Continue reading »]]> 6d6 core system by http://6d6rpg.com

Disclaimer – This first glance is based on the open source core ruleset as presented on the wiki by the developer/publisher located here http://6d6rpg.com/wiki/doku.php?id=open:mechanics:core:start

As a result I won’t/can’t make any comments as to the layout, index, ToC, graphics etc of the system given my source.

I have no personal or financial affiliation with the developer or publisher.

Random thought – I wonder why 6d6 fireball when if memory serves wizards got fireball at level 5 making their first fireball a 5d6. Perhaps just the symmetry of two 6’s.

Initial thoughts (pre-playtesting)

My initial thought was it’s a CCG RPG but it’s not really. It does have an air about it of the MtG if you’ve played that game. Your character is very similar to a CCG deck where you put together the best mix of cards for your particular design goals. In this case to build your character’s skills, abilities and equipment.

The basic mechanic -

At any given time the typical character can have a ‘hand’ of four cards that you adjust as needed from your deck of cards and in addition you have another pool of cards, specifically those with the Static keyword that are always available to you until they’re used.

If you read that you’re probably going, WTH? A CCG mechanic? Well yes and no is my answer so far. Yes it’s kind of like having a hand and a deck in any given CCG. I should probably expand that for the 1 person who may not be familiar with the term, it means Collectible Card Game of which Magic the Gathering by Wizards of the Coast is quite possible the most well known in the U.S.

But it’s more a similar but different thing. The cards simply represent all the stats and values that would normally be on a character sheet in an RPG but with the pretty cool feature that you as the player get to literally build your ‘powers’ on the fly by combining them in different ways as long as they make sense. Perhaps you want to use a combination of Speed, Brawn and Sword as a charge across the tavern? As long as it makes sense then it would be allowed.

And by make sense, it’s pretty much anything that the majority of group agrees makes sense, the Game Leader is more an arbitrator or tie breaker for these kinds of things and simply provides a final sanity check on those times when a player tries to combine Reflexes and Diplomacy when they’re trying to bribe a guard to let them pass. Although I suppose one could argue that some sleight of hand and magic tricks might be useful to garner some favor with a bored guard.

On your turn you can play none, some, or all of the cards in your two pools, the dynamic (4 card hand) and the static (any cards that have the Static keyword) assuming they’re applicable to your action. Each card adds some value to your overall action dice roll, from a small +2 to a basic 1d6 and on up to a massive 1d6+6 or even higher. You compare your roll to a target number which might be a flat value or Resistance (aka Target Number or Difficulty Number) as determined by the Game Leader (aka Gamemaster, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Keeper, Loremaster, Director) or it might be an opposed dice roll.

Oddly there are no recommendations for suitable static Resistance values in the document that I could find, only an example where a book was given a 10 Resistance for the purposes of deciphering it. We can assume perhaps that in most situations a character can bring 3 1d6 cards to bear on a problem on average and thus assume a 10.5 as the average and round down to 10 giving the player a slightly better than even odds of success. But the lack of a chart of any kind does mean you’re going to be winging it you try to use just the core system as outlined in the wiki. The pay to play version or the settings rulesets may include these charts.

Obviously some cards work for a given situation and some just wouldn’t. Let’s suppose you’re a warrior in a fantasy setting about to whack a goblin with your sword. You can add say your Brawn (1d6) + Short Sword (1d6+1) + Sword Expertise (1d6) and roll those dice and total them up. The Roll With the Punches (1d6) card also in his pool is probably not applicable to an offensive attack.

(Please note that I’m making several of the cards up off the top of my head and they’re not necessarily indicative of actual cards that might be published.)

The goblin is going to try to resist getting hit and might select from his pool to use Small (1d6)+Shifty Bastard (1d6+1)+Leather Armour (1d6) and roll the those and add them up.

This isn’t to say that you always use 3 cards, you can use none to the limit of cards you have in play but there’s a catch to that of course.

All the cards used (simplified) get tapped or sent back to the character’s deck of cards. This comes into play in the next round. In this case the sword being a physical object is just tapped and the expertise being a innate ability is also just tapped but the Brawn is moved back to the deck. Tapped cards untap at the start of the warriors next turn and they can spend ‘flow’ to move cards from their deck back into their hand.

