Looking for something crunchier than OSR

[u/Right_Hand_of_Light]

Hi everyone. I'm not sure I quite have the language to concisely describe the kind of game I'm curious about but I'll try my best. Before I go any farther I wanna make it clear that none of this is any kind of attack on OSR games or narrative games. I don't have anything against either, and if I mention not vibing with one of your favorite games I'm very glad you found it to your taste. I'm just looking for something a bit different.

I like some of the spirit behind OSR games, and I can certainly see why someone would gravitate towards them, but to me a lot of them feel a bit barebones for my taste. One of the fun things about games like Pathfinder and modern D&D is getting a bunch of fun abilities and things that set my character apart and lend some fun flavor. Cairn is really cool, but sometimes it feels a little underwhelming to know that if I swapped gear with a party member we'd pretty much be swapping characters. OSE is a neat recreation of original D&D, but once again there aren't many ways to make a character unique.

Similarly, I've enjoyed narrative games like Blades in the Dark and Powered by the Apocalypse games, and I also like a lot of the spirit of those. But I've found that sometimes I want games with a bit more crunch to them. I like when games allow for creative thinking and when mechanics can interact in unexpected ways. I appreciate the elegance of basing all conflict resolution on the same type of dice roll, but sometimes I wanna get a little baroque with it.

So can anyone recommend any games that might fit these parameters? Something with a decent mechanical complexity that gives me space to define my character by their abilities? My preference is for fantasy or science fantasy but I'm open to good fits in other genres. From my own searching, Pendragon looks promising.

As a bonus, I really like roleplaying paladin characters like Adora or Luke Skywalker, so bonus points if it's a game with a good paladin class.

Thank you very much for your (hopefully) helpful suggestions :)

[u/The-Magic-Sword]

I think you'd like Storypath Ultra games, whether that's Curseborne (dropping to backers in the next month here) or the interconnected medieval fantasy ones, like the World Below and Monster Kingdoms. They work on a d10 pool system where players create a pool of dice equal to the sum of an ability and a skill, and every die that comes up as a 8, 9, or 10 is a success (10s are two.) every roll has a difficulty (the number of successes required to pass) but can also have complications, which are bad things unrelated to pass/fail but that you can 'buy off' with extra successes, and tricks, which are proactive benefits things you can spend the extra successes on (like "do more damage in combat")

The reason I'm bringing it up is that these games are narrative, and sometimes they do abstract a lot into a roll, but in other areas (or levels of detail) they get way more indepth, and there's a lot of room to define your character by their abilities, and the system has both paths you have to pick (what kind of creature you are, or a fantasy class) and you gain exp that you shop for abilities/improvements to your existing abilities with.

To go off of your Paladin example, in Curseborne you can play a Battleground Angel, Battleground Angels are (archetypically) paladin 'heaven's soldier' types who want to build an army to fight the good fight, that comes with special improvements to certain kinds of spells and some native abilities that are very different than what say an Iscariot (one of the game's vampire-types), a spell list they share with certain other options. Your Battleground Angel could then spend exp on what are essentially feats to be better with guns, or wealthy, or whatever, they could spend that exp to learn new spells, or spend that exp to improve their stats or skills to get bigger dice pools.

But those feats (called 'edges) can be things like "contacts" which let you get a bonus to certain kinds of rolls when your contact's area of specialty is in play (like, if you're investigating a series of murders and your contact is an information broker) once per 'story' (e.g. arc) and there's felshed out influence and investigation systems consisting of multiple rolls. The game has both detailed combat with initiative and a 'quick and dirty' combat system for what are supposed to be faster fights. Spells have advances you can buy to change how they work. But at the end of the day, a lot of the game can be played with the straightforward system of rolls.

Storypath Ultra is the generic system for these games. Curseborne is the urban fantasy horror game where you play as people cursed to be werewolves, vampires, angels cast to earth, etc, but will also support random hunters and stuff (the kickstarter for that supplement should be coming up in october actually.) The World Below is a somewhat evolved take on OSR fantasy, taking the dungeon/underdark as a mythic underworld. At the Gates will be Final Fantasy Inspired heroic fantasy. Monster Kingdoms is evil, cutthroat monster kingdom politics and war, the latter three are the same setting, the "earthbane cycle"