/ore/ One Roll Engine General

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Bumping to keep this alive. Another playtest is happening later today. If all goes well we might have some rules for living the scholarly life of a highschool student

Excellent

Bump

Yeah 5 players is kind of a lot for any system.

Needing to use a turn to block does feel kind of counter-intuitive but honestly you get used to it. If you think about it it's actually exactly how Persona works-- Guarding is a deliberate action that you take at the expense of other actions.

ORE generally favors offense, which is a deliberate choice to improve the speed of combat. Attacking can be a defense in and of itself since hitting someone first knocks a die off their set. But each game has different and has quirks that makes defense a powerful option. MaOCT, for instance, introduced the Bounce Extra in Bigger Bads that lets you reflect a defended attack back at your enemy.

4 players is perfect, but 3 and 5 players is totally possible. In other systems 5 players isnt exactly difficult to do. Maybe ORE is only really playable with 3-4 players.

Scarlet Pimpernel
The Phantom (of the Pink Panther)
Black Bart
Carmen Santiago

I think most games have problems with 5+ players. It's just that with ORE the problem isn't having to wait a half hour for your turn to come up, it's the trouble of keeping everyone's Declared actions straight.

Not sure if Carmen Sandiago or Pink Panther tonally fits, but I'm digging SP and BB. Was also thinking of giving one of my players Billy The Kid.

Oh, here's the current draft of The Velvet Book as well as the permanent invite to the Discord Chat.

discord.gg/aWZMuZP

Bump

Also, here's the character sheet that was finished last thread.

Nice shiit

fuck, spoilers dont appear here

So on the Wild Talents front, here's a new power that someone in my group cooked up that I think is pretty interesting.

MASTER OF ILLUSION (12 pts)
>Defends Extras and Flaws [Interference+3, Duration+2, Exhausted-3, No Physical Change-1, Spray+1] Capacities: Range, Self
>Useful Extras and Flaws [Variable Effect+2, Duration+2, No Physical Change-1, if/then-1(Effect is linked to dice penalties)] Capacities: Range, Self

EFFECT: Master of Illusion allows the user to project focused "beacons" of telepathic force that take the form of illusions to anyone directly observing them. As a result, they don't have any effect if viewed through an intermediary, such as a security camera.

Outside of combat, Master of Illusion can be used to alter the appearance and create visuals, sounds, even tactile sensations that appear fully real to anyone whose Scrutiny roll cannot gobble down the Illusion Set.

Small, minor illusions can be created with any Set and last as long as the user desires and remains conscious. Significant illusions are anything roughly human sized and can only be created at a -1d penalty; they last for 10 minutes per Width before needing to be refreshed.

Major Illusions are large scale deceptions, such as changing the appearance of a car or a large area of space. These are created at a -2d penalty and last for Width in Minutes.

Master of Illusions can also be deployed in combat as well. Once per fight, this ability converts all Sets it rolls into Gobble Dice that can be used to foil attacks by distracting or misdirecting enemies. These Sets remain "on the board" until they are depleted through use. Illusion Sets have Interference, meaning they can gobble any enemy Dice at their Height or lower, irrespective of timing.

(In other words you roll this once at the start of combat and for the rest of the match you have a stock of Gobble Dice that you can use freely to weaken or block enemy attacks)

Looks good! The Shock being represented as a wi-fi signal bar is a fun touch.

Thanks! It's actually meant to add additional functionality to the character sheet. The default MaOCT sheet doesn't actually have a good way, in my opinion, of tracking relationship (and Stat) damage. It assumes that you'll just be constantly erasing and drawing circles around the numbers on your lists, which to me feels like it would make it hard to get a sense of what your Normal Condition really is. Here, your Normal is clearly displayed (in the Stat circles and above the Rank line), and you mark off Damage that you subtract from that Normal.

Bump

Incentally we're looking for more GMs and players willing to playtest the Velvet Book. There are a few theoretical mechanics that we want to try out and more data is crucial.

Today in the ORE Persona playtest: exciting school-work rolls! Use your Guts to practice Calculus!

