Lasers & Feelings: How can you fit so much game in just 1 sheet of A4?

The April 2020 RPG Blog Carnival hosted by Codex Anathema has the interesting theme of "To Boldly Go" which for me only means one thing... Star Trek.

Star Trek in a Single Page

I'm a big fan of Indie RPGs and when I make my annual pilgrimage to London's biggest RPG convention, Dragonmeet, I always try to get myself in on a game run by the London Indie RPG Meetup Group.  Games are pitched every hour, on the hour and usually run for 2 to 3 hours.  It is very rare that I can't get a game of something at the first attempt.

I first encountered Lasers & Feelings at one such Dragonmeet and was blown away by it's simplicity.  The entire game, including the plot generator, fits on one sheet of A4.  The game unashamedly harks back to the halcyon days of Star Trek (TOS) with its focus on derring do and emotionally chargeds romantic encounters.

Skills (Lasers and Feelings)

The core mechanic of the game revolves around two skills, Lasers (all the physical stuff and technical stuff) and Feelings (all the intuition and emotional stuff).  When you generate your character you choose where on the scale of 2 to 5 you want to be, The higher the number the more adept at Lasers, the lower the number the more adept at Feelings.

Skill checks are done with 1 or more D6 with Laser success rolling BELOW your skill number and Feelings ABOVE your skill number.  A roll of exactly your skill number results is known as LASER FEELINGS and you get to ask the GM a question which he will answer honestly.

These people are not meekly going on a space adventure

This sort of super simple system often results in Lasers characters being required to make Feelings rolls and the system includes a mechanic for helping out your crewmates by lending them a die.  Counting the number of successes

Like a lot of Indie RPGs the game lends itself to players contributing ideas on the fly from worldbuilding to storyline.  The best games I've played and run have always built upon the skeleton of the Adventure Creator with the best ideas being supplied by the players.  If you are going to try it unleash your imagination and you will have a blast.

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Thanks of course go to Of Dice and Dragons for continuing to promote the RPG Blog Carnival.  This is my 6th entry and you can read the rest by clicking the RPG Blog Carnival tag below.