Unfortunately, that's not going to happen any time soon, so I need to get myself out of a rut so that I can run a proper game. To do that, I want to know what your favourite systems are for short, one shot, or one off games. Something where I can run things and get myself out of a not-RPing funk without days and weeks of preparation or the expectation of keeping a game alive for six months.
I don't really want to ask for themes or kinds of games or anything, since I feel doing that colours what responses I'll get. Just tell me what kind of games YOUR group plays when they want quick, simple games. Although I will say I'm looking for something a *little* more involved than, say, RISUS or Tactical Waifu.
Other than checking that it's not porn, pic not related.
GURPS Lite when you seriously want to play with rolls a one shot game. 30 pages, extremely condensed, can be used for anything, doesn't suffer from long-ass character creation
Narrative gameplay when we don't feel like rolling dice at all, so usually ad-hoc homebrew with character sheet made out of napkin with all the most important elements about the character on it. Or not even napkin, just telling outright who is your character.
Anyone got reverse of that pic?
Robert Rivera
Go with D02 role playing system. Google it.
Christopher Morris
Wanna hear a really boring answer? Even for one-shots/offs we play the games we are most familiar with: DnD, Shadowrun and our Fantasy Homebrew. Call of Cthulhu also is a possibility, as it's easy enough even if you are unfamiliar with the rules.
Jaxon Fisher
D&D and Shadowrun take way too long just to make characters, and the rules are too involved. I mean, I want something I could get into. I was going to use Apocalypse World until people told me that it's actually for really long detailed character driven games, despite being rules lite.
What part of "a little more involved than, say, RISUS or Tactical Waifu" makes you think I want a game with "flip a coin" as the mechanic?
Carter Nguyen
>D&D and Shadowrun take way too long just to make characters, and the rules are too involved. I just mentioned them to underline that even for one offs we use our usual system, not something else.
But you mention Character creation as a problem. For a one shot you usually don't make the characters on the table but the GM prepares them beforehand.
Aaron Bell
Risus is the perfect one-shot game system, with dozens of free setting mods and modules.
>For a one shot you usually don't make the characters on the table but the GM prepares them beforehand. I've actually never really done things that way. Even for D&D one shots, most of the people I've been around have been told to make their own characters. I'm mostly looking for something where I don't have to do a lot of work, so I don't wanna make characters.
I guess I could probably do an SAS or something...
Still, I'm surprised I didn't get a bunch of pdfs like Crab Truckers or Car Lesbians.
Parker Gonzalez
Everyone is John, while simple can last as long as the group is having fun in the session. We managed to play on a long trip in a bus with cards (Ace to 6) to replace the D6. I know it's close to Risus in term of simplicity but if you want to get friends into the ttrpg world, this is the easier step from Mafia/Werewolf to DnD.
In a more post-apocalyptic tone I tried Tempora Mutantur, it hold in two pages and there's some extensions that you can find on the author's blog. Human, mutants and kinda psyionics for classes, encounter are easy to create and I think there's a bunch of loot tables in one of the extension.
Finally there's Naheulbeuk, but you'll need to either be french speaking or be French/Belgian or something. Here we use it to introduce new players to "real rpg". It's a homebrewed version of the dark eye with rules easy to understand and full of fantasy tropes. It's set in the world of a famous audio serie that every kid listened to during high school, so even if you don't have any idea for an adventure just listen to the story and you'll have yourself a session ready.
Carter Thomas
>One of the few things I asked for was "not RISUS" Well fuck you then, you uncultured heathen whore.
Gavin Gutierrez
Gamma Worlds can be fun for one shots
Parker White
There's the One-page Games on 1d4chan, for some really quick, casual games 1d4chan.org/wiki/Category:One-page_Games I've had a lot of fun with Crab Truckers and Time Punks, and I really want to try out Justice Hobos. Just keep in mind that you shouldn't be taking anything too seriously, and just try to roll with it, and you should be fine. For a shameless plug, I'm also attaching a game that I made, Quantum Popcorn. It's designed to be quick, zany, requires no planning, and provides GM experience for new players. Basically, every fifteen minutes of real-time, a different player takes over as GM, and picks a setting from a movie or book or whatever for the players to pop into. The only problem I'm having with it is that the character gen is a little hard to explain, but I'm working on that. Shameless plug over.
