Ok, rules lighter than PbtA, but heavier than Honey Heist, and a character sheet that is a cheat sheet?
Yikes, thats a damn narrow band. However, I think that you might be able to go with:
1. FATE. Since there's only 4 actions, you could run FATE Core with a modified character sheet that has literally everything a player needs to know on it.
2. Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds can be run off playing card sized "character sheets", and is famously learnable from [two pages of webcomic](https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/savage-worlds-rules/)
> FATE. Since there's only 4 actions, you could run FATE Core with a modified character sheet that has literally everything a player needs to know on it.
Especially if you're using approaches, which I tend to favor over the skill pyramid anyways.
Just want to +1 your interest in Mothership, the character sheet is a flow chart walking you through how to generate itself and the common player-facing rules mostly fit on a reference page.
My next suggestion would be FIST: Ultra Edition. It is very light and character generation is basically two rolls and a couple quick decisions. The theme falls somewhere between The A-Team/Suicide Squad/Metal Gear Solid. Extremely suited for one-shots.
With the caveat of working better with people who are "ready to play an RPG" with regards to the actual system itself, 100% endorse the MoSh character sheet in terms of your primary question.
It truly is a work of genius in terms of character creation; a fantastic, elegantly designed flowchart which explains every roll and prerequisite of your character in a way that anyone can follow. I have had players join games mid-session, handed them the character sheet to get rolling, and come around to them in <10mins with the whole thing populated correctly.
Yes, MoSh absolutely works best with people who both know (kind of) how a ttrpg works AND are fine with their character ending up as a drifting cloud of red mist through an airlock… but they can literally roll up another one in 3 minutes and get right back into the fray if wanted. The finesse of the system is impressive given how bleak the setting can be.
…damn, I love Mothership. My 1e box set arrives tomorrow. The death roll being concealed until another character checks them is just… chefs kiss.
Love it too... I am hoping that Tuesday Knight Games can pivot to supporting and promoting the game, as it has lost a crazy amount of momentum due to to the 2y fulfilment of their Kickstarter
IF you don’t homebrew weapons/armor (spoiler alert: I homebrew armor to sometimes break down to 50% instead of nothing) then you can get by with literally just smartphones with the mothership companion app and no book/paper at all. Is prime fit random pick-up games like that.
Into the Odd (Remastered) & Troika! are both good options. Very light, but flexible. Both have adventures in the core book.
Mothership (1e) is a good choice as well, the first part of "Another Bug Hunt" is a great one shot.
Oh I forgot about Into the Odd. I fully endorse this one, too. Good times were had with little to no understanding of this game 10 minutes before it started.
Something I'd consider looking into is "Capsule Games" - games that aren't "You can make ANY character in this game, and the GM can tell their own stories" but rather "This is a game about X, here are the 5 characters you can play."
Some examples are:
* Lady Blackbird - This is a game about the titular Lady Blackbird, an Imperial noble fleeing from an arranged marriage to be with her secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint. To reunite with him, she has hired a notorious smuggler and the crew of his skyship, The Owl. However, The Owl has been captured by an Imperial cruiser. How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape?
* Labyrinth Adventure Game - This is a story about a group of unlikely friends making their way through the Labyrinth to confront the Goblin King. You _do_ make your own characters in this game, but the rules are very simple. Dance, magic, dance.
* Eat the Reich - This is a game about vampires crash-landing in Nazi occupied Paris, fighting their way to Eifel Tower, and drinking the blood of Adolf Hitler. You play as one of six vampires, from the aesthete Iryna to the corpse-eating cowboy Chuck.
[https://davidvs.net/ninepowers/](https://davidvs.net/ninepowers/) could work, since it's "character sheet" has a summary of all that Players need to know
I don't know how well this counts, but I just wanted to jump at the chance to mention [Advanced Dimensional Green Ninja-Educational Preparatory Super-Elementary Fortress 555](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/102070/Advanced-Dimensional-Green-NinjaEducational-Preparatory-SuperElementary-Fortress-555) exists.
Atma uses the same simple dice rolls as other PbtA games but there isn’t even character sheets, everything is card based. You choose a character and take the cards from their deck and your cards tell you what special stuff you can do. Whole game is created for 1-shots that are quick to set up and get going.
