For some unknown reason you guys seem to like Pathfinder. Apparently you guys don't seem to mind the fact that it's a clunky, broken son of 3.5. But hey, you guys know what I think of it, and you still seem to like it, at least partly because you know it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Give the people what they want, I suppose, but it's tough for me to compromise my outlook. So here's some options on how this goes down.
1: Switch to Fate. This is my preferred option, and one you guys have already rejected, but allow me to make yet another appeal. Fate is a fantastic and beautiful system. It's elegant in it's simplicity. It offers endless options, but remains balanced. Almost any character you could imagine can be made with Fate, yet it resists the "God-modding" that Talon so despises. Personally I love simple systems because I view too many rules as getting in the way of great role-playing. I know that rules must exist to regulate things and to avoid the "god-modding" that Talon talks about. He's right, but IMO the best rule systems allow the most freedom possible while eliminating that element. I feel like Fate does that, and it's hands-down my favorite system. But apparently you guys don't want to learn some really simple rules.
2: GURPS Lite or GURPS Ultra-Lite. You all know that I hate GURPS. It's too rules-heavy for me. But GURPS Lite and Ultra-Lite exist. News to me. I've given them a quick glance and would prefer them to Pathfinder. They don't have many of the issues that I feel Pathfinder has. As much as I dislike GURPS, if you guys wanted to switch to GURPS Lite or Ultra-Lite, I'd make that switch in less than a heartbeat. Hell, I'm suggesting it.
3. Stick with Pathfinder…E6. Change nothing, keep your pathfinder characters, but just know that we're in E6 now. If you guys want to continue with Pathfinder, I'll go along with you, but we'll be using E6 rules. If you're not familiar with E6 rules, here's the breakdown: Nothing changes from the regular rules until you reach level 7. E6 stands for Epic 6, which basically means that epic levels start at level 6. If we continue playing Pathfinder, we'll be using E6, which means you'll never get to level 7, when you get to when you would otherwise reach level 7, you'll instead just get a feat. It's a 3.5 thing meant to more closely mirror the progression of the heros of song and story. In 3.5 or Pathfinder, a character at level 20 could pretty easily take on an an entire army if said army was made up people of level 1 or 2, which they should be. This is rather silly, and while fictional characters often help win battles and come out of them just fine, there are few who can simply defeat an entire enemy army. Further, from a mechanical perspective E6 goes a long way towards solving the problem of linear martial classes and exponential casters (the idea is that in 3.5 and Pathfinder martial classes generally improve in a linear manner and caster classes improve in an exponential one, and level 6 seems generally to be where the martial and caster power curves meet, and beyond that the latter can overtake the former, often greatly).
To sum it up: I would like to switch systems to Fate (as you probably know) and I would be willing to switch systems to GURPS Lite or GURPS Ultra-Lite if people wanted to, but if you guys want to stay with Pathfinder, then we'll be using E6 rules, which were originally meant for 3.5 but can be adapted to Pathfinder very easily, and those rules won't effect anyone until level 7 would have been reached.
