The other day when I was working on putting together Monday's post I had the realization that I am really just trying to turn Pathfinder into GURPS. All my talk of armor as damage reduction, hit points, weapon damage values, attacks of opportunity and such and the changes I propose or say should be basically boil down to trying to make Pathfinder less abstract. That's not Pathfinder/DnD though. Pathfinder uses an abstract rules system that tries to remain abstract so that the rules complexity isn't an immediate downer to players and the game can actually be played and be fun, instead of being about managing issues like a sprained ankle impacting your movement speed and being killed by a single bullet to the chest.
In GURPs, a single attack roll you make in a round is a single attack, not a representation of engaging the opponent in melee and trading blows for a moment before finding an opening and making one or more attacks like it is in Pathfinder. In GURPS, a miss is an actual miss and missing the target depends on the defending character's ability to dodge and defend against blows by blocking with a shield or parrying with their weapon. Pretend I filled the rest of this paragraph with like three more sentences comparing the realism of GURPS to the abstract nature of Pathfinder.
There's no way I can remake Pathfinder into GURPS, it's impossible and it would be painful and annoying to my players. I can tweak and poke and prob and make the game a closer approximation to what I want to play, but the two systems operate under different mechanics and ideals. I shouldn't be changing one system into another either. At least not consciously with the intent to make it as close to the system that I like as I can. There's a reason we don't play GURPS, and me deliberately trying to sneak GURPS into our Pathfinder would be kind of wrong.
I'm not actually trying to sneak GURPS into my Pathfinder, but I do like a lot of the rules GURPS brings to the table that Pathfinder does not as part of its core rules. Armor as damage reduction, a targeting system for body parts that does not rely on horrifically inflated damage or critical hits to do more than just basic damage, more comprehensive skills, stating the game is a skill based system instead of trying to hide it behind stuff like base attack bonus and saving throw progressions, abilities that can be purchased separately rather than selected en masse via class choice, more tactical and somewhat realistic combat, usage of one type of dice, and so on. But I've spoken at length of my love of GURPS many a time.
Most of my gripes about Pathfinder tend to center around combat, or at least touch on it, and that is because I like combat. The nature of my campaign world, or at least the places we've played campaigns in, makes it difficult to do much else. I like role-playing, and we do plenty of that in between scenarios via the emails we bounce back and forth to each other. My interpretation of dialogue skills can be frustrating, so talking things out in a scenario isn't always as simple as people would like it to be. In an industrialized, highly populated, and heavily explored continent like The Known World there aren't a lot of trap filled tombs to dig around in. Because magic works the way it does, there are no sorcerous puzzles or traps and such waiting to be discovered and dealt with in ruins. There aren't even that many ruins to dig around in in the first place. To change this over to Orcunraytrel, there's nothing that has ever really existed on the surface where the players currently adventure, so no ruins or magical puzzles or traps or anything. There's a reason the place the players and pirates hangout is called Morkend and the Mork live underground in that area.
What does that leave for people to do on a regular basis? Combat and dialogue, and as I said, dialogue can get frustrating for people with my interpretation of it. Now combat can be pretty varied. A lot depends on the type of enemies you're fighting and the context of the particular battle in question. There is a lot of variety to be found in fights, but I am not what you'd call a master artisan when it comes to fights. I forget a lot of little niggling details and even when I do remember them while building a fight, I usually forget them in the mess of managing the battle and organizing my forces and managing the interaction of the rules and totaling damage and deducting it from the appropriate places and such. I never fucking remember that everyone is flat-footed on their first round of combat until their turn comes up in the initiative order. Luckily, with everyone using firearms that isn't too much of an issue.
I dunno, all this yammering about combat these past few posts has had me really looking back on some of the fights I've orchestrated and had me putting a critical eye to them. They tend be straightforward fights with enemies that are either too weak or just shy of being too difficult for my players and I don't mess around with terrain much more than putting stuff in it that could be used as cover or some squares of difficult terrain. If I'm in a situation where combat is the primary focus of my scenarios, it should be exciting for more reasons than just because characters come close to being kind of in danger of possibly dying. I remember listening to a lot of podcasts about DnD a few years ago trying to find tips on how to be a better GM and make the game more interesting and fun. One of the things WotC, or someone, did was institute something that I cannot recall the name of but amounted to terrain based powers. Like if there was a table, it had a power attached to it that allowed you to use a move action to flip it and add a bonus to your AC or some such. It isn't exactly an innovative concept that hiding behind a table might make you harder to it (refer to the rules regarding cover in the game), but it was a neat way to spice up combat in 4th Edition, especially when it more or less just involved banging your dice and encounter powers against something until its horrifically inflated hit points hit zero.
I dunno. Just kind of musing about stuff here. It is what it is I guess.
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