Why I Like In Nomine: Not Human.

I've ripped on In Nomine in this blog before, and not without good reason. However, I have to admit that for everything about it that bugs me, there's a counterexample of some bit of cleverness oddly ahead of its time. The D666 system, for example, is almost comically simple (the only system I can think of with a more bizarrely simplistic pass-fail mechanic is baseline Conspiracy X), but it's almost as simple to explain to people as Over the Edge and, I'll admit, enjoyably thematic. The power disparity between humans and angels has bothered me in the past, and the system is rather easily broken, even with the fan patches that fix the most egregious abuses, but if there's one lesson I would teach myself in junior high, it would be "For Christ's sake, make some actual female friends". But if I had two lessons to teach, the other would be "And stop wearing sweatpants". But if/when we get around to the gaming-related wisdom of experience, bullet point one on slide one is "Don't bother gaming with people who put their character's power level and breaking the system ahead of telling a good story". And for all its flaws, IN told some damn fine stories.

One element of In Nomine that really stands out in my mind is how the game harnesses the artificiality of the medium, in the form of both character classes and the distance between player and character, in the service of its theme.

Class/race combos are a part of our gaming heritage, of course, and more than that they're a shorthand for characters - a shorthand that says more about the character than you might expect. If your character is a dwarf fighter, I have a pretty good idea of how he's going to be played and what you wants out of the game - and if he's a dwarf wizard, then I know he'll be going against type for one or both, and furthermore, that you're willing to forego the advantages of traditional "optimized builds". In Nomine's equivalent to the class/race combo is choir/superior: A celestial character belongs to one of seven choirs of angels (or seven bands of demons), and serves a superior (An Archangel or Demon Prince bound to a Word). Each of these choirs and superiors has certain stereotypes, and certain choir/superior combos come up regularly: A Malakite (warrior-angel) of the Sword, for example, isn't going to need much explaining; ditto a Mercurian (friendly social angel) of Flowers. But switch those two around and we've got the dwarf wizard playing-against-type thing all over again.

The problem with such class/race systems, and the reason why most good games with human or humanesque protagonists dismiss it, is that they are artificially restrictive, and for characters who are meant to grow and develop organically, that's a big no-no. But IN's celestials aren't organic - much of the game's thematic tension comes from their being entities purpose-built by God, tools of the Divine Will, which are nevertheless possessed of a will of their own. The clunky artificiality of the choir/superior combos and their respective stereotypes actually reinforces this. A human wizard in D&D will never quite behave like a real human would and just pick up a damn sword once in a while. An IN angel likewise won't behave like a real human, won't lie to spare someone's  feelings, or express a very reasonable fear, or moon over some girl in a bar - but he's not supposed to.

An old gag about RPG characters (and media characters more generally) is that they never eat or crap unless its vital to the plot. IN celestials are the same - thus, the lacunas in normal behaviour are built into the gameworld. In a sense, the oddities of being a "typical" Player Character - fanatical devotion to completing a set mission by any means necessary, a total disregard for the niceties of conversation, an immunity to the aesthetic charms of the world, and a tendency to do horrible things to bystanders on a whim - are well-modeled by celestials. And for those gamers who are more involved in the fictional world, there are humans, or celestials playing against their roles - even to the point of falling from grace, or redeeming. But the default of celestial behaviour is perfectly in line with the default of RPG player behaviour.

It's interesting to note that most games presume that the PCs are natives of their fantasy world - Whether that world is Grayhawk or Tekumel or the Sixth World. Another tack is to have the players be familiar human beings discovering a new world, either in the John Carter of Mars/various Cheapo Fantasy Novels sense of literally going to another world or in discovering that the world as they know it is not what it seems - the latter being the core of conspiracy and horror games since Call of Cthulhu. In Nomine thrusts the players into their familiar human world as total outsiders (or Outsiders), and uses the dissonance between what humans would want in their situation and what the players actually do to illustrate how strange these strangers are.

The Young Nerdhood of Studs Lonnigan: Dragon Magazine

Of course, I started with Dungeons & Dragons, just like everyone else. I found a set of old red-covered D&D books in my aunt's basement, abandoned there by my much-older cousin, and that was pretty much the end of it for a life of quiet dignity.

