Project Nemesis is a fan driven website for games that use the One-Roll Engine (like Nemesis, Wild Talents, Reign and Monsters) or Chaosium's Basic Roleplay System (BRP) (like Call of Cthulhu) and the Delta Green setting.
On Monday I received my limited edition copy of Wild Talents. It’s a
beautiful hardcover book with 240 pages in full colour. I’ve had a PDF
copy of the Wild Talents playtest document for a couple of years, so I
knew what to expect from the basic rules.
It’s basically the same game
as GODLIKE (WWII supers), ORE Mecha (giant robot combat), Star ORE
(Star Wars), and Nemesis (Call of Cthulhu-style horror), most of which
are available as free PDF games on the Arc Dream website. There’s also
a fantasy game in the works (Reign) from Greg Stolze.
The Wild Talents Game System
The One Roll Engine is kind of similar to Storyteller – to attempt
any significant action, you roll a dice pool of d10s equal to a stat +
skill total (Body + Martial Arts, Brains + Cryptography, Cool +
Stability, and so on). In order to count successes, you choose a set of
matching dice. So if you rolled 3, 4, 4, 4, 7, 8, 8 you could choose a
set of three 4s or a set of two 8s as your successes. A set of three 4s
is “wider” than a set of two 8s, but the set of two 8s is “higher”.
Both of these qualities is important in different ways.
This makes for some interesting choices, and some of the
randomness is taken away by special dice types – hard dice and wiggle
dice. These types of dice always represent super-powers of some kind;
normal humans never have hard dice or wiggle dice.
Hard Dice: A hard die is a special d10 in a dice pool that always is a
10. If you have a dice pool with two or more hard dice, you always
succeed (and succeed dramatically), because you always have two
matching 10s. They’re abbreviated “hd”, so seven hard dice is 7hd. The
downside of hard dice is that while they’re extremely powerful, they
remain outside the realm of conscious control. Instead, they represent
some type of nearly reflexive, unconscious ability.
The Limited First Edition
Wild Talents is an attractive hardcover book featuring art by
Christopher Shy, Sam Araya, and Todd Shearer. The artistic style is
the slightly surreal photo-realism that Christoper Shy is known for,
rather than something that might have come from the pages of a
mainstream superhero comic. This was a good design decision, in my
opinion; if you want to run a game that doesn’t feature capes and
spandex costumes, then the art in the rulebook won’t reinforce the
wrong images. Subsequent printings of Wild Talents will have different art.
Wiggle Dice: A wiggle die is like a wild card; you can assign it to any
number after you’ve rolled the other dice in your pool. This is even
better than a Hard Die, because any roll with a wiggle die succeeds,
and if you have two wiggle dice, you can choose any level of success.
They’re abbreviated “wd”, so six wiggle dice is 6wd. Abilities with
wiggle dice represent a versatile, flexible super-power.
So by carefully choosing what kinds of dice to assign to your
character’s stats, skills, and miracles, you can build a character
whose special abilities are very reliable, very flexible, or both. A
character with some hard dice in his Body stat would be superhumanly
strong but unable to control it; he’d almost always strike with maximum
force. On the other hand, a character with some wiggle dice in an
attack power could choose to strike for greater damage, or greater
speed, or in a precise location.
Characters in Wild Talents have six stats, and a wide variety of
skills (you can create new skills not present on the list if
appropriate). Superpowers are categorised as Hyperstats, Hyperskills,
or Miracles (whioch can do almost anything you can imagine). Wild
Talents provides guidelines for designing Miracles from scratch
(“gourmet” Miracles), or you can choose from one of the 43
“cafeteria-style” Miracles in the book. There is a braod range of
Extras and Flaws to customise your Miracles (and again, you can create
your own Extras and Flaws).
As an exercise in building characters using the Wild Talents
rules, I’ve written up Wesley Dodds, the Sandman. The Sandman is
basically a masked investigator who relies on his training to solve
mysteries, but things are complicated by his sleeping-gas gun (which
puts victims into a hypnotic trance) and prophetic dreams. I’ve built
the Sandman as a 250-point character, which puts him between a powerful
human and an average superhuman in power.
Superheroic Histories
This chapter, written by RPG and alternate histories veteran
Kenneth Hite, is one of the best parts of Wild Talents. It provides a
discussion of creating your own superhuman setting with an internally
consistent history, public attitudes towards superhumans, and the
importance of morality (black and white, or grey?) described so that
there’s no confusion between the GM and players. These are described as
the hyperfoundations of a superheroic setting.
A setting’s hyperfoundation is detailed on four axes of design,
each of which is listed as a colour (thus, every setting is a
“four-colour” setting!). These axes are Red (historical inertia), Gold
(Talent inertia), Blue (how much weirdness is in the setting), and
Black moral clarity or ambiguity).
It’s a robust method for describing the basic underpinnings of a
setting – if a setting is Blue 2 (low weirdness), then players will
know not to expect too many alien invasions, giant monsters destroying
Tokyo, and mythological entities living very public lives in American
cities. A world set at Red 1 (broad changes to history) will deal with
the social impacts of what superhumans do, whereas in a Red 5 setting
you can assume that the U.S. won WWII, lost Vietnam, and is currently
mired down in Iraq despite the existence of Superman.
A World Gone Mad
This is the default setting of Wild Talents, taking the history of
the Godlike RPG and bringing it forward to the 1990s. It’s interesting
reading and provides a broader setting than just the Second World War,
with a “historically realistic” approach to the existence of superhuman
beings (similar to Watchmen). Technology, society, culture, and world
events are all shaped and changed by the presence of superhuman
Talents. In the original Godlike game the effects of Talents
essentially cancelled each other out, thus the course of WWII was
similar to that of the real world. In the ensuing years, however, the
impact of Talents on human history quickly grows.
Overall
Wild Talents has been in production for a very long time (I
remember emailing Greg Stolze about a sequel to Godlike in late 2002),
and it shows. The rules are tight – balanced, easy to understand,
detailed where needed without being complicated, and able to design
just about any superpower you can think of.
This game is an ideal “generic” superhero game system. While it
does come witha default setting, this is confined to a single chapter
and does not impose itself on the game system in any noticeable way.
Indeed, the game system is a toolbox for defining how superhumans exist
and operate in any given setting. You could easily use Wild Talents to
run a game set in the Marvel or DC universes, White Wolf’s Aberrant
game, or one of your own devising.
If you like superhero games you should definitely take a look at
Wild Talents. Check out the previews and excerpts on the Arc Dreams
Publishing website, and if you like what you see buy a copy while the
limited first edition lasts. Even if you already have your own
preferred supers game system, the Superheroic Histories chapter by
itself is great reading and will prove useful in running other supers
RPGs as well as Wild Talents.
I think that this may be the only new RPG that I bought last year
(I prepaid before it went into print). I have a lot of RPGs in my
collection, and I feel like there’s not much reason to buy any new ones
while old RPGs remain unplayed. But Wild Talents was worth it. Highly
recommended!
Wild Talents has been in production for a very long time (I
remember emailing Greg Stolze about a sequel to Godlike in late 2002),
and it shows. The rules are tight – balanced, easy to understand,
detailed where needed without being complicated, and able to design
just about any superpower you can think of.