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D = 1/2 ATT. You fall, potential energy becomes kinetic energy, which is dissipated into the impact surface and the impacting body when it hits. If a 10' fall does "1d6" points of damage, a 20' fall should do 2d6 (twice as much energy to dissipate), a 40' fall should do 4d6 (four times as much energy) and so on. Having people just walk away may not be “realistic” (as in: conforming to the expectations I have developed thanks to my experiences in living in a non-magical universe with very different laws of nature), but there is no “realism” (as previously defined) to “hit points” - and to not taking penalties for each wound, ignoring internal bleeding and shock effects, or for higher level characters being able to walk around burning buildings for extended periods of time - to start with.

Basing things on impact velocity is a (semi-) popular notion - but: at 1 second under normal gravity you've fallen 16 feet, and have a velocity of 32 feet per second - call it 1 1/2d6 for the sake of discussion and consistency with the good old 10' fall. At two seconds you've fallen 64 feet, and have a velocity of 64 feet per second, which would be 3d6 based on velocity. At three seconds you've fallen 144 feet, have a velocity of 96 feet per second, and would take 4 1/2d6 damage. Now, air resistance gradually builds up (it depends on your speed, and thus the number of particles which must be forced aside in a given period, the square of the velocity which must be imparted to those particles to move them out of the way in time for you to pass, turbulence, and several other factors - all dissipating part of that kinetic energy a falling object is accumulating) until a freefalling human will hit a terminal velocity of approximately 180 feet per second after (sources differ) a ten to fifteen second fall. If velocity was the key this would peak out at about 17d6 - and a fall of around 1500 feet.

Since it is kinetic energy that matters, and it’s proportional to the square of the velocity, we can easily calculate that a 10' fall produces a velocity of 25.3 feet per second. Terminal Velocity is 7.1 times that - which means that a terminal velocity impact should do fifty times as much damage as a 10' fall, or 50d6. 20d6 implies that there’s either some other factor at work or that the local terminal velocity is only about 114 feet per second.

Of course, if you can dissipate some of that energy in some other fashion - by rolling, by hitting something even vaguely cushioning (such as tree branches) or a slanting surface, by increasing your surface area to dissipate more of it into the air on the way down, by being inhumanely durable enough to dissipate a fair chunk of it by forcing the material you hit out of the way, or by using some sort of magic, you can reduce that damage considerably. Skydivers are routinely expected to handle terminal velocities equivalent to that 10' fall. As noted earlier, in real life fairly normal people may die from small falls and sometimes survive extremely long ones.

In d20 terms, we’d probably be looking at a Reflex save to see if you can (1) reduce the damage by 1d6 per 10' (or, to be slightly generous, any part thereof) of your upward jumping distance and (2) reduce the damage by rolling and thus spreading out the time over which the energy must be dissipated (since normal people and parachute jumpers commonly manage this the DC should be pretty low), a rather large modifier for what you land on and how you hit it (ranging from extra damage for pointed objects down to virtually no damage (For example, the Skydiver Klint Freemantle. In August of 1993, his main and reserve parachutes failed to open. He fell 3,600 feet and landed in a shallow duck pond. He walked away with just a small cut over his left eye. http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html . Some interesting WWII cases can be found at http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffallers.html ), a modifier for how tough you are and thus how much energy you can dissipate into a surface, another for any measures you can take to dissipate energy on the way down (maybe that’s why cloaks are such common items of dress in d20), and on whatever supernatural benefits (if any) you can get from prayers, small magics, lucky rabbits feet, and whimsical game masters.

Overall, adventurers mostly have well above average reflexes, often have superior jumping ability, will very often be landing on slanted snow, brush, or sand-covered surfaces near the base of cliffs rather than on flat stone, are inhumanly tough, and have access to major magic, not just to minor folk magic.

Given all that, I could easily make a case for any given fall inflicting anywhere from 20% to 60% or so of the “basic” 1d6 per ten feet out to a similar percentage of that 50d6 theoretical cap.

In the interests of ease of use, the game rolls all those modifiers and effects into a single damage cap and keeps relatively small falls threatening-yet-predictable by ignoring the complications for short falls. Ergo: 1d6 per 10 feet, capped at the middle - 40% of 50d6 or 20d6.

I could easily make a case for 1d6/20 feet - and I usually do make notable allowances for what you land on in my games - but the 1d6 per 10 feet capped at 20 to 30 d6 (according to taste) has been hashed out over and over again since the little blue book came out. It’s actually one of the more “realistic” (in terms of expectations based on a non-magical universe) parts of the game.

Now, if you want to change that base figure - such as to 1d8, 1d10, or 1d12 for a 10 foot fall (or to base dice size on body mass, thanks to the good old square-cube law) that's easy enough. It doesn't change anything in the calculations except the dice size though.

It’s a comparatively minor point, but Channel Energy can greatly complicate your math. If, for example, two parties of five, each with their own cleric, are cooperating with each other, the two mages do twice as much damage with their spells as either would alone, the two fighters do two times as much damage, and so on - but a few effects, such as Prayer, multiply differently because they can affect the entire group. Two clerics using Channel Energy can heal four times as much damage to this larger party - twice as many uses and twice as many characters to be affected by each use. It can get out of control very quickly if you’ve got a dozen players, and five or six clerics, in a session, especially if they (wisely) invest in Selective Channeling, additional uses of Channeling, and Channeling-Enhancing devices (In a large party the rest of the group is usually willing to chip in on those for them).

Paladins also get a notable boost at L20, when their Channel Energy abruptly goes from an average of 8d6 x 3.5 (28) to 48 when Holy Champion - and that automatic maximization effect - comes into play.

Actually that would be going back to earlier editions, when both Staves and Wands were rechargeable (and a lot more trouble to make). There’s no real reason not to make them rechargeable though. There’s no real difference between picking up another wand and charging up the old one again as long as the prices are comparable. Want to make it cheaper? Reduce the number of charges as was done for Staves. More convenience on getting more charges, less when they run out too quickly.

You don’t even need a rule change really: want an wand that functions like a stave? Is there really any physical difference between a thick, heavy, wand and a small, thin, stave? I suspect that most GM’s will let you get away with making a stave that weighs less, the same way that you can put the same +3 enchantment on a stiletto or a claymore.

Well, that'd be Fast Learner (Specialized in Skills, Corrupted to Knowledges Only, for +3 SP/Level)(OGL free shareware Feat source here: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51255 ). Whether your GM will let you get away with that, or with the Fast Learner feat in the first place, is up to him or her. It all depends on how important knowledge skills are in a particular game I suppose.

Most of it seems to work pretty well in practice: I'm not really a big fan of at-will abilities since my players tend to start asking questions like "where does the power come from" and "can I enchant something to use that power in another way - and, if not, why not?" - but that's manageable.

Specific issues?

Pathfinder doesn't really fix multiclassing very well. If multiclassing was really working right - so that two characters of equal level were equally useful to have along - a character with four levels each in five randomly selected classes would be just as useful as a L20 character. The older books tended to encourage one-level dips and mixing multiple prestige classes. The Pathfinder advanced and capstone abilities tend to discourage multiclassing even if it fits a character concept. Perhaps there should be a few advanced ability options or a way to trade out minor abilities that you'd normally get with multiclassing from higher-order abilities as long as you stick with the core classes. That way a Fighter-Rogue would be able to have some upper-level abilities of his or her own.

Crafting: Needs some sort of permanent cost or limitation on how much you can do. That may not matter is a campaign with time limitations, but in open-ended games where the characters are free to do what they want, crafting without some sort of permanent cost can get totally out of control. I have had parties where the characters had projects of their own agree to "meet again here in ten years time". That may be a bit extreme - but a lot of stories do have multi-year gaps in them.

Channel (Positive) Energy is too vital for almost any party, and Channel (Negative) Energy is just a bit too powerful when you create a party that uses it extensively (The party of four neutral Clerics with Negative Channeling and Selective Channeling managed to commit an awful lot of easy massacres in typical cramped-quarters dungeon crawls). Discounting multiclassing woes, any character of a given level ought to be just as useful to the group as any other character. If the "fifteen minute adventuring day" is really a problem, perhaps giving the other classes a way to help reduce the damage the party takes would work better (Rogues vrs Traps, Rangers vrs ambushes and surprise rounds, Fighters vrs Melee Attacks, Etc). After all, the average effect on the party (being able to keep going longer) and on the cleric (not having to use all of his or her spells on healing) would be exactly the same.

Rage and Ki Points work well enough for the most part but - like any point-reserve system - can cause problems in two ways: the players who don't like resource management tend to burn them off and then complain when they can't use their talents at critical points a bit later, while others tend to come up with extremely powerful and expensive combinations - which means they rrely use their abilities at all since they're holding their points in reserve for some critical moment (at which point they go off like a nova - or get really upset if they've overlooked something and their mighty combination fails to work as anticipated).

Well, as far as the skill check goes, this does introduce a special rule - an automatic failure on a “1" for a skill check - as well as quickly becoming a near-automatic success if the caster either achieves high level or finds a way to boost his or her spellcraft skill. I suspect that you’d quickly find that all utility spells get put on the extended list, while only those spells likely to be needed in combat go on the “mastered” list.

Secondarily, a 20'th level Sorcerer will automatically have “mastered” more spells than a 20'th level Wizard - unless the Wizard uses Feats (Three of them with a +5 Int Bonus). Minor spellcasters may know almost as many spells as a Wizard does even presuming that they start mastering spells only when they acquire the ability to cast them.

This really isn’t going to be back-compatible - you’ll need to be reselecting feats and rewriting spell lists anyway - and if its not, why not just go with one of the skill-based systems or smaller-number-of-very-flexible-spells or other variant systems out there?

Skill Synergies sound entirely reasonable, but you do have to stop somewhere: you could reasonably make a case for almost any skill contributing to almost any other skill in some specialized situation. Ergo you wind up with oscillations between three poles - the extreme simplicity of “no skill synergies”, the extreme complexity of “evaluate all suggested skill synergies”, and the extreme subjectivity of “make a case for it and I’ll judge it at the time”.

Admittedly, I tend towards the subjective end based on how well the player explains how the skill is related, with something like

Skill +5-15: +1 for a poor explanation, +2 for a decent one, +3 for a really good one.
Skill +16-30: +1 for a poor explanation, +3 for a decent one, +5 for a really good one.

And so on.

Now Ysgarth tried to fully describe everything, which was fun - but it wound up with “All skills have been given a four-digit identifying number. The first digit indicates the broad grouping, the second the major subgroups, the third the individual groups, and the fourth the specific skills”.

All skills contributed both up and down: Learning “Broadsword” contributed to all Sword skills which contributed to all combat skills. Individual skills also sometimes contributed to still other skills, which contributed up and down... Oh yes. The point costs of various skills were modified by your background and innate talents. Wait. You also got separate skill point pools for Social, Mental, and Physical Skills.

Then there were the advanced skill rules.

We tried a couple of times, but nobody ever finished a character before losing patience. I don’t really recommend the “extreme complexity” pole.

Ideally a party should be able to function without a healer. After all, most fictional adventures notably DON'T feature anyone who can easily heal other people's wounds - or at least make it a highly limited ability. Somehow it takes a lot of tension out of things when a "dagger thrust to the side" goes from potentially life-threatening due to internal damage or due to the healer being exhausted to "it's only eight points, ignore it" or "anybody need a Cure Light?". Negative consequences - wounds or death, being fined or going to jail, or washing out of a tournament - are what makes combat, court trials, or even sports exciting.

That being said, trying to make the game run that way would require some pretty major changes - and would definitely be a back-compatibility issue. Hit points, and at least some healing, are fairly well built in.

Still, a Cleric really shouldn't be any more indispensable than a Monk or Bard - yet a party of four Clerics is generally a lot more successful than a party of four of almost anything else.

If you want a party to be able to get along with a healer, you need to either give healing abilities to everyone or reduce the amount of damage the party takes.

Ideally replacing the cleric with a mage would result in more enemies being destroyed before they can inflict damage, replacing the cleric with a rogue would result in more traps and incidental damage being avoided as well as more enemy spellcasters and support types being taken out by stealth and sneak attacks before they can inflict damage on the party, replacing the cleric with a ranger should allow more monsters to be bypassed or dealt with by "other means" (thus gaining the XP for defeating them without an actual fight) without allowing them to inflict damage on the party, and so on. Unfortunately, this approach usually requires either the cooperation of the game master and a lot more time spent on investigation, stealth, and planning than many groups are comfortable with or giving the other character types some codified special abilities to represent their use of such tactics.

That's probably a good spot for some consideration: there are settings out there that don't include Clerics, or have them be very rare, or mostly have Evil Clerics, or which don't use positive energy, or which don't allow healing magic. There are plenty of games where no one wants to be a Cleric (I've even seen a few cases due to real-world religious issues) - and it would still be nice to be able to sell commercial adventures and material to people playing in those games and settings without demanding that they rewrite the stuff totally before they can use it.

So: What are some options that should be made available so that campaigns without Clerics can use commercial and extrenally-written adventures without major alterations?

Over on the (extremely lengthy and rather technical) discussions on the “Is Channel Energy Overpowered” thread, someone asked for some quick possibilities as to other ways in which a party could continue functioning in a dangerous environment. Here's a segment from among the possibilities for the "let other classes reduce the damage approach":

"If the problem is "too much damage" - a party-wide problem - address it on a party-wide basis rather than making it vital to have a Cleric. Let the Cleric perform a Healing Burst once or twice a day and have their (separate) uses of “turning” just do damage. Let the Thief have a "Warning Shout" ability once or twice a day that reduces the damage each character in a radius takes from a trap or round of surprise attacks. Let the Wizard have a "Countering Word" which reduces the damage taken from a spell attack - whether individual or area effect - once or twice a day. Let the Fighter "Organize the Line" and reduce the damage taken from a round or two of melee attacks once or twice a day. Let the Sorcerer reduce the damage from breath weapons, natural energies, and environmental damage once or twice a day. For variety, let the barbarian do the "land on the grenade bit" once or twice a day - throwing himself into the path of an area-effect attack and thus reducing the damage everyone else takes. Let the Bard shatter missiles with a few notes every so often, reducing the damage from barrages at the price of reducing the parties ability to fire missiles in those rounds. We can let him do it more often, since this is more specialized than most of the others. The Paladin can get a couple of healing bursts like the Cleric - but - since theirs are a die or so less effective - we could let them redirect an individually-directed enemy attack or spell to themselves once or twice a day. That way they can be fittingly heroic and self-sacrificing (Of course, at L20 they start getting maximum effect, so maybe not). Let Druids reduce the damage from unnatural attacks - from undead, constructs, creatures of the outer planes, and aberrations - once or twice a day. If that turned out to be a bit weak, let them do a little damage to such creatures as well. Let the Ranger - thanks to their ability to scout, warn the party, and keep an approach handy - either negate surprise for those in the area or impose a surprise round on enemies at the beginning of combat once or twice a day. That should help reduce the damage the party takes... As for Monks - Hmm... We could let Monks reduce the effects of Psionic attacks, but many campaigns don’t use them. Letting them heal some damage with non-magical treatments might be interesting, you could let them negate toxins for other people, or - most fittingly for a class which is so rigidly channeled otherwise - we could give them a set of choices. It would be nice to have the antipsionic option for campaigns which use psionics without making the ability useless in other campaigns. Most of those options will need to be immediate actions of course, but that really isn’t much of a problem.
That still leaves the Cleric - and, to a lesser extent, the Paladin - as the supreme font of healing, but allows parties to function almost-equivalently without one and “preserves their precious spells” for their own use. Healing is still more useful than the other forms of damage reduction, since you can use healing regardless of the source of damage, while the other stuff may or may not be usable - but a party can get along without a Cleric if they’re a little more careful. It also adds an interesting option to the fighter, who - at least according to some of the other threads - might be able to use one. It won't eliminate the impact on the game setting, but it does reduce it drastically - and spreads it out over everybody, and having a high-level adventurer-class character around already had quite an impact. (Hm. This one seems like fun actually)."

Those were just quick possibilities thrown out for discussion of course.

So: Why not see how many suggestions we can come up with on how to keep the game functioning more or less normally in the absence of Clerics?

"I disagree. I am not saying that the situation cannot exist or did not exist in your game. While I consider it to be rare enough as to not be worth considering, I also consider the situations that you described to be acceptable." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "DeadDMWalking", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity. Proper attribution is difficult on messageboards since there is no objective way for most users to determine the actual identity or identities of the person being quoted, hence I find casual attempts to do so extremely disrespectful. So are - for example - treating Cliff's Notes as being equivalent to actually reading the work in question. Requests for summaries fall into that category, since they strongly imply that "I don't feel that I need to actually read and understand what has been said previously to properly evaluate it". I apologize for accidently misattributing something earlier).

Which takes us back to "Yes: Channel Energy has been observed to be overpowered in in-game playtesting in a variety of - admittedly uncommon in many games - situations".

This takes us to "Is this problem common enough to bother addressing?". That depends on the usual cost-benefit calculation: Will the benefits of implementing a solution to this unusual problem be sufficient to both outweigh the costs of doing so and the costs of not investing those resources elsewhere?

Personally, I suspect that there are enough benefits to outweigh the costs of inserting a couple of sentences. That does require some effort of discussion, composition, editing, and page formatting, but not necessarily a lot: much of the discussion work is being done on these messageboards. I must admit, barring omniscient access to alternate potential futures, that this position is not provable. Neither is the inverse - so there's not much point in debating it.

