Issues I see with Pathfinder and D&D.

This is not a bashing thread of the games since I have played both and I am currently in a Pathfinder game but its some observations about the systems and worlds that kind of annoy me that I would like to discuss. 1) Adventurers This is one of the things that makes the least sense to me and the one that gets me most annoyed I think. Its the fact that the games are more or less designed that you shall play these mysterious things known as Adventurers. What annoys me about them I hear you ask. Well to start off they are a group of anything that travels together and do everything, cause issues with economy, raise hell and start wars as well as grave robbing and countless acts of murder. They do not make sense in my eyes. Or for that matter that a village/person/organisation/group would just out of the blue say: "Hey we need adventurers to do this for us and we have no idea who they are but they are adventurers." That is something that just does not sit right with me but I have not grown up with the american culture enforced on me as hard since I was born in Europe. When I run games the group is something more specific, maybe they are from a order that recovers relics belonging to different cultures, or they might be a band of witch slayers since their organization have been trying to kill them off for two hundred years. While they might do many of the same things there is a huge difference, Relic hunters or Witch slayers have an organization behind them, they have a clear goal and they have an agenda; Its not just to go out in the world kill everything, steal everything thats not nailed down and get the girl... then move on to the next town. 2) Everyone is a snowflake This is something that annoys the creepers out of me. The fact that every race is rare and uncommon but everyone have seen one and no one reacts if they see a water spirit walking around on the streets of their city. I like it when elves for instance rarely leaves their forests and to see one is something that the village will talk about for a number of uneventful years. Or to see a mage for that fact maybe something that only happens once per generation. But when everything is supposed to be rare but there is no one reacting to it then it loses the attraction. I just like it when things that are supposed to be special and rare are not everywhere. 3) Levels Oh boy... now we come to a rule mechanic that I hate more then anything. Levels... I can't stand them, I dislike the step progression that you get from levels and that you get suddenly so much better, get this much more HP and is suddenly this much better at fighting. I prefer a bit more natural progression when EXP for instance can be used to raise skills one point by one. So that you don't get the sudden giant leap in knowledge and potential of the character, but that might just be me. To me it just feels so abstract and strange, there is no logical explanation why one have designed the system like this. This topic leads me to my next. 4) HP I feel that this issue comes from the issue I see with levels. That you get so much HP that you are sooner or later unkillable. A dagger is not scary since you have 250hp and it only does 1d4+1. This kinda ruins the feeling for me since it takes away even more realism. I like it when you have lower HP. And sure I have played the d20 system with houserules to address this issue. You might be saying now "Well why do you then play the game if you hate it so much and only can see flaws?" Well like all system it have flaws, I mean I have yet to find the perfect RPG since there is not one for me. Then you might think "Well why did you write this topic then if you only want to complain about my favorite system? " Well I did not want to complain, I wanted to raise the issues that I see and see what you think about them and if you think I am wrong then please say so but explain why. I have more things that I am bothered about in these systems but I thought to start with four points might be enough I want to keep this a civil discussion so please keep a good tone and I want to point it out once more. These are flaws in the system from my point I want to hear your two cent on this subject. Best regard The Riddler

Any and all of those issues are resolvable if you want them to be. It's like anything else in that regard. Take Star Trek: lots of people find it ridiculous (albeit still enjoyable) if taken to any kind of even remotely logical conclusion, and other people have rationalized it perfectly for themselves. For themselves . There's not a thing any of us could say that could or should convince you to see it realistically, even though many of us can and do, unless you want to be convinced - in which case, you'll eventually convince yourself anyway.

Well what I was hoping for was to see how other people see on the "issues" that I have with it for I don't want to be convinced but I keep and open mind to listen to others thoughts. And these things confuse me since they seem to all to have been built on the American hero concept. Since I am not from America and I have not grown up knowing it I don't have the same views on things and I would love for someone that is into the world more then me or someone that have different views to write them so I get to hear them. I am interested in how others see the world and the game since I have but my own opinion to say and I can't have a discussion with myself.

The Riddler said: Well what I was hoping for was to see how other people see on the "issues" that I have with it for I don't want to be convinced but I keep and open mind to listen to others thoughts. And these things confuse me since they seem to all to have been built on the American hero concept. Since I am not from America and I have not grown up knowing it I don't have the same views on things and I would love for someone that is into the world more then me or someone that have different views to write them so I get to hear them. I am interested in how others see the world and the game since I have but my own opinion to say and I can't have a discussion with myself. Ok, as long as you understand that what I offer is not expected to make sense to you. I'll put it up later when I have a little time.

