As mentioned in the How To Play section, the defining characteristic of Tabletop Roleplaying Games is the ability to have characters attempt anything with a chance of failing - improvisation with an uncertain outcome.

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Every creative medium has its strength and purpose, and I wanted to design a system that highlights this for TTRPGs that's accessible to all ages and experience levels.

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The first play-test of the system was sort of made up on the fly with very similar mechanics to the final version. However, when I became more serious about developing it, I began to add more elements to it, and over time all the additional mechanics ended up overshadowing the foundation and the entire purpose of making the system in the first place.

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At that point, I knew I had to go backwards and start eliminating all the things that took away from the main principle I was going for. ​

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The biggest step was to decide on a simple mechanic of success/failure as the foundation. When thinking of all the different ways to do this, including the really creative variations other systems have used to accomplish this (plus everything I tried in the past when dabbling in system design), I decided that I ultimately wanted three things:

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1) The resolutions to all be in the Players' hands

2) Very simple to see if you succeeded/failed 

3) Always a chance of success or failure

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In other words, I didn't want the person running the game to have to decide the numbers for Players to beat based on difficulty, and I wanted the majority of the storytelling (conflict resolution) to be done through the Players' rolls. 

* Other systems use a similar concept, which is termed "storytelling" or "narrative" dice.

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At the same time, I didn't want the Players to have to do an additional step after the roll to determine if they succeeded or not, such as add up numbers, look at a reference sheet based on their rolls, or any other form of extra calculation.

* The same went for any combat mechanics - eliminate as many steps as possible.

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Lastly, to line up with my overall goal of keeping "let's see if you can do it" at the center, I didn't want there to be a possibility of auto successes/failures, and at the same time I didn't want there to be a limit on character growth (which can lead to auto successes/failures for other methods). So for the Roll 1 setup, because each individual die always has a chance of success or failure, that meant that no matter how big or small your dice pool was, there was always a chance of succeeding/failing but no chance of automatic successes/failures, just changes of probability.

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Therefore, this rolling setup where you just looked to see if one number was showing matched all of the criteria I had, including the idea of being particularly good at something: the more dice you rolled, the more chances that number would show up.

* This is where creative character and setting customization come into play in the form of Skills and Items.

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The reason for choosing 1 as the number is because you can easily swap the dice you're using. For example, if I chose the number 6 for six-sided dice, but then wanted to use four-sided dice at some point, the number 6 wouldn't work. If I chose the number 8 for eight-sided dice, I couldn't use six-sided dice. 

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So really you can use any dice for this system, since the number 1 will be on every dice. You can even buy blank dice and mark/put a sticker on one side - whenever that sticker is showing after a roll, you succeeded. The only thing that will change is the probability of success (six-sided dice = 16% / four-sided dice = 25%). Which brings me to the last point: why six-sided dice?

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This is largely due to the combination of pool size and probability for each pool size (see the STATISTICS & PROBABILITY table for a breakdown of this). The bigger dice you used (like d20s) the more dice you needed to make noticeable jumps in probability, and the smaller dice you used (like d4s) the quicker the probability jumped as you added/subtracted dice. I went with d6s because it seemed like a good middle ground of noticeable jumps in probability for each die added/subtracted.

* See below on another variation you can use with the Roll 1 concept. I played around with this, but I thought it was a bit too complex for the simplicity I was going for.

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Everything else - leveling up / wound points / items etc - are all built from this foundation, and are meant to supplement it.

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So if you ever get stuck trying to figure out how to resolve something, just go back to the idea that the dice pool is what matters in the end:

- The more dice you add to the pool means the more help a character is getting to succeed. 

- The story ultimately comes from the Players' rolls.

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Like with a lot of creative endeavors, your first idea is probably the best, and I'm glad it ended up like that for Roll 1.