Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.

I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.

Also if you use The Estate box set you have a nice, episodic little campaign pre-built for Mausritter. It’s a small hex crawl with a bunch of pamphlet adventures scattered around them, complete with hooks to tie them all together.

Might be a good ongoing structure, especially if you have an inconsistent group, or intend to be swapping GMs periodically.

I’ve almost certainly go too many books, but for me RPG books are two things:

• Something I do or plan to use the actual contents of. Whether that be rules, tools, or adventures.
• Physical objects that are nice to look at and hold.

Happily the indie RPG scene is very good at making books that cover both of those categies. I will once in a while go through the collection and give away books that I both don’t think I’ll ever use, and also aren’t nice enough as objects to be worth keeping around.

I also have a number of magazine bins filled with zines, which I love but also desperately needs to be pared down.

Also because I will take any opportunity to share a shelfie:

Desk RPG shelf of “close to hand” stuff (and also tall books because they don’t fit on the other shelves).

Ancillary bookshelf of RPG stuff:

I guess the question is whether your goal is to make all three stats equally useful, or to make sure the attribute damage mechanic is used equally on all three stats.

If it’s the former then increasing the utility of the other two stats with initiative, magic, dodging, etc. would be a good way to go.

If it’s the latter then making sure enemies have a wide variety of attacks works. Psychic/psionics, poison, ensnaring, soul damage, etc. would all help.

Although I do like applying damage to other stats where appropriate, I don’t actually think you need to if what you’re worried about is balancing them.

STR is the more important attribute if you’re consistently getting into combat. All these games share an ethos that combat shouldn’t be a hugely frequent thing at the table. In that context, the stats are a lot more “balanced”. DEX is by far the most called for Save, in my experience, plus it’s how you go first in combat.

WIS/CHA is a little trickier, depending on your individual campaign. Although in Mausritter specifically casting spells can cause WIL damage.

FWIW this is something I grappled with a bit for my own Odd/Cairn hack (slightly exacerbated by some other rules changes), and I eventually came to the conclusion that I didn’t need rules changes to fix it. The only thing I really plan to do is make sure the included bestiary includes examples of damage to other attributes.

Rather than a specific system or style, I think the important thing is what gets you and your players excited. Pick a genre or theme that you are your players are into, then find a system that matches that. Once you get into it a bit more you can start digging into different styles of RPGs because you’ll have more context for what it all means and some idea of what you all like.

I like rules light systems because they’ve got a shorter “time to table”, but if everyone is very excited to play DnD, then DnD works because it’ll keep everyone motivated and engaged.

Some ideas:

Sci fi horror game along the lines of Alien: Mothership

Hardscrabble, fools forced to delve into dangerous dungeons and weird woods to make a living: Cairn

Grannies solving murder mysteries a la Miss Marple: Brindlewood Bay

A gang of thieves in a Dishonored-esque whale oil powered city: Blades in the Dark.

A gang of thieves flying a space ship in a star wars or firefly styled galaxy: Scum and Villainy

A doomed world undergoing heavy metal apocalypses: MÖRK BORG, or CY_BORG for the cyberpunk version of that.

Buffy and friends taking down vampire threats, or Mulder trying to find the truth that’s out there: Monster of the Week

Personally I’ve had really good luck introducing new players with Mausritter. The physical version is gives people a tactile card based inventory, the digital version is totally free. It’s super easy for people to get into the head space of tiny mice! There are also tons of fantastic modules to run which makes your job as a DM a lot easier.

This comment got a bit away from me, but I’ve run and played a ton of different systems, so if you have some idea of what you think you and your players will be into I can maybe point you in a more specific direction.

Mausritter is also great at getting people into the “old school” adventuring mindset. It’s easy for people to get that they’re a tiny moues, so they need to be careful, be clever, and run away from dangerous situations.

Plus it’s got fantastic first and third party adventures to run.

Might not be sufficiently fantasy magic for the brief though?

Both the NSR and the Cairn discord servers are friendly and helpful places, if you’re looking to chat with someone about running games like that. Or just hanging out and talking about games.

If I can self promo for a minute, for anyone that likes to do some physical dice rolling to generate stuff, I’ve written a little business card sized dungeon generator: Wallet Dungeons.

I’ve also got a sci fi version for making space stations.

Just ran a rad one shot of CBR+PNK, a forged in the dark cyberpunk system.

Otherwise I run a lot of my own system Brighter Worlds, which is a Cairn (and more) hack with the d20’s removed. Not that I was going out of my way to avoid d20’s, but that’s how it ended up. I’ve been playtesting it for more than two years now, I think, and I finally feel like I’m starting to close in on the finish line.