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People actually used those rules? My group back in the day found them arbitrary and tiresome -- do you really want to have to stop and roll a save for every single piece of gear every time you get hit with a lightning bolt or dragon breath? -- and never bothered with them.

These days, I find it less interesting to play a character who's a platform for magic items. Yeah, it's cool to have a magic sword that can strike someone's head off ... but only if you get very lucky with the dice, and anyone with even a single level of fighter can pick up the same sword and do...

Tenra Bansho Zero has a "reverse death spiral" damage mechanic where you get stronger as you take more damage in a fight. It's only temporary bonuses rather than actual leveling up, though.

The older I get, the less interest I have in the super-timid, poke-everything-with-a-10'-pole style of play -- on both sides of the DM screen. It especially annoys me when this attitude creeps from dungeon crawling into other genres. I've had players in superhero games worry endlessly about...

There's nothing about Cortex Prime that requires an elaborate backstory, unless you consider an "elaborate backstory" to be anything more than writing down class and race on your character sheet. All you need to know is what your character's Traits are. Similarly, consider Fate. All you have to...

There's also a PFS adventure for 2E, The Flooded King's Court, where the PCs end up putting on a play to impress a goblin king.

The 3.5E rule was a bit less forgiving: projectiles that hit were always considered destroyed, while projectiles that missed had, as noted, a 50% chance of being destroyed. See here. Of course, that makes ammunition bookkeeping even more tiresome, since you have to keep track of hits and misses...

A few more of my favorite : Fellowship is a game about a little band of heroes going on a quest to defeat the evil Overlord, just like in those books with the rings. Shared world-building is expected; if you're playing the Elf, for instance, you're the one who decides what elves are like and...

Has anyone mentioned City of Mist yet? It's kind of a cross between urban fantasy and superheroes that reminds me of Matt Wagner's Mage comics.

Because they annoy old-schoolers who think the fantasy genre stopped in 1989.

See, that just proves how well the scrolls work. I can also, if you like, sell you this rock that keeps tigers away.

Blades in the Dark, although it's meant for a specific kind of fantasy -- criminals in a fantasy city, rather than adventurers going down into dungeons. And yeah, 13th Age.

/ "I don't want to start the edition wars again, but..." // immediately repeats all the same crap we've been hearing since 2008

Hard pass. I don't particularly like D&D-variant games that boil classes down until barely anything is left.

I do, and I envy your ignorance.

Oh, hey, is it 2009 again?

To note one other diceless game, Nobilis works on the same system: players have a limited fund of Miracle Points, and an important part of gameplay involves deciding when to spend your MPs for extra effects or to overpower your enemies' attempts. Of course, you can still play the game without...

A couple of things to consider: - Hope slowly declining over the character's lifetime, rather than constantly being topped up, is absolutely working as intended. Even if a character survives the other dangers of adventuring, he or she will eventually get too worn down (i.e. too much Shadow...

I should also have mentioned that there's a new edition coming out soon, using a somewhat different system (the older edition uses playing cards, the newer one will be dice-based). The publisher has made a preview edition available here.

What you want is Starchildren: Velvet Generation, a game set in a fascist-dominated future where the Ministries of Culture dictate what kinds of art and music are allowed, and the PCs are underground musicians sparking revolution with their music. As you might guess, it's heavily influenced by...