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Which dice mechanic appeals to you?

Honestly, as long as the mechanic falls into my “emulative & elegant” rubric, I’m good with it.

That said, I will admit to a long-standing love, born mostly of nostalgia (but not entirely — I find them emulative & elegant as well), of two dice systems: Percentile (my first, through Top Secret, and via my favorite emulative system, James Bond 007), and the D6 System (bunch of D6s, including a Wild Die for extra potential — in it’s best form in West End’s Star Wars).

 
 

What Game Mechanic inspires your play the most?

For the past 13 years, the game mechanic that has inspired me the most are Aspects, from the Fate system designed by Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue.

An Aspect is a word or phrase that describes something special about a person, place, thing, situation, or group. Almost anything you can think of can have aspects. A character might be the Fastest Gun In The Galaxy. A room might be On Fire after you knock over an oil lamp. After you are wounded in combat, you might have a Sprained Ankle. Aspects let you change the story in ways that go along with your character’s tendencies, skills, or problems.

You spend points during play to activate an aspect and have it effect the game (via bonuses or penalties to die rolls, etc.), and can earn points by allowing aspects to complicate your character’s life. (For example, the GM might give you points if they decide that your Fastest Gun in the Galaxy aspect means that an NPC has heard of you and wants to challenge you to a showdown!)

They pretty much perfectly suit the sort of narrative influence on game play that I prefer, and, thanks to the decision to declare the Fate system Open Content via the Open Gaming License, you are free to include them in your own designs. They are so much a part of how I think about RPG play that they’ve featured in every design I’ve worked on in the past decade.

 

I’m going to do something irritating here, and answer a question with another question, and a long-winded one at that.

I’ve been using music in my games since college. And by “using”, I mean “giving thought into use of music as a mood enhancement for specific scenes,” rather than “having the Heavy Metal soundtrack coincidentally playing in the room where we’re gaming.”

I’ve actually been giving a lot of thought recently to writing up tips, suggestions, reviews, etc. — as far as I know, nobody has given an in-depth look into how (and why) to use music in tabletop RPGs, so I’d love to give it a shot.

The question I have is this: Would this interest you? And if so, what format would you prefer to see? A regular series of blog posts? A podcast? An actual book? I want feedback on this. Talk to me.