I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Nexia RPG lately. My notebook is fulls of notes on professions, powers and various sub-systems and games that make up the RPG, but for the longest time these were all very ethereal, because I didn’t know how they applied themselves to the dice. I knew I wanted dice, I wanted some randomness, and I wanted to tactile experience of everyone leaning forward to see the results.
With all that in mind, and a lot of other factors that have shaped my opinion over the years, I’ve decided that Nexia would be based on six-sided dice, exclusively.
That is a tough decision for me, since I love a set of polyhedrons. In fact, I’ve bought most of the gamers I know at least one set of dice. However, there are a few reasons it makes sense to not use a full set of polyhedrons:
- Six-sided dice are ubiquitous. They are used in all kinds of games, and can be found in more places than just hobby shops. One reason that is attributed to the lack of traction of early versions of D&D in Japan is the lack of access to anything besides d6's.
- In D&D, most of the dice are for weapons. This hasn't always been true, but starting with 3rd edition, you basically use d20 for everything except to determine the damage for different weapons. This is something that I am specifically changing in Nexia RPG, so we are left with basically a d20 and some other arbitrary die. Choosing just a d6 for everything works better.
- I want the game to be simple. If you have ever played with a person new to tabletop gaming, you know that in a game with multiple polyhedrons one of the hurdles is the difference between d8, d10 and d12. "It's the one that looks like a spinning top" doesn't cut it.
Taking all these things together, I’ve decided to just focus on using six-sided dice. However, because it will an open system, I am not going to suggest that everyone only use d6’s. The idea is that people will make the system their own, and since the game is based on open-ended character design (a player should be able to play the type of character they want), as opposed to minute game balance, it shouldn’t be difficult to adopt the system to using other types of dice.
I am not really ready to describe how the mechanics for using dice will work (mostly because I don’t know yet), but I will say this: the math will be relatively easy, except there will be a lot of comparative math to be done for determining damage. The base attack for everything will be 2d6, modified by powers and abilities, and then there will be ways to subtract from that. Some of them will be simply reduction of dice rolled, while others will be a specific value (like a partial parry reduces damage by 3d6 [just an example, nothing is in stone]). I have a very specific design choice for how that all works, but that is for a different post. 