Hi everybody! A couple of years ago I found a spanish heartbreaker called Anima. The setting and the character customizing options were really cool, but the system was way too complex and there was a lot of important missing data for the setting, like creatures and further info about the world. Trying to fill the gaps I ended designing a different game, using many different things I found on other games and some I developed myself. The result is Anima d6, a 21 page booklet (including character sheet) that replaces the whole 4 books of the Anima series published by Edge Entertainment. I'll keep this post as an open journal mostly, so if you have any questions feel free to ask. I still don't have a translated version of my game, but as soon as I make one I'll post it on the corresponding part of the forum.

For setting creation all every player had to do was answer these questions and roll 1d6 as indicated:

-What's your kingdom and king name?
-Describe your kingdom's geography and weather. Roll 1d6 for it's size (numbers just for reference)
-What is their economy based on? war, commerce, industry, agriculture, research, etc? Roll 1d6 to see how is going
-What is their people like, in one word? Population will be 10(1d6 zeroes after)

The rest of the 20 minutes were for creating the god each of the players worship and the usual offtopic jokes. Good things: I didn't had to explain too much and I could get to the game without preparation. Since every player was in charge of creating the kingdom his character was from, It was good to have them guiding the rest of the characters on a place they were the most familiar with. For the game to work all I really needed was that the most powerful kingdom shoud be on the center of the map and have an exit to the sea, just in case, so I drew that one first and let the players set their kingdoms as they see fit, adding rivers and mountains where necesary. Next time I'll post about pantheon creation and a resume of the setting my players created.

Character creation was done quickly too, even though I used 8 characteristics, professions ad libitum and 3 skills (one physical, one mental, one social). It's because of the system: each player gets to spend 10 dice among all these, getting 1 additional dice for racial adjustment to characteristics and 1 to skills.

This automatically defines how many dice players can roll on their turn: their top characteristic + all proffesion dice their have. At first level the maximum value fot this is 5  dice.

On their combat turn each player picks dice from this pool to make anything. Like, they can roll 2 dice for perception, 1 to move and the last 2 to make a ranged attack. Since different characteristics are used for different kind of attacks, It's feasible that while your character is best as a melee warrior that doesn't mean he can't make ranged attacks... it's just that he won't be able to roll all his pool on that sort of attack on his turn.

This was made thinking on multiclassing too, one of the things that attracted me to Anima in the first place. Say, your character has 3 levels of warrior and 1 of mage. That means he's a warlock and usually makes his attacks using weapons and charging them with magick on each blow, or casting a fireball along his combo of physical melee attacks. So you can roll all 4 profession dice together + the relevant characteristic whenever your character makes an attack. Thus, multiclassing doesn't make your character weaker in this game.

So far a couple of testing groups are playing this game and had a few questions. I had to design a way to include limited psi powers and I'm working now on pet companion rules. The design has proven to be quite modular, able to fit a lot of different mechanics as long as I keep these rules in mind:

1) Fluff doesn't add more dice or modifiers, it just gives more tactical options to players. That way as a GM I can keep player power level under control. It doesn't matter if a character has a mighty fire sword that does 5d6 of fire damage, he still makes 5d6 of damage and a 6d6 creature can give him a good fight. Challenge rating can be calculated on the run this way.

2) Anything that imposes a negative condition on another character (trapped, paralized, disarmed, etc) has to be done rolling only half the dice available.

On other news there hasn't been complains about the critical roll rules. These state that when you roll 6 with more than half of dice rolled it means your character exterted his abilities too far and so it receives different damage according to the number of 6 obtained. On the other side of the equation, a character that receives such attack gets additional damage according to the number of 6 obtained. The result of this on the battle is that the tide of the battle can change in no time and even the strongest warrior can have a bad day, but he can still hurt plenty on a bad day.