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Chapter 1: The One Roll Engine introduces players to the basic ideas of ORE. In a nutshell, ORE uses a dice pool of d10s. Often this is a “Stat+Skill” formula, but in the case of powers a single number may be used. No more than 10 dice are rolled ever, although having a pool of more than 10 dice can come in handy as dice are lost to penalties. When dice are rolled, players look for matching sets. The matched number is called the “height” and the number of matching dice is called the “width”. So if you roll four 8’s, that’s a height of 8 and a width of 4 (and a very impressive roll). Height is usually used to reflect quality of success while width is used to reflect speed, but there are a lot of fiddly exceptions to that.
But wait there’s more! When players buy dice in something (like a Stat or a Skill or a power), they can choose to purchase regular d10s, “hard dice”, or “wiggle dice”. Regular d10s are just that: you roll them and take whatever number you get. Hard dice are automatically a 10, and are generally considered to reflect maximum force or effect with no option of holding back. Wiggle dice, the most expensive dice to purchase, allow players to choose whatever number they want; a single wiggle die guarantees a matched set on any roll. Hard dice cost twice what regular dice to purchase, and wiggle dice cost four times what a regular die does. Sometimes it makes sense to just purchase hard dice (like for a power that is designed only to kill people), other times the control and finesse of wiggle dice are more appealing (like for a damaging weapon that can kill or merely wound). Decisions like this are a big part of the appeal of the various dice types. There’s a lot more to digest of course, and the entire first half or so of the book is just applications and elaborations on this mechanic, but WT is a big book and I’ve got to move on.
Chapter 2: Building a Character is a brief overview of character creation, along with some discussion as to how many points a character should be built on depending on the type of game desired. It’s a short, but handy overview. Default characters are suggested to be built on 250 points, but skilled players will be able to do much more with fewer points than unskilled players. And while such a statement is common in many games, it’s extremely true here.
Chapter 3: Stats and Skills covers… wait for it… stats and skills. Stats consist of Body (how strong you are), Coordination (how well you hit things), Sense (how well your senses work), Mind (your intellect), Charm (how charismatic you are), and Command (your force of personality). There’s a bit of overlap between the descriptions of Charm and Command, and they feel kind of redundant in places. Perhaps the best distinction I could determine between the two is that Command is used in response to (or while trying to evoke) stressful situations while Charm is more relaxed. Example skills are listed with each stat, with GMs encouraged to add their own to the list. An alternative to skills is the idea of Occupations, where characters have one “skill” that reflects everything there job would cover; personally, I like that little addition a lot.
The concept of Willpower gets a lot of attention. While Talents in the Godlike setting needed Willpower to work their Miracles, here Willpower serves (usually) as more of a mechanic to allow players to modify dice rolls or prevent character death. Willpower is gained or lost by a character fulfilling or denying their Motivations. Motivations take two forms, Loyalties (a commitment to another person or cause) and Passions (something the character cares deeply about). Serve your Motivations, get willpower, reject them and lose Willpower. There’s also a bit on Character Advancement finishing up this chapter. Advancement in WT is interesting because you can advance between adventures by spending experience points, or advance during an adventure by spending Willpower. There are limits for both of course, but I find the idea of a super suddenly becoming more powerful in the middle of fight to be very in genre.
Chapter 4: Combat explores how ORE works to resolve combat. And it’s a pretty large chapter, so I’ll just hit on the high points. The width of an attack roll determines damage and initiative, and the height determines location. Normally, hard dice attached to attack rolls always result in head shots; options are given (back in Chapter 2) for working around this. There is no “Stamina Stat” in the game; frail old Aunt May can take just as much damage as Rambo (or anybody else who hasn’t put points into buying a power giving them more wound boxes). Killing Aunt May with a shotgun blast is pretty hard, requiring an exceptional roll; even a head shot isn’t a surefire way for a normal person to kill her in one hit unless you roll three 10s or more on that shotgun attack, and those are tricky as they require two or more dice coming up 10. Healing and mental trauma both get decent attention. Special maneuvers, knockback, active defense, environmental damage, and all the standard super hero stuff is covered well. Rules for minions are covered in some depth. Basic and advanced weapon stats are given (advanced stats making the shotgun blast to the senior citizen a more lethal proposition). And we get rules for armor, as well as gear to add on to armor and how much space it takes up. One thing that really irks me about this chapter though is that it introduces all sorts of weapon and armor… but doesn’t list how many points it costs for characters to buy them. I’ll come back to this off and on.
