Superheroes! World War 2! Greg Stolze? What’s not to like? Well, there’s plenty to like, such as the fascinating superpower design system and the fairly fun dice mechanics. But could be there be more stuff coming we’re not fans of? Well, the episode is huge, so you take a guess!
System Mastery 
Stolze’s ORE engine always had the built-in problem that usually you don’t WANT more than one data point from a die roll: did you succeed, and if so, how hard? Only place where its main gimmick makes sense is combat, where you can have it handle initiative or location or whatever in addition to damage, however it’s usually put in games that discourage combat. Outside combat, I never quite knew what to do with the height of the roll as a GM, because normally it just plain didn’t matter and was just a weird loose extra variable making things muddled.
I think Owens said that bit about Hitler being mad at him was BS. Read an article about it, though don’t know much about the site:
https://www.ozy.com/the-huddle/which-leader-snubbed-jesse-owens-hint-it-wasnt-hitler/71998/
Also a quote saying that Hitler didn’t snub him, rather FDR did- didn’t get a telegram from the president on his wins apparently. Admittedly don’t know much about the website this article is from though.
Not going to bat for anyone, just found it interesting to hear a different story from the hero at the centre of the story.
i read this a while back. the teleporting kamikaze guy could be really dangerous if they kept putting him in those rocket plane cruise missile bombs over and over. thats like one battleship or carrier guaranteed destroyed per deployment of him. hey! its not necessarily overplaying the belief in baba yaga in general. it was only -one- dude who wound up becoming baba yagas house, not a bunch of them. are you saying that they resisted having a jewish person make golems? i could have sworn they did. but maybe im mixing memories of other stories or systems into it, its been a long time.
all it takes is a game master who isnt a hardass about things and a lot of your complaints about the restrictiveness, or letting people mess with the timeline. i think just a little bit of houseruling could make this system a lot more fun.
Reblogged this on Radio Free Covenant – A Podcast about the Science-Fiction Roleplaying Game "Covenant" and Urban Fantasy Novel "Crossing the Line" and commented:
Sean here. We can’t talk about Covenant without talking about the System Mastery podcast.
I don’t have a lot of experience with games outside of Dungeons and Dragons. So I started reading roleplaying game reviews to try and catch up in as short a period of time as I could. That led me to System Mastery.
Jef and Jon aren’t game designers or professionals. They have played a lot of games, though. Twice a month, that bring that experience to bear on some out-of-print tabletop roleplaying game and (usually) tear it apart. It doesn’t hurt that their funny, either.
I’ve learned a lot about roleplaying games listening to them, especially what not to do when designing my own game. They might be the extremely specific preferences of two guys from California, but they’re good extremely specific preferences.
The latest episode from them, on Greg Stolze’s “Godlike”, is a good example. The dice system sounds fun, if overly complicated, but everything else about the game sounds like a slog. Have a listen now.
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How about an episode reviewing the old Torg game?
How exactly are there Japanese talents who are “too cruel” for the IJA/IJN? These guys literally assassinated a sitting PM, did human experimentation in Unit 731, and at least once during Okinawa, they gave a grenade to civilians and ordered them to gather around it and blow themselves up