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And you'll note that's a situation that's, shall we say, a little abnormal, right? Having only one character who could hold a line at all is probably a pretty abnormal outlier, and oddly enough, nothing produces degenerate play (in the sense of doing things not typical for a game) like...

The difference is, even the best tricks aren't the best tricks all the time. You learn them because they're good a fair bit of the time. And because you're probably still at least capable when they aren't. An example is tripping. Tripping, if you focus on it, can be very useful fairly...

There's been an ongoing argument whether process simulation and genre simulation are even close to the same thing for quite some time.

If you've never seen a situation where the things Retreater describes are not optimal, someone is missing something at one end of the table or another. There's always going to be some tactics that work halfway reliably, but that's not the same thing. Poorly game balanced games do this sort of...

That was one of my points. That's a really bad tactic and in most cases is a case of people carrying over habits from PF1e or D&D 3e and assuming its still the best choice when its a tactic of last resort. With a sword and board fighter (which is one of the first characters I played) that's a...

Except, as I said, that mode of play when used without thought is not optimal. That's the point. The "swing, swing, swing" thing may have been the best choice in PF1e. Its not in 2e, and anyone who's doing it there is not thinking about it, and I don't feel a need to be complimentary to...

The problem is, even if you manage to get the horizontal options all theoretically even in value, the number of players who will see it that way isn't liable to be huge, and will probably resent being forced into just taking what the die roll gives them.

Most of those are sound as defaults, but show a low-energy/not-thought-through approach if done relentlessly. In particular, your #4 there is almost never a good use of the third action. And only a limited subset of characters should find #3 an automatic best case. I mean, I don't mean to be...

Though PF2e is one of the few D&D-adjacent I like, this is pretty much true at least at upper levels. With some of the classes its not really so true at 1-5. Its not as bad as D&D4e tended to be in that regard, but its visible.

I suspect the number of people who find starting from "nothing" isn't as large as you imply here. Though in matter of degree not specifics, the BRP system has had semi-random progression (in exactly when and how much it happened with a given skill) for a long time. Its far from a...

Though its understandable why games with the degree of both gamist focus and exception based design as is typical in the D&D-adjacent sphere are prone to book sprawl (as in, needing 2-4 books to properly express the game) I run into that a lot more there than games that can supply most or all of...

None of that's in the skill write-ups anymore? If true, that is a little odd.

Two things: 1. As always noted, people on fora are not the populace as a whole. That doesn't mean that a poll here is automatically invalid, but it can at least bring them into question. 2. "A lot of people" /= "a majority". The latter is by its nature more relevant for people trying to find...

Atomic Horror. I'm a lifetime fan of 50's SF movies, so its my favorite GURPS product.

I own all three, and some games made for the prior two. They're still pretty obscure and at least moderately old at this point.

A separate question of course. Part of it is what "level" means various not only from game to game but from class to class within a game.

I don't think I've played anything in a very long time that had that big a gap between mechanical support at both ends (though I acknowledge most games lean in a bit on extent of mechanical engagement in combat compared to others, something I complain about with some frequency. Fortunately, I...

A lot of that turns on two things: 1. How long do people play? 2. How fast are they willing to let levelling go? As an example, in theory 13th Age characters level every four sessions (in practice its slower than that in most cases after the first tier of play (L1-3) though they only go to...

Yeah, but there's nothing about a level based game that mandates that 1 is the default starting point. Its just such a tradition people have trouble getting past it both in the design, and in application in the field. In other sorts of approaches it doesn't have the baked-in history that every...

You see a little of this in 13th Age too, where some effects are more pronounced on targets that have dropped below a certain hit point threshold. Not that I haven't seen people get weird about that kind of mechanic, too.