One-Shot Party: The Simplest RPG

Hello My Imaginary Friends and Gamers,

Back in 2013 I went to an event and at that event I offered to run a One-Shot Party SRPG session. I had no rules and no ideas. They chose to play Cards Against Humanity instead and I spent the event dreaming up what I would call The Simplest Role Playing System.

It was okay and I used it for a few years before altering it and renaming it CoasteRPG I had grand plans to sell it as a coaster. The concept was cool but didn’t really work out. Apparently putting your drink on something you write on and then flipping the coaster didn’t work very well. I still plan on finding a way to sell this but I’m not sure how yet.

So here we are and I’ve modified the rules a little for balance. It still uses coasters, although you could use coins or even/odd dice rolls.

One-Shot Party: The Simplest RPG

Simple Rules: Each player chooses Body, Mind, or Luck as their character’s specialty. They have 4 in that ability. (Ex. Fighters choose Body.) Their Health and Defence each equal 4.

Complex Rules: Each person has 4 points to place in Body, Mind, and Luck. No negatives. Their Health equals their Body plus 2. Their Defence equals Mind or Luck plus 2.

Resolution Mechanism: When a character needs to do something, the Storyteller decides if it’s easy (1), hard (2), ridiculous (4), or inconceivable (6). The character then subtracts their attribute from the difficulty.

If the attribute is higher than the difficulty they succeed. If not, they have to flip a coaster, coin, or die, 3 times and call it (if it’s a die have them call even or odd). Add every right guess to their attribute.

If the player gets 3 successes in a row they continue to flip until they fail.

Combat: Each character does 1 point of damage (unless specified in their abilities) if they hit something and takes the same if they are hit. Death occurs at 0 health.

Opposed rolls between characters are calculated by the most successes. (Eg. Player one needs to bluff. They have 3 Luck and fliped successfully twice for a total of 5 successes. Player 2 has a mind of 4 and flipped successufully twice for a total of 6. Player two sees through the bluff.)

Special Abilities: Choose 2 of; Hit (1 damage +1 flip), Heal (1 healing + 1 flip), Help (+1 success to any other characters test) Or choose a +1 to body, Mind, or Luck (this can only be picked once.)

Everything else: The storyteller makes up.

Adventures

Character Sheets

One-Shot Party: The Simplest RPG – PDF Character Sheet (45KB)

One-Shot Party: The Simplest RPG – Docx Character Sheet (16KB)


Thank you and Good Gaming!

Éric

Sharing is awesome!

4 thoughts on “One-Shot Party: The Simplest RPG”

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.