I've played off and on for years but I hate most game systems and most of the people that tend to go with them. D&D is stylistically as boring as games can get to me in almost every respect, Rifts is workable as a basic design but we refuse to use their god-awful writing, lore, and concepts, and I don't think I've ever met anyone irl that I like who plays White Wolf systems and I don't have any interest in vampires and werewolves anyway. I haven't played Shadowrun in probably about a decade but I remember hating some of the combat stuff, in particular the ability to OHKO anything. A DM once wiped an entire party I was in by accident just from lucky rolls, something he wasn't intending to do. Maybe that's changed by now, but it left a nasty taste behind.
There is a small group of people that I play with, but my dissatisfaction with all the major existing stuff led me to creating my own complete set of rules, world, races, and so on, and it seems to work a lot better for everyone involved (though I'm sure an outside set of critical eyes could find some serious balance issues waiting to happen). My players have no previous experience with the creatures so they're never sure what to expect which gets rid of even some unintentional meta-gaming, and it means I can constantly expand on things in ways to ensure I stay interested. My group is mostly women so they're really role-play heavy with very little combat, which is how I wanted it to be anyway. The downside to this is that it means a ton of work on my end since I can't/don't want to let hours get eaten up in slow-paced combat, so all my stories are required to have lots of characters written together and I'm required to do crazy amounts of improv at times.
I tried to make the combat that does occur interesting in different ways than I've encountered before, which includes class synergism across abilities and limited dice to speed things up (usually the only things needed are a d20 and percentiles). It's not as fast as something retard simple like Risus because I wanted some depth to be present, but it's a little quicker than D&D (I haven't played 4th) and Rifts. I designed it to work like My First SRPG, using grid combat but nothing too crazy because I don't want people wasting time calculating tons of shit.
All that being said, if you're looking to put together your own world then good on you, because it's usually great for the players to have something new and most of the stuff printed is absolute garbage. That being said, decent world creation can be a ridiculously time-consuming process unless you're railroading your ass off. If you want any help with that send me a message, I'll be glad to help out when I can.
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