I'm looking at different d6 systems, and a friend suggested I take a look at WEG's d6 system. Can any of you fine folks give me the pros and cons? Any interesting tidbits?
For bonus points, tell me about other systems (besides GURPS) that use d6...
-Cubical J
__________________ I see you more as Oingo-Boingo era Danny Elfman, ‘cause your games are like cool little ditties about shit turned 30 degrees left of normal.
--Patrick Y. making me the happiest dude at RPG.net.
The Star Wars d6 system has three power levels that I've seen.
1) You can't succeed
2) You might succeed
3) You always succeed
The trick is figuring out where 2 is. We played a bit at 1, then
the GM gave us some bonus CP's so that we might not suck so
bad. Unfortunately, we proceeded directly to 3.
I suspect, though, that 2 is very very small for Jedi characters.
__________________
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
---
"The most important part of dance is the music. So now, let's listen to the music and identify the beats."
Originally posted by Jason Sinclair I'm looking at different d6 systems, and a friend suggested I take a look at WEG's d6 system. Can any of you fine folks give me the pros and cons? Any interesting tidbits?
For bonus points, tell me about other systems (besides GURPS) that use d6...
-Cubical J
WEG's D6 system has skills tied to attributes -- when the Attribute goes up, so does the skill.
So if I have 5D of Dexterity, ALL of my Dex Skills (except the ones that I spent points on to raise) are at 5D. If I spend points on skills, they get better.
So I have 5D of Dex and 6D in Guns.
If I raise my Dex to 5D+1, my Gun skill becomes 6D+1. If I get my Dex to a 6D, my Guns becomes 7D.
A BETTER d6-based system is Silhouette.
Attributes are 0-average, and are a modifier to the roll.
You roll a number of dice equal to your skill, pick the highest die, and add the attribute to it.
The WEG d6 system is based on rolling a bunch of dice, summing them up, and hope you get more than the difficulty of the action. The number of dice varies with your skill and/or attribute, but for a beginning-level PC it's generally something like 4-7 dice for something in which he has some training.
Each skill is tied to an ability score. In the Star Wars version of d6, these are Strength, Dexterity, Mechanics, Knowledge, Perception and Technical. I don't know if other mutations of the system uses other stats. For a human, these stats vary between 2D and 4D. Non-human species have different minima and maxima. IIRC, a Wookiee can have a Strength of up to 5D+2, for example. The lowest measurement unit is not the die, by the way, but rather the "pip" - you can have 2D+1 and 2D+2 in between 2D and 3D. Most PCs get 18D to distribute between their ability scores (rare races get slightly more or less, usually balanced by the special abilities of those races).
In addition to the ability scores, you also have skills. A starting PC gets 7D worth of skills, which are added to the ability score in question. No skill can get more than 2 dice added. In addition, you can turn in one of those seven dice in return for three specialization dice. These can be added on top of the other skill dice, but no more than one per skill at chargen. So, a starting character who fancies himself a pilot might have (among other things) a Mechanical score of 4D, a Starfighter Pilot skill of 6D and the Starfighter Pilot speciality of X-wing at 7D. He might also have the Starship gunnery skill at 5D.
When you want to perform an action, you roll your relevant skill or ability score and hope to get more than the action's difficulty. For example, if our hotshot pilot wants to fly through a rather narrow tunnel, that might be a difficult task (which, IIRC, is defined as difficulty 16-20 - in this case, the GM says it's 18). The pilot rolls his seven dice, and gets a total of 21 - success (in reality, the pilot would probably roll a bit more than seven dice, since the X-wing has a maneuverability modifier, but let's ignore that).
Now, things can sometimes get a bit more complicated than that. The first complication is performing multiple actions at (more-or-less) the same time. That's not too complex - just remove one die from all actions for each action after the first. To continue our example above, let's say our intrepid pilot is chasing a TIE fighter through the narrow tunnel, and wants to shoot at the TIE at the same time as he's flying. That means our pilot will be rolling 6D for the piloting roll (7D minus 1D for the extra action) and 4D for the attack roll (5D minus 1D for the extra action - again, this would probably be higher because of the fire control rating of the X-wing's cannons).
Also, one of the dice in every roll is a "wild die". If you roll a 6 on the wild die, you reroll and count it as 6+the new roll. If that new roll is also a 6, you reroll again until you don't get a 6 (which means that you can roll something like 45 on a single die). If, on the other hand, you roll a 1, one of two things can happen. The first, and the easier version, is that you just remove the wild die and the highest other die from the roll. The second, and a bit more fun version, is that something outside your control puts a crimp in your plan. For example, in A New Hope (non-Special Edition) Han Solo and Chewbacca get a pretty good bluff going and chase a small band of stormtroopers through the corridors of the Death Star. Suddenly the stormtroopers turn a corner and find themselves in a dead end. Since they can't run anymore, they turn to face the menace - and notice it's just a smuggler and a walking rug. That bluff failed through no real fault of Han Solo's or Chewie's, but it still failed - an example of a wild die roll of 1. There's a pretty good example of another failed bluff roll in A New Hope, by the way, in the detention block. The rulebook even uses this as an example in the description of the Bluff skill.
