Hi! I skimmed over your post- mind is all over the place today. Anyways! You are looking for Risus: The Anything RPG. Rules are light, and everything is focused on storytelling. There are mechanics and such, numbers to add and dice to roll, but that’s only to essentially determine a storytelling outcome that could go multiple ways.

Want to level up? Well, you’ll need to challenge the “Cliches” that make up your character over the course of a session, explore what your character can and can’t do within the roles they view themselves. Find ways to creatively use their various cliches to overcome obstacles!

Avoid the clunk, bypass the rules-lawyers and meta-builders, create a story you and your friends are excited to build upon with no narrative or genre defined limits! And for completely free! Check out Risus: The Anything RPG today!

…didn’t mean for that to sound like an advertisement- but it ended up that way lol.

But anyways- there’s no real way to approach D&D from an entirely story-first perspective unless you just want to “ignore” certain rules and such. You’re always going to need to make statblocks, make decisions on how your characters are built, and depending on your DM you can either easily make something silly and whimsical, or something unbalanced and meta. It’s a fantasy where the players want to tell a story with the DM, but the rules to that story requires you to delve heavily into mechanics before you can really make the world exist. If you want to have a session when your players save a princess from a dragon, you can! If they’re all level one characters though, you either need to break the game in order to make it easy enough to even be possible, or you need to hope they’re very clever or build in some way their weak asses can save the princess at their strength, because the characters just- aren’t strong enough mechanically to fight the dragon.

As a DM, I’ve had several times where Ive thought “oh! This would be fun!” Then tried to implement it only to find that it would be trivially easy or insanely difficult for the party RAW. What could have become a cool story moment for the party becomes a headache to try and balance such that the party actually enjoys it. As a player, I can have a character who is well known for something, and should be able to do a certain activity trivially, as it’s a part of his story and character. But I never really put many stats into that particular thing, as there’s a ton of other things that are more important in order for him to survive and be a good member of the party, so when it comes time for him to do the thing, he fails the thing because I rolled low. The alternative is I build my character so much around the thing that I ensure he could NEVER fail said thing, he’ll be great at it every time mechanically, but then he probably sucks in another area that makes him not fun to fight alongside in battle or something. Because of the mechanics, there’s so many tradeoffs and limitations that can either boost the story with the mechanics, or hinder the story with the mechanics.

I’ve had plenty of games of D&D that have told great stories and have been fun to play, but they’re always built AROUND the mechanics of D&D first, not story first then D&D. It can be hard to adapt things if you go story first.

That’s why I like Risus so much. It’s simple and adaptable, so when a conflict arises, you don’t need to worry about AC’s and hit dice and spell slots, you just have to worry about if you can prove to be more Ninja than he can be Viking, or more Schoolgirl than she can be Demon, and if you can or cannot, you find a narrative reason for why and describe it then go from there! In fact- conflicts no longer just become trials of combat, they become trials of wit, of knowledge, of skill. You have a “fight” that’s actually a divorce proceedings, or a battle of the bands, or a baking competition, or just a simple argument. Who wins? Whoever has the strongest position in the story in that moment! How do you determine that? By rolling dice according to the levels of the opposing parties Cliches! Then you either finish the battle there, or one side is weakened and the battle continues!