"I disagree. Who is the cleric ‘overpowered’ compared against? I prefer to play fighters and wizards, but I like a cleric in the party. The cleric has a particular range of powers that help the group. While there are some who believe that clerics are overpowered, I am not one of them. Clerics can fill any role well, with preparation. But they cannot fill every role simultaneously. As a class, they have great flexibility, but not a lot of direct power (say, compared to wizards). One of their big limitations is that since healing is so important to the group, and the cleric has most of the healing power, they are expected to contribute most of their resources to the group, not hoard them for themselves. Now, a player could ‘buck the trend’ and choose not to contribute to the party. That is a difference in play style. Again, just because it could happen, I don’t consider it a problem. As the DM, if the cleric wants to go off and play by himself, that’s fine. I’ll focus on the rest of the party." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "DeadDMWalking", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity).

Several definitions have been presented, revolving around (1) making a larger contribution on average to the overall success of a group in various situations, (2) player perceptions, (3) difficulties in using commercial material due to the presence or absence of a Cleric or Clerics in the local group, and (4) every character having a chance to "shine" (among others). What definition are you using? Alternatively, are you switching to arguing that the questions is meaningless? I'd have to point out that arguing that something is NOT overpowered is sufficient to demonstrate that some standard of comparison is in use: one cannot argue (Not-A) without admitting the existence of some definition of (A), whether or not any actual instances of (A) exist.

Secondarily, arguing that a particular Class is not omni-competent is a bit irrelevant to whether or not it is overpowered. That particular line of argument popped up back in first edition, notably with regard to various "ninja" classes with arguments of the general form "Well this version can't cast high level spells, therefore they are not overpowered!".

And to continue:

"Actually, that was me, not the DeadDM. Please learn to use the quote feature. Your continued unwillingness to do so is incredibly disrespectful." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "Shisumo", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity).

Personally I find attempts to argue which are made without taking the time and effort to examine all previous arguments in detail, or without taking care to either examine or refute each earlier point presented, or without eliminating from consideration all arguments which are logically or semantically identical to prior arguments which have been answered, or which either refuse to provide definitions or argue that the question under discussion in inherently meaningless without demonstrating that this is true in all cases, are incredibly disrespectful. Since standards differ, I do not demand that others adhere to my mine.

"And if they weren’t negative HP, then healing is not an issue: damage does not cause penalties in d20." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "Shisumo", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity).

Unless, of course, they were to suffer some additional injury before recovery.

"Do me a favor, will you? Stop with the straw man and false ad absurdum arguments." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "Shisumo", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity).

Really? Then you have merely to point out where they are logically flawed. An ad absurdum argument without logical flaws suffices to demonstrate that the initial premise was flawed - whether inherently or due to a lack of definition of its boundary conditions.

A "straw man" argument is based on assigning a position to someone that they have not supported. In this case, there was a simple declarative sentence: "In almost every game, survival is a means, not an end". If this is an accurate statement of a position and not logically flawed, it should survive any ad absurdum test applied. If it is not an accurate statement of a position, why declare it?

"But survival by itself means nothing and accomplishes nothing. It’s what they do with that survival that matters." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "Shisumo", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity).

Oddly enough, many creatures - and many role-played simulations thereof - do find their own survival important in and of itself. It observedly matters to them.

"Since I just provided you with three examples where healing is literally useless, your argument would then suggest that healing is useless and no amount of counterexamples can prove otherwise"

Unfortunately, this disregards the difference between positive observations and negative ones: no number of observations of something being useless in particular situations is sufficient to demonstrate the negative statement "this has no utility". Unfortunately, the statement you are quoting is not an argument: it is a logical rule. The classical counterexample tends to revolve around "proving" negative statements such as "there are no elephants in the room" with statements of the general form "I looked and there weren't". Unfortunately, this is not correct. You can't confirm that no elephants existed, you can only confirm that you didn't find any. Any check that can be made is vulnerable to statements of the form "but this particular elephant cannot be detected in that fashion". You won't find any "proofs" of this for the same reason that you won't find any proofs of Euclid's first axiom ("A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points."). A geometrical argument must be built using the axioms of the geometry in use. A logical argument must be built using the axioms of logic.

"No, and if you’ll reread my argument you’ll see I switched levels on the basis of my previous statements. Again, I repeat: a healer cannot contribute more to party success than the character(s) she heals, because healing does not directly contribute to party success at all. The healer heals, and then the healed character goes off and achieves the party’s goals. If the healed character contributes a huge amount to party success, then the healer did as well, and if the healed character did nothing, then neither did the healer. Parity is automatically and inviolably maintained.

What happens in the case of infinite healing is that the healed characters’ contributions become potentially infinite, because they’re being healed for a potentially infinite amount. Parity is still maintained – the other characters still set the limit for how much the healer is actually contributing. But when that limit is potentially infinite, then everyone can contribute an infinite amount, and challenges become pointless because victory is inevitable. Parity within the group is just as it was before, but parity between the group and the challenges it faces has been entirely destroyed. That’s why I shifted levels, because, in bringing up player dissatisfaction with too much healing, you went there first, whether you realized it or not." (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "Shisumo", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity)

Once again, this argument assumes that survival is not a goal in itself (if you are planning to provide a counterexample by committing suicide in order to make a point in this debate, I would strongly urge you to seek treatment). It also assumes that the players will not be able to make the connection between "I can only do this because the Cleric healed me" and "the Cleric is partially responsible for the results of my actions". Your original argument was that healing cannot lead to perceived imbalances between characters because actual accomplishments are limited by other party members. Observedly, it can. Almost as importantly, the argument assumes that the healer does not extend his own contributions by giving a priority to healing himself, that a individuals and groups cannot be challenged without facing the possibility of injury (the fact that you are debating this topic without notable risk of injury demonstrates that one can be challenged without such risks), and that you have proved that "parity within the group is just as it was before" (a part of the quote above) rather than simply avoiding that issue by switching levels. The "parity" argument has been demonstrated to be flawed in practice by observation, in logic by demonstrating that it involves several unsupported - and in some cases flawed - assumptions, and in your own statements by your admission of switching levels - redefining what you are attempting to demonstrate.

And on to the next one:

"It should not be easier to read the replies to your post to figure out what you want to say. (Since the request for attribution has been made, this was apparently posted by a person or by some combination of persons using the name "Ross Byers", whether or not they have authorized access to that messageboard identity)

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be. Many of the responses do not seem to consider the restrictions and qualifications on the original statements or to respond to all logical points. Sadly, since I do attempt to respond to all points as far as possible given time constraints, attempting to block-quote each earlier response would require quoting the entire text of each earlier post to which I am responding - including each included quote from an earlier post. That would make what are (admittedly already lengthy) posts twice as long initially and increase their length with each new post. This does not appear practical.

"I disagree. To state that 80 people can be affected by a healing burst is not to say that the situation will ever occur in the game"

As noted earlier, such situations have occurred in playtesting. You are also assuming that characters are safe to heal naturally simply because they are safe for the next few minutes. This is not necessarily true, since there may be additional or ongoing threats.

"That 80 people should take damage simultaneously while within proximity to a cleric is so exceedingly rare that it is not worth considering"

Really? Several playtesting situations (town defense and disaster rescue) have already been mentioned. For some real-life examples, Hurricanes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, dam breaks, bridge collapses, fires, battles, building collapses, and many other events have occured through history, many producing large numbers of injuries at a time. If you'd like some historical references, here's the fist one that came to mind - in part thanks to it being pretty throughly researched: http://members.cox.net/rb2307/content/medicine_and_the_battle_of_getty.htm
You might also like to look up the number of casualties produced by tidal waves relatively recently. Of course, you may be assuming that "In proximity to a cleric" means "within a 30-foot radius", which probably would restrict things to battlefield situations. Shall we compromise on "within an hour or so on foot" and a radius of around five miles?

"In the events you have described, you have not shown a situation where I would consider there to a problem"

As already noted, both I and the local players, have observed such a problem. This argument falls under the “personal playtest fallacy” noted earlier.

"As for the number of clerics, while you've admitted the error, you have not analyzed the change, instead asserting that the mistake doesn't change the conclusion - that every hamlet will have more healing..."

Unfortunately, you are skipping an important word there - "average". If you wish to examine the effects of advantages or adaptions over time, there are plenty of real-world examples ranging from human social adaptions to rain forests to animal species being introduced to new environments. The average healing available to a single, low-level cleric, was calculated earlier in the thread with and without channeling - and, as the link above demonstrates, there are occasions when that healing will be very useful indeed.

"As for survival advantages, it is likely that they will take time to have any effect. Sometimes, millions of years"

Actually this varies as a complex function related to the scale of the advantage, how frequently it comes into play, and how subject a characteristic is to random changes in frequency. The effects of 1% increase in yearly survival rates - such as, in the one hamlet in three that was raided by the goblins this year, an average of 6 additional people survived thanks to Healing Channeling - will take the setting from a zero population growth rate to doubling every 70 years even without calculating in those survivors contributions to farming, cooperative defense, producing children (and the occasional adventurer) of their own, and so on. This sort of calculation has been around since first edition, and the old discussions on how - if the Orcs lost an average of 200 Orcs to kill a single Elf - the Orcs were winning the war.

"While the stand of 300 Spartans against legions of Persians is still celebrated, the Spartans did not come to dominate the Persians"

Which actually is one of those cases where "the mission is (somewhat) successful despite the party being wiped out" that you couldn't imagine earlier: The Spartans (and 900 assorted servants) lost and died; they just managed to make it take long enough for other people to start getting organized. I'm not quite sure how dying constitutes a survival advantage. The sacrifice didn't even suffice to keep Athens from being reduced to rubble.

"Determining how long it will take to have any meaningful effect on the spread of people is entirely dependent on the type of campaign"

Quite true, and already discussed, since part of the "design purpose" of the rules (maximizing sales) is to make them work well in as many campaigns and situations as possible.

"Since the rules don't cover this aspect of the game, it is entirely up to the DM to determine what the overall effect is."

Actually they do cover quite a lot - it is quite possible, for example, to determine the skill of each individual shoemaker in a city and determine each ones daily business success: it's just a great deal faster to deal in averages. The option of ignoring such complications by GM Fiat has already been discussed.

"As part of a team, a cleric does contribute significantly more to the overall success of the party than any other class. For that reason, clerics have usually been seen as 'essential'. This was true in 3.5 and is no more untrue in Pathfinder. However, the character in Pathfinder is able to do more to contribute to overall success as an individual than in 3.5, where many clerics in my experience found themselves almost entirely relegated to the role of 'healing b#~@~', spending every action they had keeping companions in the fight. Considering the number of people reluctant to play a cleric (despite the overall survival advantages in 3.5), I think this is a welcome change."

Which apparently states that it is indeed overpowered, but that this does not matter since it helps keep the party going. The underlying problem here would apparently be that the party is taking too much damage - a problem which has already been discussed.

"Beneficial? Absolutely. World-changing? Much, much harder to prove. Is there really going to be a measurable impact whether people are back on their feet in an hour or three to five days? We're no longer discussing the question of whether they live, mind - just how soon they get on their feet."

Yes: Beneficial is always world-changing, the only question is the extent. “On their feet” is not the issue unless they were in negative HP: damage does not cause penalties in d20.

"In almost every game, survival is a means, not an end"

Really? So none of the players mind if all their character die in pursuit of wealth, as long as they had their hands on a big pile of loot when they did? The phrase here is "among the character objectives". Characters often have to compromise between multiple objectives, otherwise they would regard it as a victory to dive into the dragon's lair at level one, grab what they wanted, and die holding it. Survival is just a means to an end in some Samurai games, but most people want to live to enjoy their victories.

"What if you're a 1st level party in a temple that has been desecrated so that clerics channel positive energy as though they were two levels lower? What if you're adventuring on the Negative Energy Plane, so that not only can you not channel positive energy at all, but attempts to do so actually damage you? What if you're a cleric in a party otherwise composed entirely of lifespark golems?

Arguments that involve cornercase examples are useless, because they can always be met with a cornercase counterexample. This is the same reason why people who argue fighters are balanced in 3.5 because of the existence of antimagic field; when you have to invoke specific circumstances only to prove a point that goes beyond those circumstances, you've already failed"

Sorry, no: basic logic here: one observed example is enough to prove that something exists. No number of counterexamples or failures to observe something is eough to prove that it does not exist.

"Nothing in what I've arguing suggests that unlimited healing is a good thing, and if anything, you're proving my point. Healing, as I said before, provides other characters with additional resources to contribute - and infinite healing means, in essence, infinite resources. Setting infinite resources up against finite obstacles generally removes the challenge from the contest, which usually (though not always) results in a less satisfying game. So yes, unlimited healing does annoy players, and they are right to point out that it is the cleric who is the source of the problem - but it isn't the cleric that is over-contributing, it is themselves, but only because the cleric makes it possible to do so."

I'm sorry, but you have skipped between levels here: your original argument was an attempt to demonstrate that increasing the amount of healing available through a particular character or ability could not create imbalances between the characters in the group. Since you have abandoned that viewpoint and switched to a different standard of comparison - player characters as a group versus the world rather than player-percieved imbalances between character types - I take it you have abandoned that argument?

"Finding the balance is what the game designers job is, which is why the arguments about "achieving design objective" are actually relevant"

Unfortunately, they're not - as already demonstrated, neither "design objectives" nor rules exist in isolation from each other except, perhaps, at their most basic levels - "Will this rule increase sales of the final version of this game?". Lacking the ability to compare alternate future histories, that's unknowable. "Does this rule make the game enough more enjoyable for a high enough percentage of the people who have experimented with it to counterbalance those who have a problem with it or find that it decreases enjoyment" is theoritically knowable, but practically indterminate; the people who have actually tried the rules and posted to these boards seem to be a relatively small subset of those who have downloaded the rules.

The fact that the question was asked, and has provoked debate, suffices to demonstrate that at least some people do have a problem with "Channel Energy" - finding it "Unbalanced" however they personally define that term. The game exists to please the game masters and players, Some of them are not pleased with this feature. Therefore there is a problem and all attempts to argue that there is no problem are observably wrong. The only real question is "does this warrant a patch or are the number who are displeased too small to worry about?"

Secondarily, judging by this thread, most attempts at arguing design purpose seeem to revolve around "the party is taking too much damage" and "letting the cleric save his or her spells for things other than healing". It works to some extent on too much damage and does let a cleric save his or her spells sometimes. So would ruling that "all player characters take only one-quarter damage from anything". If the problem is "too much damage", why is the solution to a party-wide problem loaded onto a single ability only available to a few classes? If the problem is "saving your spells", why not just eliminate healing spells from your repetoire?

"As I said, this is a party-level issue, not a character-level one."

As I said, you introduced this argument as a response to an observed character-level issue.

"One cleric managed to hold multiple gates? That's impressive."

Easy enough: First he helped defend the walls against the initial exchanges of missile fire (cover made a large difference, using a cure light wounds wand was sufficient for some time), and then helped hold them against the first few escalade attempts (using a couple of Channeling bursts). With the attackers now concentrating on the main gate, the characters relocated to back up the troops defending said gate and used it as a chokepoint after it got blasted open with a little magic (The Cleric used several more Channeling bursts there). Our war-commander Fighter and the Cleric then fell back to the gate of the inner wall, leaving the field open for area-effect covering fire from the party Wizard who was providing rear support. He didn't have all that much of it available after his long-range fight with the attackers magical support, but taking advantage of the confined places between the buildings let him use it fairly effectively. Meanwhile, the party Rogue and Ranger had slipped out to cause troube in the enemy rear, which reduced the pressure nicely - giving the characters who'd gone off with the NPC messengers to organize a relieving force more than enough time to deal with various interception attempts and get their assistance back before the inner defenses were overrun.

"Honestly, this is worthwhile information, but it is, as you said above, fundamentally localized. There's no way to tell how significant it is on a grand scale; thus far, though, it seems to me that the preponderance of playtest response goes the other way."

So it may: we really have no idea how many people tried Pathfinder, said "Nah", and never came to these boards to post. That's why - as noted earlier - the only real question is "does this warrant a patch or are the number who are displeased too small a percentage to worry about?"

There have been quite a few suggested patches so far. For example, I already provided a possible one-sentence patch for larger-scale social effects that will not affect player-characters or their opponents: “Sadly, the gods only entrust the power to heal or damage living creatures with Channel Energy to great champions who are regularly involved in confrontations with other great champions”.

That doesn't address inter-player considerations due to perceived or actual (however defined) character imbalances and the occasional tactical issues which have been mentioned. I personally think that these ought to be addressed as well - hopefully with similarly-simple patches - but they may not be especially common.

And on to the next response:

"Clerics lost a spell slot and gained healing bursts. Fair trade off. Plus its not overpowered at all."

Well, I thought they got some new domain powers as well, as well as some of them getting damaging bursts. Oh well. It rather looks like this is a vote for "I haven't encountered any problems, ergo no one has". I think I'll leave the "Is! Isn't! Is! Isn't!" routine as a low-probablity (since I find it hard to imagine why anyone would bother with it) theoritical alternate future timeline.

Sorry to double-post, but someone else posted while I was working on the last reponse:

"Not to my satisfaction it hasn't. What you continue to avoid dealing with is that this is a problem of logisitics, not supply. Injuries do not conveniently happen simultaneously and within a 30 ft radius of a cleric."

No they don't - but wounded people are can usually either move or be moved. Getting the hundred or so severely injured victims of a collapsing bridge, and the people who were injured during rescue operations, to an area where the single locally available low-level cleric can heal them all with a few bursts isn't all that hard - and being healed now, instead of waiting for natural healing or taking a week out for cure light wounds spells is probably beneficial.

