Greetings. This is my attempt at what I hope to be a bi-weekly article for The Gaming Outpost. As a gaming geek, I have an interest in every level of a game from the mechanics, to the setting, and why things are the way they are in a game. So I decided, why not a column in system design? This is a little different from the games design columns from John Wick and GM Skarka. (don’t forget Jaffe - Ed.) They are trying to create a whole game. My point here is just to explore mechanics. What are my credentials? None! I have been gaming for a few years now and I think I have some ideas worth having raked over the hot coals by GO readers.

There are tens, nay, hundreds of game systems out there. Each one is a little different from the previous. Some are coherent and some are not. Sometimes, gamers can be very loyal to their game systems. Just ask some of the older D&D crowd who never left first edition. My personal favorite is the system used for Tales From The Floating Vagabond. It uses a d30 in parts of it. I am a fan of the d30, I think far too few systems make use of it.

All right, let’s talk about dicing conventions briefly. Hmm, Hercules and Xena Roleplaying Game. That will make for an interesting first study. If you own the boxed set of this game, it comes with (6) six-sided dice. If you are familiar with the d6 system from West End Games, this game is similar but with a very important change to the dicing method. In the d6 System, you add the results of all the dice rolled, not so with Herc & Xena. Allow me to describe the dice. On the five purple dice, four sides have a picture of a Chakram (that round flying blade Xena uses) and two sides have a Hydra. A Chakram is a success and a Hydra is a failure. The red die has three sides with the Chakram, one side with the Eye of Hera and one side with the Thunderbolt of Zeus. Basically, you roll a number dice equal to your skill. You count your number of successes. Failures do not take away from successes, as per White Wolf. Like the d6 System, the red die is always a part of every roll. If it comes up Eye of Hera, something bad has happened. The Thunderbolt of Zeus allows you to count it as a success and reroll the die to see if you can get another success. The loop goes on if you are lucky and you ignore Hera’s eye after the initial roll of the wild die. Sound familiar? If you play DC Heroes from West End Games, they took the Herc & Xena system almost verbatim. I believe this method of determining success may have been a response to White Wolf and their wild success with their d10-based system. I say wild success because the series of books have sold tens of hundreds of copies and has a good fan base. But I digress.

Herc & Xena use a consistent dicing method through out the whole game. This is a good thing. In D&D 2nd Edition, it had two different dicing conventions involving the d20. This was fixed in the 3rd edition, which many have applauded. I do not own a copy of 3rd edition, so I cannot comment any farther on it’s system.

This did get me thinking, though, about my own system. One goal I have with this little column is to design out my own system in view of other people. The readers of GO are a creative and endearing lot. I would want my system to have a single, consistent method of determining results. Talislanta had a single table and used a d20. I wanted a single table that used a d100. The d100 ranks up there as one of my three favorite dice (d100, d30 and d8). Basic Roleplaying uses it well and I have been quite content with it’s Cthulhlian extension for years. But, to design my own set of game mechanics, that nasty part of the game that some people do not like to design. Setting first, mechanics last. Or, Setting first, make the mechanics match. This column is about mechanics, not settings, so I am starting with the system.

For my game system, I did have in mind a campaign setting of normal people and a normal world, “no swirly stuff” as Memento-Mori might say. So I do not know how well it will scale to activities beyond normal Humans, but we shall see.

I was tinkering with dice at my computer trying to figure out how to create a genome-based system when it hit me…THE TABLE. I doodled down some numbers in a tabular fashion and this is what I came up with:

(key: Df = Difficulty, AM = Attribute Multiplier)

THE TABLE

Here are the basics: You have an attribute, for this example, let’s use Agility. The GM sets the difficulty (Df) of an action (picking a lock) at 7 (consulting the table, the AM is x4). The attributes range from 1 to 15 and, for this example, our hero has a 10. That is 4×10, or 40% chance to succeed.

What about skills? I like skill lists. Let’s say our hero had a level of 2 in lock picking. That skill level would reduce the Df of the task by 2 to a Df of 5 (AM of x6). Now our hero has a 60% chance to succeed.

And that is the basic mechanic of my system. It all started with THE TABLE. If I get the chance to write a second article on the subject, I will explore more about other dicing methods of other games and farther development of my own system.

Au revoir.