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An autobiographical opening: My prior experience with Wild Talents and its breathren was, up until last year, limited. I ran across a copy of Godlike at a con some years back, and almost got it, but bought the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game instead. (To be fair, choosing Buffy over Godlike is like choosing chocolate cake over flan; either way, you're in for a sweet, sweet time time.) I read the many good reviews, got curious about the system, discovered NEMESIS, downloaded NEMESIS, and found myself enamored with the One Roll Engine. After I found NEMESIS I discovered Wild Talents, the near-mythical superhero RPG that formed the furnace for ORE's ten-die-max brain, and further that it was finally going to be published, pending a raising of money to publish the thing. It took about two days (a little less, actually) to shoot the fundraiser straight to 110%, kicking off production. I, in my infinite wisdom, ordered my copy in December, a few days before it was scheduled to ship, well after 500 other people. And, as it turns out, Arc Dream is an itty bitty project, and thus were the books shipped out by hand, a batch at a time, in media mail.
I've been waiting for this for two months. I feel sorry for the guys who waited years to get it, and simultaneously don't give a whit, because I have it now.
Made Of Paper And Magic
...Or magic paper. The physical Wild Talents is a thing of beauty. The first impression is Christopher Shy's beautiful, dark, evocative cover art depicting the Odd Squad, the signature Talents of the game's default setting--more on that later. The paper is glossy and strong and the binding solid.Speaking of art: the art, mostly by Shy and with contributions from Samuel Araya and Todd Shearer, is brilliant. It's moody, it's evocative, it generates ideas, and... well, there is a downside: some of Shy's art doesn't really have a thing to do with what it's placed near, but it never breaks the mood and, if it's somewhat out of place, it's not immediately noticable as such.
I haven't had time to subject it to the rigors of use and perusal, but it's held up better than GURPS 4th so far. (Poor GURPS 4th, First Printing, with the Weapon section falling out...) The spine seems a bit creaky.
A note on layout: while most of the book works fine, character creation is layed out in the opposite order of many RPGs. The rules on how to create a character come after the rules-in-general; if you're used to RPGs having all the character-making bits up front and the rules in back, you'll have to do a lot of scooting around between pages before you get oriented and faster. Wild Talents shares this layout oddity with NEMESIS, but it's better here because the sections are at least back-to-back, and not separated by most of the rules.
One Roll, One Kill/Diplomatic Relation/Repaired Bike
The heart of Wild Talents is the One Role Engine. It does what it says on the tin: it tells you everything you need about an action based on a single roll. It's a die pool game, wherein you take your statistics (Body, Coordination, Command, etc.), add them to your skills (Swordplay, Chemistry, Brawling, etc.), and roll the resultig number as a pool of ten-sided dice. Unlike similar die pool games, you're not looking to beat a target number--you're looking for dice that show the same result. The number of matching numerals is the "width," and the actual numeral is the "height." For instance, if you roll a five-die pool and get 3, 8, 3, 3, and 2, then you've got a 3x3 result: three instances (width) of the number three (hight). You can never roll more than 10 dice, because you're guaranteed success if you do, and that's just not cool.This rather simple mechanic tells a whooole lot. The width, for instance, determines how fast you act, and the height how well you do it; someone who rolls 4x1 does whatever he wants to do faster but worse than someone who rolls a 2x10. In combat, the height of the die tells where you hit your foe, and the width how much damage you deal (modified by weapons and powers and the like, of course). Firing a machine gun volley, a headache in some systems, is simple: add extra dice to your pool based on how many bullets the gun spews, and every matching result is a hit.
