Killer Shrike

Today, depending on who you are talking to, "Pathfinder" can mean various things.
 
There's the rules themselves, which are basically settingless in the same way that D&D rules have always been settingless. You can use them to run a D&D-esque game in a setting of your own making. The default setting of Golarion may be referred to as idea anchors or examples, but the core classes and monsters and what not are pure D&D. Anything that they were able to repackage, legally speaking, got repackaged. In some places where something was explicitly not OGL permissible such as Illithid some other thing takes the place of that (broadly, aboleths or cthonians fill a similar niche) or a wink wink nudge nudge SRD equivalent is available (for instance, paizo can't publish stuff with Beholders, but if you wanted to run an old D&D module using Pathfinder rules you could easily drop in an SRD "Evil Eye"). It is d20 compatible, and while there are some idiomatic differences between them, it takes very little experience with either variant to translate between them.
 
Pathfinder offers variant implementations for D&D core classes, and then a whole bunch of other additional classes riffing on the same ideas in various ways. So, a D&D 3.x Wizard and a Pathfinder Wizard are not 100% line by line identical, but they are clearly "the same". Overall, the Pathfinder classes are famously more powerful than their D&D 3.x equivalents. Power creep across the board is a common theme. Of course the monsters also tend to be a bit powered up, so it's basically a wash. A rising tide lifts all boats. Some classes of course benefit more than others, and disparity in class power balances are rife. There are rather famously issues such as "Multiple Ability Dependent (MAD) vs Single Ability Dependent (SAD)", "Martial - Caster Disparity", "Wealth Per Level issues" and so on which are relevant to all of D&D 3e, D&D 3.5, and Pathfinder.
 
They differ in details, but the broad strokes are clearly the same. D&D 3.x has far more in common with Pathfinder than it does with either AD&D 2e or D&D 4e. 
 
Aside from the rules, you have the setting of Golarion and the adventures set within it...most notably the Adventure Path's themselves which are 6 issue adventure arcs with a theme which usually but not always start at level 1 and end around level 20 and present themselves as a thing where you in theory start running the campaign when the first book drops, and keep pace with them so that your group is ready for the next part of the adventure just as paizo is releasing the next book in the cycle. That's a conceit which is held over from the early desperate days of paizo trying to leverage their periodical publishing model to get some product out the door to keep making payroll; I don't know of anyone who actually starts a new Adventure Path on release and tries to keep up with the release schedule. In reality, the Adventure Paths remain available the same as any other gaming book, and it is much more common to buy into a past published Adventure Path and run it. None of the Adventure Paths are 100% perfect, some of them are highly regarded while others are not, but somewhat similar to how Magic the Gathering themed blocks roll out year after year, basically two themed Adventure Paths roll out year after year. If you don't like the current one, just wait six months and maybe you'll like the next one. There's a subgroup of players who just play Adventure Paths, and that's what they think of when you say "Pathfinder".  In some cases, there are players who do exist who have only ever played in Pathfinder Adventure Paths and don't really know much about gaming beyond that...asking such a player if "Pathfinder is D&D" may well draw a blank stare. 
 
Then there's Pathfinder Society, which is a thing unto itself. It's an "organized play" model, and the bookkeeping involved to keep things "fair" and allow characters to be portable is quite tedious but makes sense if you understand what its trying to prevent. It evolved into its own sort of ecosystem, and for some players PFS play is all they know and this is "Pathfinder" to them.
 
So, Pathfinder is a D&D variant. Mechanically it is of the 3.x era and thus is dissimilar to the current rules system that bears the D&D brand, but that doesn't invalidate it's D&D pedigree. Conceptually, the ideas of the Pathfinder setting and the metaplots within that setting and the expressions of protagonists / antagonists within the race / class / level semantics intrinsic to D&D and its successors are purely "D&D" and only make sense in that odd niche of fantasy fiction spawned by D&D. However, if your first experience with D&D was 4e or 5e, then Pathfinder may not seem like D&D to you...maybe. Many people can't separate a game mechanic from the fluff draped around out, or the content of a fictional setting from its mechanical underpinnings. That speaks more to their own imprecision of thought than to the actual facts of the matter however.

It is absolutely "D&D" 3.x down to its very bones. However, you tend to get a sectarian answer from people based upon what sect of "D&D" they personally think is "the one true D&D". Is the Lutheran church "christian"? Ask a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Baptist, one or more atheists, and your choice of adherents to non-Abrahamic traditions and you'll experience the same effect ("narcissism of small differences") ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality ) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law ).
 
Pathfinder unquestionably started as Jason Bulmahn's house ruled D&D 3.5 game, that happened to get professionally published by a group of people with professional publishing experience. The history of paizo the company and the game is well established. When WotC didn't renew paizo's license to produce and publish Dragon magazine, Dungeon magazine, (the official D&D gaming periodicals of yesteryear and fond memory) etc, they were left in a jam and faced their company going under. Scrambling to survive, they started publishing "Adventure Paths" in a periodical fashion with Rise of the Runelords, using the Open Gaming License, as a 3.x compatible supplement. They were already set up to do this because they originated the concept with Adventure Paths published in Dungeon magazine (which they produced at the time), large episodic adventure campaigns loosely set in the World of Greyhawk. Erik Mona in particular was a die hard Greyhawk fan and had started from there on the GreyTalk mailing list back in the day (which I lurked on and occasionally posted on as well, coincidentally) as a super-fan and then eventually managed to go pro...and during his time working on the magazines there was a noticeable uptick in Greyhawk related material, though it was mostly presented in a somewhat generic / loose form. Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide were the original three Adventure Paths published during this time for 3.x in Dungeon, nominally set in Greyhawk but not very anchored and easily portable to  other settings.
 
