D6 System

How many times has this happened to you as a GM, or seen it happen as a player? The night started great. The adventure is underway and suddenly the group just veers off into left field and keeps on going. Who knows why. Maybe the group got caught up by some little detail the GM let out or maybe the evening wasn’t really planned and now, you’re forced to come up with information on the fly; things like NPCs with names and backgrounds, places to go, things to find, creatures to kill. All of that is great, at least when the imagination is awake and working.

Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Weekly or monthly titles that fed the imaginations of millions with colorful images and headlines whose titles would rival the best catchlines that a muckraker of the turn of the century would envy. Creating such as a GM might make for great ways to introduce players into the flavor of a campaign, but not everyone is an artist, or has the time to create such works.

More and more electronics are invading lots of spaces that used to be the domain of the ripped off piece of paper that was hastily scrawled upon to create a reminder of something for the next adventure. Laptops and Tablets have become more affordable and the use of PDFs and other file formats and programs have reduced the large, heavy library of books for one’s game to a much more manageable weight. On top of these devices comes the ability to manage one’s campaign with digital tools; from the basic like Word/Excel to more advanced programs like The Obsidian Portal site.

I've been trying to follow the goings on in the RPG world with the Star Wars license. In early 2010, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) gave up the license to the Star Wars merchandising that they had been doing for several years (D20 RPG, Miniatures, etc...). By the end of that year no more of WotC's Star Wars RPG or Miniature products were to be found on shelves.

So, this problem keeps coming up again and again in various forums dealing with the loved and, for the most part, forgotten system from West End Games, D6 System. The problem is the presence of the "Wild Die" that was introduced in Star Wars 2nd Edition. As usual, there isn't a whole lot of grey space in this debate... or shall we more accurately say "Love/Hate".

I created a small perl script that takes in the number of iterations and the number of dice that are part of the roll and outputs the list of target numbers that were rolled, how many times they were rolled and what % of the rolls do they represent. The script takes into account the result of the Wild Die. I settled on 1,000,000 iterations as it seemed to give a consistent sample response when run several times.