RPS
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In order to implement the game mechanics, the metric system is used.

The game system is based on a set of underlying principles. for simple tasks there are difficulty ratings. For skill based activities, there are skill levels. Skills can be pitted against either a difficulty factor and or another skill. By comparing the skills and difficulties a chance of success is created. If there is more than one character involved, then there may be multiple success factors. The rolls will determine the outcome of the attempt. If the situation is complex a result table may be required.

Simple Example: Kobart, an archer, is attempting to hit a target with a bow. Kobart has a skill with the bow of 20. The target is deemed to be at long range, creating a difficulty factor of 30. Kobart has an 86% chance of hitting the target. Kobart rolls 60% on the percentile, indicating a hit, but also that it is not a bulls eye. **numbers are all wrong!!**

Combat Example: Nistorm the fighter is attempting to slay a demon. He has a skill factor of 25 with the sword. The combat situation is an average one, so the difficulty factor is only 30. Thus he has a nominal 93% chance of hitting. Nistorm rolls 05%. This is a very good hit. The deamon has a defensive combat skill of 40. Because of the good hit, the difficulty factor is increased by a factor of 3. Hence the Deamon has a nominal 80% chance of defending against the blow. The deamon rolls a 80%, a marginal result, and the resulting damage is determined from the offensive weapon and defensive armour. **Needs work** Sliding probabilities, based on 1 to 100 with a bell curve, work on one, 2, and 3 standard deviations with each standard deviation moving the difficulty ranking by one. The percent change becomes the average value for that character.

To determine the outcome of an action dice are used. The most common dice is the d10 (and its derivatives, the d100, d1000 etc.). To cope with the great variance in levels covered by the system, the system is also logarithmic in nature. Here a log of base 2 is used. Hence is you are twice as good you get twice the dice. Depending on the situation this may result in say a d10 becoming 2d10 or a d100.

As the core system is based on Human Beings, all basic characteristics for the Human class have the same starting point: 3d10.

	Skill Tables
	Mechanics Category Index
	Java Helper Applet

Author's Notes

Mechanics are part of a system, where there are underlying mechanics and then a more complex version called environments.

This only leaves the problem of where to start the number system to prevent fractional dice. Ideally the system would start at the sub atomic level, but this would create an impractical number of dice in day to day play with humans as the characters. Hence it is important to scale the system up to a reasonable level, without leaving out the ability to rescale if the situation arrises.

The system describe here is based on a normalisation for human characters.

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21 April, 2000 (c) Brian Yap All rights reserved.