Finally, the System
Now that we've announced that Rosemont Bay will be built using the Drama flavor of Cortex Plus, we can talk a lot more specifically about the game mechanics. Over the next couple of days we'll fill you in on the ways that Rosemont Bay will be similar or different to out-of-the-box Cortex Plus Drama.
If you're not familiar with the basic dice mechanic of Cortex Plus, it's very simple: your character - referred to in Rosemont Bay as a Lead - has a number of different types of traits, each rated with a particular die type, ranging from d4 at the low end to d12 at the high end. When your Lead is attempting to overcome a Test or win a Contest, you'll pick out a set of appropriate traits, roll the dice associated with them, and pick two dice to add together. If you beat your opponent's die roll, you succeed.
Rosemont Bay has three major categories of traits: Drives, Assets, and Resources. In this update we'll talk a little about Drives - the traits that motivate your Lead and provide the core of every die roll.
Drives
There are two types of Drives: Values and Relationships. Values are ideas or beliefs that your Lead is, well, driven by. Relationships are just what they sound like - a connection to another character, either another Lead or a Feature (a major NPC).
Every Rosemont Bay Lead has the same six Values: LOVE, POWER, REPUTATION, RESPONSIBILITY, REVENGE, and TRUTH. A low die rating means that that particular Value isn't a major motivation for your Lead, while a high Value is a primary driving factor for your Lead's decisions. Precisely how your Lead feels about each Value is defined by a Value Statement, a short sentence or phrase that expresses how that Value motivates you. For example, let's say we have a witch named Angie. Angie might express her REVENGE Value like this:
REVENGE is best served over and over again. d10
Your Lead will start the series with a Relationship with each other Lead, and possibly some Relationships with Features (depending on choices you make during Pathways, Rosemont Bay's character creation system). Relationships work just like Values - they have a die rating that defines how strong the Relationship is, and a Relationship Statement that tells us exactly how your Lead feels about the other person - love, hate, jealousy, protectiveness, or whatever else you can think of. Let's say that Angie has a Relationship with her fellow Lead, a reluctant vampire named Barney. Here's what that trait might look like:
If I can't have BARNEY then no-one can. d12
As mentioned before, the core of every die roll in the game consists of one Value and one Relationship (you'll probably roll several other dice as well, from your Assets and Resources, but we'll talk about that in another update). Pick the Value and Relationship that seem most appropriate to the situation. If Angie wants to get revenge on Barney for his latest rejection of her, it doesn't matter whether she plans to shoot him, whisper lies into his girlfriend's ear, or cast a hex on him - she'll roll d10 from her REVENGE Value and d12 from her BARNEY Relationship.
You should always be able to find a Value to use in your roll - they're pretty broad - but what if you don't have an appropriate Relationship? You have a couple of options. You can spend a Plot Point - a currency that you use to alter the story in your Lead's favor - to establish a new Relationship rated at d6, or you can get a new temporary Relationship at d4 for free.
There are more details, but these are the very basics of building a Rosemont Bay dice pool. Next time we'll talk a bit about Assets, and how they differ in some ways from the Assets in vanilla Cortex Drama.