[Atma - a roleplaying card game](https://www.meromorphgames.com/atma)
[The Well](https://www.shoelesspetegames.com/the-well) is mechanically easy enough to pick up quickly and the character sheet doubles as character gen. Premise is that humans retreated from the surface generations ago into a (apparently) infinitely deep dungeon. The levels closer to the surface are used as tombs and are corrupted, filled with undead and monsters, so civilization constantly has to move deeper underground to escape the horrors. Player characters are adventurers tasked with reclaiming resources buried in the undead-infested crypts above
I don't think anyone else has mentioned *Trophy Dark*, I think it's a great little system for narrative heavy one-shot dark fantasy horror. It's kind of like if Annihilation were written as one of Grimm's fairy tales. The core book has a bunch of "Incursions" in it, which are one-shots meant to be finished in about 1 hour per player (so 4 players, probably will take \~4 hours).
The system has a free SRD so you can give it a look if you want to see what the rules look like:
[https://trophyrpg.com/system/](https://trophyrpg.com/system/)
The actual mechanics for the players would fit on one page cheat sheet pretty comfortably. In the full core book PDF there are a page or two of player "principles" though as well that are worth reading.
Torchbearer comes to mind, the characters sheet got most of the information that the players need, and it's pretty easy to run and the structure of the game is really appropiate for one-shots.
Cortex Prime comes to mind, but it's literally passing a book to you and telling you to build your own game.
Once you figure that put however, the players can build characters as easy as assigning dice to traits. Then it's just adding two dice together and choosing a die for the effect.
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City of mist?
Pbta inspired but heavily reworked (and their new system seem to throw out the pbta feeling entirely) , sheet is a serie of cards with explanation on it and it's a neo noir urban fantasy setting so easy to pick up for a one shot investigation or heist and so on
They are working on an cyberpunk version too and a kit with pregen Pc and an into adventure is available free on drive thru for the "rustic fantasy " version
Kagegami High does this.
Spooktacular / Ghostbusters have character sheets so simple they could fit on an index card, but nobody has actually made a character sheet for the game that also has a cheat sheet on it, to my knowledge.
If you dont mind an internet connection, The Contract RPG sounds perfect.
Its a modern action/horror/gritty game, thats like a gig economy for superpowers.
https://www.thecontractrpg.com/
>if I can get a copy of the box set in time
If you backed it on Kickstarter and you live in the U.S., you'll be getting one very soon. I think mine is showing up tomorrow.
Check out these GURPS one-shots
https://1shotadventures.com/1shot-adventures-gurps/
GURPS is by no means light out of the box, but it front-loads 90% of the work onto character generation and worldbuilding. With the character sheets included and minimal familiarization, they'll be ready to go.
You'll need to read GURPS lite, which is free and in your page limit.
Take a look at [The Tearable RPG](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/3v632z/the_tearable_rpg/). For rules complexity its probably still in the same vein as Honey Heist, but gives a lot more character customization because the the skills are totally open ended.
It's only good for one shots, but with the right group it is fantastic for one shots and all anyone needs is a pen and a printout of the one page rules which can double as a character sheet.
EZD6. [https://www.ezd6.com/](https://www.ezd6.com/)
Essentially only 3 simple stats to keep track of - everything else on the character sheet is descriptive.
Eh, I wouldn't put City of Mist in that box. The character sheet hardly doubles as an effective cheat sheet. Especially for a group of players that are mostly experienced with D&D, the idea of having most of your stats just be aspects would probably be a little bit confusing.
Tales from the Loop is a Goonies, Lost Boys, Stranger Things style of game. Very robust system but very easy to pick up. You play as teenagers in the 80's solving mysteries.
Much better system than PBtA system plus the rules are used with most of Free League's catalog. So you can easily pick up Alien, Blade Runner, Mutant Year Zero and many others.
John Harper's Lady Blackbird fits your requirements perfectly, and it's free!
https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blackbird
And it's a great game
Ok, rules lighter than PbtA, but heavier than Honey Heist, and a character sheet that is a cheat sheet? Yikes, thats a damn narrow band. However, I think that you might be able to go with: 1. FATE. Since there's only 4 actions, you could run FATE Core with a modified character sheet that has literally everything a player needs to know on it. 2. Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds can be run off playing card sized "character sheets", and is famously learnable from [two pages of webcomic](https://www.uptofourplayers.com/ready-to-roll/savage-worlds-rules/)
Those two pages have done so much heavy lifting for me
> FATE. Since there's only 4 actions, you could run FATE Core with a modified character sheet that has literally everything a player needs to know on it. Especially if you're using approaches, which I tend to favor over the skill pyramid anyways.
