Tabletop RPG Catch All

I hit 5e after almost a decade-long role playing break brought on by my intense disappointment with 4e. I think 5e goes a long way towards making D&D playable again, but D&D itself is creaking under the weight of it’s own legacy. It’s still a great gateway thanks to it’s reputation and can be a comfortable place to hang your hat, but the proliferation of systems and philosophies have vastly expanded the scene to the point where the d20 paradigm is on the board game end of the spectrum to me, where I’d much prefer to play an actual board game to scratch that itch.

I’m nibbling around the edges of OSR stuff at the moment which taps into the core of a good dungeon crawl for me, and I’ve been moving through a bunch of other systems to find the right one that gives just enough structure without pinching the head off everything that doesn’t centre on swinging swords or magic missiling things.

Mixolyde wrote:

Feelings on Dungeon World?

For me, it's okay, but it hits a compromise between D&D and Apocalypse World that doesn't really satisfy me. I'd rather be all-in on one or the other.

Same same Mix, if you want to do a crawl use a system built from the ground up for crawling. PBtA games are fantastic, but a 1-for-1 D&D replacement it is not.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

I have played loads of systems, and none of them are as good as 5e D&D. Not even close; it's the best TTRPG I've ever played, and it feels like the basic game philosophy comes down to somebody looking at rules, asking "is this fun", and, if it's fun, shrugging and saying "good enough". Sure, having five kinds of advantage canceled out by one disadvantage doesn't make perfect sense, but, meh, good enough. It just works, and I've got a bit group of friends, almost all of us who are longtime gaming veterans, and there's this almost universal sense of relief than we can sit down at the table (well, virtual table), and we're going to have a few hours fo fun where we're not fighting the system or bickering over little rules. So, no, sorry Bernie, 5e hit my sweet spot years ago, and I still haven't run out of characters I want to play or adventures I want to put together. The game just works.

I just can't wrap my head around this. To me you're describing all the good qualities that other, more modern games have that are missing from D&D.

Dungeon World went off my radar when Koebel (one of its creators) simulated a "surprise" sexual assault on one of his players characters live on twitch without the victims (or any of his players) consent or knowledge - in fact breaking what lines and veils had already been established...all the while giggling like a f*cking idiot.

CaptainCrowbar wrote:
MilkmanDanimal wrote:

I have played loads of systems, and none of them are as good as 5e D&D. Not even close; it's the best TTRPG I've ever played, and it feels like the basic game philosophy comes down to somebody looking at rules, asking "is this fun", and, if it's fun, shrugging and saying "good enough". Sure, having five kinds of advantage canceled out by one disadvantage doesn't make perfect sense, but, meh, good enough. It just works, and I've got a bit group of friends, almost all of us who are longtime gaming veterans, and there's this almost universal sense of relief than we can sit down at the table (well, virtual table), and we're going to have a few hours fo fun where we're not fighting the system or bickering over little rules. So, no, sorry Bernie, 5e hit my sweet spot years ago, and I still haven't run out of characters I want to play or adventures I want to put together. The game just works.

I just can't wrap my head around this. To me you're describing all the good qualities that other, more modern games have that are missing from D&D.

I think I play 5e for the same reason I use a Windows machine or iPhone: Platform dominance.

There are plenty of other systems that work better in different ways, but the ecosystem for 5e is so broad and widely adopted that juicing the utility out of another system comes at too high a cost.

And here I am on the complete opposite of the scale and think DnD is the worst roleplay system I've tried, closely followed by PbtA because I'm a complex person.

onewild wrote:

And here I am on the complete opposite of the scale and think DnD is the worst roleplay system I've tried, closely followed by PbtA because I'm a complex person.

I have friends who swear by the utility of Linux too, but the fact that my corporate IT department won't support it is enough for me to admire it from afar.

If you have an easy time getting players and GM's for the system of your choice, fantastic. That has not been my experience.

The only system that I can't wrap my head around is the Fate system. I was going to try to run a game of the Dresden Files RPG, but without actual game mechanics, how to play it eluded me. Maybe it would click if a GM who got it ran a game, but to me it feels more like an improv exercise than an actual TTRPG.