Of course I do not expect it all to fall magically into place and I will see a light at the tunnel. That why I said that I wanted a discussion about it so that I would be able to ask questions about it and so that I could see from another persons perspective for I am but limited to one perspective and its so hard to be completely objective in everything. But I am really looking forward to your post, thank you for taking your time to write it. Best regards The Riddler

1) This is an issue with the DM and the players, more than with the system itself. If I DM and the players were to start murdering people, law enforcement would crack down on them. Hard. Think Judge Dredd, the medieval edition. 2) See 1). Things are as impressive and rare as you make them. If every shop sells 48 different magic items and every other guy is a high level mage, yea, people are going to be oversaturated. So make things rare. Magical items are found only rarely and powerful magic users are the exception, rather than the norm. Suddenly meeting a powerful mage is special again. 3) Personal taste. At the end of the day, if you have progression it makes little difference if you base them on levels or have XP be spendable on things. Take a snapshot of your group at the start of the first session and compare that to the group after the 10th session and they'll seem ridiculously strong by comparison in a lot of systems. Regardless of whether it has levels or "buy by XP" rules. 4) Yes, 1d4+1 is not scary when you're level 20. Then again, why are you fighting things that deal 1d4+1 damage at that point? There's plenty of scary things that you can throw at your players at high level if you so chose. As far as realism goes... Yea, just what I need in my game about magical elves. Realism. :3 At the end of the day, you gotta look at the system and see if it can help you play the game you want to play or not. If not, look for a different system or house rule it. I've got a lot of issues with pathfinder as well, but I see that more as a problem on my end than something that is "wrong" with pathfinder. The system just does not help me play the game I want to play. So I make a few changes and house rule things for now. Eventually I'll find a system more suited to my tastes and switch to that.

And these things confuse me since they seem to all to have been built on the American hero concept. These aren't problems with the american hero ideal, or even D&D and Pathfinder specifically, although you can blame a lot of it on the early days of D&D as a hobby. It's mostly from the hobby's roots as Chainmail (1971). 1) Adventurers This is a weird concept that comes out of the early days of the hobby. Broken down, traditional adventurers are crazy people who have better personal capabilities than the baseline who decide to use those capabilities to murder things and steal from them for a living. The assumption that makes crazy murderer-thieves viable in a traditional RPG is that, for whatever reason, barbaric monsters have a lot of easily-converted minted wealth to steal, and for whatever reason the local Baron doesn't just bring a company of soldiers out to kill them and steal the money for himself. Your handling of them is more in line with the RL age of exploration adventurers (e.g. Richard Francis Burton) where they would be sponsored to go explore and bring back exciting tales of sociopathic behavior, or conquistadors who get sponsored by the crown to go meet new and exciting people and kill them. Historically, their exploits may be remembered heroically, but the messy bits get forgotten. Richard Francis Burton was viewed as a great adventurer and explorer, but he was feared as a nutjob by people who knew him as he was admired by people who didn't. History is written by the victors. 2) Everyone is a snowflake That's just up to lore and GMing. If elves are supposed to be rare in a campaign but there's a bunch of them wandering around all the time, that's either a logical inconsistency that breaks immersion or the GM has to handwave it as "uh, but not in this area." 3) Levels Level-based systems offer a defined, measurable carrot for the players to achieve. I'd recommend a point-based system like GURPS or HERO if you want more granular improvement over time. 4) HP There's a lot of debate over what a big stack of HP means and how to interpret a high level character with 100 HP taking a dagger wound, from "plot armor" to "nicks and scratches". Ultimately it's an abstraction that originates from D&D/Chainmail roots as an individual-unit adaptation of tabletop miniatures wargames, where the players were not tracking the effects of a cut to a specific limb and such. Also remember that early D&D was played at low levels, where 7 was super-experienced, so the HP scale didn't get as far out of whack. If you use a realistic simulation of battle experience where your durability doesn't increase by a lot but your ability to defend does (higher parrying skill, etc.), anyone can be dropped in round 1 by a lucky shot. This isn't necessarily bad - in fact, it reinforces the idea that combat is dangerous - but players from a HP-pool game system might get the sads when their super-skilled dude gets a critical hit from a mook with a crossbow and is on the ground bleeding for the rest of the fight. The level-based HP mechanic, while silly in a lot of ways, provides for longer battle scenes where the party isn't killed on round 1 by lucky enemies.

Paul U. said: Any and all of those issues are resolvable if you want them to be. It's like anything else in that regard. Take Star Trek: lots of people find it ridiculous (albeit still enjoyable) if taken to any kind of even remotely logical conclusion, and other people have rationalized it perfectly for themselves. For themselves . There's not a thing any of us could say that could or should convince you to see it realistically, even though many of us can and do, unless you want to be convinced - in which case, you'll eventually convince yourself anyway. A bad Star Trek analogy? I think I've found a long lost brother! To get back to topic though, here my opinion: 1) I agree in that adventurers like this don't make sense. But then again, I personally think nothing has to make sense in order to be fun. And you just provided yourself a good backstory or explanation for people who go on adventures: Just find a group that's cool with that premise! I don't think it has anything to do with those game systems you criticize. But you can also give your character in particular a reason for such behaviour. One of my characters is basically a bit crazy, likes to get into dangerous situations and just enjoys killing and getting money. The perfect adventurer! As a slightly megalomaniac and nymphomaniac Cleric of Fharlanghn, the god of travelling, you also have the perfect excuse of travelling around the country! And in a world full of evil, any good-aligned character should have enough motivations to set out on an adventure. 2) Settings and how players react to different things don't necessarily have something to do with the rule system. If my characters see something rare and crazy they are going to react properly, no matter whether it's D&D or Pathfinder or soemthing else. 3) Yes, they are abstract, but the more abstract something is, the easier and more comfortable to use it gets. You could also argue how a roll of a dice would properly translate to someone attacking. If you think about it, nothing makes sense. 4) This is the only point I kind of agree on. But then again, those are systems aimed at providing "heroic" characters that won't die easily. I agree, that if you want a more authentic approach you should look for other systems. Then again, you can still work around that with certain critical hit tables, or "instant-kill" houserules.

