Funny you should mention this, since I was paging through that game last night.
First of all, let me say that Project 74 was a failure. It did not do what I wanted it to do. Basic Fantasy RPG was inspired by that failure, so it wasn't a total loss, but still... no, I'm not making a supplement out of any part of it.
But why was I paging through it? Well, I have this other game that I keep working on but never get finished. It's called Realms of Wonder. I've talked about it here before:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=110&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
The main page is here:
http://tower.gonnerman.org/realmsofwonder.html
Realms of Wonder has a long, checkered history in my gaming group. Many years ago, I set out to write a game system. I was not prepared to do it, mind you, not nearly, but I thought I was. I mashed together parts of several different games I admired, trying to build a skill-based fantasy RPG. At the same time I created a world, Anderia, which was the site of the adventures we played using those rules.
One of my players called it "Reams of Wonder" because of all the changes and reprints I made. He was still using pages from the rules for scratch paper a few years ago, actually, and I wrote the game in 1984.
A couple of years ago I got the urge to run some adventures in Anderia, and I dug up the old rules, converted from AppleWorks (on the //e, of all things) to plain text and then to MS Word. They sucked more than I remembered. But I had hardly given up writing game systems. I borrowed rules from another game I wrote, one which I had never gotten to run, and I rewrote a bunch of the old material to go along with it. I even redrew the map. This was back in 2006, the same year I started BFRPG.
But playtests, both on Dragonsfoot and at my own table, showed me that those rules sucked also. I had tried to create a game with a proper Core Mechanic, and as I had learned with Project 74, it really doesn't work for me.
So I set it all aside and forgot about it. Oh, I messed with it here and there; the previous posts here on the forum were in 2008. But I couldn't figure out how to fix the game.
Late last week, as I made a long drive home from a customer site, I was thinking about the game for no particular reason, and I realized my mistake. Realms of Wonder needs to be more like BFRPG.
RoW isn't a class-and-level game, and it shouldn't be. Anderia doesn't work that way. But the low-roll system I was using was too limiting. I think I avoided a high-roll system because of d20, but really that's not necessary... I had high-roll games that worked well before d20 ever appeared.
I started rewriting it over the weekend. I changed the combat mechanic to one that would seem familiar to someone used to BFRPG or other similar games, removing a lot of the crunch and maneuvers from the rules. I changed the skill mechanic to work with high rolls, and I defined two different rolls vs. ability scores: a saving throw of 1d20 equal or less, and an ability roll using the abstract version of the 1-n on 1d6 mechanic.
The most important thing is, I made the game numerically equivalent to BFRPG and similar games. So equivalent that I could use BFRPG materials with these rules with a moderate amount of work (though of course I have no plans to do so... that would lose Anderia's special flavor). Beginning characters are about like 2nd level characters in BFRPG, very roughly speaking, and non-humanoid monsters map well between the two. Humanoid monsters need to be revised to work correctly, since they are all "character" (but not necessarily "player character") races in Anderia.
The advantage of this is I know pretty well by now how to balance a game like that. Innovative rules are a pain, I'm discovering.
So why was I looking at Project 74? Numerical equivalence means that I can borrow those bits of Project 74 that work with the new Realms of Wonder core, and I did exactly that.
The version of Realms of Wonder on the website now has been rewritten down to the Magic section. That section is begin gutted, as it's mostly crap, and replaced with something much simpler and maybe a bit more familiar, yet with some interesting options.
... I started out to answer you, really I did, but it turned into a blog post. Sorry.