Starting with Chapter 5: Archetypes we dig into the supers-relevant applications of ORE. Archetypes are a way to organize Meta-Qualities. Meta-Qualities are broken into three categories: Source (where powers come from), Permission (what kinds of powers the Source allows), and Intrinsic (what Meta-Qualities the character would possess if his powers were taken away). Each Meta-Quality comes with a point cost, although some detrimental Intrinsics give points back. As a mechanic, it’s kind of weak. In other point cost supers games characters typically don’t have to spend points to be a mutant or a super-normal or whatever. And in terms of balancing with normal people… well, I’ll come back to balance in a bit. But the Archetype system does one thing really well: it gets players thinking about the nature of their powers. For a new player that can be a great aid. Also, negative Intrinsic Meta-Qualities serve as examples of WT’s version of super weaknesses and limitations. One point I should clarify however is that while WT's setting is "supernatural free" and without gods or magic or monsters, the mechanics in this and other chapters are much more setting neutral. Mystic and Godling, for example, are included as pre-made Archetypes.
Chapter 6: What is a Power explains the different types of powers that exist in the game. The number three crops up again, as powers are either Hyperstats, Hyperskills, or Miracles. Have a stat or skill above 5, or with wiggle or hard dice? That’s a Hyper, and the idea of Hyper Occupation Skills is one I found rather amusing (“he’s the world’s greatest janitor”). Have some other power that isn’t an enhanced stat or skill? That’s a Miracle. Miracles are further defined as possessing one or more of the following Power Qualities: Attacks, Defends, or Useful (Robust from earlier versions of this system is gone). Have a power to manipulate gravity, which you use to fly, knock bullets out of the air, and crush your enemies? That’s Useful, Defends, and Attacks. The more Power Qualities a power possesses, the more expensive it becomes. And then you buy dice, with hard dice costing double the price of a regular die, and wiggle costing four times more. Chapter 7: Extras and Chapter 8: Flaws, cover various modifiers to the powers to increase their range, effect, limit them, and so forth, all of which further modify the cost of your dice (with Extras increasing and Flaws decreasing).
Now here’s something to consider about in WT. A starting group is suggested to build characters on 250 points. For 42 points, a character can buy a single regular die in stopping the sun. For twice that, he can buy a hard die. Double that, and he now has two hard dice and thus a guaranteed matching set, and thus enough power to snuff out the sun for a few minutes. And he still has 82 points to spend, which is plenty enough to make the extinguishing permanent. I know this is all legal because the book cites “Suppress Nuclear Fusion” as an example of how easy it is to abuse the system and why GM oversight and player consensus are needed. Powers in WT are extremely free form and open to player interpretation and abuse. How much of this is a feature or a flaw is up to others, but it is something to consider.
Chapter 9: A Miracle Cafeteria tries to pull together the last three chapters into a selection of example powers. Almost 20 pages of sample powers are listed, with detailed mechanics and suggestions for how to further modify the powers. One of the neat sidebars in the chapter explains that, for 400 points, a character can be invulnerable. To everything. The sidebar then goes on to explore some ideas for how to defeat such a character. The only thing I really wish is that this chapter maybe had a few less powers and more emphasis on how they were designed. Some examples of the earlier chapters put into actual use, with the author’s rationale included. I suspect the lacking of this was possibly intentional, to encourage groups to think for themselves in resolving rules issues, but either way I think this chapter could have been used to make the game somewhat more user friendly.
Chapter 10: Choosing Your Powers is essentially three pages trying to get players to think about buying powers and making characters. The high point being the idea that “minmaxing” isn’t inherently bad; any player who invests enough time and energy into figuring out how to get maximum reward for minimum cost is at least involved in the game. It also goes on to explain that while WT is overly friendly to the minmaxer, such players can’t be allowed to “ghettoize other players who didn’t care to pop the hood and tinker”. Finishing up is a two page system for randomly generating 250-point characters.
Up to this point I’ve been focusing on the chunk of the book devoted to ORE as a system for superhuman games. The rest of the book focuses on how to make settings for superhuman games.
