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It's not particularly difficult once you wrap your head around it, but then you can say the same thing about building a character in Champions, which to me has always felt like way too much work. I liked DC Heroes back in the 90s, but again, I don't think it holds up particularly well today...

From what I have seen, teams of mixed-rank characters don't work very well. If you want to do Black Widow teaming up with Thor and Iron Man, the GM is going to have to give Black Widow opponents and challenges specifically tailored to her, and excuses for why the thunder god and the...

The 13th Age monk is built along those lines; each form gives you three increasingly powerful attacks (opening, flow, and finishing), which are intended to be used in sequence.

In 5E, the mundane fighter can kill a giant by, essentially, sticking it repeatedly in the shin with a needle, but cannot trip the giant or force it to move. Realism!

The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane.

As someone who's run 13th Age extensively, I can tell you it satisfies point 4; coming up with stats for interesting monsters and leveling them up and down for whatever kind of challenge you want to present is a snap. And there are plenty of fun adventures; Eyes of the Stone Thief deserves all...

Especially since John W. Campbell, one of the most influential editors/publishers in Golden Age SF, was an eager promoter of psi "science' and in fact coined the word "psionics."

I don't think Eddings's style has aged particularly well, and his personal history has cast a pall over his books. (See also: Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey.) Anyway, another vote for Lord of the Rings.

A hundred pages of spells (and dozens more spells in every supplement), and the majority of them are so situational or so poorly designed that they will almost never be used.

For recent(ish) media about pirates, there's also One Piece. Which, again, is not about robbing ships, it's about roaming the seas in search of adventure.

Or the Director's Cut system (Broken Compass, Household, Outgunned), where you can be rolling up to 9d6 but you're looking for sets of the same number instead of adding them up.

I get intensely bored, both as a DM and a player, by the constant stream of repetitive actions you get in a dungeon: listening at doors, checking for traps, looking for secret doors. It slows play to a, well, crawl.

13th Age barbarians roll two dice to hit while raging, and if both dice come up 11+ and at least one is a hit, it's automatically a critical. How much simpler can you get than that?

Glantri City, from Mystara, is also a canal city and has its own setting book.

Besides 4E, there's Iron Heroes, Book of Nine Swords, Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Path of War, Spheres of War, Level Up, and even BECMI's Weapon Mastery rules ... there's been a ton of work done in creating interesting, capable martial characters in the d20 chassis, and the 5E designers drew on...

I guess I must have hallucinated Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, Operator #5, Raffles, Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain, Tom Swift, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Flash Gordon, Scarlet O'Neil, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, Zorro, Captain Future, Sir Percy Blakeney, John Carter, G-8, and all the other...

I'm not sure Blades in the Dark is the best example of a "bespoke" system, given how many Forged in the Dark games have been spun off it. And I've long since stopped believing D&D is a "generic" or even "big tent" system. I've seen too many fantasy concepts ruined because the DM or designer...

In nearly 44 years of playing RPGs, I cannot remember ever seeing a player cheat, unless you consider juvenile nonsense like making up deliberately overpowered classes back in the 1E days cheating. And the definition of "exploit" is too vague. For some people, if I decide that I want my...

The Principalities of Glantri (in D&D's Known World) had canals patrolled by water-elemental-powered boats with wands of magic missiles mounted on their bows. Glantri City also minted coins with continual light cast on them. None of this making-magic-into-technology approach is in any way new...

If you're thinking of concentration as a spell duration, see the Sustain a Spell action. It's important to note that in PF2, just getting hit does not make it impossible to Cast a Spell, Sustain a Spell, or do other actions with the Concentrate trait (unless you have an ability that says you...