My developing RPG system 1

[Symmetry]

Still very much in the works, but I'm looking for advice/crisicisms/recomendations. The basic mechanic is that you roll a number of six sided dice based on your skill or attribute, and compare that to the target number. If you exceed it by a certain amount, special things might happend depending on the type of check, like doing more damage or casting your spell more quickly or a less cost.

I'll try to keep the number of dice reasonable so that adding them up doesn't take that long (2D being human average for an ability). Critical failure is rolling all 1s, which is harder to do as you get more skilled. As you get more skilled your results also become more consistant, which I like.

Question #1: Roll again on 6s? I can either do a full added reroll or only count it if its a 4, 5, or 6 (adding 1, 2, or 3 to the total and rerolling again on a 6). If I do the full reroll then getting a 7 isn't any harder than getting a 6 on one die, and that might come up farily often if 2 is average, but is the modified reroll to complicated? Or should I just ignore extra rolls?

For actual record keeping I'm thinking of listing the stat as a number and dividing by 3 to get the dice rolled, while adding the remainder afterwords. I'd raise that to dividing by 4 with a full reroll, since the expected die roll on that is a 4.2 rather than a 3.5.

I'm going to use 6 stats:

Size affects how many hit points you have, and lets you use larger weapons without penalty.

Strength affects how powerful you are as normal, and influences damage. Also, your strength minus your body is going to be this thing called the speed modifier, which'll have several uses.

Coordination: How well you can dodge (modified by speed), how well you can swing a club if you're strong enough, etc.

Mental: How well you can concentrate and remember things as well as willpower. Affects your ability to resist stun damage.

Intelligence: Mental agilty and intuition. It also affects how much you percieve in an interesting situation (as opposed to guard duty, where Mental is more important). Also affects surprise.

Hit Points: Twice your body rating. You have these little check boxes, and you put a slash through them as you get injured. At 1/2 and 3/4 damage you get skill penalties. Also, if you take more than 1/4 of your HP in a single attack, the remainder (the amount that is more than 1/4) is taken as aggrivated damage, and you mark it off with a full X through the box. You get skill penalties every 1/4 for agg damage, and it heals more slowly. If you run out of hit points, you start bleeding, falling to the ground and making one of your boxes aggrivated each turn. When they're all aggrivated damage you die.

Stun Points: Spell casting, vigorous excercise, etc use up stun points. Getting hit with blunt things causes aggrivated stun damage (which still heals faster than normal HP damage). If you have any aggrivated HP damage, you're also have that much aggrivated SP damage, and they don't heal until the HP does. Skill penalties at 1/3 and 2/3 for both normal and agg.

Thats it for now. Questions and comments?

[Hotfoot]

Good, you're still in the embryonic stages it seems. I may not be too late.

Hello, my name is Hotfoot. I'm the resident Dream Pod 9 evangelist. I'd like to show you the light of the Silhouette Rules system. While the rules did recently get revamped into Core Silhoutte, the basic mechanics stay the same. For a brief introduction into the mechanics of Silhouette, check out this Tribe 8 demo game. Once you've seen the joy and versatility of Silhouette, you may come to love it as I do.

However, if after having seen the glorious revelation that is Silhouette, you are still determined to make your own system, I wish you well. Just be warned that most of my suggestions will likely be biased into making you more like Silhouette.

[Super-Gagme]

Makes me think of the WEG Star Wars D6 system a lot.

[Vendetta]

A comment:

Sometimes it's a better idea to use multiple die types, but less dice.

I found the Deadlands system good. Your base statistic in each area determines the type of die you roll, your skill level the number.

It meant you needed D4s up to D12s, but you only had to roll and add up up to four at a time.

[Symmetry]

Makes me think of the WEG Star Wars D6 system a lot.

Thats one of the influences.

[Symmetry]

A comment:

Sometimes it's a better idea to use multiple die types, but less dice.

I found the Deadlands system good. Your base statistic in each area determines the type of die you roll, your skill level the number.

It meant you needed D4s up to D12s, but you only had to roll and add up up to four at a time.

Thats neat, but it doesn't have the increasing predictability feature I'm looking for, nor the decreased fumble rate.

[Vendetta]

Actually, it does have a decreasing fumble rate if you use snake eyes as the fumble.

A character who checks on 2D6 has a 1/36 fumble chance, on 2D8 it's 1/64, going up to ~1/20,000 for 4D12

You'll spend a little less time in the middle of the bell curve, but then that brings in more surprises for the players.

(Hell, if you ewant predictabiulity, why bother with dice? just make up all the results using the DM's First Rule.)

[Slartibartfast]

I like the FUDGE rules, myself. Not that I've ever used, but they look very interesting on paper.

[Symmetry]

Actually, it does have a decreasing fumble rate if you use snake eyes as the fumble.

A character who checks on 2D6 has a 1/36 fumble chance, on 2D8 it's 1/64, going up to ~1/20,000 for 4D12

You'll spend a little less time in the middle of the bell curve, but then that brings in more surprises for the players.

(Hell, if you ewant predictabiulity, why bother with dice? just make up all the results using the DM's First Rule.)

Since I hope to keep most skills at around 3 dice even for cool people like the characters, I think it'll still be pretty random, just not off the ball random like, say, a D20 roll

I've looked over the dreampod system, and it looks really nice if you're going to just be meeting a target number, but for trying to exceed something it strikes me as running into a wall too soon.

[Hotfoot]

I've looked over the dreampod system, and it looks really nice if you're going to just be meeting a target number, but for trying to exceed something it strikes me as running into a wall too soon.

Hm? I'm afraid I don't follow.

The idea behind Silhouette is that how well you do a task factors in directly to how much higher than the threshold you get in your skill check. So a Margin of Success 0 (meeting the number) is just scraping by, favoring the defender (if any) of the check. You need a MoS 1 or higher to "win" a roll. It lets you determine outstanding successes in a much easier fashion, rather than having to make special rules for criticals and such (crits still exist in silhouette, but they serve to modify the die roll directly, with a few special twists here and there). For noncombat skill checks, MoS (or MoF) can be used to determine how long a particular task will take, how spectacular the result is, so on and so forth.

If you have any specific questions or concerns, I'd be more than happy to address them for you.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Before being able to evaluate a system, I have to know what it is trying to accomplish. What problems are you trying to solve with this system?