Mutant: Year Zero vs Outrunners
Compare Mutant: Year Zero and Outrunners side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.
| Mutant: Year Zero | Outrunners | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Post-Apocalyptic | Horror, Cyberpunk, Fantasy |
| Tags | Sandbox, Survival, Exploration, Character-Driven, Worldbuilding, Narrative | Rules-Light, One-Shot Friendly, Narrative, Fiction-First, Collaborative, Survival, Atmospheric, Character-Driven, Worldbuilding, Strong GM Support |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a pool of d6s (attribute + skill + gear). Each 6 is a success; one success is enough. You can push your roll to reroll failures, but 1s on attribute dice cause trauma and 1s on gear dice cause damage to equipment. Mutations cost Mutation Points and can misfire with unpredictable side effects. | Each character assigns one die from a d20, d12, d10, d8, d6, and d4 set across six stats, then rolls the relevant stat's die against a difficulty number; if half that die's maximum already meets the DC, the action succeeds without a roll. Rolling a die's maximum value without beating the DC triggers a Twist of Fate, exploding up to the next larger die. Fate Points, earned mainly by failing rolls, are spent to reroll, sway outcomes, or invoke the Hands of Fate at a narrative cost. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d4–d20 |
| Complexity | Medium | Low |
| Availability | Free quickstart | Free quickstart |
| Runnability | 5 of 5 book tools | 4 of 5 book tools |
| License | Proprietary | ORC 1.0 (free SRD) |
| Third-Party Publishing | Not yet researched | Not yet researched |
| Publisher | Free League Publishing | Einsol's Razor |
| Year | 2014 | 2025 |
| Languages | English | English |
| Best For | Post-apocalyptic campaigns where mutant survivors explore a deadly Zone, build up their home settlement, and search for the mythical Eden: with the Year Zero Engine that spawned a family of games. | Groups who want a rules-light, emotionally charged one-shot or short campaign about doomed characters racing to outrun a foreseen death, and GMs who want a portable fate-and-survival horror premise they can drop into almost any setting with little prep. |
| Highlights | Push mechanic creates tough choices, Ark development gives players a shared home to build, Zone exploration is tense and rewarding, eight distinctive roles with built-in relationships and dreams, launched the Year Zero Engine family | Every character begins with a prophesied glimpse of their own death, which seeds concrete clues into the story and ties each session's tension to a deadline the player already knows is coming. Rolling a stat die's maximum without meeting the difficulty explodes it up to the next larger die, turning desperate long shots into escalating last-second reversals rather than flat failures. Fate Points are earned mainly by failing rolls and then spent to reroll, sway outcomes, or invoke the Hands of Fate, so setbacks bankroll later comebacks and every intervention carries a narrative cost. |
| Considerations | Mutation randomness can frustrate planners, metaplot requires significant GM commitment, Ark development bookkeeping adds between-session overhead, Zone travel can feel repetitive without varied encounters | The default Adamah setting is sketched in only a few pages and the game expects the table to invent most of the world at session zero, so groups wanting a prepared, detailed setting must supply it themselves. Equipment grants only narrative permission rather than mechanical bonuses, so players who enjoy itemization or tactical loadouts will find nothing to optimize. The foreseen-death premise is built to resolve at the Vision's deadline, making the game strongest as a one-shot or short arc and harder to sustain across a long, open-ended campaign. |