After giving Simpler (with Noir Package) a try, I can confidently tell it's a hella fun experience, considering how little preparation it needs to be run. Makes for a perfect rpg-themed party game with your friends, or as a simple time killer, if that's what you fancy more. I personally was relieved with just how little it needs to actually start and play. There's no extra rules you need to keep track of, but just your standard rpg stuff, like HP (which has its own fun little mechanic that I absolutely adore), some talents the GM might give you access to if you play your character in a fun way, and so on. Although from my own experience it feels a bit unbalanced in some places, you can easily tell it's Author's labor of love, and he definitely put a lot of heart into make the system from scratch. The Simpler's page itself is quite active as well, so Im sure there will be a lot more updates and fixes to make the system even more enjoyable. That's all I have to say about the system itself, the rest of this comment I will dedicate to my personal suggestions of how I would tweak and change the game.
Suggestions:
- Giving the GM a set of Difficulty Checks (for dice rolls) that somewhat represent the difficulty of the task, for example: Difficulty Checks equal to 1 would be considered trivial task, everyone with no prior knowledge might be able to achieve, 2-3 would stand for an everyday task that most Player Characters might be already familiar to, 4 could mean the task is not too uncommon but could be challenging for everyday man (as an example, I'd give the PC difficulty check equal of 4 if they had to fix the car by themselves) and reserve Difficulty Check of 5 and 6 to extremely hard, or inhuman tasks even trained characters could struggle with.
- Switching the game from d6 to d8, to give a higher range or successes and failures, resulting in more interesting results.
- Overhauling certain character statistics. As I've mentioned I've only had the chance to play the noir package, so I will speak only of Player statistics present in said setting. Fusing Willpower and Intelligence into one statistic, so more intelligent characters have higher chance into overcoming fear, and benefit from their knowledge of dark arts. It would give Intelligence a bit more use in the game as well as make space for another statistic that could be used to counter Dexterity's overwhelming dominance. Speaking of the devil, Dexterity plays too big of a role in the game, and I personally would counter it with adding another statistic to the package (now that we ditched Willpower for the sake of Intelligence). In my opinion Strength would make a perfect counter to Dex, giving more roleplay abilities and more character variations to the game. While Dex could affect dodging, using ranged weapons and so on, Strength could boost character's melee capabilities and overall enhance its survivability (maybe certain Strength related talents could be added that allow the character to take more hits before they part with their life). Also I feel like Sanity could use a little boost, and maybe somehow could help with how convincing your character is to the NPCs.
- Giving more Skill Increases in the character making to add a bit more of variety and boost the Player Characters slightly. I would settle for around 7-8 skill increases, so you could either make a well rounded character with a flaw, or get two flaws for two excellent statistics your character could be awesome at.
That's it regarding my suggestions about the game, just like I've stated before it was a ton of fun to playthrough and the simplicity is definitely a good seller. Highly recommend trying it out!