The D6 system, as published by West End Games is fast, fun, and easy to teach new players. For those not familiar with the rules, each attribute is rated by a number of (six-sided) dice. The higher the attribute, the more dice you roll. Skills add additional dice to your roll. Roll above the difficulty of the task and you succeed. It’s a simple system that should work for a variety of genres, especially the cinematic ones. Like, you know, super-heroes.
D6 Powers is a rules supplement to the D6 Adventure and/or Godsend Agenda. It is not a complete game; as the title suggests, it focuses primarily on adding super-powers to the D6 rule set. This review is based on the 151 page PDF from Khepera Publishing.
D6 Powers apparently grew out of the Godsend Agenda RPG from Khepera Publishing. As such, it does have rules sections that are specific to the Godsend Agenda world. Since I don’t particularly care one way or another about Godsend Agenda, I was pleased that rules specific to that game world were minimal, and clearly marked as being specific to Godsend Agenda.
I might as well talk about layout and style at this point. D6 Powers is very pretty. It is a full color PDF with plenty of high quality flavor art. Text is well broken up, with large chapter and section headers that make it easy to navigate. It also comes with an index at the back. The PDF is extensively bookmarked. Unfortunately, the full-color backgrounds, while pretty, also make scrolling pages slower than it should be, as well as increasing the ink-cost and printing time for individual pages. I think I would have preferred a more “print-friendly” PDF, perhaps bundled with the full-color one.
The writing is not always up to the high standards set by the layout, either. Numerous spelling errors, grammatical problems, and poor wording mar the text. Writing is inconsistent in tone and style throughout the book.
Chapter One
Characters are built on a point based system ranging from Power Level 1 (80 points) to Power Level 6 (400 points) although the default power level seems to be in the 3-4 range, which will give you a very competent (Avengers/X-man level) superbeing. The rest of this chapter is fairly pedestrian, describing the attributes, skills, and derived attributes of your character.
One interesting option (although it is labeled “Godsend Agenda only”) is the idea of archetypes. Choosing to play an archetype (basically a superhero personality package such as Adventurer, Icon, Scientist, etc.) gives a concept bonus. For example, the Icon archetype (think Superman or Captain America) gets +2D to Command skill, or the Fame advantage. It’s a cute way to add a little comic-book style flavor to your character.
Chapter two describes various advantages and disadvantages for your character. Disadvantages add points back to your total pool, while advantages cost points. There’s really nothing earth-shatteringly new here, but the advantages and disadvantages are tightly defined and well described, which is nice from a GM-perspective: there’s not as much guessing about the point buy-back for having a frail Aunt Joy, a Terrible Secret, or the Quirky tendency to shoplift from the local mega-lo-mart; nor is there any confusion about what you get with that Secret Headquarters or for having dashing Good Looks.
Chapter Three describes Powers. This is by far the longest chapter in the book.
There are, roughly speaking, two schools of thought regarding super-power design. The first, espoused by Champions and Mutants and Masterminds (among others) is an effect-based system: choose game effects that represent your powers, then describe them. So if you are playing a weather control hero, you might choose flight, energy blast, and darkness, and let those represent your ability to summon high winds, call down lightning, and create thick fogs.
From a game design standpoint it’s great because you don’t have to try to elaborate every super power ever seen in comic books within your rules. From a player standpoint it sucks: you have to try to figure out what your powers can do, and it is easy to get bogged down in minutia.
Actual gaming experience: I remember a Champions game where a new player came into our group. In trying to create a concept, he kept flipping through the powers section trying to find an idea he could work with. We tried explaining that the powers listed in that game were only effects, and that he really needed to start with a character concept, but that was counter-intuitive to the other games he had played. He ended up with a flying, invisible, energy blasting character. About half-way through the game he got mad because he discovered that his flight and energy blasts weren’t invisible– Champions has a lot of fiddly bits like that, and he hadn’t known about, or taken, the proper advantages to create the character he had wanted. He didn’t show up for the next session...
The other way to design powers is to simply list every power you can think of (or that is important to your game) and give the players some flexibility within each power. Villains and Vigilantes, the original Marvel Super Heroes game, and Heroes Unlimited take this approach.
D6 Powers lands closer to the “list everything” school of thought than “effects-based.” And I’m cool with that. Powers are sorted by type (Physical, Defensive, Elemental Manipulation, Mental, Magic, Movement,) with a cost per rank ranging from 2 (Infrared Vision) to 15 (Magic). A handful of powers have only a fixed cost. Powers can also have enhancements such as having an Area Effect, or limitation, such as Diminished Range.