Shannon Appelcline's "brief history" from all the way back in 2006 when paizo was first emerging is still up on rpg.net ( https://www.rpg.net/columns/briefhistory/briefhistory2.phtml ) and is worth a read as his historicals typically are (many of them were published by Evil Hat as Designers & Dragons https://www.evilhat.com/home/designers-dragons/  which is a great read if you are interested in the history of rpg's and the companies that make them). You can also find various accounts from some of the core early group of paizo, though I think you'll find going back to sources from the mid-2000's you'll get a much more unfiltered version of things as they were when they were happening rather than the more marketing driven corporate spin doctored version you'll tend to find after over a decade of independent aggrandizement.
 
They needed a setting, so they hacked together Golarion from bits, and shipped. I don't have perfect recall, but I was an original subscriber to the Adventure Path; my existing subscriptions to Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine rolled over. I wasn't interested in Golarion at the time as I was still running an off again / on again Greyhawk based campaign with a continuity I maintained across gaming groups and years, starting back in the late 80's, but I liked paizo at the time largely due to my appreciation for Erik Mona's Greyhawk torch bearing. So I have a lot of the early Pathfinder material from the first couple of years in storage, modules, rulebooks, settings, etc. It absolutely was D&D, and there was a relative glut of 3rd party OGL D&D compatible material at that time of which they were just the latest iteration of. However, they published the Advanced Players Guide about a year later, and started to really differentiate themselves from the rather packed field of OGL D&D 3.x successors. And it just snowballed from there.
 
Anyway, the point stands that historically, Pathfinder is without a doubt an D&D successor, and it really can't be factually disputed.
 
....I'm going to break this into separate posts for readability, I accidentally cast "Wall of Text", Maximized, as an involuntary action.
 
 
 

Change Environment is the established mechanical way to do it, with precedent in Fantasy HERO or one of the supplements.
 
Having said that, it's basically handwavium. Holy / Unholy is SFX in the same way Magnetism is SFX. For instance, some characters such as robots occasionally take complications or limitations regarding "extreme magnetic fields", which are triggered in the presence of abilities with a Magnetic SFX. Similarly, sometimes an ice or cold based character will have a "not in extreme heat" or "not in extremely dry areas" which might be triggered by heat / fire SFX. Etc. SFX related matters are mostly a matter of rulings vs a matter of rules, with a few exceptions. So any ability defined as having a "Holy" or "Angelic" or "Hallowed" or "Sacred" or "Sanctified" or "some other synonym or adjacent concept" SFX, regardless of the base power, might qualify to trigger a "holy ground" or similar complication or disadvantage. 
 
Going a step further, if things affected positively or negatively by holy / unholy areas are going to be a thing in your campaign, you can easily elevate it to a first order concept with a custom power. D&D had a similar effect as a mid level spell called Hallow; the term could work here as well. You  could build a power construct (probably using Change Environment as the jumping off point), dialed in as you like it, and then invert the effect to define that formulation as a Custom Power called "Hallow", in a very similar way as the "Slipperiness" Power described under "Creating Custom Powers" is created.
 



 
Using this sort of approach, you can follow the broad strokes of Change Environment, but dial in any secondary knock-on effects you might want, including specific language about how it might interact with "holy ground" complications, and so forth. It also tends to result in much more compact power construct write ups.

I'll go with a different answer.  What is the source of the mage's power?  This isn't a game mechanics question, it's all about special effects and background. 
 
"Holy" is about divine power.  Unless the mage is channeling the will of God, I don't think he can replicate it.  He might be able to use some kind of spell to create the same type of effect (3D6 damage, NND, area effect), but he's got to buy it outright because doesn't have the right source behind his VPP.

The 6th Ed Grimoire has the Sanctify Area spell which is kind of what you want. The basic version is:
 
Change Environment (sanctify area), Long-Lasting (duration is permanent until defiled), Area Of Effect (16m Radius; +¾), Reduced Endurance (0 END; +½) (45 Active Points); OAF (holy symbol or the like; -1), Concentration (0 DCV throughout casting; -1), Extra Time (1 Hour to cast; -1½),
Gestures (throughout casting; -½), Incantations (throughout casting; -½), No Range (-½), Only When Serving The God’s Purposes (-½), RequiresA Magic Roll (-½), Spell (-½). Total cost: 6 points.
 
This spell allows a priest to sanctify
an area, thus preventing demons, some types of
undead, and other such creatures from entering
it without feeling pain. Typically this is done as
part of the construction of a temple, but there’s no
reason a priest who wanted to take the time and
effort couldn’t sanctify other places of importance.
 
