Gunna gush post about my own game
I designed Fantastic Adventures of Sorcery and Prowess(FAsp) to adress the disconnect between what 5e players/actual play listeners seem to want, and what 5e actually provides. One of the many problems I try to address is players struggling to create simple, catchy, motivated, and complex characters. Or struggle to do so without over writing the character.
My solution to this is what I'm most proud of in the game. It's to use the many rich tropes of the fantasy genre and the class form to build a vocabulary for the players to play with, while also challenging them to explore the vocabulary's contradictions/tensions. Then in resolving those contractions/tensions creating a narrative space to play within for themselves.
In practice this looks like a system with many many(18 at time of writing with a total of 30 planned) small classes, all rooted firmly in a single fantasy. And a system that not only encourages the players to multiclass, but actually demands that all characters have at least 2 of these classes to start with.
The familiar tropes make up the vocabulary, and by forcing players to choose two of these tropes they are left to explain how these two things can exist in one person. Which gives them so much to work with and explore during play right off the bat.
To step away from FAsp for a second to give a good example of this happening accidentally in d&d. It's very popular to build up a character by exploring a mismatch between your fantasy race and class. Exploring this tension makes for easy and rich grounds for roleplaying. Think the Orc wizard, or Halfling barbarian. Now FAsp doesn't have fantasy races(another rant) so it's built around classes as things that you do or become.
What does it look like to be both an alchemist and wizard? Perhaps a witch with a bubbling cauldron, or an arcane scientist. Or an assassin alchemist, carefully creating just the right poison. Explore the angst of a vampire paladin. The double life of a noble thief. The mad experiments of a tinkerer necromancer.
In playtesting this has worked brilliantly, getting players who sometimes struggle with the blank page to run in a strong direction. While also giving experienced players a rich vocabulary to express exactly who they had in mind.
I've got more to say about how the game has players spool out characters from this initial thread it hooks in them. But I have to do a capitalism at the job factory
