Seconding Fate, the rules do a good job of supporting the fiction rather than encumbering it. I felt it very much supported that feeling of “I can do anything I can reasonably imagine.”

To help with the tyranny of the blank page, I’d recommend coming up with a pregenerated character to demo how it all works. Then, encourage her to change or adjust anything she wants to on the sheet. My players initially found it easier to modify something to their liking than to come up with something from scratch.

Magic can be as simple as “Roll your Lore skill” if you want or you can look up several more detailed add-ons that are out there, like Fate High Fantasy magic.

The rules are freely available here: https://fate-srd.com/fate-condensed.

I have put hundreds of hours into RoR2 on PC, love the game. I recently purchased a Switch copy so I could play with a friend of mine who is console-only. Sadly, the port is still in a pretty bad place when I checked last (2-3 weeks ago).

I am not expecting the PC and console experience to be identical by any stretch, but I am talking about basic issues like the music on each stage cutting out after playing for only 10-15 seconds, wonky damage (Beetle Queens absolutely massacring us even on Rainstorm if we touched their projectile splash zones), and all the other miscellaneous issues from the patch like logbook being glitches, unlocks being unpredictable, etc.

I think it could potentially be fixed, but I would give them time to put out a few more bugfix patches before I considered a console purchase

I have not yet played Return of the Obra Dinn, but it is always high up on the list when I look for games like Outer Wilds. I’m a huge fan of Outer Wilds, so maybe the recommendation can work in reverse

From what I have heard, the deduction is not as intense as in Obra Dinn, but there is very little hand holding, and the whole game has been brilliantly designed so that it is driven entirely by your natural human curiosity. Once you get through the initial “tutorial” section (probably the roughest part of the game, push through!) the whole game is wide open. See something weird orbiting a distant planet? You can go straight there and start poking around. If you follow the leads that turn up there, you will eventually even figure out what it is, and why it is there. Do that enough and you’ll eventually figure out the strange mystery of your home solar system.

Can’t recommend it highly enough, but you only get to play it without knowing the secrets once, so go in as blind as you can. It took me 20-30 hours to “solve” the main game, maybe another 20 for the DLC, which is also well worth it

Some really interesting ideas here, downloaded!

Man, we ended up setting up a wiki for all the ones from my last campaign… it’s down at the moment, but here are a few I have saved on my phone:

“My companions and I are professional adventurers”

“Some of us more professional than others…”

“For no sexy reason, what does the pope look like?”

“Also, I’m not doing terrible! But I definitely just got stabbed.”

Bard: “No, this is wholesome [Bard] moment! Anyway, how much money do you have?”

Sorcerer: “[Ranger], we are about to do some wacky-ass magic”

Ranger: “In that case, I would like to watch it from over there.”

Sorcerer: “I will not be doing it. I will be joining you.”

GM: “Divine and wild magic start pouring into and it’s like… Have you ever licked a battery?”

GM: “Divine, chaos, and dragon magic flows through you—”

Bard: “And bardic from the inspiration!”

Ranger: “Oh I can add some ranger nature!”

Sorcerer: “And I have one that can help! I cast minor illusion to make a “do not disturb” sign.”

“If I take one more step, it’ll be the furthest I’ve ever been from home…”

“You didn’t even have to step.”

“If I take one more interdimensional vortex…”

“Your left or my left? You’re an orb.”

“I am.”

“Float like a flowerpot, sting like a school bus.”

That is exactly what I ended up doing! It was a blast, definitely would also recommend

Outer Wilds

If you’re a naturally curious person, the odds are you will probably enjoy Outer Wilds. No other game I’ve played has ever had quite the same blend of mystery, conquering the unknown, and semi-realistic space exploration.

Could someone make another game like it? Not impossible, I suppose, but I think you would be hard pressed.

Should you keep playing the original? You really can’t, one time through is all you get. Once you have discovered all the secrets and uncovered the mysteries, that is your journey through it. Still fun to visit every once in a while, though

The Chaos

Ahhh, loads of them!

D&D adjacent stuff like Pathfinder 2e.

PBTA and kin like Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Ironsworn. Blades in the Dark.

Delta Green.

I have a whole folder of freeform, GMless stuff like Microscope, Kingdom, Follow, Archipelago, Dawn of Worlds, Dialect, Intrepid, The Quiet Year.

Gonzo one shot stuff like Paranoia, The Sorcerer Supreme, Ten Candles, peace was never an option (think untitled goose game: the rpg).

I recently had a test run or two of Fate Condensed and got completely hooked.

Most of those I’d be content to run or play, but the game I really want to GM myself is a campaign I’ve been dreaming up for about year now that I call the “sedition sandbox”. The scope is focussed to a single city, the capital of a hostile foreign empire. The PCs are an elite team of saboteurs and infiltrators, sent by a nation desperate to turn the tides of a losing war. Their only objective is to bring down the empire from within. Intrigue, plots, rebellions, sabotage, faction politics, assassinations, propaganda, blackmail, anything the players can think of to achieve that goal is fair game. How far will they go to stop the greater evil?

I think it would be a blast (naturally, I guess), and one or two players in my local network have expressed a little interest, but I’ve yet to rally the kind of commitment I think I’d need to really get off the ground. And the inexorable march of time makes it less likely with every passing day, as my friends either move away or are subjected to all life’s little tyrannies of responsibility ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seconded! OP, in a similar vein as the world building games you already mentioned, you might find Intrepid interesting. I could see it being used to do world building + history of some of the major players and nations therein.

I could also imagine the relationship map it uses being hacked a bit to allow for some Disco Elysium style personality skills / thought cabinet shenanigans if you were interested in leaning into that in particular.

