With a lot of games, ease of use is a matter of simple practice. Play it or run it enough and it becomes second nature.But in terms of "pick up and play" capability, I would lean towards Fate.
Once we had used Microscope to build up an optimistic apocalypse, I started having ideas for scenarios at various points along the timeline. One idea, early in the apocalypse, was clearly a one-shot. It would be highly compressed and ideally played through in a single session.
So as I began casting my mind out to decide what system to use, I knew I wanted something that didn't take a lot of effort to run. I didn't want the players to spend 2 hours building characters for a scenario that would play out over about the same span of time.
I also wanted something that would be fairly easy to run. Easy to stat NPCs or opposition. Lots of room for player solutions and improv.
I kept gravitating towards Fate.
Though it did present me with a problem and an opportunity. Since death is off the table in Fate by default, that meant that survival was not a viable stake for the scenario. They may be concerned with death in character, but it's not something that I could realistically threaten them with via the mechanics of the game.
So then I had to come up with something else that I could make the stake of the scenario: The success or failure at the climax that determines the outcome. And that's where Fate came to my rescue. With concepts like "plot stress tracks" and "social maps" from various Fate implementations, it's very easy to establish alternative stakes and give them mechanical support.
That allowed me to come up with a scenario that had real tension and risk, but also touches on the eventual optimism that comes out of the other side of the apocalypse.
(I haven't run this scenario yet, so no spoilers. But I am really looking forward to this.)
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