"even setting aside the question of how a "wiped out" party is supposed to complete any kind of mission"

For the classic fantasy example, if Frodo had sacrificed himself to destroy the ring after the entire rest of the fellowship had been killed, would that not have succeeded in his mission? There have been enormous numbers of historical missions that succeeded despite everyone involved being killed or captured.

"Healing, on its own, does not directly contribute anything to a party's success. It results in no forward progress, removes no enemies, accomplishes no objectives."

Well, I usually do include "Survival" among the character objectives.

"What it means is that the contribution of healing to the party's success is always going to be matched by a contribution from the healed character(s)."

To take a counterexample from earlier in the thread, what if your objective is to being a group of low-level NPC-class refugees through a difficult situation alive? Healing them is a direct contribution. Secondarily, most healers heal themselves as well - thus increasing their own "direct contribution" (more selfish characters with healing abilities excaberate this difference even more). More importantly, if healing is only important through its effects on other characters, no amount of healing can be unbalancing between characters: ergo simply allowing any character with healing abilities to heal without limit should in no way annoy the players of characters without healing abilities - yet somehow it does seem to, as long-ago experiments with spell point systems confirmed. Finally, under this theory it should make no difference if you trade out all the characters with healing abilities for characters with no healing abilities, since they should contribute equally in other ways - yet it does seem to make a difference.

"To use an actually relevant example, consider a cleric who heals a fighter who had been dropped to unconsciousness. The fighter then goes on to kill all the party's enemies. This was only possible thanks to the healer, but the fighter did the actually slaughtering; thus both PCs contributed equally - neither would have accomplished the victory alone. Conversely, if the fighter then proceeds to miss every swing for the rest of the combat, then neither the fighter nor the cleric's healing contributed a thing; the cleric might as well have saved the spell/channeling and left the fighter on the floor."

Well, as noted, "everyone surviving" is usually a part of the party objectives - to which the healing has directly contributed. After all, if the Fighter had been stabilized at -8 hits, the next area-effect attack he was exposed to would almost certainly have finished him off. It looks to me like the healing made a very direct contribution towards that goal of "survival".

"Actually, it is what I meant, to a certain extent. The cleric's role as a support character - a character whose contribution is measured primarily in terms of the contributions they allow others to make - is frequently cited as a reason why "no one wants to play a cleric;" it was even offered as an excuse for the massively overpowered 3rd Edition cleric by the game's designers. Bards have similar problems; despite being substantial force multipliers, they are often mocked and ridiculed, and players even my own games have expressed dissatisfaction with being forced to "sing instead of do something." If the point of avoiding "overpowered" abilities is to enhance the enjoyment of players as your definition suggests, then this is definitely an element that must be taken into account."

Agreed - although it depends a good deal on the players. I've had one who took Mystic Artist/Architecture (Instead of the usual bardic music) and a selection of enhancement spells and abilities and happily lurked in the background doing nothing at all directly while enhancing other people and designing buildings. That's pretty unusual though. In our playtests (admittedly including many odd situations, including player-groups versus player-groups, all-channeler groups, and players running defenders versus players running attackers) most of the players - including the ones playing clerics - have come to the conclusion that Channel Energy is just too good for comfort. The war-leader fighter was especially annoyed that - despite his special feats for organizing and enhancing the troops he was leading - the cleric made a bigger difference in holding the walls and gates of the town when the orc army attacked then he did.

Why would a truthfully-stated observation be either useless or untrue in itself? Contributing an additional observed case is almost invariably useful.

While your post expresses no direct opinion as to whether or not the ability is overpowered, it rather sounds like it falls into one of the cases examined earlier - that the ability usually functions well with regards to a a party that is relatively small, has few associated NPC's or creatures, and is primarily involved in combat encounters. The fact that the party has a mixture of classes and is up against mixed opponents using a mixture of strategies eliminates some of the cases considered earlier as well (such as a player character party or group of opponents with multiple negative channelers with Selective Channeling).

The only problem with arguments based on playtesting is that they tend to be of the form "I have not yet encountered a problem with (x); therefore no one has encountered a problem with (x) - and if report that you have, you must be wrong".

So yes, thank you for your post: at least from my point of view it is neither useless nor untrue.

Well, its hardly a throughly-analyzed thing, but game-mechanic part of being a Paladin always seemed to be that they accepted a variety of special duties and restrictions on options that would otherwise be practical and useful - lying, breaking their word, betraying people when convenient, and so on - and, in exchange, were given some special options, such as acquiring a supernaturally-superior steed and other unusual abilities.

In 3.5 this can easily be represented by offering the option of something like the “Dedication” Feat:

Dedication [General]
You draw strength from your dedication to a particular code of behavior.
Benefit: When you take this Feat you must consult with your game master to develop a meaningful set of restrictions on your character’s behavior or a set of duties which you will be obligated to carry out from now on. You may also select two other Feats which you may use from now on as long as you adhere to the specified restrictions or duties.
Special: You may take this Feat more than once. Each time you do so you must either build upon your old restrictions or duties or create new ones. You cannot simply apply the same set.

There are plenty of OGL feats out there for improving saving throws, building up a modest spell progression, and gaining various other weird abilities, including duplicating the special abilities of most prestige classes. This way you can dump a lot of those classes. You want to be a dedicated fighter (or mage, or even cleric - although they might have a harder time finding restrictions that meant something) of Lawfulness? Add some appropriately-rigid duties and behavioral restraints, and take some appropriate powers and there you are. Want to be a dedicated warrior of Chaos? I doubt you’ll find many appropriate restrictions, so a heavy dose of special duties is going to be in order if you want much benefit. Of course, there also won’t be too heavy a penalty for wandering from the path of Chaos, which seems suitable.

"I went back and found that section of the thread, and all I can say is, it is not me that needs to reread the demographics section of the DMG again"

Evidently you didn't. Having forgotten the -2 modifiers was already noted in a later post. You also failed to read the sections on unusual situations and cumulative survival advantages. This argument has already been dealt with.

"I saw mention of natural disasters, but that's laughable - recent events in China and southeast Asia have shown that even modern-day transportation and logistics can't get enough healers into an area affected by a large-scale disaster"

Evidently you missed some of the early posts dealing with the number of people who can be treated with a single healing burst. This argument has already dealt with.

"By this standard, positive energy channelers aren't - in fact, can never be - overpowered on the basis of their positive energy channeling, save where encounters with undead are concerned. The reason is simple: healing does not contribute directly to party success. It's true that it contributes massively in an indirect fashion"

Ah. An "Indirect Contribution" - as you have opted to define it - is somehow less important than a direct one. Under your definition, a party that completes a mission but is wiped out in the process has been just as successful as a party that completes the mission and survives without injury. I suspect that a solid majority of players would not agree. I could also read this argument as a statement that players are incapable of evaluating the value of "indirect contributions”, but I suspect that this is not what you meant.

"In the game world of D&D, magical healing was already available in these situations. Additional healing, whether through channel energy or another source does not change the fact that the healing was already available. Usually, the healing will not make any difference"

Already dealt with under cumulative survival advantages. Getting all the survivors in a village almost immediately to uninjured status after a disaster is a substantial advantage.

As a side note, it is nice to see that you embrace the “game physics” approach. Otherwise you would presumably have considered lost productivity due to injuries and the other effects of real traumas.

"If you multiply the wealth by a factor of 10, nearly instantly inflation will also multiply prices by a factor of 10"

Unfortunately, "Wealth" is not "Gold Pieces". “Wealth” includes lands, domestic animals, stored food and supplies, tools and equipment, and other chattels as well as precious metals or symbolic monetary units.

"However, the point I make is that if you do not increase the number of clerics, you do not increase the access to healing"

Sadly for arguments of this form, increasing the abundance of a given resource will - as usual in any supply-and-demand situation - reduce the average difficulty of obtaining access to said resource. Even in your own analogy, radius-effect pumps versus single-vehicle pumps will allow many vehicles to fuel at once at each pump.

"So, specifically, I disagree with your assertion that channel energy will have any more effect on society than healing magic in general. Absolutely and unconditionally disagree with your reasoning and conclusion."

Disagreeing is entirely your privilege, but - as demonstrated above - I find your arguments unconvincing.

As a side, note, given at least one posters initial assertion that evaluating whether or not something is "Too Powerful” or “Overpowered" is meaningless, their refusal to provide an alternative definition for something being “Too Powerful” or “Overpowered” that they would find meaningful, and the topic of this thread - “Is Channel Energy Too Powerful”, I must wonder why anyone would bother to post to a topic they feel is inherently meaningless?

With plus weapons the boost to damage is more or less incidental: the major benefit is the increased chance to hit. Your fighter needs a 15 to hit some really tough opponent? With a +3 weapon he needs a 12, and he’ll hit 50% more often. With a few other damage bonuses that may be just as effective at taking out a monster with damage reduction as hitting less often but bypassing it.

DR was apparently intended to make some monsters especially tough unless the characters had made appropriate preparations. Unfortunately, they keep popping up even when the characters have not had a chance to learn about them in advance and make those preparations - leading to the characters trying to be prepared for everything.

So to retain some of the flavor of it being more difficult if you don’t have the appropriate weapon without making it extraordinarily difficult, to increase the attractiveness of basic pluses, to maintain back-compatibility, and to still offer some benefits to having the appropriate weapon, how about this:

“Characters using a “plus” weapon may opt to transfer some or all of its pluses from “attacks” to “damage” during any given round, making their decision as a free action at the start of their attack sequence.”

Now +2 damage without a bonus to hit isn’t as good as a similar +1d6 damage without a bonus to hit - but it isn’t subject to elemental resistances and you always have the option of going back to a bonus to hit. Your +4 sword can effectively reduce DR 10/Whatever to DR 2 - at the price of giving up your bonus to hit. If the DR was the big problem, that shouldn’t worry you too much. If you’re having trouble both hitting and overcoming DR, it may be time to retreat anyway.

The fact that the energy damage from (say) a flaming sword bypasses DR, since DR doesn’t work against energy damage, is another matter entirely - although it does lead to amusing conclusions, such as a mob with flasks of oil being able to burn down an Iron Golem.

If you want to add new weapon powers, +1d6 damage that doesn’t always work is generally equivalent to a +1 attacks and damage. Ergo, +1d6 to overcome damage reduction only seems like a reasonable option - and there really isn’t any good reason why you can’t apply a given +1d6 effect more than once. It’s hardly any odder than having +1d6 each of fire, cold, and lightning damage. If a given opponent doesn’t have DR, don’t roll those dice. If it does, roll them and add them up against the DR total

Well Combat and Tactics simply expanded a bit on some information from older books as far as weapon specializations went. I believe it was the original Unearthed Arcana, but I could be wrong: I’m not going to rummage that one out to check right now.

The problem, I suspect, that most games spend an inordinate amount of time on personal combat - enough time so that everyone expects to be involved and to make a notable contribution. A rogues skills may be very important to the game, but few games spend an hour at a time making skill checks. A wizards spell research may be vital and take weeks in-game, but it often only takes a few minutes at the table. I could easily argue that a fighter SHOULD dominate combat the way the Cleric dominates healing and theological debates or the Rogue dominates picking locks and pockets at the duke's masked ball - but it will lead to both a perceived imbalance and a valid complaint: the game will wind up spend a lot more time on "fighter stuff" than on other characters shticks.

It might be better to spend some time looking at ways for fighter-types to have more to do outside of combat, just in case the game takes a five-session detour into diplomacy at court.

Still, if you want fighter-enhancements, there's an enormous array of weapons feats and such already out there in OGL world - and fighters have a fair supply of feats to spend on combat now. We usually use the combat enhancements chapter in Eclipse (Augment Attack, Block, Bonus Attack, Enhanced Strike, Imbuement, etc) and the weapon-themed Martial Arts (page 80) (which also require skill points, and so reward smarter fighters). Our players like using that book since they can download it for free, but there are plenty of others.

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51255

Another vote for perfect agreement. If I can't figure out where it came from, how it fits into the ecology, history, and development of the world, and what its limitations and interactions with other things in the world are like, it doesn't go in.

Isn't it? There are several free systems out there for doing it, all you have to do is search. If you need a link, here's the free one we usually use: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51255

""Overpowered" seems to imply a standard of comparison that has not been defined and has absolutely not been agreed on. I think it's fascinating that you're willing to stipulate that limiting channeled healing to PC/important NPC types would greatly or entirely eliminate the social issues you're having, when adepts lack such healing inherently and thus the amount of healing available to the world as a whole is entirely dependent on GM fiat (i.e., who is a cleric vs. an adept)."

The precentages of various character types in the population of various areas is defined by the rules system: see the section on "Demographics". This was discussed earlier in the thread. As for the standard of comparison, it was indeed defined earlier in the thread. If you want to use another definition, please provide it.

"I disagree. Overpowered involves a value judgement"

Already discussed. "Overpowered" as it is commonly used relates to one character of level "x" making a greater contribution to party success than another character of level "x" on a reasonably consistent basis, thus causing player discontent and reducing the enjoyment of the game. If the question involves a value judgement, I trust you will not mind a player with a first level character deciding that said character can use "Wish" at will? Why should one "value judgement" (yours) be superior to that of the player who would like such an ability?

As for “specific situations”, please read the entire thread. A number have been presented.

"Why would an adventure need to be changed based on the party composition?"

Because we are discussing material which is published to make a profit. Many people purchase adventures and expect them to be enjoyable for their players based purely on statements such as "suitable for five fifth-level characters". If they do not find them readily usable and fun for their players, they will cease buying them. Personally, I do not have a problem with characters who commit suicide through failure to gather information and make deductions and preparations based on it. That is, however, simply my preference. There are many game masters and players who do not feel that way, and this discussion concerns them as well.

"As for social assumptions, most societies will worry very little about 'hit point damage'"

Already discussed at length earlier in the thread. See: cumulative effects of survival advantages.

"Most societies don't engage in combat all that frequently."

Sources of hit point damage both from accidents, natural disasters, and similar troubles have been discussed earlier. Combat ranges from domestic disputes on through being kicked by a domestic animal, through attacks by various animals and monsters, and only then on to massed armies. Consider the statistics for automobile accidents - which, as defined in the game, cause hit point damage.

"Since that also tends to be the time that planting and harvesting happen"

Assuming, of course, a temperate or subtropical climate, an agrarian society with European-style agricultural patterns and crops. The patterns of life and warfare in a tropical rain forest or the arctic are quite different. Magic, exotic species and races, and large-scale supernatural effects may well make things more different still iin a d20 setting. All this amounts to "If I assume that the campaign background works without examining it, then I won't notice any effects".

"Effectively, more healing available from each provider, without increasing the number of providers, does little to increase the overall amount of healing available in any situation"

Addressed earlier. See the discussions on "disasters". Also self-contradictory. Lets see... If I substitute “wealth” for “healing” has the net worth of an area gone up? Yes? Hm. If each person with wealth now has ten times as much, then the net worth of the area has gone up by a factor of ten. Perhaps you could explain why this does not apply to healing?

"I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. Is it that if the party finds an enemy to attack, and the party has a cleric, the bad guy is more likely to run away? He might think that he can't cause enough damage to kill the opponents?"

No: it's that NPC's will make efficient use of their abilities within the limits of their intelligence - and if the characters are attacking them, will do their best to either kill their opponents or escape. For example, if they're fighting a group of characters and one of those characters goes down, they're very likely to use the same tactic the party does - make sure that that individual will not be getting up again before moving on. They will concentrate their attacks on more vulnerable opponents. They will retreat if they are losing. They will arrange their defenses to put the characters at as severe a disadvantage as possible. This is normal. Sadly, we have found that a that a party of negative energy channelers with selective channeling can - if they can arrange for a fight to take place in a confined area such as a classical dungeon - usually eliminate a "balanced party" and handily deal with quite a few different kinds of encounters (the best group-of-four in many cases turned out to be three negative channelers and one positive channeler, but four negative channelers were quite deadly enough). At long ranges they simply broke contact, used cure light wounds wands, and attempted to arrange ambushes or to escape. The outcomes of series of battles tended to be influenced much more heavily by the presence or absence of a Cleric than by a fighter, druid, or members of several other classes. This tended to provoke player discontent, and was therefore a problem.

Well, poor BAB, good saves. Why not just eliminate classes entirely and thus get rid of all multiclassing questions?

For some random thoughts...

Had one group of youngsters looking for someone to run Shadowrun for them back in 1990 spot my name on the hobby shop bulletin board. I found out years later that several of the parents hired a private investigator to check on me: couldn’t see why an adult would put up with a bunch of 12-year-olds who wanted to play a game. Why? Because they learned fast, quite a few of them later ran games that I got to play in, and most of them are still playing RPG’s today (some are out of touch).

Basic D&D could be quite a lot of fun. Of course, the more detailed you want your characters to be, the longer they take to create - and things tend to get more complicated with each supplement, since they have to put something in them.

The Players Option system was abusable, but any flexible system is. Pretty rare these days to find anyone using it though. These days we mostly use Eclipse: The Codex Persona for d20 games, because it’s basically Hero for d20 - but stays compatible with the standard classes for those who want to take a shortcut and because you can get it for free over at RPGNow ( http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51255 ) (a plug because I’d like to see wider use of d20 point-buy systems. It lets me make much odder characters).

I can’t really count 4'th edition as anything but a new game: the disconnect between “I throw dirt in his eyes!” and “You can’t do that because you don’t have that per-encounter ability!” is just too weird to count it a RPG.

“So, can you restate your position succinctly?”

The question was and is "Is channel energy overpowered".

