Harwel
Monday 07-06-2009, 04:08 PM
Been trawling around some other forums, and my curiosity has been piqued by a lot of the talk of ORE (One Roll Engine) games, particularly REIGN since fantasy is my favorite genre. It seems to have a pretty loyal following.
The general principle of the game is d10, dice pool based. Stats + Skills determine your dice pool for an action. Each stat or skill runs from 1-5 dice. However, you don't total the dice against a difficulty number. Rather, you look at your matched sets of dice to determine success or failure, as well as other qualities. For example, in combat, your one roll determines to-hit, damage, and initiative all in one (hence One Roll Engine). Out of combat, it determines whether you succeed, and how long you take. This is determined by "width" (number of matches) and "height" (the number rolled that matches). So if you roll a pair of 8's, your outcome is 2x8 (width 2, height 1). This can be further flavored with "wiggle dice" (or trump dice or master dice, depending on which ORE game), which you pick the result for, or "hard dice" which are always 10. Some ORE games apparently also replace "hard dice" with "expert dice" which you assign a value to prior to the roll. These obviously represent much more powerful abilities if you have these in your dice pool. A single "trump die" indicates guaranteed success for most any task.
I have no earthly clue what happens if you roll 2 pair or a straight. :lol:
Anyways I have just downloaded the NEMESIS free horror RPG (http://www.arcdream.com/dennis/NEMESIS.pdf) that uses ORE to kind of get a feel for how the system works. It sounds interesting, and fast, but I have no idea how it plays in practice. Anyone have any hands-on with any ORE games?
The general principle of the game is d10, dice pool based. Stats + Skills determine your dice pool for an action. Each stat or skill runs from 1-5 dice. However, you don't total the dice against a difficulty number. Rather, you look at your matched sets of dice to determine success or failure, as well as other qualities. For example, in combat, your one roll determines to-hit, damage, and initiative all in one (hence One Roll Engine). Out of combat, it determines whether you succeed, and how long you take. This is determined by "width" (number of matches) and "height" (the number rolled that matches). So if you roll a pair of 8's, your outcome is 2x8 (width 2, height 1). This can be further flavored with "wiggle dice" (or trump dice or master dice, depending on which ORE game), which you pick the result for, or "hard dice" which are always 10. Some ORE games apparently also replace "hard dice" with "expert dice" which you assign a value to prior to the roll. These obviously represent much more powerful abilities if you have these in your dice pool. A single "trump die" indicates guaranteed success for most any task.
I have no earthly clue what happens if you roll 2 pair or a straight. :lol:
Anyways I have just downloaded the NEMESIS free horror RPG (http://www.arcdream.com/dennis/NEMESIS.pdf) that uses ORE to kind of get a feel for how the system works. It sounds interesting, and fast, but I have no idea how it plays in practice. Anyone have any hands-on with any ORE games?