/ore- One Roll Engine General Discussion

One More! Bump

Hopefully we get some comments over night too.

How do these games deal with Social links? It seems like that would create situations where everyone is sitting around while one person interacts with their links?

Also, any fun S-links yet?

Couldn't you just use the existing, satisfyingly robust, central to the game mechanics Relationship rules?

If a DM can't keep the game going for the rest of the party while one player is working on a social link, that's his fault, not the fault of the system.

Go "you, you, you, you"
The scenes happen at once, you move between them.

In the playtests its working pretty nicely. S.Link scenes don't need to be lengthy, and generally it goes down with each character dealing with one of their Relationships in turn. As we work on the GM section those rules will be ironed out better, but scheduling is important: there's not enough time in the day to do EVERYTHING, so you need to prioritize. You can't hang out with all your Relationships without throwing a party, and more importantly the system calls that kind of stuff Quality Time, so you actually need to try a little bit.

So far the playtesters have been loving it. S.Links, it turns out, is an extremely popular part of the game.

Progress on the revised Persona Sheet. Definitely more space when I assemble it this way.

Trying to decide if I should format the Hit Location/Dice/etc section to have discrete boxes for each, or just leave it as a blank space where players can fill in whatever they need to as it normally is in the standard MaOCT sheet (since there's no standard number of body parts a monster must have)

Slight update with extra formatting. I may also end up adding specific boxes within the Damage field for tracking your hits, but that may not be necessary.

bump

To bump with some content:

Debuted a new character last night whose gimmick is that he has a pair of genetically engineered, highly trained attack dogs that he can roll as a miracle. Worked like a charm too until my dice started to be uncooperative.

One thing I'm going to do is modify his Wolfpack passive ability to include a Duration feature that allows his dogs to be rolled as a separate dice pool instead of as a declared action for their user, Los Lobos.

Is there any good MaOCT blogs out there?

If you go to Roleplaying Public Radio they have a ton of MaOCT actual plays, including a couple that were turned into official supplements (namely Road Trip and Curriculum of Conspiracy)

Also, here's the final draft of the second version of the Persona Sheet. Very happy with this one.

One more bump before I'm off for the day. Been a pretty quiet couple of weeks for ORE discussion.

Bump

How do you deal with losing a Put-Down fight in MaOCT?

Is there a Dungeon Delving game using this system?

Not yet, though it's a prospect that intrigues me. Reign has enough fantasy elements, magic, and weird monsters to fill a dungeon; all you'd need to do is engineer a framework for exploration and resource scarcity (if you wanted to go the Torchlight route) and you'd be in business.

The classic DnD "guy with a blank sheet of grid paper filling it in at the GM's instructions" probably wouldn't work, but something with a bit more abstraction would be fine. I've done plenty of dungeon-like scenarios in Wild Talents (infiltrating government facilities and criminal hideouts and exploring sewers and alien habitats). One approach that we use is to have 10 locations in an area and roll a set number of dice to randomize the movements of patrols or native life. It's consistently fun.

What would the stats and skills be?

Reign's default Stats and Skills would work nicely actually and provide some very interesting build and action options.

The Stats are Body, Coordination, Sense, Knowledge, Charm and Command. All of them are pretty equally important: Body is your Strength and Constitution stat, Coordination is needed for sneaking and using weapons in any kind of adroit way, Sense is not only your perception but also determines your initiative (essentially) in combat, Mind is a grab bag of useful stuff and Charm and Command are what you'd expect.

Skill-wise is where it gets interesting. Sense skills distinguish between Sight and Hearing and include Eerie for detecting weird magic stuff and Direction-- all of which are vital for dungeon exploration. Body has separate skills for Athletics (to lift up a heavy iron gate) and Running (for running to slide under a closing iron gate), and Coordination has a specific skill for Climbing. All in all they present a fairly interesting array that would be nicely at home in a dungeoneering setting.

So I've been talking with the Velvet Book GMs and one of the changes that we're considering is moving away from the single dice pool Shadows to a system where Shadows function kind of like dwarf Personas, with 2-3 parts @ 1d per hit location, plus the ability to spend AP to add dice, extras and qualities. There's a bit of excitement at the idea which could add some needed versatility and survivability to the system.

