What are your views of D6?

kenobi65 said:
IME, that's a massive understatement. :) It became incredibly unwieldy at higher levels. This was especially true when you spent a Force Point (in the SW version), because that doubled all your dice values for a round.

<snip example>

Yeah, it could get bad, but in that example you're spending a Force Point. You probably only have one or two of those, and if you're getting it back you're using it at a very dramatic moment. edit: At the moment that it makes it cool to roll all those dice.

My experience has been that when players used Force Points, and got to roll the unwieldly dice, it was really, really cool. 'cuz most of the time you're rolling 6D or 8D or whatever, and then suddenly you've got 14D or so. Just holding all those dice in your hands... it's pretty cool.

But I don't think you can have a game run like that, where characters are routinely making 20 rolls in a round. It would be like watching the DM roll 20 times for all those henchman War1 NPCs hanging around you, or having your 20th level fighter fight an army of War1s.


Anyway. I really liked the system. I never had a problem with wonky dice. I guess I played to its strengths (fast, free-wheeling games) and it played to mine (no restrictions! do whatever you can think of). (For example, if players asked me if they could do something, my response was always: Roll.)

Creating NPCs is so very easy, so very very easy.

I wouldn't try to play it like D&D, with your dungeons and your missions and crap like that. Try and get the players to make some interesting characters with obvious conflict in their backgrounds. Then roll with that. Remember that the game isn't really about the tactics 'n such; it's more about the style that you do things with.

etc. More rambling like that. It's a good game. The only problem I had was when I wanted to play a really wargame/tactical game - I could never get that feel from d6. And I missed Hit Points (although it would be really easy to give d6 PCs hit points).
 

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The Star Wars d6 version was also my first RPG.

The injury/damage system was a little clunky (a human with maximum Strength attribute could ignore direct blaster hits 50% of the time). (Roll 4 dice for Strength to resist a 4 dice blaster pistol, and if the strength equal or exceed the blaster dice you take no damage at all). In my experience (several long campaigns of d6 Star Wars), characters could get nigh invulnerable if they had a high Strength attributes and bought their Dodge skill way up.

It got really cumbersome with more advanced characters, characters could do almost anything with no chance of failure. I guess that's cinematic, since most characters only fail on rare occasion unless it's a truly epic thing they are trying to do.

Of course, the movie characters were all statted up as being far more powerful than PC's would ever be. Even fresh-off-the-farm Luke, who's a 19 year old farmboy who's been intentionally sheltered from any adventures or excitement somehow has more skills than best-of-the-best elite soldiers, ace pilots, or a PC who's been played every week in a year-long campaign.

Now, the system had it's strengths, it's quick to run, easy to teach to newbies, and easy to GM. It's quite the "rules light" system, no AoO's, no Challenge Ratings/Encounter Levels, no ECL/LA, no classes, and NPC (and PC) creation is lightning-quick.

d6 is a good game for a GM that doesn't have a lot of time to prepare, or wants a quick and simple game for players who are new to gaming, or wants a rules-light game that's good for cinematic high-action.
 

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