Rolling bones and other things

[James V. West]

Better late than never...

The mechanic in The Pool needed to be fast, so I went with shooting for a single number, always the same: a one. Rolling more dice would up you odds of getting that result.

I also wanted to get real fast-paced feel. Something that changed rapidly. So I went for the gambling of dice. Its something you can physically feel and know where you stand.

Another game I did at the same time was Sigil (which I took off my website until I can decide where it needs to go). In that one, you created dice by using wooden cubes and drawing your own symbols for succeses and failures on them. The idea there was again to have something you could physically hold. The way it worked was that you'd basically get to add successes to a die as the GM gave them to you (rewards for good rp--ill-defined as it was). Likewise, you'd get failures to add as you botched things or acted stupid.

What I liked most about it was the fact that your die pool would grow, and some of your dice would have more good sides and some more bad ones. You'd get to pick which die to roll in the best of situations, and the GM would pick for you in the worst. I'll be exlporing that system more later.

Another system I created about 5 years ago went like this:

You have 4 dice each with equal sides good and bad (I used cubes painted black and red). One of them had a red dot on one side and a black dot on the opposite. It worked like the Star Wars system in that if you scored the red dot, you rolled that die again. That way, you could have difficulties of more than 4 successes. I ran it many times with great results and I plan to use it again in a more solid game.

I like systems that do these things:

1) don't bog me down with math
2) don't drag out the resolution phase
3) don't play favoritism with combat

My favorite systems I've seen so far are Sorcerer (love it), Star Frontiers (still love it), and D6 (Star Wars). But there are so many great games I've too recently discovered to rave about yet.