal to your Body Dice. Each night of restful sleep regenerates one First Aid Check.

It's leads to a smoother, more forgiving play experience than the vanilla "first aid kind of sucks, especially if you're badly wounded".

Suggestions for characters to Stat:

Jotaro Kujo
Magneto
Dhalsim

I've been playing Wild Talents for over three years now, weekly for the most part, so if anyone has any questions about the system or how to run stuff in it, I can probably help!

If I wanted to run a Worm campaign, should I run Wild Talents over Weaver Dice since it's still in the making?

And out of system, I spoiled the fact that my players were playing a superhero campaign and now he's set on playing with a character with 40k Ork powers: whatever constructs he creates and believes will work become a reality (Red is fast, sticking a light bulb in some scrap metal and attaching a broken trigger creates a lasergun.) Before I throw away the idea, how would I stay this in Wild Talents?

I've always wanted to give ORE a try but never had the opportunity to join a game of it.

I've never played either, but from reading Wild Talents' book it's extremely open ended in how it approaches superpowers so should be good for Worm. I don't know how Weaver Dice is though.

I have to head out but I think I can answer these:

>If I wanted to run a Worm campaign, should I run Wild Talents over Weaver Dice since it's still in the making?
I'm not familiar with Weaver Dice or Worm, but an user from the last thread wanted to run Worm + STALKER and it was decided that Wild Talents is a great system for it (gritty, deadly gun violence and very flexible power creation).

> whatever constructs he creates and believes will work become a reality (Red is fast, sticking a light bulb in some scrap metal and attaching a broken trigger creates a lasergun.) Before I throw away the idea, how would I stay this in Wild Talents?
There's two ways you can do this. One would be to make his character's Archetype use Belief as its Source. That way, whatever powers he has stems from the fact that he believes them to work. Then you create the powers that he specifically wants individually, and all of them will be powered by his Belief. This is, perhaps, the more balanced option, since it means he can't literally do anything he sets his mind to-- but what he can do is because of his Orkish belief.

Now if this character's power is literally "Anything he believes comes true", then the game has an ability like that called "Cosmic Power." It's the most expensive power in the game but it lets you do literally anything, including creating other Powers.

Actually let me issue a correction: there's a pre-built power called Gadgeteering that does exactly what you want it to; it's even fueled by your Will, so it works perfectly as Orktech.

See, powers in Wild Talents are effect based-- all you need to know is what it does. How it does it is basically irrelevant in most circumstances. So an inventor who creates technology as the result of meticulous research and experimentation, and an ork who slaps junk together and has it magically work, are using the exact same power.

So yeah, it's not only easy to create a character who functions that way, but it's actually built in. Go nuts.

Do you have your own group? The ORE is super easy to learn. I play with my wife and it's the first tabletop game she's ever played, and she learned it in five minutes and is now my co-GM.

What exactly is Worm anyway? I keep seeing it brought up on this board.

It's a popular web serial (an online-published work of amateur fiction posted chapter by chapter) focused on supers. Some people (autists) love it. Some people don't. I am an autist, so I think it's great.

>whatever constructs he creates and believes will work become a reality
So, he's a regular tinker?

Anyway, I think Wild Talents would probably work if you tweaked it a bit. I personally like the "you don't choose your power" aspect of Weaver Dice. That's a big part of Worm, after all.

How does that work in Weaver Dice? It shouldn't hard to build a random gen in ORE.

I think you roll for a trigger event and everyone else creates your power. Personally, I think the trigger events decide too much of your character for you, so I think a system that randomly decided elements of your trigger while you flesh it out would be preferable.

>So, he's a regular tinker?
Not a regular one. Most, if not all, Tinkers requires real parts to configure the machines they create, not stuff they believe in. And Orktek Tinker just need 2x4 and junk to complete tools of destruction that only the Orktek Tinker can use.

I'm the user that posed the question here. and I wanted to play with the idea of random powers. But, the one player overheard just the superpowers portion and jumped to a powerset he had in mind. Is it too late or rude of me to deny him this? Should I just let the other players pick their powers too?

