Rifts: Your spell doesn’t do MDC, so the darkness is unaffected. Rolls dice. But it looks like the Coalition detected your use of magic…

Nobilis: You have inflicted a wound on Alissa Cavanaugh, Bearer of the Six Daffodils, Walker of the Western Circle, Viscountess of Darkness and Sister of the Familia Vortarax. From out of the darkness falls a white glove, holding a crushed daffodil. It lands at your feet, and from it’s empty fingers spills a scroll that unrolls in front of you, written in letters that are somehow legible, despite being inscribed of Darkness itself. The scroll reads “I know not how I may have wronged you, but this strike against my Estate shall not stand. If you and your Familia be not without honer, meet me on the night of the full moon on the steps of the Great Citadel in City Back, for by the laws of Angels and Devils, shall I have my satisfaction.” It is stamped with the Viscountess’s seal. What do you do?

WEG Star Wars: Spend a Force Point and roll Will. Wait, isn’t your Willpower currently “Battered?” Subtract 1D. Nope, it STILL seems as if the presence of the Dark Side is strong here. But also, you now sense a disturbance in the Force. As if someone, or something, has been alerted to your presence.

MERP: Critical hit. Roll a d100. Um… hang on let me find the table… 97? The darkness is ripped to pieces, it’s body parts scattering in a 2d10 meter radius, covering everything and everyone in dripping gore…

Dark Heresy: You attack the darkness. Gain a corruption point and roll WP or take 1d6 Insanity points. You hear demonic whispers in your head, it sounds like they’re screaming “Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!” Also, you’ve alerted the Orks to your squad’s presence. You see a BIG ork come out in front, carrying a really big, red gun…

Tingleverse: The Darkness stares at you in surprise, then smiles. “Is that what you want?” he asks, “Do you want to be rough with me?” From out of his black depths his eyes glow with passionate intensity as you feel him yield before you. “Yes,” says the Darkness, his handsome voice husky with barely suppressed desire. “Yes! Take me! Pound me!” His beautiful asscheeks, darker than the depths of space, part before you. “I want you,” he whispers, “Yes. Show me that love is real, buckaroo!” What do you do?

You probably don’t physically reach for GURPS Darkness because it’s just a 17 page PDF, but those 17 pages are jam-packed with content including 6 distinct varieties of darkness.

Edit: I forgot that most GMs don’t even use GURPS Darkness. If you go to the Steve Jackson Games forums you’ll find a 15 year old discussion building darkness from scratch, ending with Kromm coming in to say he just runs it as a Ghost with Weakness(Light) and gets on with his day.

Exalted: The darkness turns out to be a component soul of the Ebon Dragon and now it’s angry. Fetch another bucket of dice and roll to Join Battle.

Battletech: You land a through-armor crit on the darkness’s hip actuator. The darkness falls – let me check that table – on its left side and probably won’t be getting up again any time soon.

Shadowrun: Okay so you has a weapon that can attack the darkness? Great.

What’s the the DV and AP of the weapon?
Let’s start on your pool so add your Agility Attribute and weapon skill together.

What’s your personal reach plus your weapons reach? okay, that’s lower than the Shadow’s reach by 2, so take that out of your pool

You took 7 damage so far right? okay so minus another 2 from your pool.

Okay, now roll your pool! 7 hits because of your EDGE limit. Pretty good!

So the shadow, let me see… It’s going to parry because it counts itself as a weapon, so -5 to initiative to add it’s skill to the DEF pool, now add the intuition attribute and reaction attribute to the DEF pool, it took 2 damage which is -0 to the pool… okay I can roll now, I got 5 hits.

So, 7-5 is >0 so let’s add your DV from your weapon, so you have (7-5)+(2+STR) and the AP of the weapon was -3. So, looks like this shadow’s Armor is less than that, so it’s going to be physical damage.

So, now the shadow will roll BODY+Armor-3 as a pool, then subtract it from your hits… and it got 4 hits. So 5-4= 1, you did one damage.

…oh sorry, you have 6 more attacks this turn? And your teamates are summoning ghosts to deal with the Shadow, and Sarah is going to …hack the shadow?

Okay, give me a second…

I played in a FFG Star Wars group for a few months and it really was so freaking unintuitive the symbols and colors that they used. It felt like they wanted to simplify things but instead you had to keep track of green, yellow, purple, red, black, blue dice and like 5 or 6 different possible roll outcomes, you have to remember which symbol cancels which and also keep track of which skills are adding or subtracting dice…it really made me miss the simplicity of a D20.