Paleocon wrote:
onewild wrote:

And here I am on the complete opposite of the scale and think DnD is the worst roleplay system I've tried, closely followed by PbtA because I'm a complex person.

I have friends who swear by the utility of Linux too, but the fact that my corporate IT department won't support it is enough for me to admire it from afar.

If you have an easy time getting players and GM's for the system of your choice, fantastic. That has not been my experience.

Honestly, the Windows/Linux comparison is perfect for my attitude towards D&D; I was told over and over again I needed to get Ubuntu installed on a box at some point, because it was just better. So, I did, on an old laptop, and . . . I didn't care. Windows did enough for me. I don't really care that it's kind of bloated or has some performance issues or whatever, it works well enough, and I don't want to have to learn to configure Linux properly to really get things working as well as possible. I just don't care.

D&D's the same. I really feel like the design philosophy of 5e is "meh, good enough", and not doing much more than that. It's designed to make it easy to sit down and start playing, and I can literally throw together a character in a few minutes and just go, and that's enough for me. It's fun. That's it. It gets rid of all sorts of stuff and moves me to the fun, and, to me, it's rules-light, but that's because the systems I've played most would be (A) various D&Ds, (B) HERO/Champions 4th/5th, and (a distant C, probably) Shadowrun, all of which are chunked up with so much bloat that 5e feels like a walk in the park in comparison. I mean, I use HERO 6th as an example of how not to build a system; as a point-buy system with a superhero focus, HERO lets you break down abilities into very specific ways and build anything exactly how you want. When HERO 6th came out, the rules were in two hardback volumes; volume 1 was 460 pages. It was the book about character creation. 460 pages.

There are a lot of reasons why 5e has become so ridiculously dominant in the TTRPG space, but it's by far the most popular system ever. I mean, Roll20 clearly isn't a perfect metric, but they release quarterly play stats, and 5e's was responsible for more than half the games on the platform alone in Q3 2020:

I'm playing with a bunch of people who have been RPGing for 30-40 years, and there's very much a collective "we're tired of this sh*t" attitude towards lots of other games, and playing 5e is just relaxing and easy. Throw in the fact that D&D Beyond is a phenomenally useful tool that makes running and playing games so much simpler, and, outside of one guy who really wants to play Champions again (I do not need that much math in my life anymore), there's very much a collective "there's enough here for us" going on, and nobody really wants to wander into other systems anymore.

D&D 5e is perfectly fine for playing D&D, which is what many people want. It's not so great at handling some non-D&D scenarios, but that goes with the territory.

Non-D&D games that do stuff that D&D doesn't:

Torchbearer - The vibe of old-school dungeon crawling but reworked so that you can actually manage the details of what your character is carrying and so forth. You could do something a bit like this in straight D&D, but it would feel quite different because of the different resource modeling. One influence on its design was taking the old-school original D&D rules and setting and reworking them into a streamlined system that's focused on low-fantasy dungeon crawling.

The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game - look, even before it came out I was pretty convinced that FATE was the best system for Dresden-files related stuff because the fate point system so closely mirrored the plotting of the books.

Pendragon - If you want Arthurian Knights, complete with family manors and the grand saga of Arthur, it's hard to beat. Pendragon models the tension between the character's virtues and their desires, and makes that more important than the combat. (It's also the closest thing I know of to Crusader Kings the Roleplaying Game, albeit on a different timescale and not quite as dynastically sweeping.)

Blades in the Dark - the heist game par excellence, borrowing from Apocalypse World and Leverage and Dishonored to tell your tales of your crew of scoundrels.

Fiasco - it's a Coen Brothers movie of a game about plans that go horribly right and events that spiral out of control. Only suited to one-shots, of course, because the whole point is that things will go wrong.

Night Witches - The tale of the World War II All-Women Soviet Night Bomber Biplane Squadron.

