Killer Shrike

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.

To the initial question, I would say that, if you did not enjoy D&D 3rd Ed (3.0 and 3.5 are not different enough to classify them separately), I would not expect you will enjoy Pathfinder.  It is definitely not different enough from 3e D&D to overcome an overall dislike of fantasy games.   We don't need to define what D&D is (genre vs mechanics vs playstyle vs whatever) to figure that out!

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 agree with zslane that character growth should, ideally, make some kind of sense. However, one must also take into account the genre in effect, as well as the tone and powerlevel of the campaign in general. In some cases, it's close enough to anything goes to make little difference, in others the bolts might be double tightened and character choices are very constrained to allowable parameters of "possible"; if that's what the players agreed to when the campaign started then it's part of the shared agreement as to what is and is not allowed within the campaign. Context is king.

I agree with this in spirit; player agency must be protected.
 
However, roleplaying and participating in an ongoing story with others is meant to be a collaborative effort, which also must be protected.
 
I like to remember the old saying "your right to swing your fist ends where another person's nose begins".
 
If a player wants things for their character or the setting or the emerging campaign, and those things aren't in conflict with what other players (including the GM) want and don't do harm to the setting or the campaign story, then it's on the table. If not, some negotiation or compromise is possible, but ultimately if a player wants to do something that runs counter to the rest of the group's interests, its a judgement call to allow it or not. The social contract vs the agency of the individual is a constant balancing act.
 
 
I'm actually a very permissive GM; my general stance has always been "Yes" or "Yes, but lets figure out a way to bend that idea to make it fit the game". I want players to have fun and love their characters; for me the biggest pay off in rpgs is not the game itself but the fond memories of the awesome moments that can be revisited for years. When gamers get together again and start swapping stories about half recalled adventures and characters, that's the tie that binds.  However, as the GM it is also my job to protect the fun of the other players. So sometimes, when a player's desire for something that they think would be fun for them is manifestly unfun or problematic for the other people involved, and they aren't willing to work with me to adapt the broad strokes of what they want into something that "works" in situ, then I have to say No. If I don't, I'm not doing my job. Most of the time it doesn't matter, but when it does then the GM veto should get busted out and exercised a bit.

Most definitely.
 
All the Champions campaigns I played in over the years took a very "let's keep all the fun superhero tropes and ditch the dumb stuff only bad writers under terribly tight deadlines come up with" approach to the genre. Tone was roughly Early Bronze Age, and power level was your typical 4e 250-300 point range. It isn't that tough to find the sweet spot between fun, four-color superhero action and stuff only an 8-year old would think is cool.

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.
 
I played in a game where we could only advance if we succeeded.
 
Call Of Chthulu.

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.
 
 

name ref: Ed "Killer Shrike" Hastings
 
url: http://www.killershrike.com/FantasyHERO/FantasyHERO.aspx

I included a section on Critical Hits in my "Lethality Guidelines" 
 
http://www.killershrike.com/fantasyHero/HighFantasyHERO/shrikeLethalityOptions_Unofficial.aspx
 
