Do Anything D6

By Todd Terwilliger aka Hexed Press

Version 1.00, February 8, 2024
https://hexed.press

What is Do Anything D6?

Do Anything D6 (let’s call it DAD6 for short) is a generic, standardized system of running
challenges in any tabletop roleplaying game. It is based on the x-in-6 system from classic
fantasy roleplaying games of the ‘70s and ‘80s. It is designed to be plug-and-play: drop it
into your system of choice whenever you need or want to. It is self-contained and relies
purely on six-sided dice.

The basics: how does it work?

Whenever a Character (ie. player-character or other creature) undertakes a challenge that
poses a significant and interesting struggle to complete, use this system to adjudicate that
effort and determine its success or failure.
At its simplest, DAD6 works exactly like a standardized version of the classic x-in-6
mechanic. A die is rolled and compared to a target number. If it matches or exceeds that
target, it counts as a positive result. If not, it’s a negative result.

Set the terms

To resolve a challenge, whether using DAD6 or another mechanic, it is vital that both the
referee and the Character share an understanding of the potential banes (the risks or
complications that might arise through failure) and the prize if the attempt is successful.
Use the questions below as prompts to shape the parameters of the challenge.

What is the challenge?

Simple question, right? Well, maybe, but putting the actual task into words, and agreeing
on those terms, will crystallize exactly what is being attempted. If the challenge is
sprawling, should it be broken down into more atomic tasks that are resolved
independently? (see “Break down extended challenges into stages,” below, for a method
to handle that.) Does the challenge represent a significant and interesting enough struggle
to warrant rolling dice?

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What does success look like?
What is the Character’s goal? Why are they attempting this task? It may be obvious or it
might not be but, as with stating the terms of the actual challenge, agreeing on the
challenge’s prize not only defines success, for all parties, but it shapes what failure, and
the complications that arise from that, look like.

What does failure look like?

Banes, the consequences of failing a challenge, are immensely important. Understanding
and agreeing on those potential banes is vital. A Character cannot make an informed
decision about whether or not to face a challenge if they do not understand something
about the stakes. What do they have to lose? If we’re going to roll dice, the answer should
probably be something. And they should have some idea of what that could be.
Here are some broad categories of banes to act as starting points for discussion (when
in doubt, roll a die to find out!):
1d6 Bane
1 Enemies close in
2 Collateral damage
3 Damage (to self)
4 Something breaks
5 The horizon darkens
6 What is this new devilry?

Enemies close in: a threat gains ground on the Character; if there is no existing threat,
create a new one and put it in motion!

Collateral damage: allies of the Character suffer damage of some kind, be it bodily harm,
stress, exhaustion or something else.

Damage (to self): the Character suffers damage of some kind, be it bodily harm, stress,
exhaustion or something else.

Something breaks: a tool or other piece of equipment breaks; if nothing obvious fits the
bill, roll a die to see what gets crushed, smashed, horribly bent, or otherwise mangled!

The horizon darkens: whatever has gone wrong here has increased the difficulty of
operations going forward.

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What is this new devilry? As a consequence of this failed challenge, a new obstacle has
appeared that needs to be overcome.

Grab some dice

DAD6 uses six-sided dice. A few of them. Okay, a lot of them. In technical parlance,
their called dice pools (I will use this term fairly frequently). Unless you are new to the
hobby, you probably have plenty but, if not, raid that old box of Yahtzee from the closet
and toss them into a bowl on the table. Whenever a die is rolled in DAD6, a success,
called hereafter a boon, is a result, after modifiers, of six or greater. Always. No flip-
flopping from sometimes wanting high numbers and sometimes wanting low numbers (I
hate that). The target number is always six.

Characters prime their dice pool

A first level (or equivalent, if you’re not using levels) Character begins with three dice. I
like to think of them as one for mind, one for body, and one for their vocation (class or
equivalent, if you’re not using classes). Characters can gain more dice, as we’ll see below,
but this is the foundation of their dice pool.

