City of Jerry vs Odd Hours

Compare City of Jerry and Odd Hours side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	City of Jerry	Odd Hours
Genre	Modern	Horror, Modern
Tags	Comedy, Fiction-First, Gonzo, Improvisation, Low-Prep, Mystery, Noir, Playbook-Driven, Random Tables, Rules-Light	Fear & Stress Mechanics, Comedy, Gonzo, Weird, Rules-Light, Random Tables, One-Shot Friendly
Core Mechanic	When an outcome is uncertain, roll a d12 and add the relevant Heal or Harm stat. Read the result on a five-tier scale: 12+ is a Critical Success, 9–11 a Success, 5–8 a Mixed Success, 2–4 a Failure, and 1 or less a Critical Failure. Natural 12s and 1s are always critical. Good or Bad Luck adds d12s and keeps the highest or lowest result.	Roll 2d6 plus one of three attributes (Wit, Grit, Strangeness) plus a relevant skill and try to meet or beat a Target Number. Combat is an opposed roll. Beat the defender by 5 or more for a critical hit and double damage. Two resources then shadow every shift: Sanity drops when the supernatural presses on your mind, and Absurdity climbs as you lean into it. You spend Absurdity to reroll a failure, shrug off a point of Sanity loss, or take the higher of two rolls.
Dice	d12	2d6
Complexity	Low	Low
Availability	Paid	Free core rules
Runnability	Book tools not listed	4 of 5 book tools
License	Made for Mischief Third-Party License	Proprietary
Third-Party Publishing	Commercial publishing allowed — Made for Mischief Third-Party License	Not yet researched
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	Drimbus	Route 9 Games
Year	2026	2026
Languages	English	English
Best For	Groups who want low-prep noir mysteries with body-pun humor, player-created connections, and fast conflicts inside a human body.	Groups who want low-barrier horror with a comedic streak for one-shots or short campaigns at a single weird location. It suits players who improvise from atmospheric prompts and lean into absurd moments instead of optimizing their characters.
Highlights	Challenges, combats, and conversations all run on the same Conflict framework, so a group learns one procedure for every kind of scene. When every die in a multi-die roll shows the same number, the Twist table adds an unexpected complication or benefit. Five Roles each supply a curated set of Abilities and Traumas, so every Agent has a distinct toolkit for helping allies and harming threats.	Sanity and Absurdity move in opposite directions, so the dark humor that raises Absurdity becomes a resource you spend to reroll failures or cancel Sanity loss. The Overnight Manager plays the gas station itself as the lead character, voicing its moods and the cryptic calls from its unseen Owners as a presence the table improvises around. Reaching 5 Absurdity unlocks Strange Abilities bought with advancement, once-per-session quirks the station leaves on you rather than powers you earn.
Considerations	Every Agent works for Immunity, so a campaign built around a different premise needs reskinning. The first Wound adds -1 to rolls, the second adds -1d12, and a third leaves an Agent Dying and triggers a Death Roll. Investigations use general Challenge Counters rather than a clue or deduction subsystem, leaving evidence details to the Jerry Master.	The Overnight Manager sets every Target Number outside a few fixed tables and decides each Absurdity award, so difficulty and pacing rest on table judgment. Combat is deliberately thin: flat weapon damage, one primary and one minor action per turn, and only basic move-and-cover positioning rather than a tactical grid. Rituals, Strange Abilities, and backgrounds come as a handful of examples the book openly tells you to expand on yourself.