Fantasy Games and Point Buy Systems

As a Pathfinder 1e alternative? It is complicated.

This is the thing. When you start roleplaying, you want things simple. You want everything done for you in systems that group complexity together and manage things for you. After a while, the game matures and you end up with this:

Hero Lab is great and I love it, but Pathfinder 1e's development is this constant stream of tack-on systems that are designed to isolate complexity into subsystems and then sell you books to detail those subsystems. Just looking at the base game there are subsystems for abilities, skills, feats, the corruption system, the occult system, social, city management, and magic; and you could also argue the character stats are also a subsystem that works differently than every other subsystem.

Figure out how all these systems work individually and how they work together, and you can play the game. With every new book, they usually add a new system or more options to the existing systems.

When you first open the book, it looks like B/X. A shelf full of books later, it looks different.

Point Buy Systems

GURPS, Dungeon Fantasy, and Champions are all traditional point-buy games. What this means is your character is extremely flat in complexity - every ability score, power, advantage, disadvantage, skill, superpower, spell, class ability, special modifier, or any other thing that makes up a character is in one unified "character creation system." Those pieces are grouped up in chapters explaining each and grouping the choices together, but they are all essentially the same thing and reside in that same system of "character options."

There isn't much difference between a skill and a spell in Dungeon Fantasy, spells have fatigue costs, but they are bought and leveled the same, and spells are essentially an object-oriented extension of a skill. Everything else for characters is bought on the same point-buy system.

In Pathfinder 1e if I want hell-bound corruption to give my character a pair of succubus wings, well, I have to have the book with those rules in it, figure out how they work, hope my character creation system supports that book (and in Hero Lab, buy the expansion), and then I get a limited number of choices that the book and the program support. And no, I find out I can't give my character succubus wings, a tail, glowing red eyes, or bone spikes; but I can give them hell-bound corruption, a few random powers, and some horns.

I guess I have to live with not everything I want, but hey, I am still playing Pathfinder, right?

It sure beats playing GURPS, just like many people on the Internet say.

Point-Buy is Superior

And in GURPS I can give my character those horns, the corruption, a fiendish appearance disadvantage, social stigma disadvantages, the wings, bone spikes, the tail, the glowing eyes (that have some power), armored skin, the demon voice (that has a power), flight, claws, a leap ability, demonic spellcasting ability plus spells, or any other thing I see on an anime or dream up in my head. I can do this through the powers in Supers or the Bio-Tech book and have even more options. If I were playing Champions I could do this too easily (but on a lower level).

Spend the points, and it is yours.

Pay for them with disadvantages and take on those RP and game rule costs.

I can do most of my character customization with the main book. If I want to go really wild with more point-buy options there are a few other books that I would recommend, like Supers and Bio-Tech. Dungeon Fantasy is a great focused base game option covering fantasy, and you can pull in options from the other games as well into that.

Yes, I could sit here and give my Dungeon Fantasy character superpowers and play essentially what 4E ended up as, a fantasy superhero game. I could use the Bio-Tech book and do the magical mutations of Dungeon Crawl Classics.

I don't need a special system, a new book with Hero Lab support, character creator support or paid modules, a new tab to manage, or any new systems to learn and keep inside my head as the ever-growing ball of complexity gets bigger and bigger until that point where they made the old game so huge and messy I pay them for a new edition to please solve this problem. This is how a lot of roleplaying game companies get you, under the golden arches of choice and expansion they bloat the old game so much it dies. The new edition is so much more streamlined and simple! And I guarantee you, 10 years from now when they need to see you more books, the new system will be just as complicated as the previous edition you replaced.

Core Books vs. Book Buying Habits

GURPS is a game where you buy a few books and you are really set for life. Yes, there are a lot of GURPS books to buy, but most of them are flavor books that tell you how to use what you have to simulate a certain genre and provide options in that area - mostly to save you time. I could forego all of the option books and just do it all with the base two books of the game and be 100% fine and have a fun game.

A lot of the newer games are designed to force you into book-buying habits, and they introduce "official" expansions to the rules which I feel pressured to take all-or-nothing. Sure, getting new options is nice and it saves me work, but there are times I feel a game goes down the completely wrong path and I am helpless as I watch it completely ruin itself.

This happened to us with D&D 4E, the base books were incredible! But as the game went on, they forced in all these strange races and classes and turned the entire game into D&D Super Planar Adventures: The RPG. The high-level balance, especially with monsters, went all to hell, to the point they revised all the monsters in the Essentials line to make them less annoying to fight. I could run an incredible world and story from level 1 to 30 with D&D 4E. Once we added books, the game started to die - and it did. We never really knew what was happening until it was too late to repair.

