Introducing The Wild Talents RPG

[Diamond Cross]

Wild Talents is an RPG published by Arc Dream Publishing, a small publishing company. It is a superhero RPG.

What makes it unique is the core system. The core system uses a d10 dice pool, with of course has Stat plus ability equals the number of dice you roll.

However there are three master rules to keep in mind when rolling dice pools. They call these THE CARDINAL RULES.

#1: Roll only when the task is difficult or the task is significant. You don't roll to drive a car unless you're trying to win a race or you're a cop trying to use the pit maneuver to stop a speeder.

#2. Never roll more than 10 dice.

#3 Round down.


When you roll a dice pool, a success is a matching set. If you roll 6d and roll a 1, 4, 7, 1, 2, 8 you have succeeded at an action.

However, the success is also measured in height and width.

The Width is the number of matches rolled in a dice pool. Such as if you rolled three fives.

Height is the number on the matching dice. In this case it would be five.

Together, Height and Width is called the quality of a success. The better the quality, the more successful you're at in an action.

The higher the roll, the better the quality. It's better to have two 10s than three 1s.

Now, you can also adjust the quality of the dice roll. Say you have rolled four 5s. You can adjust this to say three 6s or two 7s. This is called Squishy Dice.

You can roll more than one set of matching dice so which one do you use? Whichever you prefer, but not both. Let’s say you roll a 3x1 and a 2x10 in the same dice pool. If you’re running a race, the 3x1 is a good idea because it’s faster (width 3, height 1). If quality is more important, the 2x10 is best (width 2, height 10).

The larger the dice pool the better you are. 9d has more range than 4d. It is also faster.

Now, even though you can have a dice pool of more than 10d, you still don't roll more than 10d. However, you can lose dice. The dice you lose first come off of the additional dice. So if you have a 13d, you would lose dice off of the first three dice higher than ten. But you would still roll 10d.

If you do not roll any matches, then that's called Loose Dice. You can still succeed at a task if the highest number beats a specific difficulty number assigned to the task.

Wild Talents uses one die type (the d10) for all rolls. But there are also two special ways of rolling dice: Hard Dice and Wiggle Dice.

Hard dice and Wiggle Dice are significantly more powerful than regular dice. Use regular dice to resolve regular actions; Hard Dice and Wiggle Dice resolve special actions—most often, the use of powers.

A Hard Die is a special die that is always a 10.

You don’t roll it; it’s automatically 10. If you have two or more Hard Dice in a dice pool, you always succeed (and succeed dramatically) because you always have at least two matching 10s. Like every other die, Hard Dice count towards the ten-die maximum. They’re abbreviated “hd,” so seven Hard Dice is “7hd”.

The downside of Hard Dice is that while they’re extremely powerful and effective, they’re inflexible. A heat ray using Hard Dice is always as deadly as possible; a super-piloting Skill using Hard Dice always flies as straight and fast as possible. There’s no faking it with Hard Dice, no controlling the result. If you attack with a power or Stat that has a significant number of Hard Dice, you will kill people.

Hard dice represent a reflexive, perhaps even unconscious ability; Hard Dice in a pool with normal dice crank up the reliability of the action but reduce flexibility. If you use Hard Dice, you must use all of them.

A Wiggle Die is like a wild card in poker: You assign it any number you want, after you’ve rolled all the other dice in your pool. This makes Wiggle Dice even better than Hard Dice—any dice pool roll with even a single Wiggle Die succeeds, and if you have two Wiggle Dice you can choose any level of success you like! You can even choose not to succeed or to succeed up to a certain level, if you want—a luxury that Hard Dice don’t have.

Like every other die, Wiggle Dice count towards the ten-die maximum. They’re abbreviated “wd,” so six Wiggle Dice is “6wd”.

Wiggle dice represent a versatile, flexible power.

Some powers and other abilities would have Hard Dice or Wiggle Dice.


There is Penalty Dice and Gobble Dice. A penalty dice is simply a penalty to the total dice pool. Some actions would remove dice, such as taking cover. Gobble Dice removes the highest rolled die from your set. So if you had rolled three 6s, you would instead have two 6s. You take a gobble die if you suffer and injury or attack a target from beyond long range.

Drop Hard Dice first, then regular dice, and Wiggle Dice last. If you have more than 10 dice in your pool, subtract the dice before rolling.

There are three types of dice pool rolls: static rolls, contests, and opposed rolls.

A static roll is when you’re struggling against an inanimate object or situation. The situation is static—it isn’t actively changing in response to you and trying to make life more difficult. Just roll the dice. If you get a match, you succeed.

In a contest or an opposed roll, you need to succeed against somebody else’s roll.


That's the core system, which is called a One Roll Engine, or O.R.E.

The stats the game uses are:

Body: Strength, endurance and physical
resilience.

Coordination: Hand-eye coordination
and manual dexterity as well as agility.

Sense: Alertness and perceptiveness.