 

The first question really is, do you WANT him to replicate the effect?
 
If not, tell him that to replicate the effect he will have to devote his life to virtue and purity for at least a few years. That should dissuade him.
 
If you do want to replicate the effect, there are other questions to ask (would it have the same "holy" SFX?  What is the actual nature of vampires, and for that matter of Gods, in the setting? etc.) but in game terms the next question to ask is if vampires have a Complication that keeps them out of holy ground. If so, just define the effect as a Change Environment that changes the environment in a given radius to "holy." If not, and you don't want to rewrite them to have such a Complication, write the Change Environment to impose a BODy roll at a penalty and to inflict one BOD damage/phase, with the result of a failed roll being "move out of the area" and a Limitation to only effect abominations (or whatever word you use to include both undead and demonic entities.) The more unholy vitality (i.e. BOD score) a vampire has, the better it resists the effect, but give it a high enough penalty and you can make a small area just about vampire proof.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary says vampires are a pain in the necks

Although they do have some interesting twists, I agree. However, throwing around huge gobs of polyhedral dice never gets old.

Quite probably true. I've hashed out things in some heated arguments with friends at the game table, and we were still friends afterwards,
 
 
I concede the point. It's a difference of style preference.
 
 
I have. I was in theater in High school for my Senior year, and some of them played D&D. The games were a bit political and "The Duke's Grand Ball" focused, rather than my more combat oriented preferences.  A bit frustrating.
 
 
Somewhat, in that it became a struggle for the spotlight between some players.  I begged their leave, and went back to my Champions group. ( I never really left, just  swapped the Wednesday night game. 
 
 
 Was a strict simulationist in the old  discussions, in that to me Roleplay was about  creating a distinct and consistent personality for a character, and then subjecting that character to the unknown, whether it be a discussion with team mates, Reacting to the description of the GM, or what ever the dice decided, "story" was to me, something that would be  the product of that interaction, rather than the guideline to the goal. It generated very entertaining, "No shit! There I was...  ... thought I was gonna die". type stories. In LDG's long running Fantasy Hero campaign interesting die rolls produced interesting results.  Sure there were unfortunate character deaths, but that kept things  exciting for th rest of us, sort of like being a character in the early "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels. 
 
 
 Everyone is wrong! Only I am the true arbiter of truth and Excellence!!! (J/k)
 
 
Quite true.
 
 
True, to some extent, yes.  But how do you get the hobby to grow, with newcomers?  Now we have had our share of turnover in recent Roll20 games, but we gave them a chance, and our core players have been very stable.
 
 
It's a product of our times.    But yes, I will concede the point, and just advocate for my position, that Hero is one of the best, tactically flexible, and creative gaming systems out there, provided you learn the tools.
 
 
A classic bit, but as I write this on Election Day 2018, it's kind of a Life Imitates Art sort of thing.  

I apologize if I have disturbed the Comity and harmony of this board. I come here, because it's NOT Facebook, and I can engage my brain with things that are divorced from the real world. I don't want to mess that up.
 
Scott

Another option is to summon an immobile construct with OCV levels for Grab and high strength, and / or martial maneuvers and as many martial arts damage classes as you like; I included a couple of custom maneuvers below which might be suitable. How many points you want to spend and how tough you want the construct to be determines the rest. The appropriate automaton powers would be suitable as well. The summoned construct acts on its own speed and dex. It can have whatever other abilities you think would be interesting, or none, as you think best.
 
 
 
Sacrifice Grab: 1/2 Phase, +2 OCV, -2 DCV, Grab 5 Limbs, Lasting Restriction (5 points) Big Crush: 1/2 Phase, +1 OCV, +0 DCV, +4d6 Crush, Must Follow Grab (5 points)    

I allowed a SPD 12 character in a supers game, a teleporting spatial awareness martial artist called Fade, waaaaaay back in 4e days. It worked fine, but the insight I garnered was that it's overkill. Often there just wasn't enough useful stuff for the character to do to fill 12 segments consistently. And of course END can be an issue unless you pay for reduced END or a reserve. 
 
Really, speedsters are often better off at between 7-9 SPD and use the points on something else. Once the novelty of 12 SPD runs out, the return on investment isn't strong.
 

D&D as the first rpg set the trend, and had first mover advantage plus hit on the zeitgeist of its times.
 
In the 60's, early 70's Tolkein's books entered the public domain in the US on accident due to a bizarre clause in the US copyright laws regarding import of books from other countries. Ace published a bunch of royalty free copies at a reduced cost compared to other books of the time. The themes of the books in regards to "back to nature" / anti-technology and an overall anti-war sentiment meshed well with the counterculture movement of the day (what we think of as hippies these days), and the idea that the "pipeweed" hobbits made and smoked was marijuana found favor with the same group as well (Tolkein himself stated it was just a kind of tobacco). Consequently, Tolkein-isms and similar derivatives became a cultural phenomenon of the era, and you end up with wizards painted on the sides of panel vans and rock ballads such as The Battle of Evermore and so on. It resonated with a lot of people who did not conform to the mainstream norms of their day, particularly creatives. In the downstream ripple of that, we get D&D and other vaguely Tolkein-esque content including some early video games made mostly at colleges by young techies who were hip to the youth culture of their day. 
 
