So, this may feel like a strange thread, but I hope people will bear with me.
I have been playing and DM'ing "Dungeons & Dragons" since the early-80s, and I am feeling more and more like there is no place in the hobby where I truly "fit" anymore. I grew up with the mechanical simplicity of B/X D&D, starting with the 1980 B/X Boxed sets supplemented by an AD&D Monster Manual. We quickly abandoned "race as class" and cherry-picked rules from the hardcover books (I read them all, and still have my Dungeoneer and Wilderness Survival Guides, but that basic game continued. I had some enduring campaigns as 1st-Edition turned to 2nd, and I kept playing D&D, but I always longed for a better skill system; as the combination of "wing it" and Nonweapon Proficiencies never quite cut it for me.
When 3e dropped, I loved it at first, but the longer I played, the more something became clear to me. Dungeons & Dragons had become more "over-the-top fantastical" than I liked. Cook and Tweet basically had turned the default setting of Dungeons & Dragons into a high-magic Monty Haul campaign. The magic system still grated and the constant embrace of making characters MORE magical was taking it further from the kind of fantasy stories I want to tell.
I grew up on Arthurian legends, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan, and a bunch of other "Sword & Sorcery" stuff. I didn't want my fantasy game to let me play the medieval equivalent of the X-Men, where every character has magical powers. I've thought about going back to the OSR, but the truth is that I want a game that has more rules guidance than those games offer. I just don't want one where every character can teleport, cast spells, and all of the other high-magic shenanigans that D&D embraces from the get-go.
The 5.24e embrace of this flavor has me turned off more than anything else. But I don't see a home for myself. Part of me wants to go backwards, but OSR type games are usually either too lethal (or grim-dark), too enamored of outdated game mechanics (OSE), or they're overly enamored with tables and whacky subsystems (looking at you DCC). I want there to be more fun combat options, but I don't want a lot of fiddly rules that will slow the game down. I see promise in something like DCC's "Mighty Deeds of Arms," or DMScotty's "Luck Dice" (or Professor DM's "Deathbringer Dice") or whatever you want to call them. I see some fun sub-systems in DC20, but I also see it getting way too fiddly.
Shadowdark speaks to my tastes a little (I love "roll to cast"), but I'd have to houserule some additions and alterations to it to really get the game I want. There's some other heavily house-ruled versions of OSR or "simplified 5e" that work for me, but they aren't there. But while I love the d20 resolution mechanic, I may need to walk away from a D&D that is becoming increasingly fantastical. And I don't know where to go.
Sorry for the wall of text, but is anybody else in this boat?
