Arc Dream produces the Godlike roleplaying game (it was originally published by Delta Green's Pagan Publishing). It is a gritty, "realistic" world of superheroes during the Second World War. The game system is called ORE, for One Roll Engine. It is a dice pool system, vaguely similar to that used in Vampire: The Masquerade and other games.

Briefly, each character attribute has a value from 1 to 10, though 1 to 4 is most common. Each skill also has a value from 1 to 10, with 1 to 4 being most common. Each skill is associated with an attribute. Add the skill value and the value of the attribute associated with that skill, and you get the skill's "dice pool". This is the number of ten-sided dice you roll. To succeed at a skill, you want numbers to match. For instance, if your character has a dice pool of 5 and you roll 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, your character succeeded (the two 1s match), but if you roll 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 your character failed (none of the dice match).

The value of the dice that match indicates how well your character accomplished the skill (this is called the "height" of the roll), while the number of dice that matched indicates how fast you accomplished the skill (this is called the "width" of the roll). If you rolled five 1s, your character just barely accomplished the skill, but he did it very quickly. If you rolled two 10s, your character took her time accomplishing the skill, but did an excellent job of it.

That, in a nutshell, is the ORE system. Using these basic principles, combat and skill use can be resolved in a single roll of multiple dice. In combat, the "height" is used to determine the hit location, and the "width" is used to determine which character succeeded first, and how much damage was doled out.

Shane Ivey wrote the Cthulhulike document, which I downloaded from the Godlike web site. It's new home is on the NEMESIS web site, in the Downloads section. It gives rules for using the ORE system with Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu. It includes stats for some common Mythos creatures, as well as for Majestic-12s Adolph Lepus. Our group played the "Convergence" scenario from the Delta Green rule book using Shane's Cthulhulike modifications.

Everyone liked the Godlike combat system, though we didn't give it too much of a trial. One die roll to resolve combat was well received. In particular, the fact that a pistol causes more damage than a kick to the head, even with martial arts, was seen as a good thing! (In Chaosium's BRP, you usually can do, on average, more damage with Martial Arts than with a single pistol shot.) They also liked the way the skill system in Cthulhulike handled timing issues as well as success issues in one roll. There was a perception that it was actually easier to succeed at skill rolls. I had the characters continue to make skill checks on their old Delta Green character sheets in case we went back to the Chaosium Basic Role Play (BRP) system. At the end of the scenario it appeared that they had more skill checks than they typically did under BRP. Players are always happy when their characters succeed at their skills.

However, there were some issues with the ORE game engine and its implementation for Delta Green. The main problem with Cthulhulike was the sanity system. While the Godlike mental stability subsystem may work well for simulating traumatic stress disorder in a combat setting, it doesn't work very well as a model for Cthulhu Mythos insanity. In Godlike, stressful situations call for a "mental stability" check. If your character fails, you have basically two options: 1) lose half of your character's Will points (initially equal to the Will attribute) and then have the character run away, cower in fear, etc. for 15 minutes, or 2) lose all of your character's Will points, stand and fight, but then take a mental disorder (roughly equivalent to the disorders characters get when they go Temporarily Insane in Call of Cthulhu). The character gains back Will at the rate of 1 Will point for every good night of sleep. In Cthulhulike, this basic system is modified based on the amount of sanity the monster, spell, etc. would cost the character in Call of Cthulhu. Situations or monsters that cost less than 1D6 sanity don't require a mental stability roll, they simply require the character to roleplay the situation. After that, the mental stability roll is necessary, often with some sort of modifier. (Modifiers in ORE require you to achieve a certain "height" on your success in order for it to count as a success.)

This sanity system showed weaknesses compared to the system in Call of Cthulhu. Having the players roleplay sanity when they see lesser Mythos creatures without it having an effect on a sanity stat took away from the trepidation of seeing these lesser monsters (though my players still roleplayed this trepidation very well). There is no way to lose little bits of sanity over a long period of time in Cthulhulike. The scenario we played before "Convergence" was "Night Floors", where characters take small sanity hits over the course of several days. The accumulated effect can be quite severe, but there is only a small risk of a character losing a large amount of sanity at once, or it manifesting itself as a personality change due to going temporarily insane. This can't be replicated with the mental stability system in Cthulhulike. While reading Mythos tomes gives increased Cthulhu Mythos knowledge — which is handled in Cthulhulike — those same tomes also result in a loss of sanity. This is not easily handled in Cthulhulike. If you lose Will points due to insanity, but you gain them back with a good night's sleep, what's stopping a character from simply resting up and getting the points back after reading a scary tome? There is also the problem of handling the small sanity loss from some lesser tomes. It is very hard to model creeping insanity over long time periods in Cthulhulike. I could adapt the Call of Cthulhu system for it, but that takes away from the dice pool nature of Godlike.