So how "hackable" is ORE, my group has been looking to play something akin to persona and I thought that MACOT's monsters might make good personas but I've never played anything in the system, just heard podcasts play it. Is there a way to simulate the social bonds thing as well or am I barking up the wrong tree system wise

MAOCT has a relationship mechanic, but without being familiar with persona I can't say that it'll fulfill what you're after.

>What house rules or systems have you cooked up with the ORE?
I've considered shifting the head to hit location 7 and bumping the torso up to 8-10. That way headblows become easier to dodge than blows to the body and aren't an automatic artifact of hard dice.

It might be rude, but I think you should be able to explain to your players that Worm is about doing what you can with what you have. It may be the case that your players don't even want the Worm flavor. It's something to discuss, I think. You know your players better than I do, I imagine.

ORE is stupendously hackable. I'm in the middle of a WT game right now actually (taking a brief break) so if this thread is around tomorrow I'll talk about how MaOCT can be ported to Persona. Needless to say it's a very nice fit.

Trying to get mechs to work in the ORE system, but not quite sure how to do them. I might go with the way Wild Talents does them, but the system MaOCT uses for making monsters seems like a simple, easily accessible method as well.

There is an ORE Mecha game.

arcdream.com/pdf/ore_mecha.pdf

...

Kick the idea around with them, see what the interest is in different parts of the setting. There's no reason that you have to take the whole thing as written.

One potential alternative if you want to keep the random aspect but let them have the poweset is to randomise other parts of the character (or let the other players pick them) like the trigger event or their background.

MaOCT works great for like a Super Robot show, but I think you could make an excellent Real Robot show just by hacking the ORE directly. Another thing I'd love to discuss. I actually think it could be a perfect system given how lethal UC Gundam and a lot of other real robot shows are.

ORE Mecha is cool but I think for a game where mechs are the central focus, we'd want something built for them from the ground up instead of bending Wild Talents around a mecha framework.

does any user have links to the above mentioned games. would like to take a look at them all.

That's what I was thinking. ORE Mecha is neat, but it didn't really seem like the best way to do a mech game.

Is this well done?

Phantom of the Opera (11)
Qualities: A D U.
Attacks Extras and Flaws(Haunting Melodies): Controlled Effect +1, Radius (3) +6, Duration +2, Obvious -1, Touch Only -3, No Physical Change -1, Locational -2. Capacities: Touch.
Defends Extras and Flaws(Sensory Overload): Interference +3, Duration +2, Obvious -1, If/Then (Must be singing) -1, Locational -2. Capacities: Self.
Useful Extras and Flaws(Soul Music): Controlled Effect +1, Engulf +2, Duration +2, Radius (3) +6, Touch Only -2, Obvious -1, If/Then (Must be singing) -1, If/Then(Only regenerates Shock) -1, Locational -2, Attached to Sensory Overload -2. Capacities: Touch.
Clamaris' singing voice can enter the heads of foes near him, shattering their minds and concentration as well as mending his and his allies' bruises and scrapes. Phantom of the Opera requires it's user to keep singing to work, and will stop working if Clamaris takes any damage to his head or chest, requiring him to start singing again.

You could make it cheaper by taking Attached (Singing) -2 rather than If/Then (Must be singing) -1, if there's enough points to buy the skill and they don't mind spending an action to 'spin up'. Another option you might want to consider is breaking it up into multiple powers so you can assign different dice values to the qualities.

Hadn't thought about the skill.
What stat would singing use anyway, Charm?

Yup, under Performance (Type)

I'll hold ya too that if the thread is still up, I like the system conceptually so I hope t works

Whats your preferred points limit for character creation?

I'm a the end of a year long campaign of Godlike. Set in a quanrantined zone of Berlin in 1946, my players must find seven nzai hidden among a cast of 60 talent in a "neutral" zone where Allies diplomats and spies are trying to figure out what to do with Talents now that the war is over. Of course the last Nazis are messing things up, russians and USAns are at each others throat, English and French are trying to save what's left of Europe.

And my players decided to create a country for Talents. It's fun

Tell us a bit about your WT game too, user! I'm about to run one myself, and it's got me real excited.

I used these characters a few years ago for a Wild Talents one-shot to introduce new players to the system.

