So we hear the phrase "Have you tried not playing D&D" a lot. Here's my question to you Veeky Forums:

It is? Shit, so many of my past games have become less adventurous knowing this now.

You misunderstand. Your past games had adventure, but people want ADVENTURE!

People want Heavy Metal. People want early Toriyama. People want Ralph Bakshi.

Have you tried actually playing D&D?

>Print name of skill in all caps. Add exclamation mark.
>Skill now does everything.

GURPS go home. No, just pls go.

The funny thing is that, in my experience, very few people actually do.

So often, I see people talking about D&D and ascribing traits and mechanics that aren't present anywhere in the system. They're so familiar with it that they've ended up rewriting it and creating something that's almost entirely new and different, but it's happened so gradually they never realised that they stopped playing D&D ages ago.

I think it's why some people find edition changes so difficult. They can't disassociate the actual system from the years of experience and adaptation and investment, so seeing the system in a raw, unmodified form just seems utterly lacking in comparison, even if at core they aren't that different. It's a rather curious phenomena.

OP here
Honestly its because people are different, and usually get bored easily. I tried running a dark edgy game in Symbaroum, but that shit got old pretty fast, for both me and the players.
In a kitchen sink setting you can have a dark edgy arc, then go fuck around catching a wizard's escaped multicoloured pets without having to learn a whole new system inbetween.

For picaresque fantasy in a world of pulpy clichés (the "kitchen sink") I use B/X D&D about 95% rules as written. My group and I haven't found any system that hits those specific tones as sweetly, though 5e D&D comes close. But when we want a more focused type of play, we go to another system (say, Bronze age Heroics, we use Runequest).

I literally saw a post yesterday on another site where the OP was complaining that his players were trying to do things that weren't covered in the rules of 5e, but didn't seem unreasonable. Things that were usually covered in other game systems, like called shots and the like. The idea to switch to another system never came up. Ever. It was out of the question. Everyone just agreed the players were being unreasonable and to tell them to cut it out, or make a really clunky rule to do what they wanted. It really hit a nerve with me.

Several generic rules sets can be used as you describe, the question comes down to how much crunch you want.

FATE, Strike!, Dungeon World, Savage Worlds, GURPS and others will all break the D&D mode.

Exalted does that kind of tone-jumping fairly well, but suffers from being about a specific thing, albeit a different one to D&D: You're all incredibly powerful heroes from the start, and will probably end up as god-kings of a local city without trying. Still, this is a game where you can find yourself fighting the edgelord knights of the underworld one week, then go off on on a quest to find the best ingredients around to make stew that will spsoken of for centuries, then find yourself handling treaty negotations between a local government and their soul-eating fairy neighbours. Your characters' powers are based on your skills, so you can play a character who focuses on superhuman Bureaucracy, Investigation, or Linguistics abilities if you want to try something that you wouldn't see in D&D. For example, there are powers that let you look at someone working and instantly tell how they feel about the people they work for, or that let you write something that causes anyone who reads it to unconciously blurt it out. The setting is extremely kitchen-sinky, but with enough of a solid foundation and general feel that it doesn't end up an incoherent mess.

It definitely has problems. For example, the current third edition is by far the best design, but has almost nothing past the core book published for it. (Seriously, don't playu the first and second editions. The greater quantity of stuff isn't worth putting up with the rules.) The crafting system in 3e is generally regarded as overcomplicated, and some find that it forces them to try and solve all their problems with crafting if they want to be able to make anything cool. There are a few different hacks floating around to try and fix that system. The combat system isn't bad, but it is quite complex and strange (initiative is a resource that you can spend to make attacks, and is also a second pool of hit points, as well as determinning your turn order). In fact, the whole system is quite rules-heavy.

>second spoiler
SenZar

My go to "I want to play D&D but nobody in the group likes 4e aside from myself" game is Shadow of the Demon Lord. It's pretty cool.

Aside from that,

Mutants and Masterminds 3e lets me do just about almost anything, especially kitchen sink fantasy considering superhero stuff is kitchen sink by default.

I don't have to worry about having to figure out what class would go with what a player wants to do character wise only to realize I have to dig through homebrew. I don't have a system that seems to throw a tantrum at any notion of any creature as simple as a centaur or skeleton that doesn't follow the stale trappings of le Evil Undead. Strength is actually a valuable and fun stat to have, allowing you to do anything from actually do something with a grapple, thunderclaps, etc.