CRITICAL HITS Some other games have a concept of "critical hits"; strikes that randomly do more damage than normal. The HERO System tends to shy away from "random" and lacks such an option natively. However different variations of critical hits have been suggested at or described as possible options in some supplements over the years, and some play groups have versions that they use. Described below is my version of "critical hits", which I call the "Rule of Three", that I've used successfully for years. I also describe a Critical Hit concept based on a "lucky die" mechanic, and a mechanic based on degree of success. NOTE: You should probably only implement one kind of Critical Hit rules in a given campaign; two or more can get severely out of hand. RULE OF THREE If a character (PC or NPC) rolls a natural three on a 3d6 roll under type of check then they have the option of either taking "max effect" or an "epiphany". MAX EFFECT If the three was made for an Attack Roll max effect is the maximum possible damage or effect with that attack (treat all effect dice as having rolled 6's). If the three was made for a non attack roll, not only does the character win any opposed roll (even if the opponent made their roll by more) or succeed at their task, but they do so in a stylish looked-cool-doing-it fashion which is also justification for gaining a "Display of Power" bonus to a Presense Attack made sometime within the next few actions against anyone that observed them. EPIPHANY The character has a flash of insight regarding the skill or ability that they rolled a three for and their competency with that ability is expanded. The character gains +2 character points to allocate towards a bonus with that skill or attack. For attacks this translates into a +1 OCV Combat Skill Level with that attack. If a skill this translates into either a +1 or +2 with that skill depending on whether the skill is on the 3/2 or 2/1 costing model. If the three was rolled for a familiarity, the familiarity becomes a full skill instead. This can not be used to upgrade existing levels; for example a character could not opt to bump an All Combat level to an Overall Level with the 2 free points gained in this fashion -- the 2 pts must be spent specifically for the task they were gained from. However, levels gained in this fashion can themselves be upgraded later with experience. For example a 2 pt +1 OCV level with a specific kind of pistol could be upgraded to a 3 pt "Pistols" tight group level later on. LUCKY DAMAGE DICE Some other games have the idea of a "lucky die" which is rerolled and cumulatively added if its max value comes up. In other words, if the lucky die is a d6, then if it rolls a 6 it is rerolled and the result adds to the original 6; if another 6 comes up it is rolled and added in again and so forth until it stops rolling 6's. The HERO System already grants more damage to a 6 when doing Normal damage in the form of +1 BODY inflicted but Killing damage gets no such consideration. In the interests of increasing lethality you as the GM can decide to up the ante further by implementing a "Lucky Damage Dice" House Rule for Killing damage. You can specify that this rule applies to all Killing damage dice, which is a powerful / dangerous kind of critical hit that will occur often and can result in one-hit kills vs. even protected targets, or you can specify that only one die (represented by a physically different die) is "lucky" which is much less extreme. DOVETAIL WITH LUCK POWER Alternately, you can converge this with the Luck Power and allow characters to buy Luck dice defined as "Lucky Damage Dice" instead of the normal function of Luck dice, and a character can roll as many Lucky Damage Dice on a given attack as they have purchased up to the limit of the attack (a character with 3d6 Lucky Damage Dice using a 2d6 Killing Attack would only roll 2 dice but both would be "lucky"; if they later picked up a weapon that does 4d6 Killing they would roll 4d6 and 3 dice would be "lucky"). CRITICAL SKILL / DEGREE OF SUCCESS Some games feature a mechanic whereby more skilled attackers inflict more damage due to their increased skill. The HERO System allows this to some extent if Hit Locations are being used since a more skilled attacker can overcome to hit penalties for choicer hit locations, but using Called Shots can result in a total miss which can seem very odd in practice. An alternative to relying on Called Shots (and even Hit Locations in general) is a mechanic whereby characters that hit by more than they needed inflict more damage. The base mechanic is +1 Damage Class per 1 point a character made their Attack Roll by; thus in a 3 OCV vs 3 DCV scenario, an Attack Roll of 10 is made by 1, which grants the attacker +1 Damage Class. This is easy to remember and scales evenly, but doesn't overly reward characters that make truly impressive to hit differentials. BASIC EXTRA DAMAGE SEQUENCE Hit by: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Extra DC: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 This can be scaled up or down by the GM to suit their campaign by varying the ratio of extra success to extra damage; for instance a GM could set the ratio at +1 Damage Class per 2 points a character makes their Attack Roll by. LESS EXTREME EXTRA DAMAGE SEQUENCE Hit by: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Extra DC: 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 A GM could also make hitting by a little not make much differenct but hitting by a lot being extremely lethal by basing the to hit vs DC ratio on a Fibonacci sequence instead as displayed in the following table. Basically using this kind of progression hitting by 5 or less is not much different than the basic progression (and is in fact more moderate overall), but an Attack Roll that hits by 6 is more comparatively deadly, and anything that hits by 7 or more is almost absolutely fatal. FIBONACCI EXTRA DAMAGE SEQUENCE Hit by: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Extra DC: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 Any other progression of this sort is equally valid based on the GM's preferences, of course. The following displays the same concept on an exponential progression which is easier to remember and more consistent with HERO System doubling rules but would result in excessively higher damage if on the same scale as the Fibonacci sequence; thus this chart is based on a progression of hitting by 2 more than needed per step. EXPONENTIAL EXTRA DAMAGE SEQUENCE Hit by: 0 2 4 8 10 Extra DC: 0 1 2 4 8 And so on; it's just a numbers game. Any approach that is easy to remember and apply at the table that rewards hitting with a margin of succes at a rate acceptable to the GM and players is equally valid for that group.