I can't remember all the details of it, but the basic premise was that the first six characters were pregens pitted against the final three who were robbing a bank. The main non-combat challenges I recall were:

* Negotiating for access with the cops before the situation deteriorated.
* Protecting and rescuing the hostages.
* Using Mitosis Mike's foibles against him (he was an environmental activist turned super-criminal to fund protest action against fossil fuel extraction in his native Canada and vulnerable to having that played on).
* Dealing with Whiplash's distraction attack on the vehicle blockades (intended to let the others get away by an underground route).

>I've considered shifting the head to hit location 7 and bumping the torso up to 8-10. That way headblows become easier to dodge than blows to the body and aren't an automatic artifact of hard dice.

This was something I've also thought about, but my group ended up not adopting the idea since it kind of goes against the flow of Wild Talents, where a 10 is always the best possible result you can roll. We instead just sort of went with the gentlemen's agreement that no-one is allowed to have 2hd or more in an Attack power or skill.

>I wanted to play with the idea of random powers.
This is the single biggest thing I'd like to work out for Wild Talents. Reign has an awesome system for random rolling characters, but the only character generator for Wild Talents is hosted on some obscure ArcDream site and it's very obtuse. In Godlike the whole idea is that your character's Talent arises spontaneously in response to trauma, but there's no system for actually creating spontaneous, unpredictable powers. It's something I'd be very interested in working out.

Alright so check it out:

Monsters and Other Childish Things can be turned into a form of Persona with basically Vanilla rules. Just change "Monster" into "Persona" and you've basically got it. But there are some interesting hacks you can do to add more Persona flavor to the game.

Basically in MaOCT, every character has a Monster that can only be seen by them or by other characters with Monsters. A monster can be basically anything-- the rule is that you literally draw the monster and then circle bits on it to say whether that part can be used for attack, defense or has some useful function (like flying or being able to smash through walls). Your Kids also have stats, ones that are very applicable to playing in a school setting (such as the Put Down skill for insulting people). It should seem fairly evident that this patches to Persona nicely.

Also, the rules are such that social combat can be just as effective as actual battle, so someone being humiliated, bullied or teased into submission is a valid strategy or problem to overcome (which works very well for a Persona 5 type game)

It also has a built in relationship system, where you establish contact with people and then can cash in those ties for additional dice, but at the cost of introducing strain to that relationship. Strain is repaired just by spending time with the relation, and improved by gaining new understandings and drawing closer to that person, so again, maps very nicely to Persona.

Beyond that, there's not much else that the game says you HAVE to do. It's quite open ended, to the extent where it works even without the Monsters part; Roleplay Public Radio did a Five Nights at Freddies actual play using the system and it was pretty great.

To adapt more closely to Persona, here's what I'd suggest:

1. Adding Elemental strengths/weaknesses. This can be done simply by tweaking how damage works (Normal damage is Scars; vs Resistance is Shock; vs Weakness is Shock and Scars).

(continued)

(2/2)

2. Adding combat flourishes. Since Persona 3, the fighting system has been all about the One More mechanic, so to add that in would give the game a real Persona feel. The way I'd suggest to do it would be to let a player who Knocks Down a target use a second set he rolled as another attack against a different target. This means you won't get One More 100% of the time, but I feel like that's a decent balancing mechanic since it prevents every fight from becoming a rote repetition of moves, which works fine for a video game but is dull as dishwater at the table.

3. More Personas. If everyone has a single Persona, then you're fine. But if you want to introduce a Wild Card mechanic, I'd suggest that you NOT make every single persona you can summon have its own stat sheet, since that's a lot of work to do and it detracts from the "main" persona of each character (which is my big complaint from each game-- the MC's persona is always very cool and distinct looking, but you never get to use it beyond the first dungeon). Instead, what you could do is make them Support Personas-- instead of having a full suite of abilities, give them one or two things that you can call them out to do, like letting a High Pixie throw out some Zionga or titillate an unwary shadow, but not much more. That way a character's Persona roster can expand while they can still say "this one is MY persona."