The good news is you're not alone with this set of complaints and I'm sure people started feeling the way you do sometime in 1974. The diversification of the hobby stems from people with the same level of dissatisfaction as you have. 1 and 2) - I'd be careful about assigning the concept of adventurers to an American worldview. The basis for these sorts of acts occurs in the tales that comprised Malory's La Morte d'Arthur which was collated prior to Columbus landing in the Bahamas. Granted, those tales do assume the protagonists have some sort of affiliation with an organization - swearing fealty to King Arthur if nothing else. Once you start having the increased social mobility afforded by the industrial revolution, I'm not sure you need America to come up with D&D adventurers. Beyond Elizabeth Taylor's husband, you can also see similar concepts of adventurers in William Marshal and to a lesser extent the condottieri. This probably has the easiest fix since its a group issue. It's something that can be brought up during campaign creation and assuming there's sufficient buy in fixed to what you would like. Having characters that owe allegiance to a guild or an individual can make a lot of in-game sense and provide ample opportunities for plot hooks. This is also your chance to hash out how rare things are and what people's reactions would be to things out of the ordinary. 3 and 4) - There are many, many games that set out to address these issues. GURPS and Runequest are some of the older (and in my opinion, best) reactionary games that tried to move past HP and levels to good success. Even the creators of D&D acknowledged issues with HP as one of the supplements for OD&D included hit locations and variable HP levels to those locations. Even a d4 dagger is scary when your sixth level fighter only has 4 HP in his head... Personally, it depends what kind of mood I'm in. The zero-to-hero, warts and all D&D experience is great when that's what everyone wants to do and the baggage it brings can be fun in the right company. Heck, I run a OD&D derived game right now and embrace all of these odd trappings. When I'm not in the mood for it, I find a different game. I'm working on a GURPS swashbucklers game set in the 17th Century where social connections are important, there's a distinct historical worldview to the NPCs and there isn't a level or inflated hit point in sight. With Roll20 having a large player base, I can guarantee you'll be able to find players who feel the same as you. Yes, yes, I know the difference between Sir Richard Francis Burton and the actor Richard Burton.

1. Adventures: By my reading, you've already solved this for your group, which is all that matters. Plenty of people play differently from the stereotype. 2. Snowflakes: This is another one very easily fixed for your own group, and plenty of people already play this way. 3. Levels: I'm not sure where the concept came from. Some systems that originate from the same time period don't use experience or levels at all. Traveller is one example. But if you're stuck using it as is (which you're not: this is another thing you can fix at your table), it's a simple matter to think differently about it. For instance, the mage I'm playing already knows every spell he'll ever be able to cast, but he hasn't mastered them yet. For a while, his attempts to throw a fireball resulted in small searing flashes (his magic missile) or gouts of flame from his hand (burning hands). Out-of-game, he finally reached 5th level, and can now cast fireball. In-game, he's been practicing the spell for weeks and has finally gotten the hang of it. Skills and feats can be handled similarly. 4. Hit points: These are very, very abstract. Obviously, treating them as a representation of the character's physical condition does not work. Obviously, a dagger to the heart or an arrow to the head is going to kill anyone, regardless of how long they've been around. Hit points don't actually change that. Hit points are entirely a pacing mechanism, not a simulation. Most people tend not to want their character, in which they've invested no small amount of time and which serves as their only interface to the game, to be able to go from functional and participatory one moment to stone dead the next, so the game sets the "loss" condition (it's only one of many ways to lose, but it's a common one despite the issues it causes) as something that takes a couple tries to reach, giving the player some opportunity and choice. The increasing numbers have to do with the way the designers wanted to simulate things. They wanted dragons, for instance, to be something only experienced characters could face, and for bandits to be something rookies could deal with. So, a sword, while no less lethal than a dragon's claw, does damage at a rate that a rookie can stand against one for a few turns. The dragon's claw might kill that rookie with one swipe, but the experienced character has that same couple of rounds, at least. And so does the dragon, against whatever the PCs are packing. As I mentioned, a dagger to the heart is still lethal. All HP do is represent how long it takes, in combat, to be able to get that dagger where it can be lethal. The game talks in terms of "hits," "misses," and "damage," but you don't need to think of the weapon ever making actual contact, even when it reduces the target to zero. Hit points represent the "stress" of combat, of dodging, or blocking, or of even just seeing the dangers in the scene. At some level of stress, the character simply becomes unable to contribute. Hit points get easily misapplied. Obviously a king would have more than a few hit points, but all the assassin needs is to be in position to deliver a fatal blow with a knife. Most of the issues you have partially stem from the fact that the game is not reality and we all have a limited capability for input and output. Obviously the characters aren't psychotic drones, but combat can be fun so we do it and if we want to assume there's a rationale, moral reason for it we can, even if that reason is never made explicit. Obviously people are reacting oddly to the motley crew that is the typical adventuring group, but there's not always time or reason to represent that. Obviously people usually change gradually, but we tend not to have the time to represent that, while still getting to the changes we want to see. Obviously combat looks like an action movie or real-life or whatever we want, but describing that exactly is excruciating. Obviously there are toilets on the Enterprise, but who cares?

