Rethinking d20 project

I spent a lot of time in the early 00s and even the 10s doing house rules for d20. Ultimately, I ended up with two options; one that was a highly curated class/race list with E6, and one that was essentially using d20 Modern + d20 Past to get a lower magic approach. I abandoned it when I migrated to m20 and embraced that more rules lite paradigm instead, but there were always reasons for which I liked some of the more rules; particularly with regards to character generation and definition. While in play, I don't find that I care all that much about all of the rules, but I love being able to define characters with the rules, and I feel like it does indeed create roleplaying opportunities because it defines the character much more. 

Sure, sure... in rules-lite games, you can define the character outside of the rules, just like a novelist would do with a character for his novel, and then utilize the rules to run the character that you've defined outside of the rules. OSR types have been saying this for years, the you can just use the old fighting-man class and decide that your character is a witty and urbane swashbuckler, or a gritty and cynical mercenary, or a proud and noble knight, etc. To some degree that's true, although to some degree also it is not. Some of those concepts aren't well represented by the rules, and if you try to do that, you just kind of have to pretend like your swashbuckler is swashbuckling, even though the rules are going to penalize you for playing that way when you have a class that's optimized to be run like a pole-arm utilizing soldier or whatever. As much as I have problems with d20 that put me out in the wilderness avoiding it for years, now that I'm back more firmly in the hobby again, playing much more regularly again (my 5e Tyranny of Dragons session is tonight, BTW, in which I'm a player) I'm caught in this same bind again, where I want two things that are mutually exclusive at the same time. Obviously, I can't have it, but I'm doing my best to navigate the straight between Scylla and Charybdis, so to speak.

I've got two potential projects, that I'm trying to decide if I really want to do or not. (If I won the lottery or something like that, I'd absolutely do both of these, and take them on as valuable uses of my now freed up time. Given that I do still have to work full-time, I'm not 100% sure that these projects... TARR out, for lack of a better term; i.e., is it really worth it to do or not, or does it just generate a lot of effort and very little benefit? I'd do it anyway if I had the free time) The first of these is to take my existing rules-lite game engine and revise the document for it so that it's got better layout and a better look and feel. It would also give me an opportunity to possibly correct some minor things, or add them. I might even take the opportunity to get rid of my D&D-ish spell-list and go back to my original Cthulhu-ish spell list. Yeah, yeah... most of the spells had mechanics taken from old D&D or m20 spell lists, but the names and feel and spell selection were deliberately Lovecraftian. This is another decision that I've been on the fence about for years, and go back and forth on.

The second, more ambitious project would be to take the 3.5 and PFRPG SRDs (found here) and create my own rule system that utilizes all of my house rules integrated into a modified SRD. I.e, it would use a 3.5 base, Pathfinder classes, and have Elephant in the Room and E6 built in from the get-go. The problem with this is that while it would be quite personally satisfying to create this fantasy heartbreaker ruleset by editing, splicing and kitbashing the 3.5 SRD, the PFRPG SRD and the E6 and Elephant in the Room house rule documents, I doubt—honestly—that I'd ever really use them.

One thing that would make it more fun for me as well is to have three completely separate and discrete f/x "systems" and for any given game, you don't mix and match, you use one and only one of them. The way that this works is that for "standard" RPG fantasy, you'd use "regular" D&D classes like the wizard, sorcerer or cleric, etc. for your magic. These would only be 4-level classes, and you can't take a level in them until third level, so 1st and 2nd level characters simply don't have access to magic yet. If you were going to play a magic using class, you'd probably want to use rogue for your first two levels and focus on skills. Or maybe noble (from Freeport) or something like that. 

I could expand this with many of the additional magic classes of Pathfinder; the witch, arcanist, shaman, oracle, etc. And some of them could be five level classes; if the classes are written so that that they don't get 3rd level spells until 5th level, then they can only be four level classes and you can't take them until 4rd level, but if they don't get 3rd level spells until 6th level, then they can be five level classes and you can take them at 2nd level. All 3rd level (and higher) spells that you want to allow need to be treated as or converted to rituals/incantations. 

The "Occult Adventures" iconics

Of course, I'm also talking about variants, utilizing the occult classs, only one of which (the psychic) would need to be started after 1st level, and a psionics variant using. the Ultimate Psionics book. I'd need to do this if I ever actually run STRANGE AFFAIRS OF THE UNSEEN BEYOND or EMPIRE OF THE MIND-WIZARDS, so maybe it's worth doing just to have those project actually available. If I think that actually doing those projects is worth the trouble. Maybe if I retire in a strange environment where I can run whatever I want and can find players who will play it, it would be worth doing. Otherwise, I'm just spending many man-hours on a hypothetical because I have very complicated house rules.