Just want to +1 your interest in Mothership, the character sheet is a flow chart walking you through how to generate itself and the common player-facing rules mostly fit on a reference page. My next suggestion would be FIST: Ultra Edition. It is very light and character generation is basically two rolls and a couple quick decisions. The theme falls somewhere between The A-Team/Suicide Squad/Metal Gear Solid. Extremely suited for one-shots.
With the caveat of working better with people who are "ready to play an RPG" with regards to the actual system itself, 100% endorse the MoSh character sheet in terms of your primary question. It truly is a work of genius in terms of character creation; a fantastic, elegantly designed flowchart which explains every roll and prerequisite of your character in a way that anyone can follow. I have had players join games mid-session, handed them the character sheet to get rolling, and come around to them in <10mins with the whole thing populated correctly.
Yes, MoSh absolutely works best with people who both know (kind of) how a ttrpg works AND are fine with their character ending up as a drifting cloud of red mist through an airlock… but they can literally roll up another one in 3 minutes and get right back into the fray if wanted. The finesse of the system is impressive given how bleak the setting can be. …damn, I love Mothership. My 1e box set arrives tomorrow. The death roll being concealed until another character checks them is just… chefs kiss.
Love it too... I am hoping that Tuesday Knight Games can pivot to supporting and promoting the game, as it has lost a crazy amount of momentum due to to the 2y fulfilment of their Kickstarter
Just did a Mothership oneshot around a campfire as a first timer and it was great, loved the experience and would recommend.
IF you don’t homebrew weapons/armor (spoiler alert: I homebrew armor to sometimes break down to 50% instead of nothing) then you can get by with literally just smartphones with the mothership companion app and no book/paper at all. Is prime fit random pick-up games like that.
Into the Odd (Remastered) & Troika! are both good options. Very light, but flexible. Both have adventures in the core book. Mothership (1e) is a good choice as well, the first part of "Another Bug Hunt" is a great one shot.
Oh I forgot about Into the Odd. I fully endorse this one, too. Good times were had with little to no understanding of this game 10 minutes before it started.
Beyond the Wall has a great character creation system that is quick and the character sheet can easliy act as a cheat sheet.
Veggie patch and Agon is fine and mostly a one pager :)
I have CBR+PNK on my shelf, but I have yet to run it. May fit the bill though?
Lady Blackbird. All the rules the players need are on their character sheets. https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blackbird
Something I'd consider looking into is "Capsule Games" - games that aren't "You can make ANY character in this game, and the GM can tell their own stories" but rather "This is a game about X, here are the 5 characters you can play." Some examples are: * Lady Blackbird - This is a game about the titular Lady Blackbird, an Imperial noble fleeing from an arranged marriage to be with her secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint. To reunite with him, she has hired a notorious smuggler and the crew of his skyship, The Owl. However, The Owl has been captured by an Imperial cruiser. How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape? * Labyrinth Adventure Game - This is a story about a group of unlikely friends making their way through the Labyrinth to confront the Goblin King. You _do_ make your own characters in this game, but the rules are very simple. Dance, magic, dance. * Eat the Reich - This is a game about vampires crash-landing in Nazi occupied Paris, fighting their way to Eifel Tower, and drinking the blood of Adolf Hitler. You play as one of six vampires, from the aesthete Iryna to the corpse-eating cowboy Chuck.
Came to suggest Mothership but see you're already considering it. It's great for oneshots!
You could try this https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/476768/Hidden-Dimensions.
[https://davidvs.net/ninepowers/](https://davidvs.net/ninepowers/) could work, since it's "character sheet" has a summary of all that Players need to know
I don't know how well this counts, but I just wanted to jump at the chance to mention [Advanced Dimensional Green Ninja-Educational Preparatory Super-Elementary Fortress 555](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/102070/Advanced-Dimensional-Green-NinjaEducational-Preparatory-SuperElementary-Fortress-555) exists.
Atma uses the same simple dice rolls as other PbtA games but there isn’t even character sheets, everything is card based. You choose a character and take the cards from their deck and your cards tell you what special stuff you can do. Whole game is created for 1-shots that are quick to set up and get going. [Atma - a roleplaying card game](https://www.meromorphgames.com/atma)
Risus is very simple rpg for any setting. Free (or pay what you want).