The Position was, and is, Yes. To be more elaborate, Yes: Channel Energy has been observed to be overpowered in in-game playtesting in a variety of - admittedly uncommon in many games - situations, in inter-player and inter-society situations due to the increased value of a cleric to the party or a society versus members of other classes (and the resulting need to rebuild adventures and social assumptions to accommodate the presence or absence of various numbers of clerics), and in game-master situations both when role-playing NPC’s who want to survive (via winning as efficiently as possible given their intelligence, abilities, and knowledge, or by fleeing if that looks like a better option) instead of serving as an “exciting encounter” and on an analysis of various likely larger-scale effects.

As for your specific attempts at a summary:

“I believe you are saying: 1) Channel Energy tremendously increases the amount of healing available in the game world. 2) Because more healing is available, this would have a tremendous effect on every aspect of society. 3) Because good societies can channel positive energy, they should now dominate the world. 4) Because of channel energy, the entire world of Golarion is useless since this rule would have such profound effects that the world would look completely different... Including, but not limited to having cleric shelters within 30' of walls to include defenders in a healing burst.”

To answer these:

(1) Yes it does. This has been mathematically demonstrated earlier. Whether or not that healing is needed, useful, or provides a survival advantage for a group that possesses it, is a more complex question.

(2) No. It may or may not have a large impact on any given social structure. In a variety of the situations examined it seems like it should have a notable impact barring the introduction of some counterbalancing factor or explanation. Worlds that operate logically seem to be more popular than those which do not, especially for long-term games (Anyone ever had a two-year d20 Toon campaign? Anyone out there?). Based on that, it is evidently more satisfactory to have such explanations - which leaves it as the responsibility of the game rules and game master to supply them when such questions come up.

(3) No. They will have a competitive survival advantage, and will eventually come to dominate a setting over time IF no counterbalancing factor comes into play. Channel Energy makes it necessary to introduce such factors if you wish to maintain a logical structure to your world over the long term - and each such factor introduced carries its own set of ramifications. This can be fun, but it is an unnecessary burden. Unfortunately, most opposing posters so far have chosen to argue that “no such advantage exists” rather than suggesting that “these other factors exist, or can be easily introduced, to counter this advantage”.
This is actually pretty easy. Large-scale effects could be readily avoided by adding a sentence to the Channel Energy description, such as “Sadly, the gods only entrust the power to heal or damage living creatures with Channel Energy to great champions who are regularly involved in confrontations with other great champions”. That doesn’t address the smaller-scale tactical issues, but it neatly includes the vast majority of player characters (and almost all of them who need lots of healing available), and the classed NPCs that they confront, while excluding most local clerics. There would still be smaller-scale issues in various situations, but there may well be equally simple patches for them. Proposing or applying such a patch, however, implies admitting that there could be a problem - something which many of the posters here seem to be reluctant to even consider.

(4) No. The interpolation that “the entire world of Golarion is useless” is quite unjustified (Falling under the “Straw Man Argument” classification). As already noted, large-scale effects can be ignored if your players are not interested in them and/or are not inclined to apply deductive reasoning to the description of the world you supply. Even if such considerations apply to your group, it is often easy enough (although a bother) to alter the appropriate details - provided that you think about them in advance. In terms of any particular world, the game master can easily insert various (hopefully well-thought-out) house rules to modify any given effect or situation (Such as the modification to Channel Energy noted above). Even aside from such details, few worlds are ever “useless” even if there are problems modeling them with a given set of rules. The worlds of Dragons Egg (a novel about fast-living vaguely ameboid organisms of condensed matter who live on the surface of a neutron star), Tolkien, Traveler (I prefer the original system to Megatraveler), The Black Company, the Bible, the Vedas, of Gilgamesh, World War II, the Book of Coming Forth by Day (I have a childhood preference for the Budge translation), and Edding’s Belgariad all make useful sources.

Now, for the non-succinct portion - attempting to quickly break down other presented positions:

Opposing arguments have been presented based on
(1) The limited prevalence of “Faith” in the population. (varies with the setting and in no way relevant to many of the other problems).
(2) The relationship of gods to clerics. (Varies with the setting).
(3) Having not encountered such problems. (Personally I have not encountered a breadfruit tree. That does not mean that they do not exist).
(4) The “Fifteen Minute Adventuring Day”. (Not related to whether or not Channel Energy is overpowered).
(5) Not caring about the world beyond the party - and it working well in our party. (Which is fine, but does not invalidate the problem for people who do care about the larger world or who have parties for whom it does not work well).
(6) That GM fiat or a wide variety of house rules prevent such effects in particular campaigns. (Also fine, but irrelevant to other campaigns).
(7) Not having any players or game masters who find this ability overpowered in their groups. (Again, fine for them - but the existence of this thread demonstrates that this is not universal. This is basically a variant on (5), but has been presented several times and so merits a listing of its own)
(8) On it allowing clerics to save their spell slots for things other than healing. (If anything, an argument that it is indeed overpowered)
(9) On it being a “vital tool for party survival” (Ditto above).
(10) On it not making a difference. (Observably incorrect in many situations - and, if so, why argue anyway?)
(11) On “flavor”, “Style” , “Narrative Choices”. (Not related to whether or not Channel Energy is overpowered)
(12) That “Balance” - and player perceptions thereof - depends on “every character having a chance to shine” (Already disposed of at length above).
(13) That it’s necessary because the party takes too much damage. (A problem of adventure design, game mastering methods, player decisions, die rolls, and other factors - and one that can be addressed in many other fashions and not relevant to whether or not the ability is overpowered).
(14) That various classes do various things. (True. Also irrelevant to whether or not this ability is overpowered).
(15) That curative spells are less important than other spells (Debatable. Also, once again, quite irrelevant).
(16) That no other patches for the perceived problem of “too much damage” are available. (Simply incorrect. A number were suggested).
(17) That charisma is usually considered a dump stat. (Only true in a limited range of game styles, and irrelevant as to whether the ability is too powerful).
(18) That such situations never come up. (Observedly untrue).
(19) That having a healer is a strategic choice for the party. (Yes it is. This is, however, not relevant to whether or not the ability is overpowered).
(20) That it is not possible for people manning a wall to be in line of sight of those inside the wall while the people within the wall remain out of line of sight of those outside the wall. (Demonstratably untrue if your setting has three dimensions).
(21) That other poor rules exist. (Yes, but irrelevant).
(22) That the characters acting in accordance with what they know about the world is “metagaming” if it does not suit the game masters ideas of how they “should” behave. (Both an fairly original definition of “metagaming” and irrelevant).
(23) That Storytelling takes precedence over game logic and that problems with the setting and events can always be fixed by game master fiat. (Only true for a limited number of game masters - and for those players and game masters who do not see “game master fiat” as a problem in itself. Also true of any rule whatsoever for those game masters and groups willing to accept game master fiat as a valid answer to questions, and hence irrelevant to the question of whether Channel Energy is overpowered).
(24) That having large amounts of healing available is not useful because there situations in which it is not relevant. (A classic “does not follow” error, as well as often being coupled with the argument that Channel Energy is important to the party - while somehow being unimportant to everyone else. This is where the discussion on plagues came from).
(25) That this “is not based on playtesting. (Observedly false).
(26) That it will not have any large-scale social effects over the long term. (Reasons for “why not” so far have tended towards “because I don’t think it ought to” or “because I don’t see why it should”. Sadly, neither of these are valid arguments, as was demonstrated earlier at length).
(27) That the game rules do not actually reflect the physics of the game world. (Quite possible in various settings - but it requires a good deal of thought as to what those actual rules are and as to how they modify game conventions when the players opt to investigate. Usually coupled with the “the assumptions in my head are not “rules” because they’re not written down” fallacy).
(28) The idea that basic changes will not have massive ramifications. (They often do. Consider “Increased Intelligence” and “Thumbs”).
(29) That it fulfills the “design purpose”. (Which is irrelevant to whether or not it is overpowered, as demonstrated earlier).
(30) That the mechanisms of social change are very complicated. (True, if only relevant to a very small part of the discussion - however, by this point, enough situations in which the ability is overpowered have been presented to change the original question to “Do situations in which the ability is overpowered come up often enough in play throughout the customer base to worry about?”).
(31) Assorted apparent digressions - the Liar’s Paradox, the “fuzzyness” that results if you attempt to have two different systems of rules (those of real-world biology and physics and those of the game world) operating at the same time, statements that “The game master cannot be expected to run an entire universe”, discussions of “railroading”, the “basis of D&D”, and that there is no definable difference between “good” and “bad” sessions - have also been presented. In most cases I do not personally see how these are relevant to whether or not Channel Energy is overpowered. Since the people bringing up these topics in the context of this discussion evidently do see such a connection, I have, of course, assumed for the sake of argument that such a connection exists and responded to those sections of their statements as well.

"But what about the SR 32? That's got to boost it up too, right?"

The Improved Spell Resistance was for that. It's useful, but it's still a power available to higher-level characters - and 10+Level was a pretty good match for the usual level 20+ candidate for godhood and allowed lower-level types to have the template without simply becoming immune to spells at first, then progressively move vulnerable, up until - at epic levels - it pretty much became irrelevant.

If you want to match the original fixed rating of 32 we could just say it was "Specialized for Doubled Effect: will not progress past 32" (that should be a meaningful restriction by the time the characters may be picking up divine templates) and buy another level of "Improved" (+6 CP, I don't think that's enough to change the ECL modifiers offhand). That would give us the SR 32 for a character of level one.

"Criticals imply that "vital spot attack""

This involves unsupported assumptions again and ignores portions of the game rules. Some creatures are immune to criticals that definitely have vital points, such as skeletons (although they may now be subject to sneak attacks: the current rules are unclear). There are quite a few single-connection points in a human skeleton, each of them vital to effective function. You are, of course, entitled to make your own assumptions - but they are still house rules.

As for "Irrational Physics" "Irrational" is "not logical". Since you offer no explanation of how such physics is not logical, and have failed to present an alternative set of explanations that are consistent with the defined properties of hit points, shall I presume that you have given up on the project?

As for "Death from Massive Damage", in what fashion does this combine "an absolute measurement of trauma" with "the relativity of levels and HPs"? For example, a colossal creature can still be instantly killed by a blow to the foot or tail while a tiny one can survive a blow that would crush its entire body. Both take the same amount of damage from a fall into lava, despite one having a much greater exposed area than the other. This is not how real-world injuries work and there is no reason to assume a related mechanism. I take it you define "Insanity" as "Not how I want to think of it"? I would recommend avoiding most branches of mathematics then.

"It is, as both are based on leaps between levels of language or metalanguage."

In what way is "I don't understand" based on leaps between levels of language? Self-referentiality is a necessary element of the liars paradox. Secondarily, "rhetorical usage" allows one to emphasize a point. It does not establish a point in itself. Since no other point was established where this phrase was used, it could not have been a "rhetorical usage".

"You still don't explain the difference. I don't see any unless it implies that some game sessions are better and more sophisticated than others"

This has already been explained several time before, in terms of players, in terms of character tendencies to experiment, and in terms of tactical and strategic situations, but I'm quite willing to explain again. Try it this way. A rule that functions well in 50% of game situations but causes difficulty in 50% is inferior to one that functions well in 80% and only causes a similar level of difficulty in 20% ("Most"), which is inferior to one that functions well in 95% of all games and only causes a similar level of difficulty to the 50/50 rule in 5% of all games ("almost all"). Ideally a rule should function well in 100% of all games. This is probably not attainable.
As for some game sessions being "better than others", lets see: a game session which so infuriates three of the seven players that they kill the game master and other four players, set fire to the place where it was being run, and go home and commit suicide is - I suspect - a "bad session". One which causes the players to want to come back every week until they die of old age is probably "better". Most sessions fall in between such extremes. If the average effect of a particular rule is to move the quality of the sessions towards the "kill everyone else involved" end of the spectrum, it is a bad rule - and the fact that this thread exists at all, and has attracted participants on both sides, is sufficient to establish that some groups find that it has a negative effect on their sessions. Whether or not this is acceptable depends on the percentage of groups that find it has a negative impact versus those on which it has a positive impact and on whether alternative rules which can accomplish the same goal can be found. Since all reports of positive effects have indicated that the desired positive effect can be achieved in other ways, and none yet have addressed ways to mitigate all observed negative effects, it seems likely that this is a poorly-designed rule.

"Now you're forgetting your own theories on "game physics"."

Not at all. You have made it quite apparent that you do not subscribe to such theories, and these questions are addressed to you, in relationship to your position as to the rules being merely an approximation of the underlying reality. If you had actually considered that "underlying reality" you could give sensible answers to those questions, and explain other ways in which a given ability or effect can be used or misused within the game reality. However, you seem to have opted to avoid making such an attempt.

"whatever. GM creating a world and a story and players playing it has been pretty well defined as the bases for D&D."

Really? Lets see: you have already indicated a preference for using a pre-packaged world. The "Story" is often up to the players. Some GM's let the players design large parts of the world - or simply peruse their backstories to see what kind of a world they want to play in. Others never bother with much of a "world" or "story" of any kind, being content with the good old kick-in-the-door and fight routine. Others don't like combat, and focus on intrigue - to quote the Pathfinder rules introduction; "These rules can be used to run a game of high intrigue set in the court of a dying king, or they can be used to chronicle a desperate struggle for survival on
the borderlands of an evil empire. It all depends on you and your imagination." Nice to know that most of these people aren't actually playing D&D. Will you tell them or will I have to do it?

As for having a particular world being railroading? If you insist on running in that world despite player requests for another setting, then it is indeed railroading. As already noted, it's a relatively subtle form, and one that most players are willing to accept. It's not railroading if the players ask for a particular world or system; that's their choice. If they ask to be surprised on Wednesdays (request night), well, everyone had fun with the "Magic Gophers versus Land Developers" game (and there are occasional requests for a return to it). When they requested a "low-magic semi-historical Ancient Rome setting - but with being able to play gargoyles and druids", that was what they got too.

Now, as for the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide, I have two copies: the first one was getting pretty battered and the later printings one had some extra pages with tables on them in the back, so why not? Now I see the old Potion Miscibility Table (PG 119), the section on Morale Scores and when to make die rolls (PG 67), random NPC reactions (PG 63), the percentage chances of intervention by deities (PG 111), the section on Random Dungeon Generation (PG 169), the rules which gave you more hit points when you were drunk (PG 82), the section on the Fabrication of Other Magic Items (PG 118), the random table for secondary skills (PG 12), the section on monsters as characters and why the world is "humanocentric" (PG 20-21), the skills and spellcasting abilities of Sages (PG 31), the random table for the party getting lost in the woods (PG 49), the Psionic Attack Matrixes (PG 76-77), the random insanity table (PG 83), a section on Climate and Ecology (PG 87), a section on the rational placement of monsters (PG 90-91), Random NPC Personality Traits (PG 100). Most of this seems to be concerned either with world logic or random tables. I'm afraid that I don't see a chapter labeled "The GM as a Master Storyteller". Could you provide a page number?

To quote Mr Gygax: “Know the game systems, and you will know how and when to take upon yourself the ultimate power. To become the final arbiter, rather than the interpreter of the rules, can be a difficult and demanding task, and it cannot be undertaken lightly, for your players expect to play this game, not one made up on the spot.” (1979 first edition Dungeon Masters Guide, Introduction, Page 9, second column).

And on to the next one...

"Quentyn, the rules cannot be a perfect mirror of reality, even a fantasy reality. And the DM cannot possibly be expected to run an entire universe.

Channel Energy does not distort a setting any more than previous clerical healing did. It doesn't. If you want to worry about things that break known social structures, worry about the fact that Clerics can cast Create Water all day"

Lets see... We have here an unsupported (and inverted) statement - a world is always a mirror of the rules it operates under. A game world may, of course, be operating under the vaguely-defined rules in your head rather than the ones in a book - but they are still rules.

Next up, the GM can certainly be expected to run an entire universe. If the players want to go somewhere that is insufficiently detailed, then knowing how your universe actually works and has developed lets you run it. If you can't manage, take a break until next week, develop your material, and then run it.

We've already discussed fairly extensively why Channel Energy does have a larger impact than clerical healing did - and no support is provided for the statement that it does not.

"The physics of a game world are not transparent to the people living in that world"

Who said that they were? They're entitled to whatever they can observe and deduce from those observations though. The rules of the game world aren't even necessarily transparent to the Players. They do, however, need to be transparent to the Game Master. That way he or she can maintain a consistent world in the face of player questions and character experiments. You're running a game according to the requirements of the "story"? According to your ideas of how the world "should function"? Those are still rules, and hopefully you've examined them.

"You are misusing 'railroading'. Railroading is when the adventure is 'on rails' and the players cannot deviate from it. Dangling an adventure hook in front of them doesn't constitute railroading simply because it wasn't a purely random encounter. They players should be free to turn it down. They should be able to make meaningful choices, but 'all roads lead to rome', as they say. That doesn't mean they are railroads."

Lets see... If "all roads lead to Rome", then my choice of road is not meaningful. That doesn't constitute "railroading"? What does? Even the most "railroaded" adventure provides some degree of freedom: I have yet to see a game master who won't let you announce that you're scratching an itch while you're walking down a corridor (unless, perhaps, your armor makes it impossible). Few game masters will allow you to announce that "I'm using my dimension-traveling power to leave the current dimension in favor of one with sunny beaches, walking couches which carry you around while massaging your back, and three-headed storks which bring you drinks" - unless, of course, you happen to be playing Amber (a game which does, indeed, expect the game master to run an entire multiverse, with player-described dimensions, on the fly). This is why the concept of "degrees of railroading" was discussed above: What one person will regard as unacceptable levels of game-master manipulation, another will find too little. Can you provide a test which will tell us which one is wrong?

Well lets see...