Chapter 11: Building Superheroic Histories encourages world builders to think about setting by plotting superhuman campaigns along four different measures (Red, Gold, Blue, and Black), with each measure rated from 1 to 5. Red is a measure of Historical Inertia, gauging how easy or hard it is for supers to truly change the course of history. Gold covers Talent Inertia, or how society is impacted by supers and how they in turn impact society. Blue details “the Lovely and the Pointless”. Low Blue indicates a world where the characters may be the only thing weird about the setting, while a high Blue rating means anything you can imagine pretty much goes and all at the same time. Moral Clarity is covered by Black, with moral nihilism an no shades of black or white at the low end and unambiguous sin and righteousness at the other. These four Axes of Design have a lot of overlap, and different ratings would seem to invalidate or reiterate others. But what I found myself wondering was how to make the most inappropriate markings work. Like combing the gonzo madness of Blue 5 with the completely amoral existence of Black 1 and the stasis of Red 5 and Gold 5 for instance, which is kinda’ a good description of Warhammer 40,000.
Finishing up the chapter are several pages considering the impact of supers in other times, the progression of superhuman population numbers over time, and other considerations into superheroic world building. It’s might confuse some people to read about Talent populations over time and supers in various time periods, only to discover that none of that really applies in the next chapter, but as a tool to stimulate thinking about supers at different points in history and how they might progress from there it’s not bad.
Fans of Godlike’s detailed world setting will likely love Chapter 12: A World Gone Mad. Continuing the timeline introduced in Godlike, A World Gone Mad details the evolution of Talents into Wild Talents. No longer are superhumans as limited as they were. Changes are lasting, super tech can be mass produced, and Hyperbrains are changing the world. Coming in at roughly 100 pages, this is really one of the highlights of the book. Those wanting magic or other-dimensional entities might be disappointed, as more supernatural elements are not part of A World Gone Mad; I don’t consider this a flaw, as such elements are intentionally not part of this setting.
Okay, so at the end of World War II, the US and the USSR are the world super powers. And their Cold War was rather heated, with both sides racing to claim space. From there though things get pretty wild. By 1947 Wild Talents are beginning to manifest in place of further Talent manifestations, in ‘69 Americans have landed on Mars, by ’72 the nation of India and Xerox lead the world in personal home computers, in ’77 scientists discover that the galaxy is filled with alien races, in ’86 alien invaders destroy the planet Mercury, in ’96 FTL travel is tested by humans, and in 2001 the US and USSR join together to wage a secret war in space against the alien Fish.
Honestly, there are little quirks here and there that (even with the rationalization provided) kind of annoy me. Why would Israel side with the USSR over the USA under any circumstances? I figure they’d rather go solo (and with the largest body of Talents in the world they had a huge advantage initially). I’ve seen other people annoyed with the idea of an alien wielding a katana. But despite quirks like these, the chapter is really, really, really good. And while most of the Talents and Wild Talents are presented as not too immensely powerful, there are a few who possess cosmic (and perhaps galactic) level powers. And for those wondering, this is a supers setting where a PC super brain can truly change the world. None of that nonsense some other games have used where super tech works only in the hands of the inventor; your PC can be making powered armor for the military if you want. Perhaps the only complaint one might have is that Chapter 12 ignores Chapter 11, just as 11 ignores 12. It’s a small thing really, but some players might have enjoyed an example of how to use the Four Axes of Chapter 11 by seeing it applied to the setting of Chapter 12. But I’ll come back to this issue later.
Finishing up the book we have four Appendixes. Appendix A: Sample Characters covers around a dozen NPCs mentioned at places in the book, including the four on the cover, along with the previously unmentioned NYPD Talent Squad. It also has some pre-statted animals, normal people, and gear (like the power armor of Stalin’s regime, or the gear US soldiers used in the early 70’s). It all spans various decades and eras, and it’s a neat read. Appendix B: How to Play a Roleplaying Game is advice to new players on how to… well, I think you can figure it out. It’s casual and easy reading, but there’s not really much there for experienced gamers. What’s more handy is the analysis of three trouble player types (Lazybones, Powergamers, and Overactors) and what causes them and how to handle them. Appendix C: How to Run a Roleplaying Game is also pretty self-explanatory. A section on how to run Wild Talents specifically is included, which struck me as more of a subtle encouragement to houserule the game yourself with some samples provided. There’s also a two-page “blink and you’ll miss it” Appendix D: Adventures, Scenes and Challenges. Again, nothing great but a new gamer might find it helpful. Finishing up the book are reference charts and an impressive index.
