Hi all!
In this post, I'll talk about some roleplaying games which use 6-sided dice for calculating success. I have to say that I didn't try much of a range of d6 games variant. But writing this post is giving me a need to try more different games.
There are different kind of d6 uses as game system.
One of them is, taking 1-2-3 as failure and 4-5-6 as success, or taking 6 as critical success. Technically, it's not different from flipping a coin.
Another method is, having attributes and related skills, summarizing their values, and rolling that much d6. Mostly, 6 or 5-6 is success and having more success increase the outcome.
And the other method I know is, also called as Year Zero Engine. In YZE, you basicly use the 2nd method, but you also have an extra variable die, which is mostly a d6, but can change depending on its system.
If I have to give some examples, I can say that ALIEN RPG has extra d6 for its "panic mechanics" and The One Ring RPG has d12 as "Feat Roll" to determine success.
I tried Big Eyes Small Mouth, which uses 2d6 for calculation, but it has a difficulty value, called TARGET NUMBER, and you just add up the numbers to reach to equal or beyond TN. BESM is the best use for generic anime-style RPG.
I can state Shadowrun as the second method I mentioned. You have attributes, and attribute-related skills and their values. You add your values together, and check your edge. If the summarized number is bigger than your edge, take your edge instead, because it's your dice pool limit. Then, roll that much d6 and check 6s on result.
Year Zero Engine is a Free League Publishing (Fria Ligan) system and their games use this dice mechanics for all of their games. ALIEN RPG, with its panic system and stroytelling method, won EN Publishing's Best RPG award for 2020.
Actually there's nothing really interesting for me in d6 systems, except YZE. Because rolling an extra die as a complication die (like ALIEN RPG's panic roll) is an interesting idea. But I believe that rolling too much roll and spending your time to inspect the result is just slows the game down.
In most cases, either you don't have much variant on the results, or you have to roll too much dice. I like to keep my game on the flow, so when it's one or two dice, it's generally okay for me. Higher amounts are okay since my games are on internet and there's auto-calculation, but on the table, I don't like it.
And I guess that's all.
On my later posts, I will start to introduce different games which their companies provided for me to review on my YouTube channel.
See you later!