Divine Rank 0 (3.0 Version)

Advanced Augmented Bonus/HP per level (18 CP)
Celerity III/+30' Speed (12 CP)
Damage Reduction 35/+4, (Specialized: Physical Only, not vrs +4 Weapons, 75 CP)
Improved Spell Resistance/10+Level (12 CP).

Immunities:
Forced Physical Transformations (Common/Severe/Legendary; 48 CP)
Mental Manipulations (Common/Severe/Legendary, 48 CP)
Energy Drain (Common/Major/Legendary, 36 CP)
Ability Drain and Damage (Common/Major/Legendary, 36 CP)
Time (Uncommon/Major/Legendary, 24 CP)
Normal Bodily Needs (Eating, Drinking, and Sleeping) (Common/Minor/Legendary, 24 CP
Fire (Common/Major/Major, Corrupted: 20 point resistance only, 6 CP)

That's a 339 CP Template, or +10 ECL.

The 3.5 Version is similar, but replaces the DR 35/+4 with DR 10/Epic (only 18 CP) and reduces the Fire Resistance to 5 (Common/Major/Trivial, 3 CP). I'm unclear offhand as to whether they still get the boosted speed, but I'll assume that they do. That gives us 279 CP, which is only +8 ECL.

That seems reasonable enough: the immunities are nice, but defensive abilities against relatively unusual attacks aren't all that vital - and the reduced DR will no longer make such a character virtually invulnerable to attacks by creatures that can't bypass it.

I’ve translated into Eclipse point-buy, since that’s what we usually use - and it does cover ECL calculations nicely. If you should want it, it’s a free download at RPGNow:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51255

"But if you see it from the point of view of the orc and the greataxe"

What do we actually know about "Hit Points"? We know that they "tell you how much punishment you can take before dropping", that they are "based on your class and level", that they "measure how hard you are to kill", that "no matter how many hit points you lose, your character isn't hindered in any way until your hit points drop to 0 or lower", and "Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one. For some characters, hit points may represent divine favor or inner power". From various spells, such as Deathwatch and the Cure spells, it looks like hit points are both measurable and manipulable by spells that measure and manipulate positive or negative energy. Apparently creatures can be killed just as readily by damage to their feet - such as when characters are attacking a colossal creatures feet with knives - as by damage to their necks or "vital locations". Actually doing extra damage by attacking "Vital Locations" requires a special ability, such as "Sneak Attack" or "Death Blow" or a "Vorpal Weapon". "Coup de Grace" attacks represent a special attack which bypasses hit points. Hit points are also equally effective against immersion in lava as they are against blows.

This does not tell us HOW a character can turn a serious blow into a less serious one - although this seems to have something to do with level. We do know that "damage" in d20 settings does not operate like real-world injuries. Real-world injuries produce a wide variety of hindering effects. d20 "damage" does not.

So how can we envision this?

Simple option one: A blow does 20 hit points to a first-level warrior. The blade plunges deep into his chest shattering his heart, his store of positive energy is depleted, his spirit departs his body, and he is dead. An identical blow strikes an 18'th level warrior, the blade plunges deep into his chest, shatters his heart - and the warrior still has plenty of positive energy infusing his body, so he is nowhere near dead. Why should he die? His life is linked to positive energy, not to minor and unimportant functions like "blood circulation".

Simple option two: the blow strikes the 18'th level warrior, but the energy in his body absorbs the blow like the "force fields" you see in some movies. The blow leaves a mere scratch, turned "from a serious blow into a lesser one" by his "inner power" - as noted in the d20 descriptions of what hit points are.

I could go on with alternative ways to envision this - but the point is sufficient: the "fuzzy part" you see comes from attempting to import real-world physics and biomechanics into a realm where they do not apply. Hit points are defined in the system. They do not represent "difficulty to hit an opponent" (armor class) or making someone having "lost his footing" (a trip or knockdown attempt).

"That's technically not a contradiction"

We have indeed arrived at a contradiction: If arguments of the form "I don't understand (proposition A) are valid arguments that (proposition A) is false, then statements of the form "I don't understand how you [don't understand (proposition A)] are valid arguments that the preposition [I don't understand (proposition A)] is false - demonstrating the you do understand the original statement. Since we started with the assumption that this was a valid form of argument, and thus that the first statement was valid - and have now proven by the same form of argument that it must be false - we have demonstrated that our initial assumption - that this was a valid form or argument - must be false since we have derived contradictory statements from it.

To reduce to symbology if (D) defines the “I don’t understand” argument, and we have a proposition (P), and accept that (D) (P) is a valid argument implying (Not-P), than since (D) is a valid argument, (P) is false. However, this also indicates that (D)[(D)(P)] is also a valid operation, implying (D)(Not-P) and thus that (P) is true. If (D) is a valid argument, then (P) = (Not-P). Since accepting the validity of (D) leads to a contradiction, (D) is not a valid argument.

The problem lies in the fact that "I don't understand" is neither an argument nor evidence for or against the item which is not understood. It is merely an indication that the person making the statement does not understand something - and thus is a valid starting point for a question.

As for the “I am a Cretan. All Cretans are Liars” routine, this is a weak version of the classical Liars Paradox. The stronger version is simply “this sentence is not true”. See: Tarski’s Undefinability Theorem and Godels Theorem. It is not, however, related to arguments of the form “I don’t understand (P)”: such arguments are not self-referential, a key component of all versions of the liars paradox.

Now "good enough for most games" is inferior to "good enough for almost all games". Perfection is not obtainable. Improvement often is.

"Turning the idea around, if its magnitude is similar to the wand's, why not leaving"

Unfortunately, this misrepresents the original statement. This was about the idea that "It fulfills the design purpose" ("its magnitude is similar" is your own interpolation). Lets see: if a pesky squirrel keeps stealing the birdseed from my bird feeder, using a nuclear warhead on said squirrel will fulfill the "design purpose" of eliminating the squirrel and - incidently - the design purpose of the warhead. That does not make it an optimal solution.

Secondarily, this once again ignores all other dimensions of a problem to focus on a small party of adventurers. A wand is a very small expense for such a party. It is, however, both a larger one for most people in the campaign and is a limited (charged) resource. Channeling has no associated expense and is not limited over time.

As for "elegance" - lets see, if this is a burst of "raw life force", why doesn't it encourage diseases and sprout slimes all over everything? What level of spell will duplicate this effect? I'd suspect that you'd say that it regrows flesh and restores blood, so why wouldn't it restore a damaged plant? Does it work on trees, allowing instant replenishment of lumber resources? Pumpkins and fresh (living) fruits, allowing an endless food source? Why should an uncontrolled burst of energy do the subtle work of healing? Wouldn't it be more likely to encourage cancers and wild scarring?

Secondarily, What does "Elegance" have to do with it being overpowered?

"I assume the normal tendency is a decreasing level of interest and detail as action moves away from the PCs' area. Not only with PC-triggered, but also with all events."

It's a planet. The characters are free to make their own decisions - and its not at all uncommon for them to find some distant rumor intriguing, and go off to pursue it. So yes: the normal opening for a group that is not currently engaged in urgent business is "here is what you were doing last time, here are other things you were intending to get around to, a list of things you've observed going on in the area, some rumors of other things going on elsewhere, some old stories or historical tidbits you may opt to follow up on, and some items related to your character histories and contacts. You may, of course, opt to dig for other things, go elsewhere, work at home, or start off for anywhere on the planet you wish to go and do anything you wish to do". From the characters point of view there is no such thing as "plot" or "the convenience of the game master". Paying attention to either, or to whether a given character is a PC or NPC, or to whether or not every PC is going in the same direction or doing the same thing outside of the characters in-game relationships is metagaming on the players part or the game masters - and in the game master that's usually called "railroading". Having events depend on the "plot" is metagaming by the game master. "That's the only dungeon I've got ready!" is railroading. Yes, your "prostitute" example is railroading. It's more subtle than some forms - but if there's a big necromantic conspiracy going on, and the players miss it for better than a years worth of sessions, or simply go somewhere else before noticing it, so be it. There are hundreds of other things going on they could opt to get involved with - or they could opt to have a party, and spend the night interacting with each other without any “adventuring” at all. The Champions players back in college missed a secretive alien takeover attempt for better than 60 sessions, and were quite annoyed with themselves when they finally realized what had been going on in the background for the last three and a half semesters. If they'd never noticed, and no other events had interfered, the aliens might have taken over - and they might never have known what was behind all the changes.

People create stories about their lives. The characters create their own stories from the various events that they observe and participate in. The players give their characters direction and purpose. “Your storytelling” is a fairly blunt statement: you are telling a story. The players are not free to tell their own stories. The fact that you allow a limited degree of freedom within the structure of “your story” is the usual pattern, and most players are willing to accept a certain amount of railroading for the sake of the game, but it is still railroading.

"An argument that begins 'I don't see' is an indication that you have not made that point convincingly. What it takes to be convinced, however, is clearly not expressed."

No. It's a valid beginning for a question. Questions (inquiries for more information on a specified subject) are not Arguments (a set of propositions which lead to a particular conclusion). This is, of course, a purely semantic point, but semantics does help to avoid confusion.

"I much prefer to take the world that has been built (in this case Golarion) and look at whether the rules do fit into that environment. If the rule makes such a setting logically impossible."

Several problems here:

First is that the Pathfinder rules, as a successor to the Players Handbook - Dungeon Masters Guide - Monster Manual trilogy, are attempting to be back-compatible with previously published OGL material and various settings. Being compatible with any single one is not the issue.

Secondarily, although possibly more importantly, is that demonstrating that something is "logically impossible" can be done through variants on showing that two axioms in a particular system are self-contradictory, such as "A=B=C" AND "A not equal to C". Since any world design carries its own system of both stated and unstated subrules and axioms which may both modify the initial axioms and which may be expanded without limit, demonstrating such a contradiction comes down to proving that "there is no possible modifier that will resolve this problem" - and proving negative statements is not logically possible. This both (1) departs from the point of this thread - namely, "Is channel energy too powerful", and (2) goes nowhere.

"So, what effects might occur from channel energy? In a nutshell, it isn't likely to be much different in most situations than the healing that a cleric can already provide. The simple fact is that spells are nearly always 'expendable'. When the cleric reaches the end of the night if he has uncast spells, he could convert all of them into healing spells. The next morning, they all return. Why doesn't that happen?
If it does, the channel energy really has no effect (other than he might do the healing a few times each day instead of once before bed). But in most situations, hit point healing is already as available as it was before, so there is no real change in the availability. This change would be very similar to doubling the number of 1st level spells a cleric has available - it could certainly result in more healing, but not more situations where healing would be applied."

Yes - when you have good clerics or neutral clerics who have chosen to channel positive energy who have substantial numbers of spells that are not expended during a typical day - which leaves open the question of why they selected those spells rather than more useful ones. The very large increase in the overall amount of healing available in an emergency has already been addressed on this thread. "In most situations" has also already been addressed, since cumulative social effects from rarer situations have also been covered earlier. Now one could, of course, make arguments along the line of "Evil societies will value Neutral Clerics with Channel Positive Energy much more highly than good ones, thus providing a selective pressure for neutral Clerics to locate themselves in such societies" (although this might cause such societies to drift towards overall neutrality or at least exercise some self-restraint) or suggest some similar counterinfluence. I suspect that these would not be sufficient, but one could certainly attempt to make a case for it reducing the community survival advantages of Good Clerics to the point where other minor factors, randomness, and the relatively short historical time scales of most campaigns might render the effect unimportant. Unfortunately, if I have to do it, it leads to me debating myself - which is in no way entertaining.

And on to the next one... Since it has come with numbered points, I shall simply use those numbers.

(1) Yes. Since the theory is a positive statement - "This applies and is explanatory" - it is susceptible to disproof: one example that demonstratably does NOT fit into the theory suffices to eliminate it or at least to force it to be modified or restricted to a lmited set of situations. The statement that "This theory is NOT explanatory" is a negative statement, and is therefore not provable. That is why theories are disproved, rather than proven.

(2) Yes: a “20-point damage greataxe chop” always reflects the same physics: the fact that the physics involved does not match the physics of the real world, or player or game master preconceptions based on their experience with real-world physics, does not matter. The physics of the game world recognize the difference between 1'st and 18'th level warriors: otherwise there would be no differences in play. The campaign "physics" includes all its laws of nature, whether those are matter-based, energy-based, structure-of-space based, "spirit"-based, "mind"-based, or whatever. As for it "not being the operating principle between most rules design, adventure design, and campaign playing", I'd have to disagree. If the rules say "No one can actually be injured" yet game play in an adventure revolves around people with knives trying to intimidate you with threats of personal injury, that adventure won’t work for most players or game masters (such situations can be found in “Teenagers from Outer Space”, where no one can actually be more than briefly stunned - and so hall monitors equipped with heavy military weapons are cheerfully ignored). The more subtle the disconnection between the game rules and the setting and adventures the larger the number of people for which a given setting or adventure works.

(3) Well, the context was logical discussion: after all, I could always state that "I don't see how you can not understand how "I don't see how" arguments are invalid. Therefore your response must simply be an attempt to confuse the issue!" But wait! We've just arrived at a contradiction! Ergo our initial hypothesis (that such arguments are valid) must be invalid. More seriously, as noted above, statements of this form are invalid as Arguments. They are often perfectly valid questions. Secondarily, that at least some of the people playtesting do not have a problem has already been noted earlier in the thread as an argument for "good enough for most gamers and the purposes of the publishers" or even for (to be more relevant to the topic) "good enough for most games".
The topic of the thread was "Is channel energy overpowered?"
Responses have included:
(A) No. We have not had a problem in playtesting in whatever range of situations we have experimented with.
(B) Yes. We have had a problem in playtesting, whether due to larger-scale effects on the game world, unusual situations or party sizes, player discontent with inter-class balance or feeling that the cleric is overly effective, difficulty in adapting adventures to deal with the presence or absence of clerics in various numbers, or simply finding that your party of four characters encountering the four high-charisma (16+) evil clerics with Selective Channeling and some channeling-enhancing items or feats led to a total party kill - especially if they got a surprise round. (Such a situation coupled will lead to every member of your party taking 2d6/Level damage, plus perhaps 4d6 extra for the heightening effects, feats, and items, before they get to do anything. With good NPC initiative checks it may result in twice that. How many characters will that leave standing? For that matter, has anybody experimented with a player-character party of such Clerics? Should handily deal with a great many close-up dungeon encounters - and yes, I’ve seen lots of fighter-only, cleric-only, wizard-only, and thief-only parties. They just pick their adventures more carefully).
(C) The party takes too much damage, and this helps. As previously demonstrated, a problem with (1) many possible solutions, (2) is mostly due to problems other than a lack of healing, and (3) is actually supporting the position that Channel Energy is overpowered - if only because an ability which allows one character to fix a party-wide problem which occurs in most adventures is probably a bit much. What if the Ranger had an ability to let the party skip an encounter (Wis Mod + 3) times per day yet still get the rewards of victory? The consequences of a fight in d20 are already modest, why reduce them?
(D) It “fulfills the design purpose” or “lets me save my spells”. Yes it does. So would a wand, giving everyone fast healing 10, or many other things. Again, not an answer to whether or not this is overpowered, although like (3) it does tend to support that position a bit since, if it isn’t overpowered and doesn’t make any difference, why object to replacing it with that wand?

(4) Yes it is. However, the game master must still be able to answer questions. The notion that "rules are not rules if they're in my head instead of on paper" is popular, but facetious.

(5) Arguments of the form "I don't get it" have already been addressed above. Furthermore, this has already been addressed under the note that this will work if the players are not interested in the logical background and development of the campaign world. If they are, the game master needs to know how things work so he can determine the results of their experiments. The simplest sort of example? In playing Exalted, a character's simple question ("Can I convert Ambrosia back into usable Essence Motes? I can try in these ways...") got a "Yes" on one of the proposed methods - a result which, over the next few sessions, totally broke the game system; in combination with his other powers it gave that character effectively unlimited time to do research, make magical devices, and develop his abilities. Watching the train wreck was sort of amusing, but I had been hoping to actually get to play something for a bit.

Secondarily, "the game master can get around it" is true of anything - but the more you use that approach, the less the world makes sense and the less involved the players will become. Why should they care about an NPC or take action on his or her behalf? If it's "important" that he or she survive, he or she will. If it's "important" that he or she doesn't, he or she won't. The only decisions of theirs that are allowed to have an "impact" are the ones that don't matter to the plot or are at predetermined plot decision points - as in "if the PC's are supposed to protect it". Keeping events following the "plot" through game master fiat is usually known as "railroading" - treating the players as an audience, rather than as co-authors. Things haven't changed a bit. Railroading still bores quite a few people.

As for quoting, I've had several posts which did not save properly and had to be reconstructed - so I use a word processor. Ergo, normal quotes, not HTML coded ones. A second window might help if this is a problem.

"A hamlet has a 33.33% chance not to have a single cleric. It has a 66.66% chance"

Already corrected in a later post. Also irrelevant to the discussion on disease, which is primarily concerned with available information and transmission, not with cures.

"I'm lost. Are you saying that traditional hospitals figure into games that have healing magic frequently? While certainly there may be people who provide some healing services without magic, magic is quick and easy, so is preferred for anyone with wealth. Now, if we use the DMG, a 1st level cleric would get 10gp for casting a CLW, but a good faith would likely provide the healing for a dying woman in childbirth for free if she could not pay."

