I'm throwing my hat in for Quest, for something that still has the "vibe" of 5e (for lack of a better word) while being dead-simple at the table and very... chill? The digital edition is free. Highlights include:

• Characters don't really get their own stats, they're defined entirely by the character abilities their classes get, but those abilities manage to not feel like they restrict what other people can do.

• D20 resolution, "degrees of success" built in as an assumption.

• It really warms my twee hippie heart that the last paragraph in the book is a happily ever after with a lost loved one granted by a "wish locket". If you ask it for anything else it's a monkey's paw, but it'll grant a wish like that no questions asked. I'm not sure why it gets me so emotional but it does, bookending the rulebook with it is perfect.

Hmm, IMO using dice for something like this is where I'd start to think in "Kriegspiel" terms- Use the dice to jumpstart ideas but don't let yourself be beholden to them. It can be helpful if you're not very good at being creative in the moment.

I'm curious, do you have any specific examples of rules that specifically work well in a steampunk setting? I always struggle to figure out what people are talking about when they say stuff like that.

Feels like it should spells should only trigger Spell Absorption if the person on the receiving end is the person the spell was "shot" at. I get the logic behind saying that the player is the ultimate target of Absorb Magicka but I imagine it's going against most people's intuition, and for that I'd say it should be revised.

Since most of them are hard to read on a cheap e-reader

This right here is the actual problem. Everyone's got the text but no one makes Epubs because it's easier to just release the PDF you made for whoever printed the book.

There are multiple.

As someone who also sucks at the "lovable characters" thing this is a nice set of ideas. Particularly avoiding names- it's a weird idea until you realize that 99% of the time no one cares by the next session. The only time I think names are useful is if it's hard to refer to them otherwise, like "the brother of the chick that Strahd keeps chasing". I suppose under your habits that NPC probably wouldn't exist, actually.

Followers giving PCs explicitly bad suggestions is actually a SUPER good idea. Make your players feel like they're making decisions for themselves without necessarily realizing that you're steering them.

Contacts existing on a "Shrodinger's Cat" basis, yeah, I'm stealing that. Mythras is very interested in a character's relationships to the point of having tables to figure out how many [X relationship] you have, which slots into this idea perfectly. Since that includes rivals, maybe rivals are contacts that the GM reserves the right to introduce. Heck, even family members could be handled that way, in the sense that players seriously don't need to come up with their whole family tree which is kinda what Mythras wants of them. It only comes up if it comes up. Me just knowing that they've got a cousin on their Dad's side is ammunition for me to make interesting scenarios happen, and if I want to use that info, then we can come up with something.

If only :D
I think the biggest problem with Mythras as-written in the book is that stat allocation is super tedious on top of everything else the core book suggests you come up with at character creation. The Mythras Companion and lot of systems derived from Mythras like Odd Soot have come up with the idea of giving people "blocks of points" to allocate, so you're not doing nearly as much bean counting.

Ooh, this is a fun idea. Tools like this are some of the best examples of limitation sparking creativity. Plus now I'm seeing all your other projects, and they're all looking genuinely helpful.

I've been thinking about doing this in Mythras. My initial idea to introduce the game, assuming that the players are antsy to fight something, is to toss them right in a coliseum because all you need is your primary stats and a "combat style". They can grab what weapons they want, that's their combat style, go earn your reduced jail sentence. Once you're out we can talk about what you're doing for work.

I don't know... this sounds like just making a game about everyday life, which is pretty boring.

I just don't get it. We have a bunch of bottles specifically for carrying around water and yet my dad just keeps buying them and sticking them in his truck.

Jeraboa hasn't been working on Beehaw for me due to Beehaw sticking to a slightly outdated version of Lemmy, I'm using Connect for Lemmy and it's pretty good.

Honestly, I do think early D&D games kinda show the way to some extent. Large groups made sense when games were games were more procedural, with a designated map-maker, a designated "caller" who settled on final decisions, a designated inventory tracker. Combat that makes people want to avoid it more often than not, morale rolls. The very episodic nature of adventuring vs. modern campaigns where every session is highly coupled probably helped too.

I think early first-person dungeon crawlers and JRPGs are closer to how "serious" AD&D groups actually ran things. Players literally glued to the hip and doing something more like piloting a multi-person mech than all trying to run around doing their own thing.

