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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Flying Dice]

That's not a half-bad idea. IIRC it's difficult enough to optimize for crits in 5e that you couldn't even exploit it much.

[Neonivek]

Instead of hurting HP recovery you could have players accumulate wounds that don't go away after rests.

[Kadzar]

Spoiler: Summary (click to show/hide)

Character class doesn’t matter when it comes to background fluff. Essentially, if you want to take the monk class, you don’t have to be an actual monk. Some justification will be needed, but we can work with that on a case by case basis. Since the player count is small, everyone can have some awesome backstories. The world is flexible, but PM me first. Nothing overblown, though. You’ll regret that.

The only available race from a fluff perspective is Human. In this world, the other races never existed in the first place. However, I’m letting you take other race’s stat blocks as well as their racial abilities with fluff changes where necessary.
The exception is darkvision. No one gets darkvision naturally, since I actually want (natural) darkness to be a genuine concern.

If you're going to remove Darkvision from some racial choices (even if they actually represent humans) remember to add something back in to make up for it.

I think the biggest element to making the game more gritty/real has more to do with consequences than difficulty.  For instance the actual fight might be over in a moment, but the effects can be very disproportionate.

To implement something like that, what if you made critical hits deal constitution damage equal to the weapon's critical multiplier.

EDIT:
This could also help alleviate the traditional problem of wizards being more powerful than fighters, (especially if the constitution damage is in addition to rather than instead of the normal extra damage) as critical hits for spells are extremely limited.

Critical multiplier is only a thing in 3e/Pathfinder, and I don't think 5e really does ability damage, though lowering max HP and possibly giving permanent Disadvantage on Constitution saving throws works just as well.

[UXLZ]

Any suggestions on what might actually replace it?

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, it would just effectively mean that any crit does 2 Con damage. I'd forgotten about that, since I've mostly played Wizards and a Monk in 5e.

Re: Replacing Darkvision: I'unno. It had a pretty firm niche as removing something which ranged from annoying to actually dangerous as part of the benefit to taking a more rigid racial bonus set. One option might be to replace it with, say, 10' Blindsight, which would deal with what seemed to be your primary issue of people not needing torches/magical light to be fine navigating underground, while still retaining the same sort of niche of "able to function better than average in darkness". It's probably not balanced, though, given the additional advantages of Blindsight, even with a short range.

Maybe replace it with Low-Light Vision (which gives an advantage in dim lighting while still requiring a light source to function) and another small bonus. Problem with 5e is that you can't just tack on something like a racial +2 to Perception (and, for example, Elves already get a racial proficiency to Perception, so you couldn't just use that). You might be able to do something related like +2 to Initiative and Passive Perception while operating in less than broad daylight but more than total darkness, which would fit with the same motif of higher than average sensory ability  in dark conditions while still circumventing the "60' darkvision, I don't need a torch" thing.

So yeah. That would be my hesitant suggestion. For all races with Darkvision, substitute Low-Light vision and racial +2 to Initiative and Passive Perception while in lighting dimmer than direct daylight and brighter than pitch darkness. Tweak as desired.

[GiglameshDespair]

I still find human, but all the abilities of a different race to be odd. If I'm a not!minotaur, would I still get a gore attack?
Either have different races or just have everyone as a human. Can't have your cake and eat it too very well.

[UXLZ]

I'm pretty sure there are less races that don't have darkvision than there are races that do, and given that I'm hoping for darkness to be a fairly regular occurrence in this campaign that's a genuine issue rather than the minor nuisance it tends to be (after all, it's sword and sorcery/dark fantasy, with somewhat less magic than a regular DnD setting but plenty of monsters.) Having darkvision in it just doesn't realy fit.

Low-light vision was the one that just made it so you didn't have sight-reliant perception disadvantage in dim light, correct? If that's the one, it sounds fine. +2 to passive perception is also fine, but I'm not so sure about initiative. I guess it isn't really *that* major so +2 to that as well shouldn't be major.

@Gig: I haven't decided on what supplements I want to allow/disallow, yet, so not!Minotaur might not even be an option, like not!Aaracockra or Aasamir or Goliath or any of those others.

Fluff changes will be made where necessary, it's not really that hard. not!Dragonborn, for instance, if they are a magic-casting class could easily have their breath attack reflavored as a special spell the character favors, and so forth. The only real issue is with stuff that's a physical feature of the race that can exclusively be used for the function (like the Tiefling's tail, I believe? Or was that just window dressing? I can't remember if they could actually use it for stuff.)
A minotaur's gore attack can be refluffed as a special fighting maneuver.

I've got that cake, and I'm eating the whole thing godamnit! :v

*edit*

Yeah, the tail's just window dressing. Tieflings are easy to re-flavor since they're pretty much humans already. (In a broader sense.)
Oh, and I also forgot to mention that everyone gets the regular human lifespan, but that's basically a non-issue.

[Twinwolf]

Oh, and I also forgot to mention that everyone gets the regular human lifespan, but that's basically a non-issue.

Really, if death by old age becomes an issue, either you've been playing too long or allowed someone to play to old a character.