These are all just ideas I had as to how it could be done. If you want to see how it actually IS done, check out The Drunk and Ugly's "Shin Megami Tensei and Other Childish Things" actual play, which is in fact Persona by way of MaOCT. It's very good.

There's a one-roll power generator on p.162-163 of the Wild Talents corebook. I'd start from there and adapt it along the lines of the different power types.

And here's the second page.

Nice, I guess that's what happens when I only have the 2nd Ed Essential Edition without all that stuff added to it. I'm all over this.

So as a basic idea, a full-blown ORE mecha game would be fairly easy. Combat between mechs isn't much different from combat between people, since most mechs are humanoid and so you can just take the normal wound silhouette and change the 10 location from the head to the cockpit.

The real trick, I think, would be in how you roll dice. I've been working on a space adventure supplement for Reign, which would also work mostly for Wild Talents, where characters have a separate field of skills for spacecraft flight; the same could be done for mech operation. Each roll you make then is Character Skill + Mech System. So to fire a gun you roll Gunnery + Weapon, or to avoid an attack you roll Pilot + Handling. That way the outcome an action is dependent equally on the human and machine parts. A skilled pilot operating a crappy robot might be no matched for a decent pilot in an excellent machine.

That's pretty much the baseline you can start from. I'd love to see what we could come up with building off it, because I'm always in the market for a new, good mecha game.

There's some amazing stuff in here; I'm especially digging Sleep's Booster ability as being tied to her Hyperdice; I'm almost certainly going to steal that for my game. Forward Planning is also a great way to do a "I had a plan for just this contingency!" type character. Nice work on that too.

Can you explain how you built Latency's Quick Study ability?

Seriously, good show on this. I'd run this for new folks in a heartbeat.

I can't really take credit for Forward Planning. I'm pretty sure I stole it from somewhere else, but it's been years.

>Can you explain how you built Latency's Quick Study ability?
IIRC it's a Hyperskill with some extras and flaws tacked on, should look something like this:

Quick Study +4D+2WD (3pts per die; 36pts)
Hyperskill Extras & Flaws: If/Then (builds one dice per skill use, wiggle last) -1, If/Then (start over when switching skills) -1, Variable Effect +4. Capacity: N/A.

If/Then is pretty much the universal go-to for building conditional powers.

Can you elaborate as to how you envision Haunting Melodies to work?

And yes what said is correct, you can apply Attacked-2 to all of these in place of the if/then to cut the total cost by -3.

I posted a little about my game last thread. It's set in an alternate timeline where the cold war ended in the late 80s when an asteroid almost collided with the Earth, and was only averted when a joint US-Soviet mission diverted it into a stable orbit. As a result, the geopolitical situation is a good deal different, with Russia as a much more present force due to their access to alien technology found inside the asteroid (called The Stone). This element of the story was introduced because two of my players ended up creating Russian characters and I wanted to expand that part of the setting.

Back in WWII, hypertrained soldiers began distinguishing themselves, which lead to the first breed of "superheroes"-- Elites, normal folk who through driven and determination can acquire any Hyperskills they want. The 70s and 80s gave rise to the second superheroic archetype, Mutants, who were the result of government experimentation to create the next generation of super soldiers. Much more recently, exposure to a strange retrovirus creates the third archetype, Retros, who have very strange and eclectic abilities that seem at times to defy physics.

The story, as its unfolding, centers on metahuman activity in Ransom City, the capitol of the fictional American state of Arcadia. The characters deal with crime, both mundane and superhuman, while also coping with increased government policing of metahuman activity, incursions by a hostile parasitic alien species, and investigating the origins of the Retrovirus that seems to date back to WWII.

I hate to be pedantic, but the Madness Meter predates Nemesis, and was used in Unknown Armies first, not the other way around

Nice catch; should have done my research a little better in that, UA 1ed came like 8 years earlier. I'll make sure to adjust that next time I make a thread.

The way I would hack MaOCT to run Persona with Wild Card characters while retaining as much of the vanilla mechanics as possible would be to let people buy monster dice with experience and let them build personas with them.

I'd allow them to sacrifice two or more personas to get a refund on monster dice and just treat them like a resource to build monsters during downtime. If you relax the restriction on the minimum amount of hit locations a monster needs, they can build their own support personas with ten dice or so, and save you the trouble.