Jeremiah Garcia
Not op here, you got me genuinely interested with this one. Never heard of it, it could be a good way to put my players in the role of GM and see how they hold up. Thanks
Joseph Jenkins
This looks dope. Gonna have to try this, but THERE'S NO MORE TIME
Nathan Hughes
That image makes me think of my girlfriend
Ryder Long
The quiet year is pretty good, that is, if you're into that kinda stuff.
Xavier Brown
How so?
Owen Cox
She wants to be hardcore, but her daddy(me] won't let her
Cameron Price
I've been watching a lot of LPs of Lady Blackbird. I think that the mechanics of the game are a lot of fun, I'm into the whole steampunk-or-not-Firefly flavor, and if you like how it runs, you can always reskin the game yourself (which is something I'm considering doing). I've seen a list of a couple of reskins that I want to check out.
Ryuutama is definitely fantasy-but-not-standard-fantasy that might get you out of the rut. Can be run as a one-shot or a "between games palette refresher" serial. Fairly easy to pick up.
It's been awhile since I've done a oneshot, though. My usual group is great in campaigns of 3+ sessions. I feel like in oneshots, they're not quite as much fun to play with because they either put in less effort or don't have enough room to hit their stride before it's over, so I tend to let the players who never seem to have time for a game sign up for oneshots and I just wait for the next "miniseries" game.
Gabriel Rogers
I've played Fiasco. There was a website and everything with a lot of different setting-things. The game is meant to be played as a two-part one-off single-sitting thing.
There are a lot of different setting things written for it online somewhere.
One was a group of adventurers off to slay a dragon, another was a bunch of human-level-intelligent-mice trying to do mice things.
Fiasco is about dramatic failure, so you try to set up your characters to fail in huge ways.
William Lee
Fiasco
Luis Kelly
I think for oneshots it pays to look at some indy games, something that comes with a focussed setting and has a minimal set of rules required to support play and character creation. You want a strongly coherent set of expectations to put everyone on the same page so you can get the most satisfying play experience from a single session.
Goblin Quest and the variant Inigo Montoya Quest are fun little games. Remember Tomorrow is cool, but the one time I played it I was dog-tired and out of ideas, which kind of soured me on it. In A Wicked Age is pretty cool, with the Oracles helping get the creativity flowing, we've played all sorts of oneshots with that from GoT/Conan stuff, to a cyberpunk street war. The Quiet Year is a map and narrate game about the last year for a post-apocalyptic community, each turn you add something to the map, and you draw and pick an event that has befallen your people, and decide the fate of a troupe of PCs before the inevitable coming of winter and the Frost Shepherds. Zombie Cinema is pretty much perfect for simple oneshots. The Final Girl RPG is also pretty fun. Both of these games emulate cinematic genres and are one and done games, with as many variations as you want. I've used both games to include and have fun with non-RPG players in the past, and they've had a real blast. Final Girl shines in character creation where you make a bunch of characters (~3 per player) and the ones that don't immediately grab the spotlight become cannon fodder pretty early. Because you aren't limited to the PCs you create, and you don't have ownership of any characters you can try stuff outside you usual mold, or something you dismissed can be given a new spin by the other players at the table.
Noah Collins
>Google it. No.
>...our Fantasy Homebrew. Our fantasy mixtape.
Eew.
>Fiasco Not really a game though is it?
Zzzz. Huh!? Oh you’re done? Cool.
One-Shots don't necessarily have to be simplistic they just need to allow the game to set up and play rather quickly, whilst also wrapping up well after only a few hours.
The End of the World games and Call of Cthulhu work well as they punish the PC's often enough so that they will either succeed or die.
If you're looking for fantasy stuff try picking up some of the starter sets for Pathfinder or D&D. Pre-generated character sheets and adventures which are designed to take only a couple of hours. Plus if you as the GM/DM wanted to you could grab the core rules and introduce more complex elements if your players are finding it all too easy.
I advise against picking up anything too light. After all you will still be playing for the better part of 5 hours.
William Evans
>OP needed five teenagers with attitude >instead he got an underageb& with an attitude
Christian Cooper
>Not really a game though is it? Why would you say that? I mean, it kind of is.