Ten Candles - the absolute best horror RPG I've ever played. You sit in the dark with ten actual candles, you literally burn your character trait index cards, and the darkness closes in around you...

Like I said, if you want something close-ish to the particular high-fantasy dungeoneering/adventuring mode, it's hard to beat D&D. It's got a lot of stuff in it, people make a lot of material for it, and it has nice crunchy combat mechanics and character advancement. The one D&D-ish thing that I'd consider instead would be 13th Age, mostly because I've played it (but haven't run it) and it has a bunch of neat ideas that I like. But if you're comfortable with D&D for that, you might as well stick with 5e.

(Well, if I was running my infinite-free-time-fantasy-campaign I'd use Burning Wheel, but I'm like that.)

Paleocon wrote:

I think I play 5e for the same reason I use a Windows machine or iPhone: Platform dominance.

There are plenty of other systems that work better in different ways, but the ecosystem for 5e is so broad and widely adopted that juicing the utility out of another system comes at too high a cost.

Something a lot of us indie RPG players forget is that there is a pretty steep barrier for entry to getting into something like a PbtA game. I think for a lot of indies, the idea of learning and playing a new system with new, interesting mechanics is part of the appeal. For like 95% of the rest of the general RPG populace, that's a tough ask.

That said, I would argue that tabletop RPG's are more like any other creative endeavor (music, book, art, video games, etc.) than a universal operating system. D&D is still running on a hacked version of basically the very first RPG, which was itself a hacked wargame. It's sort of evolved since then, but can't quite shake some of those initial assumptions.

To me, it's more like meeting one of the fabled 'I only play Madden and COD' gamers. Like, they're having a perfectly fine time with what they're doing, but you can't help but think that they'd really love Breath of the Wild or Rocket League or something.

Nevin73 wrote:

The only system that I can't wrap my head around is the Fate system. I was going to try to run a game of the Dresden Files RPG, but without actual game mechanics, how to play it eluded me. Maybe it would click if a GM who got it ran a game, but to me it feels more like an improv exercise than an actual TTRPG.

If there's a system I like less than D&D, it's FATE. What if we used pretty much the same mechanics as D&D, but everyone gets several random Calvinball elements that they can use at any time?

(This is also the problem with recommending Indies. If you look at D&D alternatives, it turns out everyone hates everything.)

Gremlin wrote:

D&D 5e is perfectly fine for playing D&D, which is what many people want. It's not so great at handling some non-D&D scenarios, but that goes with the territory.

Non-D&D games that do stuff that D&D doesn't:

Torchbearer - The vibe of old-school dungeon crawling but reworked so that you can actually manage the details of what your character is carrying and so forth. You could do something a bit like this in straight D&D, but it would feel quite different because of the different resource modeling. One influence on its design was taking the old-school original D&D rules and setting and reworking them into a streamlined system that's focused on low-fantasy dungeon crawling.

The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game - look, even before it came out I was pretty convinced that FATE was the best system for Dresden-files related stuff because the fate point system so closely mirrored the plotting of the books.

Pendragon - If you want Arthurian Knights, complete with family manors and the grand saga of Arthur, it's hard to beat. Pendragon models the tension between the character's virtues and their desires, and makes that more important than the combat. (It's also the closest thing I know of to Crusader Kings the Roleplaying Game, albeit on a different timescale and not quite as dynastically sweeping.)

Blades in the Dark - the heist game par excellence, borrowing from Apocalypse World and Leverage and Dishonored to tell your tales of your crew of scoundrels.

Fiasco - it's a Coen Brothers movie of a game about plans that go horribly right and events that spiral out of control. Only suited to one-shots, of course, because the whole point is that things will go wrong.

Night Witches - The tale of the World War II All-Women Soviet Night Bomber Biplane Squadron.

Ten Candles - the absolute best horror RPG I've ever played. You sit in the dark with ten actual candles, you literally burn your character trait index cards, and the darkness closes in around you...

