House Rules and Procedures for Play


Instead of making opposed rolls during combat, players simply make a normal combat check. If they succeed they roll damage. An enemy can make an armour save to reduce the damage rolled by half. This is inline with what the online Mothership community is doing, and what Sean himself suggested.

Hazard Die

Gradient Descent suggests rolling for random encounters every 10 minutes of in game time, or once per human scale room, three times per industrial scale room. As written, there is a 1 in 10 chance for an encounter (rolling doubles on d100). So, relatively infrequently. In my first session there were no random encounters, for example.

An idea I stole from Brendan is to have the dead results on the encounter check also do something. (The infamous Hazard Die) This can add a bit more dynamism into what’s happening during a game. Since this is Mothership I’ll use a D10.

1: Encounter
2-3: Exhaustion
4-5: Expiration
6-9: Environment
10: Easement

Encounter: roll on a random encounter table.
Exhaustion: the characters are hungry or fatigued. They must rest and eat, or take a point of stress.
Expiration: batteries die, oxygen runs dangerously low, etc.
Environment: something about the players immediate surroundings change. Perhaps there are hints of a future encounter.
Easement: a moment of calm, so the players may lose one stress.

I have liked having ‘quiet’ results, so “environment” is the most likely event. I’ll experiment with this over the coming sessions.