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I’m not going to go into all the minutia of the ORE system, since other reviews would cover it better. In a nutshell though, players roll a number of ten-sided dice equal to a Stat plus a kid-relevant Skill plus a Relationship. Stats in MaOCT consist of Feet (for skills like Dodge and Running), Guts (for skills like Wrestling and Courage), Hands (for Shop and Punching of course), Brains (to Out-Think and Remember), and Face (covering Charm and Connive); other Skills are included in the game, and characters are free to make their own. Relationships are those perfectly normal relationships that motivate and inspire the character, and help keep them grounded in reality when their monster carries them off to Pluto or whatnot. Stats, Skills, and Relationships are all rated from 1 to 5, and in order to make a roll you total the number and roll that many dice (but no more than 10). After rolling you look for matching sets. For example, a player rolls a 1,4,5,7,7,7 on six dice. He’s said to have rolled a “height” (the highest number in the matched set) of 7 and a “width” (the number of dice in the matched set) of 3. Height generally determines quality, while width determines speed. Those familiar with Wild Talents should note that kids (and normal people in general) don’t get Hard or Wiggle dice; they don’t exist in MaOCT. Players do have the option of rolling two less dice to set the number of the unrolled dice; for example, a pool of 8 dice might instead be reduced to a pool of 6 dice with the player setting one of his two removed dice to (say) the number 5. This is about as close to “dice setting” as MaOCT gets (for humans anyway).
One other comment is that each of a characters stats are tied to a fixed number as a hit location(humans all have the same hit locations); when an attacker gets a matched set, he compares the height of his attack to the defender’s hit locations and applies damage accordingly. The width of the roll determines how many dice are lost, modified by the power of the attack or weapon. And in MaOCT weapons are kept very simple and basic; there’s no mechanical difference between a katana and a claymore for example. Personally, I think the system is a little bit more prone to character failures than I like, but I suppose it helps reflect the somewhat comical and child focused default tone of the game. To further emphasize the idea of rampant failure, if the character fails to get a matched set and all the dice come up 5 or less, than the roll is considered a botch and the failure is exceptionally bad.
“But how do I hit someone” I hear somebody ask. Well, remember what I said about “width” and “height”? The person who rolls wider goes first. Assuming the other character is still in any shape to respond, then their action occurs. I thought there were rules for multiple simultaneous actions in there, and there may be, but heck if I can find them. In fact, there are a lot of rules in this book. It’s not that they’re confusing or anything, but there’s an awful lot of them and nothing in the way of an index or quick rules in the back. Anyway, after the blow lands damage is applied to the character’s relevant stat and his dice pools suffer. Good thing he has those Relationships to help him out!
Relationships are pretty broad things really. It could be a security blanket, your dad, somebody else’s dad, a favorite cartoon character, whatever. As long as the character can make his Relationship relevant to the task at hand (“I’ve gotta’ diffuse the bomb! I can’t let dad down again!”) he can add its rating to his dice pool. But what happens if he still fails? Not only does the Relationship decrease a level, but the character has to spend Quality Time building it back up. And monsters can make getting Quality Time very hard to do. Worse than that though, the character can loan his Relationship dice to his monster, and if the monster still fails its roll than the Relationship permanently drops a level (in some cases, rival monsters relish the damage to the Relationship).
“Okay, so there’s a bunch of rules. And you’re not going to cover them all?” Correct. “But this isn’t like an old edition of Call of Cthulhu where rules for healing and advancement aren’t included, because characters aren’t expected to live that long, is it?” Nope. Healing and advancement are covered. Team-work, not so much. Interestingly, if a monster has a connection to a child, it can be physically hurt by emotionally damaging the child; it’s possible to crush The Soul Taker’s spine by making little Sally cry. One of the features and flaws of the various iterations I’ve seen of ORE is that they’re all easy to house rule and modify on the fly, and every version I’ve seen so far requires some of that. MaOCT is no exception in either regard.
“Fine, fine. What about those monsters?” Okay, first things first. “Monster” is a bit of a catch all term really. The monster could be a creepy clown, a colony of telepathic rats, a man-eating tree, a clone-factory, whatever your GM will let you get away with basically. Monsters have a few common traits though: they can all hide from normal people (i.e. people who don’t have monsters), and they all truly care about the kids they’re bonded to. How they hide varies from monster to monster, but the bond they share with a kid is real. Not to say they won’t encourage the kid to let them eat the kid’s parents, blow up a mean teacher’s house, and so forth; they’re still creatures who don’t quite understand normal human society, and it causes them to see the world differently from people. Unless said people are clinically insane I suppose. Anyway, monsters have powers that either Attack, Defend, or are generally Useful, or some combination of all three. They have 50 dice to assign to powers, and every five dice are assigned to a hit location. You can assign 15 dice to a single power, but that means those fifteen share the same hit location. Furthermore, you can trade dice in for enhancements to increase the amount of damage the power does, how tough the hit location is, or how reliable it is, among other things. As an example power, a creepy clown monster might have something like:
Cockroach And Ice Cream Filled Gut: Hit Locations 6-7, 6 dice, Attacks (vomits acidic stream of cockroaches), Useful (forces people to vomit), Defends (“You see what he’s got on him? I aint touchin’ that!”), Awesome X2.