Superheroes on the other hand had their original heyday in the 1940's and then again later in the 80's. For a very long time, they were seen as being strictly for kids. This began to change in the 80's and 90's, and of course the last decade has been insanely big for superheroes. 
 
Unfortunately, most people only know DC and Marvel characters from the movies and TV shows, and for whatever reason both Marvel and DC have never really been able to get their act together when it comes to RPG's and videogames. There's been a lot of good rpgs published. I myself enjoyed Marvel FASERIP from TSR in the 80's, Marvel SAGA (the card one, which was actually pretty fun if you gave it a chance), and Marvel Cortex+ (which was a GREAT game). But either they don't catch on, or they are not supported and die off, or the license lapses. 
 
I think that perhaps part of the problem with getting more people hooked on superhero rpgs is that fantasy stories are mostly literary; you read them and imagine them in your minds eye. They attract readers who are good at imagining things in their minds eye. This is the very same skill one needs to get into and enjoy roleplaying games. Superhero stories are mostly comic books / graphic novels or now movies and tv shows; you experience these stories mostly by looking at pictures or cinematic representations. You don't have to imagine anything in your mind's eye...what is happening has been drawn or acted out for you to look at. It is a visual medium, and it draws people who appreciate a visual medium and want to be SHOWN what it is vs imagine it for themselves. There is some overlap; some people enjoy both traditional textbased books and graphical books, but a lot of comic book fans are not big readers in the general sense.
 
 

Yes, definitely. A system with such a high barrier to entry is daunting to many. If I had a nickel for every person who said something along the lines of "I heard that it was cool, but the rulebook is so thick!"...well...I'd have a lot of nickels.

A lite-hero book similar to Basic Hero or Sidekick, priced to sell.  I intro'd way more people to the Hero System successfully using those books than by any other means combined. I used to buy 5-10 at a time and give them away. If the game isn't gaining new players, it's dying. The way to get new players is by lowering the bar / making the product more accessible, available, and attainable. 
 
 

The fact is if you removed the Endurance part from Charges it would require less words to explain, it would also remove words from Autofire. It would create less side explanations as everything would be normalized:
Charges limit how often a power can be used.
Reduced END removes Endurance cost.
 
The only reason you see an interaction between the two is because the system put one in at the very beginning. Once you remove all Endurance considerations from Charges every argument about pushing, reducing effect, altering costs, math on where it switches from Limitation to Advantage, go away completely. That's a fact.

The Basic Rulebook \ Sidekick were not a different game; they were just slimmed down. The existing supplements from their respective editions were and are usable with them. 
 
As to posters (at the time) anti- comment, I don't recall it that way but perhaps. Experienced players are often dismissive of gateway / entry products; all that eliteness they've amassed I suppose. That doesn't change the fact that getting new blood is essential to growing and maintaining a consumer base.

D&D as the first rpg set the trend, and had first mover advantage plus hit on the zeitgeist of its times.
 
In the 60's, early 70's Tolkein's books entered the public domain in the US on accident due to a bizarre clause in the US copyright laws regarding import of books from other countries. Ace published a bunch of royalty free copies at a reduced cost compared to other books of the time. The themes of the books in regards to "back to nature" / anti-technology and an overall anti-war sentiment meshed well with the counterculture movement of the day (what we think of as hippies these days), and the idea that the "pipeweed" hobbits made and smoked was marijuana found favor with the same group as well (Tolkein himself stated it was just a kind of tobacco). Consequently, Tolkein-isms and similar derivatives became a cultural phenomenon of the era, and you end up with wizards painted on the sides of panel vans and rock ballads such as The Battle of Evermore and so on. It resonated with a lot of people who did not conform to the mainstream norms of their day, particularly creatives. In the downstream ripple of that, we get D&D and other vaguely Tolkein-esque content including some early video games made mostly at colleges by young techies who were hip to the youth culture of their day. 
 
Superheroes on the other hand had their original heyday in the 1940's and then again later in the 80's. For a very long time, they were seen as being strictly for kids. This began to change in the 80's and 90's, and of course the last decade has been insanely big for superheroes. 
 
Unfortunately, most people only know DC and Marvel characters from the movies and TV shows, and for whatever reason both Marvel and DC have never really been able to get their act together when it comes to RPG's and videogames. There's been a lot of good rpgs published. I myself enjoyed Marvel FASERIP from TSR in the 80's, Marvel SAGA (the card one, which was actually pretty fun if you gave it a chance), and Marvel Cortex+ (which was a GREAT game). But either they don't catch on, or they are not supported and die off, or the license lapses. 
 
I think that perhaps part of the problem with getting more people hooked on superhero rpgs is that fantasy stories are mostly literary; you read them and imagine them in your minds eye. They attract readers who are good at imagining things in their minds eye. This is the very same skill one needs to get into and enjoy roleplaying games. Superhero stories are mostly comic books / graphic novels or now movies and tv shows; you experience these stories mostly by looking at pictures or cinematic representations. You don't have to imagine anything in your mind's eye...what is happening has been drawn or acted out for you to look at. It is a visual medium, and it draws people who appreciate a visual medium and want to be SHOWN what it is vs imagine it for themselves. There is some overlap; some people enjoy both traditional textbased books and graphical books, but a lot of comic book fans are not big readers in the general sense.
 
