I'm sad that none of my favorites made it into the top 10. I guess my tastes have evolved too much away from the mainstream in the direction of story games..
Since Avatar Legends, The One Ring 2E, and Cy_Borg were already mentioned, here are my nominations:
The Wildsea RPG by Ray Chou (was supposed to release this year but got delayed)
Salvage Union by Leyline Press (delivery is December 2022, but hopefully still counts)
Have you taken a look at Into the Unknown? It's a really cool OSR-like game built on 5e mechanics Into the Unknown - Book 1: Characters - O5R Games | Into the Unknown | DriveThruRPG.com
I like the idea since it allows for more diverse character concept (the charismatic barbarian, the strong monk, the intelligent fighter, ...) without making you feel like you're not making full use of your class abilities. It also mostly solves the problem of racial stat bonuses pushing players...
Here are mine:
Berserker: The exhaustion caused by Frenzy is removed by a short rest.
(rationale: current version is needlessly punishing, but removing it entirely also gets rid of the flavor.)
Champion: Your maximum hit points are increased by 1 per level. In addition, Remarkable Athlete...
This actually sound really close to what D&D already provides. The Wheel of Time is one of the few settings where all the high-level magic of D&D doesn't feel out of place at all (except perhaps for resurrection magic). This makes me wonder how feasible it would be to reflavour a few aspects of...
Unearthed Arcana has an option that seems to be intended to fix the math of 4E monk:
It's a bit boring as far as fixes go, but it does help a lot with keeping up the damage compared to other monks.
Alternatively, my favorite "simple" fix is to simply reduce the cost of all elemental abilities...
Very cool idea, though I'd allow players to use point buy with a greatly reduced total (say 9 points instead of the usual 27) to allow for some more diversity at level 1. Another idea to reinforce the zero-to-hero feeling would be to let the maximum for each ability score scale with level as...
There's a cool supplement on the DM's guild that gives sidekick statblocks for all kinds of animals: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/293883/Animal-Sidekicks I'm hoping to use it in one of my games in the future.
It's unlikely you'll find any good creatures in Avernus. It is one of the nine layers of hell, after all.
Or that was my first thought upon reading the title of this thread, at least.
I believe this would be very exploitable as a source of temporary HP before the start of a battle, especially when combined with efficient out-of-combat healing such as healing spirit, prayer of healing, goodberry, or even just hit dice. If you intend it to be used as a source of in-combat...