@Shorticus Appreciate the honest and direct feedback. I'll take a look at games using the systems you've mentioned.
Tbh, at first I was going to just use a 1d6 system to keep things really simple, but maybe I can find other things I wanna use.
Thanks again!
Yeah, other systems will have a ton of cool ideas to teach you. For instance...
For instance, Dungeon World and Mouse Guard both have a great XP system in which
both success and failure gives you XP. Heck, to advance in Mouse Guard you
have to fail at your task. It's really neat, and it means it's easy to become a novice in a skill but difficult to become a master in it. Dungeon World also rewards XP for achieving certain goals, such as "Did you find great treasure this session?" and "Did you defeat a great evil?" It even sets up a way for roleplaying XP to be earned: through bonds you have with other player characters.
If you play D&D "right," you'll learn that XP isn't rewarded specifically for killing monsters. It's rewarded for defeating an encounter. That means subduing the enemy, or trapping them, or evading them in some situations... You don't have to be a murderhobo to get XP is the point. D&D players just ignore that.
The basic Shadowrun system is really simple to learn: you get a bunch of dice from adding your attribute (like Strength or Agility) and your skill (like acrobatics or how well you fight with swords). Roll 'em out, take the number of successes you get (a result of 5 or 6), boom. It's only once you start adding all the other rules that Shadowrun gets complicated.
Fantasy Age has
one of the coolest mechanics to simulate cool moves in combat. Let me repeat that:
this thing I'm about to describe is really cool. It's a 3d6 system where 1 of the dice you roll is not the same color as the others. When you get doubles on any two of the dice, you get a number of "stunt points" based on whatever number is on your off-colored dice. So, if you roll a 4, 4, and a 6 (with one of the 4's being your off-color dice), you get 4 stunt points to spend on maneuvers in combat. This could mean dealing extra damage, getting an extra attack, penetrating armor, knocking an enemy down or upwards or away, disarming them... Etc. The same rules apply to social encounters and to exploration, so you can do cool things in
pretty much any scene. And if you're exploring and suddenly you find a monster, you can use your stunt points (if it's still the same scene, if the GM allows) on combat maneuvers rather than exploration ones.
Observing the pitfalls of games is important to design, too. For instance, D&D 3.5 suffers from the pitfall of having TOO MUCH STUFF. God dangit, you can't sit down at a table without having a dozen books dropped next to you. The player's handbook is really simple (if unbalanced) and playing with JUST the player's handbook honestly offers you a much better experience than allowing every darned splatbook in the game. Shadowrun is just way too complicated thanks to all the fiddly bits it adds. Savage Worlds tries to be a game that works for "any genre" but you need to work hard to adapt it to whatever genre you want, and I do mean HARD. Fate and Fate Accelerated sometimes leave you wondering "Okay, how hurt is my guy ACTUALLY and should he be dead yet?" because they don't use numbers to represent damage.
And can we get some rulebooks and documents for games that are actually well organized for once?!
Whew. Sorry. Got a bit excited with that last paragraph.
Point being: there's a lot of cool mechanics you can cherry pick from games, and there's a lot of problems you can observe and do your damnedest to avoid once you've actually played them.
EDIT:
another system we've heard is quite adaptable is GURPS.
I've heard that, too, and have heard a lot of great things. However, I've never actually played it.
It's a funny system, though. I hear you can pretty much make ANY character concept with it, including a limbless torso that flops about.
