The term tabletop RPG (without any Google / Wikipedia research I can claim) denotes a category of games which have historically been played on a ... tabletop. That is with maps, miniatures (called "minis" in the community), dice, and pen and paper. There is then another type called pen and paper RPGs, and the distinction is not clear to me, maybe I can be corrected on this. As far as I can tell they are almost interchangeable with tabletop being the more widely used term.

While you may have been told that there is no distinction to be had between minis gaming and pen and paper gaming, in actuality there is a vast, vast difference.

Minis gaming focuses a lot of the time on very material conflicts. The representation of the relative position of characters and terrain on the table is an integral portion of not just gameplay but expected gameplay. It provides a very grounded experience where the concerns of the moment are very much manifest.

These games tend to borrow from the miniature wargaming lineage which gave rise to role-playing games in the first place and make expressing mastery of the mechanics of first-order part of the experience of play. Narrative tends to arise retrospectively after a situation has been introduced, characters and elements interact with a degree of randomness, and then meaning is described afterwards.

For example, if I were running THW's Nuts!, and this is a thing I have done, I may have an entire squad of men under my control in front of me on the table, and I will make decisions about what they do in accordance with not just purely moment to moment tactical situations but a knowledge of the history of these particular characters in front of me and the overall narrative of who and what they are. After the given tactical engagement, the results enter into the narrative history of who they are, and you may have a character who distinguish themselves on the battlefield for bravery as a result of some lucky rolls but that becomes part of who he is and how everyone else reacts to him.

D&D Fourth Edition, which had a much stronger focus on miniature play than previous or the following editions, generally only gives you control of one player character, but the actual effects are very much the same.

Pen and paper RPGs tended to dispense with the miniature representation and as a result the conflicts which become part of gameplay are more abstracted and less directly grounded much of the time. Questions of relative positioning become literally relative, and in some cases abstracted out almost entirely, in favor of narrative description and interacting with the environment as a story element.

Wushu, as an example, is very much in that space, with no miniature or map representations of the actions of the players at all – just the mechanical operations which help resolve the question of what things happen and what things do not.

They are definitely not interchangeable terms.

I got into non-traditional RPGs thanks to @lextenebris from whom I first heard about Microscope, an epic storytelling game with no traditional "Games Master" or GM.

If anyone wants to know more about nontraditional RPG designs, I'm sure I can go on at great and disturbing length about them for days on end.

In fact, the designer of Microscope has put out a game recently called Union which expands on one of the play modes in Microscope Explorer focused on playing out stories about families and ancestry, bouncing back and forth in time to find out what made them tick, what things came together to create the situation they found themselves in, etc.

1. Combat is a central focus, and is heavy on "mechanics". Mechanics are hard rules almost always involving chance in the form of specified dice rolls. Think World of Warcraft, but an overlapping turn based system, narratively embellished by the GM.

Combat is not necessarily part of the core experience of D&D, but the odds are deeply in its favor. That is because that it evolved from Chainmail, a very particular type of tabletop miniature wargame where combat between things was sort of the point. It was the desire for more enter character interaction and means to resolve that which drove the development of D&D in the first place.

Also, players are just as welcome to narratively embellish the results of mechanical operations in D&D as the GM is. In fact, for most people's games, it's preferable that the player be responsible for describing how what they're doing is cool even if it's a failure. While there is a lot of traditional belief that D&D should be played with the GM as the core arbiter and creator of story and the players merely move their pawns around, modern play (as in the last couple of decades) definitely leans much harder on distributing responsibility for narrative. That in particular is one of the ways in which Fifth Edition differs from Third Edition, to its advantage in my opinion.

1. The GMs word is law, they are the authority on reality. If they say you lose an arm, you lose an arm. The rules and mechanics are there to keep a bulk of play up front and known, but importantly the GM - player relationship is collaborative and in good faith. It's no fun if the people involve active work against each other or play favorites.

Not always the case. There is a long history of a far more aggressive, adversarial GMing style which goes back a long, long way and you can find rabid adherents to this very day. In their mind, the GM exists to create adversity in difficulty for the players (not just the characters), to give them an opportunity to demonstrate system mastery and good judgment. Anything less than full out making maximum use of the rules to challenge and oppose the intent of the players is thought of as cheating them out of a good game.

It is not a game style which I like, but it's definitely a game style which I've seen promoted and other people enjoying. Then again, I am no kind of D&D fan and never have been for the last four decades, in the interests of full disclosure.

1. Narrative roleplaying generally more suited to fantastic adventures, will need other kinds of conflict

If that were true, you might have something here – but it's not. Not even vaguely or slightly true.

Role-playing in general has been largely directed at fantastic adventures because fantasy is what entertains people. But it certainly hasn't always or solely been. Role-playing games have tackled dark, personal, very un-fantastic stories more than once.

Consider the case of Gray Ranks, an RPG where the players assume the roles of young Polish partisans before, during, and after the disastrous 1944 uprising against the Germans. It is a game which is grounded purely in the real and the historical, while making use of of very strongly narrative mechanical architecture. Topics of abuse, violence, the horrors of war, the necessity of survival, and balancing what you believe to be right with what is required to continue are always at play.

Narratives are often more suited to fantasy, but we still tell stories about what actually happened. We just call them history.

Given the premises of your intent for this game design, perhaps you should reconsider whether it itself is not more fantastic than grounded. It's explicitly ahistorical, explicitly engaging in the play in the space of fantasy, so I don't think that you have a lot of room to suggest that narrative role-playing engages in too much of the fantastic for what you want to do.

In fact, since you bring in "realism" and connect that with "a lot of mechanics," I know that you don't actually know what you're doing. That's okay, but you're making a classic failure in RPG design in conflating more constraint on choice and action with "realism." You don't even really want "realism", because the real is unbelievable. You want "verisimilitude", which is an entirely different thing but requires you to actually understand what kind of stories you want to experience with the people playing the game.

I will admit that this is a compromise as well as a cool new direction. I'm curious to see how people who were intrigued by the idea of Nth Society in the past react to this, as well as people more familiar with tabletop / paper and pencil RPGs react to this new idea.

I'll be honest, at the time you started kicking this idea around, I asked out right why you didn't just want to create some sort of mechanized version of the already extant RPG Freemarket, and now with the drive toward creating some sort of tabletop RPG – I revisit that question.

Given the original premises of the setting, you don't really have a compelling core to build a game off of. Maybe, with a lot of work and a good chunk of paring down, you could have the beginnings of an inspiration for some sort of board game, but the semi-obsession with "realism", the lack of understanding of game spaces and the use of narrative, and a weird fetishization of the blockchain are all serious strikes against.

From my perspective, that's a problem.

You might have the seed of an interesting setting that could be played in with multiple already extant tabletop RPG systems, but at this point you don't actually have something that would be interesting to make into a game in and of itself.