I don't know why I started buying Dragon mags specifically. They were reasonably priced and well within the range of a young nerd's allowance, and offered a wide variety of supplementary material - Almost all of it for D&D, but of course at that point I was only barely aware that there were other options. The then-current issues often focused on the arcana of Second Edition which was strange and baffling to my first-ed mind, and so I skipped over them and went straight to the back catalogue. Of these back issues, I favoured the Halloween and April Fool's editions, which offered opportunities for horror and comedy gaming, strange, alien ideas at the time.

One particular Halloween issue (1994, to be precise) was the tipping point. There was an article on resurrection magic and its impact on the imaginary world - In particular, how it fucks around with the quasi-medieval milieu that, as mentioned, is D&D's default arrangement (The King is dead! Long live the King! The King is back!), and how, given the hefty but by no means impossible cost of magic, for wealthy merchants and the like being assassinated was closer to a fine you had to pay than an actual corporal punishment. Pretty standard stuff by the standards of modern gaming, but it blew my young mind because it presumed a few things: An internally consistent world, and actually working out every possible impact and effect of the changes of that world.

Another article, which it turns out came from six months earlier (1994 was a good year, I guess), enhanced this idea with an article breakdown of a short series of books and pamphlets of what I would later refer to, with much gleeful elbowing and knowing looks, as "controversial knowledge". Specifically, these materials conveyed Thomas E. Bearden's spectacularly loopy theories about how the Soviets were totally developing Tesla technology, guys. In addition to the usual Tesla fun, Bearden's version of the tech kicks physics in the balls in a whole new way, as any energy transmitted through hyperspace is massively magnified through pure magic*. Thus, by transmitting nuclear blasts through harmless-looking transmitters, the dastardly Reds had access to planet-cracking bombs with no need for satellites or missiles! And shining a flashlight through hyperspace creates lasers! And the devil is in my water supply! This was my first encounter with CK, but even to a 13-year-old, the author, Gregory Detweiler, was a bit too credulous (although come to think of it, he was probably just adhering to TSR's general "please, please don't sue us" attitude, which they held for pretty much the entire 90s**). Anyway, this set off a lifelong fascination with crazy guys and their vanity-press frothings, a fascination all the more enabled by my later discovery of Kenneth Hite and his whole rich galaxy of WTF. As for Detweiler, he went on to write Blood Brothers, the greatest idea for a Call of Cthulhu supplement ever***.

The Reviews section was another favourite, as it was often written by Rick Swan, whose breezy manner made them more interesting than a lot of the (usually ponderous) regular articles. Swan had done a lot of freelance work on Paranoia and it showed in his writing style. The reviews tended to make everything sound great (although nothing was ever quite as good as good old TSR**** products), and it was through that column that I learned about this crazy game called Over the Edge where "PCs can be anything from Green Berets to talking cats". Of course, it was also in the review column that I found my first mention of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so in a sense it's Rick Swan's fault that I spent a lot of 1999-2001 statting up fomori and not realizing what an absolute knob I was being.

And finally, in the pages of Dragon I had my first real glimpse of how awful gamers could be. My gaming groups had had our fights, our games had been cancelled on account of rules disputes and nerd drama, but I had assumed that was us and our youthful inexperience - Surely real gamers didn't have these emotional freakouts. In Dragon, in the Forum and Judges' Guild columns, I learned that it never really gets better, it only gets sadder. Judges' Guild was people writing in for Official TSR Rulings on rules questions, and you could tell that behind every one there was a seething argument about how my halfling totally would have survived that green ooze pit if my dick DM hadn't rounded up for encumbrance, and now TSR themselves are going to show him he's wrong so nyah. But even that was relatively mild compared to the Forum section, in which the overpowered/underpowered nature of the cleric was endlessly debated in multi-column screeds, as were other weighty issues like gaming outside your gender. Yeah. Exactly like an internet forum. Nothing ever changes, it seems.

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* Actually, there was a technobabble explanation for why the Laws of Thermodynamics not only don't apply but appear to be actively reversed in hyperspace, but it's about as convincing as everything else Bearden wrote.
** If the words "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri"  mean nothing to you, you dodged a bullet.
*** A series of short, light-hearted adventures based on classic horror movies, from teen slashers to silent films. I know, right?
**** Hey remember when the internet loved spelling it T$R? Man, that never got old!