There are two flavors of of D6. D6 classic (or Legend?), and D6 Prime.
D6 Classic is pretty simple. Basically, if you want to do something, you roll a number of d6s equal to an attribute or skill, and if the total is greater than the target number, you suceed.
Attributes and Skills are rated in terms of number of dice and pips. For instance, 2D+1 would be 2 dice and 1 pip.
One of the dice is wild, so that when you roll a 6 on it, you roll again. So anyone can do anything, if they are lucky enough.
Attributes usually range from 2D to 4D for humans, and Skills can reach up to 10D or so (in the case of very long or very powerful characters).
D6 Prime (I think that's the name of it) is a more simple version WEG came up with for their Herc/Xena game, after discovering that RPGers can't do simple addition. It's basically the same mathmatically, but instead you count the number of successes you roll. A success is when you roll from a 3 to a 6 (I think). They also made special dice for those that can't read numbers.
In this case, Attribues and Skills are rated only by a number of dice. Instead of a target number, you need x amount of succeses.
Anyway, the great think about D6, is that is can easily replace the core mechanic of just about any RPG that uses attribute based skills.
WEG's D6 system has skills tied to attributes -- when the Attribute goes up, so does the skill.
So if I have 5D of Dexterity, ALL of my Dex Skills (except the ones that I spent points on to raise) are at 5D. If I spend points on skills, they get better.
So I have 5D of Dex and 6D in Guns.
If I raise my Dex to 5D+1, my Gun skill becomes 6D+1. If I get my Dex to a 6D, my Guns becomes 7D.
A BETTER d6-based system is Silhouette.
Attributes are 0-average, and are a modifier to the roll.
You roll a number of dice equal to your skill, pick the highest die, and add the attribute to it.
Yes, but you're deliberately breaking the system. Humans in d6 have a maximum of 4D in an attribute. 3D is considered above average, and 2D is average.
You really can't get your Dexterity to 6D. You can't get it to 5D unless you're playing Star Wars or something that has non-human races.
Attributes in D6 tend to range from 1D to 5D. (1D to 4D for Humans). Skills in D6 tend to range from 1D to 10D. It's about a 2 to 1 ratio.
Attributes dominate with newer characters, but skills dominate as they get more powerful.
There are two flavors of The D6 System - D6 Classic (or just "D6" to those of us who cut our teeth on it) and D6 Legend (or "crap" to those who cut our teeth on D6 Classic).
<i>Note:</i> D6 Legend is what some people are calling "D6 Prime" in this thread.</i>
Last edited by James Hargrove; 07-23-2002 at 08:28 PM..
A Fistful Of Dice (AFOD), my soon to be released system, is The Greatest RPG System EVAR.
There are no "attributes". Talents are things like Pistol, Drive, or Pyrokinetics. Each is fairly broad, and there is no "dice plus more dice". There are no "pips" either. Talents run from 1 to 7, but 4 is max for "normal folks", 5 is heroic, 6 is superhuman, 7 is superhero level.
Basic task resolution is:
You roll a number of d6 equal to a Talent score. Roll that many dice, total, and compare against GM total or opposing character's total. Task Difficulties are by number of dice. For example, if a lock has a Difficulty of 3 the GM rolls three d6.
If you get all 6s, you get to roll another die, if it is a six again, and so on. As you can see, these "expanding dice" are rare at high levels.
Modifiers are expressed as dice (ie. 1d, 2d, 3d). They do not add, but it is a choose highest. For example, if you have a Talent score of 3 and a modifier of 2, you roll 5 dice and keep the highest 3. HOWEVER, modifiers do not affect the number of sixes needed for Expanding Dice, so in that example if 3 dice come up 6s you can roll another.
There 3 types of Talents, Ordinary, Extraordinary, and Meta.
Ordinary Talents are things normal people can do, and they all start at 1. Even if you have never done something you have a chance to try anything with one die (with a 1 in 6 chance of Expanding Dice).
Extraordinary Talents are things like magic, psionics, etc. and all start at 0.
Meta Talents are dice pools: Courage, Style, and Ingenuity. A player must roleplay/justify how one of these things can help in a situation, and then can add that many dice to a roll. They go away until "refreshed" by the GM.
There are critical successes and failures, specialization, and such, but that's the basic idea.
__________________ Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.
I'm not terribly familiar with "d6 Prime" (which was also used for DC UNIVERSE, WEG's not-terribly-successful attempt at a comeback game), but the classic version works great for a lot of things.
D6 is good for fast, action-heavy, not-terribly-serious games, where realism isn't much of a priority. An early version of it appeared in GHOSTBUSTERS, but I think it only really officially came into being with STAR WARS. The MEN IN BLACK RPG also used d6, so this should start giving you an idea of the kind of settings it's suited for.
The one real drawback I've found is that character advancement can be fast but power levels aren't easy to gauge. This means you'll probably have to be prepared to adjust encounters on the fly, so you can "balance" them based on how well the PCs are doing at the moment. (And SW's handling of Force Powers isn't entirely satisfactory, but it'll do.) I've never had a problem with the adding big pools of dice- this probably varies from person to person. To test it out, practice rolling a lot of d6s together and see how long it takes you to add up the results. If you can do it quickly, you're good to go.
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