The coming of the Die-TAGE system.

Alright. I just had to get that tagline out, because I'm pretty stoked over how quickly the TAGE rules are rolling out... TAGE (The Any Genre Engine) is the name I picked for the system about 10 years back, last time I tried to put it on paper and never found a reason to change it. Originally it was going to be TAGS for the The Any Genre System, but somewhere along the way in it's first 10 years of design I'd come to the conclusion that I wanted to design if from the very start to be easily ported to a programmed virtual environment and the word System mutated to Engine when I started taking that new approach to setting up the base rules. The fact is that I went so far into the making it computerizable that the math did get just a little more complicated to do on paper, but I like the balances of the system with the more complex math.

So what's with the Die-TAGE, you might ask... Well, it's one of the dice types in the game. The Engine is being set up to work with either a full range of gaming dice sizes or to be played with just a 10 sided and 12 sided dice, and in many cases the d10s and d12s will be interchangible, because the d12s won't always be d12s. Sometimes they will dTs. I am going to have to get quotes on how much it will cost to get Die TAGEs manufactured initially, but the idea is that the d12 acts as a d10 with 2 additional special condition faces in addition to the normal numbers 1 to 10. These two extra values are a Drop and a Rise and when a dT is used instead of a d10, a roll of either a Drop or a Rise will add extra dice and special conditions to the roll. The exact specifics of how they work are already mostly fleshed out in the what I already have on paper, but I am not going to post any of it, till I have a whole document to sum up the core elements of the whole game concept. In short, though, a Drop is a bad thing and means you did worse than roll a 1 and is the beginning of what can turn into a critical failure while a Rise is an outstanding success that adds extra dice to the total sum of the roll. Whenever one uses a dT to get a chance of one extreme outcome one has to take the risk of also falling to other extreme or, in other words, with the chance of outstanding success often come outstanding risks.

As far as how is it coming along? Well, in 2 days I have gotten a few pages down (until formated I really have trouble calculating actual pages or word counts from a digital document), covering the introduction, basic concepts, the dice mechanics, how success and failure works and I've covered the first section of Attributes... In all, about 1/5th of total document I need to crunch out. So far it's been easy, but it's usually when I get to skills that I start to bog down some in my ability to get it from concept to text.

In conclusion, though, I will definitely have something to show the public about the TAGE system within the foreseeable near future.