[RPG]: Wild Talents Essential Edition, reviewed by C.W.Richeson (4/4)

[RPGnet Reviews]

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14006.phtml

Christopher W. Richeson's Summary:

In play <I>Wild Talents</I> provided a very enjoyable time, though some issues did come up. Looking for a game of gritty super hero action? Read on!

Go to the full review for more information.

[Dan Davenport]

Great job, Chris!

I was a playtester for the game's predecessor, GODLIKE. I seem to recall someone mentioning that the setting of Wild Talents is in the GODLIKE continuity, and that while some of the supers are still Talents as seen in GODLIKE, the full spectrum of supers have now shown up as well. If I have that right, how do the Talents stack up against the modern supers?

[theCimmerian]

That was a great review, thanks.

As a fan of Reign (a fantasy RPG that also uses the One Roll Engine), I will probably purchase the final Wild Talents 2 anyway. But I appreciate the warning.

[Gilbetron]

Thanks for the review - it was a great overview. One of the problem I had with 1E for WT was that it was a bit schizo in it's rules presentation - rather tough to wrap your head around it. I was hoping 2E fixed that (and maybe the full edition will). I've already ordered the EE, so I'm hoping that it is already fixed up some there.

What I'd like to see from the creative minds surrounding ORE is a character build system where the player builds the character as they see fit, the GM then calculates the cost, but instead of trying to make the points equal, there exists another process where the GM adds "stuff" to the character with lower point totals to balance them. Basically, some Fate Point mechanic, or something, so that if I create Magneto, and you make Kitty Pryde, the GM has a way to balance it out within the game. My thoughts are still vague on the "how", but the point is not to restrict a character concept to a point total, but instead to find a different way of balancing the game with unbalanced characters...

[C.W.Richeson]

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Dan Davenport

Great job, Chris!

I was a playtester for the game's predecessor, GODLIKE. I seem to recall someone mentioning that the setting of Wild Talents is in the GODLIKE continuity, and that while some of the supers are still Talents as seen in GODLIKE, the full spectrum of supers have now shown up as well. If I have that right, how do the Talents stack up against the modern supers?

I've not read Godlike, so someone else will have to answer that question!

From the book it seems like the Talents just have a lower point build.

[The Unshaven]

Originally Posted by Dan Davenport

I seem to recall someone mentioning that the setting of Wild Talents is in the GODLIKE continuity, and that while some of the supers are still Talents as seen in GODLIKE, the full spectrum of supers have now shown up as well. If I have that right, how do the Talents stack up against the modern supers?

Basically the WW2 Talents were limited to a 50 point build for powers, and had other elements like being able to turn off each other's abilities regardless of what they were, by bidding willpower.

There were exceptions to this in the GODLIKE setting, called Mad Talents, to whom those rules did not apply.

At some point after WW2, the world started finding more and more people to whom The Rules did not apply, but who were also sane.

They were called Wild Talents.

Now read on.

Rules for building WW2 era Talents are still included, so you can use the updated ruleset for GODLIKE with no problem at all.

The Essential Edition doesn't deal with the backstory and setting, but WT 2nd Ed will expand on the GODLIKE timeline much as 1st Ed did, as I understand it.

- The Unshaven.

[Arc Dream]

Chris: Thank you for posting the review!

The revisions we're doing now for the full print run of the Essential Edition ought to make the powers chapter a lot less murky than in the intial printing. Writing with the veterans in mind rather than newcomers is an easy trap to fall into, even after doing this kind of thing for years.

The game balance issues are just part of the game, though. As you observed, game balance per se just doesn't interest us all that much. If a player wants to create a character than can defeat anyone with one blast of his optic rays, I'm happy to let him, and to tailor the game's events accordingly to make things interesting. That can make the game a poor choice for some gamers, for all the reasons you noted.

[yorrick]

I had more or less the same reaction to the Wild Talents Essential Edition. I like a lot of it but get confused by many of the power build options. They combine a level of detail with a degree of flexibility that caught me off guard compared to Mutants and Masterminds or SAS. In essence, it's as if any power in Wild Talents is the equivalent of a Dynamic Power in SAS, once you add Attacks, Defense, and Useful qualities.

I think that building more basic characters and running more tests with them will give me a better sense of combat benchmarks. I think you would really need to set a cap on the number of hard dice and wiggle dice you'd want in any single power to have some level of control over the balance in play.

That being said, I'm very pleased with Arc Dream's willingness to rework the text so quickly to improve clarity in response to reader/player feedback, while at the same time holding true to some of their basic design principles, such as the lack of major power restrictions. For some reason that combination seems to display a lot of integrity to me, and I'm looking forward to comparing my revised hardcopy of EE with the .pdf I downloaded.

[Gilbetron]

Originally Posted by Arc Dream

The game balance issues are just part of the game, though. As you observed, game balance per se just doesn't interest us all that much. If a player wants to create a character than can defeat anyone with one blast of his optic rays, I'm happy to let him, and to tailor the game's events accordingly to make things interesting. That can make the game a poor choice for some gamers, for all the reasons you noted.

I kinda wish you would've made WT2 without the constraints of Point Buy issues, or at least seen what you would've done with it. These days, I either like constrained systems like D&D4E or Savage Worlds, or just wing it. Point buy just doesn't work for me anymore - except in extremely limited situations it does not create balance, only consistency.

Anyway - can't wait for my copy to get here, and the full version to come out!

[Arc Dream]

Point Buy in WT serves as a nod to game balance, or at least a way to facilitate it to some degree. Combine a limited number of character points with some archetype restrictions on the number of hard dice and wiggle dice you can get and you'll have a very different kind of game than if anything goes.

In Monsters and Other Childish Things, Bailywolf adapted Wild Talents by skipping points altogether and making dice themselves the currency. That served to both simplify the creation of monster powers and also made those rules somewhat insulated from changes to the WT rules that Monsters is based on. (Monsters, after all, started off as basically a whole game setting around the miracle "Sidekick" from Godlike and WT.)

But Wild Talents is the baseline "powers" game line, so we felt it needed to drill down to exact details using points.