For me, it's Mythras, and it's Mythras because I can steal ideas from literally everything else as needed. It's easy to say "this game does everything I need" but in the case of Mythras, I see it as the sanest "base system" around, and it's structured in a way that actually lets me incorporate mechanics I like from elsewhere without any problems.

Mythras was originally RuneQuest 6e, but after the authors lost the right to use the RuneQuest name, they transformed it into a thoroughly generic game. It's really a toolset for making RPGs, like GURPS, but it provides way more sane defaults, is way less confusing (IMO) and doesn't do GURPS's "be universal by making a few hundred different sourcebooks" thing.

So at this point it's basically a fork of BRP (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, etc.), and personally I think it's a direct improvement over it.

I like that Mythras is heavily focused on everything making narrative sense. Something happens because it happens in-universe, no characters getting new magical abilities or "feats" that other people somehow can't do without them actually learning how to do those things in the story you're telling. But it manages to do that while still feeling like a traditional stat-y, game-y RPG, rather than an improvisational storytelling tool like a lot of other modern games.

I think BRP style skill resolution is good because it's boring. How good are you at Athletics? You've got 30 points in it, that's a 30% chance of success, straight-up. It's extremely clear. As a GM, I think it makes deciding the difficulty of checks (you're really modifying how many points the players have in that skill) very easy compared to other systems. d% for the win.

I think Mythras' combat system is the best in the industry, if you're looking for a game that avoids abstraction. I know exactly what a fight in Mythras looks like without having to ask players to "describe how they swing their sword" or whatever because it's mechanically telling you that already. There's no need to argue over what HP actually is or what really happens when a character misses. Mythras manages to do that without getting painfully slow, actually it feels faster than D&D combat, because most combat ends quickly. A defender can take advantage of an attacker's mistakes, getting stabbed is about as bad as you'd expect getting stabbed to be, and you can end up in states where someone should surrender after a single round or two. You're given tons of options in melee combat other than "I swing my sword" but they're gated by successful rolls, your equipment and the situation in a way that stops choice paralysis from happening too often. Your setting involves guns? Mythras Firearms has you covered and those are some of the best rules for modern combat I've seen, too.

Mythras is crunchy, but it's not meandering like D&D is. I don't feel like there's always another weird rule exception that people could end up arguing over on a YouTube video. You learn how to play the game and that's sort of just it! Mechanics all work similarly enough that I find them much easier to remember.

Mythras has rules for everything that matters. Wish you had more structure for social encounters rather than everything other than combat being delegated to a single skill check? The Mythras Companion has you covered (if the core book didn't already). Want your players to be part of a guild, religious organization, something that they'll advance through, rely upon and be answerable to? Mythras has a huge chapter Cults, Guilds and Organizations that provides more narrative (but still structured) ways to do something like a class system.

Speaking of, Mythras is classless, being BRP-based. As presented in the core rulebook your character is defined mainly by their culture and their profession, which I love. Characters actually come across as real people with significant lives outside of "adventuring" or whatever. It's a wonderful tool for introducing players to the world you're dropping them into. Being "good at fighting" isn't something that needs to come at the exclusion of being good at other things, not even being a magician of some kind, but you don't need to be good at fighting. "Combat styles" are an awesomely flexible way of handling it.

Magic is a totally optional part of Mythras, you super don't need any in your game for it to be fun, but damn does Mythras have magic rules. Actually, it has five magic systems and encourages you to heavily tailor them to your world. Those systems vary significantly in how much power they give your players.
Folk Magic is something you can give your players without worrying about balance much at all. It's all little domestic spells people might use to heat their home, or fix something that snapped apart.
Mysticism is "monk magic". It's themed around inner strength and includes lots of stat buffs, alongside abilities like wall climbing and fitting through impossible spaces. You could use mysticism to have whole campaigns of less "grounded" characters flinging giant swords around like Guts, if you wanted.
Animism is all about the spirit world. Want to play Supernatural as an RPG? you could do that with Animism, easily, although a lot of the chapter is about the shamanistic social structures that usually surround it as a practice.
Theism is what it sounds like, you're getting magic from a god or gods. This is the most conventionally balanced magic system in Mythras because it makes narrative sense for "more powerful" miracles to only be available to extremely faithful people, or people of a high rank in the local cult. The book Classic Fantasy, which is a Mythras rewrite of classic D&D, uses the mechanics of Theism as a basis for traditional D&D magic.
Sorcery is the magic system that leads people to call Mythras a Sword & Sorcery game, because yeah, the defaults Mythas gives you are perfect for that. Sorcery is the closest aesthetically to the classic D&D wizard trope, but it's terrifyingly powerful. You can "shape" sorcery spells to be more or less powerful at will, and combine them to do multiple things at once. Sorcery's primary "just hurt things" spell is called Wrack and unless you modify it as a GM, your player will be an armor-ignoring murder firehose for at least a full minute. Smart players who really dedicate themselves to sorcery could become immortal litches, or perform assassinations by calling down lightning bolts on people while they're sleeping (right from the comfort of their creepy wizard tower). I find it very cool how Sorcery lets things like that happen systemically, but it's also so overpowering that the developers warn you in the rulebook about it. Which... yeah.