The main issue I can see is people will eventually make something broken, so letting them experiment like this requires some oversight.

How do you make a character who can control Weather?

See that's beautiful. The idea of using monster dice as resources is awesome. To add structure to the idea you can make each character a Wild Card within a specific Arcana, so the Magician character can make trickster Personae like Jack Frost while the Chariot character makes physically powerful warrior personae.

This also allows you to introduce Arcana mechanics into the game. If you set up a limit on the total dice a persona can have and give them an arbitrary arcana, you can give a relationship that same arcana "tag" and relax the limits as the relationship grows stronger.

You could also tie the arcanas to specific extras, so maybe you can't get Sweet unless you have a Magician relationship with an NPC, or you're limited to 2 Gnarly extras until you meet that Chariot girl's parents and up the relationship to 3

Pretty easily actually. There's already a Control (Type) miracle in the core game. Since Weather is an exceptionally broad thing to control (it encompasses water, wind, electricity, etc...) you'd want to add Variable Effect to it, which would make it pricey but also extremely useful. So it would look something like this:

CONTROL WEATHER (15 pts)
>Attacks Range, Mass
>Defends Self, Range
>Useful Range, Mass (Variable Effect+4, If/then-1 (only for controlling meteorological phenomena)

The Attacks quality allows you to both attack at range and throw your targets around, and the Defense quality allows you protect both yourself and others within your range.

This would allow you to inflict Width in Shock and Killing damage by lightning, hurricane winds or giant hail stones; block attacks by creating impenetrable storm walls; and basically do whatever you want outside of combat as long as Weather is involved. It's pricey, but it covers everything you'd ever need, for the most part.

More excellent ideas. I'm going to keep track of these and load them into a pastebin file specifically for Persona and Other Childish Things.

I feel like MaOCT is probably the single best Persona system that could be created simply because it has a "relationships can be damaged" mechanic that the games themselves don't deal in and therefore don't prime homebrewers for.

Static social links only work with scripted scenarios.

I've been thinking about it, and the six human stats can be condensed into just three for mechs. Structure, Response, and Systems (Electronics?) would cover physical strength and toughness, quickness and ability to respond to input, and general tech (like deployable drones or ECM and radar)

Aside from that the most complicated thing is weapons and equipment, which boils down to a matter of taste. With MaOCT and Wild Talents, you can stat out a weapon or a piece of gear, assign it to a hit location, and be done. This allows quite a good bit of customization for mechs, and it allows people to personalize them. Or you can pre-design everything and just mix and match like Battletech, which has the benefit of keeping everything relatively balanced but less personalized.

Agreed. It works not because it replicates the complete experience of a Persona game, but because it emulates the same feeling you get while playing one.

It was mentioned last thread that one thing you'll have to keep in mind is that MaOCT isn't really a dungeon-crawly game, though you could make it one if you really wanted to. As a result, that aspect of Persona doesn't quite work. You're much better off creating strange, unique supernatural spaces that the characters have to deal with than sprawling networks of hallways patrolled by shadows. The One Roll Engine handles combat a lot quicker than most, but it's still slower than how most Persona random encounters resolve (like within the first two measure of the battle theme). So make it more about exploration and dealing with the unnatural than about fighting everything you see.

I made that point in the thread of a GM asking for advice

Ah, yes, I remember that now. It stuck with me as great advice.

This seems reasonable; what do you think about the dice pools being Pilot Dice + Mech Dice? Or do you think it would be easier if all the dice came from the pilot, and the mech merely provided the stats for what it's capable of?

Weapons would also be pretty easy to work with: standard weapons deal Width in Killing, small weapons (or large infantry guns) deal Width in Shock, and heavy artillery deals Width in Shock and Killing. The variety of ways that a giant robot can kill another giant robot isn't quite as varied as in a superhero game.

Beyond that, most non-weaponized Mech functions could be described as Useful Miracles (WT) or Useful Parts (MaOCT) and priced accordingly.

Your the man, I'm gonna go check that actual play out and this should help a lot, thanks man

Pilot + mech would work out. For instance, interfering with another mech's electronics or infiltrating a network would be something like Hacking + Systems. Firing a weapon would be Gunnery + Response.

