I've spent the better part of today looking through the wide variety of games being offered for cheap or free on Drive ThruRPG today and I've found several gems.
One of these gems is Toypocalypse, a game by Trevor Christensen. The game was originally written for a 24 hour RPG writing contest in 2011. The game describes itself as being a cross between Lord of the Flies and Toy Story, a combination that has no room to be anything but awesome. The game seems to be light on the rules front, which after reading the 18 page PDF rulebook I think is to the benefit of the game. Simple rules make it easy to pick up play and get new players up and running quickly. I really like rules lite systems for short burst games while your group's normal GM refreshes their creative batteries.
Players take on the role of children's toys that come to life suddenly to find all of their human masters mysterious absent. Now with the toys left as inheritors of the planet they have to keeping themselves filled with stuffing and batteries while dodging wild dogs and toys who have started oppressive regimes to control their territory.
Character's have four attributes which are rated by different modified dice rolls: Average attributes will give the player a 1d12 to roll, next rank up the player will get 1d10 +2, next 1D8 +4, and finally pinnacle of toy achievement gets 1D6 +6. So you can see the better your attribute rank the less that is left up to random dice rolls on any skill checks.
Characters also get to pick from a list of various toy traits such as what kind of mobility your toy has, what kind of condition it is in, do other toys resent it for being a hot item over the Christmas shopping season, and magic toy powers.
Most dice rolls in the game involve the GM naming an ability to roll on and a number that must be rolled over for whatever that task is to succeed.
One thing I notice is there isn't much room for advancing character stats, the author even warns against giving players anymore then the initial ranks in abilities for character creation. With their only being four ranks for four abilities it wouldn't take much to make a character pretty much bad ass at everything. With no additional skills or merit systems there isn't really anyway for player characters to improve over the course of a long campaign, which could turn off some players.
All in all the game has everything you need to run a great game but I don't know if the system has enough meat to hold player's attention for more than a handful of game sessions. The game is free and interesting enough to merit a download. I'm already planning on running this for my group.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/94301/Toypocalypse
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