 

I wonder if this is another of those conversations in which people feel, metaphorically speaking, as if they are at opposite ends of a football field, when actually they're within arms reach of each other in a small room.
 
That is to say, regardless of how people are expressing their positions, in actual practice I suspect you're all closer to one another than you realize.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
And a reifier of palindromedaries

So, not that anyone particularly cares, but I agree w/ both Hugh and zslane on character skill vs players skill, and attempting to roleplay vs directly stating mechanics. 
 
Since I prefer players to stay in character as much as possible, I encourage players to have "tells" that they communicate or describe from the perspective of what it would be apparent to the characters in the scene, AND THEN state the mechanics being leveraged. 
 
If a player gives a good roleplaying attempt for a social or combat or utility effect, I feel its in my best interests to encourage them to do so as it helps the player experience / makes the campaign more interesting. So, depending on what is going on, I may allow a bonus or a reduced impact of failure (plot consideration), or respond in kind to the player's descriptive contribution with some reciprocal narrative hand-wavium. 
 
Whether the player describes / portrays a fun combat "panel" or action sequence or an elaborate social one is irrelevant. Whether what is going on in the scene parallels real world ideas or is entirely mythical doesn't matter. In a game of make-believe it's ALL make believe.
 
However a character who is mechanically good at things the player is particularly bad at or vice versa can be problematic. Either a player is able to make it work regardless of the disparity, or they cannot...in which case they should consider picking a different character that they are better able to pilot more effectively.
 
When there is a major discrepancy between a player's abilities and their character's abilities, it can suspend disbelief only so far before it just doesn't work and detracts from the game for other players at the table. People usually want to march out the social skills argument here; the character who's got the stats to be a "face" and the player who is socially hopeless. The gamist approach is that the player should be able to just roll dice or exercise their character's abilities to be good at the thing the player is not in the same way that the couch potato player who has never been in a fight in their life can rely on mechanics to play their sword swinging barbarian; this can work if the table is being run in a gamist mode. But in a simulationist or narrative mode it doesn't work very well. In the simulationist scenario, the player probably doesn't even really understand how a socially capable person sees the world or the boundaries of what is and is not attainable by such a person; the dunning-kruger effect as well as general cluelessness...such a player is not 'right' for the role of that character as without constant coaching they are going to struggle to initiate actions and react to situations in a way that more or less simulates how such a person would really act. In the narrative mode, a similar situation can occur wherein the player just can't affect or influence the emerging narrative for similar reasons. It isn't wrong per se; different styles of play value different things. And it can be made to work with enough effort, but it can detract from the overall experience.
 
Putting the old social ability argument aside for a moment, if we change the context to something a little more technical in nature, it can be useful to illustrate the differences. Lets just pick "nuclear physics" out of a hat as the straw man. Our hypothetical player in this case, is not a nuclear physicist or even particularly bright; they know next to nothing about physics in general, much less nuclear physics...they may even pronounce it "nucular". Can this player "roleplay" a character who is a nuclear physicist effectively? It depends. In a purely gamist mode, they absolutely can...the character has the relevant abilities, and whenever necessary the player can rely entirely on that to "cover" any nuclear physics related resolutions, and can just say "my character says nuclear physics stuff" or words to that effect if it becomes necessary to a scene. In narrative mode, it can be made to work without too much issue depending on how loose the system is...particularly if the player is willing to do a little stretching and throw in some in character "I'm not a nuclear scientist but I play one on TV" style mumbo jumbo / tech babble; unless a hard science genre is being portrayed that's probably good enough for the emerging story to make "cinematic sense". In simulation mode however, it can be very problematic. 
 
Of course, it's pretty rare to be pure simulationist; it doesn't work so well. Most "sim" games and groups are a hybrid of gamist or narrative, and depending on where you happen to sit on that spectrum is going to dictate your feelings on whether a character's mechanical stats / abilities should trump a players' ability to bullshit their way through challenges that their character isn't good at or vice versa.
 
I used to be much more strict on enforcing character vs player competence separation...if you didn't pay for it on your character sheet it didn't matter how smooth your patter was at the table. But over the years, particularly as my freetime became less and less, I began to loosen up and favor going with that feels right at the table so that at the end of the session all or most of the players go home feeling good about making the effort to get together to play. This mostly consists of meeting the player half way wherever they happen to be on their skill as a roleplayer and gamer...for some players this means allowing them to lean on the mechanics to succeed, and for others it means finding a way to harness their effective bs'ing skills to keep the scene moving forward while not letting them steal too much thunder from the other players / step on other character's actual paid-for abilities.

I would allow that, per se. Presense attacks were a thing at my table when I ran HS games. I'm all about maintaining parity between caster, martial, and social. It's one of the reasons why I gravitated in later years to games that were a little more intrinsically balanced in that regard and required less effort from me to maintain.
 