Characters build their dice pool to mitigate challenges

The base chance to overcome a mundane challenge is roughly 42%. Slightly below even
odds. Keep in mind that we’re generally looking to model struggles with interesting and
significant consequences, so if those odds seem low for the task at hand, it might not be
worthy of a challenge.
With that said, Characters can improve their odds by adding more dice to their dice
pool. How do they acquire these dice? I’m glad you asked! Characters increase their die
pools by:
• gaining class levels (or equivalents), 1 die per level;
• using tools, 1 die per tool;
• receiving help from other Characters, 1 die per helper;
• taking advantage of the environment, 1 die per advantage; or,
• spending extra time, 1 die for each doubling of time spent.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. If an advantage can reasonably be gleaned from
some angle, toss a die into the Character’s dice pool. Every eight dice in a Character’s
pool can be traded in for a boon. The referee, of course, is the final arbiter of what can
or can’t be used to mitigate a particular challenge. It should be a conversation so talk it
through!

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Roll the Dice!
The parameters of the challenge have been set and the Character has mitigated those
circumstances as much as they can. What’s next? Let’s roll the dice and see what
happens!

Count the boons

Each of the dice that results in a six is a boon, a success. Boons can be used for several
things but the primary purpose is, as you can probably surmise, to overcome the
challenge. For a basic challenge, one boon is all it takes to succeed. Things can get more
complicated than this but we’ll talk about that in the Advanced section, below.

Manage success
If the Character succeeds at the challenge, they win the prize! Pretty simple, right?

Characters can spend excess boons

If a Character achieves more boons than required to defeat the challenge, what do they
do with the leftovers? There are are a few options, actually:
• Pay down banes;
• Reduce time (though never to less than the minimum time required); or,
• Roll them forward to apply to the next challenge.

Pay down banes: the Character excelled at their task enough to hold any banes at bay or
even push them back:
• If any enemies are closing in, the Character opens a gap;
• If the horizon had darkened, the Character finds a silver lining;
• If there is some new devilry, the Character finds a remedy.

Reduce time spent: the Character was surprisingly efficient at work and so has cut down
on the time spent on task; sorry, but the time can never be reduced below the minimum
required, everything’s got limits.

Roll them forward: let’s call it momentum— the Character is able to ride the wave from
this task into the next one. Surf’s up!

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Judge Failure
If a 6 is a success, then the further the result is from 6, the greater the failure. A result of
1, or less, would obviously be the worst sort of failure.
Margin of Failure Meaning
1 Almost!
2 Close!
3 A miss!
4 Lookout!
5 or more DUCK!
If more than one die is rolled, use the closest roll to determine the scope of failure. What
this failure looks like, precisely, will be entirely up to the referee but it should align with
the potential banes that have been agreed upon (see, “What does failure look like?”
above.)

Sell Boons
A Character faced a challenge, lost, and incurred a bane. What now? One option is to
just proceed from the failure: write it off and move on. Another option is to negotiate
with the player to turn that potential failure into a success, but at a cost. Isn’t this letting
the player off the hook? Why would we want to do this?
Here I must confess the joy that I experience, as a referee, in raising the stakes.
Allowing players to buy boons puts them in position to, by their own hands and wills,
hoist themselves on their own petards. With each transaction, another bane is added to
the board or advanced towards a terrible conclusion. This creeping doom is, to me,
infinitely more fun, than the sudden and complete stop, jarring as it may be, of a simple
failure.
To buy a boon, a Character must accept a bane (see “What does failure look like?”,
above, for some general and generic categories). If a bane is already in play, activate it
and progress it in whichever way is the most detrimental to the Character. If not, create a
new bane and put it in play.
While selling boons to Characters will soften the blow of a single failed challenge, it
will both make for more heroic actions (escaping by the skin of their teeth!) and
complicate the adventure in deliciously unforeseen ways.
Finally, context is king. If the circumstances of the challenge dictate that it is all or
nothing, so be it! Whether it’s to the death or to the pain, sometimes you just can’t buy
your way off the hook.