Whew.
Okay, so WT is a big book filled with big ideas. And there were several points I think I should come back to. I’ll start with the negatives, and the biggest negative I can find is that it’s a completely unbalanced game. It’s open and unapologetic about this fact, and I admire that, but even for a point-buy system there are some serious issues of balance. For example, normal mundane gear apparently costs nothing. Want to shoot an energy blast from your hand? You spend points. Want an armored vest? Well, the sample characters don’t spend points for it so I guess it’s free. Now, I’ll chalk that up to editing as much as anything else, and actually statting out an armored vest in the system isn’t a challenge (they’ve already provided the mechanics even). What is problematic is that what one GM considers balanced, another may not. Groups playing Wild Talents can expect to houserule the heck out of this game to deal with issues as they crop up. In fact, just about every power is going to be an exercise in house ruling. Furthermore, the game introduces concepts like the Axes of Design and then ignores them when presenting its own setting. What is the Gold rating of the world gone mad? Black? Blue? Red? I know some people would’ve liked to have seen the actual numbers applied, and while it’s easy enough to figure out yourself it would have been a good place to see the ideas in actual use.
But that leads me to the positive of WT, which is that it’s designed from start to finish to make you think. I don’t think I like Archetypes, but it really makes me think about defining the nature of a character’s powers. I don’t care much for the color-coded Axes of Design, but they serve to get somebody asking questions about the type of supers game they want to run. I don’t like the mechanics for a lot of the pre-made powers in Chapter 9, but they get me thinking about the system. It seems like almost everything I dislike is designed to at least get me thinking about designing things for myself. And that’s impressive. On a middle of the road note, I really like how WT tries to be welcoming to new gamers and offer a lot of useful advice at the back of the book. Unfortunately, I think WT could have used more clear cut examples of character and power creation, along with the rationale behind the choices made. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how much of the design is meant to subtly encourage gamers to think for themselves and play with the rules how they want, and how much is just a fanboy reviewer trying to rationalize what may be a rather flawed system. I’m going to lean more with the first than the second: I love the Emperor’s new clothes!
For Style I give WT a solid 5. The layout is crisp and clean, the Table of Contents is excellent (and even sneaks in a few quick mechanical references!), and while the index is a bit unwieldy it’s still impressive. The art is all by Todd Shearer, and provides a wonderful consistent feel throughout. It almost seems as if he used this project as an excuse to whip out every toy and gimmick he wanted, and then managed to pull it all together in a united whole. Impressive! The writing is also quite good, with good editing, and an engaging feel. More formal than casual, but not stuffy or off-putting.
Substance is trickier since some people may approach this book for different reasons. For mechanics, I give WT’s application of ORE I give a solid 4. It’s clunky, weird, and in serious need of more examples, but it’s also stimulating and versatile, and most of all it makes me want to play it. Is it mechanically perfect? No. But it’s the kind of game that rewards people who can roll with it. For setting information I give it a solid 5 (with a high 5 for Chapter 12). Lots of supers games try to encourage players to develop their own settings or provide pre-made worlds, but WT truly excels at both and in less space. So overall, I’ll give WT a solid 5.
Who Should Get This Game? People who like new systems for supers should be pleased. Personally I’m thinking it would make a great alternative system for anybody who likes high, epic games. Those who enjoy new super settings would also likely be happy. This is possibly the best “gritty realistic” super setting out there. Fans of more free-form systems will probably find WT to be quite refreshing, despite all the pages of material explaining the basic rules of ORE. Anybody looking for a new game for superheroics should seriously consider WT.
Who Shouldn’t Get This Game? People who like well defined systems are probably going to be disappointed. WT is open and honest in that it requires GM oversight and player cooperation to work. This design feature may be a major deal breaker for some. Also, those who already have superhero systems and a superhero setting that they like may find WT has little to offer them.
Conclusion: I see this being one of those games where everybody knows they’re playing it right, until they meet a different groups who plays it differently. Nobody’s wrong in how they play it, but everybody will end up running the game differently. And I really think that degree of empowerment was at least somewhat intentional. All in all, this is probably going to become my go to generic system for high powered gaming (like converting Exalted to another system). As for “A World Gone Mad”, it’s excellent, and the kind of setting that makes me want to sit down and play a game at various points in the history.
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