Cortex Plus
| Designer(s) | Cam Banks |
|---|---|
| Publisher(s) | Margaret Weis Productions |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Genre(s) | Role-playing game |
The Cortex Plus System is a toolkit RPG system that evolved from Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd's Cortex System. It has been used for four published games and one published preview to date, and the design principles are in the Cortex Plus Hacker's Guide, a book of advice in how to create new games using Cortex Plus, and list of new games produced via kickstarter. According to the Hacker's Guide there are three basic 'flavors' of Cortex Plus; Action, Drama, and Heroic.
Of the four games published using this system, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game was nominated for the 2011 Origins Award for best Role Playing Game, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying won the 2013 award and the award for best support as well as the 2012 ENnie Award for Best Rules and runner up for Best Game.
Note that despite the similarity in name, Cortex Plus is not the Cortex System, also produced by Margaret Weis Productions.
Unlike the Cortex System, Cortex Plus is a roll and keep system in which you roll one die from each category and keep the two highest dice in your dice pool. What goes into your dice pool is whatever is considered important for the game you are playing - but different stories have different things they consider important so the implementation of the system has been different for each game so far. All versions of Cortex Plus use standard polyhedral dice and the normal dice notation ranging from d4 (a 4 sided tetrahedral die) to d12 (a 12-sided dodecahedral die), and narratively notable features are given dice from this list, with d6 being the default.
In all cases Cortex Plus uses dice pools ranging from d4 (terrible) to d12 (the best possible), and every die in your pool that rolls a natural 1 (called an 'Opportunity') doesn't count toward your total and causes some form of negative consequence which, depending on the game, either creates a complication for the characters to overcome or adds to the Doom Pool that provides the Game Master resources within the scene. Adding a d4 to your dice pool is considered a penalty because it isn't likely to roll one of your best two die results and there's such a high chance of rolling a 1.
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