Adding a wrinkle to the system is the presence of Hard and Wiggle dice. Hard dice are always set to the number 10, which means you'll do whatever you want to do with maximum force... but can't hold back if you need to. Wiggle dice aren't rolled; after you've rolled the rest of your dice, you set your wiggle dice to whatever result you want, essentially ensuring success; with more than one wiggle die, you've got all kinds of options reguarding success--go for a guaranteed 10, or match 'em up with other dice in your pool for a bigger width? Wiggle and hard dice add a strategic element to the game--both in character creation and in play--without increasing the complexity by more than a few descriptive sentences. (Incidentally, wiggle dice were used in NEMESIS as Trump dice, which sounds much more decicive than "wiggle," but hell, "wiggle" grows on you. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.)
It goes to say that this is a very, very good system to build up on. Perhaps the only drawback is that you're going to be rolling a lot of dice at once--not as a single player, but as an entire group, as initiative is determined round-by-round with each roll. If you don't have a set of dice for each player and the GM, bring some scrap paper to keep track of your results.
The Freak Machine
Ah, character creation! If the rules form the left lung of a superhero game, character creation is its three-chambered twin.* Wild Talents, I'm glad to say, has a nice healthy pair.*(I knew which lung has more chambers off the top of my head. I'm proud of myself.)
Character creation is point-based; there's no "default" point level as in, for instance, Mutants and Masterminds, but there are several benchmarks and suggestions. (I've found 250 points to be a satisfying number of dice for many of the characters I generated.) The pricing of powers and attributes are brilliant--almost nothing feels arbitrary. Let me explain...
Powers are designed by the layering of qualities. Every power has at least one quality, the "core quality," which is what the power does. You layer other qualities onto that to determine what you can do with the power. For instance, if you want to create fire, and took no other qualities, you could, say, ignite sparks and nothing else (a la Jubilee, or various "dud" mutants who can do weird things but not to any great degree of competency). With Useful Outside Of Combat, you could use a spark to light a fire, but not attack with it directly; with Attacks, you can hurl fireballs/bolts/whatever-your-fire-poison-is at people!; with Defends, you can (say) erect walls of fire to defend yourself; with Robust, it means if you're distracted by something like, say, being punched, you won't fumble the power like a wizard in Dungeons and Dragons.
This is a brilliant design idea. It takes a little getting used to ("Oh, so if his Harm power doesn't have Robust, anybody going before him can potentially futz it? I... did not know that."), but soon designing powers becomes second nature. Pricing is based on number of qualities and the strength of the die, with each die type priced twice as many points as the lower (so a wiggle die is four times as expensive as a normal die). Even weird powers can be summed up in rapid order, as Greg Stolze exemplified with Tuumblor, Prince of Space.
Powers are divided into two broad types. On one end, there are the Hyper- powers, which increase natural abilities--stats and skills--by either pumping them beyond the human limit of 5, or adding hard or wiggle dice to their ratings, or both. On the other are miracles, which are entirely unnatural and are rated by their own die pools. Instead of rolling, for example, Body+Breathe Fire, Breathe Fire would have its own die pool rating. Some powers, like Extra Tough, come in levels, because they're not something you'd normally roll for (in this case, increased health), and are priced like hard dice.
Besides powers, you can choose from a wide selection of extras and flaws to customize a skill. Things like Radius, Locked On, and Deadly allow for powers to do all kinds of fun things... for a price, of course. Flaws are likewise around and in considerable variety. The background of Wild Talents encourages the creative use of flaws; besides making powers cheaper, they make characters that much more interesting. As an example, the pregenerated super-speed character, The Streak, can run fifty times the speed of sound, but only if he's stark naked. Some flaws are used to build device-dependent supers, like Iron Man's power armor or a Green Lantern's ring; others just make life interesting and powers cheaper.
Much like how Mutants and Masterminds had Power Level as a ceiling on what characters can do, Wild Talents puts a speed bump on the road to munchkindom by the use of Archetypes. An archetype is made of sources, where you get your powers from; permissions, or what you can take as powers; and intrinsics, things inherent to your character that don't call for a pool of dice. More restrictive permissions (e.g. "Hyper-Trained") are cheaper to buy, and sans a permission, characters are separated from their delicious, nutritious powers. Intrinsics are such fun things like Globular or Custom Hit Locations, stuff that isn't quite a power but is inherent in the character and affects how he works. While archetypes are optional, I quite likes 'em.