The way I look at it, "character concept" is a set of flexible guidelines that shape a character's behavior and the actions the player takes when taking on that role. It isn't some kind of holy writ that rigidly limits what the character is allowed to do. Most GMs I know (who care about such things) will let players do what they want as long as it fits reasonably well within the established character concept.
 
Personally, I've only ever used character concept to make sure players aren't doing things that are wildly inconsistent with the established ideas for their characters. There's a lot of interesting conflict and drama inherent in the boundaries painted by character concept, and I feel the benefits of benign enforcement of "character concept" outweigh the associated loss of total, unconstrained freedom such enforcement might impose on the players.

This is a good question. I am old enough to have experienced the presence of real hippies, and disliked them. My tastes in RPG tended towards SF,  and modern combat, but I came at this hobby from war gaming. 
 
I think the attraction to fantasy is mostly the escapism, and to be someone else, if not heroic, but capable. Part of it is playing by their own rules, rather than society’s. Fantasy also has the advantage of attracting more women to the game table than superheroes. Overthrowing and abusive local tyrant, is something you do in fantasy, there is that hint of revolutionary romanticism nfor some, that in a Superhero environment would spark a diplomatic incident, or worse, look like domestic terrorism. So yes Superheroes wield great power, but do stand to uphold the status quo, and bourgeois values. Superheroes also are mostly analogies to modern society, whereas Fantasy is more mythic, and open to different interpretations. Superheroes are Civic minded. Fantasy is tribal. 

I also think it is easier for teenage boys to step into the role of your typical murderhobo adventurer out to kill monsters and take their stuff, getting more powerful along the way, than it is for them to step into the role of your typical superhero with a substantially more mature moral compass and a driving need to selflessly help others. Of course, there are characters in both genres that subvert these norms, but the general perception of these genres is largely shaped by those two archetypes (the murderhobo and the do-gooder).

For me, there are two major wickets for character advancement, and ideally both of them should be met by a given advancement scheme.
 
The first concern is player engagement. Is a player excited to see their character develop and grow, and are they happy with the way in which their character develops and grows. Are they empowered to build or shape their character into whatever form makes them happy to play that character week to week?
 
The second concern is that most rpg games (and heroic fiction in general) are powered by the dynamic tension of protagonists being challenged and tested, being resisted or threatened by some form of antagonism which is initially formidable, but which the protagonists ultimately triumph over after a period of struggle followed by growth. 
 
 
If the first concern isn't being met, players become frustrated or disinterested in the emerging story of the campaign. 
 
If the second concern isn't being met, either the players don't feel challenged because their characters are already too capable to be challenged by the available threats, or the players feel frustrated or overwhelmed because their characters never advance to the point that they can overcome the antagonists arrayed against them. There is some room on the cusps of this (sometimes it's fun to play on "god-mode" for a little while as in high powered supers or the extremes of high fantasy, sometimes it's fun to play in "doomed mode" for a little while as in horror), but eventually or if taken too far, there's no dynamic tension and thus interest fades out. 
 
