Odd Hours vs The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Compare Odd Hours and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, and more.

	Odd Hours	The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Genre	Horror, Modern	Historical, Fantasy
Tags	Fear & Stress Mechanics, Comedy, Gonzo, Weird, Rules-Light, Random Tables, One-Shot Friendly	GM-Less, Diceless, Comedy, Narrative, Improvisation, Rules-Light, Gonzo, Beginner-Friendly, One-Shot Friendly, Short Sessions
Core Mechanic	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.	There are no dice. Each player starts with a purse of coins equal to the number of players, or five each with fewer than five players. In turn, a player tells a first-person tale of about five minutes on a subject another player names just before it starts. A listener with a coin may interrupt by staking one coin on an objection. The teller either keeps the coin and works the objection into the story, or pushes it back with a coin of their own. A refused objection normally goes back and forth, one coin and one insult at a time, until one side backs down and takes the pile. A teller who backs down must then use the objection. After everyone has told a story, each player gives their whole remaining purse to the story they liked best, never their own, and the largest pile wins.
Dice	2d6	Diceless
Complexity	Low	Very Low
Availability	Free core rules	Paid
Runnability	4 of 5 book tools	2 of 5 book tools
License	Proprietary	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	No verified route found
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Publisher	Route 9 Games	Fantasy Flight Games
Year	2026	2016
Languages	English	English, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish
Best For	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.	Groups who want a short, GM-less party game of competitive boasting that needs only a handful of coins and quick wits, including tables new to roleplaying.
Highlights	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.	Objections are wagers, so a sharp teller invites interruptions that can be woven in and pockets each accepted stake. Appendix One gives 186 ready-made story subjects that a player can hand to the next teller. Two coin-free versions for online play let the game run asynchronously over email or a forum, or live in text chat.
Considerations	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.	A storyteller normally improvises a tale of around five minutes on a subject named moments before, which can put hesitant players on the spot. There are no advancement or campaign rules, so play suits one-off evenings rather than long campaigns. The core game assumes drinks are flowing, and a player who declines to tell a story must buy the company a round.