So the Catch is – Cards that are in the player’s deck or tapped can’t be used until they’re returned to the player’s hand or untapped. A character can at most return or Flow two cards from their deck to their hand on their turn and to do that they must give up their ability to move on the field as Flow also provides movement. This certainly can add a tactical element to choices, do you use several cards trying to go for the knock out blow or reserve some to use in your own defense in case you don’t manage to take the creature out.

The goblin’s Small and Leather Armour are both persistent advantages and neither tap or move to his deck but his Shifty Bastard trait does.

For the attack to succeed the instigator, in this case the warrior, has to beat the goblin’s roll, ties go to the defendant.

Let’s say the warrior hit and beat the Resistance roll by 10 points. The goblin now has to discard 10 points worth of life cards. If he’s out of life cards, then you can guess what happens next. Note that if the goblin had say 3 life cards worth 4 points each, obviously worth 12 points or 2 higher than he needs to discard, he still loses them all, you don’t get ‘change’ from spending life cards.

Action continues in this way until someone’s out of life cards or the conflict is otherwise ended.

This same mechanic is used everywhere you’d normally make a skill roll in any RPG. Want to bribe a toady to get an audience with the CEO? Then use your Bribery+Wealthy Backer+Persuasion cards against him.

Or say your character is caught in an earthquake and about to go on a journey deep down below and needs to do some white water rafting? The GL could just assign a flat resistence that you have to beat.

Or a little more cooler, the GL could treat the white water just like a creature and assign a pool of cards, perhaps cards for Swift Currents (1d6), Boulders (1d6+2), Submerged Tree Trunk (1d6), Water Spray(1d6), Whirlpool (1d6+2), Large Drop (1d6+4), Waterfall (1d6+6) and give it a pool size of 3 and flow of 1.

The player in the raft would then ‘fight’ the white water by using purely as an example their Reflexes, Brawn, Driving – Rafts, Awareness, Sharp Eyes and Lucky Bastard or whatever they have that’s appropriate.

If the player wins the ‘fight’ then he sails out at the end of the section of white water alive, if the river wins, he sails out at the end of the section of white water a corpse.

Which anyone has to admit is a pretty damn cool way to do what would be a flat skill challenge in other systems.

As you can see there’s definitely a flavor of the fairly common Traits mechanic from say Spirit of the Century / Fate derivatives to the system although the mechanic is different enough to be it’s own unique thing.

The system is fairly inclusive in provide rules for the most typical needs in a generic setting, the setting rulesets would expand as needed for specific rules covering things like detailed Magic or Cybernetics etc.

Movement, Damage, Healing, Weapons, Social interactions, Skills etc are all handled in a pretty straightforward manner and should be pretty clear to anyone. The only complex part that I came across is when dealing with range modifications to dice rolls when the target is resisting it or when there’s cover involved on one side.

I was able to, I believe anyway, pick up the general gist of it with a single read through and although I’d have to go back and look up various specifics to actually play it, that shouldn’t be necessary more than once or twice. And not even that much if you happen to have a better memory than myself, I’ve got rules for over 200 core game mechanics rattling around in my head, colliding, merging and juxtapositioning with each other until that section of my brain is just a chaotic mess.

The Pros -

The pool and flow mechanic is fairly elegant and self balancing so that character’s tend to be level across the board in terms of power. A very huge thing for me in a game system, I dislike systems that allow some players by accident or design (i.e. power gaming) to be significantly more powerful/useful than others.

Character creation also seems reasonably balanced and pretty simple and straight forward.

The concept that everything costs in some fashion is a good one because it provides the players with discrete choices that have impact.

The card mechanic lends itself nicely to having interesting creatures for the GL to engage the players with, much like DnD 4E did, with creatures combining their cards in nifty ways. Additionally it can work very well with adding flavor and color to challenge sequences like the white water rafting I mentioned above that in many systems would be a dull series of dice rolls until success or failure was achieved. “I roll my nature skill, yay I got a success, how many more do we need?”

There are a few one-shot adventures for free to anyone that can be played along with the openly available core ruleset to give anyone who wishes to try the system out, the chance to do so.