 
Any kind of advancement scheme that meets both criteria is a good one...if players can craft the character they want and the GM is able to keep opposition correctly tuned to challenge, force growth, then fold or relent and then recur that pattern without the players noticing or getting bored with the formula, all will be well regardless of the specifics.
 
The Hero System is actually very good at meeting the first concern as is, but it does require player skill. Unskilled players, unassisted, are generally unable to leverage the system effectively while skilled players can easily squeeze the system to produce a supremely customized character to suit themselves. There is a high skill cap. Direct translation of XP to character points, and the build what you want model is about as directly empowering to players who know exactly what they want and how to get it as a system can be, and the complexity of the system and abstract thinking it can sometimes demand of a character builder is about as opaque and unaccommodating as a system can get for those who don't know what they want and / or don't know how to get it.
 
The Hero System relies entirely upon the GM's discretion for the second concern, having little in the way of structured encounter building and a relative dearth of canned adventures and scenarios. It provides tools better than almost any other system, but not much guidance or handholding. If you are a good GM already and can handle the crunch, you'll have little problem crafting and running scenarios and encounters in the HERO System, but if you really need published adventures or material to follow, or can't handle the system crunch and how unique and unexpectedly synergetic Hero System characters are going to be, you will likely have problems. A good GM is easily able to meet the second concern in the HS.
 
 
However there are situations where, even though it is actually a game with a really good and consistent advancement model, the Hero System struggles. The first is in play by post or remote play. The sheer crunchiness and granularity of ability definition in the Hero System makes it more difficult than usual to administer and run the game in a non-face to face situation. A more abstracted / simplified model of character definition and advancement can be pretty appealing for these cases.
 
Another common issue for the Hero System is that, because XP is typically gained in small increments session to session, it is common for players to constantly be spending small amounts of XP to make small gains. This increases record keeping quite a lot, and also prevents a character from experiencing moments of dramatic growth or improvement. This isn't a problem per se, but it is usually difficult for most players to practice sufficient self control to save up large chunks of points towards the delayed gratification of a major upgrade, which can cause some players to feel like their characters "never get  any better" as the impact of lots of micro improvements isn't as memorable, splashy, or satisfying. A lot of people just can't seem to save up their resources, they spend spend spend, and then complain they have nothing saved. It's not the system's fault for allowing immediate gratification any more than it is a hospital's fault if a patient keeps hitting the painkiller button...but they put a regulator on that morphine drip anyway because there isn't much to be gained by fighting human nature. 
 
So, for me, normally I was perfectly happy with the way HS handled character progression, but in some circumstances or with some players, I felt that either less crunch or more restriction on when XP could be spent was in order for me to fulfill concerns 1 and 2 for a particular campaign or with a particular group of players.
 
The skill-up as you go model falls into that same bucket as "lots of micro improvements"; with some players or for a certain style of campaign, it's great. It would really fit a lower powered, grittier setting and help support the feel as in real life people generally just get incrementally better at things they actually do over time; if "realism" is desired, then it is a good fit though it interferes a little bit with concern 1 because it forces players to jump thru hoops to shape the character they want. It would be a very poor fit for higher powered settings where characters are more dynamic and capable of dramatic, unexpected changes or growth and would interfere with both concerns 1 and 2.
 

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.
 
 

Certainly I am not blaming the lack of dice or narrative focus--  it's not every time I see such a group; I have seen that problem in across the board.  I just tend to see it most in newer players using highly narrative systems.  I don't think the problem lies with the game as much as I do new players who are encouraged to focus so much on all aspects of their character so much that the idea of a static character seems correct. 
 
Or maybe it's because they're younger, and have grown up on serialized entertainment that resets the status quo at the start of every---
 
No.  That's not it, or we wouldn't be growing characters inspired by comic books. 

