Oh well! Or a primer on game mechanics.
Well as you can see Tom either got to busy, or forgot that he was writing the geekdom column this saturday.
I'm betting on the later, though it could be a mix of both.
Which is too bad because I was rather looking forward to seeing Tom's spiel on the 84 crash of video games.
Oh, well work on it Tom maybe next week.
What's the topic for this week?
Good question, I'm not entirely sure.
I put topics on the back burner because I thought I was getting a reprieve.
Now I find myself writing and I have to come up with one quick.
.............................................................................Got one.
Game mechanics. This week will be about rpg's game mechanics.
Sort of a FAQ for those of you not babtized in the church of geekiness.
What game mechanics are, simply put, or the overriding rules and determing factor for rpg's.
They are the die rolls, the numbers (or stats as geeks like to call them), the charts and tables.
They how we (geeks) determine what the characters, non-playercharacters, and beasties can and can't do.
The most common way to determine this is a dice roll and an adding of a number.
Some of the most common game mechanics are Wizards of the Coast d20, Whitewolfs d10, and West End Games d6 system.
The d20 system was developed by Wizards of the Coast for their 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and it has, hands down become one of the most popular in the last few years despite Wizards of the Coast updating it and forcing players to fork of another 30 bucks per book.
The reason for this is the Open Gaming License.
This License allows game designers and developers to use the base mechanics of the the d20 system as the base mechanics for their own system, as long as the give Wizards their due and make note of it some place in the product.
The system is easy; roll a 20 sided dice (yes these have exsisted since the 1970's for sale) apply the appropriate number to the roll and add them up.
There is usually a target number determined by the Game Master (gm, or dm if you will) he compares the score and decides whether or not you succeed.
The 20 sided dice is used for most rolls, skills, ability checks, and combat. Only damage in combat requires the role of another dice.
What are skills? Things you're character can do such as: listen, search, spot, hide, move silently, climb, ect... This will usually have a number of ranks, which increase every level or just use your ability score bonuses (which are dete... you know this is can get confusing for the novice let's move on to d10 mechanics....
D10 mechanics are simpler. The same concept applies as the d20 system, but instead you use d10's.
Instead of rolling one d10, your skills and abilities have a number of marks and that is the amount of d10's you role, and instead of getting ridiculously high numbers (as can be the case with d20) your target number is between 1 and 10.
You still need to roll over that target number, but this time you might have more than one success, which means you are stellar.
The d6 of West End Games is sort of a combination of the two above only using d6's (or yatzee dice for the uninitiated) instead.
This was the system originally developed for the Star Wars rpg, which West End Games no longer holds the rights to and is now a d20 game.
Esentially take a number of d6's once again determined by your skills and/or abilities and roll them.
Add them up and compare them to the target number.
This is probably my favorite game mechanic. You know exactly what you have to roll as for as dice rolls go, and you improve the dice rolls directly as your characters advance.
So, that was a brief primer on game mechanics.
There are several we didn't even touch on, like the D% of chaosium, the d6 system that was popularized by ShadowRun, then there is the algorithmic game system of Earth Dawn...
FUN!!
More next time.
posted by F.G. Shaw @ 4:22 PM
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