Possibly give them all 1 attacking, 1 defending, and 1 useful part?

Right now the only rule is you need at least one part with an Attacks quality. Beyond that it's entirely up to the GM what other qualities should be attached where.

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Any new ORE players with questions about the system/games? I've been playing Wild Talents and some Reign for about three years weekly now and can answer just about anything I think.

How does Wild Talents stack up with powers compared to something like Monsters and Other Childish Things? I know MaOCT likes to do it with Attack/Defending/Useful designations to your pet monster's body parts.

MaOCT is based on Wild Talents, and the two share that framework, actually. Powers in Wild Talents have Attacks, Defense or Useful Qualities, and a variety of Extras and Flaws that modify their behavior.

What's different is the dice pools. In Wild Talents, the sum of a power's Qualities, Extras and Flaws adds up to a per die cost, and you spend character creation points or XP to buy up those dice.

For example the basic "Harm" power, which inflicts Width in Shock and Killing either at long or melee range, has the Attacks Quality and either the Mass (meaning it can move and smash things) or Range (meaning it can attack at a distance) Capacities, and a base cost of 2pts per die. Now if want it to penetrate armor we add Penetration+1, which increases it to 3pts per die. Then you buy up dice however you want.

WT uses special dice called Hard Dice, which function as Awesome x1, and Wiggle Dice, that function as Awesome x2, which cost double and quadruple the point cost of the power.

So if Harm with Penetration+1 costs 3 pts per die, then 6d would cost 18 pts, and 6d+1wd would cost 30 pts.

Oh sounds beautiful! My group fell pretty hard into the Overwatch hole, and I was thinking about running either ORE game to do something in such a setting now that Papa Jeff is giving us something resembling lore.

I can't think of a better system to run Overwatch than Wild Talents. It lets you make literally any character you can fathom, which falls in very nicely with Overwatch's mixture of characters and abilities.

Call it ORE-verwatch.

I'd love to help with hashing this out, btw. It would be a really interesting character building challenge.

As a setting, Overwatch is rooted in the Science-Fiction category with a (now very little) focus on mysticism, so that rules out the Divine, Extradimensional/Extraterrestrial, Paranormal, and Psi, and (generally) Life Force Source Meta-Qualities. Remember, if it seems weird, it's either hard light or nanomachines.

Permissions are, for the most part, quite alright as are Intrinsic Meta-Qualities.

I do notice that a lot of abilities in Overwatch are very much gear-related. Most of the time it's about the equipment that the characters have, rather than whatever inborn superheroic traits they have. For the most part. Bastion and Winston are not included for obvious reasons.

That works just fine; in WT you can apply the Focus flaw to powers to bind them to a physical object, be it a magic artifact or a piece of technology. In this case since that's the core assumption we might want to negate its effect since it would, as you said, apply to just about everything.

Are we looking to recreate Overwatch characters to play as, or set-up new characters in the Overwatch universe? Or both?

A mix of the two. One possible player loves the heck out of D.Va, and the other is undecided as of right now. I do want there to be a possibility of you playing your original hero and such. Only because The World Needs Heroes.

The only other system I'd run Overwatch in would be Mutants & Masterminds, honestly. And that's simply because it's so close to the classic comic book approach to heroes.

This can totally be done. I'm not especially knowledgable about Overwatch but I know about ORE and Wild Talents, so if you post D.Va's capabilities I can cook up a character profile. She's the one who flies around in a mech, right?

D.Va and all other characters have their abilities listed on the Overwatch site. In D.Va's case:

playoverwatch.com/en-us/heroes/dva/

D.Va's big thing is that she rides a bright pink mecha. It's got boosters for limited horizontal and verticle movement, a defensive array of lasers that zap projectiles in the air in front of her and can set the mech to self-destruct. It's got a pair of rapid-fire shotguns, and when the mech gets broken, she runs around Zero Suit Samus style with a dinky laser pistol.

Fun fact, every time they work out an update, D.Va's two-characters-in-one-ness breaks the game.

If this thread is still up in the morning I'll take a stab at this. I think we can have some interesting results.