Basic Game System

The dice system of Oasis is based on the system created by White Wolf Entertainment for their World of Darkness books, and all credit for it goes to them. All we've done is streamline it, making the points easier to distribute and getting rid of most of the things that complicate rolls and combat.

Basic Roll System
This system is based on rolling big handfuls of ten-sided dice (using the `wod command in IRC.) When you are called upon to make a roll, you take a Stat and combine it with a Skill. The resulting number is how many dice you roll, referred to as your Dice Pool. These rolls have a target number, called the Difficulty Rating, or DC. Standard DC for rolls is 6, but it may go up or down based on the factors involved in the scene. Each die that lands on or above this target number is called a Success. How well you do at whatever task you were attempting with the roll is based on the number of Successes you get.

Example:
Bear needs to try and pick a lock so he can get into an old shack to have a sheltered place to wait out a sandstorm. He has an Agility of 4 and a Lockpick of 2, giving him a Dice Pool of 6. The Storyteller decided there aren't any major factors that would make this easier or harder, so his target number is 6. Bear rolls 6 ten-sided dice and gets 6, 7, 4, 3, 2, and 8, giving him a total of 3 Successes. He picks the lock without much trouble and gets inside, safe from the scouring sand as night falls.

Resisted Rolls
Sometimes, you're doing something that someone else is trying to stop or hinder. In that case, you and the other person in the scene both roll, and whoever gets the most Successes is the winner. The most common place you'll see this is combat rolls, but it can happen in other places as well.

Example:
Bear and Wolff have decided to have a friendly footrace, just a way to pass the time on a boring afternoon. They're going to see who can run 100 yards the fastest, with the winner getting the big juicy steak Marlene is cooking up. A short-range Sprint like this requires a resisted Agility+Athletics roll. Bear has 4 Agility and 4 Athletics, for a total Dice Pool of 8. Wolff has 5 Agility and 4 Athletics, so he has a Dice Pool of 9. It's flat open ground so the Storyteller decides the Difficulty is the standard 6. They both roll. Bear gets 6 Successes and Wolff gets 7, meaning Wolff just barely managed to win the race. Looks like Bear's eating stew again tonight.

Initiative
In the chaos of combat, rolls become a bit more complicated. To begin with, everyone in the scene rolls their Initiative. To do this, you combine your Wits and Agility ratings into a single number. Then, you roll a single ten-sided die and add that number to it (`roll 1d10+number in IRC). The resulting number is your place in the turn order of the combat to follow, and we usually represent it by putting the number in brackets in front of your IRC nick. Now, if you get lucky enough to roll a 10 on that die, you get to make the same roll again and add both numbers together.
Example:
Raiders are attacking and Bear's heading for the fight. He has 4 Wits and 4 Agility, so he types `roll 1d10+8 into the chat. The d10 lands on 7, for a total Initiative number of 15. Bear changes his IRC nick to [15]Bear in the chat room, and his place in the turn order is set. Wolff also has 4 Wits and 4 Agility, but he rolls a 10, for a total of 18. He then RE-ROLLS the die, and this time he gets a 4, for a grand total Initiative rating of 30. He changes his nick to [30]Wolff in the chat, and he's definitely going first (the lucky bastard.)

Damage
Damage is a fairly simple beast in this system. All firearms and bows simply have a damage rating, and that's how many dice you roll (plus your overs) if you manage to land a hit. Melee and Fist weapons, on the other hand, use a "Strength+X" type of damage rating. For that, you take your character's own strength, add the rating number to it, then add any overs and that's what you roll. DC for damage rolls is always 6.
Example:
Bear is fighting a raider with a 9mm pistol. The raider gets a shot off and manages to land a solid hit on Bear, earning himself 2 overages. Since the Damage Rating on a 9mm is 4, he rolls a total of 6 dice. Next turn, the now-hurting Bear gives it back, swinging a two-handed sword and managing to get a solid 3 overs. The damage rating on a two-handed sword is Strength+6, and Bear has a Strength of 5, so his base damage rating is 11. He adds his overs and rolls a whopping 14 damage dice. The Raider doesn't stand a chance.