Examples of the flexibility of Mythras include:
M-Space
Odd Soot
Perceforest
The Mythic Earth series
Destined (yes, it's a superhero RPG)
Classic Fantasy
Worlds United
After the Vampire Wars
Firocetta
And the list goes on.

This is a super cool concept.

I'm working on an unofficial Elder Scrolls sourcebook for Mythras and I'm putting a ton of fanwank into it, it's very much a passion project. More of a PGE1, r/teslore, AlinAll, Elder Kings III, Lady Nerevar's Nibenay fanon vibe than Bethesda's official stuff. (If you don't know what any of that means, it's more culturally nuanced and more weird sci-fantasy).

Although I don't think following thread specifically would be too interesting for The Elder Scrolls beyond a look at Ancestor Moth silk, because it's all too generic to matter, what I do want to do now is dive deep into how the hell Tamriel has so many books. Proper paper based books, seemingly, which is doubly weird because paper in the modern sense is actually pretty anachronistic. All we've really got is a few silly notes in ESO about an Orc blacksmith who learned how to "smash letters instead of swords". There's got to be a relatively huge bookbinding and printing industry.

I'm going to list off some free games (or at least System Resource Documents) you can check out, because the key to being a good TTRPG designer is recognizing just how broad the idea of a TTRPG is, and that a lot of your ideas have probably been done before-- maybe you just need to mash them together in a new way.

I'll say also, though, that some of the more radical ideas around unfortunately aren't free and it'd still be good to check some of them out eventually.

I'll also talk a little about different "categories" of RPGs that people use and some terminology because it could probably help map what's out there. Note that these aren't exclusive labels and many could apply to one game.

• Crunch:
  A game is "crunchy" when it has a lot of rules for specific things or the rules it does have inevitably involve some math. D&D 5e is generally considered a mid-crunch game that somehow manages to be more complex than most other mid-crunch games.

• "Traditional" / trad games:
  D&D 5e is more or less a "trad" game, but D&D 3.5e is, like, the trad game. Trad games are those that hew close to the conventions that D&D set, more or less.

• Simulationist / Gameist / Narriativist:
  This is an old trinity that's fallen out of favor now, but it's still a helpful idea sometimes. As usual, not exclusive categories.
  "Simulationist" games are those that try their best to closely simulate reality, or at least the reality the game is presenting. The mechanics exist to make sure that whatever happens makes sense within that world, and these games typically reject vague, "meta" mechanics like 5e's Inspiration.
  "Gameist" games are those that focus a whole lot on "being a game rather than just a story". It's a vague idea but they're typically concerned with balance between characters, and giving players interesting mechanical choices regardless of whether they really makes sense in the story you're telling. D&D 5e is a very "gameist" sort of game.
  "Narriativist" games are sort of a new-school idea. They're typically less concerned with mechanics that describe specific actions you're taking, and more concerned with pushing the story you're telling in an interesting direction, rather than relying on the GM to do that. You could say that this is the rulebook and the GM swapping roles, with the rulebook helping to set the pace, the tone, what characters are like, while the GM has more say in ruling exactly what players can do.

• OSR / NuSR:
  OSR stands for "Old School Rennisance" or Revival, depending on who you ask. In it's purest form, it's what it says on the tin. People wanted to bring back the attitude and, to some extent, the mechanics of early RPGs, typically the D&D edition we call B/X (Basic & Expert, essentially 1st Edition.) Most games that consider themselves "OSR" are actually compatible with content written for B/X D&D, a couple OSR games like Old School Essentials are literally rewrites of the B/X rulebooks. In short, OSR games are typically focused on player ingenuity over character stats, would rather put players in challenging situations than give them a power fantasy (sometimes falling into outright survival horror, although others are very whimsical), and try to keep their rulebooks relatively short and concise.
  "NuSR" is an acknowledgement that there's a new wave of games which definitely came out of the OSR scene, but have little to no resemblance to what the OSR was initially about. This is the realm of quirky Itch.IO RPGs about racoon pirates or reflections on what it's like to be transgender.