There were a couple of other issues the players had with the Godlike system. My wife Alana is relatively new to pen-and-paper roleplaying. She found that the BRP D100 system was easier for her to figure out how easy it was for her character to do something. In Godlike it was more problematic for her. She preferred the more intuitive feeling that comes from seeing a percentage chance of success. This issue may have been alleviated by giving her a copy of La Belle Curve, the bell curve table provided in Godlike.

There was a feeling that the characters were too similar in attributes and skills. While there's little difference in game play between a character with 40% in a skill and a character with 45% in a skill (on average one extra success in 20 attempts), there is at least a perception of difference. There is no difference between two characters with the same number in the dice pool. A character with a dice pool of 4 is the same as another with a dice pool of 4, even if the two original Call of Cthulhu characters had skills differing by 5% or more. This isn't as big a deal in Godlike, where the characters are superheroes and differentiated due to their super powers if nothing else. It was an issue in a Delta Green setting.

The characters were built in the BRP system and ported over to Godlike/Cthulhulike. While this more-or-less worked, something about the character conceptions got lost in the translation. You begin by converting Call of Cthulhu attributes to Godlike attributes. This is pretty straightforward, but then comes the tricky part. As stated earlier, Godlike skill dice pools are based on the skill level and an attribute rating. To have even the slightest proficiencey in a skill you need to have at least 1 point in the skill. If you don't have a skill in Godlike the player simply rolls dice equal to the attribute associated with that skill (for universally available skills), or the player does not roll at all (for skills requiring special knowledge and/or training). As an example, the Dodge skill is associated with the Coordination attribute. If a character doesn't have the Dodge skill, the character would have a dice pool equal to Coordination. Forensics (not a skill in Godlike, but one I had to add) is associated with the Brains attribute. It is a skill requiring special knowledge. A character with a 4 in Brains either must have the skill at level 1 (giving him a dice pool of 5) or he does not have the skill at all (giving him a dice pool of zero).

Call of Cthulhu doesn't have this association between skills and attributes. It is possible to create a character that is very smart and has dabbled in forensics in Call of Cthulhu, but who isn't particularly good in it. You can't do this in Cthulhulike/Godlike. To get around this limitation, I allowed characters to have a level 0 in specialist skills. The dice pool is only equal to their associated attribute, but it signified that they did, indeed, have points in the skill. This meant that some characters suddenly got a lot better in some skills compared to the character's ability in Call of Cthulhu. Power gamers would see this as a positive. Our gaming group saw this as a negative.

Another skill issue involved the use of Godlike skills in place of Call of Cthulhu skills. In most cases the skills easily mapped to each other, or it didn't exist in Godlike and was simply added. In other cases, the Godlike skill was different from the Call of Cthulhu skill. In a couple of cases I had to take two different Call of Cthulhu skills, with different skill percentages, and average them into a single Godlike skill.

The end result were character conceptions that differed from the way they were originally created. I could have simply given the skills dice pool values based on the original Call of Cthulhu character, and used Call of Cthulhu-based skills. This would have saved me the bother of trying to associate skills with attributes and skill values, and I wouldn't have needed to map Call of Cthulhu skills onto ORE's skill system. I didn't do this because the characters wouldn't be compatible with later characters generated with the Godlike system, something that was likely if we liked the system well enough to continue using it.

There were a couple of other little hitches in play, but nothing I couldn't work around. For example, Cthulhulike doesn't give statistics for modern firearms. Godlike has statistics for World War II weapons. I was able to find a playtest version of the modern superhero game, Wild Talents, currently in production at Arc Dream. The playtest version had statistics for modern weapons, plus an idea of how the Martial Arts skill would work. The TOG Bulletin #2 supplement for Godlike had rules for shotguns.

The players did like the system, and I think if I were to do a Godlike campaign they would have no real problem with it. They enjoyed the scenario, and did not mind using the ORE system. Combat, in particular, was easily and quickly resolved. At the end of the scenario, when we voted to keep using Cthulhulike or go back to the BRP system, the vote was unanimous to go back to Chaosium's system. As a Keeper, the main sticking point was the Sanity system.

April 12, 2004 (edited with NEMESIS information on April 17, 2006