Traveller might be a good fit, except it is sci fi. Players can gain skills but it takes weeks. A dagger is a weapon to be feared unless you are in serious armor, even with a character that is old. It is easy to get killed by fire, drowning and electrocution, etc. Saving against these things does not really increase as you go on. Rare things should be rare, but many GMs run D&D like there are magic shops and things. Yet this rare one of a kind weapon can be taken to town and sold for cash in many games, so how rare is it to buy one? In my fantasy, items are rare, potions costly and swords and such made are rarer still. Nothing likea +1 magic dagger exists. more like a +3 blade. With a legend behind it. That the party might find in 6 months to a year of play and by found, I mean fight for it. I like systems like Mongoose Conan, where magic is rare and wizards and their ilk are dangerous, and most players cannot have one for a character. The 1d4 dagger thing came about because it's a basic weapon. They designed D&D so that over time you just get better at dodging a dagger's thrust in combat, and it is all about losing luck, and endurance until the last few hit points. Modern day systems are better if you are looking for realistic, but those paradigms were set in the mid 70's, and Were Not Trying to Be Realistic. Boot hill, Original top secret were pretty realistic games. You got shot with a bullet you were hurt pretty bad hit points did not really go up a lot, you just had to be faster, more accurate or ambush your enemy. Modern day Spycraft 2.0 is pretty good but it's an action flick kind of realism. Traveller Tries To Be Realistic, except for things like hyperspace (Jump) travel, and the efficiency of system travel ship's engines. Traveller, played without a lot of battlesuit armor, people have to take the idea of we aren't going to fight.. too risky, because one average shotgun blast will just cut any player character in half. A laser rifle will do that and set the remains alight to boot. If you tell people in a D&D party, "No, no, you can't fight, it's too risky, no avoid battle we might get killed", they will look at you weird. But people who play Boot Hill, Top Secret, Delta Force, yeah those are key decisions to make if you want to last beyond 3 or 4 sessions.

What I've noticed about games with supposedly realistic danger is that they don't offer any advice on how to handle character death. Yes, characters should be circumspect about getting into combat, but that's true even of D&D to some degree. The difference is that in D&D, a character can be raised from death. In Traveller, if you lose your character... what? Sit around not playing until you can go through the laborious character generation process again and find a location for your character to come in? There are ways to deal with it, obviously, but it's odd that the game itself just advises "don't get killed!"

If you lose your character in Traveller it is gone. Any game I run that has modern weapons, I advise players, this game is pretty gritty. So I ask players to Gen up a character and a spare. To me raise dead is just never an option built into the campaign design when I run D&D. No raise dead, no resurrection, no reincarnation. So in the rare occasion when you lose a D&D character, you've got a spare. All of that is set up well in advance. I do not recruit players seeking script immunity who plan out to have long, long lives. You might have one, if you are careful, especially since D&D as a combat system is pretty much forgiving. If a player is doing a session of Recon, the Vietnam RPG he's lucky to make it through 3 to 5 missions. But careful? Sure. It's completely opposite of the school of play that is long term story arcs. Can be but often aren't. Star wars, yeah characters can last a really long time, but that's a different genre and style. More cliffhanger. / action, wade in vs stormtroopers. Characters in boot hill who get into a gun fight come out wounded and dead. Not all players like it, and I let 'em know in my advance "Here is how I'm going to do it" advertisement or whatever. Those who like it, love it. Surprisingly, Conspiracy X characters, no one has ever been killed in years of play, but they play VERY carefully. Each game is different, though. Star Wars is not gritty. Modern Games are. D&D somewhat. Depends.

Trollkin said: If you lose your character in Traveller it is gone. Any game I run that has modern weapons, I advise players, this game is pretty gritty. So I ask players to Gen up a character and a spare. To me raise dead is just never an option built into the campaign design when I run D&D. No raise dead, no resurrection, no reincarnation. So in the rare occasion when you lose a D&D character, you've got a spare. All of that is set up well in advance. I do not recruit players seeking script immunity who plan out to have long, long lives. You might have one, if you are careful, especially since D&D as a combat system is pretty much forgiving. If a player is doing a session of Recon, the Vietnam RPG he's lucky to make it through 3 to 5 missions. But careful? Sure. It's completely opposite of the school of play that is long term story arcs. Can be but often aren't. Star wars, yeah characters can last a really long time, but that's a different genre and style. More cliffhanger. / action, wade in vs stormtroopers. Characters in boot hill who get into a gun fight come out wounded and dead. Not all players like it, and I let 'em know in my advance "Here is how I'm going to do it" advertisement or whatever. Those who like it, love it. Surprisingly, Conspiracy X characters, no one has ever been killed in years of play, but they play VERY carefully. Each game is different, though. Star Wars is not gritty. Modern Games are. D&D somewhat. Depends. So, are the out of the game until the spare can be incorporated? How long does that last? If the spare dies too is the player out of the game entirely. When do they get to rejoin? I don't have any issue with character death, just with players not being able to enjoy themselves.