Jay Gould and pals

Woohoo! Looking forward to hearing more about this!

Also, when are we going to get Wild Card/Persona Fusion rules

We've worked out a rudimentary system for Wild Cards. Not fully written up though.

So, you purse owners, who plays the Fool? The GM?

Who says anyone has to be a Fool?

In most campaigns that have been set up so far, The Fool and the World is restricted from the normal Arcana array. Some GMs are using them as metrics to gauge the advancement of the plot, while others are just omitting them entirely for the sake of ease of narrative.

If I had the design talent, I'd make a character sheet that looked like the P5's stats screen.

another session went well. It looks like the Education system works fine, even though there was only two days of schooling so far. To others looking to run this: S-links are very important to the players. So put effort into them.

Can you give a rundown of the Education system?

Every day in your classes you will be making a roll to see how much schoolwork you complete and how well you do. First off there is a quota of width you want to reach each week. meeting this quota means you finished all the work given to you. The cumulative height of these sets throughout the week determines the final letter grade at the end of the week.
Each day is a different class and each one relates to a specific stat. you will be making your roll based off that stat, AND with any one of the three skills associated with it, aslong as you can make a quick argument for how you could use that to get ahead in class(I will be very lenient about that)
if you do not go to The Scaffold, or do a big S-link event, and spend the night before studying then you can do the roll as if you had Awesowe 2x
you will not know what the width quata is at start of week, but you will be informed when you meet it. at that point, you can do more work to go for more rolls with hiegher heights (and therefor higher letter grade) or are free to spend your time doing other things.
frequently not getting work done may attract the attention of teachers, who may take action against you
still roll, even if you roll one die. it means you will have a width of 1, but the height will still add to the quality of your letter grade at end of week

How are Exams handled?

thats being workshopped, and i dont want to spoil it since I know my players are looking at this. Rane says hi

but in essence...like any other boss or threat.

You could just make all the PCs the Fool with the stipulation that WC Personas have less dice to make skills with

How much lower are you talking?

Bump

Bump

I feel like that's a bad idea, but then again I like being restricted as a player

Well, in the long haul you'll have more power overall, you just couldn't have it all in one place. I'd rule it so you had to take a whole turn to switch Personas

Bumping with great interest

Well it depends.
While the Fool is associated with the Wild Card in 3/4/5, it's not necessarily required.

1 and 2 had everyone have the ability. And in 4 the Empress Social Link had that ability, and of course in in 5 so do the Strength and Justice confidants.

And in the EO spin off, the Fools were limited to Orpheus and Izanagi.

Hey I'm the main text guy for The Velvet Book, just wanted to chime in to say that I'm super busy with work and other projects this week so I won't have much to add to this until next week.

Bummer.

Gonna try character creation with these rules...will post sheets later in case anyone needs some pregens.

Takehiko Oshiro
Age 16
Appearance: Rockabilly pompadour, leather jacket, ripped up jeans.
Favorite Thing: Hanging with his gang
Relationships: His gang (Chariot)(4), (Insert other party member here) (2)

DILIGENCE 2
-P.E. +3
-Beat Down + 0
-Block +0

GUTS 4
-Courage +0
-Fighting +3
-Wind +0

PROFICIENCY 2
-Aim +0
-Reflexes +3
-Shop +0

KNOWLEDGE 4
-Academics +0
-Notice +0
-Out-Think +2

EXPRESSION 3
-Charm +0
-Connive +0
-Put Down +4

(continued)

Good to have. One of the things I want to put together when I have some more free time is a fillable version of the character sheet so that sample characters have a bit more life than just a list of qualities.

It's not too bad. We're at a stage where playtesting is more important than new content, since most of the alpha text has been completed, and I'm hesitant to add more to the Shadow Compendium before we have a stronger grasp on how strong they should be.

