Before we get into the specifics of Hack100’s mechanics, I thought it would be helpful to outline some of the high-level objectives of the project. Therefore, here are my design aims, in approximate order of importance.
- A d100 system (obviously!).
- A small number of character attributes and skills. My target is to have less than 15.
- Quick character generation – it should take no more than 10 minutes to create a character once you’re familiar with the system (and most of that should be taken up with deciding the character’s name!).
- Quick combat – approximately 5 rounds to resolve a typical fight.
- A skill-based, resource-constrained magic system. By this I mean:
- spellcasting is not automatic – it is dependent on the competence of the caster and there should be a chance of failure; and
- casting is dependent upon a finite resource that depletes as spells are cast.
- Character progression through the use of skills and training – no experience points.
- No complicated maths.
- A minimum of reference tables.
- A concise ruleset – no more than 32 pages in a digest format (if we get that far!).
- Only uses d10s – this might turn out to be an artificial and overly restrictive constraint; we’ll see if it’s practical.