Riddler, you mentioned the flaws with Pathfinder. Have you played many other games, because the problems you are describing seem to be almost exclusively a product of the D&D family of games? Take levels, for instance. The various d20 games, and other games by TSR/Wizards that sprung out of D&D (like Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and the best of the lot, Alternity) all used levels. And deliberate clones of D&D used levels, as well as games designed to emulate D&D like Dungeon World. But nearly every other game ever made - hundreds, maybe thousands of them - is skill-based (even if they dont call the ratings skills, they function like skills), where you raise abilities independently and individually, and you typically get advancement for things other than killing monsters. Before D&D 3, the OGL boom, and the later Old School Renaissance, D&D was on its way out, and level-based systems were very much a minority in the market place. There were exceptions, like Chivalry & Sorcery or Rifts/Palladium systems (but in those games, the power creep is very different to D&D - it's perfectly feasible to have mixed levels groups, like 5th and 15th level characters in the same group - they are more similar to skill based games in that respect - that's also true of TSR's own Alternity, IMO the best game they ever produced). Looking at the other points Adventurers: D&D is based on the concept that players get together in a dungeon assault team, and the D&D worlds are constructed to support that and justify it. Everything else is window dressing. In many other games, the world is built with different purpose, where PC adventurers make more sense (like 7th sea, where they are freebooters and pirates, or Pendragon where the players are knights who need to raise money to establish a dynasty, which they do by beating up other knights or going on quests, or Dogs in the Vineyard where the players are sent out as enforcers to police the towns of the faithful). OR the game gives strong guidelines on how to build a PC group that fits together with a purpose (like Ars magica, where the players form a covenant of mages and their minions, attempting to build power, or the Fate games where the first session builds a team of PCs linked to each other). OR the game doesn't require team-based play at all and PCs may have separate overlapping adventures and may even be antagonists (In a Wicked Age, Amber Diceless, Trollbabe, many more). Everyone is a Snowflake: Most other games don't have the special snowflake effect. D&D has a ridiculous variety of monsters and races in the same setting, purely because the power creep required a huge variety; other games that dont have the same power creep tend to have much more limited ranges of races, special abilities, character types. (One of the most extreme example: Pendragon, where every character is a human knight). When you have more limited races and character types, you can give attention to the ones that are genuinely rare, When there are literally thousands of different race/class types, it's hard to treat each one as special. It's natural people become blase about it. Levels: Discussed above. Hit Points: this is another direct consequence of the D&D system. Most other games have very little difference between the "hit points" of a starting character and a highly experienced character. Their defence comes from other sorces, like increasing dodge skill, or better armour (which reduces damage rather than makes them harder to hit). While the effect is the same - experienced characters are hard to kill - the feel is very different. Often even experienced characters can be seriously hurt or even killed by one or two lucky rolls from weak opponents, and being outnumbered can be seriously dangerous. So, every one of your problems is solvable, simply by casting a wider net and trying some of the immense variety of games that exists outside the D&D fold.

I never thought of points #2. It's awesome. I'm going to use that idea now. But HP is put there because of skills in defense increasing. It's either HP going up or AC going up. It makes some situations survivable while there are other situations that losing your level AC bonus means you would die immediately. Just about keeping the heroes alive. If your campaign is not hero based then just make levels grant an AC boost.

