I wanted to do a game where all the characters where most of the characters were emergent intelligences on organic computers or offspring from there first AIs, or humans that had been encoded as molecular computer programs and the mechanic was largely binary. If you and the opposition are tied, you flip a coin. If you exceed the opposition by 4 bits, you grab 4 more coins and only if they all come up tails do you lose. If the opposition exceeds you by 2 bits you grab 2 extra coins and only if they all come up heads do you win.
To make it easier to understand but way harder to roll, 1 bit = d2, 2 bits = d4, 3 bits = d8, 4 bits = d16, 5 bits = d32, etc. and whoever rolls highest wins.
I kind of like that sci-fi games often have random details to help GMs come up with interesting settings. Albedo Anthropomorphics had a clothing attitude table such that 16% of worlds randomly generated would be nudist. But d8 is the highest binary die that I've seen in real life. And the fact that Modern Dispatch's random adventure generators all use d8s keeps nudging at me too, to get back to work on this game and make d8 x d8 tables of the things one might encounter in a space game about nanotech and molecular computing.
One day, if I lead a full life, I'll be playing Diaspora with a Serenity kind of flavor to it, and I'll whip those bad boys out and everyone else will drool with envy.
I like rolling d12s, and I really like that you can take one type of face card out of a deck of cards and use that instead, on those long road trips when you have neither room nor stability for polyhedrons. Dominion and Mnemonic are two free games that pop off the top of my head that only use d12s. There's also Thousand Suns and Colonial Gothic.
Now that Kumakami has suggested it. I really want to see a d4 mechanic called Caltrop.
I've been working on it a bit in the rpg I'm writing.....basically only the 4's count as successes in pool style roll mechanic.....can't wait to play test
Time Fly's like an arrow! Fruit Fly's like a banana!