The following year, Ianus and R. This also resulted in a three-part comic book anthology in Dark Horse Presents. In , the Dream Pod 9 team developed a card game called Heavy Gear Fighter , their first in-house project, and started to develop a game called Project A-ko: The Roleplaying Game based on the anime movie Project A-ko , as well as a roleplaying game system.
In , the Dream Pod 9 team released the first edition of Heavy Gear , [ 6 ] their first roleplaying and combat game that used the design team's roleplaying game system called "Silhouette", [ 5 ] and started using a "Dream Pod 9" logo to identify their work. The Silhouette game system was developed by Dream Pod 9 specifically to work with both its mecha-based miniatures combat games and roleplaying adventures. Called Silhouette, the system uses 6-sided dice to generate quick and sensible results.
All skills are rated from a low of 0 little or no aptitude to 5 superhuman aptitude. Actions are assigned thresholds of difficulty, ranging from 1 effortless to 12 near-impossible. When a PC attempts an action, the gamemaster assigns a threshold and determines the relevant skill. The player rolls a number of dice equal to the skill level.
The results are not added together. Instead, the highest number rolled on an individual die is considered the outcome if a player rolls two dice and gets a 2 and a 5, the outcome is 5. Every additional 6 adds 1 to the total if he gets two 6s, the outcome is 7. If all of the dice show 1s, the PC suffers a critical mishap. Actions with higher thresholds, then, become increasingly difficult to achieve. PCs with low skill levels are more likely to fumble then their high-level counterparts.
Character creation is equally smooth, involving the purchase of attributes Agility, Build, Perception and skills Acrobatics, Law, Stealth from a pool of character points. Simple formulas are used to compute secondary traits Strength, Stamina, Health. Creating a PC from scratch takes half an hour, tops". RPGGeek wrote that "the system is based upon rolling multiple d6s and the results exaggerate the effect either way.
