I really, really, really like The World's Most Popular Role Playing Game. Big surprise there, wot wot? But as I've graduated from college, I've had less time to game. Just as much to _imagine_, you understand; just less time to crunch numbers, less interest in getting the stats right, and so on. So, I wanted something like OD&D, really. And I played that for a while, and that was fun, but I'm primarily a DM, I get to create all sortsa stuff; players have to play the character generation minigame, and so need more to engage with. Besides, there's only so rules-light I can get, thus, this game. It's basically FATE as written in SotC (though it's leaning more & more towards Diaspora these days!), with a few renamings/base assumptions changed. Nothing ground breaking.
It's probably a good idea to ensure your character has an attack of some sort between 2 and 5 and a melee defense in the same range.
Skills
Conflict
Races
Talents
Most characters are probably +4-capped pyramids (thus: one +4 skill, two +3 skills, three +2 skills, four +1 skills), 6 aspects, refresh 6, 3 free stunts, 3 stress (which acts as boxes, not as hit points — a 2 stress hit checks the 2-stress box, and no others).
At the beginning of each session, the highest level character's player should recap the events of last session; the MVP thus indicated selects the lowest level character present (choosing tiebreakers if needed) and gives them a fate point from the common pile, increasing their refresh by one and allowing them to choose an additional aspect (to a maximum of 10 — if they already have 10, they must alter an existing one. If there are more than 4 players present, the GM may select an additional number of players up to a third of those present (round randomly!) for similar treatment.
A player may trade 1 refresh to increase a skill by 1 point or gain a skill at +1 level of skill; they must maintain a columnar structure of trained skills and cannot have any given skill X at a level 4 or more higher than any other player; that is, to have a skill at +4, there are no restrictions; to use a skill at +5, every other character participating in that session must have it at at least +1.
This represents that you must teach to learn, that the DM shouldn't be a jerk and throw an obstacle at the players which any one of them couldn't defeat with a "natural 20", and that since these scores are all relative anyway, let's not go nuts.
If this condition isn't met, the character with extraneous skill ranks uses the maximum available; they receive 1 (temporary) point of compensatory refresh for each rank they are unable to use; this may immediately be spent on (temporary) talents if desired. These go away at the end of the adventure, of course.
