Free RPG Rule PDFs

Recently Michael Wolf's blog has featured three free role-playing games, downloadable as PDF files.

I'm sharing theme here for my brother-in-law. He enjoys reading about RPG rules that use only six-sided dice, because it is an interesting intellectual challenge to use only these common dice to create satisfying game mechanics for a RPG.

The first two of the three free games use only six-sided dice, an in very different ways.

The first free game is an abbreviated version of Fantastic Adventures in Tabletop Entertainment named Free FATE. The download is here.

Free Fate uses two six-sided dice for all skill attempts. The character's skill and the difficulty of the attempt are given matching numerical ratings, for example "fair" is 2 and "great" is 4. The two dice should have different colors, and one is named the Plus Die and the other is the Minus Die. Only the lowest rolled die has effect, and its value is either added or subtracted from the character's skill. So a character who is "great" at the skill who attempts something of "fair" difficulty would succeed if the Plus Die was the lowest with a total of 4 plus some die value; success would also happen if the Minus Die was 1 or 2 and the Plus Die was higher, for then the total would be 4-1=3 or 4-2=2, still equal or greater than the attempt's difficulty rating.

The second free game is Mini Six. The PDF download is here.

Mini Six uses six-sided dice quite differently. Skills are rated not with a numeric value but with a number of dice, and attempts are rated with higher target numbers such as 11, 21, or more. A character with 4 dice in a skill would roll that many six-sided dice and sum them when making a skill attempt; one of those six-sided dice has a distinct color and its 6's cause it to be rolled again (perhaps more than once if more 6's happen), which allows a character of low skill a tiny chance of success in a difficult skill attempt.

The third free game does not use six-sided dice, but I will link to it for the sake of completeness. It is Chill, Third Edition, and the PDF of its quick start rules is here.

UPDATE: The link to the Free Fate file has been changed, as requested in the comments.