Takehiko's Persona:

King Arthur (Arcana: The Emperor)

Appearance: See picture attached, towers over all humans and most other Personas.
Favorite Thing: Being in charge
Evocation: (insert GM's evocation method here)

Resist: Electric
Weak: Ice

1-2 Armored Feet: 4d
Defends, Tough X1
3 Royal Cloak: 4d
Defends, Useful (Hide Behind)
4 Excalibur: 7d
Attacks, Useful (Cuts Anything), Gnarly X4, Wicked Fast, Awesome X2
5 Zio: 4d
Attacks (Electric), Useful (Electric Charge)
6-8 Knightly Armor: 10d
Defends, Useful (Shines brightly), Tough x4
9-10 Crown of Britannia: 4d
Useful (Command people)

Lemme know if I got this wrong, I'm not used to this system.

The only thing (and it's an easy mistake to make), is that by default you match up your hit locations with how many lots of dice it got. So, the Armored Feet and Crown of Britannia would be only one hit location in size, while Excalibur would be three large. There's also the matter of what being hit in the Zio would look like, but that's a problem for fluffing.

Other than that, I like it. It relies pretty heavily on Excalibur, but that makes sense, and it has enough Useful bits to be interesting out of a direct fight.

Zio would probably be Arthur's gauntlet or something like that.

Yeah it seems like you've got quite grasped how dice numbers work for Persona creation. That's probably because they aren't included in the Velvet Book, since they're described fully in the MaOCT core book.

Basically each Hit Location is worth 5d, so "1-2 Armored Feet" are worth 10d, whereas "7 Excalibur" is worth a measly 5d. You can trade in dice for Extras and additional Qualities, and you can't have a final dice pool greater than 10d, so any location with 3 numbers (like the Knightly Armor) needs at least 5 Extras or additional Qualities to bring it down to a playable 10d. Which you actually did correctly in that instance.

OK. I thought hit location for Persona had to be analogous to human hit locations.
Hopefully I got it right this time

1-2 Royal Cloak: 8d
Defends, Tough X1, Useful (Hide Behind)
3-5 Excalibur: 7d
Attacks, Useful (Cuts Anything), Gnarly X4, Wicked Fast, Awesome X2
6 Zio Gauntlet: 4d
Attacks (Electric), Useful (Electrical Charge)
7-9 Knightly Armor: 10d
Defends, Useful (Shines brightly), Tough X4
10 Crown of Britannia
Useful (Command people)

(Crown of Britannia has 4d for it, forgot to put that in my post)

Bump

Yup it's perfect now.

Humanoid Monsters/Personas tend to fall into a similar hit location paradigm as human characters, but it's not mandatory.

Would a Monster Musume style monster girl campaign work well using the wierd kids MaoCT rules?

On first glance the flexibility of character creation is a huge plus when everyone wants to be a different type of monster and the focus on high school and relationships is also a bonus. Part of the wierd kids rules seems to be about hiding your powers, which is hard when you're a centaur, but I figure this can be interpreted in different ways. The more wierd dice the more monstrous you are, and the more monstrous you are the more you're likely to scare the normal pupils.

Yeah that would work fine. There have been plenty of MaOCT games that run smoothly purely with Weird Kid rules, no monsters at all. While monsters are the hook, the real meat of the games is Relationships, which are pretty universal functions.

Wow, all this stuff you guys made for Persona looks amazing. I want to run it. Should I read MaOCT as well?

read dat shit and get into the discord.

You gonna make all of the Round Table into Personas?

Jesus Christ, no. I don't have the time for that.

Bump

Yeah it's required since The Velvet Book doesn't include most of the core rules, as it's meant to be a conversion instead of a standalone product. Especially for GMs.

That's at least 12 Personas.

> Not having one persona that is all 12, Final Fantasy style

You couldn't possibly do that, there's only 10 hit locations.

That's actually a pretty interesting theme for a group.

Some of them could be paired together.

Ah, but which ones? It's impossible to balance them all evenly.

I'd be tempted to give the main ones a slot or multiple slots each. So Arthur can have 15d, Lancelot can have 10d, leaving 10 knights with 5 zones. Then pair those up. Alternatively give Arthur 20d, and pair Lancelot up with Gwynevere.