Maybe FATE would be worth checking out?

Things I think it might hit for you:

• Characters are good at what they’re good at. You define the core concepts of your character and use them to get bonuses. Your character is a Highly Trained Ninja? Then yeah, you’ll be getting bonuses to all your sneaking, hiding, acrobatics, flashy martial arts, etc. Plus, the way the maths work, the dice have a bell curve centred at +0 (extremes of +4/-4) so the +4 in your character’s best skill is constantly having a huge impact on outcomes. Contrast that with your +7 in D&D which is still missing 25% of the time

• Fairly simple rules. The core is, describe what you’re trying to do, and then use one of four basic actions to model it if a roll seems appropriate: Attack, Defend, Overcome (beat a DC) or Create an Advantage (alter circumstances/environment/characters to tip the odds in your favour). However, there’s a little more for combat and also a meta currency to manage, which I’ll talk about below

• Very quick to get off the ground. Character creation can take only minutes if you want. No mucking about with long lists of feats and spells and class builds and whatnot. You’re actively encouraged to leave spots blank and fill them in during play when an idea strikes you, great for new and unsure players

• Completely setting agnostic, it’s flexible enough to do almost anything

Things I think it might miss for you:

• FATE’s approach is much closer to a story game, especially compared to something like D&D which leans towards the simulation side of the spectrum. Its meta currency, Fate points, aims to emulate the feel of an action movie or TV show. Spend points to do awesome things, get them back for accepting challenges, complications, and setbacks in your character’s arc. That latter point especially often means the table needs to have a “writer’s room” mentality, which isn’t a good fit for all players.

• FATE doesn’t really try to do certain things that D&D does, like strict resource management, accumulation of powerful loot, big powerful character level ups, or dungeon crawling. It can be done, and guides are out there to help you do so, but you will be bolting a lot of extras onto the system, so watch out if those are what you enjoy

• Which brings me to the last point, FATE is a system that really wants you to hack it and make it your own. It’s very resilient to this sort of thing compared to something like D&D where getting some maths wrong can make things unfun in innumerable ways, but it does take effort and thought regardless, which may not be to everyone’s taste. For example, you won’t really find a “bestiary” of monsters to throw at players, you’ll be making them up yourself, maybe entirely on the fly.

The rules are all freely available online or in pay-what-you-want PDFs. There are three current editions:

• FATE Core, all the rules of the game plus lots of extras, examples, optional systems, things like that

• FATE Condensed, all the rules same as Core, but with most of the extras cut out and overall streamlined down to 60 pages from 300 or so

• FATE Accelerated, uses the same basic ideas for its rules, but simplifies things down to the barest of minimums, e.g. dropping the skill list for 6 basic “approaches”, simplifying the damage system.

Here’s a link to FATE Condensed, as I personally found it easiest to start with: https://fate-srd.com/fate-condensed

One disclaimer: I haven’t actually played it myself yet, but I have been prepping a one shot I’ll be taking my D&D 5e group through this weekend to see if it’s going to be a good fit for us, so I have been doing a lot of research!

I’ve been plotting out some ideas for what is essentially the inverse of your campaign for some months now. My players will be an elite group of saboteurs and seditionists sent to the capital city of some evil empire in order to bring it down from the inside, however best they see fit.

I ran into the same problem you did. If this empire is ostensibly so powerful, wealthy, and influential, then why couldn’t they just resurrect anyone important?

I realise it’s not quite as exciting as the other answers, but ultimately I did decide that I’ll just heavily restrict the resurrection spells. Resurrection will be theoretically possible, but in the setting, the only known way of accomplishing it is with a powerful and limited-use artifact locked deep away within the empire’s vaults. Destroying it or stealing it would be a very good avenue for the players to pursue in order to destabilise the establishment.

On the players’ side, should I ever actually get the campaign off the ground, I’ll tell them that resurrection spells will not be generally allowed to pick for level ups. I think I would be ok with them spending significant time and effort, maybe a chain of quests, to discover the spells themselves if that’s what they’re truly interested in and think will advance their cause, but with the warning that if word gets out it will paint a massive target on their backs since that kind of power could completely reshape the worldwide political landscape.

Hopefully, in addition to solving the problem of making sure their high-profile assassinations actually stick, this policy would also encourage the players to play a bit cautiously and generally keep the stakes high.

Anyway, all this to say, shaping the rules and lore of your world to more precisely fit the experience you are trying to provide makes a lot of sense to me, and is worth considering. As long as you get buy-in from the players up front, of course. Good luck with it!

I think you’ve received lots of great advice here already. One additional thing you may want to keep in mind as you’re weighing your options is how the manner in which this character exits may impact other players.

Obviously, the needs of this player come first, and making whatever changes they need to ensure they can keep having fun in the game is most important. But I bring it up because, in a similar situation where I was running a game for a player who wanted to switch characters, I executed the change in a bit of a clumsy way that one of my other players found frustrating.

I had worked together with the player who wanted to change to craft a heroic last stand scenario in which their old character would sacrifice himself to allow the rest of the party to escape. Critically, we didn’t discuss these intentions with anyone else at the table. One of my other players picked up on what was happening the moment we started playing it out, and did everything he could to prevent the loss of a party member. I essentially railroaded right over anything they tried.

Afterwards, they told me that while they understood why I ran it that way once the other player had a chance to explain their intentions and new character, it still wasn’t very much fun to play through in the moment.

All this to say, if I had to do it again, I would make sure I have some sort of buy-in from the other players. They wouldn’t need to know all the details, certainly, but I think a little heads-up would have made that experience much smoother for everyone.