The Riddle of Steel: why not using all dices to attack ?

[Corvus]

While the system is complex and deep, it works well in practice. And I am always surprised when DnD players (especially those who play 3.5) think the system is clunky/too complex: I find DnD's system quite distracting and while I love it in theory, I find it hard to run smoothly in practice.

I much preferred 2e over 3.x myself, but that is a whole other matter. The complexity I was referring to was the actual combat side of things, which is a step up from d&d melee combat. But I do get the clunkiness side of things. Grappling for starters. And trying to wok out which of the dozen or more different modifiers apply...

In this case: go with Blade of the Iron Throne. There are some changes to the combat system, but overall it looks a bit streamlined. On the other hand - it has a working magic system, which works pretty well with the Dark Sun setting from what I have heard.

Magic is of the dark variety, with Taint mechanic providing a reverse mana mechanic (the more Taint you accrue, the less dice you have for casting spells), there are no real utility spells (like cleaning clothes), but it allows you to rain fire and lightning on people, hypnotize them to believe their swords are snakes (and it could happen they get bitten and die), causing pain - it is of the eldritch variety, so it should work well.

Dark Sun has three different forms of 'magic.' The first is of the arcane type, which nobody likes, because it sucks the life out of living things around it, leaving the land dead. Defilers are happy to do so, as long as they don't get caught, but Preservers try to avoid it and instead only pull out enough life to cast their spells without killing the land. Most people can't tell the difference though. Preservers would probably work with a reduced dice pool, or some other mechanism.

Then there are the priests of the elements - earth, air, fire and water, plus various combinations of them. One who tended to a geyser would have access to water and fire spells, and one who oversaw a region of magma would be fire and earth. A lot more respected than arcane users as they don't destroy the land, and the druids actually try (in vain mostly) to heal it.

Lastly there is psionics. Every single person (and most monsters) have some minor psionic ability, a wild talent, which can range from minor and not very useful to a very powerful ability, like disintegrate. Some people are a lot more skilled at it as well.

Plus you'd have to work on the races. Ones like muls, thri-kreen and half giants are a lot more power than others.