Note to Reddit: this poorly written draft promo copy to help get the site at least halfway up prior to playtest. These aren’t the “rules”… rather a musing on the general function of the mechanics without providing enough detail to grasp it. The beta version of the rules is actually solid and readable, but not here on the site yet. As means of remedy until the SRD is up and you can just read it, I made this article: On dice.
Rolling d20s can be boring.
Roll a die, add a number, see if something works. The action itself is fundamentally passive. It can come with great tension: highs from critical hits or crushing defeats (and dice jail) for poor rolls. However, the agency for the player is in advance of the dice check only.
The system of The Meidlands is based on D6 dice pools. They can be from 0 to 7. Excluding specifics for academic magic schools and folk magic paths, a character is built from accumulating skill ranks in 14 skills with 68 specialties. For each rank in a general check, you get a die. For each specialty, you get a bonus, or in certain cases (like highly specialized checks) the specialty becomes the determiner of the dice pool size. The skills themselves are largely dictated or corralled by the character’s chosen character class, of which there are 12, but there is a lot of latitude between the variety of skill and specialty options.
Ability scores (the same six everyone is familiar with already) and situational factors add additional bonuses or penalties to the whole affair. All checks are opposed (dice are rolled for difficulty or for the target).
But the way the dice are used is a bit different than expected.
The dice pool and bonuses (or penalties) are not added. Rather, a check is determined by spotting the highest die or the highest number of highest die. The pool is tossed with two additional D6s, often of a distinct style or color to distinguish, called critical dice. Any bonus allows the player, before the check is resolved, to reroll any 1 or 2 on any pool or critical die; any penalty requires rerolling any 5 or 6 on any pool or critical die. Prior to throwing the dice, the player can decide to exchange bonuses/penalties (within certain guides) at a rate of 4 to 1 die. Here a player can decide whether to optimize for a bigger pool to chance getting more high rolls (including multiple successes) or optimize toward rerolls, which can often be a deciding factor in manipulating critical dice.
At the table, it makes every roll a strategic (and occasionally party-wide) decision: which way to apply the bonus? Extra die or additional rerolls? Once rolled, do I apply it to a low pool die to get a 3rd success or should I try rerolling the low critical die to see if I get a better number or a double?
Even though this takes a moment more than a single d20 throw and the calculation following, in cases of combat, the damage is already rolled. The critical dice determine the effects of weapon damage. Some weapons use the lower number die as the base (dagger, rapier), others the highest (axe, mace), and others the average rounded up (long sword). Some are capped, some have other damage modifiers. All do a specific “critical damage” number to each weapon when doubles are rolled.
Through this, different weapons of similar damage output feel different. L weapons often benefit from maximizing dice successes and fishing for critical hits. H weapons do fairly consistent high damage but barely benefit from rerolling critical dice, due to largely having less dramatic critical damage numbers. A weapons (most swords) are balanced inbetween.
And since all checks are either difficulty dice pools or opposed, a defending character’s critical dice determine damage reduction through armor, which similarly display mechanical quirks and variation.
The varying pool and bonus sizes provide a degree of strategic and statistical variation. It not a 5% for a natural 1 on a d20 or a 5% for a natural 20… A 1D pool can win against a 5D pool (the former getting a 6 and the latter getting none) or vice versa.