[Flying Dice]

Ironically enough, Low-Light Vision in 5e was folded into Darkvision, though it is true that in 5e sight-related Perception checks are made at disadvantage in Lightly Obscured areas (which also includes medium-density foliage and thick fog). IIRC the only other effect of Lightly Obscured areas is that certain races are able to attempt to Hide in them as if they were fully obscured. I was more thinking of the effects of Low-Light Vision from when it existed, namely:

Characters with low-light vision have eyes that are so sensitive to light that they can see twice as far as normal in dim light. Low-light vision is color vision. A spellcaster with low-light vision can read a scroll as long as even the tiniest candle flame is next to him as a source of light.

Characters with low-light vision can see outdoors on a moonlit night as well as they can during the day.

Specifically, it doubles the radius of bright and dim light circles from all light sources and (unlike Darkvision) allows you to see colors. At least, that's how I've always seen it parsed. So for example if you had a rock that you had cast Light on, it would effectively cast 40' of bright light and an additional 40' of dim light instead of 20' of bright and another 20' of dim (for you -- anyone without LLV would still see 20'/20'). I'm pretty sure this is why Low-Light Vision was axed as an independent thing: when Darkvision was readily accessible there was pretty much no benefit to having it.

[UXLZ]

Hm, I don't really like the sound of that if I'm honest. What about about tripling the Dim Light distance? So it's 20'/60' rather than 40'/40'.

[Flying Dice]

*shrugs* It's your game.

[UXLZ]

I might just make it so they don't get disadvantage on dim-llight perception checks along with +2 passive perception to see in dim light and maybe some sort of init bonus.. Even just the lack of disadvantage could actually end up fairly important, too.

I'm leery of the initiative bonus because I'll need to add a bunch of conditions to it or you'd end up with some irritating situations on both side, and arguably it could end up better than regular darkvision. (Though it's not really power that I'm worried about, I just don't want to over complicate it or let people pretend darkness doesn't exist.)

[Neonivek]

Yeah as much as I give 5e a good time, don't get me wrong there is a lot that rubs me the wrong way.

5e is something I want to fully explore because not only is it balanced, you don't have to throw away the monster manual because players are a higher level, but most importantly the game flows leagues greater then 3.5 ever did.

And heck some of the simplifications in 5e are ones I am fully behind... We didn't need a bajillion skills for everything. We don't need monsters to fall under 8 separate knowledges (though I wish there was just "monster knowledge" as opposed to Arcane being the umbrella). Severely limiting the instant kills? I am all for it, I felt like after a while that "cheapness" was the only trick 3.5 knew.

But what took so long for me to get into 5e was just how much it felt like someone took a hammer to the game's complexity and variety. Spells are simplified to hell and back and even to an extent there being so many "It does damage yo" spells hurts the overall feel of magic (even if all 3.5 did was remake the same spell over and over again with different elements... so I might be being unfair to 3.5)

HECK!... The one thing I loathe about 5e is how much I feel like you don't REALLY make your own character. They made getting a feat an "alternative option" as opposed to something ingrained in the system, which is a shame because the feats are actually good and worthwhile without a lot of feat surfing (in fact just about ALL the feats are good). It is to me the biggest weakness of 5e...

It was like to achieve balance they had to make sure the player had as little involvement in creating their character as humanly possible.

[UXLZ]

Making feats optional is probably why they're so good, since they're aren't a bajillion of them with only 3 useful ones and 6 tax ones.

Players break things.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly that's my pretty close to my own feelings about 5e. They did a pretty good job of balancing things without falling into the 4e "Make every class the same thing with different fluff," trap, but it came at the expense of investment via the crunch. When I build a character in 3.5 or PF I have a firm idea of how they fight, how they interact with other people, and maybe even what they do to relax (if the build has space for skill points in things like Profession (Chef) or Perform ([insert instrument here]), or for little bits and bobs that cost a pittance for a higher level character) before I ever start writing their personality and backstory.

When I make a character in 5e, it feels like I'm following a color-by-numbers book. It dumps the entirety of the character beyond the most basic aspects suggested by ability scores into the realm of backstory, which I'm sort of leery of -- it reeks too much of freeform RP for my taste, which at least in my experience tends to be the domain of shitty self-inserts and Sues (not that people don't manage to do that in 3.x/PF, mind you. >.>). That, and pretty much every character looks more or less the same at any given point, distinguished solely by their backstory. That's not to say that backstory doesn't matter, just that it functions better when supported by the rest of the sheet.

I'm of mixed opinion regarding the "four personality boxes" -- on the one hand, they're a good crutch for people who don't care to spend much time developing their character, but on the other they're more of the same shallow paint-by-numbers character creation.

There's also something I've encountered in the magic system. Between the miscellaneous nerfs and those done by way of the new Concentration mechanic, and a vastly smaller set of spells, there are actually relatively few spells worth taking. In 3.5/PF my usual problem with casters is narrowing my options, not digging up enough spells that aren't mehworthy or complete crap. Concentration means that you take at most maybe two or three Concentration-limited spells of each level even if you're a Wizard -- you'll never be able to use more than one total at a time, and you don't get many prepared spells to begin with. But the thing is, beyond that all you really have are a scant handful of non-shit direct damage and Save-or-X spells, and a scattering of glorious rituals.

Ritual casting is pretty much the only purely good innovation in 5e casting IMO, given that it's basically done for the boring utility spells like Detect Magic what unlimited cantrips/orisons did for those.

Arcane casters also smell the most like 4e to me: Wizards and Sorcerers in particular are almost alarmingly similar now because of how spellcasting has changed.