Like I said, if you want something close-ish to the particular high-fantasy dungeoneering/adventuring mode, it's hard to beat D&D. It's got a lot of stuff in it, people make a lot of material for it, and it has nice crunchy combat mechanics and character advancement. The one D&D-ish thing that I'd consider instead would be 13th Age, mostly because I've played it (but haven't run it) and it has a bunch of neat ideas that I like. But if you're comfortable with D&D for that, you might as well stick with 5e.

(Well, if I was running my infinite-free-time-fantasy-campaign I'd use Burning Wheel, but I'm like that.)

I have heard of half a dozen of those and would, honestly, be really interested in playing them, but the reality is that I will never find folks to commit the regular time to play something that they will have to learn as a party and doesn't have the user community or support to sustain it.

Probably the single most attractive thing about 5e is that it has such a large user community and such a well resourced corporate support system that resolving rules disputes in most cases is just a matter of a google search. Whatever you might encounter has probably been encountered before by someone who has commented on it. And in most cases, it has been ruled on by WotC. And if it hasn't, there is a big enough hacker (homebrew) community that has discussed the foreseen and unforeseen repercussions of your edge case interpretation to inform it.

I am certainly not pretending it is perfect by any means, but having a fully baked ruleset (even if it has some really headscratchy sh*t) makes the collective storytelling a lot easier to manage. It makes it feel more like Minecraft and less like Calvinball.

Paleocon wrote:

I have heard of half a dozen of those and would, honestly, be really interested in playing them, but the reality is that I will never find folks to commit the regular time to play something that they will have to learn as a party and doesn't have the user community or support to sustain it.

Yeah, in practice I've found that playing these requires a group with either enough interest in trying out new things or a willingness to learn a new system. Which, in my case, comes from selecting them out of my friend group. But I've got enough people in my friend group who are also interested in new games (I got introduced to several of the above by them) that the size of the active-player community hasn't been a problem. (Though the destruction of Google+ did eliminate some of the online fan-created resources, which hurt.) If you're recruiting people as players first out of the game's community (instead of people you already know) that's harder with smaller games.

That said, I've also got friends who just play D&D. And so I play D&D with them when we do that.

I've seen two great explanations of FATE:
Short comic from the excellent Up To Four Players: comic
Epically long thread on RPG.net: Fate Core Tutorial - sorta - Wherein *I* teach *you* how to play Fate

kazooka wrote:

If there's a system I like less than D&D, it's FATE. What if we used pretty much the same mechanics as D&D, but everyone gets several random Calvinball elements that they can use at any time?

Here's where one has to risk re-igniting the gaming style taxonomy wars. I think there's a hard split between gamers who feel that players' narrative control extends only to their characters, and those who do not. My wife's the first kind and has happily been playing Rolemaster for 20+ years. She bounced *hard* off Exalted in large part because of the stunt system. When I explained a John Wick* idea about players collectively designing a dungeon to explore, she *recoiled*, asking how then the GM was going to tell his/her story. She didn't use the word 'Calvinball' but I think she'd agree. Players like that want a story where the GM presents a world of obstacles and the characters grapple with them.

5e provides that; it doesn't stop you from throwing narrative control to the PCs but doesn't encourage or mechanize that in a way that Fate or PBTA are intended to. If you feel you're exploring a defined world, and that's what you want, it breaks your brain when the GM asks players to define what god the shrine you've just encountered is to, or when someone Spouts Lore or spends a Fate Point to narrate that the mobster who just kicked down the door is his cousin.

* 7th Sea guy, not Matrix guy

I may have FATE confused with something else then, because that's a lot closer to a PBtA system than the game I remember playing. I was playing something that basically used D&D rules with a d100 roll and the aspect system. It felt like more of a transitional form than something fully fleshed out.

Totally agree about the splits in player base. Only, I think there are a lot of them, and because historically the hobby has been confined to a pretty small group of people, we rarely talk about any of them. You see that whenever people start talking about OSR games vs story-games.

One thing it seems many players of D&D and the other "big rules" systems don't realise is that learning a small game can be very easy.

Plenty of games have a lot less rules overhead and can be picked up in one or two sessions.

