One Roll Engine - Mutation

One of the things that most appealed to me about the One Roll Engine is the sheer variety of rules tweaks it offered. As an amateur game designer (like pretty much any gamer) I couldn't possibly resist the lure of a sleek system with a bunch of optional rules allowing me to customize exactly to what I'm going for in my own game.

At the moment, I'm trying to stat out characters for my "Wizard" setting - currently just Delta Green/Generic Monster Hunters with a Frank L. Baum theme and the serial numbers filed off, but I'm hoping to make it more unique as time goes on. At the moment, my goals for the game are:

• A horror game, using the Madness Meters to help players confront both the monstrous things that are out there and the monstrous things they'll do to fight them.
• But a more heroic game than, say, Call of Cthulhu or basic Nemesis. The characters are significantly competent, and their willpower of the characters in the face of Awful Things From Somewhere Else is enough to give them the edge to, if not destroy, certainly foil the plans of their foes; There's a much stronger "We can fix this" vibe, as opposed to CoC's "All we can do is prolong the inevitable". Mind you, none of this means that they're guaranteed to succeed, merely that success is a possibility.
  
• The villains the PCs will be fighting are mainly human or at least humanoid. In addition to letting me work with the standard damage silhouette, there should be the constant threat of slipping too far and becoming a lunatic servant of darkness or a demonhost or something equally unsavoury. (Villains and set dressing being an eclectic mix of Mage, Vampire, Unknown Armies, Conspiracy X and Kult)
  
• Players should be encouraged to set scenes, make up background material, and generally fuss about with the way stuff works. A no-brainer, IMHO.

The current mutation is mostly based on the Dark ORE system as presented in Nemesis, but with the following rules tweaks and patches:

• Stats cost 5d each (I'm almost certain this was a typo in the version of Nemesis I looked at, anyway). Source: Pretty much every other ORE game.
  
• Body above 2 now gives extra wound boxes: +1 in the body location at 3, +1 in each arm at 4, and +1 in each leg at 5. (Source: Godlike)
• Mind and Sense, added together, equal Initiative in combat: In the event of a tie, the higher Sense goes first. (Source: ORE Toolkit, slightly tweaked)
• Command and Empathy, added together, equal Will, which works a lot like it does in Godlike/Wild Talents, albeit with a few changes to reflect the gritty-but-still-adventurous tone I'm going for. You can spend Will to:

Add 1 die to any die roll before rolling, or buy off the cost for multiple actions, called shots, etc. A maximum of 2 dice may be added or bought off in this way per roll.

Bump yourself one back in the initiative queue (that is, declare as if your initiative were just slightly better than whoever would be acting before you)

Remain conscious: Remove one point of shock damage - Like the name suggests, you would generally only use this to remain conscious when you really should be K.O.'d.

Ignore pain: Ordinarily, getting hit at all makes you lose a die from your highest set. Spend a point of Will, no problem.

Remain sane: After failing a Madness check, the character generally wigs out and behaves badly. Spending Will allows you to continue acting normally. This doesn't make the Failed notch go away, or prevent any disorder the player may get from the failure: It just allows the character to act normally rather than flipping out.

The magic system definitely runs on Will, although the exact mechanics of that still need to be hammered out.

• Running out of Will, however, is a Very Bad Thing. All the character's dice pools are halved until they regain at least 1 point of Will. Thus, a player with 1 Will remaining who fails a Madness check may be forced to decide between acting crazily but effectively, or else remaining calm at the cost of the last of their willpower.
  
• Still trying to sort out the mechanics of when to gain or lose Will, although the "Natural 10" and being awesome suggestions from Godlike seem good. Making a character lose half their Will on a failed Madness check seems pretty damn cruel, considering the game penalties that already exist for such failures, but it is arguably in keeping with the general flavour of the Will-Madness relationship I'm trying to bolt together here (especially Self checks, which are more or less by definition about the betrayal of who you thought you were). Also, players will have damn good reason to spend Will on Madness checks, making them much more likely to be have Hardened notches than Failed - Not necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to our badass monster hunters blurring the line between "badass" and "psychopath". As for magical characters, losing half their Will on a failed magic check seems like a good limiting factor. Play with fire, you get burned.
  
• The critical failure and critical success rules from Wild Talents seem like a gas: A roll with no successful sets in which no dice are above 5 counts as a critical failure, a roll with at least one successful set and all the dice above 5 is a critical success. These don't have any set mechanical effect, they're just there because they're one of those bits of old-school rules cruelty I have a fondness for. In general, a critical success should carry its set over as bonus dice to another roll (as in a critical success on a Madness check giving a bump to an attack on the monster that caused it) - Failing that, a critical success can squish/squash a roll, or maybe just flat-out add 1 to the roll's Width. Critical failures, as usual, are left to the GM's tender mercies.
  
• Adding another player-control mechanic, this one outside the ambit of the PCs' personal/psychological abilities, seems like it might be overwhelming or confusing for newbies (and yeah, also for me), but dammit, I love Whimsy Cards, so they're in.
• Speaking of stuff I love (and chances for players to be cool), Reign's Ridicule mechanic is awesome. The idea is that the character makes up a one-liner or comeback for a given line or situation, and the GM tries to ensure that the trigger line or situation comes about, giving the player a chance to crack wise action-hero style. I think this would work extremely well with the setting (after all, the characters are basically action heroes - and making light of the seriousness of their situation is very much in genre). Only trouble is, I can't think of a Nemesis skill that would map well onto it. Oh well, I can always just go the Reign route and make it a separate skill entirely for players who want to be smartasses.
• Idea I'm toying with: Will and Madness: If a character is already at maximum Will and is entitled to an extra point, for instance from a natural 10 or excellent roleplaying, they may experience a breakthrough, removing a Failed or Hardened notch. I'm not sure how I feel about this - ruleswise, it implies that characters can simply will themselves sane or unviolent. I'd probably want to limit it to thematically appropriate times, if I end up using it at all. There's also the question of whether to charge Will for it - A character losing half his Will to bump off a notch seems would be a reasonable trade of a renewable resource for a permanent injury in a non-stressful cases (and might be a component of the Counseling skill in this mutation), but in the field it turns what was a pure bonus one Will point lower into a mixed blessing. Maybe give the player the chance to decide whether their character has an epiphany or not.
  

That's the current set of ideas, but obviously there's a ways to go on this. Any suggestions, tweaks or glaring errors?