I posted some off the cuff answers elsewhere in this post: https://ttrpg.network/comment/3849752

But that was specific about the rest thing.

Fate is my game crush. It's a general purpose RPG. And i know some people cram DND into any setting but it usually doesn't work great. Fate is actually designed to work for any setting.

It's very open and honestly I think requires more engagement from the players. If you have a bunch of wallflowers who look at their phone and then just say "I attack" on their turn, fate isn't going to go well.

But if you have good players it can be fantastic.

The core of the game is "Aspects". They're free form short phrases about your character. "Fresh Faced Wizard", "Last Knight of the Silver Shield", "Royal Accountant", or whatever. Those inform what your character can do, and you can invoke them to get a bonus on rolls.

The dice system is also more to my taste. It's a fixed dice pool, so you tend to roll average results more than outliers. 1d20 means every outcome on the die is equally likely. I kind of hate that.

It also has better rules for succeeding at a cost. DND just doesn't have any rules for that. The DM can handwaive something but it's not codified at all.

It encourages anymore writer's room approach where players are encouraged to add to the story. More than just being zeroed in on their character. Some people hate this. I like it.

I could go on, but I'm on my phone and supposed to be working. Fate is really cool though.

The world of darkness / Chronicles of darkness games are also very good. I like cofd more but I think that's uncommon. Very clean dice system. Honestly could do fantasy with it without much changes.

I like that stats and health are pretty tightly constrained. You know that on average a person has 7 health. So you can be pretty sure that if you have a hammer that does two damage, and your dice pool gives you on average two hits, you'll probably take them out of the fight pretty quick. Compare with DND where that bandit might have 8 HP or 20 or 40. There's not really a way to gauge what you're dealing with. Some people like it. It feels bad to me. Like the worst kind of video game where the red goblins have twice the hp as the green ones just-because.

The rules for supernaturals are also pretty good. Mage just blows DND magic out of the water with the flexibility and depth.

There's also blades in the dark and related powered by the apocalypse games. They're popular. They have a pretty simple but effective dice pool system. I'm not a huge fan but they're worth checking out.

I could go on but I really should go back to work. Been fussing with this between tasks all day, heh.