Additionally there are some example rulesets that provide, well examples I guess, of how the system can be extended to add things like a Shadowrun feel with body augmentations.

The Cons -

Note while the con section is longer in word count, overall I’m still highly in favor of the system as of right now.

The core rule system is fairly bare bones but really what do you expect for free? I’d be curious to see how much more information the paid versions have. Perhaps if a playtest shows promise with my players I’ll indulge myself.

In terms of dealing with the core rules and card design might start to get unbalanced for cards that have multiple keywords or advanced keywords. The designer states that designing cards is an art which I can understand.

Personally I prefer a more hard system in that respect or at least a few pointers. And again the paid for version may have all this.. One of the reasons I enjoy 4E for example is the creation system simply works from the DM’s viewpoint. Previous editions did require experience, the more the better, in designing content for the players to engage. 4E made it simple(r) for anyone to pick up the DM hat and go to work.

I’d like to see some general guidelines on how much keywords that add/subtract/impact Flow are ‘worth’. It’s well and good to say it’s an art and I think after 30 years of using RPG’s I could do a reasonable job, someone with less experience might end up floundering a bit.

I think personally I’d start with each advanced keyword adding a 50% cost to the card with some unique keywords costing double for instance Persistent which as I read it means that card never taps or returns to your deck and thus is usable over and over. Obviously Persistent would be mostly restricted to things like Armour.

The Rotate keyword that lets you tap a card but otherwise leave it in your pool for use on your next turn, thus not costing you any flow to return it from your deck is fairly powerful as is the ability to use flow to untap it on your turn and use it again. So a character could for instance, again as I interpret the rules as presented, have a Sword card with the Rotate keyword and attack with it, spend one Flow to untap it, attack again, spend one flow to untap, attack again.

Granted the character is giving up their ability to move, but once combat is engaged, how much movement do you typically do? And while they probably don’t have a lot of cards to combine with each attack, neither will the defender have a lot of cards to try and resist each attack. And remember if you beat the target’s Resistance roll by even 1 point, they have to burn a full life card to cover the damage.

As written/read the Rotate ability is pretty powerful stuff. As intended the mechanic might be different, perhaps you can only use a card once on your turn and being able to spend flow to untap it (un rotate it) is just designed to let you use that card defensively when you’re getting attacked. It’s not written that way though and as written as best as I can determine a character could attack up to four times on their turn assuming they have two weapons with the Rotate ability, either use both and untap each one once or use both and untap one twice. Personally that seems a little over the top and is a huge advantage to whoever wins initiative. I believe I’d simply use my own rule from my system and say in general any given item/skill can be used once on any given turn as a house rule.

The gun/ranged weapons as listed lack any modernization and have a strong old west or even further back leaning to them such as having to load bullets one at a time and the ranges are extremely short. A modern ruleset may resolve that minor issue and of course it’s an easy fix to bump the ranges up and adding the concept of magazines to the reload mechanic for firearms.

Final Verdict -

The system is definitely something I’m going to work into our rotation. I believe the card mechanic can simply work for a lot of gamers and the ability to combine the cards to perform actions as well as the costs involved give the players some really cool decision points.

I think there are a few minor places where I’d personally house rule some things but really who doesn’t end HR’ing stuff?

This is a system I definitelyrecommend checking out, especially given the price of admission to see what it’s about.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been going through the 6d6 core system available from the wiki for said system. I actually cut and pasted the wiki pages into a google document as I have difficulty absorbing information when it’s separated into small bits and pieces like that.

LInk below to the wiki -

I’ll post a more detailed reaction, after I get it written up but in short it’s primarily favorable. My biggest nit picks so far are the lack of a weighting/cost to add keywords to powers, my gut reaction is increase the cost by 50% to a cards cost for each keyword added that impacts flow spending as a rough rule of thumb after a cursory read through.

And that the ranges on the weapons given the granularity of the system are on the low side But then along with the multitude of interests I have one of them is a long time associated with firearms so saying that a pistol has a range increment of 2 and rifle of 4 is a bit low for my personal tastes in mechanics. It makes it practically impossible to hit anything at range and personally I can hit a 2×2 target about 9 times out of 10 with iron sights at 100 yards. Much less 50′.