After action report on last night's Wild Talents:

-Myself and three other players are on crime patrol looking for alien activity. The cast:

>Zero-Point, hindi gunslinger and electronics expert who uses a caster gun with the serial number filed off
>Vixen, human-fox mutant who can create illusions that basically cause glitches in the matrix. She also knows capoeria
>The Sphinx, a lady iron-man who recently joined the cast and is hunting the aliens that abducted her in the past
>Mary Annette, victorian-themed black chick who can psychically control children's toys. In execution, she's literally Squirrel Girl. The newest character.

We wind up rolling three events that run into on our patrol while cruising around in Zero-Point's suped up crime fighting Mercedes. First one is easy: Zero-Point and Mary Annette have to stop a stick-up in a convenience store. We did this as sort of a trial run for Mary Annette's power since it was the first time she'd used them. It basically a modified Minions power that lets her turn her toys deal Width in Shock. It lead to some pretty hilarious antics as one of the robbers gets brought down with a toy gorilla pounding on his back while a G.I. Joe is just spraying him with its to M16. Zero-Point managed to talk the other guy down after Mary Annette's My Little Pony unicorn gored his buddy in the face.

Second crime was a drug deal. A couple guys are selling Luko, a drug that gives temporary superpowers. Sphinx and Vixen took this on, with Vixen using her illusions to get them into the train station where this is happening in fully gear, then the fight starts. Turns out these guys are using Luko themselves. One of them can fire a beam that slows down time, the other guy has heat powers that started the fight by melting a light pole. They were actually a huge headache because the time slowing guy had Interference and was gobbling Sphinx's and Vixen's sets, which gave the heat ray guy a shot at dealing some nasty damage.

(1/2)

(2/2)
What they didn't count on was Vixen rolling insanely good-- nothing but Width-3 and Width-4 all night, and with her Capoeira skill she broke this guy's arms in like two turns. She still got singed but managed to kick him into next week, then she and Sphinx teamed up on the time freeze guy who went down easy. Finally they tossed their Luko supply in front of a moving train.

Final event was the grand finale. A silent alarm in a rich residential. We get there and Zero-Point's thermal visor locates two intruders with waaay higher body temperature than normal for humans. Sphinx is hyped. We're spotted even though the car is moving silently and is pitch black. One intruder jumps out of a second story window to the backyard and makes a break for it. The other is injured. Sphinx tries to use Zero-Points grappling gun to catch him but the dude rolls like a 5x8 athletics and gets out of range. But not out of range of Vixen who almost hits him with the car. We corner him and he throws off his coat to reveal this muscular, grayish shark looking dude who hulks out. We fight and the guy is swinging some real nasty Sets, but Vixen's illusions are doing a good job at keeping him flummoxed. Sphinx pulls this crazy wall-running 5x10 head kick that brings him down, but then he transforms into an orange skilled demon bull that I later realized was basically Ganon.

Round 2. Zero-Point nearly gets gored in the face but at the last second Vixen uses an illusion to cause three more of him to appear, distracting the alien and gobbling most of his attack, which she finishes off with a huge 5 shock kick to the torso. Zero-Point manages to blast him with an energy shell dealing engulf, and after another round he's down. At which point he shape shifts again, this time into a purple acid-dripping tentacled monster.

(guess this needs 3 posts)

(3/2)

Okay, Stage 3. Mary Annette, who'd been keeping an eye on the second alien but determined that he wasn't threatening, shows up and sics her toys on the thing while taking pot shots with her victorian-era pistol. Vixen almost takes an acid tentacle to the face but Sphinx pretty much cuts it off before it can hit. Zero-Point shoots another tentacle off with a concentrated, armor piercing energy blast, and after another two rounds its finally finished. Zero-Point uses a freeze ray on as the second, mortally wounded alien stumbles into the aftermath, is barely able to squeek out a few words, hands us an alien tablet computer and tells us to remove the bracelet from the guy we beat. We do so and it disintegrates in a puff of smoke and a flash of red light. Then the other guy dies.