The Riddler said: 1) Adventurers This is one of the things that makes the least sense to me and the one that gets me most annoyed I think. Its the fact that the games are more or less designed that you shall play these mysterious things known as Adventurers. What annoys me about them I hear you ask. Well to start off they are a group of anything that travels together and do everything, cause issues with economy, raise hell and start wars as well as grave robbing and countless acts of murder. They do not make sense in my eyes. Or for that matter that a village/person/organisation/group would just out of the blue say: "Hey we need adventurers to do this for us and we have no idea who they are but they are adventurers." That is something that just does not sit right with me but I have not grown up with the american culture enforced on me as hard since I was born in Europe. When I run games the group is something more specific, maybe they are from a order that recovers relics belonging to different cultures, or they might be a band of witch slayers since their organization have been trying to kill them off for two hundred years. While they might do many of the same things there is a huge difference, Relic hunters or Witch slayers have an organization behind them, they have a clear goal and they have an agenda; Its not just to go out in the world kill everything, steal everything thats not nailed down and get the girl... then move on to the next town. Well, you found a solution yourself... didn't you ? I try to forge my world such as the concept of "adventurer" doesn't really exist but the core concept of what players end up doing are the same, only that getting there is more logical. Only uninterested GM's have to use the "adventurer" trope and all the issues you link with them ( issues with the economy, being able to raise hell... etc ) are the fault of the GM running a setting which allows them to do that. If your town has 3 guards that are level one, or if every town has merchants with lots of gold that are willing to purchase literally everything and never try to barter/outright cheat the player of their item then it's YOUR world that has a problem, your world that doesn't feel realistic, the player are simply exploiting that. 2) Everyone is a snowflake This is something that annoys the creepers out of me. The fact that every race is rare and uncommon but everyone have seen one and no one reacts if they see a water spirit walking around on the streets of their city. I like it when elves for instance rarely leaves their forests and to see one is something that the village will talk about for a number of uneventful years. Or to see a mage for that fact maybe something that only happens once per generation. But when everything is supposed to be rare but there is no one reacting to it then it loses the attraction. I just like it when things that are supposed to be special and rare are not everywhere. That's why you shouldn't use systems like Pathfinder/4e where player are allowed to pick all the races/classes. That's why players should start out weak, this issue is a non issue in AD&D games, if the whole premise of your game is that you start at the "UBER HEROIC MEGA TIER" even if you are level 1 then this will obviously be a problem. If player naturally work up to be "snowflakes" then you'l find that it's much easier to make the world "react" to them being that AND the position of "snowflake" offer much more enjoyment since the player didn't just start there. 3) Levels Oh boy... now we come to a rule mechanic that I hate more then anything. Levels... I can't stand them, I dislike the step progression that you get from levels and that you get suddenly so much better, get this much more HP and is suddenly this much better at fighting. I prefer a bit more natural progression when EXP for instance can be used to raise skills one point by one. So that you don't get the sudden giant leap in knowledge and potential of the character, but that might just be me. To me it just feels so abstract and strange, there is no logical explanation why one have designed the system like this. This topic leads me to my next. Then instead of asking 3000XP for level 3 ask 1000XP for a bonus hit die, 500XP for THAC0 19 and 500XP for an additional 2 weapon prof and skills AND make the numbers balance out so a player cannot just invest in HP/attack bonuses/skills (make them increase exponentially from "tier" to "tier") 4) HP I feel that this issue comes from the issue I see with levels. That you get so much HP that you are sooner or later unkillable. A dagger is not scary since you have 250hp and it only does 1d4+1. This kinda ruins the feeling for me since it takes away even more realism. I like it when you have lower HP. Nor does it make sense that you skill a dragon using swords and bows instead of a fucking mounted ballista, it doesn't make sense that people wear leather armor to be able to "dodge" and "sneak" when in fact mail gave you more mobility and possibly made less noise depending on the situation. It doesn't make sense that you use dexterity for ranged weapons when bows were all about strength, it doesn't make sense that thieves deal more damage when attacking from behind, it doesn't make sense that Katanas are better than Longsowrds it doesn't make sense that a bastard sword is prefer in favor to a hammer/spear by 95% of warriors, it doesn't make sense that you can keep your bow stringed all the time, it doesn't make sense that you don't need a case for the bow. That's just the very tip of the ice-berg of shit that doesn't make sense in D&D and other RPGs, you can live with it, fix some of it, or not play RPGs. Hp issues are resolved by not giving players tons of health. At level 4 a fighter with 20 hp is considered average, considering that level 4 is what a captain of 10-40 man might be I would say it's reasonable, a critical from a one-handed weapon can easily bring him close to death, 3-5 blows can easily kill him. When a player has above 40-60 health then he is probably powerful enough for you to find a way to explain him taking 40 damage and not dieing. It's all about: IMAGINATION

Much of these things refer to the concepts of D&D from when D&D started, especially the idea of heroes / adventurers (I use them both as the same right now). Thus, you need to go back to the od&d days and read some things from there to see where pathfinder and newer editions concepts started. Others said some different things, but... The idea of adventuring parties in these games actually came from this - Gygax(I think) thought to use a group of "adventurers" as one side in a war game instead of both sides being armies. That's how od&d stared out of chainmail - application of the adventurer party. The adventurer party and concept in D&D and other games started with OD&D. When this happened, it was accepted - by the makers - that adventurers can generally take more punishment than a single standard troop in an army, such that an army of standard troops would match up with the group of adventurers. This is usually written as something like "a hero is worth 4 standard men" or something like that. When you look at it from that view, many of the other things mentioned might seem better. Many of your statements concerning how adventurers cannot do this or that actually make more sense when you change the word "adventurer" to "army", try it yourself. According to that, four basic attacks (e.g) - with abstract combat in which hp represents more than just how many times one can be slashed with a weapon - with a dagger or standard weapon are actually supposed to threaten an adventurer, not only one. So your first and fourth points are related. Your 2nd point largely has to do with setting, which is chosen by the DM. Your 3rd point is also related to the actual adventurer concept, being that a "level" is actually how an adventurer progresses - not a standard troop. Like others said, other systems don't use levels, but one over the other is of course taste. So after making it clear where the idea of adventurers/heroes come from and what they are in the games historically, the other concepts might become clearer. Many of these concepts are talked about in older edition books and articles from that time. Those books and articles, or places where they are discussed, might make the concepts more defined. Just some thoughts.