That sums up my feelings pretty well. When all these different companies each start offering their own service, I'm going to be forced to deal with the hassle of keeping track of my subscriptions to a dozen companies or more. It'll be like dealing with a dozen cable companies and having to hassle with one or another of them every month.
 
Frankly, I'm not interested at all in doing that. I'm opting out of all of them. My best option is to hope that they all fail miserably in order to keep my entertainment from fragmenting into so many different pieces that it is difficult (and much more expensive) to consume.
 
If they want me to watch Star Trek, for example, they need to put it on TV where it belongs or they need to spend $200 million to make a movie. I'm not going to pay to watch services regardless of whether it is CBS All Access, DC Universe, Disney, etc.

I'm actively opposed to things like this.  I think it's a horrible value and I won't go for any of these single-provider streaming services.  I'm actively rooting for them to all fail.
 
The way I see it, I already have most of what this service would offer.  I have Netflix and Amazon Prime, and each of those services offers me hundreds (maybe thousands) of different movies and TV shows.  I can almost always find something I'd like to watch.  If this DC Universe thing doesn't exist, then I can watch most of what they're offering on either Netflix or Prime.  I can do that already.  So what are they offering that is new that I can't watch right now without paying for their service?
 
I know they're planning on removing their shows and movies from these other streaming services, but that just means they're taking away value from me that I've already got, to try to promote their own service.  I don't like that, and so I won't support it.  Even if it wasn't a bad value, I wouldn't support it because I don't want to encourage other companies to do the same thing.  It's part of why I won't get CBS All Access -- I'm not going to be goaded into getting it just for a show they'd have put on Netflix otherwise.
 
And finally, I just don't think they've got enough content for me to want to pay just for their stuff.  It's not a very good deal.  I don't even think Disney's service is going to be worth it to me.  They don't have enough stuff for me to want to see each and every month.  When it's October and I want to see scary movies, what Disney films will I watch?  You can only watch the Legend of Sleepy Hollow cartoon so many times.  I think these specialty services have very limited appeal, and a very limited library.

I don't know if GURPS 4e retains this feature, but 3e had damage in game terms scale linearly with energy in real-world terms. Perfectly reasonable from a pure math and simulationist perspective . . . but it leads to two problems. The first is that die codes get so big that you can't physically roll for them; I seem to recall that a nuclear bomb did something like three million d6 of damage. The second, and actually worse, of the problems is how damage, scaled in such a fashion, interacts with defense values. Outside of a swords-to-small-arms kind of range, it's easy to wind up with a very narrow window between "attacks bounce off harmlessly" and "closed-casket funeral". In fact, with a sci-fi setting, you could get that effect from one shot to the next with the same weapon and target. As defense numbers and damage die codes go up, human hit points become a proportionally smaller piece of the total, and variation between rolls of the dice can easily take you from "under your defense value" to "exceeds your defense value by more than twice your hitpoints".

I hear you. I'm just trying to clarify and focus the frame of discussion. To my mind, narratively isolated sessions that test character builds in combat are basically wargaming sessions not roleplaying sessions. On the other hand, when characters are earning XP from multiple, ongoing, narratively connected adventures and using it to simulate character progression/development, that's when you have a roleplaying campaign. And I just feel that RPG campaigns ought to, you know, feature roleplaying, right down to the way players spend their XP. In that context, roleplaying (i.e., doing that which fits the character's concept) ought not to be thought of as optional.

The question of "what is D&D" occurs.  I would suggest that Pathfinder has more in common with 3rd Edition D&D than 3rd Ed has in common with 2nd Ed or 4th Ed. After 1e/2e, each edition of D&D has been more like a different game than a different edition.

Thank you, Sir.
 
Thank you very much.
 
This answer is far and away beyond what I was even hoping for.  I feel quite confident, then, that I can consider Pathfinder to very much be D&D, in a new setting, with changes being more semantic or re-coloring for legal reasons.
 
Thanks, Shrike.  That was amazing.
 

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.
 