Agreed. As already noted, cure disease is irrelevant to this entire discussion. This segment of the discussion has come down to social effects - which your own quote demonstrates as a problem. Why, in a world where radius effect healing does not even cost a spell slot you might want to devote to something else and will simply go to waste unless used on healing - since 99% of NPC village Clerics cannot be encountering Undead every day if those villages are to survive - should there be a 10 GP charge? Once again the level and numbers really aren't relevant: only the fact that the available healing is a very large amount in comparison to normal demands and will often suffice in emergencies. It is subject to supply-and-demand factors and - even if the effect at any given time is very small - over long periods of time the effect will be very large. It also must be figured into town design, how common various skills are, and a host of other effects.

"Things like arrow slits allow line of effect, even if the cleric does not have line of sight. That could be bad if the town is assaulted by living creatures."

Despite the common use of two-dimensional maps, walls and other fortifications exist in three dimensions. It is easy for people behind a wall to have line-of-sight to people manning the wall without themselves being in line-of-sight to persons on the ground beyond the wall. A solid roof will handle most attacks from beyond the wall as well, since most are burst-effects and many have a lesser radius than channeling.

"And again, since we know that the village with 190 commoners DOES survive in the wilderness"

An unsupported assumption: it presumes the result you are attempting to derive. Particular settings may have such villages, it is in no way guaranteed.

"But I don't see good churches 'dominating the world' as a result of their ability to channel positive energy"

If you agree that there is a net survival advantage of any kind for one social strategy over another, then cumulative selection will do the rest. Thumbs and higher intelligence only provide a small advantage in most situations, but the end result does seem to be reshaping the real world. Why should other small advantages not have equally significant results?

Incidently, arguments of the form “I don’t see...” are only useful as a part of a request for additional information or clarification (which may sometimes reveal that no such information is available, and the logic chain prompting the question is faulty). As a counter-argument they are vulnerable to mirroring: If “I don’t see how that works, therefore it doesn’t” is a valid argument, so is a statement of general the form “I don’t see how you can fail to see how that works, so you must actually see and your original statement is necessarily false”.

As for the proportions of races - and whether or not some of them should be going extinct - that also doesn’t belong in this thread although (if you wish to run a well-developed world) that is also a factor that must be considered. Fortunately for most settings, the “evil” races tend to be very poorly organized, a massive disadvantage in overall survival. “Quality versus Quantity” reproductive strategies can be observed in a wide variety of real species for comparison.

As you wish: one distinctive spell list with a focus on the immediate for sorcerers. I’m afraid that you’re unlikely to get such a thing into Pathfinder, it’s both a major back-compatibility problem and a lot of work - so would a free OGL third-party download do?

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=28926&it=1

"What I don't see is a total correspondence between *game* rules and *world* rules"

Nor do I - but the far more complicated issues of "how things actually work" falls under house rules unless the rulebooks in use address the underlying physics of the game world. There are a few games which do, but they're rare. Barring an official book devoted to the physics of the game world, we're stuck with what's in the rulebooks (the SRD and current Pathfinder release) as a basis for discussion.

By the way, hit points are a poor example of things which are not measurable - or at least not in discrete steps - in the game world. The existence of the Deathwatch spell establishes the ability of a level one spell to classify organisms by discrete levels of hit points as an area effect. Ergo hit points/vital energy/whatever you want to call it are something which is precisely measurable (although possibly not as a true step function) in the game world - if anyone wants to take the trouble. This bears no resemblence to the complexity of real-world organisms and traumas thereto, but we already knew that d20 biology (and what passes for "genetics") bears little resemblence to reality.

"But a History check is based on available materials for research."

Once again, house rules. No such requirement is listed - and the source of a characters knowledge is not defined. If a character wants to describe it as "tapping into the cosmic all beyond the gods", they're entitled to do so since character descriptions are up to the player. In fact, I use house rules depending on how the player has described the source of his or her information to tell me how much they get and about what, so most of the histories I hand out do include a lot of areas where little is known or there is misinformation (and, yes there have been characters who went time travelling to find things out). Regardless, those are still my house rules and don't belong here.

In the real world, there are no general skill ranks: instead there are things you know, things you believe you know but are in error about, things you don't know but are aware of not knowing, and things you are not aware exist to know, as well as the subcategories of damaged information, misfiled information, and information you must be prompted to recall. This could all be classified and tested given time and effort. Our rules can, in fact, be pinpointed with enormous accuracy: it is simply that the number of interacting factors is very large (for example, there are approximately 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a 70 KG human body: http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/Ch03_1.html )

"It is pretty different; the "uses per day" of an ability are, again, an abstraction. A "real system" would take into account"

Once again, a large number of house-rules assumptions: Why would a "real" system keep track of a Clerics piety and deeds? Maybe the god finds clerics annoying but can't prevent them from drawing on its power if they're properly mentally attuned (the alignment requirement). Maybe it doesn't even realize they exist or doesn't care. Maybe the deity is a creation of the Clerics and simply exists to channel power to them. Maybe the deity does not exist and they're simply drawing on some energy source. Maybe the Deity is truly infinite, and the only limit on Clerics is how much power they can channel from it. All of that either belongs in individual campaign settings or house rules.

And yes, I own and have played Aftermath. The combat flowchart put off most of the other players though.

"Either one has to take that "adventurer classes" represent exceptional individuals or, in other words, that cultural bias and tradition have a strong hold on the gameworld (and that cannot be covered by rules, just by role-playing"

Yes: the ones who are determined and insist on learning and studying. That's not a factor covered in the game rules, but it fits into the same family of distribution curves as other characteristics of biological organisms. Player characters are simply assumed to be on the high end. That's a fairly basic limitation of role playing games, since the player suffers none of the pain of spending a lot of time training: they just get to apply the rewards to their characters.

"To leave it short, survival advantage based on dietary taboos, for instance, does not explain how they can endure for so long after the physical conditions have changed."

Fairly simple: if a characteristic is no longer important to survival, but has no real negative impact - or one balanced by some remaining positive impacts - it will not be selected against. Its distribution in a population will change only with the development of variations and random fluctuations. In the case of cultural traits, all surviving cultures are either (1) extremely isolated, or (2) have a built-in tendency to reject changes and other cultures. Those which don't soon disappear when exposed to other groups. Cultural groups tend to function as support systems, and are thus beneficial to their members when other cultural groups are competing with them. Those which lack identifying traits and characteristics which tend to isolate those who practice them from those who do not tend to be absorbed. Of course, those that persist in rejecting advantageous features from other cultures will eventually be overwhelmed, but that process is often slower. In practice there are a very large number of factors, random events, and interacting feedback loops, but that merely complicates analysis and makes it difficult to demonstrate the accuracy of a particular derivation: it does not render the problem insolvable in principle.

"Rules don't cover that, but their impact changes dramatically when those factors are taken into account."

Yes. This discussion is, however, about the rules and their effects. Since the rules can be used in a wide variety of settings, setting-dependent arguments are not productive.

"I find it easier to envisage a campaign by designing the status quo of traditional practices which the larger segment of population lives by. Then one can think and cover patterns of innovation and revolution. Unless your campaign happens to procure those "interesting times", the time span for radical cultural change tends to go beyond the length of most rpg campaigns (unless you're running a multi-generational saga or are heavy into time-travelling)."

Personally, I find it easier to start with the physics, then the physical setting and its development, then the biological development, then the development of civilizations. The campaign scale does vary. I generally plan for a minimum of 100-150 sessions, but how much campaign time that covers is up to the players, as is when the game ends. Game world time varies with the players: the longest one covered 14,000 years episodically with stops out to +6.5 billion (by which time the planet was dying and abandoned) and back to -600 million (where Artos got stuck in the past on an alien world, accidently merged himself with the planetary biosphere in his experiments as to ways to get back, and settled down to evolving sentient creatures and building a civilization as the local demiurge so there would be someone to meet his friends when they finally arrived).

"you seem to see a game rule as a reflection of world logics, physics, whatever:"

Yes: A functioning world has to be based on some kind of underlying "physics" - whether those are equations or rules in a book, in your notes, or unexamined assumptions in your head - and characters are quite free to investigate that physics, thanks to being able to spend skill points on whatever skills they want to, to spells like Commune and Contact Other Plane, and various other spells and abilities, both existing and researched.

If a character requests an outline of the history of the world and puts the resources into getting a sufficient skill check one way or another, he gets one. The better the check, the more detailed the history.
If a character develops sufficient skill in Knowledge/Arcana, or "Magical Theory", or whatever, and wants to know if a given effect is practical - such as transferring some or all of the powers of a demon into another creature - he may have to wait a few days while I examine the problem, but he's entitled to an answer too, and to information on what can and can't be done along those lines, and why or why not.
If they use a Wish to find out how some mighty item from the past was made, they're entitled to an answer - or, if they find out that there's some sort of block in place, they're entitled to start examining it and looking for ways around it or to get the information some other way if they really want to know. They may or may not succeed.
One player who's character was inclined to magical research and always attempted to investigate the details of any new system of magic or variation thereof eventually (about 5 years in, which would make it session 250 or so) found that he wasn't encountering any more major variations and fairly well understood what was going on in most situations. Given that the character was far smarter than the player, and actually had invested heavily in theory skills, he settled down to writing an Encyclopedia of Magic - a work that brought him considerable fame. The player never tried to lay a character without a substantial Magic Theory skill afterwards; he found it too difficult to pretend that he didn't understand what was going on when such details came up.
Others have investigated the subcellular biology of dragons, the evolutionary history of various species, instituted a long-term project of flood control by creating a race of sentient giant beavers, attempted to improve the treatment of children and reduce wars by global manipulation of fertility rates (a project which had so many unintended consequences over the next few centuries that the players spent a good deal of time finding a way to undo the tampering), attempted to develop improved systems of semi-automated justice, ran planetary colonization projects (and found that the ensuing drain on magical healing and construction supplies created problems for other themselves elsewhere), untangled the side effects of a forced-reincarnation effect laid over a region thousands of years before, and many, many, other projects.

I agreed to run the game, and part of that is dealing with the consequences of player actions. If they want to investigate something esoteric, than so be it. If none of your players want to do that, than your life is easier.

The game rules may well represent some deeper underlying physics. In fact, I usually assume that they do and analyze what can be deduced about those laws - but if you don't want to do that analysis, and determine where there are exceptions, variations, and ways for characters to exploit those underlying laws to get around the restrictions and requirements of the rules, than we're stuck with the rules as laws of nature. More importantly, since such an analysis is entirely a set of house rules, on a general discussion board we're pretty much stuck with the rules-as-laws-of-nature position. After all, your "underlying reality" may not be the same as the next game masters - which is why arguments based on it really don't persuade anyone. You may not have two clerics saying "we should train harder so we can Channel Energy a couple times a day more for the next season of goblin raids" - but there's no reason why they shouldn't be saying "We must dedicate ourselves more to our faith, that we may call upon the holy light more often in aid of our fellows when the forces of darkness attack!". Is that really different? After all, the characters don’t usually speak English either, so some translation is pretty much assumed.

"One extreme example would be multiclassing: if all the world were "observing the rules", most minor NPCs in a community would multiclass."

As last I checked, everybody in the real world "observes the rules" known as "laws of nature" - and those rules allow any reasonably close to average individual who wants to do it to get themselves into shape, govern their diet to maintain their health, learn the basics of physics, biology, history, reading x-rays, and a dozen other disciplines, do house wiring and plumbing, fix cars, learn some herbology, practice a martial art or two, write books, raise children, and study hundreds of other disciplines. Why don't they all do all of that? It's because they're not interested enough to do all that extra work when they could be relaxing. Neither are most NPC’s. Why would you need any additional explanation?

“Even in belief systems which have that attitude (propitiate the best-suited power for your needs), there also elements of totally unnecessary ritual activity, absurd taboos, etc.”

How do you know? I suspect that, in reality, many of those fall under “psychological necessity” - but have you looked at the statistics for church-shopping in the United States? The U.S. is one of the most religious industrialized nations in the world - but the number of people shopping around for a faith that suits them better is extremely high. Quite a lot of classical dietary taboos made excellent sense in the eras before refrigeration. There have been examinations of taboo systems and their economic and health results - and in many cases those cultures that observed such taboo systems had a long-term survival advantage over those that did not. Try googling feng shui and "engineering practices" or “pig hate and pig love”.

"I think that your endeavor would be better-served if you started by assessing how those powers do not exist in an ideological vacuum."

Actually they do exist in such a vacuum: this discussion is about game rules, independent of any particular setting. Currently those rules consist of (1) the SRD and (2) the current Pathfinder release. Neither is big on ideology.

"think of military tacticians who are deeply-rooted in conservative maneuvers, even when it's clear that a more innovative breakthrough could be favorable"

Who eventually give way to new leaders with new attitudes. The standard existence of many ancient artifacts strongly implies a rather old world. Plenty of time for cultural evolution - although this may be masked in particular settings by changing environmental conditions forcing new adaptions.

And onwards...

“But who in the village is suffering from hit point damage to begin with?”

Lets see: the injury rate for anyone who works with farm animals is fairly high; consult a vet and check their insurance rates. Minor injuries from kitchen work, butchering, woodchopping, and many other tasks are also all too common now, were far more common before modern conveniences, and are likely to become more common when they're easily fixed (people do tend to push the limits). Classically, even a small injury could be fatal due to infection. Of course, this will also have the effect of raising productivity slightly. Do you want a classical quotation on the subject? This is probably the most widely-familiar one in the western world: Ecclesiastes 10:

"He who digs a pit may fall into it, and he who breaks through a wall may be bitten by a serpent.
He who moves stones may be hurt by them, and he who chops wood is in danger from it. If the iron becomes dull, though at first he made easy progress, he must increase his efforts; but the craftsman has the advantage of his skill."

People injuring themselves in their daily lives has evidently always been a problem.

"The extra hit point healing doesn't increase the amount of disease healing potential, or other effects that can cause a massive change in social organization."

Actually it is an effect which can cause massive changes: this is already covered in prior posts. If you think it can't or won’t cause a massive social change, why not? What is the chain of logic that supports that statement?

"Most villages and towns in D&D don't make sense due to the relative power of a monster compared to all of the people in that town."

Quite correct. That makes it the job of the game master or whoever's writing a setting to figure out how and why it makes sense, and implement any necessary changes in the rules if they want those villages and towns there or to remove them if they don’t make sense under the rules.

"there would be a problem with the game world making sense. This is frequently the case."

Which means that it is frequently done poorly. So are car repairs. If the car repairs are poorly done, or a setting is poorly developed, the mechanic, or writer, has done poor work. The fact that this is common does not justify it.

“Will the extra healing from channel energy make the town any more likely to survive? Not really. It makes the goblins less of a threat because they do small amounts of damage per hit. Since the other threats might not care as much about the presence of humans, maybe this does help the survival of this hamlet make sense. As a small defensive location, a cleric could help the defenders just a little more that would otherwise be possible.”

Already discussed. Survival advantages, however small, provide a compound interest-effect across generations.

“And take the idea of a traditional fantasy castle. Again, not very effective in a world of magic. Besides flying opponents, area of effect spells usually make squeezing into a small area a bad idea. But if the castle has a few cleric defenders, the fact that the defenders are close is at least justified by the cleric's ability to provide some bolstering.”

So if you want “traditional fantasy castles” you need to explain where they come from. This may involve making them more effective as defenses (Rolemaster has some spell lists for this and the Mystic Artist sequence from Eclipse: The Codex Persona works) easier and cheaper to construct (Various magic items, creatures, and spells come to mind - but they'd need to be either cooperative or relatively cheap themselves), ruling that they arise spontaneously due to the activities of crazed gods or earth elementals (now that sounds like fun actually; where did that ancient haunted ruin just outside of town come from? It just popped up last week, the local adventurers will clean it out shortly...), or that they serve other purposes more efficiently (maybe they channel magical power, or are actually components in a giant glyph which wards off monsters - thereby explaining how hamlets can exist in the local area).

"The power is VERY powerful if you create scenarios where all the folks who need healing happen to be within 30' of the caster. 30' is a very, very small distance to be "within" when it comes to this sort of thing. True, they could get all the wounded together for one big Burst but then you aren't really saving anything but time and charges from a wand. You haven't substantially changed anything except for freeing a few rounds of action- in mass combat- and the cost of the wand. At least until the Channeling runs out. Which it will, and fairly quickly too. The number of uses is great for an adventuring party but in the context of a large scale battle it'll be gone very very quickly- just as would a cleric's healing magic of any other type. Clerics are not setup for mass-battle field medics. No one is. Mass-battle field medics are largely identical to our own real world field medics. Bandaids and Heal checks rather than spell casters. Even in a village of 200 with a cleric, he's more likely to be using heal checks than magic to cure wide spread problems because the magic isn't enough."

Again, already covered under cumulative survival advantages. Most “scenarios” are created by the people involved. For normal people, wands cost a great deal and run out. Lets try this: what is the cost-benefit relationship for expensive versus free? Why shouldn't the wounded be carried back to an aid station behind the lines for treatment? Care to start figuring out how many village defenders will be saved across - say - a mere hundred years of goblin raids? Don't forget to factor in the advantages of a longer average survival time for the defenders, resulting in more healty and experienced people on the wall (and thus fewer injuries next time), more healthy adult farmers to provide food and care for children, more locals surviving lower levels to reach higher ones, and so on.

"In terms of medieval combat, this is actually a good thing. In D&D previously, massed Phalanxes are dumb. Like, really, really dumb. It is one of the most effective anti-infantry and anti-cavalry formations ever. But in a world were Fireball is available to 5th level wizards (sure, there might not be many of those, but it only takes one to ruin an army's day), clumping up on the battlefield is foolish. The proximity of Channel gives a reason for troops to gather around each other."

