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

This is now the 6th installment of my posts related to my soloable game based on the Warriors of the Red Planet RPG that I'm writing. 

If you read back on my previous posts, you will see this game aims to be a standalone game which strips out many of the OSR mechanics until what is left is a game of race or heritage as class (the game has no classes), a game of skills to adjudicate success or failure in game actions, and a game of character flaws. The band of adventurers will follow set turn procedures to go on a series of quests on a world map of the far off and mysterious planet of Ephaphus (which all residents are trapped in something of a 'snow globe.') The adventurers will try and save the world from imminent destruction playing Tellurians (Human-Like Off-Worlders), Xagzan (Humanish Sorcerers with two-hearts from beyond the warp gates), Anurans (Toad People), Grotto Kin (Humanish underdwellers who wield the power of immaterialisms with their minds),  and five other remarkable races / heritages of Epaphus!

In the last installment, I considered the actual mechanics of solo play and wanted skill and combat resolution to be swift for a fast pace solo or cooperative GM-less play experience. I have changed the engine of the game I have in mind to something that is hopefully more streamlined, and one that does not have you looking up tables. The downside (or upside if it works for you) of my game design so far, is that I have not been able to write 1 line Skill and Flaw descriptions (some of mine are a little lengthy!), and this is the single area of the game that players will need to look at as they play (of course the details should be noted on their character sheets at the time of character creation!)

Skills, I decided for various things such as Survival (Mountains), Combat (Hand-to-Hand), Anuran (Bite from Behind) etc., would be considered a success on a roll of 5 or higher on 1d6. Bonuses could be added if a character's skill level in a skill is higher. 

Skills that a character has no training in could be attempted if it does not require a heritage feature such as a tail, does not require training, or is not something mentally inherent to the character. Overall any skill that is mundane such as Combat (Hand-to-Hand) or Rogue (Stealing), could be attempted. My game will do away with the insane debates about what to do with non-thieves attempting thief skill in the original, later, and OSR offshoots of the original game. If you don't know what I'm talking about here, don't worry about it - and take from this part of the blog - that every character can at least try any mundane skill.

Combat itself would be one roll - adding a player's skill bonus and subtracting an enemy's skill bonus on a d6 roll. A 6 would always be considered a success for a player's character, but a roll of 1 would always be considered a success for the enemy. The player would hit on any roll of 5 or higher, and inflict 1 Health damage on the enemy for every point rolled above 4. The enemy would hit the player's character on any roll of 2 or lower, and inflict 1 Health damage on the player's character for every point rolled under 3. 

SKILL ROLL TABLE (Roll 5+ on 1d6 for a success)
SKILL LEVEL	BONUS ON ROLL
Fantastic	+3
Adept	+2
Apprentice	+1
Novice	0
Feeble	-1 or more

A roll of 6 or 1 might have some extra benefits or demerits, and weapons would add damage to hits, and armor would reduce damage.

That, very briefly, is the game engine I'm trying to put together which will hopefully end up being not more than about 120 pages in a digest size, with some wonderful public domain sci-fi comic book art to really inspire you the reader!