 
 

So, I had no real interest in Golarion myself. When I did D&D, I did Greyhawk D&D...though after over two decades of house ruling and continuity retention my home version of "GH" was not a purists form. Like a lot of long running campaigns, the lore and practice of playing within had grown to the point that it was difficult to incorporate new players. Also Greyhawk itself had been cast aside by TSR in favor of Forgotten Realms and other later settings, so it was difficult to get material for it, and only players of a certain age were still into it. After I got out of the military, my gaming group of the time dissipated over time as players, who were mostly military, also got out and went back to wherever they were from or were redeployed elsewhere. At some point, I had gotten fed up with AD&D 2e and moved the game into the Hero System and that had been very successful. I did that for several years with an expanding an contracting pool of players as a large group of people came and went or were back from deployment, or whatever. 
 
So, I needed new players, and it was just too difficult to lure people in with the bizarre cocktail of a mostly defunct D&D setting using a homebrewed hack of the Hero System (4e) which we referred to as GreyHERO and over 20 years of a shared continuity over something like a dozen different campaigns, which had seen somewhere approaching 50 players and a few hundred PC's over the years traipsing thru it; those of you who have run or played in large, long running continuities know how hairy and difficult to relate that kind of shared lore can become. Not a very elevator pitchable game.
 
About this time D&D 3e hit the shelves; it was a big deal. I remember leaving work early that day to drive down to a game store with a co-worker who was also one of my last remaining former military buddies and players in my games who had stayed in the area. We cracked open the PHB over really good food at a Chinese place in the mini mall the game store in, and we decided that we should try it out. So me and the last couple of holdovers from my last group accumulated new players interested in trying out the new D&D rules and started a new Greyhawk campaign set within my shared continuity, but in a different part of the setting and we just sort of alluded to / had callbacks to earlier events as sort of easter eggs or references that the old hands understood. That started a string of followup campaigns over the next few years. During this time, D&D 3x was getting created in front of us. Splatbooks and rules supplements and then a trickle and then a flood of 3rd party material was descending upon us as it was published. At first it was cool, hey look interesting new stuff! But all too soon it turned into a glut, a feast, a veritable typhoon of content. Way too much.
 
After having run a few campaigns, I had come to the opinion that the core game was broken at higher levels; it worked ok from somewhere around 5th level and stayed basically stable into the early teens, but the low level play experience sucked (as it always has in D&D based games unless you just really like XP grubbing to level up to the point you can actually do something interesting), and the high end was off the rails with very brittle rock paper scissor characters (save or die was still a thing) and a top-heavy pile of stacked bonuses and class features that gets more ponderous with each level. And as supplements started to rain down, the quality and power level were all over the place. And there was just so much of it. It got harder and harder to keep up with and commensurately more difficult to run the game as the GM. I finally got fed up with it, and had curated a good group of players, culled from the bones of other campaigns, whom would stick with it out of love for the evolving narrative rather than attachment to the game mechanics. So I converted that group over to the Hero System (5e) and resumed running the campaign using the Hero System which I greatly preferred. We lost a player who just did not care for HS, but the rest stuck and we were able to get several more years of games set in my weird Greyhawk variant using HS 5e. 
 
Meanwhile Wotc and the D&D bubble had burst. Hasbro happened. D&D 4e happened. Paizo's entre as a OGL 3x spin off was a side effect of that. Disgruntled 3.x players and GM's reaction against the vicissitudes of WotC post-Hasbro and eventual dissatisfaction with 4e drew many to Pathfinder which people started to un-ironically refer to as D&D 3.75. Paizo was able to hold on to the tiger and parley initial interest into a successful brand, and eventually grew to first compete with WotC, and for a good stretch of years dominate that sector of the market. I don't pay attention to these things the way I used to, but I have the impression that WotC has made some kind of inroads in retaking some of the market share with 5e, and now paizo is responding with a revision of Pathfinder, but I've lost interest in that space and tuned it all out.