This is a follow-up to last week’s rant on the not-so-forthcoming RPG revolution, but it deserves its own posting, because it’s a self-contained idea that may or may not spark some discussion.

Why yes, that is a picture of Dragon Dice to the right there. I’m not even posting a link to Wikipedia or anything because it was such an awful game. Truly horrible. But it did have those custom dice which were so fun to own and sort and throw and count, and it’s such a shame the game was so total in its awfulness.

“But I digress”, I’d say, but I haven’t really started yet, have I?

I want to throw out a simple idea of an “alternate mechanic” RPG in line with my Euro-game cravings. Probably totally flawed, but if it gives substance to the thought, it’s good for something. So here goes.

In this imaginary RPG, there are a bunch of different dice, let them be six-sided, because hey, why not. Keep it simple. Let’s define maybe 10–25 “interesting” qualities of a character or creature, speaking somewhat broadly like “martial prowess”, “toughness”, “movement”, “arcane power”, “stealth”, “perception”. Call them facets. Then define a set of standard dice where each one has a collection of six facets, matching some theme or idea. So a “rogue” die might have movement and stealth and such facets, whereas a “sorcerer” die would have a different set of facets. You might even incorporate the “role” parlance from 4E and go with “defender” and “striker” dice, etc.

To keep things from going insane there’d be maybe 20–30 die types, max. Some would be more common than others. They might have different colors to help a human brain keep track of them, but whatever. In addition there might be a die type for each race or monster type. Maybe you need a “special” die to catch all sorts of things like breath weapons, who knows.

You can probably see where this is going. A new character gets a very few dice, maybe one for race and one for level. And all of the gameplay is based on hucking your pile of dice and trying to score the facets you need to succeed at relevant actions. A character balance is built in to the system because you have only so many dice, with so many facets. Party balance is built in because different characters will want/need to excel in different areas. When you level up you get to add a die. A wizard might take the “magic” die three times out of four, but then occasionally need some sort of “defender” die just to get some hits/toughness/whatever. Rolling more dice is more fun and so having 20 dice to chuck at 20th level feels just splendid, and before you say, “hey, that’s a lot of dice to throw!”, consider how much less complicated that is versus a typical 20th-level 3.5 D&D character!

Details, details. The tactical system, the more it uses just the dice, the better. Like, as you get hurt, you set aside dice rather than losing HP. You can imagine “equipment” dice like arms and armor. You don’t want to get onto the treadmill of a “+3 armor” die; rather, you want a “armor” die that’s worth +1, but you “outgrow” at level 6, after which it’s not “good” enough to augment your latent abilities anymore. Whatever – there’s a way.

A brilliant implementation of this system would allow these same dice to be meaningful in a whole new way the narrative space, versus the tactical space.

Anyway. A “character” or “monster” ends up being defined extremely simply – a list of which dice make them up. And yet the play would be extremely robust, don’t you think? A simple orc might be Humanoid 1 + Fighter 1; a ghoul might be Undead 2 + Fighter 1 + Striker 1. A GM preps for an encounter by getting the right dice on hand; that’s it. As the monsters take a beating, the GM is ticking off which dice they’ve lost.

Let’s not worry about packaging and physical execution just yet, OK? I don’t want to devise a system that’s all about selling wacky special dice, but if wacky special dice could add up to a whole and fun new RPG experience, let’s think about how that would work. For instance, you might be able to simply print out sheets of stickers that you slap onto existing dice. On rare occasions you could just use a plain d6 and know how to “score” the numbers into facets. Doesn’t really matter. If the system is good, the rest would follow. Just trying to say that it doesn’t lead from merchandising!

So, three questions for the audience?

(1) Is this a useful example – IN GENERAL – how how an RPG system might be setup completely different from the tradition book-and-paper stat-fest that we have today?

(2) Does this SPECIFIC example have any merit or potential as a system, or is it good only for talking about?

(3) Any systems out there that you know of that do something like this? Compare/contrast? And hey, don’t tell me about Shadowrun or any such system where you huck a bunch of GENERIC dice trying to score successes against a long list of skills and abilities defined on your PAPER character sheet. That’s not what this is, see?

Thanks!