Makes sense. What would you roll Structure for then? Off the top of my head it seems like it would be a mostly passive stat related to how tough your mech is.

I do like where this going, though. Is your point of reference more Gundam or Mechwarrior?

Definitely mechwarrior, but with a bit of armored core because I'm a sucker for modular mechs. Structure also seems to be the most passive stat, unless you're doing a lot of melee in combat.

This post got lost earlier in the thread but I just want to point out that it is awesome. Feels very noir, but with superpowers. What are your characters' powers?

Also it's real cool that you're playing this in Godlike. A lot of people I think balk at the game as being kind of impenetrable (if only for the maaaaassive timeline of WWII history) and think "that's cool but what do I do in it?" so it's great to see someone throwing actual dice instead of just marveling at it.

What if Structure included things like your mech's power plant, so that you can use it for a pure outrun roll? You'd also roll Structure along with, say, Engineering, to do quick fixes on your Mech (since better Structure means it can tolerate jury-rigging better).

As far as the pilot is concerned, I can see these skills:

Gunnery- for normal line-of-sight weapons
Artillery- for heavy duty or very long range weapons
Melee- for fighting in close quarters
Pilot- for moving the mech around
Engineering- for repairing it
Electronics- for using sensors and other similar systems
Hacking- for computer warfare

What else would we want? We clearly should avoid having too many skills but since this is a system ABOUT mechs it should be a focus.

For mech-related skills that pretty much covers everything you might need. Every other skill would be for out of mech play.

A mech, on the other hand would probably look something like:

Type: TST - 001
Structure: 3
Response: 4
Systems: 2

1 - Left Leg
2 - Right Leg
3-4 - Left Arm, Hand, Weapon Mount
5-6 - Right Arm, Hand
7-9 - Torso, Weapon Mount
10 - Cockpit

Pretty much, though I wonder if only having 3 stats would make it hard to differentiate between mechs. The system for Parts would have to be well developed for it to make sense.

In Battletech you have the differentiation between mech weights as well as the equipment differences. With the built-in creation rules you get your scouts, your mainline ranks, and your heavy bruisers. Trying to recreate that with ORE's point values is a bit difficult, as you end up in the situation of "more dice = all around better". This is why I was looking at MaOTC, as it seems like a balanced way to get varied, personalized mechs.

I see where you're coming from. So the three central stats themselves encompass the mech's ability to do things, while the actual parts you equip onto it describe the things it can do. Like if you have a torso unit with flight capabilities you can roll Pilot + Structure to go airborne, or if you have a cockpit with enhanced sensors you can roll Electronics + Systems to get a better view of the battlefield. It's a good idea.

This discussion about ORE mechs actually reminds me of my group's driving system for Wild Talents:

>pastebin.com/BC6YQhDV

It includes rules for how to run a car chase, how to shoot out tires and nail passengers inside, how to run someone off the road and what happens in a collision. We ran it for the first time last night and it went great, though it ended up with the players hanging upside down from their rolled over vehicle, one with a broken rib almost sticking out of their side.

Thanks! Gotta stop being lazy and actually make the equipment, or rules for making it.

That is very, very nice.

Thanks! I'm working on something similar for running spaceships in the ORE Sci-Fi system I'm patching together. Here's the notes for spaceship damage:

>pastebin.com/uv2Es1hG
It's just how a spacecraft's hit locations work, the real grit of systems and combat is another story altogether.

RE: mechs, I do feel however that maaaybe 3 stats is too limited a field, but I'm not sure necessarily how I'd expand it. Right now the three that we have are pretty encompassing:

>Structure: How durable, well built and mechanically powerful the mech is
>Response: How nimble and well handling it is
>Systems: How electronically sophisticated it is

What if we added Mobility as another Stat? In contrast with Response, which is more of a twitch-movement stat, Mobility is about a mech's ability to traverse its environment effectively and quickly.

