My top recommendations based on the OP would be 3rd ed with the Epic 6 variant, or to keep poking through the OSR for more options, and be ready to house-rule a little. Which is what a lot of us wind up doing.
@JohnSnow you said you like roll to cast, right? Have you looked at Low Fantasy Gaming, from Pickpocket Press? They have a
free edition on their website. It seems like it checks off most or all of the boxes you've described. It's built off a quasi-3E chassis with lower magic and roll to cast.
From what I've read of it, I think Worlds Without Number might also suit you, but I have less personal experience with it.
Me too. Sounds like we have similar tastes
The solution that works for me is:
- 3.5e
- Core rules. PHB, DMG, and monster books. Anything else needs DM approval.
- A house rule is a Ranger variant without spellcasting and with favored terrain (from PF1) rather than favored enemy
- Greyhawk setting, which defaults to lower magic and lower levels than Forgotten Realms
- Mostly 1e & BECMI adventures, or others with that feel, including Raging Swan Press, Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated, Paizo, and even Harn and Ice MERP. Oh yeah - I use “Song of Ice & Fire” rpg too. Surely JohnSnow uses it?
- Ignore wealth by level.
- Stop at “mid” levels. My 6-8th level group is talking about retiring the PC’s to start over. My 6-10th level group thinks of themselves as high level.
Ryan Dancey described it as having 4 divisions: gritty fantasy, heroic fantasy, wuxia, and superheroes, and I found that to be eminently true, and even largely had been true in Advanced D&D. Problem was, those should be FOUR DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT GAMES, not one game that always does them all. 3E got worse and worse for me as PC levels got higher, and after running just one campaign up to 20th level and then being given the travesty of 4E as the Next Big Thing in D&D, I gave up on 3E. I went back to 1E, but later found the E6 approach to 3E. It intentionally limits itself to that first division of Gritty Fantasy and just barely crosses into Heroic Fantasy, but ABSOLUTELY AVOIDS the crap of D&D becoming Wuxia and Superheroes. I really feel that E6 identified and solved the issues that I had with 3E.
To be fair to WotC, I think they were responding to the market. D&D has always had the issue that it seems like a vanishingly small minority of players actually want to transition to domain-level play at high level, and centering the campaign on politics and war. Most want to keep adventuring.
I agree that limiting our games to lower levels or imposing drastically-slowed advancement a la Epic 6 is normally the necessary approach for players who want to keep their D&D from becoming super-heroic (which it officially was at 8th level, in OD&D and in AD&D, per Gary.
) Two of the games I've had the most interest in, in recent years, cap advancement at 9th or 10th level (5 Torches Deep and The Nightmares Underneath).
That problem was overwhelmingly the higher level magic. It was just TOO MUCH. The vibe I wanted from D&D was at best the Heroic Fantasy, and the higher that spells and general magic got, the more that D&D FELL APART and became something I didn't want. And 1E/2E D&D suffered the same problems, just to a slightly lesser degree. I don't think it was anything like deliberate sabotage, but 3E designers failed to see that it WAS a problem in 1E/2E that should have been reduced/eliminated, and then just went and made it worse instead.
I blame WotC. They want to have only ONE SIZE FITS ALL - the one size that they want to sell. But I don't fit that anymore. My size is 1E, or maybe 2E, or 3E following E6 guidelines, but WotC doesn't want me or anyone else to have anything like that. They want to sell me 5E, but I don't FIT 5E's Unitard. I wear it if I have to, but it's not comfortable. Yet everybody else seems to like Unitard Gaming. When I ask if anyone wants to try on another size, or designer, their closets only seem to be WotC Unitards. The percentage of NON-5E ongoing gaming out there is insignificant compared to 5E.
Things will change, for better or worse (eventually), but what it means right now is that I don't have a game that fits ME.
It's challenging. I can enjoy the higher-power games at times, but my tastes are generally a bit more aligned with yours. Thankfully we do have a wealth of options nowadays, both in the plethora of D&D variants and in our ability to house rule them.
