Design Diary: D6 Legend (the lesser-known D6 System)
When people mention the D6 System, most people immediately think of the version of the game that has it’s roots in the West End Games (WEG) Star Wars line (which in turn was derived from the older Ghostbusters game). If you’re not familiar with it, the core mechanic of the game used regular six-sided dice (hence the name, the D6 System). To do anything in the game you add your skill value to your attribute value, roll that many number of d6s, and then add all the dice together to see how you did.
This system works great when characters are starting out, but a common complaint about the game was experienced character could be rolling 10 or more dice – adding up all those d6s could be slow.
In the late 1990s, WEG came up with an alternative system that they called D6 Legend (also known as D6 Prime) that aimed to solve this problem. Instead of totalling up all the dice, you counted how many dice had rolled 3 or higher – the number that had were called ‘successes’, and the difficulty of the task determined how many successes you needed to roll. WEG even released their own dice that replaced the numbers on the dice with symbols, to (in theory at least) make it even easier to count the successes.
WEG only ended up using their D6 Legend system in two games – “The Hercules and Xena Roleplaying Game”, and (more popularly) “DC Universe”. Later on WEG returned to concentrating more on the ‘original’ D6 System in their games (by far their best known version due to the popularity of the original Star Wars RPG), and D6 Legends become just a footnote.
But with the D6 System now released under the Open Gaming License, the D6 Legend system can live again. Which is precisely what I plan to do via Polgarus Games.
One of several projects I’m working on is creating a new version of the D6 Legends system that I’m calling STAR6. As the name suggests, it has a sci-fi focus (not surprising, since the first setting I plan to use it for is a sci-fi setting!) I’m attempting to create a version that takes into account many of the comments that people made about the D6 Legends system over the years, while at the same time moulding the system to my own preferences in roleplay games.
The rules for STAR6 will be a free release when they are ready (going through a period of testing before the final version is ready). I hope that with my contribution (and the contribution of many others who are working on their own projects), the D6 Legend system will once again be an easy option that people can consider when hunting for a system to use.
I’ll be detailing the design progress in this diary, so be sure to check back regularly.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Design Diary.
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