Vampire: The Masquerade Conversion

[mshute]

Back in the 90s, my game group noticed a lot of similarities between WEG's d6 Star Wars system and White Wolf's d10 World of Darkness system. They both used dice pools. They both used Health levels and let characters "soak" damage. They both had a "complications" mechanic. "Humanity" was the mirror image of "Dark Side Points".

We found the d10 system to be more elegant and versatile though. It was faster and easier to count successes rather than add up all the dice. Successes could be converted to bonus dice or difficulty modifications 1-to-1. The skills were more cinematic; a pilot could fly a speeder just as well as a star fighter or transport. We tried playing a Star Wars game with the d10 rules, and it worked really well.

Over the last 20 years, we've been refining and developing our homebrew conversion as the prequels and sequels were released. We expanded Force Powers and Skills. We developed native mechanics for vehicle combat. We even came up with some great rules for "cinematic duels". When "The Mandalorian" came out, I started pulling together all of our different iterations into a single document. I've finally finished that project.

I don't know if anyone else outside of my game group would have any interest in this conversion or not, but I thought I'd make it available just in case. You can find the PDF here - http://laurelcadre.org/Star_Wars_WEG_to_WoD_Conversion.pdf

If anyone does bother to look it over, I'd love to hear what you think.

-Mark

[Whill]

Thanks for sharing your alternate game system.

I briefly entertained the idea of changing to a d10 system because the difficulty numbers are based 5s and 10s – the number of dice rolled and the difficulty ranges are irrelevant to each other in D6 (5s and 10s were only chosen because they are easy to remember). But then I remembered that the average roll of a d10 is 5.5, so there wasn't any real advantage to changing from d6 which is 3.5. To line things up, I instead when the direction of shifting the difficulty ranges to being based on 3.5s and 7s, so the number of dice rolled directly corresponds to difficulty ranges now.

And regarding it being success-based, WEG published a D6 has a version of that too. It was only used for two published games, DC Universe and Hercules & Xena. The mean joke about it is that it is D6 for the arithmetically inept. Personally, I find counting pips to be fun, and I've been blessed with never having any players that had too much trouble with it. I feel you lose too much nuance with a success-based game, but that is just my preference.
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Star Wars D6 Damage

[mshute]

Yeah, I'll grant that d6 offers more flexibility for setting difficulties. With a success-based d10, you can fall into the "6 seems too low but 7 seems too high" trap. It was adding up all those dice that really shifted our preference to success based systems though.

When we ran d6, the most entertaining part of the night was watching the vein throb in the engineering major's forehead as the history and English majors tried to figure out if the seven dice they'd just rolled added up to 18 or not. Even the most math-averse in our group could figure out many d10s landed on 6 or higher.

[MrNexx]

[mshute]

[MrNexx]