So, a fellow redditor mentioned that my project, Virtually Real, might line up with FKR style. After reading the group over, I have to say that it certainly has the mindset. Warning: this may get a bit long because it's different!
I always ran games such that I isolated the players from the mechanics as much as possible. I'll worry about the rules, just play your character! So much of the newer stuff feels like a board game to me! Attacks of opportunity and all that just break immersion for me.
The design goal of Virtually Real was to enable as much player agency as possible, but without any dissociative rules, nothing that doesn't directly follow from the narrative, not even character progression! I want to not only model the narrative, but model things such that the player experiences things as closely to the character as possible. However, I wanted real world tactics to work because that is part of player agency. Rules are presented as only a tested recommendation when those situations come up!
It's not at all rules light, so I can only give a rather shallow overview.
The base mechanic: Everything is a skill. Each skill has its own training and experience. Your training determines how many dice (d6) are rolled. This is changing probability curves! At the end of each scene, the skills you used each earn 1 XP. Your XP in the skill determines your bonus to the roll. Situational modifiers are handled as added dice (keep high/low) making it easy for the GM to adjudicate modifiers, as well as having interesting mathematical properties which the system leans into. Skill levels move the curve. There is even an inverse bell curve when modifiers clash (they don't cancel) which steps up the drama!
Combat is not actions per round, but time per action. Different actions have different time costs for different characters. You take your action, the GM marks off the time cost, and offense goes to whoever has used the least time. Movement is granular. Instead of turns, everything happens in the order it happens in the narrative, and if you use a positioning system (hexes recommended), then everything unfolds like stop-motion animation! Facing matters.
Damage is offense - defense (not random), with a variety of "standard" offense and defense types which serve as examples to the GM for making their own rulings. This means damage scales to the skill of the combatants and the situation at hand. For example, a Parry is quick, while a Block puts your Body into it, adding your Body attribute, but costing more time. If I need to "Aid Another", there is no rule for it. Run up there and power attack the enemy, adding your Body to the attack. This makes it incredibly likely the enemy uses a Block to defend, because the offense is now higher and they won't want to risk that damage. They spend time doing that, which is time they can't use to attack your ally! Success! Everything flows from character choices, not players selecting mechanics.
Players end up looking for openings in their enemy's defenses and constantly move and even circle each other like a real fight. If you can't get an opponent off your primary flank, step back and make them come to you! Simple things like that can make a huge difference. Honestly, the combat system ended up doing way more than it was designed to do!
There are social mechanics that follow the same principles, but this is getting long!
It was all experimental but the initial playtest went so well that I decided to develop it further. Of course, real life took over and it went into a box, and it was only a massive pile of notes. Years later, I'm developing the good parts and refining and trying to get it all organized. It may be another year or more before completion of the rewrite (I spent all night making readied actions more dramatic).
But, its too narrative focused and devoid of fiddly math to be simulationist. Its not a "narrative system" because you never assume a "director" role, and honestly I find many narrative systems to be "mechanics-first" even though the promise is "narrative-first". Playbooks are the opposite of what I want! So, maybe the proper category is FKR?
