Grade The D6 System

How do you feel about The D6 System (any variant)?

  • I love it.

    Votes: 8 8.2%
  • It's pretty good.

    Votes: 41 41.8%
  • It's alright I guess.

    Votes: 18 18.4%
  • It's pretty bad.

    Votes: 1 1.0%
  • I hate it.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I've never played it.

    Votes: 26 26.5%
  • I've never even heard of it.

    Votes: 4 4.1%

Kannik

Hero
I like the D6 system. It's probably my next preferred system after the venerable D20 system. I missed out on WEG's Star Wars and the Ghostbusters. However, the only D6 system books I own would be Robotech-The Macross Saga Roleplaying Game and PDF copies of Age of Sigmar: Soulbound by Crucible 7.
Huh... the new RTech game by Strange Machine is based on D6? Or just that it uses d6s? Giving a quick perusing of the rules, especially given it uses success counting rather than additive dice counting, I think it's its own system (the AD6 system I think they call it) rather than using the D6 or OpenD6 (the D6 OGC 'evolution') system. :)
 

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aramis erak

Legend
Huh... the new RTech game by Strange Machine is based on D6? Or just that it uses d6s? Giving a quick perusing of the rules, especially given it uses success counting rather than additive dice counting, I think it's its own system (the AD6 system I think they call it) rather than using the D6 or OpenD6 (the D6 OGC 'evolution') system. :)
Just uses d6's. Playtest left me very cold about SMG's Robotech.
 

Kannik

Hero
Just uses d6's. Playtest left me very cold about SMG's Robotech.
Cool, thanks for the confirmation. I'd only glanced through it myself and didn't see anything that excited me either (vs running it in a other rulesystems to better match the thematic/tonal elements of the campaign).
 

Weiley31

Legend
Just uses d6's. Playtest left me very cold about SMG's Robotech.

Cool, thanks for the confirmation. I'd only glanced through it myself and didn't see anything that excited me either (vs running it in a other rulesystems to better match the thematic/tonal elements of the campaign).
I'll say this on SMG's Robotech: I think it does a good job at giving the anime visual and "scenes" in motion during gameplay and with the skills. But, I feel like reading it makes it sound daunting.
 


ThrorII

Adventurer
I've loved the Star Wars D6 system since 1987!!

Currently, I'm running my kids and their friends through a 1e D6 Star Wars game, using the HyperspaceD6 rules for the Force, and MiniSix rules to replace reaction (Dodge, Stamina, Parry). It is very cinematic and fast to play.
 

Celebrim

Legend
I've loved the Star Wars D6 system since 1987!!

Currently, I'm running my kids and their friends through a 1e D6 Star Wars game, using the HyperspaceD6 rules for the Force, and MiniSix rules to replace reaction (Dodge, Stamina, Parry). It is very cinematic and fast to play.

Sounds cool but I'm always intrigued by the different impulses people have when house ruling a game. I have never looked at a game as bare bones as D6 and gone, "You know what? This needs to be even more simple."

I was skimming back and forth through the Hyperspace D6 rules and thinking to myself, "How does this even play?!?!? It would be utterly lethal compared to even the normally brutally lethal D6 game when I got to the part where characters don't die they just get "downed", and I'm like. "Ahh, OK. It doesn't really matter if the rules work because the DM isn't going to let the game go wrong anyway."

MiniSix rules to replace reaction (Dodge, Stamina, Parry).

How does this work? I've seen comments on D6 rules that are like, "It would be better to have static defenses than opposed roles" presumably because a lot of modern games have gone to one roll and I'm thinking "The game literally can't work without opposed roles. Opposed roles is literally the core mechanic of D6."
 

Thomas Shey

Legend
How does this work? I've seen comments on D6 rules that are like, "It would be better to have static defenses than opposed roles" presumably because a lot of modern games have gone to one roll and I'm thinking "The game literally can't work without opposed roles. Opposed roles is literally the core mechanic of D6."

How so? You roll versus a flat value. As die pools increase it starts more and more approaching that anyway. What would be the problem with it other than its not what you're used to?
 

Celebrim

Legend
How so? You roll versus a flat value. As die pools increase it starts more and more approaching that anyway. What would be the problem with it other than its not what you're used to?

Because that's not actually how the math works. D6 shares with all dice pool systems that its math is not intuitive - one of the reasons I've decided I don't generally like dice pool systems. (D6 is the one left I will actually run, precisely because it uses both opposed rolls and static DCs in combination and notably doesn't count number of successes.) For the size of dice pools used in D6, the standard deviations are unintuitively large. D6 is actually utilizing this to ensure almost all characters have a non-trivial chance of success against almost all other characters. I wrote a program to visualize what the real math is and it's rather surprising.

But if you move to a static difficulty the math changes wildly. Think about it this way. What is the chance someone with 4D beats someone with 8D? Small but possible, despite 8D averaging 28. Now what is the chance someone with 4D rolls above a 25? The variation in the difficulty turns out to be useful in a non-trivial number of cases. If you don't vary the difficulty then the game changes radically.

(Notice that D20 handles this problem in a different way with a "20 always hits rule" where combat rolls with a 20 always work, but non-combat rolls with a 20 don't necessarily do so. It's a solution to the same problem.)

I mean, a lot about the math of Hyperspace D6 changes the game radically. Like for example, cover or concealment adds static difficulty of +5 means that it's very hard and generally pointless to take cover. In base D6 cover or concealment can often add 3d6 or 4d6 to the DC. +5 isn't even as effective as say half-cover. But then, there is that problem with fixed DC's again. If they made cover more effective, the lack of difficulty variation would probably be a near hard counter to most NPCs.

But my guess is that in play none of the math actually matters that much anyway, since there are no permanent consequences to combat and probably you have as a process of a play a lot of fail forward assumed by the GM to hard steer the game into story. That's how the author can get away with boons and burdens being so wildly unbalanced, and how the author can get away with going to a hit point system with so few hit points and so forth.
 
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