One that's story oriented...
How about Dogs in the Vineyard?
It's supposed to be an Islamic-centric game, but you can make it work for any religion (my Jewish friend ran it when I played). And the rules are simple:
The GM says "yes" or he rolls dice.
If it's not a direct conflict (dice) whatever the player says, goes.
It's actually entirely valid to walk into a town, see that there are demons, and say "we burn the place to the ground, and everyone in it."
It's not the best way to solve the problem, but it is a valid way.
Also, the dice rules are real simple. Bigger numbers win.
Dogs In The Vineyard is islamic-centric???
It's either Islam or Muslim.
*Wiki*
Derp, I'm
way off base. Mormon.
(Hey, it's been at least three years since I played and at the time I thought it was Catholic Orthodox)
But it's so low key about
which religion it doesn't really much matter (you're dogs of the church, go out and do god's bidding). The only thing in the book that would hint at which religion is the list of suggested names.
So far as I've experience, the setting is pretty much a fantasy(or rather, set in a fictional version of the west very similiar to the real one) version of "Wild West Mormon Sheriffs With Guns And License To Kill".
Preeeetty much.
Also, the mechanics can be VERY annoying if you're into story driven roleplaying. The whole "stop the RP to chalk up the conflict and then resolve it through some weird dice-variant interpretation of poker"-mechanic certainly didn't work for me. It depends on what you want, I guess.
I liked it because it forced--in a way--me to stop and think about
the environment and see if there was anything I could pull in to get extra dice. Rather than just "I shoot him *dice* I miss."
The poker mechanic is a little strange, but it works for the system to drag out conflict as long as possible and give an excuse to escalate from yelling at someone to hitting them.
Dogs is probably good for those small stories where the GM and players want to tell a very specific story contained within some hard boundaries set before the game is even started. If you're the type who wants to play something dynamically growing where the story goes its own way depending on PC/NPC actions, I wouldn't recommend it.
Its a difference of whether there's a pre-existing story that is being told by the players or the players are telling a story from scratch, respectively.
I think it depends on the GM. The game I had was pretty well told, collaboratively. My one friend, in his short solo scene was caught having premarital sex with a woman because the house caught on fire and they had to rush outside. Only one person witnessed the two of them out in the street naked at 2am, and after a short discussion Andrew said, "The burning building collapses on the guy."
The GM could have escalated into a conflict with dice, but let that roll. It wasn't the cleanest solution to the problem, but it was simple and fast.
In the actual game, all of us bungled around for a while, completely failing to figure out which NPC was the demon, but doing what we thought was the right thing. I don't recall the details too much at this point, though. Just that we were rather surprised at who the demon turned out to be.