Damage Types
There are three types of damage in this game, meant to represent the varying levels of severity than injuries can have. Bashing damage is fairly easy to survive, representing things like bruises, shallow cuts, and maybe broken bones at the highest numbers. You can't die from Bashing, generally, but if you lose all your health to bashing damage you must make an Endurance check to see if you can stay conscious, and you'll be severely hampered by the injuries. Lethal damage, on the other hand, is deadly. This is for things like gunshot wounds, getting stabbed or deeply cut, or getting badly burned. If you lose all your health levels to Lethal, you are incapacitated, unconscious, and bleeding out. At that point, you must make an Endurance roll to see if you can stay alive for another few minutes and hope help comes. The final damage type, Aggravated, is basically the ST's auto-kill button. Only a direct hit from an artillery shell, a concentrated burst from a mounted plasma weapon, or being flash-fried with radiation can cause this type of damage, and even if you do manage to survive, you will be maimed for life at the very least.

Soaking
Getting hit isn't the end of the world in this game, because there's one last line of defense. This is your ability to simply shrug off damage, as well as what your armor can take before something manages to get through and hurt you. Soaking is based off of Endurance, as well as your armor rating. Damage Threshold on armor automatically soaks a few damage dice, and then you roll Endurance for the rest. The complication is that most people cannot soak Lethal damage. It is, after all, deadly stuff, like blades and bullets and shrapnel. In that case, your pool for soaking Lethal is the Damage Resistance rating on your armor. You simply roll that many dice for your soak pool and hope for the best. Against Bashing damage, however, you add the DR of your armor to your own Endurance and roll that many dice.

Health Levels
Because of the chaotic nature of combat and the fact that even a solid hit can end up doing no damage if you soak it away, this game doesn't use hit points like most systems. Instead, everyone in the world, from Legate Lanius all the way down to Birdbone Bill, has seven health levels (HL). Every time you take a point of damage, you lose one Health Level. Losing health can affect your rolls as injuries pile up, leading to dice penalties. Also, the various types of damage roll into one another. For example, if three bandits were to beat a man up with their fists and deal a total of 12 Bashing damage, he would end up taking 7 Bashing (at which point he'd fall unconscious) and 5 Lethal (as the rain of blows broke bones and pulped flesh.) Radiation is handled in a similar way to the actual rad meter from Fallout. As you take more and more radiation, based on ST say so on the area around you, you take levels of radiation. These have the same penalties as health levels, but they don't stack; a player with 4 levels of radiation and 3 levels of lethal would only take the penalties from the four radiation. In addition, radiation doesn't stack with other forms of damage. You can have six radiation and barely be able to crawl, but if someone wants to finish you they need to land seven levels of lethal or more. The dice penalties on the various health levels are as follows:

(7 HP) Healthy: You're not hurt, moron. Why are you asking about dice penalties?
(6 HP) Bruised: No penalties just yet. Walk if off, wuss!
(5 HP) Hurt:     -1 to all dice pools. It's just a flesh wound!
(4 HP) Injured: -1 to all dice pools, and it's getting hard to move. Your speed is only half the normal.
(3 HP) Wounded: -2 to all dice pools, and a fast walk is the best you can do.
(2 HP) Mauled:  -2 to dice pools and you can barely limp.
(1 HP) Crippled: -5 to dice pools and the best you can do is crawl. How the fuck are you even still alive?
(0 HP) Incapacitated: You're out cold on the ground, possibly bleeding out with your guts scattered around. You must roll Endurance to see if you can stay conscious (Bashing) or stay alive a few more rounds to see if help comes. If the damage that put you here was Lethal, then any more damage is an automatic death.

Willpower
Getting hurt isn't the end of the world. After all, human beings have been known to keep fighting after they've been disemboweled or shot in the head. It's all about mind over matter, and that's where Willpower comes in. This is a numerical representation of your character's sheer pigheadedness, and it can be used in two ways. Firstly, you can spend a point of Willpower to ignore wound penalties for a single turn (including any multiple actions you decide to take). Second, you can spend a point of Willpower to add 1 automatic success to any action, representing you fiercely focusing as hard as you can to do your best at this task.

Be careful about burning up Willpower too fast, though. Your current Willpower level represents how hard it is to scare you, fool you, lie to you, or in some other way manipulate you. If you burn all your WP, then even little Anna the flower girl could send you crying for your mother with a few choice words. WP is fully restored with a good night's sleep, though traumatic events might lower it for a longer period of time if you and the ST decide so. Standard starting Willpower is 4, and you can buy more with Creation Points, up to a max of 10.