As to simulating a firebolt...I think there may be some confusion as to what I meant by "simulationist". I was referring to GNS theory (gamist, narrativist, simulationist). Unless you are doing the LARP thing (which I've never been inclined to), you wouldn't literally simulate a firebolt anymore than you'd simulate chopping someones head off or simulate seducing a NPC by physically wooing the GM (ugh). 
 
The rules of a game that lends itself to simulation measure and define all of that...that's the mechanics. But the player is responsible for trying to simulate how a character who HAS those abilities would behave in the context of the setting and pilot their character appropriately in a way that maintains the verisimilitude of the scene. 
 
Lets say you have two players, Bob and Joe.
 
Bob is not a wizard in real life; he can't cast spells, he knows no arcane secrets...why he didn't even attend a mystically oriented collegium nor did he apprentice to a master...in fact the world he lives in has no magic at all. Bob however intends to portray a wizard in a game of make believe with friends. You know, for fun. 
 
However while Bob isn't really a wizard and has no personal body of knowledge to call upon for the specifics of how to actually cast spells, and isn't really naturalized to know how a real wizard would really behave in the setting of the game if such a place were really real...he does have a good understanding of the fantasy genre, understands the color and tone of the setting, and has ideas on how such a character might behave and act and perhaps even speak and interact with others.
 
Bob, despite being woefully un-wizardly in real life, is well set up to portray a wizard and make the other people at the table feel that he is doing so competently in a way that enhances the overall shared make believe for all of them. He says wizardly things, and knows the story beats or cues for when he's supposed to apply his characters mechanical abilities. Bob is ready to go.
 
Joe is also not a wizard in real life, etc. However, unlike Bob who at least understands the purpose and practices of portraying a wizard in a fantasy roleplaying game, Joe is kind of clueless in that area. Whether its because he has no background in the genre, or because he's never played one before, is not relevant. Maybe sometimes Joe has a vague idea that he's supposed to do certain things or fill a certain niche or tries to make some hay, or maybe he doesn't but most of the time he just bumbles from scene to scene tagging along, waiting to be told by the other players or the GM what to do next. "Joe, cast firebolt on the troll already!" or "Joe, go talk to the learned sage and do smart guy stuff" or "Joe, maybe you should go investigate the obviously magic thingy that only your character has any hope of figuring out".
 
Unlike Bob who can pilot their character effectively and make the game better (or at least more interesting) not just for themselves but some or all of the group as a whole, Joe is just kind of there and scenes where he could have or should have interacted in some way played out some other way than they would have with a more capable player piloting the same character. Overall this detracts from the verisimilitude of the setting and acts as grit in the gears of the simulation.
 
 
Bob may or may not be able to actually be as seductive as Roger Moore's James Bond in real life, but he may very well be able to simulate it. 
 
Gamist: Bob says "My character has very high Seduction  (whatever mechanical form that takes in the game at hand). Bob rolls for effect / success / whatever is necessary to apply it to the situation; usually a single roll against a difficulty and perhaps opposed or unopposed depending on the game. Bob succeeds or fails based upon the outcome. The goal here is to win the scene or overcome the obstacle to get to the next one in an efficient way until some final obstacle is overcome and the game or session is over. Did we triumph? If yes then happy gamists. Narrativist: Bob says "Because my character is The Sexiest British Spy Alive (or whatever), it makes sense to the story that he should be able to seduce his way through this scene"; the table agrees and it either happens or if it might be interesting if he fails some kind of mechanical resolution occurs. The goal here is to tell a good story, ideally one that makes some kind of sense based upon the canon of the ongoing story...much like television. Was it a good episode? If yes then happy narrativists. Simulationist: This one is more complex depending upon what genre / tone / etc is being simulated. Basically, the campaign has some kind of specific framework in which things are supposed to behave in an internally consistent way and there are rules in place that attempt to model some kind of reality via mechanics (this is how you determine what happens) or fiat (the rules assert what happens) or both. In a campaign attempting to simulate James Bond or similar "internationally famous secret agent" hijinks, then to even make a character in such a setting one must have gone through the steps of justifying why Bob is allowed to play a Bondian superspy. There may be classes, or life paths, or package deals, or careers, or archetypes, or templates, or whatever, but probably something is defined that says, if you want to be this kind of characters this is the basic model for that. If, in this campaign, Bob has jumped thru the necessary hoops or checked the necessary boxes and perhaps filled in some gaps with elective choices to justify his character's background and get the abilities appropriate to a James Bond like character, and Bob understands the story beats of the genre well enough to know when to say "My character intends to use seduction to ultimately get useful information from the femme fatale"...then Bob can simulate being as seductive as Roger Moore's Bond. How that resolves may be gamist, or narrativist in nature, or a prolonged set of challenge and response / multistep resolution, or the player describing an elaborate evening out with dinner reservations at an exclusive restaurant carriage rides luxurious hotels, and so on. The goal is that whatever happens should be internally consistent to the thing being simulated as a whole. Was the session a good simulation of what it might be like to live in whatever period piece the game represents? If yes then happy simulationists.  
Joe, unlike Bob, might have to be told..."maybe you could try seduction" whenever the story beat came up that way. Or Joe might go the other way, and not understand when seduction was an appropriate approach. "The big bad Bloviated, your arch nemesis, strokes his shaved lap poodle and quirks his eyebrow as he reaches for the big red button to activate the death trap you have fallen into 'No, Mr. Dobbs, I expect you to DIE!'...what do you do? 'Uh...I try seduction?' I'm supposed to be good at that right?".
 
