Quote from: some guy on facebookStar Wars Live Action Roleplaying was the book you are thinking of. The book was indeed clunky, and was published on the heels of the wildly successful White Wolf LARP books. Interesting note, the Vampire and Werewolf system is a descendant of the D6 system. Creator Mark Reinhagen, who was the mind behind several WEG books (most notably the Tramp Freighters Galaxy Guide) borrowed heavily from the WEG D6 game because of its easy flow and adaptability in a story driven game style.

Does anybody know if this rumor has any fact to it? I can confirm that Mark Rein-Hagen wrote several WEG d6 Star Wars books, but am not sure about the system being the basis for Vampire.

Quote from: jeff37923;731092Does anybody know if this rumor has any fact to it? I can confirm that Mark Rein-Hagen wrote several WEG d6 Star Wars books, but am not sure about the system being the basis for Vampire.

I've never heard this before. I'm also straining to see much of a direct influence from WEG's Star Wars to Vampire. (Other than the use of a dice pool. And while Star Wars D6 may be the mother of all dice pool systems, it was also additive instead of count-the-successes. So even in that it wasn't particularly similar to Vampire.)

Counting successes actually pretty much is the same thing as adding up.

It sounds strange, but WEG developed a D6 variant that was just that - D6 Legend used in Hercules/Xena. But you could directly convert from one to the other.

Legend                     Classic
(#successes)              (total)
Very Easy (1)             Very Easy (1—5)
Easy (2)                     Easy (6—10)
Moderate (3)              Moderate (11—15)
Difficult (4)                Difficult (16—20)
Very Difficult (5)         Very Difficult (21—25)
Extremely Difficult(6)  Heroic (26—30)
Heroic (7+)                Very Heroic (31+)

And it's been a while since I played Vampire, but wasn't everything rated from 1 to 5? Which was the number of d10s you rolled? That's exactly how D6 works, only it's generally 2-5D for attributes and up to 12D or so for skills (but usually not that extreme)

Wikipedia claims: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling_System:

QuoteWhile on the road to Gen Con '90, Mark Rein·Hagen came upon the idea of a new game design that would become Vampire: The Masquerade. Tom Dowd, co-designer for Shadowrun, worked with Rein-Hage to adapt the core mechanics from his previous game success to use d10 instead of d6 for calculating probability.[1]

I'd heard the same thing before, too. So Shadowrun, not Star Wars. (...unless Shadowrun was inspired by Star Wars).

Quote from: Justin Alexander;731099also additive instead of count-the-successes. So even in that it wasn't particularly similar to Vampire.

They feel like completely different systems to me, so I doubt there was much influence.

It's not surprising that a game designer working within one system would be inspired by that system to develop another. If you read the original WEG D6 Star Wars, there is a lot of talk of story and scenes in the GM section.

Outside of using a pool of dice, there's not much in common between SW, SR, and VTM's resolution systems. I'd be hesitant to say that any of them owe anything particular to any of the others without hearing it out of the mouths of the various designers, and all three games have some pretty solid pedigrees.

Wasn't Greg Stafford's Prince Valiant RPG more closely related to Vampire systemwise? Wasn't the dice mechanics originally used in some boardgame?

Quote from: MatteoN;731138Wasn't Greg Stafford's Prince Valiant RPG more closely related to Vampire systemwise? Wasn't the dice mechanics originally used in some boardgame?

Prince Valiant used a pool of coins with success/failure across the pool.  Ghostbusters used a pool as well, and was the first major game I can remember do so for the core resolution mechanic, and predates PV by a year or more.  OTOH, PV resembles Vampire's pool more than it does SW or SR, which resemble Ghostbuster's pools.  

To make matters murkier, Lynn Willis worked on PV, and GB 1e, IIRC.  Dowd worked on SR 1e and Vampire.  It may just be that pools were something whose time had come and people started mucking about with them simultaneously.

Quote from: jeff37923;731092Does anybody know if this rumor has any fact to it? I can confirm that Mark Rein-Hagen wrote several WEG d6 Star Wars books, but am not sure about the system being the basis for Vampire.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;731099I've never heard this before. I'm also straining to see much of a direct influence from WEG's Star Wars to Vampire. (Other than the use of a dice pool. And while Star Wars D6 may be the mother of all dice pool systems, it was also additive instead of count-the-successes. So even in that it wasn't particularly similar to Vampire.)

Well, I feel that Shadowrun would have been a more logical influence tahn Star Wars. Also, Rein-Hagen wrote those SW books well after Vampire waqs out, if memory serves.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;731141Ghostbusters used a pool as well, and was the first major game I can remember do so for the core resolution mechanic, and predates PV by a year or more.  OTOH, PV resembles Vampire's pool more than it does SW or SR, which resemble Ghostbuster's pools.  

To make matters murkier, Lynn Willis worked on PV, and GB 1e, IIRC.  Dowd worked on SR 1e and Vampire.  It may just be that pools were something whose time had come and people started mucking about with them simultaneously.

Yeah, the criminally underrated and ahead-of-it's-time GHOSTBUSTERS was the first RPG I can remember using dice pools. IMHO Shadowrun and Vampire owe a debt to it.

Ghostbusters seems to add the dice, rather than counting successes. YMMV but I've mostly seen 'dice pool' used as a term for the count-success thing.

Do people like dice pool systems around here?

I do like them, but they are kinda random with the results.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;731274Do people like dice pool systems around here?

I do like them, but they are kinda random with the results.

I may have too low a post count to be considered to be from "around here" but I like well designed dice pool systems.  Which mostly means they need to use a fixed target number like later versions of Storyteller and Shadowrun.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;731274Do people like dice pool systems around here?

I do like them, but they are kinda random with the results.

Odd. Probability-wise, they are generally a bell curve.

If you set the TN to score a success at 50% of the numbers (say 4 - 6 on a d6), you have a 50% chance of scoring half the dice pool rolled in successes.

i.e. If I am rolling 4 dice in my d6 pool and I need 2 successes, I have a 50% of succeeding.

With the standard Storyteller system, you score a success on a 7+ (40% of the available numbers), so you have a slightly worse chance of scoring half your successes in the dice pool. However, when you toss in the 10 counts as a success and re-roll, you get a bump in that (10% chance per die of scoring the 10, 40% to score a success on re-roll... is some percentage chance increase but I don't recall how to calculate that. :-). When the number on the die is an 8+, the odds are a tad grittier.

You get more wild results with a linear roll like a d20. Of course bonuses/penalties over a TN help with that a little, but generally the chance to roll any specific number on the die is the same. This is why it feels more dramatic or random.

The more dice you throw in a pool, the more normalized the results. It helps emulate the idea of a more experienced/talented person performing better results more consistently while your less experienced/talented person performs all over the place.

I enjoy a good dice pool system. More of a fan of the nWOD, Shadowrun or Witchhunter (2e) approach than D6. The D6 TN ranges irk me (personal preference).