Agents of FATE: Groundwork

So I've been watching Archer¹, and it has once again given me that itch to run a spy game that I tend to get after any series focusing on international cloak-n-daggerery (Cf. The Sandbaggers, Burn Notice, Queen and Country, The Prisoner), but which inevitably seems to fade once the inherent challenges of crafting a properly back-stabby scenario rear their ugly head. A ways back I picked up thirteen books worth of first-edition Spycraft, which is a pretty decent implementation of d20's better bastards (complete with ACTION POINTS!!!! and a vitality/wound system cribbed from d20 Modern and Star Wars respectively) but which nevertheless suffers from d20's general problem with specialization and situational advantages. It can be best summarized with a single feat: Rocket Launcher Mastery. Aside from niggling simulationist questions about how you get enough field experience with a highly situational weapon to be considered to have mastered it, and the pain in the ass of remembering every little bonus the feat gives you when you use it, there's the point of how to please the player who has taken this feat (and the other feats before it in the tree) and made it a part of his character. Working situations that can only be solved by rocketry into the plot is simple enough, even if bringing in a helicopter or a tank every week smacks of FPS or Metal Gear - The real trouble is when, having focused on this element of the character, the player attempts to solve all problems with high-speed explosives, turning every climactic encounter into the one from Invasion USA. Add to this the remarkably 'spergy system for creating villainous organizations, and it's clear that Spycraft's a little too close to its parent for comfort. I would, however, love to use it as inspiration - the Shadowforce Archer² setting is pretty nifty, though I may just be saying that because it appeals to my love of Magic Nazis and goofy gadget stuff like fake money that can be chewed up and turned into an adhesive.

So instead, let's take my much-beloved FATE system and toss some tweaks in there to make it sing. A lot of what follows assumes a familiarity with 2nd and 3rd-edition FATE, available for free from Evil Hat Games, but should be simple enough to follow along - Call it FATE 2.5, or FATE Un-Stunted. Other sources include John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors, Greg Stolze's A Dirty World and my eternally recurring inspiration, Ron Edwards' Sorcerer.

So, let's start with Aspects. These would be pretty much as in FATE 3, as the limit on uses-per-session from FATE 2 always seemed weirdly arbitrary and reminded me of the most annoying part of GUMSHOE.  Fuelling Aspect invocations with Fate points makes considerably more sense. The full ten aspects seems a bit much, though - Maybe a mere seven, to have characters that are broadly capable but not as omnicapable as the standard Spirit of the Century characters. Of these, two would be required, or at least given a skill point benny: One a belief or motivation that a character considers vitally important, be it commitment to country, agency, democracy, no killing women, etc. - And the other, something for which the character would be willing to betray that belief. Hey, trust's a bitch in spy fiction.

As far as skills go, I'd want characters to be highly skilled, meaning a relatively small and expansive skill list. I'd probably port the FATE 2 skill system directly, including the pyramid, although tying the skills directly to the aspects might be overdoing it. As in FATE 2, if you're willing to take a hit on skills, you can buy plot-important objects with skill points, allowing you to have the fancy car or the favoured gun or what have you. You can also spend Fate points for these in-game, of course, but then they're set dressing - Improbably explosive set dressing, in many cases.

No stunts. I don't care for them. The idea of a cool move that you can do all the time, at will, just seems dumb and ironically uncool. You want a neat trick, invoke an aspect and justify it and we're off to the races.

As for actual resolution, this is where the Sorcerer bit comes in, kinda. Under normal circumstances, without description, characters only roll 3 dice instead of the FATE-standard 4, making for a slightly smaller range of possible results. But, if they describe the action well, they get an extra die. If the description is really good, they get two. If it's absolutely amazing, they get three, but that should only happen once per session, if that. Now, clever readers familiar with FATE will note that, unlike Sorcerer or Exalted or Wushu or other systems that give bonus dice for description, this doesn't make you more likely to succeed - It just makes the range of possible outcomes wider. This is intentional. Playing Wushu, I was frustrated by loquacious players filibustering absolutely every move they made regardless of actual narrative importance, just to get the dice. Describing a scene under this system doesn't make you better at it, it makes the scene more important and more pivotal, for good or bad. Since players are going to have a lot of Fate points, they can probably turn a failure into a success (with, yes, even more description), and a regular success into an overwhelming, suitably awesome victory (a +5 result is pretty badass, and +6 is worthy of Bond at his best) - but mere description isn't going to guarantee it, and a really well-described action could result a failure so massive that even Fate points couldn't fix it. If that did happen (say a player tosses a -4 or worse on a five-dice roll), I'd definitely consider giving the poor schlub a a Fate point or two just so his grand description didn't go to waste. And then, of course, I'd work out the worst possible way for such a big, important action to go wrong. The GM is also well within his rights to simply declare an action climactic even if the player is trying to play it safe by not describing it, so the player might as well go all out and get the benny if he fails.