I've always thought of Adventuring as a viable profession in a world as dangerous as our fantasy ones are. It makes sense that a group of people uniquely equipped and skilled to handle dangerous situations would be useful to your average salt of the earth individual under threat. In such a world the local authorities would likely be stretched thin and unable to deal with all situations that crop up in a timely manner and so it makes sense for the gainfully employed to sacrifice a bit of their wealth to hire people who can get the job done immediately. Basically I guess I see Adventurers as you see Witch Hunters or Relic Finders. I try to think about how dangerous our world was way back when, and then add in all the monsters and terrors of the fantasy world, it's overwhelming.

James G. said: I've always thought of Adventuring as a viable profession in a world as dangerous as our fantasy ones are. It makes sense that a group of people uniquely equipped and skilled to handle dangerous situations would be useful to your average salt of the earth individual under threat. In such a world the local authorities would likely be stretched thin and unable to deal with all situations that crop up in a timely manner and so it makes sense for the gainfully employed to sacrifice a bit of their wealth to hire people who can get the job done immediately. Basically I guess I see Adventurers as you see Witch Hunters or Relic Finders. I try to think about how dangerous our world was way back when, and then add in all the monsters and terrors of the fantasy world, it's overwhelming. Adventures: +1 to the quoted text Edit: I've always thought of adventurers as sort of consultants or freelance "A-Teams" that can go take care of things that go bump in the night (so commoners can go about their regular business), or just explore and uncover lost treasures (which happens in the real world). The idea of special orders to handle this type of thing is also a really good one; I have used this type of premise in campaigns and it is quite a bit of fun. Ah, the snowflake syndrome: Restricting PC races and classes to things that make sense in the setting will get rid of this problem. Levels: These were used to represent gradual skill advancement. It is a lot smoother in OD&D since the hit-point and attack bonuses for leveling tend to be a lot slower. This type of binning is even used for real-life measures. When was the last time you heard someone brag about being able to bench-press 138.762 kgs? Probably never, because we bin it to easily measurable amounts. So yes, you are slowly advancing continuously, but we only take it into account when you advance far enough to get that 5% boost. Note, it does feel a little choppier with an ability focused system like Pathfinder (but some people like having a level be a big thing). In OD&D (the system where it originated), I can barely even tell when someone is a level or two higher than me until they lose more hit-points than someone my level could have (e.g. 12 hp down and still fighting when I am level 1). With regard to HP: OD&D combat was very abstract (one minute rounds, ect.). Hit points were also there to represent endurance, minor hits, and setup in general (for example in fencing, sometimes you miss intentionally to try to set up a future hit, which is different than going in for the kill and missing). New editions have tried to remove some of the abstraction from combat, which I understand can make it feel a little awkward, but understanding where it came from can help you explain the system. One very interesting system you might want to look at is Star Wars D20; they separated abstract hit points and actual wounds. The abstract part of hit points are vitality, and the wounds represent actual, serious damage. Either crits or damage after reducing opponents vitality to 0 can give wound damage. Wounds are equal to the characters Constitution and Vitality is computed in the same manner as HP's in D&D. This system is easily transferred to D&D or pathfinder.

Posit: one can be in apparently perfect health with all but one hit point remaining out of an arbitrary total; one can be battered, bleeding and scarred with full hit points.

Riddler, it sounds like you're looking for something that's further towards the simulationist end of the GNS triangle. Here's a thread on stackexchange looking for simulationist game recommendations.

I'm not sure most of what you're talking about are actual problems, or at the least problems with the system. 1. Adventurers - this is something that you can talk about at the start of the campaign. You and your players don’t have to be “adventurers.”Talk to your players and ask them questions.How do your characters know each other?Why are they working together?Are you part of a larger organization, or are you essentially mercenaries?Who is paying you? 2. Again, something you can address at the start of a campaign or a game. You can put down some thematic race/class restrictions if you don't want certain "weird" races.I think better though, instead of doing ham-fisted bans which your players might not appreciate, talk with anyone who wants to play an unusual race.Where are you from?Have people here seen your people before?How do they react?How does your party react?This could open up some cool possibilities.Personally, I feel that PCs should feel free to be special snowflakes.They’re already special snowflakes by virtue of being PCs. 3. This is as much of a problem as we feel it and as much as we make it. I think the levels system makes sense as a way to pace out how characters grow in power, and to me, it’s not a problem at all. In 4e, you gain a little bit each level, and there’s only a couple levels with big power jumps (11 th , 21 st , etc). 4. Why are you sending something that does 1d4+1 damage against high level PCs?That’s a problem with failure to scale threats to player level – sending a bunch of level 1 mooks against a team of level 30 badasses – not with the system itself.What epic tier monster in 4e does only 1d4+1 damage?