Example
Widdershins the first-level human fighter wants to jump across a pit. The success state is

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easy: if he makes the jump, he’s across. In this case, the failure state is also easy: if he
doesn’t make the jump, he’s falling into the pit… and it looks bottomless. Let the games
begin!
They start with three dice. Standing jump? Roll those dice. What if he takes a
running start? Add a die for a running start. He’s got a sturdy staff— can he use it to
try and vault his way over? Why not? Add another die. Widdershins now has five dice in
their dice pool, giving them about a 60% chance of success (hey, if jumping across this pit
were easy, we wouldn’t bother rolling dice). They like those odds so they roll dice to
jump.
Widdershins rolled a 2, 3, 3, 4, and 5 (no really, that’s what I rolled). The highest
die roll is a five which means he got achingly close to getting over the pit… but he didn’t.
So is that it? Does Widdershins tumble into a freefalling doom? Not so fast! The referee
offers him a bargain.
Widdershins can make the jump BUT it won’t be easy. He got so close that he’s able
to grab the edge of the far side with his fingers to avoid falling. But that slamming into
the side of the pit hurts so he’s going to take some damage. He’ll be able to pull himself
up and over to safety but now denizens in the dungeon are closing in on him. Deal?
Better than being dead!

Advancing beyond the basic framework

The basics will work fine for many mundane tasks, particularly with starting, or low level,
campaigns, but the system is flexible enough to expand on as our needs evolve.

Increasing the challenge difficulty by requiring multiple boons to succeed

It may happen sooner, or it may happen later, but the time will come when a challenge
arises that is more difficult than normal. To model increasing difficulty, add additional
boons to the requirement.
What might increase the difficulty of a challenge?
• poor environmental conditions;
• lack of resources;
• lack of time;
• supernatural resistance; or,
• active opposition.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. If a disadvantage is present that will materially
affect the task, add a required boon.
To make tracking challenges easier, let’s categorize their Difficulty. Mundane
challenges have a Difficulty of 1 because they require one boon. If a challenge is noted as

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having a Difficulty of 3, it requires three successful boons.
Keep in mind: adding Difficulty will significantly reduce the chances for success so
reserve it for significant obstacles! If a Character with three dice has a 42% chance of
succeeding on a mundane (Difficulty 1) challenge, it drops to a 7.5% chance of success on
a Difficulty 2 challenge, yikes!

Considering degrees of difficulty

Another way to approach difficulty is to consider nested degrees of success, each degree
increasing in Difficulty. A broad success might be Difficulty 1 but a specific success might
be Difficulty 2 and a perfect success, whatever that means, would be Difficulty 3. What
would this actually look like?
Imagine a Character engages in a game of darts at the local tavern. Just striking the
board anywhere with the dart would be Difficulty 1, striking the Double Ring would add 1
to the Difficulty, striking the Triple Ring would add 2 to the Difficulty, and so on. Do they
need to hit a specific number? Add another 1 to the Difficulty.
Call this the bullseye method. If we want to measure varying degrees of success, from
nailing the center of a bullseye to barely striking the outer ring, we can model it.

Breaking down extended challenges into stages

Sometimes challenges represent a single action in a single moment of time: a jump, a
throw, a sprint. Other challenges are more like a marathon or a multi-stage race like the
Tour De France. In those cases, successes and failures measure progress and setbacks
towards an objective. A failure in one stage may set a Character back but it does not
doom their enterprise outright.
If you’re not sure if the challenge at hand should be multi-stage, consider:
• Does this challenge take place over an extended period of time?
• Is incremental progress towards success possible?
If the answer to either of these is affirmative then consider running the challenge in
multiple stages.