Okay, now for the other two gaming sources. From Wilderness of Mirrors, there's the notions of planning, timing and betrayal. In WoM, the GM just details the basic goal of the mission and players fill in details like security arrangements, opposition, locations etc, getting points from the GM for every detail they provide and extra ones for particularly diabolical scene-setups. This seems directly portable to FATE - The opening loadout of Fate points is dependent on the scenario the players set up, and allows them to more or less describe the mission they want. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, etc. and so we move on to timing. For every, let's say, ten minutes of real time that pass, the GM gets a point to mess with the players, change some element of their planned arrangement, etc. I'm not sure yet if these would be additions to the NPC Fate point pool or separate - Certainly it seems most logical, since it keeps down the number of variables.

Finally, there's betrayal, and here's where WoM crosses over with A Dirty World. PCs in ADW can get points both for being cruel to each other and having cruelty done to them. A similar arrangement here would mean that a character who screws over another in-character (Remember that inspiration-for-betrayal Aspect? Yeah, that came back) gets Fate points both for himself and the player they're dumping in the soup - Probably two or more, just to make it extra appealing. Along those lines, perhaps I should add the option to leave an Aspect undefined, so that the player can just reveal his perfidy at the moment rather than having DOUBLE AGENT on his character sheet the whole game.

There's the start of it - If any of you six people who check my blog have suggestions as to how to make it even more convoluted, or of obvious flaws I should patch, feel free to weigh in. And if anyone's got a suggestion for a good spy-agency backronym from FATE, so much the better.

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1. Seriously, I could sit and listen to H. Jon Benjamin yell all day.
2. What is it with the name Archer and spy fiction? The eponymous jackass agent in the aforementioned Archer, this setting, Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever; is it a reference I don't get, or just a coincidence?

Why I Like Blue Moon

It seems I'm late for everything. My friends have learned not to trust anything I say about when I'll show up. My professors have been remarkably accommodating of my tendency to grin sheepishly and say "At least it's only three days late this time." Slip me some scotch and put on Human Traffic, and you'll get to hear me bitch at considerable length about how I got into the rave scene about seven years too late and four years too old.

So it goes with Blue Moon. By the time I found out about it, it had been out of print since 2007, leading to jacked up prices on what core sets were still available. On the up side, the supplemental decks are going for a song (six bucks a go on Meeplemart), and the game can be played with just these expansions and the rules, so The Hunger can be at least partially satisfied.

Blue Moon was created by Reiner Knizia, who I can't mentally name without adding an apostrophe like Flapjack's Captain K'nuckles. K'nizia is the Frank Zappa of game design, which is to say, ridiculously prolific - in an industry where every gamer wants to be a designer, he has over 500 published games - and massively influential - He's pretty much the face of the German school of game design, and his games reflect that school's obsession with simple rules and complex strategy.

Blue Moon's an excellent example of both. The game is played with 30-card decks representing various crazy fantasy races (mercifully none of the Tolkien assortment pack - I'll take bright red golem/natives and caterpillar people over orks'n'elves any day) trying to win fights and thus seduce the three fickle dragons that rule their world. To do this, you play a character card, declare whether the ensuing fight is to be fought based on the Fire or Earth stats and draw new cards. Your opponent plays another character (or combination of a character and a support or booster card - Boosters only affect a particular character, supports affect all the characters you play that fight) to equal or exceed your value in the chosen element. If they do, you have to play a new character and support cards to equal or exceed them. This back-and-forth continues until one player can't or won't equal the current active total, whereupon they admit defeat, the other side moves one or more dragons to their side (or from the loser's side to neutral), all the cards in play are discarded, and the loser starts a new fight. This continues until one player has all three dragons and would win another, or until one player runs out of cards, in which case the player with any dragons (or, failing that, any cards) wins.