The scope of powers is quite remarkable, and imaginative. Powers like Molecular Mimic (think Absorbing Man from the Thor comics), Elemental Sheathe of Insects, Time Manipulation, and Hex are interesting and exciting. Just paging through the powers is enough to jumpstart character creation ideas. In truth, there aren’t any super powers that appear to be missing. Even minor powers (Spider-man’s swing line) and cosmic level stunts (Firestorm’s matter manipulation) are listed. Broad powers such as Weather Manipulation and Super Speed give plenty of examples of the kinds of things that a hero can do with his power. Want to run up a wall using your Super Speed, or use your Super Physique to create a shockwave? The power descriptions are thorough enough to describe how to do those things.
Having said that, there are a few problems with the Power rules. First, there seems to be a problem with point balance. Infrared Vision the same price as Flight? Really? The ability to turn Two-Dimensional is a six-point per rank power; for seven points you can manipulate Time, and for eight points you can manipulate Water.
Powers don’t seem to have any common scaling. It’s hard to tell how comparable 8 ranks of ice manipulation is to the same number of dice in elemental sheath (fire), for example. This makes power versus power rolls somewhat problematic. Some powers increase linearly, some geometrically, and some apparently do both. Super-speed, for example, doubles combat running per rank, but increases non-combat running by 50 kph per rank. Yes, Run-real-fast-man can end up with a faster combat movement than a non-combat one.
A few powers are not well described at all. For example, Omnivore (think Matter-Eater Lad) is a four point power that allows you to “chew through any substance with no adverse effects to her teeth or jaws.” Unfortunately there’s not much more for the description of the power. No discussion of how long it might take to, for example, chew through a prison wall, or how much hazardous waste the character could digest at once– important considerations if they come up in play.
Other powers seem to have “Chart-itis:” the Mutation power (“the ability to manipulate the evolutionary growth ... of another living thing”) has an entire page of random roll charts devoted to it. The ranged power attack Entropy Blast has another page of wild and wacky things that could happen to its victim, ranging from becoming semi-intangible to being plagued by vermin. Probably a lot of fun for the joker who gets this power, not so much fun for the rest of the gaming group while she looks up the results of her Entropy Blast every single time. The Magic power also has a fumble table with “wild and wacky” results. Sigh.
Chapter Four deals with Gadgets, which, for the most part, are just super-powers with appropriate limitations on them. It is nice to see detailed rules for creating vehicles. Powered armor also gets a mention, as well as the Omni-Gadget (think Batman’s utility belt.) After purchasing a gadget, the character must roll against a difficulty number to see if it can be built. It is not clear if this only applies to gadgets built “in-game” or if a beginning character gets his gadgets without rolling. If the former, it begs the question, “can Tony Stark design an Iron Man armor so complicated that even he can’t use it?”
Chapter Five is an expansion of the D6 rules with regards to super-powers. Here are lifting charts, as well as rules for knockback, using trees and cars as missile and melee weapons, and more. There are some neat things in here: rules for menacing bad guys into submission as per Batman, Coordinated Attacks (“Teen Titans, Go!”), and Breaking Things. I didn’t find anything about emulating comic book damage, where one is very likely to get knocked out, but nearly impossible to kill. Nor are there guidelines for using existing powers in unusual ways (“I want to use my laser eyes to cauterize the wound”). My understanding is that Godsend Agenda has some alternate dice-rolling rules to speed play when characters are rated in the 10's of dice. Those would have been nice to see here.
Chapter Six is Character Templates: 26 partially created templates that allow a player to jump-start into a game. I like how it separates out, for example, Brick-(Metal Titan) from (Brick-The Monster.) Unfortunately, several templates in the back are duplicates. One of the duplicates, Elemental (Weather Manipulator), is mislabeled (twice!) as Elemental (Human Manipulator). That’s just sloppy.
There are also two sample characters in the back. The Mirror is a young man with the ability to travel through mirrors. Blue Bottle has a suit of armor that allows him to shrink and fly– sort of an Iron Man/Wasp hybrid. Both characters are imaginative and show off the flexibility of the system. Alas, the flavor text for both is pretty poor. Here’s a sample from The Mirror:
“...One evening after his uncle had passed through to him his left over evening meal Charlie went into the mirror land. He browsed for a few hours until he came upon a little girl crying. She was about six years old and was hiding down between the bathtub and the sink... [f]ollowing her gaze Charlie saw a large man shirt open to the waste [sic] belt in hand and he was shouting something at the girl...”
Sans commas, sans spelling, sans everything...
A character record sheet and a good, but not great, index rounds out the book.
I really wanted to like D6 Powers more than I did. Much of the book is slick and the writing is enthusiastic. Browsing through the power list is a lot of fun and makes me want to start creating characters. Further, the approach chosen for designing characters means that it is easy to get a new player up and running, even without the templates in the back. Unfortunately, the power designs aren’t consistent or necessarily elegant. Rules aren’t always explained clearly. The entire book needs at least a few more passes under an editor’s pen. D6 Powers has a lot of potential, and I hope the authors consider working on a second edition.
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