For example, I played Fiasco second edition last night, and I'd say that telling the rest of the group the rules took maybe 10-15 minutes tops. That's probably about as simple a game as you can make (and they did a great job streamlining it in the new edition). But a good example of why you don't need several big books full of rules to make an rpg. (FYI Fiasco has a 24-page rules booklet, a general play deck of cards, plus a card deck for your chosen scenario).

Paleocon wrote:

Does anyone have any good mods for the 5e grappling rules? As a jiu jitsu practitioner, I have always been frustrated by how gimpy they. Grappling someone should result in something a bit more consequential than the grappled condition which still allows the victim to conduct pretty much business as usual with the exception of movement.

IRL an experienced grappler with any training at all would easily be able to absolutely mess up someone who doesn't have a specific grappling skill. Just about any BJJ blue belt I know would be able to take someone with no specific grappling skill and dump him to the ground in 6 seconds (one round and knocking the victim to prone). In the next 6 seconds, he should be able to advance position to side control resulting in the restrained condition. And another successful grapple check should result in executing either a choke or joint lock resulting in, at the very least, levels of exhaustion or damage. All the while, anyone unable to counter would not be in a position to reply with physical attacks or spells.

Just got the new Cyberpunk Red book today and it looks like it has a lot more interesting grapple rules. Like choke for 3 rounds and they're out.
Here's Charlie Halls review of the game:
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020...

Paleocon wrote:

I have friends who swear by the utility of Linux too, but the fact that my corporate IT department won't support it is enough for me to admire it from afar.

If you have an easy time getting players and GM's for the system of your choice, fantastic. That has not been my experience.

I mean I wouldn't call anything in particular we have played in our group niche. Also given I've been the defacto gm for the last 3 years (apart from the aforementioned trip into PbtA land), they pretty much have to play what I want to run

But yeah CoC, Shadowrun (ok I gm'd this one because a few of my players really liked it but god is that game a pain to gm), Traveller and going to try running Warhammer Fantasy 4th ed next, after we have done with Lancer.

pyxistyx wrote:

Dungeon World went off my radar when Koebel (one of its creators) simulated a "surprise" sexual assault on one of his players characters live on twitch without the victims (or any of his players) consent or knowledge - in fact breaking what lines and veils had already been established...all the while giggling like a f*cking idiot.

Agreed

NathanialG wrote:

Just got the new Cyberpunk Red book today

Just ordered that earlier! I never played any of the cyberpunk games before, so I'm excited to check it out. Looks like a whole new foreign system to me.

kazooka wrote:

I may have FATE confused with something else then, because that's a lot closer to a PBtA system than the game I remember playing. I was playing something that basically used D&D rules with a d100 roll and the aspect system. It felt like more of a transitional form than something fully fleshed out.

We're on the 4th edition of FATE now, and it's changed quite a bit since the early versions split off from Fudge, so some of the earlier versions felt pretty transitional...but FATE has always used Fudge dice (d6s with sides of [+,+,-,-,0,0]). So a d100 system sounds like something else.

qaraq wrote:

Here's where one has to risk re-igniting the gaming style taxonomy wars. I think there's a hard split between gamers who feel that players' narrative control extends only to their characters, and those who do not.

Yeah--though there's a separate thing with the GM's story versus collaborative storytelling. I'm fine with GMing something where the players are very tightly limited to their characters' perspective, but I'm simultaneously a very play-to-find out GM. I'll set up scenarios and map out dungeons and so forth, but I often don't have a plot (though I might have some ideas for where things are likely to end up). I've certainly run things with plots, but they were Mouse Guard dynamic plots.

One technique that's foundational to my style is spelling out the consequences before rolling the dice. At least for my groups that tends to keep people on the same page for a wide range of the player-agency spectrum. (My first GM experience was running Burning Wheel, can you tell?)

On the other end of things I've talked with people who need a hardline on the reality of the game world, so that the magic mirror's effect was always what it was in the GM's notes, and those who are happy with it being Schrödinger's GM screen.