There's some interesting conflict and tough choices to be had just using this simple arrangement. If you have a character with a mediocre Earth and strong Fire, do you play it to continue the current Earth-based fight, or retreat and save it for later? Do you keep the level of the fight relatively low, allowing both you and your opponent to toss out small fry characters and wear each other down, or do you escalate and hope to overcome on sheer shock and awe (particularly worrisome if you don't have the resources to keep the escalated fight going another round)? Another point to add to this hand-wringing: If the winner has played six or more cards, they attract an extra dragon, so it's wise to give up a hopeless conflict before it reaches that level. Of course, what qualifies as a "hopeless conflict" can vary from turn to turn as you draw new cards and have to new options to weigh, particularly as many of the character, booster and support cards have their own rules text to change up the basic game.

Considering this last, it's amazing that the various decks are balanced as well as they are, a state of affairs I'll credit to Knizia's  PhD in Mathematics. What's more, each deck has a significantly different feel, from the basic game's Hoax and Vulca representing a relatively straightforward "Boost myself/Fuck you over" dichotomy to the birdlike Flit's incredibly irritating reusable cards, to the amazonian Mimix and Oompa-Loompa-esque Khind's ability to twin up and form gangs respectively, which look similar on paper but which play completely differently, to the Pillar's giant fuck-off caterpillars that eat cards from the opponent's hand.  It's the kind of balanced equality you'd expect from an extremely well-made fighting game, and like those, it takes a fair bit of practice to really use your favoured ass-kickers to their greatest effect.

But wait, say you, the reading audience - isn't the game extremely out of print? How can you have significant experience with even one deck, much less the encyclopedic knowledge that you claim? Well, one of those wonderful Internet obsessives has taken it upon himself to create an AI simulator for the entire game. While it does kind of get up my pantleg that it always loads with you as the Hoax fighting the Vulca, that's a minor complaint - It looks good, it plays well, and all the interface questions I've had thus far are covered by the accompanying FAQ. Fair warning: the AI is very, very good - Download the rules and rely heavily on the Assist menu option until you get into the rhythm of the game, or you'll get your ass handed to you early and often.

Traveller!: First thoughts

So from reading a bunch of old-school gaming blogs and being bored with all my usual systems, I've decided to try out Traveller, a system that's pretty much the opposite of my usual taste in games (and somehow, also the opposite of games I hate). The big thing everyone knows about Traveller is that it's The Game Where You Can Die In Chargen, although recent changes have modulated that down to The Game Where You Can Merely Be Horribly Injured, Go Deep Into Debt To Pay Your Medical Bills, Rack Up A Bunch Of Enemies, And Maybe Also Get Dumped Why Not In Chargen*. And that's part of Traveller's loopy appeal - character generation is startlingly randomized. Aside from some basic choices about which numbers go to which stats and what jobs to take, the fall of the dice decides everything about your character, from whether you get promoted to what skills you have to whether you get kidnapped. What this means is that a character can get completely hosed by a series of bad rolls, or conversely become a walking god on the whim of the dice.

While this kind of inherent power discrepancy between characters kind of makes me itch, I do enjoy how it's the opposite of the everything-must-be-balanced-attitude of, say, 4e. Traveller characters emerge from the gauntlet of randomness almost always having had something totally unexpected happen to them (I've made six or seven at this point just for shits'n'giggles, each of which had something to make them stick in my mind). This is especially true when you include the supplements and their expanses of tables - Two characters, starting with the same stats and taking the same career paths, are almost certain to be unrecognizable in the aftermath. It's the promise of 3rd edition D&D - Feats make every character unique! - but even more so, because the uniqueness has been taken out of the hands of minmaxing players and given over to total randomness. It promises to make for a hell of a game.

* Which is, if anything, even crueler. A dead character just means you need to restart - it's having to actually play that poor bastard that really smarts.

Don't Lose Your Edge

I'm starting with the basic Over the Edge system: It's simple, it's elegant, it's pure roll-and-yell fun. So of course I'm going to have to go and fuck with it.

