Author's Vision & Overview:

An effective and useful roleplaying game mechanic requires a unified vision of purpose to guide it’s design or it can easily become a jumble of complexities that contradict, confuse or haplessly mix ideas to become cumbersome, overly formulaic or downright destructive to the settings and stories it is used within.

The system you are reading is designed to be effective at both long and short term playing game styles, so that it can be used for single session games (as one might encounter at a convention, using pre-generated characters) and for long term play with interesting character development over time with player designed characters.

To achieve this it must reduce the amount of in-game tracking of information that changes purely within a session (removing such burdensome bookkeeping, placing it in a very simple and efficient mode or making it a GM chore rather than one for players).

The dice mechanic must be fast, requiring a minimum of dice. It must have a certain amount of a cinematic or graphic element to entertain the imagination, but not in a methodology that would require large quantities of reference material access.

Characters must be robust, not just mere stereotypes, and be presented in a manner that is enjoyable, fast to reference and easy to understand by both novice and experienced player.

The system is not currently designed for a novice GM, but for someone who can take what is presented and expand it upon need for specific ideas, campaign setting and playing style without breaking the balance mechanisms easily or having to reinvent the wheel in numerous ways.

To achieve these goals the system heavily depends upon the use of an action matrix table, rather than a variety of mechanical tools. It also uses basic percentile dice, rather than a full range of polyhedrons or large handfuls of dice of a single type (such as many D6 that are rolled and compared in complex patterns).

Simple addition, subtraction and multiplication (primarily multiples of 5 or 10) are used during game play, rather than complex math formulas. Character generation is by a constructed method, rather than a random one, and several non-math oriented decisions are made by the players that easily delineate details of abilities and potentials for their characters rather than other methods found in other systems.

This initial set of the mechanics is designed for use with the Worlds of Zamani setting, but can be easily expanded or updated to work with other settings and genres. It’s designed for fun, for speed of play and for depth of character. This means it may be more abstract than some Gms are used to, sacrificing ‘realism’ and to some extent ‘simulationism’ for characterization, ease of use, playability and character depth.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License.

It is copyright 2006 By Joseph Teller unquietsoul@gmail.com & Kiralee Mccauley dancingkiralee@gmail.com.