Speaking of options, I've not mentioned Base Will and Willpower yet--in the default Wild Talents setting, and treated as a default, powers work because of their users' superhuman will. Base Will determines how much Willpower you start with and influences how fast you regain 'em; further, you can spend Base Will for some last-ditch roll assitance, but because Base Will is almost as pricey to replace as a stat, this is an act of last resort. In contrat, Willpower is used to fuel powers, and thus fluctuates quite a bit. Like Spider-Man in the second movie, running out of Willpower dents your powers and leaves your Base Will vulnerable. Without any Base Will, you're as washed-up and wretched as Tony Stark With Real Gutter-Waking-Up-In Action.** Naturally, it's in your best interests to keep your Willpower in shape.
**(Incidentally, it took burning a point of Base Will to avoid making an Aquaman joke. Wait, "Aquaman joke?" Whoops, I repeated myself! Badum-kish.)
Willpower adds an interesting dimension to the game. While you normally risk Willpower loss by failing at using a power that "bids" Willpower, or suffering some tragedy or defeat, you can also spend it for handy effects in-game or even suddenly gaining new stat, skill, and miracle dice. Fortunately, Willpower isn't all that restrictive for many powers, particualrly those with hard and wiggle dice. Powers that regularly drain Willpower really aught to, and Hyper- powers aren't slaved to those points. You can buy scads of Willpower (or a few extra points of Base Will) during character creation, too, if you have a few points you're not using or if you wanna play it safe.
The only thing I don't quite like about powers is Cosmic Power / Spellcasting, but this is more of a bad first impression on my part. It captures some forms of comic spellcasting well, but it's advisable to gain powers you'll be using fairly often (like Harm) with an If/Then flaw for "must do the magic words and gestures;" else you'll be spending quite a lot of Willpower just for the basics (or lots of XP to lower the cost).
And Tonight, Kennith the Hite is Topping The Bill
If'n one were to have a race to determine which was better, the rules of Wild Talents or the fluff, you'd have a resounding tie. But what a hell of a tie you'd get.Kenneth "Yes, That One" Hite contributes to the book with "Changing the Course of Mighty Rivers." The chapter is an essay on how to best handle an alternate superheroic history, and it's damn nearworth the cover price. It's brilliant work, including a guide to various world-altering events ripe for superheroic intervention, a guide on how to place numbers of superhumans, and even a big two-page table on how many superhumans you can expect to emerge from suffering various superhuman-friendly traumas, divided by decade. It's the perfect tool for the advanced-level Game Master.
Something I'll be using not just in Wild Talents but elsewhere is Hite's classification system for alt-histories. Hite uses an interesting set of five historical axes to describe how a superheroic alternate history works, using examples from comics to back up each level's meaning. Each axis is described by a color in a fashion that makes perfect sense to someone Illuminated by Ken Hite's Supressed Transmissions. The axes--red, gold, blue, and black--stand, respectively, for how much superheroes can change history, how much perceptions of superhumans and the status quo can change, how much random ape city/mummy ant/Asgardian cyberclone weirdness is inherent in the setting, and how morally clear or murky the setting is.
The World Mad Gone
The default setting of Wild Talents is the World Gone Mad, an extention of the World On Fire found in the previous ORE superhero game, Godlike. The chapter is a timeline tracing the history of the world as influenced by Talents, starting with the limited but awe-inspiring Talents of WWII and on to the more-reliable, still-astonishing Wild Talents of 1947 and onward, though the timeline ends in 1992.Even without the context of the roleplaying game, "A World Gone Mad" is a compelling piece of literature on its own. Even now, cruising over the setting information for review purposes, I have to fight to keep from being absorbed into it again. It's not only immensely interesting, but it's left just vague enough to let any number of PC Talents step in and kick some ass. There's even a ready-made supervillian, Destroyer Of Worlds, whose fate is left ambiguous and who's rarin' for some face melting, courtesy of some face-melt-providing, radiation-proofed PCs.
