D6 System is dead! Long live D6!

I just read across the WEG and RPGNet forums that Eric Gidson, sole owner of WEG properties, is folding up shop after a lot of effort with very little return. He seems a bit snippy in many of his post. I guess that’s because many are angry over his lack of production for that new D6 product they announced about a year ago. He seems frustrated and I can understand. WEG was a solid company until they lost Star Wars (and went through all that pesky bankruptcy stuff).

What was wrong with D6? It fell back as one of my back up systems, but as it stands now, in the form of three different books for three different genres, it is frustrating. It needs to be consolidated into one core system. Three different genres where each genre has its own attribute set (but still somewhat cooresponding) and some skills may fall under different attributes… that simply does not work. Folks want to use stuff acorss all genres at times, so making things very different makes it difficult.

The new D6 did something right in that it took the best of Masterbook and merged it with D6. The advantage/disadvantage was one of the more attractive systems about MB. It also brought over some of the game mechanics including the power creation system. That needs to be done generically and just call it a power system.

The combat rules need to be worked on a little, including the autofire and burst fire rules.

When I looked for it, I could not find the scaling system of the old Star Wars days. That made sense. That needs to be brought back.

There is nothing like rolling a fist full of dice and D6 is all about that. It is a fun system that is HIGHLY customizable. It is a shame to see it go away.

Gibson says that he is endeavoring to make D6 an open license property. Since he’s not making any money on it, I guess that makes sense – let other people make money on it. We’ll see where it goes. It definitely needs work before I would do that.