I like to collect and occasionally play fun, quirky and rules-lite RPGs. I thought I might share some that I’ve enjoyed reading or playing over the years with this community. I’ve linked my Google drive collection here. Hopefully this can be a good resource for people looking to play in this community or elsewhere!
Some of my favorites include:
Honey Heist
Lasers and Feelings
Pride and Extreme Prejudice
Adventure Skeletons
I’d love to hear some recommendations for any that I should add!
Thanks! I will mention that if you let players stack up multiple dice the odds of failing become very slim, so if a player wants to be very good at something they become very, very good at something. I’ve found that players enjoy succeeding, funny that.
Just give them a variety of goals and challenges. This ruleset is meant to work better from a storyteller’s perspective than it does from a dungeon master’s - Look at the sample characters, they’re all plot hooks with no single focus. Almost like regular people. :)
That’s true, for example, if you have 4 dice in something and the DC is 2, by my math that’s a 1/1,296 chance of failure. Still technically not a guaranteed success, but there’s not a big incentive to get excited for the roll since you pretty much know the outcome. May I suggest:
Complete success roll: whenever two or more of your dice on a skill check each have a value of “6”, you have achieved a complete success. Not only do you succeed in what you are trying to do, but you may confer a one time bonus of 1D to another player attempting a check related to that success.
For example: Pick and Slip are trying to get a document from a gang leader’s room at a local tavern. It’s pretty busy tonight, so not only will Pick need to successfully unlock the door, but Slip will need to get into the room undetected. Pick attempts to unlock the door. DC4 - not easy, but Pick is really good at opening locks, so he rolls 4D. He gets 2, 6, 3, 6. Two sixes, a complete success! Pick whispers “there’s an arcane alarm on this lock, but whoever cast it did a sloppy job. The rune they used is very similar to the one I saw on the table right…over…there!” A group of patrons jumps with a start as their table begins emitting a high pitched beeping sound. The entire bar is staring at them in confused bewilderment. “There you go, Slip, you’re not the loudest thing in the room anymore.” Now slip gets a bonus dice on his roll to sneak into the room.
This mechanic brings back an element of chance to rolls that would otherwise be almost certain, it rewards players that are really good at or well equipped for a task, and it encourages teamwork, planning and coordinating.
That’s a great mechanic! I tried to simplify this system for people who had never played before, both for ease of learning and ease of running the game. I left a lot of possible mechanics out chasing that 1page status. There’s a lot of room to expand this base system into a pamphlet sized ruleset, but I’ll leave that work to others right now.
My next work is more elaborate, more along the lines of a dice pool system with attributes / skills. It does have a “help” mechanic that works a lot like this one (or the one from the 2d20 rulesets), where one player can give their extra successes to another player. Definitely won’t be a 1 page system.