 

When I refer to a player who is particularly ill-suited to play a character I'm not referring to the player who wants to just say "I do the thing that my character can do" at relevant moments. That kind of player, the player who knows what they want to accomplish and just doesn't know how to make it sound legit and / or work within the game mechanics to accomplish it is a player who can be worked with, assuming they get better at playing the role over time.
 
I am referring to the player that has to be constantly told, reminded, coached thru, or line prompted by the GM or other players at those moments when they should take focus, because the player just doesn't even recognize the moments in the game where their character could, would, and should do something relevant per their concept, backstory, role, etc. Sometimes a player is just ill-suited to a character concept in the same way an actor can be ill-suited to a role.
 
In acting, some actors have a wide range and can play against type, but many are best within a narrower range of roles that they have a feel for. It's the same with gamers. Some gamers can play virtually any character and make it work, others can manage to pilot a particular kind of character or perhaps a few, but can't just sit in front of a sheet do a cold read, snap into character, and make it work.
 
Player skill is a thing, fit is a thing. When they align its great, but sometimes they don't. If its a matter of skill, that can be developed. Fit is trickier.
 
The player who has no feel for their character at all, and has to be told the opportunity for their character to do their thing is dancing around in front of them begging them to engage with the scene, will probably be happier with a character that better suits them and their natural proclivities. 
 
 
 
 

Agreed. I'm a tech guy from way back, hardware, software, network. I'm constantly cringing at bad-wrong tech in fiction. Sometimes its just too much and I can't enjoy the fiction, but usually I can set it aside and enjoy the material on its own merits. 
 
And nobody, I mean nobody, wants to sit at a gaming table while I hold forth on specifics of a technical nature. Or set theory. Don't get me talking about set theory; it would be traumatic for both of us.
 
However sometimes there is an issue. For instance, a GM running a modern game offered up a plot element that was stuff written down in a foreign language. What he wanted was for the group to go find a scholar to translate it which would be the bridge to the next bit of the story. Of course someone said "I whip out my phone and google translate it". The GM, who is somewhat behind on modern tech, was like...no way that's impossible. Hi-jinks ensued.

I would allow that, per se. Presense attacks were a thing at my table when I ran HS games. I'm all about maintaining parity between caster, martial, and social. It's one of the reasons why I gravitated in later years to games that were a little more intrinsically balanced in that regard and required less effort from me to maintain.
 
As to simulating a firebolt...I think there may be some confusion as to what I meant by "simulationist". I was referring to GNS theory (gamist, narrativist, simulationist). Unless you are doing the LARP thing (which I've never been inclined to), you wouldn't literally simulate a firebolt anymore than you'd simulate chopping someones head off or simulate seducing a NPC by physically wooing the GM (ugh). 
 
The rules of a game that lends itself to simulation measure and define all of that...that's the mechanics. But the player is responsible for trying to simulate how a character who HAS those abilities would behave in the context of the setting and pilot their character appropriately in a way that maintains the verisimilitude of the scene. 
 
Lets say you have two players, Bob and Joe.
 
Bob is not a wizard in real life; he can't cast spells, he knows no arcane secrets...why he didn't even attend a mystically oriented collegium nor did he apprentice to a master...in fact the world he lives in has no magic at all. Bob however intends to portray a wizard in a game of make believe with friends. You know, for fun. 
 
However while Bob isn't really a wizard and has no personal body of knowledge to call upon for the specifics of how to actually cast spells, and isn't really naturalized to know how a real wizard would really behave in the setting of the game if such a place were really real...he does have a good understanding of the fantasy genre, understands the color and tone of the setting, and has ideas on how such a character might behave and act and perhaps even speak and interact with others.
 
Bob, despite being woefully un-wizardly in real life, is well set up to portray a wizard and make the other people at the table feel that he is doing so competently in a way that enhances the overall shared make believe for all of them. He says wizardly things, and knows the story beats or cues for when he's supposed to apply his characters mechanical abilities. Bob is ready to go.
 
Joe is also not a wizard in real life, etc. However, unlike Bob who at least understands the purpose and practices of portraying a wizard in a fantasy roleplaying game, Joe is kind of clueless in that area. Whether its because he has no background in the genre, or because he's never played one before, is not relevant. Maybe sometimes Joe has a vague idea that he's supposed to do certain things or fill a certain niche or tries to make some hay, or maybe he doesn't but most of the time he just bumbles from scene to scene tagging along, waiting to be told by the other players or the GM what to do next. "Joe, cast firebolt on the troll already!" or "Joe, go talk to the learned sage and do smart guy stuff" or "Joe, maybe you should go investigate the obviously magic thingy that only your character has any hope of figuring out".
 