But those are things easily house ruled and overall I really want to give the system some table time.

In other news of a more personal nature and a stunning display of cliche-ity, I certainly do not feel as old as the guy in the mirror at the barber shop looked today. I don’t know who the hell that guy is but he certainly epitomizes why mirrors have so often been gateways to horrible things.

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6d6 Online Tools – 6d6 Core
6d6 Core. Introduction. The Golden Rule. Groups. Leaders. The Character Deck. Life Cards. Ability Cards. Equipment Cards. Path Cards. Effect Cards. Circumstance Cards. Game Mechanic Cards. Understandi…

Continue reading »]]> This is a review of “The New Death and others” by James Hutchings.

In the interests of full disclosure the copy was a review copy and I have no previous affiliation with Mr. Hutchings and no fiscal involvement with him or this book.

I was very quickly struck by an aura of familiarity after starting the book.  In short order I’d drawn connections between the author’s style and works of Harry Harrison, Spider Robinson and Steven Brust.   This is not a bad thing as you’re aware if you’re familiar with those authors.

The book is reminiscent of 1001 Arabian Nights in flavor although not form.  It is a series of short, some very short, stories and poems with a very punny thread surfacing time and again.  Many of the stories have a middle eastern color to them while others bring to mind the touch of an African folktale influence.

The stories range from decent to very good in quality, with some unusual and unexpected twists to them, the Face in the Hill was especially evocative and thought provoking for me.

As I said there’s a punny underlayment to a lot of the stories and some are outright groaners (riding the emotional rollercoaster) while others border on genius (emotional babbage). If puns are something you avoid like a bad case of herpes then you’ll probably not like many of the stories in this book.  But if Punday Night is something you’re familiar with you’ll find some delights in this book.

The technical quality of the writing is good, I didn’t notice many (or any that I can remember) obvious typos or grammatical issues. It’s obvious that someone did a very serviceable job proofing this book and didn’t just hit F7 in Word.

Overall I’d give it a very solid 7.5 out of 10 in my personal scale of which I have no 10′s and precious few 9′s.

You can check out the book at (and no I don’t get anything if you click those links):

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/92126

Continue reading »]]> Summation – F'ing Brilliant

DRYH, which sounds like something that Head and Shoulders would fix stands head and shoulders above so many systems I've read and or used.

It's a highly narrative gaming system rather than simulationist, there are no tables of charts, no multi-page character sheets filled with numbers.

Let me be frank and say that narrative isn't my preferred, I likes me some captain crunch in my gaming systems so the fact that this system is still extremely appealing should give you some idea of how good I think it is.

The setting is horror-noir and is reminiscent of "They Live" (the Rowdy Roddy Piper cult classic film, a short story that I can't remember the title or author where as I remember it smokers were able to see horrible creatures walking among people that others couldn't [Edit: The Ten o'clock People by Stephen King reminder courtesy of +Chuk Goodin ] and yet another short story where people 'woke' up or broke their programming and no one else could see them because they were outside the loop.

It deals with what happens when human beings go so long without sleep that it's no longer necessary and the dark horrifying madness in the world that is opened to their eyes as a result.

It has a extremely unique and innovative dice mechanic to resolve conflict that works wonderfully well in this particular setting. And I'm not a fan of dice pool systems but I so wish I'd of thought of this.

When a hero tries to resolve a conflict and it's really that broad, it's not "I roll to hit." it's "I roll to deal with the Paper Boys chasing me." they roll a dice pool of d6's that include their Discipline stat and optionally their Exhaustion value, either current or added for this roll and any Madness dice, again either current permanent or added for this roll.

The GM simply rolls their Pain dice pool. They use as many dice as they feel would be Painful to overcome. Of the various pools, Discipline, Exhaustion, Madness or Pain, the pool with the highest single value (or subsequent values as needed to resolve ties) dominates the result, i.e. is the basis of the narrative flavor of the conflict. Each side also counts up how many of their dice or below a 4 and those are successes.

So a hero may win the conflict but if the GM's Pain pool has the highest dice they certainly win in a way that's less than satisfactory.