Yes indeed - although if you really want it to work that way, you might want to institute a rule stating that characters linger for a round, or get a fortitude check to do so, and can be revived during that period, unless they're driven below some large negative threshold. Otherwise the clerics may find that most of the people they wanted to help were killed instantly rather than being healable.

For something I forgot to address earlier, there was at least one earlier statement about “design purpose”. Unfortunately, “fulfilling its design purpose” - or failing to so - is not a defense of a rule. Most games have “ease of play” as part of their “design purpose”. Inserting a rule that “if the characters embark on a long and difficult quest, flip a coin. On heads they succeed. On tails they fail.” certainly fulfills its design purpose of “ease of play”. It’s still not a good rule.

Ah, nostalgia... One version or another of Armor as Damage Reduction or Armor as Extra Hits has been around for a very long time.

Rifts uses armor as extra hits. Kind of clunky, since it represents enormous amounts of them in Rifts, but there are other systems that use that method without too much problem. AD&D used to for some magic items, like some rings from the Forgotten Realms (I seem to recall they were actually called Rings of Armor, but I’m not going to go downstairs to check) which added a given number of HP to you when they were activated. The first edition rules for Full Plate for Cavaliers also provided some bonus HP as I remember (again, I’m not going downstairs to check).

Runequest III (for example) uses Armor as Damage Reduction and it works quite well - but their armor doesn’t come in too many varieties, is locational, and the underlying character doesn’t have many hits. Runequest III had very fragile characters - but that’s what they were shooting for, and the best armor available didn’t absorb that much damage.

Hero (sort of) uses Armor as Damage Reduction, and has many nigh-undamageable characters - but that’s no problem in a superhero setting. They split up damage between hit points (body) and stun anyway.

Other systems used separate absorption and deflection ratings for cut, thrust, and blunt impact as well as resistance and deflection ratings for various types of energy. I can’t recall one offhand that also used an ablative effect as well, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Too much bookkeeping for most people.

World of Synnibar (yes, I know, Boo, Hiss, but it’s the only one I know of offhand that uses the system) has armor that divides the damage you take by some factor. Potentially workable, too complicated in execution for anything but a computer-run game unless - perhaps - you either use a very easy fraction or allow the armor to protect against energy too, and thus can simply adjust the wearer’s hit points.

Given that d20 has exotic materials, strange technologies, weird magic, and a hundred campaign-specific oddities running about, why restrict yourself? This doesn’t require any modifications to the core rules, it simply requires a few additions to the equipment list:

Keep the standard armor available and working as-is.
If someone wants to get armor forged by the Blind Smiths of Or’kall that works according to the armor rules from Unearthed Arcana or whatever source you have handy, let them give it a try. If it doesn’t work, well, you should be able to come up with some way to make him get new armor - and the Blind Smiths just aren’t available right now. Something pretty similar can be done for any other option that fails to work.
If someone else wants to wear enchanted armor that provides a pool of extra hits (maybe half only to keep him alive), that either heals with him or must be repaired by craftsmen, but which doesn’t raise his AC much, go ahead and let him try some.
If someone wants to wear armor that reduces incoming damage by some easy percentage - or just multiplies his hit points by the inverse of that percentage - so, its some sort of exotic force field device.
If someone wants to wear armor with some weird combination of such effects, look at it, let him try it, and see how it works.
If you want to shake up your players with the exotic armor worn by the six-armed invaders from beyond and their four-handed repeating crossbows, so be it: it’s just another weird monster power.

Probably because disarming an opponent - presumably removing his or her best weapon - was considered an investment in the next few rounds.

As for grapple, its likely because most characters lack effective natural weapons, meaning that grapple is mostly a restraining tactic.

Similarly, most of those options were considered powerful enough as they were, since you could keep trying them indefinitely - while Wizard spells, and an awful lot of the "cool moves" in fourth edition are limited use.

Still, if that's what you want to do - take Reflex Training/Gets an immediate free attack when the character succeeds on a special combat move that does not otherwise allow one. That gets you what you want for the price of one Feat, and well worth if for someone who wants to use a lot of special combat maneuvers - and the Feat requirement explains why everyone isn't doing it.

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(1) This goes by the provided game statistics for communities for generating actual numbers of clerics. As someone noted below, I did forget the community size modifier: This will reduce, but not eliminate, the problem. As for "choosing Feats" and such: all characters, both PC and NPC, use the same rules. If a PC can develop any suitable feat, so can an NPC. If something actually is an innate knack, it should be present - if possibly unpracticed - at level one.

(2) See above. The rules do specify the number of characters with the Cleric class in a given community. There may well be additional NPC's who consider themselves clerics however.

(3) Yes. Their average wealth is greater, because they are presumed to be luckier. Secondarily, they are presumed to train more intensively than most other people, thus gaining levels in PC rather than NPC classes. There is no other difference in the game world. "Narrative" considerations are purely metagaming.

(4) Most plagues start with a strictly limited number of cases - and, in a world with spells such as "commune" available, as well as information from dimensional travelers, neither the causes nor transmission methods of diseases are likely to be a mystery. Widely-transmitted zoonotic diseases, such as the classical bubonic plague, are somewhat more difficult to control (presuming that classical remedies, such as burning particular herbs, and not in fact effective in a d20 universe - a question that the rules do not really address), but can - to a considerable extent - be limited via basic sanitation. The problems of transmission from isolated sources are more difficult in d20 - very rapid travel methods, and even visitors from alien yet biologically-compatible worlds, are not uncommon - but are unlikely to be as critical. The same mechanisms which favor the occasional introduction of exotic diseases also favor the development of local resistances. The classical plague is still endemic all over the world, but cases are uncommon: plagues are most virulent during the initial exposure of a population which has never been exposed to the organism in question before. Rapid d20 travel methods argue against widespread plagues from such sources.
Few campaigns make a point of the huddled masses of filthy humanity anyway. It’s no fun and clashes with modern sensibilities. Similarly, plagues may be purely magical in origin - the creations of evil creatures and spellcasters - but in this case I’d expect equal and opposite countereffects to be deployed. If such effects were not available but plagues were of supernatural origin the powers of darkness should have toppled civilization already.
Regardless, both basic information and spells such as Mage Hand and Message have relevant applications even if no one has bothered to research appropriate spells other than "cure disease" (Immunization? Enhance Resistance? Mitigate Disease? Ward versus Disease? Purify Area? Exterminate Insects?). Basic immunization methods for many diseases are well within the technology level of many d20 campaigns, and - once again - Commune, Contact other Plane, and similar spells make such research relatively easy. Societies that encourage such research and precautions will do better than those that do not; over time they will come to dominate.

(5) Given healing channeling, why not? It costs nothing and it pays off in goodwill and belief - the chief currencies of any religion. This is importing a previous-edition concern (expensive healing) into a revised system which has specifically devalued basic healing.

(6) By "Background" I mean "Anything you don't play out". Nothing important to a character should ever be "Background" by that definition. As far as the characters are concerned, they have lives. There's no such thing in the game world as "Plot".

(7) Our only difference here (I find situations such as you describe annoying and jarring as well) is that we disagree as to whether it’s "Metagaming". Role-playing is playing a character who lives in a fantasy world under the laws of nature / game rules that govern that world - and the default worlds don't provide much of a "relationship with a belief system". Looking at quite a few historical religions, as well as modern pantheistic faiths, there's more of an attitude of grocery shopping about it. Going on a sea voyage? Make an offering to the appropriate gods in exchange for good luck. If you have a problem with the implications of the rules and the characters acting logically to take advantage of what they know about how their world works that's a Metagame issue - on your end. Your concerns are not a part of the game world. You may want to change the rules to avoid rewarding such behavior, but the bahavior in itself just doesn't fit into the usual definitions of metagaming: it's not based on real-world considerations.
I’ve got to agree, its still a pain. Ergo, the rule giving rise to it is a pain.

And onwards...

"an evil army can get mercenary clerics of neutral deities who choose to channel positive energy"

and so can the good side. Why would this equal-opportunity effect correct the original imbalance?

"Your concerns seem to be connected to situations in which defenders can create a "contained position"".

Not really. My personal concern - since I've pretty much invariably been stuck running things for the past few decades - is with world logic and social structures. Large reserves of near instant, essentially "free", instant magical healing has a massive impact on the long-term survivability of various social organizations, on military tactics, and many other situations. If you want a setting that will stand up for years of use, it has to make sense, developments have to flow logically from past actions, and the effects of the various powers available have to be accounted for.

As for "actual playtesting": yes, we've done it, as noted above. As stated earlier, the problem is not so much with the effects on a small party of adventurers. It's the effects on the world they're in that are a concern. Playtesting with the characters attempting to guide settlement and economic development of the domains they're carving out of the wilderness involved them directly when chasing away or dealing with particular menaces. At other times, it involved them sketching the designs for cities, organizing production, and similar mass effects - all important to their characters, played out, and not involving their characters combat abilities in any fashion. Several times those activities were massively impacted by the existence of healing channeling - or its lack for the evil-aligned groups. That was easy enough to try out: we simply tried inserting the Pathfinder tweaks into the ongoing game and did some comparisons. Most of the modifications produced few problems. This one did.

Like it or not, the problem has been observed in playtesting, both on the social level, and on the party level.
Stating that “this is unimportant, since its not going to come up in “typical” (whatever that means) games” is an answer of sorts. It may well be sufficient for the writers, at least in terms of not having a noticeable impact on sales.
Stating that “I don’t care about social effects and the impact of this effect on the long-term development of civilization” is also an answer, and will work if the players don’t question the background much, get into researching the world and its cultures, or get too involved in domain-building. I’m not usually that lucky, but then I tend to run the world and leave the activities of the characters up to them.
Stating that “It doesn’t matter on the party level because most parties don’t spend enough time on planning and research to take full advantage of their capabilities” may be true. It’s not an answer for those groups that do, but that minority may well be small enough to be ignored.
Answering that “the problem does not exist” or that “that’s not real playtesting” is pretty much like stating that “the sun was not in the sky yesterday”. I was present, and it was.

The problem with the 4'th edition rules is that the "fixed number of successes" rule makes for some major absurdities: You need to cross a river. The players decide that they need a bridge. You decide that this is a skill challenge calling for four successes before six failures or whatever.

So... The first player notes that you'll need wood: he goes out to stat cutting and shaping timbers: he gets a successful check - lets say he uses "survival" and a tougher roll than "profession: lumberjack" would require, but he still succeeds. The next guy notes that pulleys and hoists will be in order, and rolls "Use Rope" (for old-style skills) or whatever seems appropriate. He succeeds. The Wizard with a few points in Knowledge/Architecture rolls to design a stable bridge and boosts hit intelligence to make sure he succeeds. The Bard uses Perform/Oratory to persuade some local villagers to supply some nails, on the grounds that the bridge will be a net benefit.

Wait: Now you've got four successes, and have won the skill challenge, without actually building the bridge or crossing the river. We could say that "you've prepared so well that the actual building is automatic" - but what if a flash flood was on the way or Carpentry is actually by far the weakest skill in the group?

That hard-and-fast "number of successes/failures" mechanic really doesn't make a lot of sense. Now, "everybody can try various ways of making a contribution", and "not all contributions are going to be equal", and "we're making steps towards a goal, but not all routes are equal" system is more complicated - enough so that a comprehensive rules system rather than guidelines may be impractical - but life is like that.

Well, you can pick up Eclipse: The Codex Persona for free at RPGNow ( http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=51255 ) - and it deconstructs everything into a point-buy system. Covers 3.0, 3.5, Modern, Future, Superheroes, Divine Ascension, a bunch of new magic systems, and a pile of other stuff. If you want a really unique chracter that should do it.

I think that - given Pathfinders boosts to the core classes - upgrading to Pathfinder standards would require an extra two or three points per level though.

(This will address two sets of concerns in one post: this makes rather lengthy, so my apologies for that).

"Charisma is usually considered a dump stat"

Really? Considering that characters spend 99% of their time out of combat, this is only true if you spend almost all your game time on "dungeon crawls" of one kind or another. That’s not uncommon - but its still only valid in a limited set of games and settings.

"The amount of healing is very limited"

The math here was addressed earlier - as well as the note about conditions under which it will not make a tactical difference. From your description, your tests so far all fall under those conditions. "When used in practice" - did you consider what it does to town design? To the spread of religions?

Lets consider that for a moment. As already noted, an average Hamlet - where 90% or more of the population is likely to live thanks to the limitations of medieval-style farming - will have 200 people and 8 Clerics - 4.5 of first level, two of second level, one of third level, and a 50% chance of one of level 4 to 6 hanging about. Player characters get to assign attributes because its assumed that they gravitated into professions which took advantage of their strengths, just like everybody else. NPC’s just get what they get - which means that the general population has no “dump stat” and that those Clerics are likely to be a little above average in the relevant attributes - Wisdom (for their spells) and Charisma - for virtually everything else a real Cleric does - preaching, educating the young, and representing his or her deity, not to mention turning. Call it a “12" just to ease calculations; it would be higher in such a selected sample of the population, but 12 is plenty to make the point: even without any “extra turning” (and what other single feat will be quite so spectacularly useful in administering to a farming village? Skill Focus/Oratory?) That gives us 32 healing channelings per day.

So much for hospitals. Studying healing is a job for esoteric specialists who treat the (rare) diseases (most epidemics are readily stoppable in the initial stages given cure disease) and poisons. Emergencies are hardly a problem; the casualties will be back on their feet in minutes. There was already enough healing around to handle a lot of little stuff - death in childbirth due to blood loss, deaths to infected wounds, deaths due to any kind of relatively slow injury, all out the window - but now we can forget about most forms of daily caution: the woodcutters won’t worry about hitting themselves with their axe, burns are negligible, and so on.

Now, if the place has a wall - and in d20 worlds, it should have at least a wooden palisade or a ditch and pile of earth just like many neolithic villages which had less to worry about - there will be Cleric stations just below it and to the back, where opponents can’t see them and the line-of-sight of their burst to opponents will be blocked.

Now, admittedly, healing channeling can’t help you if you’ve been killed - but the NPC’s get those Pathfinder bonus first-level hit points too and don’t die until negatives, just like the PC’s. It’s not as easy to take out a bunch of peasants who have throwing weapons and cover any longer.

But wait! Can’t the clerics in that attacking horde of Orcs just make up for the difference?

Well no, they can’t. They’re evil. They have negative channeling, and using their ability in battle either means using a horde of undead - almost impossible to control once you get past the “small skirmish with a few PC’s stage” since the number which can be controlled at once is so limited - or getting out in front of all the troops to attack: it won’t reach the opposing good clerics in the back of the battle line and makes them obvious targets. Any battle of attrition - such as a siege, a swarm of minor monsters attacking the land, the competition to out-breed and out-settle each other, now enormously favors those communities that follow good religions, somewhat favors neutrals, and are spectacularly unbalanced against evil faiths. Over time the good churches, states, and the races which support them are going to drive the evil ones into extinction - or at least into existence as minor parasitic hangers-on. So much for most campaign settings.

That didn’t used to be the case: evil clerics and their faiths used to be somewhat balanced as far as their benefits to the communities that supported them went. The good guys were better at healing, but the more powerful evil ones could raise a few skeletons and put them to work doing the messier and more dangerous tasks. It was a wash.

Now: “The range of channeling is a 30 feet burst, so it requires some degree of exposure” was already addressed above.

The basic assumption though is that most battles are decided in melee. The vast majority of people in the world, however, are not crawling around in tunnels, have no special movement abilities, and rely more on the occasional lucky shot than accuracy to damage their opponents. If I’m using Spelljammer, Dark Sun, a vaguely historical setting, a near-modern setting (remember the section on Firearms in Dungeons and Dragons?), or many many others, the dungeon-crawl close-in melee may be rather rare.

“Anybody here could probably bring other powers/rules/spells, etc from 3.5 which can be easily abused and need to be addressed by DM and players”

Quite true, but not especially relevant. This is still in Alpha, and thus is still a proposed rules change. The fact that there are other poor rules is not an excuse for adding to that number.

Now, part (3) of the entire section on “how to fix it” is in fact addressing another perceived problem expressed by a number of individuals - essentially: “The characters are taking too much damage, and thereby need some additional source of healing”.

Now, if the characters are taking too much damage, there are only a few possibilities: (1) They are suffering from bad die rolls - a situation which normally evens out over time. (2) The adventure is badly designed - a problem addressed by better adventure design. (3) The adventure is being administered badly - a problem of game mastering strategy, and probably beyond the ability of a rules system to address. (4) The characters/players are making bad decisions - a problem that, while it cannot be addressed by game rules, should not be compensated for by them. It’s not much of a game if the characters/players choices don’t matter much to whether or not they succeed.

Note that “(5) The rules are badly designed” does not appear: that’s because dealing with poor rules is a matter for designing adventures to operate properly under them (problem 2) and properly evaluating their effects on play (problem 3).

Now, adding more healing may be one way to compensate for (1) and (2), and occasionally for (3) and (4) - but compensating for (4) is a bad idea anyway.

The “Strategic” and “Tactical” notions do indeed address some of the concerns - but there are two additional “levels of play” here: Global concerns include questions like “What impact this has on the larger game world beyond the party?” “Will it take a lot of modifications and extra work to keep making the game world believable and absorbing?” and “What effect will this have over the next couple of hundred sessions?”. Player concerns are - of course - exclusively metagaming. In the game world, there’s nothing wrong with one character being a level thirty wizard and the others being his third-level apprentices and assistants or other enormous character imbalances. In the game world, there’s nothing wrong with having a good-aligned, or neutrally-aligned with positive channeling, Cleric having a greater impact on a groups overall success or failure than the Monk, Druid, or Bard. Around the table, though, it will annoy many other players - reducing their enjoyment of the game, which is - after all - the entire point. Some players won’t mind. Others will.

