House Rules for Warriors of the Red Planet (Part V)

In my last post, I made a critical decision to not just create a soloable supplement for Warriors of the Red Planet RPG, but to make a stripped down version that would ultimately be a stand alone game.

I entertained the following design philosophy:

  • remove all OSR styles classes, and make everything "ancestry-as-class."
  • remove all 3-18 range ability stats common to these games (and often seldom used).
  • remove all the tricky dice and use only d6s
  • remove the game referee from the game
If you look back, you will see that my fancy Skill Ability only Ancestries template that I posted were not necessarily simple. Each Ancestry is unique and has many possibilities, so no two characters of one Ancestry will be the same.

Now I've since gone on to refine all of these, and the final game will include 9 different Ancestries.

As I was working on the game more the last two weeks, I had another thought experiment to add to my design philosophy:
  • In a typical OSR, there is a to-hit roll for each character, and a damage roll if they hit an enemy. Each enemy also gets its turn to try to hit the player characters, and if successful roll for damage.
  • I thought, what if a player character could roll a die once (in this case a d6), and resolve all 4 (or more) rolls at once (the to-hit rolls and damage of their character and the enemy)?
This was a bit of a complex design for me to come up with, and one that I thought would lend itself to a combat table. Here is a portion of it to give you an idea:





Here the Skill Level would represent how skilled the character is in either Hand-to-Hand or Ranged Combat. If the character had a Novice Skill level in Hand-to-Hand Combat, and wanted to hit an enemy, the player would roll 1d6. If the result was a 5, the player would inflict 1 Health damage on the enemy. If the roll was a 2, the enemy would inflict 3 Health damage on the player character.

It may seem a little simple, but I have a few more ideas to make this more viable at the game table - and it is intended for the solo player in mind - to minimize the number of dice rolls needed in a game. 

The way the table looks so far is the more beginner you are, the more difficult the combat. I am thinking through some rules to add more damage for large weapons, and reduce damage with armor. This would give beginner players a better chance. Some other ideas I had would allow for players to roll at a higher Skill level when they outnumber the enemy. Severe weather might mean that both character and enemy damage might be very low. I may have rules about which damage category enemies will use considering some enemies are weaker and some are stronger. For example, a Novice player may have a weak enemy who can't do that kind of damage, and so the enemy could get their damage from a more advanced Skill level which would have very low damage for enemies.

So it should be more nuanced once I work out some of these extra rules. In the meantime, I have a huge number of Ancestry Skills to write out and type into my game document. Stay tuned for more updates and thanks for reading!

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