The players then determine if they resolved the conflict by Fight or Flight which as they use those options up leaves them with just the one option. A hero who burns through his Fight responses inevitably ends having had enough and running for it while a hero who runs away is eventually going to get stuck fighting for their lives or more to the point their sanity.

There is also a Despair and Hope mechanic, similar to Fate and Hero points, Bennies, Rewrites, etc, that allow the players and GM to tactically alter the dice outcomes but they trade hands. When Pain dominated a conflict the GM gains a Despair token that can use to flavor future conflicts. But when they use Despair on the heroes, the Despair turns into future Hope.

The setting is filled with flavor and highly evocative to me of the Nightside series by Simon R. Green. Which is a good thing.

The heros have access to super human abilities known as Madness talents that give them an ability beyond that of normal man. There are also Exhaustion talents that give you benefits but at the cost increasing your exhaustion. And exhaustion leads to Sleeping.

As the heroes go about their uphill battles dealing with this new world that's open to their eyes they can rack up exhaustion and madness that builds and builds until they sleep or go insane.

And sleep has suddenly become the most dangerous thing a hero can do, death may be the preferred option. While sleeping a hero is open to the Nightmares and they are utterly defenseless against them.

When the Nightmares come, one best hope that one has a stalwart companion for protection.

Speaking of companions I really see DRYH as highly suitable for small groups, even a single hero with a lacky to guard their sleep when the inevitable exhaustion forces them down. It should allow for highly focused stories for 1 to 3 players with none of the "Okay we need a fighter, a cleric, a wizard and a thief. Oh and a ranger would be good."

The heroes tend to be very gray, I would think, and very little is going to be black and white but shades of grey so close that it's hard to tell good from evil, pain from joy and the heroes from the villains.
The rule system is light, less than 80 pages when you take out the fluff pages at the start and end. Which includes a Index?! That's right a 70+ page rules light game manual includes a detailed index. Would that every publisher saw fit to follow that.

The mechanics take up roughly half of that including character and scene building leaving the remaining half for setting information such as locations, organizations and bosses.

This isn't really a game system aimed at the newbs although they can certainly understand it. But I think it would work best for a group with at least one or two experience gamers to lead the way, especially gamers experienced with narrative game styles. A group of games say with only Pathfinder or Hero system experience could end up a little lost. "There's no place to put my attack bonus on this sheet and it doesn't show how much a damage a dagger does."

It has a strong narrative basis which in my opinion does require more creativity to let it bloom to its fullest potential. Anyone can run a set piece module dungeon crawl where E1 leads to E2 leads to E3 filled with stats and descriptions and tables and charts. It takes more creativity to deal when the hero is simply trying to track down his lost child who was stolen by a Monster Under the Bed.

But the lightness of the setting does require any extended story line to go outside the book to come up with material. Luckily there's a wealth of material out there in the horror setting in movies, fiction and other gaming systems that can be adapted for this due to its easy mechanics. You don't need to know the stats on a Shoggoth to use it in DRYH, you just need to know "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter." to use it in Don't Rest Your Head.

I don't necessarily see this as something you're going to be using to run a year long campaign with, you could but I'm not seeing it personally. But for a short 4-8 session storyline? Or even a one shot? This is a extremely highly recommended.

And the best part? You can get it for less than a latte and danish. ($5)

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Continue reading »]]> Just wanted to post a quick review of the SnowBall microphone by Blue.  You can find them on Amazon or Newegg if you’re interested. Â  Right now it’s cheaper at Amazon.

It’s a USB mic so you’ll need a PC of some kind to use it and you won’t be able to feed the input through a mixer or anything like that.

Previously I was using the mic on a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam as my mic.  If you’ve listened to the podcast you can tell the quality isn’t all that and that’s after extensive cleanup and tweaking.

I think you’ll find the next podcast release to be significantly better in quality with everyone audible and without overload.  Probably doesn’t hurt that I parked the mic in front of me on the gaming table and put Temple at the far end of the table.

I’m not an audiophile, I don’t really know cardioid patterns or impedance or pickup sensitivity.  I do know that the recording with this mic is very acceptable to me and although I cringe at the price, its worth it IMO.

D