While the Dossiers don't come with statistics (only one member of the Odd Squad, the poster-boy counterculture superhumans of A World Gone Mad, has set stats, and he's the example-of-character-creation), they're nonetheless excellent for adventure seeds and for inspiring other characters. The setting is provided with world axes as outlined in Hite's essay, and the denounment states that anything--even the introduction of magic into the setting*--is possible for the setting's future. *-Or, perhaps it's a hint that the power that fuels Talents is, in fact, magic... holy hell!
Did I Mention There's An Adventure?
There is.The adventure, like the rest of the book, has a lot going on. "White Knights, Black Hearts" chronicles the PCs getting fingered for murder and subsequently workin' their way out of it. As a wrinkle, the game takes place in 1975, and the various enemies and allies found within adhere to 70's movie and comic book tropes. These include a "working woman with the heart of, uh, a working woman" and the superhero Black Atlantean, who's black and from Atlantis. A neat and compelling adventure, it's useful even if you don't want to run it--it comes with a number of pregenerated 250-point characters and tons and tons of interesting NPCs.
The pregen NPCs are exceptionally useful and cool. I've already mentioned one, The Streak. My favorite is Barry T. Brown, aka "Troubleman," a morphing blaxploitation superhero whose secret identity is Barry T. White, a white guy. Really, though, they're all winners.
The Rest
An optional Wealth system a la d20 Modern and True20 is present in the appendix, along with a Contacts system, some stuff on dice odds, and a full set of stats for mundane creatures and normal folks. The rest of the book includes a quick guide to miracle creation, an appendix, and a decent character sheet. My only quibble with the character sheet is the relatively limited space for superpowers, meaning particularly miracle-laden characters might have to write on the back of the sheet.
Every Rose Has Its Radioactive, Superpower-Granting Thorn
Sad to say, Wild Talents isn't perfect. Ah, well.The biggest weakness is that some of the examples granted throughout the text--such as the sample suit of power armor and the Godling archetype--are obviously overcosted compared to what they provide. From what I've gathered these are editorial oversights from earlier versions of the game. Fortunately, these are easy to catch.
The secondary weakness is the somewhat unusual way some powers are built. Once learned, the rules are great at what they do, but there's a solid learning curve; I'd strongly reccomend taking a few whacks with example characters and reading all of the examples to soldily grok the system. I'm still in awe at the somewhat-counterintuitive way one builds a speedster--lots of Hyperbody with the limit "speed only," and ample use of Doubling.
Last, and somewhat least, the game is geared at experienced roleplayers, so there's no guide to general-issue Game Mastery or things like that. It's not wise to take Wild Talents as your first-ever roleplaying experience, but it's not meant to be.
Oh, and there's (as of this writing) less than 200 copies left, so, um, hurry up and getcha some. Or, if they're out, find somebody who does have it and loom over their shoulders, and pray that Arc Dream and co. find a way to get a non-special-edition printed.
In the Shadow of Mutants, Masterminds
So, my first review for RPGnet was Mutants and Masterminds 2nd edition. In it I said it was the greatest superhero game I'd ever seen, possibly of all time (okay, so I flat said it was the best superhero game ever). How does Wild Talents compare with it?Pretty damn favorably. Mutants and Masterminds is a fine game, no doubt, but Wild Talents just hapens to do some things better.* In my opinion, Wild Talents handles low-powered or gritty superheroes much better. A victim hideously failing his Toughness save doesn't have quite the same kick as delivering 8 points of shock and killing damage to the head. Further, the resolution system, while less straightforward than "roll d20, add the bonus," ORE also grants more complex results, making it ideal for those who like a little more crunch with their superheroics without adding much more complexity.
Also, Wild Talents is gonna be fantastically rare soon, so you've got bragging rights. Be the first on your block to have Wild Talents!
