You'll have to tell me if I'm off base here, but from what I can tell, its not the point buy system specifically you like so much... but the GM story telling style. Point buy systems, from what I've seen, tend to rely on the cinematic story telling method rather than interactive or hard data keeping. Things like a resource stat rather than actually solid monetary values. You roll the dice and depending on the number of successes you succeed or fail, the margin of fail to win determines how things turn out. Its sounds like you feel the flow of the narrative is interrupted by the tables and specific rules for events in DnD style games.
Personally I find, at least with d10 style games, that this means I don't need dice at all... I need coins to flip. Unless I put all my exp into a single stat and speciallize... then I get bonuses for how well I suceed... more coins to flip, but only sometimes. Its closer to chosing your own adventure than roll playing for me. Its hurry up and wait manifest. At least with DnD I can micromanage my character sheet or plot specific actions, then remember/look up/ask what specifically I need to roll to do so. On other people's turn I can think of what they should be doing. Its why I actually like to have the occasional quick time event during over long FMV segments in game, I get bored doing very little.
With cinematic play I put out an often vague action and get told what I did relative to the narrative. two minutes of press 'X' to attack and steer around... spend twenty minutes or so of unskipable videos. Basically, I find it fairly mindless. I am extremely bad at mindless and reptile brain level functioning. I have to be doing something else at the same time. Its the reason I can't do traditional meditation... attempting to clear my mind just fails. If I clear out the front of my mind, something else moves to the forefront. Then something else and so on. I need a check list. I need a reason. Turning off my brain is not going to occur. On the other hand let me grind levels in a game, thus tying up parts of my mind with busy work and I can clear my mind.,, or close enough to it. I had to with drawl from a class once as we got the notes handed to us and were suppose to watch the teacher lecture (in a droning tone) for the entire class... I remember sitting down and sitting up at the end of class... for all I know I was abducted by aliens in the middle.
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Maybe I should try rephrasing what I meant. Its not a matter of PK DM, the DM did actually fudge things for the players, if it was stupid. For instance, minor dex checks that could lead the party to lpointless lethal falls and such. The high starting stats were just cursed to the point of semioffical house rule. Rube-Goldberg killed those characters just as much as direct lucky atatacks... like a player cuts off someone's sword hand midfight, the direction it goes flying is randomly dice determined by a d8... it heads torwards the high stat player... who badly fails a reflex to dodge the blade... so it gets and attack role... which is a triple 20/critical... and that is how the party got a vorpal sword. It wasn't that the DM wouldn't allow resurection or anything... it was a running gag that those characters died repeatedly and pointlessly. It was a house rule that you didn't bother to res them as they'd just keep dieing in often silly ways. It was just distracting.
As I said before, I find campaigns have treands to them. Another example was that the DM had a campaign where nothing much was critable. It had lots of undead varients at us from any random source he ever saw. One of the characters had a mercural great sword (it has a hollow in the center full of mercury and it increases the weapon's momentum)... which required an exotic weapon profieceny to use... you also had to get lucky to find one. it did 2d8 damage (later books labeled it as 2d6) and 4x crits, but only on a 20 did it have a critical risk. We had the party's main tank with that thing (and a magicly raised to 20 strength). Creatures that you could crit got rare enough that the player would ask if any new thing was critable (this included some of the undead)... if it was that sword would critical hit. It was not enchanted, but with its hunger for crits it was almost an deranged ego weapon. One time we ran into something stupidly above (8-10 levels) the party's levels and it got to buff itself full on before attacking. It knew it had us. Woe betide it, it was critable and having over a hundred HP survived the first crit. The DM praised the dice gods it couldn't risk death from massive damage... then it wiffed on its attack that round. The sword critted a second time... and the DM started laughing (hands in the air gazing at the ceiling) about why we would ever fear it. Granted it was a large war party of 12 or 14 of us, so we could have taken it with losses, but the sword's critical hunger must be fed.
