From now on, I’m going to concentrate on getting a playable online version of my game coded. This will hopefully make it easier for people to give feedback, compared to if they were required to print out and assemble a physical version. So it’s likely that there won’t be as many long posts about the game’s rules in the near future.

Encounters with Green Martians are based on the system in d6 Shooters for being attacked. However, in my game, it won’t automatically involve combat. In this I’m going against the way that Green Martians are represented in the Barsoom series.

This is the system I’m going to go with for now. My original intentions were much more complicated, and were intended to have more player choices and possible outcomes. For now, I feel that it’s important to get a complete set of rules which can be tested and improved.

The player has a Hostility score which starts at 4. This represents the likelihood that a group of Green Martians will be hostile. This score goes up by 1 at the start of every turn, to a maximum of 10.

If the player rolls any 8s, there is a group of Green Martians in the area. More 8s represents a larger group.

The player can choose to diverge, head for the nearest settlement, or face the Green Martians. As in d6 Shooters there is also the option to ‘hide’, sacrificing time and Luck.

Heading for the nearest settlement ’costs’ 1 Morale (if any followers are alive) and 1 Willpower. The player makes a Fate Roll. If the result is equal to or less than the number of haads travelled this turn (ie the total of 1s and 2s), they make it to a settlement and do not have to encounter the Green Martians. Otherwise they have to fight.

Diverging ‘costs’ haads equal to the total of two Fate Rolls. That is, in taking the long way round to avoid the Green Martians, the heroes end up with further to travel.

If the player chooses to face the Green Martians, they may choose to offer gifts of Food and/or Shells. Each gift reduces the Hostility score by 1. Whether or not they offer any gifts, they then make a Fate Roll. If the result is higher than the current Hostility, the Green Martians allow the heroes to pass through their territory. If not, combat results.

Combat works as follows: the Green Martians re-roll all 8s. The total is their Combat Total. The player rolls as many dice as they choose to sacrifice Luck points and/or Willpower, and adds half their number of followers (if any).

If the Green Martians’ total is higher, the party takes casualties equal to the difference, in followers and in Morale. A lone hero who loses a combat is out of the game. D6 Shooters gives casualties equal to a number of dice, not to the total rolled, which I found to be too few.

After a combat, the player loses 1 Willpower. Thus Willpower has a role similar to Ammo in d6 Shooters.

Winning a combat gives the player 2 Morale if there any followers.

Another recent comment on my Mars game:

other [elements] seemed forced, if not slightly misplaced (The Andersons Gang, to some extent).

I had ‘Bloody Bill’ transported to Mars for no reason known to himself or explained to the player, because that’s what seems to happen in a lot of fiction about Mars. John Carter famously gets there by concentrating really hard. I don’t think it’s ever really explained, and the Martians don’t seem to show any curiosity about it. There are a few less famous books I read about in Imagining Mars – a history of fiction about Mars – which have people who die on Earth reincarnated on Mars.

However, there’s no point referring to conventions which players aren’t going to get. That leads to people perceiving what you’ve done as lazy or illogical. A famous example of this would be the magic system in Dungeons & Dragons, which is based some stories by Jack Vance but, if you haven’t read those stories, seems very arbitrary and ‘un-fantasy-like’.

So I might drop ‘Bloody Bill’. He wasn’t intended to be a major part of the game anyway – he was just a one-off encounter, that would be treated like an encounter with Green Martians except that the Anderson Gang are always hostile.