Gremlin wrote:

On the other end of things I've talked with people who need a hardline on the reality of the game world, so that the magic mirror's effect was always what it was in the GM's notes, and those who are happy with it being Schrödinger's GM screen.

I recall reading about players who check up on a GM by reading the module after the game and complain if it wasn't run as written, if they didn't get all the loot or xp or whatever they "should" have gotten. I normally don't care what other people like, but that is Hurting Wrong Fun.

Yeah, I had a player once get really mad when he learned that the scenario we were running was something I had written. He flat-out asked how he could be sure that I had run it as designed as opposed to "cheating" them on loot and xp.

No wonder Adventurers Guild is so popular.

I don't get folks who play like that to "beat the game". Shows a level of immaturity I wouldn't want in any game I play or run. The whole point behind the exercise is to have fun with collective story telling. If you can't do that, you need to stick to videogames.

Nevin73 wrote:

The only system that I can't wrap my head around is the Fate system. I was going to try to run a game of the Dresden Files RPG, but without actual game mechanics, how to play it eluded me. Maybe it would click if a GM who got it ran a game, but to me it feels more like an improv exercise than an actual TTRPG.

I own The Dresden Files books. The rule book is 356 pages. The setting book is another 261 pages. Claiming it lacks "actual game mechanics" makes as much sense as saying the world is flat and made of barbecue spare ribs.

I've also played improv exercise RPGs. Fiasco & Universalis are two I can name off the top of my head. Oh, and Prime Time Adventures.

Some people like the tactical combat part of the game. Which seems reasonable to me--a solid tactical combat system so you know what the basics are plus a game master if you want to try to go off the wall with something seems like a fun time. It's not my primary interest in tabletop roleplaying, but I've had occasional fun treating it as a wargame with context.

tanstaafl wrote:

Yeah, I had a player once get really mad when he learned that the scenario we were running was something I had written. He flat-out asked how he could be sure that I had run it as designed as opposed to "cheating" them on loot and xp.

No wonder Adventurers Guild is so popular.

Which is separate from the combat-wargame fun...but I think this mode of play has been present from nearly the beginning of D&D. Some people had a practice of bringing their characters between games run by different DMs, Tomb of Horrors was originally designed as a tournament dungeon for an event at the 1985 Origins con, etc.

It's a bit silly to worry about the DM cheating you out of xp, though. That's a social problem, not a game mechanics problem.

I never use xp thes days, it's milestones all the way for me!

I prefer D&D because of the structured world I know, the combat which is easy to follow and optimize around, and the fantasy setting.

I honestly dislike making up the world on the fly. I want there to be rules... I don't care if you whipped up a town or monster, but it fits in a framework that has defined rules/boundaries. No need to persuade the group that this or that not really relevant aspect applies so you get to add to your roll. I also have started playing games on easy mode... lol...

I'm a die hard Dresden fan, but will most likely never touch the rpg because it is Fate based. The examples of Fate I have seen make it seem very not my thing.

Honestly I think most of the other RPGs out there are more for groups that are established and have had their fun with standard stuff but know and trust each other enough to give something else a try. Kind of like... I would never order pineapple on a pizza myself, but if you are with me and telling me to take a bite of yours because you think I'll like it then ok.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

The only system that I can't wrap my head around is the Fate system. I was going to try to run a game of the Dresden Files RPG, but without actual game mechanics, how to play it eluded me. Maybe it would click if a GM who got it ran a game, but to me it feels more like an improv exercise than an actual TTRPG.

I own The Dresden Files books. The rule book is 356 pages. The setting book is another 261 pages. Claiming it lacks "actual game mechanics" makes as much sense as saying the world is flat and made of barbecue spare ribs.

I've also played improv exercise RPGs. Fiasco & Universalis are two I can name off the top of my head. Oh, and Prime Time Adventures.

It's been a while since I've picked up the Dresden rulebook or the Accelerated one, but I seem to recall most of those pages were devoted to lore, background, and stats for key characters.

