Dude, please stop this numbering thing and just quote. I can't tell what the hell you're responding to half the time.
1) I don't know what action movies you're judging from. I know that the ones I'm looking at...it's not that the Hero(es) can take mountains of damage, it's that they don't get hurt to begin with.
Usually the damage that they take is merely "flesh wounds" (see
Last Action Hero for a meta-commentary on that phenomenon), whereas bad guys drop like flies.
In fact, most action movies behave as if they had D&D-style HPs by level. High-level characters (good guys and bad guys) can take punch after punch, even stabbings and shootings, but they're
never portrayed as serious injuries. If low-level good guys/bad guys take any hits at all, the injures are
portrayed as more serious or even fatal. They fall down and stay there. Similarly, fighter types can take a pounding while thinker-types drop like sacks of wheat; note, for example, that Giles gets cold-cocked more than anyone else in
Buffy.
To switch to Wuxia, the blows of the cinematic HK martial artists can break six-inch-thick hardwood, but they
hit each other dozens of times per fight. Thus, logically, those fighters have way, way more physical fortitude than the hardwood, stone, and metal that the fighters punch into scraps for effect. If we are to try to emulate this behaviour in a rule-bound game, gobs and gobs of HPs works quite well, but we have to
utterly abandon all notions of how much damage certain kinds of attacks or weapons actually do in the real world.
That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.
2) Mmhm. But "demigod" should be pushed into epic levels. As noted, even Cuchulain is going to be outclassed by an Epic Barbarian, which is weird.
Sure, I agree. The progression would be something like this:
Low-level (1-5): nearly human
Low-Mid (6-10): genuinely above average
Mid-level (11-15): Big Damn Heroes
High-level (16-20): legendary
Epic (21-30): god-like
3) I'd rather have requirements. That way it's clear what the minimum to do X well is. If you don't have that, you're going to fail. "Good scores" is too vague. Is a 14 good? Yessss..but you don't want to have only 14 Charisma as a paladin if you can help it.
Best of both worlds: specify a recommended score. "Do not play a Paladin unless you have a minimum Str 17 and Cha 15" (or whatever number you think is appropriate). That way people still have the option if they want to play the character with lower stats than the recommended numbers (because playing under-powered characters can actually be fun if that's what you're into; yes
really it can), but they have a clear idea of what they really ought to have to play the class to its fullest.
4) Social freaks, yes. Mutants, no. And having the PCs be one of a fraction of a percentage point of people is good for some campaigns (and power levels), not for others.
I think we just disagree on this, then. To me, adventurers/heroes just are those gifted lunatics who decide to step outside of the normative social order
and are physically/mentally/spiritually capable of surviving the sword-and-sorcery lifestyle. It's the only way I can think of to justify a functioning game world. The vast majority of people in it have to
not be in PC classes.
5) No, but saying "You can do up to X damage with a dagger, dragons have DR Y/-" would be quite simple and reasonable.
Sure, that'd work, but you're no longer saying "you can't kill a dragon with a dagger." What you're saying is "if you get
really good with a dagger, you might overcome the dragon's inherent toughness."
6) I don't mind if other people play god-like at very high levels (since D&D level progression can theoretically reach 1 short of infinity), I do mind having the levels I want to play in forced to be 1-8 because 9-20 becomes increasingly demigodic in a hurry.
Okay, that's reasonable. But having just finished a campaign that went to level 17, I don't think we got anywhere near god-like. I think the warrior types arrived at a few notches above the kind of ridiculous skills that you see in, say,
Lord of the Rings. The spell-casters (Cleric and Wizard) became pretty damn crazy powerful, but that to me could be addressed by taking spell-casters down a few pegs. I don't think we actually have that much to worry about in regards to the non-magic classes.
9) Not really. There are hundreds (thousands?!) of spells out there. I wouldn't be in favor of cutting them down to "ten or less per level", but "hundreds" of options is excessive.
Sorry, I misread that. I thought someone was referring to keeping the number of castable spells per day down to a more reasonable amount, which is why I suggested a different "curve" to the per-day progression: more low-level spells (lots of Magic Missiles and Mage Armour spells), but very few of the upper-level spells. That's just off the top of my head, though.
11) There's no point doing a rewrite so minimal that all it does is patch the biggest holes and make it so that anyone who doesn't like VERY HIGH FANTASY is shit out of luck. If I wanted to play solely Earthdawn or GURPS, I would. I would like to be able to play D&D and do things at a moderately cinematic level but not be forced to either stop advancing really early on or play characters who create empires by personal fighting ability.
Part of that choice is up to the players and the DM. As a DM you can say "no splat books without my explicit permission" or "I, as DM, will open access to only certain prestige classes," and etc. The Core books aren't nearly perfect, but it's a hell of a lot easier to keep the power-level of a game down to a reasonable limit by not going into
The Complete Book of Eye-Gauging. Similarly, you can just not give out all that many magic items, if you want to. If the players choose or allow a game to get insane in its power level, then that's largely on them. The rule system will never, I repeat
never be able to keep people from finding ways to go above and beyond the intended power level. Somebody with the will and time on their hands can find ways to break any rule-bound system eventually. You're much better off just seeking out players who share your preferred power level.
All that being said, I do actually agree with you. I think a lot of "balancing" efforts result in power creep. What I'd like to see is a full range of options, from "gritty realistic" to "ridiculous/god-like," and not just by playing certain level ranges (although that is definitely among your options!), but relatively easy ways to keep characters from getting crazy as they progress through the levels. As I said, though, unless you start to introduce really ludicrous levels of "optimisation," that's not all that much of a problem; and if you actually play with "optimisers" (people who enjoy building characters as much as playing them), then you either resign yourself to that style of play, your find new players. No use trying to ice-skate uphill.
I have nothing against epic/superhuman level, Exalted is an interesting game that I wouldn't mind trying at some point. But I mind the tier system being set up so that the majority of the pre-epic game is like that, and
I thought the general idea was to bring everything to Tier 3, going by
JaronK's Tier system. That seems reasonable to me.
any pretense towards being realistic is abandoned simply because actually getting hurt is unfun.
That's not an explanation that anyone has offered. Please don't put words in people's mouths. If you're looking for realism, D&D is not your game. I'm sorry. It's just not.