A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! vs Honey Heist

Compare A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine! and Honey Heist side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	A.C.E. — The Awfully Cheerful Engine!	Honey Heist
Genre	Universal	Modern
Tags	Comedy, Cinematic, Rules-Light, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Pulp Action, Fast-Paced	Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Comedy, Heist, Random Character Creation, Random Tables, Low-Prep, Gonzo, Fast-Paced, Theater of the Mind
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d6s equal to one of four Stats (Smarts, Moves, Style, Brawn) rated 1–5, add two extra dice if you have a matching Focus, and sum the total against a Target Number (10 normal, 20 hard, 30 herculean, 40 impossible). Sixes explode and reroll. One die in every pool is the Calamity Die: if the roll fails and the Calamity Die shows a 1, the Director invokes a comedic complication.	When a bear acts and the outcome is in doubt, the player rolls 1d6 against the relevant stat, Bear or Criminal: a roll equal to or under the stat succeeds, and a roll over it fails. Using the bear type's skill or doing something covered by the character's role rolls 2d6 and keeps the lowest. When the lowest die rolled is a 6, the GM introduces a twist or unseen complication.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d6
Complexity	Very Low	Very Low
Availability	Free core rules	Free core rules
Runnability	2 of 5 book tools	Book tools not listed
License	Standard commercial	RR&D Community Licence v1.14
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Commercial publishing allowed — RR&D Community Licence (Grant Howitt's One Page RPGs)
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	EN Publishing	Rowan, Rook and Decard (Grant Howitt)
Year	2021	2017
Languages	English	English
Best For	Groups who want a fast, comedic action movie at the table with minimal prep and the freedom to swap genres between adventures: ghost hunters one night, talking-animal vigilantes the next.	Groups who want a silly, low-prep one-shot as a crew of bears pulling a heist at a honey convention.
Highlights	Character creation runs through six steps on a comic-book ID Card, so a new Hero is table-ready in minutes: a Role (talking ape, druid astronaut, vigilante), four Stats split across 12 points, a Focus per Stat, and a single-word Trait. Karma is one shared currency that buys extra dice, damage reduction, or Flashbacks where the player retroactively establishes a useful item or prepared action, and Karma is refunded when the player leans into their Trait. Heroes never die: at zero Health you are Knocked Out for five minutes and stand back up at 1 Health, keeping the tone slapstick rather than tragic.	Greed moves a point from Bear to Criminal when the plan goes off without a hitch, and Frustration moves one back when the plan fails and the bear runs into difficulty. A player can shift a point toward Criminal by playing a flashback scene of the bears planning the heist, or toward Bear by eating a load of honey. The GM sets up each heist from random tables, including two security features and a complication kept secret from the players.
Considerations	The whole rulebook is thirty comic-book-format pages with no advancement track beyond +1 Stat or +1 Focus per adventure, so long campaigns need imported structure. Genre, setting, and bestiary are intentionally a grab bag of one-paragraph Roles and Extras with no published world: published Issues (Spirits of Manhattan, Below Decks, Accidental Anthropomorphic Heroes) carry the setting work. Combat resolves quickly but is mostly damage exchange against flat Defence numbers with no maneuvers, conditions, or positioning rules beyond optional zone-based ranges.	There are no experience, advancement or campaign rules. Bear covers shrugging off damage, but the rules track no damage or injury. The sheet gives no rule for what a player does after their bear betrays the party or flips out at 6.