The die mechanic is rolling a positive and negative d6 and applying it to the PCs skill (usually 8-15) or stat (0-10). That number is compared to the target number to see if the action succeeds. If you hit in combat, any number rolled over your target number are added to damage (you roll an 18 and you needed a 15, you get +3 damage).
This provides a stable range of regular outcomes - if the PC is good at something, they're reliably good at it. However, dice explode on a roll of 6, so you can occasionally get wildly high successes or poor failures, which I find captures the action movie style. Fights between equal opponents are usually resolved in 3 initiative phases, or roughly a hour to 90 minutes of play time. Since fights are the core of the game and are designed to be flashy & exciting I find it's worth the investment.
There's some resource management both in Fortune points (which add an other positive d6 to the roll, once per session) and in Fu. you spend Fu per round to activate kung fu powers, so a high fu lets you do either more things in a round or access the more impressive powers. Gun shticks are more reliably but less versatile, and sorcery is very open ended but both flashy and sometimes quirky.
It's worked very well for my 1001 New York Nights action heroes in Chinatown game for a while. I suspect that sans the secret war you could find its charms.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-11-18 04:26 pm (UTC)This provides a stable range of regular outcomes - if the PC is good at something, they're reliably good at it. However, dice explode on a roll of 6, so you can occasionally get wildly high successes or poor failures, which I find captures the action movie style. Fights between equal opponents are usually resolved in 3 initiative phases, or roughly a hour to 90 minutes of play time. Since fights are the core of the game and are designed to be flashy & exciting I find it's worth the investment.
There's some resource management both in Fortune points (which add an other positive d6 to the roll, once per session) and in Fu. you spend Fu per round to activate kung fu powers, so a high fu lets you do either more things in a round or access the more impressive powers. Gun shticks are more reliably but less versatile, and sorcery is very open ended but both flashy and sometimes quirky.
It's worked very well for my 1001 New York Nights action heroes in Chinatown game for a while. I suspect that sans the secret war you could find its charms.