We look at the tablet and it turns out that it's footage of a nature documentary on humans this guy was filming (we started calling him The Anthropologist after that), and then we realize that none of the events he's filming could possibly have happened. They're focused on another one of our characters, a russian socialite whose parent's died when she was in the college, and yet the footage shows her very much alive parents with her right after her graduation, and also hanging out with a dude that she actually just met like six months ago. And also she has a younger brother instead of being an adopted orphan. This lead us to the realization that it was footage of a parallel universe, which we as a group had only started to think about as a possible thing to explore as kind of "What if..." one shots.

Our GM had a perfect David Attenborough impression for the Anthropologist. It was great.

Unrelated to any of the above: there's a new Persona campaign being set-up in the Discord for anyone that wants a piece.

Lemme give a bump with a question

Any advice on S-links in general?
Setting them up, handling the timing, etc

One thing that was highly successful in the Discord's Orexis campaign was the idea of an Arcana Draft.

Basically you start with each player picking the Arcana for their character, and then they take turns choosing from the remaining Arcana what they'd like their Social Links to be.

From that point there are a couple ways to go.

1. Players create their own S. Links
2. The GM creates the S. Links for the players
3. Players create S. Links for each other.

Since a relationship's Arcana is important, in that it gives you access to Arcana Boost extras as well as creating a certain direction for that relationship, options 2 and 3 give the player agency over what kind of relationship they want, but it's still a surprise as to who exactly the person is.

The other thing that has been determined is that players really like S.Links so it's helpful to put some time aside for the activity. Thankfully MaOCT already has that mechanic in place with the Quality Time rules.

The other thing too to keep in mind is that Relationships are supposed to be advanced with XP (2 points per Rank), so one way that you can play is to allow players to spend their XP during the game to effectively Rank-Up an S.Link, though a GM should make sure that it's an appropriate time for it.

In this vein it's also worth remembering characters are intended to start with so many relationship dice. So if you do a fresh campaign like Orexis, where you've never met the links, then the first few need to come at no cost.

Great point! Starting characters get up to 6d in Relationships, so those first 6d should be a part of that.

I'm going to run a persona campaign with my group but I ran into a little problem.

I thought of using some cards with shadows printed on them to represent enemies and show when they are knocked down easily, but I can't find any good images.

Any idea where I could find something to use?
I was looking for some kind of ink drawing or similar, because not all of my players are down for colorful and "friendly" enemies.

I was planning on using a card as a type of enemy and tape it when is knocked down, and using some counters to represent any other status effects.

Go to the Shin Megami Tensei wiki. They've got fairly high quality images of most Demons, though the Persona 3-4 Shadows aren't as well represented.

Note that Status Effects as they are in Persona aren't expressly in MaOCT as of yet; they're more factors of Useful Qualities that you can sling at enemies and kind of roll with on the fly. So there's no "Sleep" and "Brainwash" effects (unless you as the GM want to establish them) but you can have a Persona with Useful (Induce Sleep) or Useful (Brainwash the Weak-Willed)

How would Shock/Burn/Freeze be handled?

Burn is already in the game. It's an Extra.

Freeze would be a Useful power that holds a target's Hit Location still by encasing it in ice. Generally you can't hold an entire Monster at once in MaOCT, but you could with Minor Shadows that don't have multiple hit locations.

Shock is kind of tricky though...

I meant having Nuclear/Psychic attacks doing bonus damage to enemies with Burn/Freeze/Shock on them.

That electric extra from WT+daze, burn/duration, and some sort of interference power?

Oh that would be easy, it's just a custom rule that you deal +1 damage when you hit enemies suffering certain conditions.

As someone who has not been keeping up with the Velvet Book and its development, should I just focus on learning Monsters and wait until it's done?

If you're interested in playing Persona, go for it. The Velvet Book is in an alpha state but the important parts (character and persona creation, combat and shadow rules) are drafted up. Right now we're in initial playtesting phases so if you want to give it a spin go for it!

But also you definitely need to read Monsters and Other Childish Things because it's a great product that stands on its own.

The supplemental stuff is also worth a read. Pick up Bigger Bads if you want to put some oomph into your bosses.