Roll Some Dice

As I've enthused elsewhere on the Internet, I recently picked up the original three Traveller LBBs at my FLGS for six bucks inclusive, and it's been a real psionic blast from the past. I have a lot of nostalgia for Traveller , but in all honest I don't think I ever actually played it. I didn't have a lot of people to play with back in 1980 or whatever, and my little group in elementary school was mostly about D&D and Tunnels & Trolls , with Top Secret added sometime in junior high. By then, I think Traveller was mostly forgotten, although we did squeeze in a little Star Frontiers , so it's not like sci-fi or space opera was totally unappealing to us. (How could it be? We're the Star Wars generation, man.) At any rate, the thing I do remember doing with Traveller was rolling up characters. Like the AD&D DMG , those Traveller books weren't written for my demographic -- but unlike Gygax's work, Traveller 's text was almost as hard...

I've never written anything quite this... uh... math-intensive before. It's not especially math-intensive in play -- there's a table lookup, a d100 roll, and the multiplication of two single-digit numbers -- but figuring out everything on the front end has been a challenge. I knew I had a solid concept with the way I wanted to do damage, but sorting it out so it all makes sense, and works in a way that makes sense to provide results that make sense, has taken a lot of trial, error, and math. Most of the original idea is still there. On a successful attack, there's a roll for hit location that doubles as a damage roll -- every location has its own damage rating. Multiply that number by the weapon's Damage Factor (DF) to get the total damage dealt. Compare that number to the target's Toughness : If it's less than his Toughness, he shakes it off. No big deal. This is only likely to happen with run-of-the-mill unarmed attacks. Bullets, knives, clubs, etc. ...

So for some reason, fresh on the heels of the relatively rules-light Tales of the Glass Slipper , I've made significant progress on a modern-day espionage game that uses: Percentile dice. A big 20x20 table to resolve everything. Nine stats. 34 skills in five different categories (plus one derived stat!). Skill points, the exact number of which depends on your stats. Multiplication. Hit locations. Who would play this game? Man, I have no idea . But I am so taken with it right now, I can't even tell you. I'm dying to see it in action. It's called [CLASSIFIED] -- the name's an homage to Top Secret , but I also think it has a nice ring to it all on its own. Like I said, I can't imagine interest in it would be very high. It's like a Jurassic Park velociraptor: Recreating a dinosaur's an interesting accomplishment and all, and people might be curious about it, but not many are going to want to get too close to it. What do you call a fantasy heartbr...

OMG, I'm obsessed with this table I made yesterday: (click on it to see it full-sized) Attacker's skill is the Y-axis; defender's is the X-axis. Cross-reference attacker's skill with defender's and roll that number or less on d100. Formula is Y/(X+Y) = Target Number . Against someone of equal skill, you're evenly matched. After that, your odds of success are essentially how much "dog" you have in the "fight," as it were. This was inspired by ShanG of RPG.net and his quest for his ideal dice mechanic . I'm unreasonably enthusiastic about putting this dinosaur to work in a Top Secret -like espionage game. Why not just play Top Secret ? Because... I dunno. Because I like this table, that's why. I mean, I'd like to play Top Secret again, but I honestly think the odds of running this as a playtest of some kind are better than the odds of getting a group together to play a 30-year-old game like Top Secret . That's just ...