Hello! First post here, hopefully of many.

For a while now I've been working on a game called Unearth, which was pretty much a culmination of all the post-apocalyptic game ideas I had as a kid. It took place several centuries after global nuclear warfare, where the last human civilization was located on a large tropical island and there were several other races to compete with them, like these large insect things and crystals capable of forming bodies for themselves out of the surrounding environment. It turned out pretty wacky, and I wasn't particularly satisfied with the direction of things, primarily because I couldn't figure out game mechanics and the story components to go along with them at the same time.

Recently, I decided to salvage all I could of the game mechanics and work on a system that wasn't setting-specific, with the rather sparse notes located at http://sites.google.com/site/unearthsystem/notes. I'm a complete newbie to the world of RPG development, but my hope here is to create a competent system that I (and others) could use to make their own settings, and perhaps one day make the Unearth setting a reality.

To answer the Big Three,

What is your game about?

I'm trying to go for a system that encourages very open-ended play, without confining characters to strict attacks. Instead of saying, "You are a wizard. This is a fireball spell," I'd rather say "You are trained in magic use. Here are the components with which to construct spells." Similarly, instead of giving a warrior an attack with his weapon that would sweep around him, the GM would give him a DC to roll his weapon skill against, with possible penalties for failure like having his sword go flying out of his hand on a 1. I want to leave the players with many choices.

What do the characters do?

Characters in the various settings are going about doing heroic deeds, without turning into demigods. Stats and my HP equivalent are a fixed number, with character advancement consisting mostly of skills. I'd like the general feel to be that the only thing separating a player's powerful wizard from a lowly peasant is the amount of things he knows. Both will die after the same amount of hits with the same sword.

What do the players do?

Players would hopefully be thinking up interesting solutions to highly threatening situations, as most of the time a setting would involve permadeath with few options for resurrection. I think this comes from many long nights of playing various Roguelikes, and I'd like to recreate the feel for Unearth players. Due to the very possible chance of dying, the game world is supposed to provide a wide variety of options for the players to mess around with. There shouldn't be anything stopping a player from figuring out a spell that teleports a plague rat into the bedroom of a tyrant, potentially infecting him with the bubonic plague and solving a quest that would otherwise involve slaughtering the entire castle guard. As both a one-time player and GM, I find these situations hilarious.

To anyone that would like to help me reach my goals, thanks! I hope I wasn't too vague. If so, just yell at me.

I get the impression a big part of making your game fly will be giving the everyone tools to improvise, and a clear view of "the competitive success of the human race" as a target to aim for.

Me and my friends have done some hilarious improvisation with a very minimal system, pretty much avoiding dice rolls completely! The thing that made that work for us was a good agreement on what was possible within the setting, and whether we really could (for example) use a "swap places with opponent" ability after jumping off a cliff, or use someone's "temporary invincibility but stasis" power to use him as a door jam.

At the same time, the more people do this, the more there need to be success conditions that can be affected by a wide array of things, like "the hidden location of our village" or "the condition of our air purifier plant", and the enemies need to have the same kind of thing, so you can know when you've done a serious blow, and they can start plotting how to come back from it.

That way you have a never ending set of elements for the GM to make puzzles out of like prospecting for steel to fix a purifier, but then attracting the attention of a load of the crystal guys and having to draw them off so they don't find your village, then deciding to set them against the insect guys and disappear in the struggle. Or something like that.

In these kinds of situations, one big fun thing about the dice rolling is that it forces you to plan for more eventualities, and occasionally throws up exciting twists. If that's what you like about it, then try to insure that there are precautions people can come up with for many failures, although you might want to keep unavoidable critical fails, just to keep things unknown.

Ah, thanks for the reply!

I'm a major fan of magic being interpreted in a horribly wrong way, and that one example of invincible stasis made me laugh. One thing I've always wanted to do with an invisibility spell was make something that would cause you to be completely invisible to all waves, effectively making you blind and deaf for the duration of the effect. Of course, nobody can hear or see you either.

I'm not sure how many times my rolling system has been done before, but I think it goes along very well with the theme of improvisation. Your stats cannot be modified, and are presented in a xd6 form, with 3d6 being the average and every d6 above or below provides a modifier for skill rolls. When rolling for skills, you roll a set amount of d6 provided by the rank, along with one more/less d6 from your stat modifier. This can either be against an agreed-upon DC or another entity's rolling. Weapon proficiencies and magical capabilities are skills too, they aren't separate.

My idea for combat would be that you'd roll the d6s from your weapon skill along with the strength modifier when attacking, and the d6s provided by your armor when defending. If you're not wearing any armor, you either get no roll to defend with, or a measly d6, though I haven't decided yet. Chain mail might give you something like 3d6. Mishaps will always happen, as an unlucky yet skilled warrior can still fail miserably against someone in reinforced leather.

The thing I'm wondering here is what sort of downfalls this part of my system has, and how I can compensate for them. I don't think I can progress much further until I'm confident with the framework I have so far, but I think it could work. Like you said, there should be precautions people can come up with for failures, and this I think can come from the players instead of the characters they represent. Instead of getting into a situation where they need to roll something critical  (like assaulting a pirate captain with an ax), they could interact with the environment creatively (like aiming a burning arrow at the pirate's store of oil while they're distracted by far-off fireworks). Critical failures are present throughout all skill rolls, typically on achieving a series of 1s and 2s. This can lead to situations where you lose the ore you're trying to smelt, or you accidentally snap your bow string and render it unusable.

By the way, these are the races I had in my old Unearth (the setting, not the system), which I'm thinking I can recycle for the next incarnation of it:
- Humans, who have average stats across the board, but also have access to a magic system unique to them and the only reliable source of gunpowder. Their mages are called scribes, who etch patterns upon crysophene crystals, which when concentrated upon can produce an effect in the physical world.
- Mulg, an aquatic offshoot of humanity, who are descended from a group of humans that left the bomb shelters while it was still not safe. They are much more durable than humans and can breathe underwater, but lack physical strength. They also have their own magic system, a sort of shamanism.
- Tlek, a race of cave-dwelling insects resembling a cross between a locust and a roach. They have an elaborate system of tunnels reaching around the island, and their society somewhat resembles that of ants, in that they are ruled over by a single queen in each hive. Fantastically stupid (light terrifies them) and clumsy (they have difficulty getting back up after being knocked over), they make up for this by being strong and durable with their natural armor.
- Cryssith, the previously mentioned sentient crystals. In their natural form they are pale blue blocks of crystal with sparks of red pulsing throughout their interior structures. They are capable of using a sort of attractive energy to pull bits of the environment around them to make a body, which can be in any shape they desire. Highly intelligent, and suspiciously secretive.
- Ulari, a group of extremely violent religious fanatics with a culture based off the impurity of their flesh. They cannot heal from wounds, and must instead graft skin and limbs from defeated opponents, with the typical Ularn warrior looking very different after having gone through combat. While fantastically capable fighters, they don't last very long.