#RPGaDay2024 - 16 - Quick to Learn

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. Quick to Learn?

A. Mausrítter, as I’ve already picked TRIPOD.

Two of the games from the start of my gaming spring out as easy to learn. Call of Cthulhu’s iteration of BRP, and Traveller. 

Traveller is a simple roll 2D6, add a skill and get 8+ to succeed at its heart. You can see an evolved variant on this on Paul Mitchener’s Liminal, which doesn’t have the layered complexity that Traveller hides underneath. That layered complexity - lifepath character generation, starship combat, worldbuilding, starship construction etc. mean that Traveller is more complex as you dig into the game. However, it’s very much emergent when you need it rather than being throughout the game. It does make it quick to learn, as you only really need the subsystems as you get to them.

Call of Cthulhu was a very simple iteration of the percentile basic roleplaying engine from Chaosium. All the complexities seen in RuneQuest fall away and you’re left with an elegant and simple game. However, along the years that simple and elegant game has accumulated cruft and rather than the short and complete rulebook that my battered second edition copy from Games Workshop presents, the game has bloated with two large core books. Now some of this is art, and some of this is extra material and explanations, but some of it is overwriting. It’s lost its simplicity of presentation, something you’d only get to with the Quick Start booklet. 

It’s interesting that a lot of systems come with free Quick Starts these days, or Starter Boxes. I think that they’re great (especially the free ones) for getting a taste of the game. I think that they’re a necessity with the price of games these days. That’s not a critique of prices, by the way. The books we get now are a world of difference from the staple-bound black and white short volumes or boxed sets I got as a youth. Now we have glorious colour, lots of art and hardcover volumes with quality components. That’s why gaming books cost significantly more (that and inflation). We get what we pay for.

My lack of familiarity with FATE in play (I’ve never run it and only played a couple of sessions and read some games built from it) means that I know it’s a contender in this category, but I can’t speak about it with any authority. So that knocks FATE out.

TRIPOD would be my natural winner here. Simple descriptions of a character with narrative traits, add a base attribute (Body, Mind or Soul) and a relevant trait to get a number of D6s in a dice pool, then roll them. 6s give two successes, 4 to 5 one success, total the number and the margin by which you win or lose creates a trait that’s applied to the winner or loser. If you gain a big enough margin, it’ll be a complete victory. There’s lovely touches too where you pass another player a dice to roll if you help, so you can see if you made a difference. However, I’ve used TRIPOD before, so I’m going to pick something else for this. I’m going to pick the game that I introduced my kids to roleplaying with, Mausrítter.

Mausrítter from the GM’s side.

Mausrítter has a really stripped back game engine, using a D20 to make saves against three primary attributes. It’s an evolution of Into the Odd which I’ve talked about before on the blog here, with my initial review here. I ran it for my lads two years ago and it worked really well (first session here and follow up here). The tactile approach for components and the simple engine, not to mention the cute setting, make it an excellent and easy to learn game. 

Tactile and simple character sheets

As a result, I choose Mausrítter as my ‘Quick-to-Learn’.

16 August 2024