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Slayers is inspired by not a hard rules variant of DnD. Other things (it was a parody of high fantasy in general) are involved, but the feel of it is epic level, player characters doing stuff. This included the DM fudging the rules for the sake of the campaign. Take, for instance, in Try the point when Lina responded to immune to everything, wall of plot armor Dark Star and Lina goes screw it and decides its Giga Slave time. I can just see a different DM with the group running TRY... at that moment Lina starts casting asks to see the what spell she is casting... Realizes that its not the Slayers section of the staff that is in danger of oblivian, but his own personal section of the staff.... Almayce is opening channeling the DM's reaction as he is reading said spell and realizing his entire campaign's railroad is about about to drive over the Yellowstone Caldera as it spontaniously erupts.
There are a couple of blatant tells for DnD influence... for instance orcs in Slayers are dumb as rocks and are pigheaded (literally), this is not Lord of the Rings (the standard for old style orcs), but how orcs started off in DnD and as far as I know, exclusive to early. Fireballs are explosive and not flaming sling stones. The way Naga and Lina handled a hundred level dungeon, they earth magiced a hole to the bottom levels and levitated downward. All the good stuff is at the bottom of the dungeon after all. In the Slayers' Nintendo games, you got exp for eating and beating up team mates. The eating is probably part party members are challenge rating their level and an old, now abandoned rule from second edition: treasure exp. Find Treasure get Exp. Thieves leveled like mad as according to these rules, making pickpocket checks on your party members and pickpocketing their treasure meant you 'found' the treasure thus got treasure exp. Hand it back (or better yet pickpocket to plant the item on them) then swipe it again and again. This is why there is the X days/weeks rule to train to level X. Otherwise Thieves got level 40 in a session or two and the party was stuck at level 3-6. Some items are worth hundreds or thousands of treasure exp. Its why exp requirements get crazy high real fast.
Second edition did have 'epic' level modes. It had monster manuals for that... I remember one creature that I think was from the para/demi elemental plane of vacuum, it was near Xorn in the MM. Saving multiple saving throws verses death per round were involved or you imploded into it. I had a friend who's campaign ended up getting far off the rails and involved managing to consecrate 4 or 5 levels of the nine hells. The DM ended up resorting to the next level turtling up and putting an absurdly large (read mile wide), teleport trap on that next level. In games like 'Pools of Darkness', the level cap was 40. However, there was a knight class... which had a 3 tier system.... with you could stop being a lower level knight tier and rank up. However you got blocked from using the previous classes abilities... I think until your level matches the highest in the previous class... meaning you could effectively hit level 120. Giving you insane HP.
Personally I find, at least with d10 style games, that this means I don't need dice at all... I need coins to flip. Unless I put all my exp into a single stat and speciallize... then I get bonuses for how well I suceed... more coins to flip, but only sometimes. Its closer to chosing your own adventure than roll playing for me. Its hurry up and wait manifest. At least with DnD I can micromanage my character sheet or plot specific actions, then remember/look up/ask what specifically I need to roll to do so. On other people's turn I can think of what they should be doing. Its why I actually like to have the occasional quick time event during over long FMV segments in game, I get bored doing very little.
With cinematic play I put out an often vague action and get told what I did relative to the narrative. two minutes of press 'X' to attack and steer around... spend twenty minutes or so of unskipable videos. Basically, I find it fairly mindless. I am extremely bad at mindless and reptile brain level functioning. I have to be doing something else at the same time. Its the reason I can't do traditional meditation... attempting to clear my mind just fails. If I clear out the front of my mind, something else moves to the forefront. Then something else and so on. I need a check list. I need a reason. Turning off my brain is not going to occur. On the other hand let me grind levels in a game, thus tying up parts of my mind with busy work and I can clear my mind.,, or close enough to it. I had to with drawl from a class once as we got the notes handed to us and were suppose to watch the teacher lecture (in a droning tone) for the entire class... I remember sitting down and sitting up at the end of class... for all I know I was abducted by aliens in the middle.
---
Maybe I should try rephrasing what I meant. Its not a matter of PK DM, the DM did actually fudge things for the players, if it was stupid. For instance, minor dex checks that could lead the party to lpointless lethal falls and such. The high starting stats were just cursed to the point of semioffical house rule. Rube-Goldberg killed those characters just as much as direct lucky atatacks... like a player cuts off someone's sword hand midfight, the direction it goes flying is randomly dice determined by a d8... it heads torwards the high stat player... who badly fails a reflex to dodge the blade... so it gets and attack role... which is a triple 20/critical... and that is how the party got a vorpal sword. It wasn't that the DM wouldn't allow resurection or anything... it was a running gag that those characters died repeatedly and pointlessly. It was a house rule that you didn't bother to res them as they'd just keep dieing in often silly ways. It was just distracting.
