A deceptively simple question for day sixteen of RPG a Day 2024. My first response would be to list a few games with rules that are easy to pickup. But I don’t think that is the best approach for the heart of the matter. What interests me with this prompt is which games teach you what they are trying to do in a way that is quick to learn.
I think the best of the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games do that – Apocalypse World, Night Witches, Bluebeard’s Bride, Last Fleet, Under Hollow Hills .. to name a few. And the way they do it is through the moves you use to interact with the game world. The moves shape the way the game wants you to think about it.
Another good family of games that has a good way to show you what it wants are Fate games. Two of them immediately stand out to me: Atomic Robo and Unwritten: Adventures in the Ages of MYST and Beyond. Atomic Robo beautifully build on the Fate Core system, but what makes them sing for me are the Brainstorms and Mission Briefings. Two sets of mechanics that allow the players to steer the narrative, but they also tell you the player a lot about the way the game want to be played. It tells you that crazy, out of the world ideas are very much on the table. And that discovery and team work is a very Atomic Robo way of looking at the world.
On the other hand Unwritten is a game where violence is never a solution. Not even that, it is not even an option. So what the designers did was to remove it from the rules completely. And by doing that, they are showing you, teaching you, that approach (pardon the accidental pun) is not an option for this game.