One Roll Engine Bundle of Holding
If you're not familiar with Bundle of Holding, shame on you. +Allen Varney has set up a wonderful way to get a huge list of amazing games into people's hands for just about whatever amount they can afford. On top, a portion of all proceeds goes to charities of the creators' choice.
The current Bundle involves one of my personal favorite rules systems: +Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine.
What is the One Roll Engine (or ORE, for the sake of keyboard)? At its heart, it's a dice engine that tries to unpack more information from a single roll than just "success/failure." In ORE, you roll some number of d10s, and you look for matching sets. So, if you roll 5d10 and get 2,4,6,6,9, you got a pair of 6s. That would be good, if not spectacular.
The fun comes in interpreting the result. That pair of 6s has two important features. Its Width is the number of dice in the set: 2. Its Height is the value of those dice: 6. Width generally indicated how quickly you accomplish a task, while Height determines how well. In different situations, an action may favor Width over Height or vice versa. (Sets are often written Width x Height, so that pair of 6s would be 2x6.)
The way this dice mechanic falls out leads to some fun rules. Combat, for example, is simultaneous. Everyone rolls for their action at the same time, and effects are resolved based on the Width of all rolls (deferring to Heigh in case of ties).
So, what about the Bundle? Well, you get the game that started it all, Godlike, a look at an alternate WWII with gritty superpowers. Wild Talents, now in its second edition, spun out of Godlike when fans demanded a more generic supers game using ORE. WT has perhaps the most flexible power creation rules of any supers RPG I've seen. And Better Angels is the most recent ORE supers game, only this time you play supervillains powered by demons you only barely keep in check. It's based on a version of ORE that first appeared in Stolze's A Dirty World, his film noir RPG.
If you pledge over the average for the Bundle, you get a few campaigns for Godlike and Wild Talents, including +Allan Goodall's Black Devil's Brigade, detailing the invasion of Italy. But the king of the extras is the Reign Enchiridion. In Reign, Stolze took ORE and made a fantasy game unlike most. The focus is not just on your individual characters but on a company they form together. This could be a mercenary band, a thieves' guild, a religion, or an entire kingdom. With Reign, you can pit your company against others in vast wars both public and private, while still allowing for the actions of individual heroes (PCs) to make a difference.
The ORE Bundle has a few days left to go, and I encourage you to check it out. Ten percent of proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger, so you can feel even better about getting such great games.
The current Bundle involves one of my personal favorite rules systems: +Greg Stolze's One Roll Engine.
What is the One Roll Engine (or ORE, for the sake of keyboard)? At its heart, it's a dice engine that tries to unpack more information from a single roll than just "success/failure." In ORE, you roll some number of d10s, and you look for matching sets. So, if you roll 5d10 and get 2,4,6,6,9, you got a pair of 6s. That would be good, if not spectacular.
The fun comes in interpreting the result. That pair of 6s has two important features. Its Width is the number of dice in the set: 2. Its Height is the value of those dice: 6. Width generally indicated how quickly you accomplish a task, while Height determines how well. In different situations, an action may favor Width over Height or vice versa. (Sets are often written Width x Height, so that pair of 6s would be 2x6.)
The way this dice mechanic falls out leads to some fun rules. Combat, for example, is simultaneous. Everyone rolls for their action at the same time, and effects are resolved based on the Width of all rolls (deferring to Heigh in case of ties).
So, what about the Bundle? Well, you get the game that started it all, Godlike, a look at an alternate WWII with gritty superpowers. Wild Talents, now in its second edition, spun out of Godlike when fans demanded a more generic supers game using ORE. WT has perhaps the most flexible power creation rules of any supers RPG I've seen. And Better Angels is the most recent ORE supers game, only this time you play supervillains powered by demons you only barely keep in check. It's based on a version of ORE that first appeared in Stolze's A Dirty World, his film noir RPG.
If you pledge over the average for the Bundle, you get a few campaigns for Godlike and Wild Talents, including +Allan Goodall's Black Devil's Brigade, detailing the invasion of Italy. But the king of the extras is the Reign Enchiridion. In Reign, Stolze took ORE and made a fantasy game unlike most. The focus is not just on your individual characters but on a company they form together. This could be a mercenary band, a thieves' guild, a religion, or an entire kingdom. With Reign, you can pit your company against others in vast wars both public and private, while still allowing for the actions of individual heroes (PCs) to make a difference.
The ORE Bundle has a few days left to go, and I encourage you to check it out. Ten percent of proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger, so you can feel even better about getting such great games.
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