I also might add that D&D 3 and Pathfinder characters at high level begin to turn into comic-book style superheroes. A random mugger with a dagger is really no threat to The Incredible Hulk. If you would like a system that keeps characters down-to-Earth (as far as that applies to a fantasy setting), without having a fixed ability cap (that comes from a standard level cap), look into the Epic X hacks. This will allow you to decide what power level you want in your campaign, without putting a limit on character ability (PCs can always still get better, they just do so logarithmically rather than linearaly or quadratically after reaching level X, and tend to improve in versatility rather than just raw power). Epic 6 is probably the most popular (and the one I prefer). It matches a lot of heroic literary fantasy, and it is considered to fall at the sweet spot where the classes are mostly balanced. There are many other choices for the level cap, and discussion of the pros and cons of which level to choose are throughly discussed on various gaming forums. Here is a link to a description of Epic 6 (or E6) for D&D 3.5: <a href="http://www.myth-weavers.com/wiki/index.php/Epic_6" rel="nofollow">http://www.myth-weavers.com/wiki/index.php/Epic_6</a>

Tree Ant said: I also might add that D&D 3 and Pathfinder characters at high level begin to turn into comic-book style superheroes. A random mugger with a dagger is really no threat to The Incredible Hulk. Nor to Conan the Barbarian, nor Aragorn. That's not because they have impenetrable skin, but because they have experience and savvy and luck. A dagger can certainly kill them, but in a straight fight they'd have to suffer a number of "hits" (represented by stressful parries and dodges and maneuvers) before the final blow could land.

The Riddler said: This is not a bashing thread of the games since I have played both and I am currently in a Pathfinder game but its some observations about the systems and worlds that kind of annoy me that I would like to discuss. 1) Adventurers This is one of the things that makes the least sense to me and the one that gets me most annoyed I think. Its the fact that the games are more or less designed that you shall play these mysterious things known as Adventurers. What annoys me about them I hear you ask. Well to start off they are a group of anything that travels together and do everything, cause issues with economy, raise hell and start wars as well as grave robbing and countless acts of murder. They do not make sense in my eyes. Or for that matter that a village/person/organisation/group would just out of the blue say: "Hey we need adventurers to do this for us and we have no idea who they are but they are adventurers." That is something that just does not sit right with me but I have not grown up with the american culture enforced on me as hard since I was born in Europe. When I run games the group is something more specific, maybe they are from a order that recovers relics belonging to different cultures, or they might be a band of witch slayers since their organization have been trying to kill them off for two hundred years. While they might do many of the same things there is a huge difference, Relic hunters or Witch slayers have an organization behind them, they have a clear goal and they have an agenda; Its not just to go out in the world kill everything, steal everything thats not nailed down and get the girl... then move on to the next town. 2) Everyone is a snowflake This is something that annoys the creepers out of me. The fact that every race is rare and uncommon but everyone have seen one and no one reacts if they see a water spirit walking around on the streets of their city. I like it when elves for instance rarely leaves their forests and to see one is something that the village will talk about for a number of uneventful years. Or to see a mage for that fact maybe something that only happens once per generation. But when everything is supposed to be rare but there is no one reacting to it then it loses the attraction. I just like it when things that are supposed to be special and rare are not everywhere. The simple answer to overcoming your objection is to ask yourself to imagine a fantasy world where these things are plausible. Come up with reasons that work for you and your players. The bit I bolded above is an example in your own words of exactly that. Ask yourself why something does make sense rather than come up with reasons why it doesn't make sense. This is called "buy-in." 3) Levels Oh boy... now we come to a rule mechanic that I hate more then anything. Levels... I can't stand them, I dislike the step progression that you get from levels and that you get suddenly so much better, get this much more HP and is suddenly this much better at fighting. I prefer a bit more natural progression when EXP for instance can be used to raise skills one point by one. So that you don't get the sudden giant leap in knowledge and potential of the character, but that might just be me. To me it just feels so abstract and strange, there is no logical explanation why one have designed the system like this. This topic leads me to my next. Potential is relative and thus not as "jarring" as I think you perceive it to be. You're not facing the same threats at 10th-level that you faced at 1st-level, or at least shouldn't be since they represent no threat to you. Your power level goes up and then so do the monsters, threats, and scale of the problems you face as an adventurer. Advancement is a core aesthetic of many games since it's a way to feel like you've achieved something mechanically in addition to what you achieved fictionally. It is also a pacing mechanism. It's not the right mechanic for every game - it depends on the game's creative agenda. 4) HP I feel that this issue comes from the issue I see with levels. That you get so much HP that you are sooner or later unkillable. A dagger is not scary since you have 250hp and it only does 1d4+1. This kinda ruins the feeling for me since it takes away even more realism. I like it when you have lower HP. And sure I have played the d20 system with houserules to address this issue. Hit points are abstractions and only represent physical health when you say it does in context. You can be at 1 out of 250 hp and not have a scratch on you because the 249 hp you've lost so far represents luck, stamina, will to go on, or whatever you imagine it to represent. That last hit point lost is the dagger through the heart, if you like.

Headhunter Jones said: Hit points are abstractions and only represent physical health when you say it does in context. You can be at 1 out of 250 hp and not have a scratch on you because the 249 hp you've lost so far represents luck, stamina, will to go on, or whatever you imagine it to represent. That last hit point lost is the dagger through the heart, if you like. Or even something else: tripped and conked yourself while avoiding the dagger. Cowed and demoralized. Panicked. Or maybe actually injured, but not mortally and not beyond what you can suck up. Because it doesn't necessarily take magic to bring you back into the fight.