Going off of an older document I have, you could split up a mech's stats about six different ways:
Structure - The measure of a vehicle’s durability and strength.
Handling - How quickly and how well the vehicle responds to input.
Speed - The vehicle’s velocity compared to other vehicles.
Electronics - The processing power of a vehicle. Uses Communications or Sensors for range.
Sensors - A vehicle’s radar system. Range of Sensors*400 meters.
Communications - A vehicle’s ability to communicate, as well as control drones. Range of Communications*500
Targeting - The vehicle’s ability to target and fire swiftly and accurately.

However, this runs the risk of splitting things up too much, and making things more complicated than they need to be.

Yeah communications and sensors might be overboard as stats given how oftent they'd be used compared with response or weapons. Systems probably covers them nicely.

Also: is this system assuming that mech weapons have their own dice values? So that you roll Gunnery + Weapon to attack with a machine gun, for instance? I noticed that one of the early ideas was to have Response govern weapons, but that could cause the system to get dangerously close to Mekton Zeta's "Reflex is the God Stat" problem.

That's one of the drawbacks, yeah. I was actually thinking that a standard roll would be Gunnery (pilot) + Response (mech), but your suggestion of the guns/equipment having their own dice pools would be a nice hybrid method.

Bump

are there combat alternatives beyond Height=location&speed Width=speed?

The Toolkit pdf has multiple ways of doing combat, one of which is a reversed method, I think.

A Dirty World and Better Angels use a more abstracted mechanic that involves pushing stats (qualities and identities for ADW) back and forth on a sliding scale (or knocking points off for potent successes). It also incorporates other kinds of conflicts, you can knock someone's Deceit around by guilt tripping them over a lie you've caught them in for example.

A Dirty World's mechanics are so good. Listen to RPPR's "A Very Thorough Murder" to see it at its finest. Best noir game I ever heard.

I have stuff to ask tomorrow, so bump.

anything new come out using this system?

Gonna answer to that after breakfast because eurofag

>And my players decided to create a country for Talents

here

We've been playing for a years now at my LGS, and with around 6 to 8 players who come and go, we got quite a cast. Here's the roaster

Tiberius "Tibia" Hart
He's the captain, even if he can never go back home since he commited treason a few times in the Zone. He was a charming and cunning officer in UK army, then he turned into a lich. He is litteraly a skeleton mage with spell tome and staff, a helmet and a rifle. He can cast spells and does not bleed, but can not be healed unless by powers.

Raymond "Canard" de Voulgezac
A weel groom french bourgeois, he survived an bombing during a diplomatic meeting in the zone and developed powers.FUll of himself, he was a great talker and now he is a even greater figther, but only with a cane. He is also unnormaly athletic.

William "Propulso" Cumry
He is the Yankee. A boxer, he looks like Bruce Willis at the end of Die Hard, and he is a great soldier as long as he have orders to follow. Always bragging, he really want to be charming but just can't. He can create impulses through his palms and feet can can push about 6 tons, or propulse him in the air. He is also one of the few that survived since the beginning of the campaign.

Philomene "Milou" Chatouillette
A shy french girl, she's a thief. Always was, always will be. She's a good fighter now becuse she survived the whole campaign too (she lost an arm but it grew back). She can change the size of thing by touch, and has a magic pocket that can contain a lot of stuff. She collect miniaturized dead nazis in bocals.

Joseph "Jojo" Dzik
A pale and very young polish dude, he's a bit of a wallflower. He can create time bubble where the time slows, or speed himself up. He can also launch ghost knives.

Paul " Nuir Nax" Faulkner
A germen prisor, he has been left in a cave with gold for too long and started turning into a dragon. He can spit fire and is covered in red scales (armor). He reeeaaaallly likes gold and he's starting to develop wings while losing his grip.

Thomas "Son" Lancaster-Hart
The son of Tiberius, he is nothing like his father. He is extremly loyal to the Crown, and more of a bookworm than a soldier. He can turn his limbs into tools he touched earlier.

And last but not least
Anna "The Black Queen" Malinova
She is the only survivor of a campaign I ran witht he same players about two years ago, and that lasted a year and half. She is a gritty, 80% burned czech anarchist tomboy, who became the war and is now queen of the underground in the Zone. She can blow about anything with a loud scream, or release a killing murmur up close.

+ 8 dead characters