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I never thought of mother-may-I as having anything to do with GM favoritism. The former is certainly more arbitrary, but what I'm saying is that even the latter doesn't actually give any guidelines for how esoteric this knowledge is. I don't want to quote the sections in question so as not to...

Me too! But if it's going to be akin to a magic crossbow, there needs to be a ranged attack check. But at this stage in the playtest there isn't, which is what I find a little crazy. It's automatic damage versus anyone you can see that scales with level, no check required, no limit on it's use.

Magic Missile should either require a check or have limits on its use. I'd prefer the former ("Drop the 3e dreck," to paraphrase the OP), but an inerrant, infinite Magic Missile is a little crazy.

So if the orcs manage to surprise the party in the middle of the encounter with the kobolds, they just get a +20 bonus to their initiative? I like it!

I don't think they mitigate mother-may-I at all in this case. How does the GM determine whether the level of expertise required to know how to defeat a medusa is "moderate" or "advanced", "extreme" or "master"? Nothing in the guidelines say how to do that, so it's entirely up to the GM to...

For what it's worth, it doesn't work that way by the rules, which state that anyone looking at the medusa must make a save against petrification, regardless of whether she's looking back. That could easily be changed, though, and doesn't really affect anyone's argument. I was trying to remove...

Ah, but you only can come to that conclusion because you, the player, know about the Medusa from mythology. I'm asking how the characters would know. How would they know that snaky hair = turn-you-into-stone? There's absolutely no connection. How would they know that their fellow party members...

So how do the PCs know to avert their gaze?

This is a pretty good take on what you're after. It's not a perfect product, but it's cheap and has a lot of good ideas. I've thought a lot about how to get rid of per-day abilities and have a few basic ideas: -Require dice checks for magical effects, like the attack roll for the warlock's...

I agree that system affects play experience. But the specific distinction you are drawing between "verb" skills and "noun" abilities strikes me as highly subjective and impressionistic. I don't see much difference between "I Intimidate" and "I use Charisma," nor do I see how one or the other...

I hope you notice that so far the advice from any one post on this thread is at best only slightly compatible with any other post. That's fine; people have different ideas of what is fun. But my first bit of advice is don't try to please everybody! Whether you want skills to be freeform or...

In general Hackmaster seems to fiddly for my tastes, but I'm intrigued by the "countdown" initiative system. From the combat example it sounds like, where in DnD you would get a move and a standard action on your turn, in Hackmaster you get one or the other. Then, depending on your action, that...

He's using character behavior as part of his definition of "gamist", so the fact that there happen to be characters in RPGs is not incidental to the definition. If I'm talking about different guitar tunings, you can't tell me I'm talking about guitars but not strings*. "Democracy", or...

I assure you I wouldn't have started this thread if it wasn't something I noticed before :). Check out the OP of this thread for starters: He's not talking about encounter powers as a challenge for characters to overcome in game, but as an abstract metagame resource. Other posters in that...

That's awfully gamist of you :).

That's not quite right: gamism means to challenge the player-characters, not the players. It's a subtle distinction, but it's why DnD is gamist, while Risk isn't.

Part 1: The Pedantry "Gamist" does not mean what you likely think it means; that is, it does not mean "like a boardgame," or "reminiscent of a video game." "Gamist" is a term from Ron Edwards' infamous GNS theory and refers to playing a game with the intention of addressing and overcome...

You're possibly thinking of Greg Korynta's Class Construction system. I've found it can be imperfectly adapted to Pathfinder by keeping classes at around 250 points, instead of the default 215.

Isn't this Narrativism? Ron Edwards, vindicated! Naturally if you think that, you really are a revolutionary, like the one guy in the crowd in The Life of Brian who says he can't think for himself :). (Of course that's not necessarily true, and would make being a revolutionary a little easy...

Isn't this core? Does Pathfinder not have delayed actions? Though I suppose if the PCs could go at any order in any round, that's a bit different than how delayed actions work.