As I said before, I find campaigns have treands to them. Another example was that the DM had a campaign where nothing much was critable. It had lots of undead varients at us from any random source he ever saw. One of the characters had a mercural great sword (it has a hollow in the center full of mercury and it increases the weapon's momentum)... which required an exotic weapon profieceny to use... you also had to get lucky to find one. it did 2d8 damage (later books labeled it as 2d6) and 4x crits, but only on a 20 did it have a critical risk. We had the party's main tank with that thing (and a magicly raised to 20 strength). Creatures that you could crit got rare enough that the player would ask if any new thing was critable (this included some of the undead)... if it was that sword would critical hit. It was not enchanted, but with its hunger for crits it was almost an deranged ego weapon. One time we ran into something stupidly above (8-10 levels) the party's levels and it got to buff itself full on before attacking. It knew it had us. Woe betide it, it was critable and having over a hundred HP survived the first crit. The DM praised the dice gods it couldn't risk death from massive damage... then it wiffed on its attack that round. The sword critted a second time... and the DM started laughing (hands in the air gazing at the ceiling) about why we would ever fear it. Granted it was a large war party of 12 or 14 of us, so we could have taken it with losses, but the sword's critical hunger must be fed.
--
Slayers is inspired by not a hard rules variant of DnD. Other things (it was a parody of high fantasy in general) are involved, but the feel of it is epic level, player characters doing stuff. This included the DM fudging the rules for the sake of the campaign. Take, for instance, in Try the point when Lina responded to immune to everything, wall of plot armor Dark Star and Lina goes screw it and decides its Giga Slave time. I can just see a different DM with the group running TRY... at that moment Lina starts casting asks to see the what spell she is casting... Realizes that its not the Slayers section of the staff that is in danger of oblivian, but his own personal section of the staff.... Almayce is opening channeling the DM's reaction as he is reading said spell and realizing his entire campaign's railroad is about about to drive over the Yellowstone Caldera as it spontaniously erupts.
There are a couple of blatant tells for DnD influence... for instance orcs in Slayers are dumb as rocks and are pigheaded (literally), this is not Lord of the Rings (the standard for old style orcs), but how orcs started off in DnD and as far as I know, exclusive to early. Fireballs are explosive and not flaming sling stones. The way Naga and Lina handled a hundred level dungeon, they earth magiced a hole to the bottom levels and levitated downward. All the good stuff is at the bottom of the dungeon after all. In the Slayers' Nintendo games, you got exp for eating and beating up team mates. The eating is probably part party members are challenge rating their level and an old, now abandoned rule from second edition: treasure exp. Find Treasure get Exp. Thieves leveled like mad as according to these rules, making pickpocket checks on your party members and pickpocketing their treasure meant you 'found' the treasure thus got treasure exp. Hand it back (or better yet pickpocket to plant the item on them) then swipe it again and again. This is why there is the X days/weeks rule to train to level X. Otherwise Thieves got level 40 in a session or two and the party was stuck at level 3-6. Some items are worth hundreds or thousands of treasure exp. Its why exp requirements get crazy high real fast.
Second edition did have 'epic' level modes. It had monster manuals for that... I remember one creature that I think was from the para/demi elemental plane of vacuum, it was near Xorn in the MM. Saving multiple saving throws verses death per round were involved or you imploded into it. I had a friend who's campaign ended up getting far off the rails and involved managing to consecrate 4 or 5 levels of the nine hells. The DM ended up resorting to the next level turtling up and putting an absurdly large (read mile wide), teleport trap on that next level. In games like 'Pools of Darkness', the level cap was 40. However, there was a knight class... which had a 3 tier system.... with you could stop being a lower level knight tier and rank up. However you got blocked from using the previous classes abilities... I think until your level matches the highest in the previous class... meaning you could effectively hit level 120. Giving you insane HP.