A bit negative, but I kind of agree that combat should probably have less emphasis in a Solarpunk RPG. I remember from the old days that the Paranoia RPG had a similar situation where combat really wasn’t the focus of the game, so they pretty much kept it out of the rulebook and left it to the game master to flesh out if needed.
Without having read the rulebook myself, I was thinking if there is a need for “action”, maybe that should rather take place as some form of “fight” with the environment due to natural disasters? There are actually many interesting examples of real-world simulation exercises for disaster relief groups, so maybe this could be a bit stream-lined into a more fun game concept?
First, I’d love to get your impression on the actual manual: Fully Automated! RPG manual
Take a gander. Let me know how it comes across to you.
I welcome the diversity of opinion, but I think the game is best viewed through its artistic intention and principles. This game is in the style of “Old School Revival”, or OSR games.
OSR games are very flexible. They’re often light on rules, and light on math. And you’ll see this throughout the rule book. Do you want to convince a community leader to provide some resource, like access to a deceased person’s private data? First, you roleplay it or describe how you’d like to convince them. And then you roll the dice. And a GM just does what feels appropriate. We don’t even have strict pass-fail value. We suggest 21ish, but tell the GM to just describe an outcome. and not even worry about categorizing things as either a “success” or “failure”, but rather an assortment of possibilities that range from great to terrible insteaad.
Combat has strictly defined rules while most of the game doesn’t because we don’t like games with rules, but we felt combat as a minigame demanded this. That’s really all there is to it. It’s a rules-light social game with a structured combat minigame included to make combat events brief and easy to get past, because the folks who made this happen to find combat to be a big headache and an exception to our preferred rules-light style of play that we’d rather just move past.
Through this lens, I think the game achieved our aims.