Running a multi-stage challenge

There is no functional difference between a standard challenge and multi-stage challenge
except for this: the Difficulty of the multi-stage challenge is spread over two or more
stages. These stages might represent the same task repeated over time or different related
tasks undertaken sequentially. Each stage represents a specific amount of time. How long
that time is depends upon the context of the challenge. In a downtime challenge, each

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stage might last a week. In a dungeon challenge, each stage might last ten minutes.
In either case, treat each stage as a separate challenge and run them normally. At the
end of the process, any excess boons (if any) can roll over and count towards the next
stage of the challenge. Conversely, if there is a margin of failure, that margin, can either
be converted into banes (see “Sell boons,” above) or will add additional Difficulty to the
next stage. This process is repeated for each stage until the overall challenge is
completed, one way or another. At that point, deal with the overall success or failure as
usual.

Using multi-stage challenges for retries

Many challenges, time permitting, can be run as multi-stage challenges. In these cases, the
Character is repeating the same action for additional time in order to win, banking
incremental progress as they go. To take advantage of this, that additional time has to be
available. The amount of that time would set the ceiling on the challenge’s number of
stages.
An example of this type of multi-stage challenge is climbing a wall. Running this climb
as a multi-stage challenge might look like this:
• Determine how many rounds of climbing it would take to climb the wall; each of
those rounds becomes a stage.
• Each successful stage moves the Character up some distance on the wall.
• Each failure either adds a bane or increases the difficulty of the next stage or both!
• For kicks, use the Character’s Constitution or similar attribute to determine the
maximum number of stages they can attempt before they tire and fall.

Running races, chases, and contested challenges

Contested challenges are a particular type of multi-stage challenges that can be roughly
divided into either a race (complete the challenge first) or a chase (overtake a competitor
before they complete a challenge). For these cases, we’re going to introduce two new
concepts: the gap and the margin of victory.

Mind the gap! The gap is the distance, measured in boons, between the Characters
competing in the race or chase. The more boons that separate the Characters, the wider
the gap, the more distance (in whichever measure makes sense) exists between the
Characters,

Life is just a game of inches. Or, in this case, boons. The margin of victory is the amount
of boons one Character needs to achieve, above and beyond those gained by their
competitors, to win the challenge.

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Go, Speed Racer! In a race, two or more Characters compete to finish a challenge. The
race can have a fixed number of stages, in which case whoever has the most boons at the
end of the last stage wins. Alternatively, the race can have a variable number of stages
and a set margin of victory, in which case whoever reaches that margin first, wins.

The heat is on! In a chase, the gap represents the relative distance between the pursuer
and their quarry, in whatever units of measure make the most sense. Each boon won by
the pursuer closes that gap while each boon earned by the quarry widens it. Banes add to
the opposition, if not bought off.
If the pursuer reduces the gap to zero, they’ve caught their quarry. If the pursued
widens the gap to at least the margin of victory then they escape.

Adjudicating Stunts
Up until now, we’ve assumed that the prize for completing a challenge was a singular
thing. Why is the Character jumping across the pit? To get to the other side. Sometimes,
though, the prize might be a compound of multiple goals. The Character wants to jump
across the pit not only to reach the other side but to do it silently. Two goals, movement
and stealth, in one action, jumping across the pit. This is a stunt. How do we handle it?
Actually, it’s pretty easy.
For each goal, sum up the difficulty as if it were its own challenge. The Character
assembles their dice pool as usual and rolls their dice. Here, the stunt kicks in. The
Character must split up their boons between the goals. Any banes they suffer should use
the context of whichever goals they come up short against. Failed to be stealthy? You’ve
made a bunch of noise. Failed the jump? You’re falling (let’s hope it’s only a ten foot
deep pit!). If they manage to succeed at both goals, then they’ve done it! Huzzah!

Adjusting for skill (Character skill, that is)

Want to model a Character’s occupation, background, or skill-set that might otherwise fall
between the cracks? We can do that. I am a big fan of leveraging a Character’s class levels
(or equivalents). After all, it is the measure of a Character’s power in the world. A
Character with an applicable ability, background, or skill receives a bonus to their die
rolls, depending upon their applicable class level:
Character Class Level Roll Bonus
1-3 +1
4-7 +2
8+ +3
This bonus applies to all the dice they roll.

