The Game

Sixcess Core is a new Universal game engine that is going to be used for a new line of Roleplaying Games. Sixcess was kickstarted in 2013 and is now widely available. The kickstarter went smoothly and although I originally only went in for the PDF, I have since bought a print copy. The company behind it, Harsh Realities is klckstarting a number of settings to go with it. The first two, Promised Sands and Elfwood have both been funded and are on the way to being produced.

The book is divided into a number of sections (System, Character Creation, powers, Sample Characters, Bestiary and Game Mastering) and has the usual introduction to role-playing. Dotted throughout the book are little comment sections from the original players, which are amusing but may be subject to taste.

Before I go through the main review there is one thing I'm going to get out the way first. The game was written by Christian roleplayers and assumes that there is a one true God in most iterations that interact with an attribute called Faith [FTH]. They say that this can be taken out if you don't like it. I am an Atheist and I have no problem with this as I'll use it if the world demands it, but some people may have an issue with this.

The system is a modified form a a dice pool system with the number of d6 that you roll being equal to your Attribute + Skill. The TN is either set by the GM or is equal to the skill level of your opponent in a contested roll. The TN is the number that you need to roll or above on the dice to get a tick sixcess (success). You can get a super success called a Mark if you roll a natural 6 (which then explodes and you can re-roll it). More difficult skill checks require you to get a number of Marks instead of a single tick. In an opposed roll you take the number the person with the lower sixcesses from the highest (1 Mark equals 5 ticks) and that is the amount they have made it by.

Combat works using this basic opposed roll idea with the number of Marks you have and any armour the opponent is wearing increasing or decreasing the type of damage of the weapon (Slight, Major, Lethal, Fatal) and the number of ticks increasing or decreasing the actual damage. The combat round is interesting as it is divided into 5 combat phases. You roll your drive in number of dice to indicate which phases your character can attack (duplicates are discarded and 6's are a floating attack you can use any time up into the end of the next round).

There is additionally a detailed social combat system that seems to work similarly. This may put off people who dislike such things and prefer to play with the spoken word. I am of the opinion it should be used as written but with small bonuses and penalties based on what is actually said.

Creating characters allows you to choose where you want to focus your character in the first instance. The choices are Attributes, Skills, Social Status, Wealth and powers. You get something in them all, but the higher up the order you put each, the better they become. Choosing Attributes will give you more attribute points to spend for instance. Characters can then allocate those points to attributes, skills and powers. I'd like to try this out to see how balanced this makes characters in practice as I worry that some of these might be better taken higher than others. [This is something I'd like to see in actual play].

Characters the can get backgrounds (which get more exp if used heavily in the story), edges (cool innate and learned abilities) and flaws (innate character problems).

Powers are described next that go into Powers (such as Psi, Magic etc.), Sorcery (which comes from Demons) and Miracles (that come from God). They all seem to have a similar system that involves charging up before using the power. There is a nice array of powers in the book, but individual settings will probably have their own powers detailed separately.

The book has its own pretty good list of fantasy races and a bestiary for the GM's NPCs but it doesn't present its own setting for you. As such the book is usable for a generic fantasy game, but a specific setting or you doing up your own setting is required to play the game.

The Good

The book has everything you need to play in pretty well any setting. The systems all make sense and seem pretty playable. It looks like it can be infinitely adaptable to any number of different settings. It has a good contents and index page and the layout is clean and readable with few typos.

The Bad

There are several places in the book where concepts are introduced without actually describing them. Edges is one that springs to mind. The system setting talks about them a lot, but they are not described until the character creation section. Similarly CP (combat phase) is used about 10 pages before it is described. It's not a big problem as the index is pretty good and you can look things up, but I do find it a bit annoying.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a universal system that can do any genre using dice pools and successes then this will be a system that you should look at. Such systems are always a matter of taste, but for me it doesn't have some of the issues that I see in other universal systems (Fate in particular I think suffers from being a plot point economy game. GURPS suffers from having just two stats that are much more useful than the other two).

There is a fair bit of competition in this field but this game does have some good ideas that might spring role-playing ideas. Harsh Realities additionally have a number of cool settings coming up that should really bring the system to life.