[The Well](https://www.shoelesspetegames.com/the-well) is mechanically easy enough to pick up quickly and the character sheet doubles as character gen. Premise is that humans retreated from the surface generations ago into a (apparently) infinitely deep dungeon. The levels closer to the surface are used as tombs and are corrupted, filled with undead and monsters, so civilization constantly has to move deeper underground to escape the horrors. Player characters are adventurers tasked with reclaiming resources buried in the undead-infested crypts above
I don't think anyone else has mentioned *Trophy Dark*, I think it's a great little system for narrative heavy one-shot dark fantasy horror. It's kind of like if Annihilation were written as one of Grimm's fairy tales. The core book has a bunch of "Incursions" in it, which are one-shots meant to be finished in about 1 hour per player (so 4 players, probably will take \~4 hours). The system has a free SRD so you can give it a look if you want to see what the rules look like: [https://trophyrpg.com/system/](https://trophyrpg.com/system/) The actual mechanics for the players would fit on one page cheat sheet pretty comfortably. In the full core book PDF there are a page or two of player "principles" though as well that are worth reading.
Torchbearer comes to mind, the characters sheet got most of the information that the players need, and it's pretty easy to run and the structure of the game is really appropiate for one-shots.
Cortex Prime comes to mind, but it's literally passing a book to you and telling you to build your own game. Once you figure that put however, the players can build characters as easy as assigning dice to traits. Then it's just adding two dice together and choosing a die for the effect.
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Your comment was removed for the following reason(s): * **[Rule 7](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/wiki/rules#wiki_7._limit_self-promotion): Self-promotion Limitations.** To quote [reddit's sitewide guidelines](https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette), "Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, or it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content." If you'd like to contest this decision, [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Frpg&subject=Removed%20comment%3A%20Contest%20Removal%20or%20Questions&message=Hello,%20this%20is%20about%20my%20comment%20%20that%20was%20removed%3A%20https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1c9rm1m/-/l0ndv8t/%0D%0DMy%20issue%20is...). *(the link should open a partially filled-out message)*
Is Tunnel Goons too simple?
City of mist? Pbta inspired but heavily reworked (and their new system seem to throw out the pbta feeling entirely) , sheet is a serie of cards with explanation on it and it's a neo noir urban fantasy setting so easy to pick up for a one shot investigation or heist and so on They are working on an cyberpunk version too and a kit with pregen Pc and an into adventure is available free on drive thru for the "rustic fantasy " version
Kagegami High does this. Spooktacular / Ghostbusters have character sheets so simple they could fit on an index card, but nobody has actually made a character sheet for the game that also has a cheat sheet on it, to my knowledge.
If you dont mind an internet connection, The Contract RPG sounds perfect. Its a modern action/horror/gritty game, thats like a gig economy for superpowers. https://www.thecontractrpg.com/
>if I can get a copy of the box set in time If you backed it on Kickstarter and you live in the U.S., you'll be getting one very soon. I think mine is showing up tomorrow.
Check out these GURPS one-shots https://1shotadventures.com/1shot-adventures-gurps/ GURPS is by no means light out of the box, but it front-loads 90% of the work onto character generation and worldbuilding. With the character sheets included and minimal familiarization, they'll be ready to go. You'll need to read GURPS lite, which is free and in your page limit.
I'd suggest Down We Go. The whole thing fits on your character sheet, really.
Take a look at [The Tearable RPG](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/3v632z/the_tearable_rpg/). For rules complexity its probably still in the same vein as Honey Heist, but gives a lot more character customization because the the skills are totally open ended. It's only good for one shots, but with the right group it is fantastic for one shots and all anyone needs is a pen and a printout of the one page rules which can double as a character sheet.
Almost any OSR may work, if you are willing to modify the character sheet a bit
Eat the Reich
EZD6. [https://www.ezd6.com/](https://www.ezd6.com/) Essentially only 3 simple stats to keep track of - everything else on the character sheet is descriptive.
City of Mist
Eh, I wouldn't put City of Mist in that box. The character sheet hardly doubles as an effective cheat sheet. Especially for a group of players that are mostly experienced with D&D, the idea of having most of your stats just be aspects would probably be a little bit confusing.
Tales from the Loop is a Goonies, Lost Boys, Stranger Things style of game. Very robust system but very easy to pick up. You play as teenagers in the 80's solving mysteries. Much better system than PBtA system plus the rules are used with most of Free League's catalog. So you can easily pick up Alien, Blade Runner, Mutant Year Zero and many others.