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If you stop caring about verisimilitude and "treat the game as a game", you will divide the player base rather severely IMO. 4e more or less tried this, and we all know how that turned out. On the other hand, if you want a game targeted at a smaller fraction of the fantasy RPG player base, have...

I do get soggy about hit points, because bringing it up as a counterargument to any desire for simulation in RPGs is very much beating a dead horse. I prefer that, if a game is going to use hp, that they don't use it exclusively. Some kind of stamina mechanic, long-term injury potential, or...

This is the sort of stuff I'm talking about (although I don't care for your implication that sim and fun are somehow mutually exclusive. I find sim rules extremely gratifying).

Beyond Level Up and ACKS II, games I would happily run as a 60+ session campaign include Legend of the Five Rings (any edition prior to 5th), Star Trek Adventures, Marvel Multiverse, any of Kevin Crawford's ...Without Number series of games, a 1e/2e AD&D hybrid (my jam for 20+ years), or BECMI.

I don't know...a lot of stuff in TSR D&D was designed to represent a thing in the world, not just to facilitate "fun" for the players. Why bother to discuss history and setting logic at all otherwise? The 1e DMG is full of sim mechanics. And abstraction is a necessary component of any RPG. It's...

To be honest, I've never really believed him on that. I'm not sure he did either.

The whole, "elves have no souls" joke made the rounds many times in my long-running 1e group.

So you're cool with multiple nonhuman classes (as suggested in the post to which you responded), but only want one human class?

...Yeah. I do that with every game I like. Finances, allowing, why wouldn't I? For me, play is driven by the player's actions through their PCs, moderated through the settings qualities and events.

Perhaps not everyone agrees with your assessment of spell point systems?

I agree. Since I strongly disagree with that idea, it really explains why I don't care for most modern mechanics. Thanks!

Wait a minute...the idea that D&D is a game is a "ridiculous assumption"? What do you think the G is for? What are we all doing?

As I said, the issue isn't flash. It is continuous, always-available flash. Casters in Dragonlance ran out of spells (usually depicted as running out of stamina, especially in Raistlin's case). Maybe try reading what I wrote? If this is about how wizards running out of spells and becoming...

Level Up or ACKS II, depending on my mood.

Which is why I like a broad tent or multiple starting points for RPGs based on those franchises. I wouldn't at all mind D&D doing the same.

Agree to disagree on just about every point you make here.

Dying Earth, from which the original Vancian system was derived, is literature, not a video game. And anyway, there's no realistic spellcasting system, so whatever you use just needs to be consistent and make sense in the setting to my mind.

Meh. In my game, all the PCs start out as glorified (maybe) commoners with a couple uncommon skills anyway.

I said continuous flashy magic. Dragonlance followed the rules of 1e (more or less). No always-on cantrips.

Well, we both clearly have a preference. Good thing there are different games, even different versions of D&D (in the general sense, rather than the IP sense), that cater to them. I just don't treat popularity or recentcy as important factors in my discourse.