My interpretation of Fate was "do a good job roleplaying, you get a token that allows you to reroll the sh*tty dice". But I want to check out the references above to evolve my understanding.

manta173 wrote:

I prefer D&D because of the structured world I know, the combat which is easy to follow and optimize around, and the fantasy setting.

I honestly dislike making up the world on the fly. I want there to be rules... I don't care if you whipped up a town or monster, but it fits in a framework that has defined rules/boundaries. No need to persuade the group that this or that not really relevant aspect applies so you get to add to your roll. I also have started playing games on easy mode... lol...

In which case, yeah D&D is probably the game you want.

There's a number of other RPGs that have that kind of foundational framework1, but obviously you aren't as familiar with them so it doesn't make sense to switch.

As a game master, the part I like is constructing the world and I actively dislike running published scenarios because it's hard for me to keep all the details in my head so I can respond quickly when players inevitably do something I didn't expect. I can do that when I wrote the scenario (or I took an existing scenario and wrote out my own version of it) so it's way faster for me personally to prep my own material and just use published stuff as fodder for ideas.2

Though in my experience it's new groups that are more open to non-D&D games. Like, I wouldn't try to convince my hardcore D&D groups to switch, but there have been lots of times that I've pulled together groups of people who want to roleplay but aren't particularly invested in D&D. (It helps that my friends group has some people who are even more interested in indie RPGs than I am.)

Spoiler:

1. There's a bunch of non-D&D games that have similarly rigid foundations to build off of, but obviously if you're invested in D&D it makes less sense to switch. Fate's does-this-aspect-apply-here clearly doesn't work for you: the idea is that the proposed thing needs to make logical and narrative sense but that requires a degree of consensus that's harder if you've got a more adversarial style of play.

Most of my perspective is as a GM, because while I like playing, I like running the game more, and that certainly colors which games I prefer.

It's a bit difficult to find things that take approaches similar to D&D, in terms of laying out the combat system, because there's a lot of things that tried to be D&D-but-with-more-stuff that don't really work as well as D&D at doing the D&D things. And for the ones that do find their own path, I'm not as familiar with them because it's not as close to my interests.

The ones that I do have some passing familiarity with:
- With Pendragon I'm not particularly fond of the rules per se, though its a pretty solid take on what it focuses on, and it is very focused on Arthurian knights. But for a defined setting it's hard to beat, because between the base game and the Great Pendragon Campaign you can spend hundreds of sessions exploring the setting.
- 13th Age is D&D-esque but with its own spin on things. Possibly too far in the Fate direction to interest you?
- 7th Sea is fantasy pirates. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but it's been sitting on my shelf...
- Ars Magica is about magicians and the people they employ to help them.

Then there's the stuff that I'm more familiar with...

Apocalypse World style things may or may not work for you. The conditions under which each rule applies are clearly spelled out, but they're spelled out in prose, from the narrative point of view. The idea being that the consensus reality being constructed is the primary thing, and the rules are there to provide an interface between the players' understanding of what is going on and the numerical bits.

Blades in the Dark is similar, but to my mind has a better handle on long-term play and character advancement where the city and the crew can come alive in the sandbox.

Despite Burning Wheel being largely skill based, I've found that in practice it lends itself to this kind of shared-foundational play, mostly because of the rules around it: rolls only happen when they mean something, the potential consequences of the roll (positive and negative) are spelled out before the roll happens, and the results of the roll apply for as long as they're relevant--you don't have to keep rolling your stealth checks because it models it by abstracting all of those moment-to-moment checks into one check for the scene.

It makes things a little looser and more meta than D&D, but I've found that in practice I like it because the terms are negotiated up front, as it were. You get a slightly more prose-based game, but with clear terrain for players to do their strategic maneuvering.

Torchbearer and Mouse Guard borrow these features and I particularly like Mouse Guard as a model for running mission-based games because it taught me how to pre-plan a story that still gives the players maximum agency in resolving.

Anyway, I think, from your description, that you'd be perfectly happy sticking with D&D.

2. That's why I like random tables and cards and stuff like that: it's an objective content delivery system that delivers unexpected input but is out of the hands of the GM.