Donjon

Donjon is more of a STORYTELLING game than a GRIND SLASH COLLECT +X ITEMS game.

You pick your own skills (say, you decide that your character has Necromancy, Running Fast and ELVEN EYES as skills). Then you decide that, "Hey, I want to use my ELVEN EYES to see what's over that next hill!" then depending on how many successes you get, you get to describe more or less. A weak success and you could go: "My elven eyes see an orcish encampment!" and a good success could be: "My elven eyes see an orcish encampment! They have many siege engines ready for war, and the chieftain's tent stands out, heavily guarded, in the middle of the camp!"

The mechanics are like this: everyone's stats are dice pools. Even your wealth and inventory are dice pools, I'm not kidding. When you want to do something, or see if you've got something, you roll umpity-ump d20s and the DM rolls as many d20s as the difficulty for where you are, or as many d20s as the monster has. For every die higher than the DM's highest die, you get to state a fact, like "I totally had a healing potion" or "dude forgot to lock the door," or you do some damage so the other guy loses dice from his pool. For every die the DM has that's higher than your highest die, he gets to think up nasty stuff for you to deal with.

... okay, so it's actually cooler than that, but I gotta leave.

• Donjon Rules for free, but you can buy the book in print to if you aren't a cheapass bastard.