• Generic:
  In the context of TTRPGs, a "generic" game is one that strives to be setting-agnostic. A game you could use for your typical Tolkien fantasy thing, a cyberpunk dystopia, or courthouse drama all in one package. These games are super diverse, but they still tend to focus on a specific style of story or play. A lot of these games are considered "toolboxes" that give game masters the tools to basically build their own setting-specific system. I'm a big fan of generic games and I think a lot of people looking to make a ruleset could get a lot of mileage with the right generic RPG.

• Free Kriegspiel Revival:
  Kind of a small one, but basically Kriegspiel was one of the first games with a game master rolling dice, and a good "referee" was one who sometimes ignored the dice entirely because dice are stupid. FKR games are the most minimalist things you'll see in your life and it's surprising that there's even room for more than one.

• Game families:
  OK, I just made this up now, but there's a lot of "families" of TTRPGs. D&D and all of the games obviously based off of it are the biggest, but there's also probably a hundred Basic Role Playing (BRP)-based games, hundreds of Powered By The Apocalypse (PbtA) / Forged in the Dark (FitD) games, FUDGE / FATE have quite a few games built off of them, almost certainly others I'm not thinking of right now.

Free stuff:

Ironsworn (Ironsworn's core rulebook is free. It's designed to be played solo, so you should probably check this one out!)
Forge Engine, a seemingly underrated generic game.
Roll for Shoes (A teeny-tiny Free Kriegspiel Revival game)
Worlds Without Number (Somewhere between a trad game and nuSR, famous for having really helpful tools for GMs.)
Stars Without Number, it's sci-fi system game.
Rowan, Rook & Deckard's one-page games (When people say NuSR this is what they mean.)
FATE SRD (FATE is the narriativist system, once described as the best game people rightfully don't play. The rules aren't too complex but somehow confusing.)
Basic Role Playing SRD (BRP is a generic system built off of one of D&D's first rivals, RuneQuest, the game Call of Cthulhu is also based on it. It's generally considered simulationist.)
Mythras: Imperative (Mythras is another game built off of BRP, but it's generic like BRP is, and really more like an evolution of it. Mythras is my favorite RPG of all time. This free version is alright but a little confusing because of missing rules.)
Delta Green: Need to Know (ALSO BRP-based, it's Call of Cthulhu set a century later.)
Risus: The Anything RPG (This one's a lot of fun for very goofy games.)
Basic Fantasy (One of the original OSR games. Totally open-source. I'm making an EPUB of the current rulebook!)
Apocalypse World (The game that started the label "Powered by the Apocalypse". The other the narriativist system, if you can really call PbtA a "system" rather than a grab-bag of philosophical ideas about RPGs.)
Blades in the Dark SRD (Kind of a "powered by the apocalypse" game, but Blades in the Dark did enough cool stuff to get it's own label for games based off of it, "Forged in the Dark".)
Gumshoe SRD And the official version here. (A game built entirely for mystery-solving. Very good at it's job.)
Quest (Quest is sort of like if you took D&D 5e, made it extremely cozy, and took all the math out. I love it, personally.)
Archive of Nethys' Pathfinder 2e site (pretty much lets you learn how to play PF2E for completely free, not that you'd probably want to.)
Cairn (A great example of the more minimalist, modern OSR scene.)
Zafir (Bids itself as a "tactical RPG", so lots of combat like 5e and Pathfinder.)
Lightmaster, (A free sci-fantasy clone of the legendary, famously crunchy Rollmaster.)
The Void (Apparently a "Lovecraftian hard sci-fi horror setting" which I haven't seen much in the TTRPG world. Pretty cool.)
Stardrifter (Scroll to the bottom. Dude wrote a bunch of stories and made a space opera RPG based off of them!)

I like stuff like this. A lot of games seem to try extrapolating their smaller-scale movement stats out to long-term travel and at that point it makes way more sense to just go off of what makes sense.

I could try my hand at it. I assume I'd need to set up another account that's actually hosted on blahaj zone, though?

...Because most of us play TTRPGs with friends and strangers with whom we're super not interested in either? And if we were, we'd just actually be interacting with each other rather than doing so through a TTRPG of all things.