Unlike Bob who can pilot their character effectively and make the game better (or at least more interesting) not just for themselves but some or all of the group as a whole, Joe is just kind of there and scenes where he could have or should have interacted in some way played out some other way than they would have with a more capable player piloting the same character. Overall this detracts from the verisimilitude of the setting and acts as grit in the gears of the simulation.
 
 
Bob may or may not be able to actually be as seductive as Roger Moore's James Bond in real life, but he may very well be able to simulate it. 
 
Gamist: Bob says "My character has very high Seduction  (whatever mechanical form that takes in the game at hand). Bob rolls for effect / success / whatever is necessary to apply it to the situation; usually a single roll against a difficulty and perhaps opposed or unopposed depending on the game. Bob succeeds or fails based upon the outcome. The goal here is to win the scene or overcome the obstacle to get to the next one in an efficient way until some final obstacle is overcome and the game or session is over. Did we triumph? If yes then happy gamists. Narrativist: Bob says "Because my character is The Sexiest British Spy Alive (or whatever), it makes sense to the story that he should be able to seduce his way through this scene"; the table agrees and it either happens or if it might be interesting if he fails some kind of mechanical resolution occurs. The goal here is to tell a good story, ideally one that makes some kind of sense based upon the canon of the ongoing story...much like television. Was it a good episode? If yes then happy narrativists. Simulationist: This one is more complex depending upon what genre / tone / etc is being simulated. Basically, the campaign has some kind of specific framework in which things are supposed to behave in an internally consistent way and there are rules in place that attempt to model some kind of reality via mechanics (this is how you determine what happens) or fiat (the rules assert what happens) or both. In a campaign attempting to simulate James Bond or similar "internationally famous secret agent" hijinks, then to even make a character in such a setting one must have gone through the steps of justifying why Bob is allowed to play a Bondian superspy. There may be classes, or life paths, or package deals, or careers, or archetypes, or templates, or whatever, but probably something is defined that says, if you want to be this kind of characters this is the basic model for that. If, in this campaign, Bob has jumped thru the necessary hoops or checked the necessary boxes and perhaps filled in some gaps with elective choices to justify his character's background and get the abilities appropriate to a James Bond like character, and Bob understands the story beats of the genre well enough to know when to say "My character intends to use seduction to ultimately get useful information from the femme fatale"...then Bob can simulate being as seductive as Roger Moore's Bond. How that resolves may be gamist, or narrativist in nature, or a prolonged set of challenge and response / multistep resolution, or the player describing an elaborate evening out with dinner reservations at an exclusive restaurant carriage rides luxurious hotels, and so on. The goal is that whatever happens should be internally consistent to the thing being simulated as a whole. Was the session a good simulation of what it might be like to live in whatever period piece the game represents? If yes then happy simulationists.  
Joe, unlike Bob, might have to be told..."maybe you could try seduction" whenever the story beat came up that way. Or Joe might go the other way, and not understand when seduction was an appropriate approach. "The big bad Bloviated, your arch nemesis, strokes his shaved lap poodle and quirks his eyebrow as he reaches for the big red button to activate the death trap you have fallen into 'No, Mr. Dobbs, I expect you to DIE!'...what do you do? 'Uh...I try seduction?' I'm supposed to be good at that right?".
 
 

This also makes me think of another issue that comes up sometimes.  Occasionally there's a situation where the player is legitimately an expert on a subject, and the GM doesn't know anything about it.  One of the guys who used to play in our group was in the Navy and actually ran nuclear reactors.  He knew more about that subject than everyone else at the table put together.  The GM didn't even know enough about nuclear physics to set up a plausible scenario.  He could say something like "the reactor is going critical, it's going to explode!"  And the player would say "American reactors are incapable of exploding.  They are designed differently.  It literally can't happen."
 
In the end we just had to treat each other with respect, both for our respective areas of expertise, and for our roles at the table.  The GM has to be able to say "this is just fiction, for purposes of the game it works this way".  We all know that Rob knows nuclear science better than us, but we also respect that the GM has taken the time to try and tell an interesting story.  
 
In real life, I'm a criminal defense attorney, but nobody wants to set aside what their characters are doing in the game to listen to me talk about how things "really" work.  Years and years of inaccurate TV legal dramas have convinced me to just shrug my shoulders and say "the law works differently in that world".

No wonder he's so angry.  He's never alone.  I mean just think of how frustrated he must be when trying to use the bathroom... ?
 

Agreed. I'm a tech guy from way back, hardware, software, network. I'm constantly cringing at bad-wrong tech in fiction. Sometimes its just too much and I can't enjoy the fiction, but usually I can set it aside and enjoy the material on its own merits. 
 
And nobody, I mean nobody, wants to sit at a gaming table while I hold forth on specifics of a technical nature. Or set theory. Don't get me talking about set theory; it would be traumatic for both of us.
 
However sometimes there is an issue. For instance, a GM running a modern game offered up a plot element that was stuff written down in a foreign language. What he wanted was for the group to go find a scholar to translate it which would be the bridge to the next bit of the story. Of course someone said "I whip out my phone and google translate it". The GM, who is somewhat behind on modern tech, was like...no way that's impossible. Hi-jinks ensued.