Mind: Memory and reasoning.

Charm: Charisma and influence.

Command: Innate leadership,

Secondary Stats are BASE WILL and WILLPOWER.

Most characters, normal and superhuman alike, have a Base Will score that defines their internal resilience, confidence, and drive. It rarely changes.
Most superhumans also have a Willpower score, which drives their incredible powers.

Self-confidence is crucial to achievement; tragedy and defeat sap the abilities of the most powerful hero.

Base Will and Willpower aren’t measured in dice like Stats and Skills; they’re measured

in points that you spend do superhuman things. Base Will starts equal to the sum of your Charm and Command Stats, but you can improve it by spending character Points. Willpower starts equal to your Base Will. You can

Motivations for the character are measured in PASSION and LOYALTY.

A Passion is an internal belief. A Loyalty is a group or a cause. A character could believe in the law but would work for a law firm that specializes in say copyright law.

Wild Talents tracks two kinds of damage, Shock and Killing. Shock damage can disable your character; Killing damage can permanently maim or kill your character.


Characters are created using a point total. Generally, the GM sets it. The points are:

Normal human 40 to 100
Exceptional human 100 to 200
Powerful superhuman 200 to 500
Earth-shaking entity 500 to 750
Galactic entity 750 to 1,000
Universal entity 1,000 to 2,000


Stats cost: Regular die 5 Points Hard die 10 Points Wiggle die 20 Points

Normal humans have Stats between 1d and 5d. A Stat of 1d is dismal, human average is 2d, 3d and 4d are exceptional, and 5d is the human maximum. Ordinary humans have only regular dice with Stats, not Hard Dice or Wiggle Dice.

Skills cost: Regular die 2 Points Hard die 4 Points Wiggle die 8 Points

There are three types of powers: Hyperstats, Hyperskills, and Miracles. For ease of use, from here on out we’ll refer to them all as powers. But it’s important you understand the distinction first. Under the hood, they’re mostly the same but in fundamental concept they’re worlds apart.

The difference between Hyperstats, Hyperskills and Miracles is simple: Hyperstats and Hyperskills are normal Stats and Skills, such as the Mind Stat or the Firearms Skill, exaggerated to superhuman levels. Hyperstats and Hyperskills add extra dice to ordinary Stats or Skills.

Then there are Miracles. The distinction between ordinary Stats or Skills and Hyperstats

or Hyperskills is a difference of degree; anyone can lift some weight; someone with a Hyperstat in Body can just lift a lot of it. No ordinary person can turn invisible, change metal into ice, or teleport. Those are Miracles. Miracles are different kinds of abilities entirely.

Most Miracles are measured in dice pools. When you activate it, roll the dice pool to see how well it works.

Sometimes powers aren’t even part of your character, but are embedded in an item like a ray gun, magic sword, or flying carpet. These are external powers, or foci (singular:

focus). External powers are often cheaper to build than internal ones, because they can usually be stolen or destroyed.

Also, sometimes a Hyperstat, Hyperskill or Miracle is more or less effective than usual. Maybe your Harm Miracle does more damage than usual, or your Flight goes faster; or maybe your Hyberbody (that’s Body with Hyperstat dice) can’t lift things made of tin, or your Archery Hyperskill only allows you to shoot at night. You can make any power more effective by buying Extras that increase its cost, or less effective with Flaws that reduce its cost.

Hyperstats and Hyperskills always have the same base cost. But because Miracles are so varied, they can have very different costs.

You can decide on the flavor of a game, between Gritty, Cinematic, and Four Color.

And the rest of the book goes into the details of the powers and the skills and combat situations.

This is my first review of a Role Playing Game. I hope you enjoyed it.

 

[Wik]

This is also the basic system used in GODLIKE, which was made by the same company I believe. Godlike was a superhero RPG based in WW2.

Mechanics look fine, but how does the game play? What do you do? What sort of superheroes do you create? Is this a Watchmen style superhero game, or more of a Four colors comics genre? Etc.

 

[Diamond Cross]

Generally you can agree on a style of play, which is between Cinematic, Gritty, or Four Color.

I have not played the game, just read the core book.

 

[Treebore]

Yeah, I hope to run a 6 week game of this on line using SKYPE and Maptools some time this year, probably on Thursdays.

 

[pawsplay]

It is a very sweet little system. It is basically genre-agnostic. The game is designed to be able to cover "powers" of a wide scope, so it will do anything from psychic teenagers to the Avengers to dark fantasy. In theory you could use it for a non-powered game, although you would be missing out on everything unique, cool, and fluent about it.

Probably it's main selling point is that if you set someone on fire, the rules will give you a hit-location-by-hit location rundown of their emergency room visit and tell you exactly how much they are freaking out (usually, a lot). The same rules that served Godlike so well for horrifically killing PCs and NPCs with flamethrowers provides an equally satisfying experience if you want to put a gang of knights up against a dragon.