Perihelion
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I've played a considerable number of systems, from D&D to Call of Cthulhu, but I've gotta say that new World of Darkness is my favorite. WoD sort of has a bad rep as a game for goth kids, and while some of the chronicles (well, just Vampire: The Requiem, really) are definitely geared in that direction, the mechanics are awesome. You can tell someone 90% of what they need to know to play the game in about a paragraph. The system is really simple, intuitive, and flexible. You have a number of attributes (rated 1-5) and skills (rated 0-5), and to perform an action, you pick an attribute and a skill, add their ratings together, and roll a number of d10's equal to the total (plus or minus modifiers). For each 8, 9, or 10 you roll, you get a success, and you need an increasing number of successes to succeed at increasingly difficult tasks. A few tasks are marginally more complicated, but that's really about it for most things. You might roll dexterity + stealth to sneak past a guard, for example, or manipulation + persuasion to sell someone something, or wits + subterfuge to come up with a convincing cover story on the fly and composure + subterfuge to deliver it convincingly. It's easy to come up with a dice pool for just about anything you want to do, or even more than one dice pool depending on how you want to do it. WoD is much more roleplaying-oriented than, say, D&D, which is another thing I really like about it. When combat shows up, it's brief and deadly, and you don't need to keep track of a million different things like you do in D&D. I started enjoying GMing way more when I moved from D&D to WoD.
I like GURPS a lot too, but GURPS is much more complicated than WoD. That said, they don't call it the Generic Universal Roleplaying System for nothing. You can stat everything from a plant to a spaceship as a character (not exaggerating). The level of character customization is simply tremendous, and there are a bunch of highly specific rules and skills and whatnot for different situations. The sourcebooks are all amazingly well researched, too. If you're looking for a system that has rules for every conceivable thing ever, GURPS is for you, but there's a good bit more number-crunching than in most other systems. I mean, you have the option of ignoring the more complicated rules, but I once spent days making a sheet.
I like GURPS a lot too, but GURPS is much more complicated than WoD. That said, they don't call it the Generic Universal Roleplaying System for nothing. You can stat everything from a plant to a spaceship as a character (not exaggerating). The level of character customization is simply tremendous, and there are a bunch of highly specific rules and skills and whatnot for different situations. The sourcebooks are all amazingly well researched, too. If you're looking for a system that has rules for every conceivable thing ever, GURPS is for you, but there's a good bit more number-crunching than in most other systems. I mean, you have the option of ignoring the more complicated rules, but I once spent days making a sheet.
