Sometimes you don't want to have to plough through a 300 page hardcover rulebook in order to play your next one-shot. It's so much easier to pick up a rules-lite RPG and get your improv on. The following games have really gone to town with the 'lite' aspect. Here are the top 4 minimalist roleplaying games:
1. Cthulhu Dark
Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu isn't exactly a crunchy game mechanics-wise. Simply roll a percentile to find out if you succeed in doing something. Of course, there are other rules for phobias, magic and the like, which make it a little more than a proper rules-lite game. Cthulhu Dark is the Call of Cthulhu experience distilled to its bare essentials. Conceived by Graham Walmsley, Cthulhu Dark (a pun on Cthulhu Lite) is a 3 page rules set with freeform character creation and simple d6 task resolution. Dark still keeps a simplified sanity system in which when you see something horrific you roll a d6: if you get higher than your insanity value you increase it by 1. Once it reaches 6 you're incurably insane.
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2. Risus: The Anything RPG
Risus is arguably the most popular rules-lite game out there, with it's simple-yet-brilliant task resolution system involving dice pools and madcap sense of humour. Risus is designed as a system more than a setting in itself, so it can be used for whatever genre you want. Last Halloween I ran a teen slasher flick game with Risus completely on the fly and it went great.
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3. BEAN! D2 RPG
BEAN! Is a game I've been championing for a while I even interviewed creator and artist Jeff Freels about the second edition of his unusual and brilliant system. The D2 system involves using a 2 sided object like a bean or a coin for resolving tasks and combat. Each character has only 3 attributes which have 'beans' assigned to them. The default setting is fantasy, but there are rules for modern and sci-fi too.
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4. Zombie D6 Lite
Now this is what I call minimalist. Zombie D6 Lite is merely 1 page in length but offers a really fun zombie apocalypse system. Each character has attributes that have a poor, average or good score. Each score has a related roll to succeed in a task with modifiers depending on the difficulty of the task. Give this a whirl if you're looking for zombie mayhem without the prep time.
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