“Okay, but what does that mean?” Well, if anyone attacks the creepy clown and gets a matched set of 6 or 7 in height, they’ll damage the Gut. When the clown does anything (the specific Attacks, Defends, or Useful powers), it rolls 6 dice. The Awesome X2 means that the clown can, after rolling, assign any number it wants to another die (the elusive “Wiggle die” that I previously said didn’t exist for humans). All for 15 of its 50 die pool; and for those keeping score, the first power, the Attack in this case, is free. This also means that if the clown’s 6 die pool is reduced to 0, it loses all of the features of this power. Those familiar with Godlike or Wild Talents may think this looks familiar to power creation in those systems, and it is, but it’s also much more streamlined and lighter than either one. Given the very open and broad nature of powers in MaOCT, players and GMs will have to work together in defining just what a monster can and can’t do. Perhaps a player wants a monster that can “open the gates to the Sea of Dreams”. What does this mean? The book won’t answer that question (which is a shame since it’s the power of a sample monster in the text) but it’s the kind of thing a group can decide for themselves. Little touches like that can let players help define the kind of stories they want to play in.
“Okay, so there’re kids. And they’re BFFs with monsters. But what do they actually do?” Uhm… uh… well. Why are there monsters, how did they come into being, and all those other questions are left up to the GM to decide. The book offers a few various short ideas, but really there’s not much in the way of a default setting. Okay, that’s not exactly accurate. It’s kinda’ like one of those “modern day, just like your world, but we didn’t define things so you could be free” sort of half-finished settings lazy game developers use to make dumb gamers feel empowered. Only in this case it actually works. Normally I’d be annoyed at the lack of depth in the setting, except there are some really cool NPCs, sample PCs, and monsters, and they all kind of come together like a great big mess of fun and insanity. Anyway, apparently the default assumption is that the kids and their monsters secretly fight other monsters, MIBs, and creepy weird adults, all while trying to do normal kid stuff. If the setting were a food, I’d say it reminds me of a baklava: thin, flaky, but loaded with enough yumminess to make you giddy (although, in baklava’s case, that’s probably the onset of a diabetic shock).
“Alright, but how is it for little kids?” Not bad. Perhaps a bit too dark in tone overall, but even then it’s more a matter of dark humor than anything. As an extreme example, to quote a bit of fiction from the book, one of the monsters says “we’d be total BFFs if we shared a murder!” On the flipside, maybe I’m just overly sensitive. I’ll leave this one up to individual groups to decide; worst case is that you could run a much lighter atmospheric game. As a game for adults though, it’s fine as is. Not too childish, never too dull (well, maybe in the mechanics some). “So I can use it to play Pokemon?!?! Please!!!!” If you want to, it can handle it. Personally, I find MaOCT to be the best RPG game about kids and their battle-ready monsters. How you want to take that premise from there is largely up to you. Pokemon, Digimon, Rashomon, whatever floats your boat. And yes, you can use it to make a game about kids in Feudal Japan and their battling samurai if you want; the system’s just that versatile.
“So this is the point where you do your formulaic discussion of Substance and Style isn’t it?” Yes it- hey! If I don’t elaborate on why I give MaOCT a low 4 for Style and a just-under-the-line 4 for Substance, people complain. The Style is really good; the art is sharp, and the writing really conveys the mood of the game. Layout is crisp and clean. What hurts the Style is mainly that it needed a better copy edit; I think it got a “spell check” rather than a “spell cheque”, but at least a couple of sentences are missing words needed to form a fully coherent thought. Nothing critical or related to game mechanics or all that often, and it’s easy to guess what’s missing from the context when it happens, but it’s still kinda’ bad. And finding anything in the book can be pretty tricky since it lacks a decent index; it feels dense to the point of being cluttered. In terms of Substance MaOCT is really close to being a 5. It provides almost everything a group would need except for a few elements like what happens to a monster when its kid grows up (there are examples, but they’re all meant for NPCs), some more development of a default setting (any default setting) would be nice, some more depth on sample monster powers, some clarification and expansion on the mechanics, etc. etc. Honestly, I may be overly hard on the Substance; the book just doesn’t feel quite as complete as it should to me, but it’s really, really close.
“So that’s it?” Yep. MaOCT is a really good game that takes the ORE system in fun new directions, ties the mechanics to the premise of the game, encourages player creativity, and promotes a certain kind of atmosphere of child-like adventure and excitement through its tone. And for $15 the pocket edition is a great deal! It’s one of the best games I’ve seen in some time and I think it’s made me a Benjamin Baugh fan at this point.
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