Scarlet Heroes: First thoughts on the rules

I picked up the Scarlet Heroes RPG because of its touted awesomeness for single player OSR style roleplaying. A few years back another GM ran me (my character) though a single adventure. it was really a learning experience for him, but I remember having a good time.

Anyway back to the present day, and I now have a soft back copy of the game myself. Reading the rules for the first time certainly made it look suitable for solo play. In fact it IS designed for one player and a GM, but I think it could easily handle two players. However I would have to think twice before moving to three or more, I'm not so sure that would work, and here's why...

At first level your PC is a bit of a bad ass able to leap into battle with as many as ten goblins. It'll be close, but you'll likely win. With a second PC, you'd wipe the floor with them. With a third PC it wouldn't even be a challenge and I'd be surprised if it lasted beyond a single round of combat. 

So what would you do as a GM to increase the interest level for these three PCs? Adding more goblins would seem the obvious choice. But this leads to a huge number of gobbos to track and a bucket of dice, which would bog the game down. The next option would be to place beefier monsters in the dungeon to batter the PCs. BUT the players PCs are pretty squishy without a large number of hit points. One, maybe two hits from a bigger monster could lay them out dead. So that seems like a bad idea. Maybe there's something else to do, but it escapes me for the moment.

The rules of the game are presented first and only take up about a third of the book, with the remained being the well laid out background for the world. The rules are based in an OSR framework and indeed you can use these rules to play in any OSR world, not just the one presented in the book. I have done this and will make a separate post about that.

There are two main changes away from your average OSR title that make you're PC a bad ass, and that increase the single-PC dynamic preferable. 

The first is that hits your PC does to the monster, are done to hits Hit Dice (HD) rather than its hit points (it effectively does not have hit points). Therefore one hit point of damage done to a 1HD monster kills it. Whoa, don't panic. you roll your damage as normal, for instance 1D6 for a spear, then reference the result on a simple chart. A 1 on the D6 does no damage at all, 2-5 does one point of damage and 6 would do two points. Thus, a result of 2-6 would kill a 1HD opponent, and a result of 6 would be able to kill a 1HD or a 2HD opponent.

The second bad-ass trick is the "Fray" die. This is like secondary damage. In each round of combat you roll this extra die and check the number of damage the result does on the same table. These "extra" points of damage you can allocate to other opponents of your level or lower that are in the same combat. If your PC is in combat with ten goblins, you roll to hit one on them, perhaps skewer it with your spear, BUT you also roll well on your Fray die scoring two hits, meaning in the same round you also take out a couple more goblins. The Fray die results represent the general melee that takes place around and close to the main target.

I've run a couple of mini solo sessions, and I'll be posting about them shortly, but the TLDR of those sessions was "Nice!".