And then they wanted to sell us a new edition to fix it. We bought it, but we never really got a chance to play, and since we were huge on 4E we were still very let down to even give them a second chance.

Pathfinder 1e I am a fan of because it is a dead game and I know what is in there. These new games I am very hesitant to buy into them because I have this fear they will expand themselves into ruin and something I never wanted or expected. I look at the tail end of 5E and I have this strange feeling I am right again, and the mid-life point-five update is on the horizon, which means the next edition is really right around the corner and they are sneaking in another 2-year paid beta test on us (like they did with D&D 4E Essentials).

My Current Game

I was redesigning a few of my Aquilae game characters in Dungeon Fantasy using GURPS Character Assistant 5, and I was struck by how powerful point-buy was. Yes, in Dungeon Fantasy you build characters by templates and you are supposed to make all your skill and power choices by the guidelines - but you do not have to.

If I wanted to take my "far north arctic survival cleric" character and give her all sorts of survival skills, spells to keep her warm, parkas and survival gear, snowshoes, and other cool options I can. Pathfinder classes have "class skills" that can improve easier than others. Here, all skills cost the same to raise, and your base level in them depends on your ability scores. I can make her the ultimate Bear Grylls drop her onto pack ice and watch her row home in a canoe made out of seal skins master of survival, hunting, and brutal northlands combat. And she can pray to the gods for warmth, good weather, food & water, and heal herself. If I want her to use a bow, I give her a bow and the skills to use it.

With point-buy I can create that character exactly like she is in my head.

With Pathfinder 1e I am back in the same situation with creating the flesh-warped demon. I can kinda-sorta get the character I want as long as I lower my expectations some, do a lot of fiddling, fit square pegs into round holes, and tell myself well I don't have everything I want but I am still playing Pathfinder. I love Pathfinder, but I do make a lot of sacrifices to stay inside the lines of that system.

Is GURPS perfect? No. Neither is Pathfinder 1e. Can I tweak it to make it run the way I want and ignore rules that complicate my life? In both games, yes. GURPS has a stigma because people like to be negative, but the power under the hood makes it a game I always keep coming back to after other games let me down. Yes, it is complex and not for everyone, but when I can build the exact characters I want the exact way I see them in my head, guess what?

I am not wasting time in other games figuring out how to get what I want.

I just have it.

How AD&D 2E Ended for Us

We saw the same thing happen at the end of our AD&D 2E run. We had so many ideas and the system felt so constraining that we ended up converting everything to Champions 4E and running a Fantasy Hero game. Everything "just worked" in that system as well, but Champions/Fantasy Hero to me feels a lot more low level where you are doing a lot of power design for each spell and ability, such as a sweep attack that affects all targets 2-3 hexes away from a character in a 180-degree arc, 3d6 killing damage, fire effect, knockback, etc.

That stuff is great when you are kids and have a few people to sit around and dream up powers, but for me, at this stage in my life GURPS/Dungeon Fantasy does a lot of that work for me and I can focus on the story instead of mechanics.

I did check in on the 6th Edition Fantasy Hero Complete game (standalone), but they included skills like Combat Driving and Paramedic in the rules so I did not get a great feeling about the book. To me, if you are making a subset game of the main rules for fantasy, you need to remove modern references or at least rename these skills. I know for compatibility reasons with the main rules so they left the names the same to avoid confusion, but it does not feel right to me.

Dungeon Fantasy feels like the better-supported game with the larger community at the moment, so I went with that despite my experience with Hero.

Where I Am

It is just there comes a point when you play these games, actually play like I am doing and not sit around and theorize, and you begin to crave the power user features of point buy games. At this point you have three options:

1. Stick with the game you are in, make sacrifices, and have fun.
2. Go power-user and switch to a point-buy system.
3. Switch to another game that feels great for your current idea, but has different drawbacks for others.
4. Get disappointed and quit.

Right now I am really close to #2. I want to go power-user and design all the characters in my head without wasting time on figuring out how to make them work in games where you either have to handwave and say "this is so" or shoehorn your idea into one of the limited systems the game provides.

And if I can do my survival cleric and mage that turns into an infernal creature in the same game, using the same point-buy system, and the system does not get in my way?

Less time wasted on figuring out rules, less money spent on books, and more time playing.