This was my response:
My vision:
1) the game has to have at least as much support for non-combat as it does for combat.
2) character advancement is based on character development. (not on killing or acquiring loot).
3) easy enough that an 8 year old can play
4) complex enough to be entertaining for experienced adult wargamers.
5) fast combat/resolution to work well with play-by-post. (that means no skill contests, and no grinding combats... it also means that many contests will be resolved without any dice rolling).
6) Super easy adventure generation/monster stats/character generation.
7) Support for swords-and-sorcery style gaming (that conflicts occur at the character level rather than world-level.)
8) Few meta-mechanics... that means no action points or rerolls.
9) no "gotcha's" during character creation... no crappy dead-end feats or abilities.
10) the game should encourage inter-party cooperation, similar to how 4E has divided character roles as striker, defender, etcetera.
11) I want the game to reward players who are persuasive, clever, charismatic, thus there is no stats for IQ or Charisma, with all of that being provided by the player and not the character. I understand full well that this penalizes a socially inept player who wants to roleplay a suave courtier... them's the breaks. I want skill challenges to be resolved by players being persuasive rather than my calculating the best modifiers for rolling dice.
12) I want a game that has clear enough rules that someone who has NEVER played an RPG before could read the rules and actually play or GM a game.
Why do I want this? Because this is the kind of game I want to play. Certainly, the opposite of everything I've described above can be a lot of fun when you have the right group. There is nothing wrong with action points, character advancement based on collecting loot, robust support for combat, or high fantasy. Those are all fine and dandy. Whenever I've thought about what my "Ideal game" is, though, it is not D&D. I also understand that every single one of my gripes above can be "fixed" in D&D with appropriate houseruling and competent DMing... but I don't want to play a fixed game, I want to play a game that does exactly what I want out of the box.
This brought out a few questions, and I further explained:
Aramil Caelvan wrote:What do you mean by character development? As in more emphasis on backstory/roleplaying XP?
I like the mechanics in "The Shadow of Yesterday". In my game, each character can pick 2 motives. As long as they fulfill their motives during the course of the adventure, they gain some XP. If they act against their motives, they gain even more XP, but then lose the motive for the next adventure. They will then have a chance to select a new motive, or to return to the old one that they acted against.
For example: a character might have as a motive "Family comes first". This character happens to have a ne'er do well brother that is always getting into trouble and the character must always bail out the brother. Whenever the character rescues the brother, they gain XP. Eventually, the brother crosses the line and the character decides that the brother must pay the consequences for his actions, the character gets a little extra XP for acting "against character", but then must spend the next adventure without that motive... (the character has some time to consider the consequences of his actions). After the next adventure, the character can pick a new motive, or perhaps select the same one that they recently betrayed.
The key here is that characters do NOT get XP for acquiring loot or getting into fights or even overcoming challenges. They get a small amount of XP for completing an adventure, and about twice as much if they have fulfilled their motives in the process.
Aramil Caelvan wrote:I'd be interested in seeing how you manage that {fast combat} without turning combat into a death machine for characters. What I mean to say is that the one advantage of grinding contests is that a player can say to themselves that they're losing, and get out of there. With rapid combat resolution it seems to me like you're going to run into situations where the ability for tactical play is reduced. Maybe, I'd have to look at the rules first.
I am working with something similar to Savage WOrlds, where the first "hit" leaves an opponent "shaken", and a second hit on a shaken opponent takes them out of the combat. Players go down on the 3rd hit after being shaken instead of the first.
Once a player is down, they are simply unconscious or whatever for the rest of the encounter, UNLESS they decide to put death on the line. If a player does this, then they can rejoin the combat, but if they suffer any injury at this point it is likely to mean days or weeks of recovery, and a 3rd hit when death is on the line is going to kill the character.
I am hoping that the way this works out is that combat will be very fast, yet characters do not die unless the player chooses to put death on the line.
Aramil Caelvan wrote:I have mixed feelings about this {no stats for INT or CHA}, but I guess I could get used to it. I just feel like there's a point where you might have players dealing at such a high level that the intelligence that their character should be displaying is a level of intelligence that they themselves simply cannot.
Well, this game is more swords-and-sorcery level... characters are much closer to ordinary people. In real life there are sports stars and famous actors that frankly are not that smart. For the most part this is a vast departure from D&D 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0. This game will not have the fantasy equivalent of Warren Buffet or Stephen Hawking. This game could have the fantasy equivalent of Brett Favre.
Unlike D&D 3.0+, I want the most persuasive creative player to have an advantage. In D&D, the player with the most advantage is the one with rules-mastery... the one that has read the most rulebooks, crunched the most numbers, and is most familiar with all of the available skills/feats/spells. D&D rewards a particular type of player... one that has great attention to detail, one that likes to pour over rules, and one that has a good deal of tactical skill, whether that tactics is from character positioning or determining how to squeeze the most positive modifiers on a skill check. I am interested in a game where the player who is talkative and charismatic has an advantage, where rules mastery is not much of an issue.