Quick rundown of OtE for those who haven't seen the light: Characters have traits like "Elf", "FBI Agent", "Vegetarian Chef" "Obsessed with Trains", with maybe a couple sentences explaining their limits. 3 is pretty skilled, 4 is professional level, 6 is ridiculous and 10 is HOLY JESUS WHAT. PCs have one main trait rated at 4 dice, two side traits at 3, and a flaw which gives them one less die on anything the flaw would cover. Any action not covered by a trait the player has gives them 2 dice, so an unskilled, flawed action only rolls one die. Characters roll against other characters or GM-set difficulties, derp de doo, you know how it goes.

Base Over the Edge uses six-sided dice, because you're likely to have a shitload of them. I'm changing that to ten-siders, because I'm such a dork I actually own more of those. There's another reason for this, which I'll get to in a minute.

In a roaring great break with tradition, I'm going to say the 0 on the die counts as an actual zero. This means that any die pool has the same bottom, which, along with the greater number of sides-per-die, means that larger die pools aren't quite as guaranteed to destroy smaller ones - there's always a chance they'll roll a lot of zeros. Of course, they may also completely ruin you, but that's to be expected. Rolling ALL 0's is, of course, wicked bad times.

To further complicate matters (and help out low rollers), I'll add in the OtE optional rule that if all your dice coming up the maximum (in this case, 9), you can roll another die. If that comes up 9 as well, you get another die, and so on into infinity.

Okay, so far so what, it's just OtE with different dice and a few new rules only serious math-huffers care about. The big change is a bit I shamelessly stole from Don't Rest Your Head* - the highest single roll. See, when you roll your dice pool, in addition to the total of your roll, you also note the highest die. So if you've got a 6,4,2,7, you have a total of 19 and a high of 7. Whichever side in a conflict gets the highest single die gets the Edge (if they both or all have the same high, nobody gets it). What this means is that you get a little something cool above and beyond what your mere total tells you - Even if you lost the conflict. The winner often has the Edge, so they get little flourishes like knocking enemies down as they hit them, finding out a clue in addition to what they were researching, and looking demure and innocent even as they ruin someone's reputation. But if the losing side has the Edge, then the victory is not total, and you can define some way that what they wanted didn't quite go off - Or what they didn't want, did. Basically, the total determines who succeeds - the Edge, who looks good doing it.

Mechanically, this means that that you can define some little extra bit of coolness that gives you the upper hand or penalizes them. Maybe the guy is bludgeoning you into submission, but you're able to manoeuvrer him into the path of an oncoming bike. One concept I'm gnawing on like a terrier is that of letting the Edge add a penalty die to the opponent's next roll. That is, when he rolls, he rolls one extra die, and then drops the highest die of all of them. It sucks for him. But, if we let the highest die be counted towards the Edge even as it's dropped (requires a touch of mental gymnastics, but I reckon we can manage), then the penalized character has a better chance of getting the Edge for himself next turn, creating (it's hoped) a nice little bit of back-and forth. In the same way, if a character uses the Edge to boost his next roll, he gets one extra die - But his second highest die is used to determine Edge. Easy to get, hard to keep.

Here's an example using the always mechanically awkward situation of several attackers fighting the same character. Zsolt the Bear has burst into the lab that created him, and is teaching the three scientists therein that you don't put a man's brain in a bear's body unless you have his permission. Zsolt's "Goddamn Bear" trait is 4, and the science boys have no relevant trait (they could have relevant flaws, but I'd say they're in enough trouble as is). Zsolt rolls 1, 5, 5, 7 for a total of 18 and a high of 7. The scientists would have to roll their maximum to have any chance of damaging him this round, so Zsolt's almost certainly going to cause some serious carnage. However, if one of the scientists manages to roll an 8 or 9, he can put Zsolt into a position where he (the scientist) has the upper hand, such as it is, giving the bear a penalty die. He'd better take advantage while he can, though, because Zsolt's probably going to have the Edge on the round after that.

* Yeah, I know DRYH uses six-sided dice. There's a detour here involving Ron Edwards' Sorcerer and some design babble, but the upshot is that using ten-siders makes ties for the Edge slightly less likely. At the moment, I like that, because it means the Edge rule gets used more - If its disruptive to keep handing off Edge, after playtest I might go back to d6s. I could also consider using DRYH's (and Sorcerer's, for that matter) mechanic of comparing the next-highest if the highest is tied, but in the mayhem of four players all doing different crazy shit, two numbers a pop is about my limit.

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?