FATE vs SW vs Cinematic Unisystem

Have you considered GURPS?

You might also want to try PbtA

>>50645597
FATE is a bit crunchy and narrativist; as in, the players have many tools to control the narrative beyond the capabilities of their characters. It takes some time for the people playing to get used to how aspects work, invokes/compels/etc. but it's smooth sailing from there. You are probably best off looking into one of the systems that are based on FATE but advanced it a bit, like Atomic Robo. There's also FAE (FATE Accelerated), which is a bit simpler, which I quite like but needs a bit of tinkering with its approaches.

SW is mostly trying to be a medium crunch system that's fast and fun to play. It's a bit random (which is a source of fun for some, admittedly). Combat relies a lot on getting raises/not getting hit with raises, and your fate point equivalent (bennies) acts as your secondary HP, which means that the GM handing them out at the correct pace is kinda really important.

I have no experience with Cinematic Unisystem.

I have one more generic game to add to the pile; if your group likes tactical combat games, Strike! is a really simple universal system with a lot of focus on that. Out of combat it's sorta FATE-lite. I like it a lot and am probably going to run a game in it next week.

>>50645597

CineUni is probably the crunchiest out of all the games you're describing, but it does a good job balancing characters who are competent and don't need as much assistance from plot armor with weak characters who live and die on metacurrency. Part of this is in how CineUni makes each of the two types dependent on each other in order to survive.

It is generally less crunchy than normal Unisystem, but still has some elements that require a bit of pre-calculation, in particular the results of the various melee attacks. Even the potential damage of simple punches and kicks are derived from a combination of your stats, and it's easier to just have those all figured out for the character in advance. This makes the difficulty of play front-loaded into character creation in a manner similar to more complicated point-buy games, but once players are past that hurdle it's pretty easy to use.

Note my experience with CineUni comes largely from the Buffy and Angel RPGs, which may be skewing how I view the system. I'm unfamiliar with any other versions out there.

>>50646684
I considered STRIKE! but I'm looking for something that has very simple combat mechanics and it's for that reason that I'm leaning towards FAE, though I'm having trouble conceptualizing how combate would work in FAE...

>>50646834
I looked into Cinematic Unisystem because I heard it was so easy to use but the combat damage mechanics have me a bit worried. I heard it requires a lot of math in the calculations and I'm looking for something really fast in practice.

File: Olaf-Vs-The-Orcs.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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>>50647665
Here, have an example.

>>50647870

OP here, thanks for that link, I think I've read over it before.

I also just found this one right now, it plays out the final NYC battle from avengers as if all the PC's are the heroes, Loki is the big bad, and the Chitauri and NYC itself are also characters.
http://station53.blogspot.ca/2014/07/avengers-accelerated-invasion-begins.html?m=1

The Cypher System is quite rules lite and has some interesting eating designs.

>>50647665
>but I'm looking for something that has very simple combat mechanics
Strike! combat is about on par with SW in simplicity; probably simpler, overall.

>>50647665

What I'd recommend if you want to take the time to do it is to make a really basic spreadsheet which calculates all the values for you automatically. You can do that for just the really basic moves or for everything if you want to be thorough. Then you can plug in the necessary numbers for your PCs and they're ready to be copied for later use.

I didn't do that for my own campaign, but my players at the time were careful enough to want to record that information themselves. We found it generally made combat quite a bit faster since damage was always based on those fixed numbers, increased by your level of success on the attack roll. So a player could just say "I'm swinging my axe," get the results of their roll, and immediately know damage inflicted without needing any other steps. As I said, it's front-loaded, but it's one of the few systems I've played where all the front-loading made actual play noticeably faster.

File: Mini_Six_Bare_Bones_Edition.pdf (1B, 486x500px)

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Mini Six is a pretty good generic game that's light on crunch. It's a dice pool game, but the inclusion of the wild die mixes things up a little. Combat is also real simple, though it might take a few tries for players to grok the fact that they can take multiple actions.