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What about specialized challenges?
A specialized challenge is one that requires some measure of ability or skill to even
attempt. Open heart surgery, for example. If the Character lacks any skill or ability in
that department, there is just no chance for success. Mechanically, a penalty is attached
to the die rolls, as follows:
Challenge Type Roll Penalty
Mundane 0
Specialized -1
Expert -2
This bonus applies to all the dice they roll.
The upshot of this is that a specialized challenge will require a skilled Character to
attempt. The reason is that their +1 bonus will negate the -1 penalty. It won’t be easy,
but they can do it. An unskilled Character cannot. They’ll never be able to score even a
single boon. An expert challenge will require a skilled Character of at least fourth level,
for the same reasons.
You might ask: can’t the Character buy the boons they need? No because buying
boons presumes the character has some ability to complete the task with the tools and
talents they have and, in this case, they can’t. The challenge is simply beyond them.
That said, if the word impossible doesn’t exist in your vocabulary, there’s always the
puncher’s chance (see below).

Giving a puncher’s chance

Characters are going to run into challenges that they are not equipped to overcome. One
option, if it isn’t a specialized task, is to sell the Character boons (see “Sell boons,”
above). Another option, which at the referee’s discretion can be used at any time, is to
offer the Character a puncher’s chance to win the challenge.
When a Character decides to take a puncher’s chance, they roll their dice as normal.
If they score any natural sixes, they score boons and they can re-roll those boons for
further boons. This process can be repeated until the Character chooses to stop, in which
case they can apply all the boons rolled against the challenge, or they fail to roll a boon.
If they fail to roll a boon, they lose all the boons they had banked. Cave pugil!

Adjusting for Character attributes

The basic assumption of DAD6 is an average Character attempting a fraught or difficult
task. Of course, a Character may possess attributes (strength, agility, willpower, etc.) that
are above, or below, this average, so how do we deal with that?

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 For above average attributes, add dice to their dice pool equal to their attribute bonus.
For below average attributes, increase the difficulty for every two negative modifiers (ie. a
-2 attribute modifier becomes a +1 Difficulty).
Why aren’t negative modifiers traded 1 for 1 into Difficulty? Added Difficulty swings
the odds more than added dice so we’ve adjusted the scaling accordingly.

Accounting for the extraordinary

Extraordinary tools, such as spell effects or magic items, at minimum add the value of
their numerical bonus, if any, to the number of dice their wielder’s dice pool. If no bonus
exists, estimate its effect as follows:
Magic Item Power Spell Level Added Dice Character Class Level
Equivalent
Minor 1-2 1 1-3
Major 3-5 2 4-7
Legendary 6+ 3 8+
If an extraordinary tool would grant a Character an ability, power, or skill, add a bonus to
their die rolls as if they had the appropriate skill bonus (see “Adjusting for skills,” above)
equal to the power of the item or the level of the spell. Note: if you want to let high
level casters flex, let them up-cast their spells to increase their effects!

That’s all, folks!

That’s about the long and short of it. While I didn’t cover every particular use-case, edge-
case, or suitcase, I hope that the system has been explained well enough for you to take
these tools and use them in your game. I hand them off to you now to use as you will in
whichever way suits you. The rules are yours now. Do with them what you will, that is
the extent of the law. Excelsior!

Want to use Do Anything D6 as a base for your game or

module?
Anybody can use Do Anything D6 (DAD6) in their game or module by adhering to these
guidelines:
• You can use text directly from this document;
• Credit Todd Terwilliger and Hexed Press for being the original creator of Do
Anything D6; and,
• include a link to https://hexed.press.

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This is a general license. If you want to negotiate a license with different terms, please get
in
touch directly.

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