Invent your own faith system

[DeistPaladin]

We haven't played for about a year, but I have been playing and DMing D&D for almost 20 years. Forgotten Realms, mostly. Plus a number of other tabletop paper and dice games (not White Wolf, though. Ugh).

I've yet to find an RPG system that I'm completely happy with. D&D is a deeply flawed system, even the latest versions, but I've "patched" it with a set of edges, hindrances and point-based character construction in my variant.

White Wolf (Vampire and Warewolf, never played any of the others) is great for story telling and some of their mechanics make a lot of sense (I particularly like their relatively simple wound system) but some of their ideas are either not adequately supported by rules structure or badly unbalanced. Was this the cause of your "ugh" reaction?

Deadlands is appealing for its innovative mechanics (cards and chips in particular) and its great whopping handfuls of dice (always appealing to RPGers). However, its combat rules are cumbersome, there are too many Traits (a problem White Wolf shares) and the mechanic for skills relies too heavily on luck and too little on skill rank.

I love the primary rule in Feng Shui (anything that promotes the story is automatically successful) but its not a system for serious role playing.

Champions really pioneered the skills-based and point-based character construction but the mechanics are so complex that you need a computer program just to create a character.