# Silhouette tags: #game/rpg/silhouette ![[Heavy Gear - 4th Edition (cover).jpg|600]] **Silhouette** is Dream Pod 9's house d6 system — the quietly elegant engine behind **[[Heavy Gear]]**, **[[Jovian Chronicles]]**, and the rest of the DP9 line. After thirty years of edition churn elsewhere in the hobby, Silhouette has stayed notably stable at its core: a small dice pool, keep the best, and let the extra dice nudge the result. It is the sort of system that lets you spend your brainpower on the fiction instead of the arithmetic, which is exactly why Dream Pod 9 keeps returning to it. ## The engine Silhouette is a **d6 dice-pool** engine. Every roll builds a pool, after which you **keep the single highest die**. The twist is the **Threshold Number (TN)**: every die beyond the highest that rolls equal to or above the TN *modifies* the kept die, adding **+1 each**. The TN **defaults to 5**, and threshold bonuses/penalties (TB/TP) shift it rather than the dice. With no skill involved you roll a flat **3d6**; a skill test rolls **1 base die + 1 die per skill level**. If a pool is reduced to zero, you roll 2d6 and drop the highest. Tasks are **independent rolls** (no one opposing you), which carry a **Difficulty (Dif)** — a number you must meet or beat on a kept die, defaulting to 5 — or **opposed rolls**, where both sides roll and compare and whoever keeps the highest modified die wins. Each point over/under the Dif is a **Margin of Success (MoS)** or **Margin of Failure (MoF)**, which grades how extreme the outcome is. The modern edition layers in a few named dice effects: **Favored/Disfavored** decide ties, **reliable dice** add a die and drop the lowest, **unreliable dice** add a die and drop the highest, **edges** add dice while **challenges** subtract them (a challenged roll earns XP toward that skill even on failure), and **rerolls** exist but never cheaper than a clean first roll. ## Games built on Silhouette - **[[Heavy Gear]]** — the flagship: Terra Nova, gears, and the Interpolar War. The current (2024) 4th Edition is Silhouette's modern expression. - **[[Jovian Chronicles]]** — the solar-system cousin: space combat and massive exo-suit combatants. - The wider **Dream Pod 9** line runs on the same core. ## References - [Heavy Gear Roleplaying Game 4e Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heavygearblitz/heavy-gear-roleplaying-game-fourth-edition/description) - [Jovian Chronicles Rulebook - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/579/Jovian-Chronicles-Rulebook) - [Heavy Gear - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Gear) A dice-pool system that keeps the single best die and lets the rest just improve the story — Silhouette has quietly powered some of the hobby's best mecha fiction without ever demanding the spotlight itself.