This version of channeling raises questions on all four levels - which is why all four levels need to be addressed and why statements along the lines of “we didn’t have a problem” aren’t really very helpful without an accompanying discussion of the circumstances - in which case you have one narrow test case. Now, I got out some of the old “Defend a Village”, “Promote your Faith”, “Protect a Caravan”, and “Deal with a Disaster” scenarios which have re-appeared in various forms many many times since first edition - and found that healing channeling did indeed create problems.

“On 3), that could be a problem”. Of course: as noted, all rule changes do have consequences, both good and bad. That’s why that particular set was “something for everyone”. If the problem is “too much damage”, throwing the solution on a particular character class, or set of background elements, isn’t really a solution.

“6) That's totally clear and agreed upon. Most PC abilities should be built in the background story.” I suspect that this is a major disconnection in what we’re talking about. “Background Story” is (1) what happens before you started play, and (2) the times when nothing of importance happens - and, if you’re going to play a Cleric, Druid, or other religious type, then religious tasks and interaction with the world at large is important. A fair amount of the players in-game time should be spent on such activities - preempting things like item creation. Are the Clerics in your game actually spending any time planning for founding new temples, teaching youngsters, and otherwise spreading and promoting their faith? If the Wizard wants new spells, he’ll have to spend time in-game and in-character searching for them and negotiating with the people who currently possess copies of it - or take out the time and money to research it. Is the fighter seeking out training in a particular Feat, a rare magical device, getting married, obtaining a new position, becoming a father? These are important events in the characters lives, not “Background Story”.

As a side note, "we need healing, let's find some undead to bash before going for the evil wizard" (undesirable metagaming).” really isn’t metagaming. It may not seem heroic, or fit in with the flow of the plot - but both of those are metagaming concerns in themselves. For the characters it’s a perfectly reasonable strategy based on observable events in the game world. After all, they’re pretty much bound to know that (1) the cleric’s channeling energy heals them and hurts undead, (2) that they build up their skills and abilities through practical experience in using them, (3) that the more efficiently they use their resources and eliminate their opponents, the better their chances of ultimate success in whatever their goals are, and (4) are likely to assume that any undead near said evil wizard are resources that he or she can draw upon. All perfectly sensible in-character reasoning - not using out-of-character information or assumptions about the world being “only a game” as a basis for in-character actions, which is what I usually see as the definition of “metagaming”.

We usually just use the "Mystic Artist" paths ( http://www.box.net/shared/lum1u99fu5 - around page 80). That way people can use Performance skills (Music, Dance, Oratory, Storytelling, etc), Craft Skills (Painting, Sculpture, etc), and even things like Knowledge/Architecture (one character got a lot of mileage out of designing structures that inspired people, spread particular ideas, or produced other effects).

“But that's not different than already-existing factoring of magic in the "medieval warfare" tactics which most campaigns assume...”

Actually it is, although the difference is less blatant: hostile area effects can be countered by spreading out, most can be counterspelled, and there are various protective effects - such as (in many cases) breaking line of sight to the center of the burst. A helpful area-effect ability can be progressively exploited by simply putting more and more people into the area - something which is under the control of the people using the effect, not their opponents. That's one of the reasons that most of the current beneficial effects only affect a limited number of targets.

“That's quite over the top. First, you heal your enemies too (if alive)...”

Quite true - but simply a way of making a point: most of the time the party is going to be "the good guys" - and there is no distinction in the game world between PC's and NPC's. Even if there aren't any NPC party members PC's will often find themselves with groups of relatively fragile NPC's to protect or coordinate - meaning that they will benefit disproportionately from helpful area-effect abilities. Similarly, a trio of high-level PC's may well benefit greatly from casting a ground-zero fireball when being harassed by a swarm of weak enemies.

As for "fixing" Channel Energy - there are quite a few possibilities here, some mentioned earlier:
(1) Simply note that healing injuries is harder than causing them: keep the damage and half the amount of healing.
(2) Limit the number of beneficially-affected targets for similar reasons.
(3) If the problem is "too much damage" - a party-wide problem - address it on a party-wide basis rather than making it vital to have a Cleric. Let the Cleric perform a Healing Burst once or twice a day and have their (separate) uses of “turning” just do damage. Let the Thief have a "Warning Shout" ability once or twice a day that reduces the damage each character in a radius takes from a trap or round of surprise attacks. Let the Wizard have a "Countering Word" which reduces the damage taken from a spell attack - whether individual or area effect - once or twice a day. Let the Fighter "Organize the Line" and reduce the damage taken from a round or two of melee attacks once or twice a day. Let the Sorcerer reduce the damage from breath weapons, natural energies, and environmental damage once or twice a day. For variety, let the barbarian do the "land on the grenade bit" once or twice a day - throwing himself into the path of an area-effect attack and thus reduce the damage everyone else takes. Let the Bard shatter missiles with a few notes every so often, reducing the damage from barrages at the price of reducing the parties ability to fire missiles in those rounds. We can let him do it more often, since this is more specialized than most of the others. The Paladin can get a couple of healing bursts like the Cleric - but - since theirs are a die or so less effective - we could let them redirect an individually-directed enemy attack or spell to themselves once or twice a day. That way they can be fittingly heroic and self-sacrificing (Of course, at L20 they start getting maximum effect, so maybe not). Let Druids reduce the damage from unnatural attacks - from undead, constructs, creatures of the outer planes, and aberrations - once or twice a day. If that turned out to be a bit weak, let them do a little damage to such creatures as well. Let the Ranger - thanks to their ability to scout, warn the party, and keep an approach handy - either negate surprise for those in the area or impose a surprise round on enemies at the beginning of combat once or twice a day. That should help reduce the damage the party takes... As for Monks - Hmm... We could let Monks reduce the effects of Psionic attacks, but many campaigns don’t use them. Letting them heal some damage with non-magical treatments might be interesting, you could let them negate toxins for other people, or - most fittingly for a class which is so rigidly channeled otherwise - we could give them a set of choices. It would be nice to have the antipsionic option for campaigns which use psionics without making the ability useless in other campaigns.
Most of those options will need to be immediate actions of course, but that really isn’t much of a problem.
That still leaves the Cleric - and, to a lesser extent, the Paladin - as the supreme font of healing, but allows parties to function almost-equivalently without one and “preserves their precious spells” for their own use. Healing is still more useful than the other forms of damage reduction, since you can use healing regardless of the source of damage, while the other stuff may or may not be usable - but a party can get along without a Cleric if they’re a little more careful. It also adds an interesting option to the fighter, who - at least according to some of the other threads - might be able to use one. It won't eliminate the impact on the game setting, but it does reduce it drastically - and spreads it out over everybody, and having a high-level adventurer-class character around already had quite an impact. (Hm. This one seems like fun actually).
(4) Simply do damage with channeling and let the party invest in a wand of Cure Light Wounds. They’re cheap enough and don’t have the same kind of mass impact. The healing burst does fit quite a few conceptions and definitely has its uses in combat though. It’s been noted that the “mass cure” spells are rarely used, so we might want to drastically reduce their level if we want to preserve this kind of option in combat.
There’s an interesting dichotomy in this discussion by the way - the simultaneous notions that Channeling Energy is a vital tool for keeping the party going and that it isn’t unbalanced - or that it’s a vital tool to let a Cleric save his precious spells but can be easily replaced by a wand of Cure Light Wounds and a few potions. In either case, it really can’t be both.
(5) Having such a burst of energy act as a powerful stimulant instead of actually healing damage - keeping people on their feet longer, allowing them to go further into negative hit points without actually dying, and - perhaps - letting people get an extra attack or similar benefit for a round.
(6) Give the Cleric a few responsibilities - when in town they’re expected to actually perform some religious services, or are actually expected to visit small villages and preach once in awhile - and, in exchange, have their churches give them some support, such as a the occasional Cure wand. This has the same sort of impact on the party as the channeling effect without having much effect on most settings.
(7) Offer the characters lots of opportunities to exercise caution, gather information, plan ahead, and take precautions to minimize the damage they take. Of course, while that’s very realistic, it’s hard on the game master - and many groups will contain one or more players who will find it boring.

There are lots of other options of course. Each one will have both benefits and consequences.

As for it being “necessary to make it” - any adventure which doesn’t cover the likelihood that the player characters will occasionally fail, whether at individual die rolls, solving puzzles, rescuing NPCs, in battles, or any other short-term project is poorly written. Take the most classic example of all - the Lord of the Rings. The party failed to keep Frodo from being wounded with a cursed knife. They failed to cross the mountains through the pass. Frodo failed to enter Mordor on his first attempt, so he tried another way, failed again, was rescued, and finally got in. Always winning is throughly boring. If the monsters are getting the short end of things - as they often will - they should do their best within the limits of their intelligence to change tactics or escape. If the characters are losing - which should happen sometimes in any case, and much more often if they don’t plan ahead - they should do their best to pull out.

As for most of the other classes, they really aren’t relevant - but none of these are particularly new. I tend to translate everything into the sources we use most, but lets see: the Fighter gets Weapon and Armor training (Specialized Warcraft, Defender, Damage Reduction, and Immunity to disarm and the need to confirm criticals - a lot to buy, but the fighter build had left over points anyway), Wizards get bigger hit dice and - if the advance information on Beta is correct - some bonus spells within their speciality schools (Specialist, with the modifiers for being unable to change the spells once selected), can trade in their familiar for Intuitive Enchantment, and get some capstone abilities - mostly minor Immunities again. The Paladin can trade in his Companion for Imbuement, gets some Damage Reduction, and can Banish outsiders (Trick). Minor, unlimited-use effects aren’t too difficult to get either (Innate Enchantment). This sort of thing can be obtained relatively readily.
Damaging Turning has been around for quite a while already, as have ways of buying extra healing abilities. The trick there was that buying area-effect healing was always a fairly high-level stunt. There were some second-edition kits that offered healing turning effects, but they never worked very well.
Of course, despite the fact that there are ways to build all of these abilities already, some of them are problematic. Automatic critical confirmation can run into the old problem of “every hit being a critical” if a character’s laboring under heavy penalties or something.

"For the record, I used an above-average sized party and I did not run into overpower issues for channeling. If anything, one could limit the number of people healed per level, besides the radius of effect."

An example of a medium-sized party was provided earlier: A dozen caravan guards, four people they're protecting, the cleric and eight other PC's, familiars, animal companions, and summoned creatures as appropriate - for a total of 25 people and their associated creatures.

For a large party, try a dozen player characters, their followers, mounts, familiars, and sundries, and a military detachment of a hundred or so, attempting to defend a town against an oncoming menace.

And yes indeed, limiting the number of people healed besides the area of effect, or stating that "healing is harder than damaging" and reducing the amount healed per person, or many similar patches may work.

"And again, that defines the balance of the adventure, not of the party (or of the adventure in relationship to a concrete party, if you will). That's where the concrete vs. abstract issue comes in."

The fact that the sample size and number of permutations is large does not suffice to make a problem abstract: a problem is only abstract if tests of its factors cannot be constructed.

""Most damaging encounters are against a limited number of powerful opponents rather than forces which distribute damage more evenly""

"I don't get this one. In my opinion and playtest experience, Channel is a key helpful factor to minimize the "attrition factor" of multiple encounters with low CR critters/traps which wear your party out for the final battle. I only found that Channel was a big over the top when the party when to the clock tower at the end of Skinsaw. That is a situation of very few damn hard fights (one CR 8 and one CR10, but the CR10 has a huge tactical advantage with flight) with a rested party (they are in Magnimar, so could heal up at a temple after the brush with Ironbriar). Nevertheless, the Clock Tower is a bit infamous for being too tough for parties of the intended level (6 3.5, 5 PF), so it might not be the best testing ground."

Examples were already provided, such as during siege situations. How about an area which gradually inflicts damage when you're escorting a large group of refugees? A party without a channeler must make some tough decisions - go around and face other problems? Abandon some refugees? Break them up into small groups, leave guards on either end and get them through with what healing you can provide? Try to face whatever they're fleeing from?

With a channeler, the problem vanishes: one particular ability bypasses a broad range of strategic choices.

"Channel is a key helpful factor..." is - once again - a statement of the problem. If a single, specific, ability which is limited to a particular class or very small group of classes is the key factor in a wide variety of adventures and situations, then it is overpowered.

Want another way to look at it? The spell list has had a great deal of playtesting has it not? Particularly the low-level stuff, yes? A 3'rd level character using positive-energy "Channel" is equivalent to one who can cast "cure light wounds" on everyone in a wide radius. If this is balanced, it should also be balanced for casting any other first level spell. How about a burst of "Charm Person"? Hypnotism? Summon Monster I? Cause Fear? Shield? True Strike? (Say, on that detachment of 50 bowmen facing a vicious monster?).

This might be fun actually: Give everybody some burst powers - Bards can charm or something, fighters can organize the line and give everyone a short-term bonus (Shield of Faith perhaps?), and so on - but that's another discussion entirely. It would also have some fairly major impacts. Things which are small from a “party” standpoint can be pretty important to the world.

For those comparing Druids and Clerics, this might be a good option: letting the Druid burst-summon creatures would allow them to be as effective in preventing damage to their friends (provided that such damage was from sources which could be blocked by a swarm of animals) - as Clerics are in healing it (provided that it is distributed across a group).

For example, one campaign featured a common weapon; a replacement for bows built using local magical minerals. It fired a 1d6 burst of non-magical energy, of a type set when the device was constructed (including Divine and Infernal). This was a ranged touch attack with the same range as a bow. They were good for six shots or so and then they had to recharge for an hour. Would that make much difference to a party of adventurers? No, not really. For them it was an amusing toy, and provoked lots of western jokes.

It made an enormous difference to the defense of cities and towns however. An adult red dragon attacks a city? Touch AC 8. The local first-level residents can simply blow it away unless its layered itself with Resist Energy or similar defenses against all the available energy forms.
Some dragons could do that kind of thing, but an awful lot of monsters couldn’t. Cities were suddenly much safer places - or at least safer from external attacks by big monsters - and massed armies meant something again.

Still, as noted in an earlier post, the game is played in many ways: there are those who build and explore complex political worlds, campaigns that span many centuries of activities, players who focus on their characters social relationships, groups that want to explore and interact with alien cultures, groups doing large-scale military operations, groups that like complex simulations, groups that engage in social engineering, groups that like to do magical research, groups that like small-scale tactical combat, and many more.

There do seem to be a variety of situations in which Channel Energy is indeed overpowered. “Don’t let those situations come up”, “house rule it”, or “we didn’t get into those situations” are all essentially ways of saying “play a different game then”. This will not help sales.

"The thread was not about the cleric being better at healing than other classes, it was about whether the new Channel Positive Energy unbalanced clerical healing skills."

Hm. The title appears to be "Is channel energy too powerful?".

As far as that goes, a number of situations have been noted where it is, indeed, too powerful - most notably, when a large number of friendly characters are involved or when the danger of a situation relies on a slow but steady accumulation of damage. All answers stating that it is not too powerful have relied on simply excluding such situations by fiat.

As for fixing problems - Looking at these message boards and the successive pathfinder releases, it seems that much of the point is feedback on the game system and proposals for fixing observed problems. It has already been noted that under a specified set of conditions - (1) the party is small, (2) only the members of the party are important, (3) most "encounters" involve combat, and (4) most damaging encounters are against a limited number of powerful opponents rather than forces which distribute damage more evenly - Channel Energy as currently described will not be a problem.

In other situations it has been observed to be a problem. Proposals for fixing it or requests to drop it are therefore in order.

Finally, while it may or may not be true that "Balance cannot be defined as an abstraction" (negative propositions are not provable), defining it as "every character getting a chance to shine" definitely does work in some situations. Fortunately, the previous post - Mr Byers note about running the same adventure with a variety of different party mixes - provides a reasonable practical test.

Here I always thought that it was planning and prudence which kept wizards and other spellcasters from burning through their spells too fast.

Any place with any kind of organization behind it - including simple tribes of orcs - which has come under an attack which was quickly broken off, should bring in assistance, make preparations to deal with any abilities their attackers were observed using, set up ambushes, send out their own trackers to locate the group that attacked them and attack them, get their valuables and most vulnerable members out of the way, and otherwise respond as appropriate to their level of intelligence. Giving up the advantage of surprise and letting the opposition get organized is likely to be fatal to the entire party: if whoever you’re attacking was strong enough to give you serious trouble (enough to, say, “burn through your spells”) during a surprise attack they’re quite possibly going to be strong enough to kill you if you fall back and let them get organized - unless you give up on the attack entirely and go elsewhere (not uncommon).

Unoccupied places are generally so dangerous or environmentally hostile that no one wants to occupy them - which means that settling down to rest in or near them is likely to be equally problematic.

Running out of healing? Either you’ve gotten really unlucky, you’re near the end of your mission, you’re up against opposition which is too powerful for you (and it’s time to get out and stay gone), or you’re behaving recklessly rather than trying to avoid injury. The fact that there’s a hospital nearby doesn’t mean that I should need it every time I work with the power tools.

Over the decades, the “15-minute adventuring day” has never been a problem.

3.5 did tend to be far too quick on leveling: I've seen groups that managed to go from level one to level twenty in less than a year of both game time and real time - and if PC's can do it, NPC's can do it. Besides, its sad to have abilities that you've never even gotten to try out.

I rarely run a campaign for fewer than 2-3 years of weekly sessions, and some have run much longer than that. It gets kind of awkward when the characters are likely to be level 50 less than halfway through the campaign.

If you need to revise a particular adventure based on whether or not the party happens to contain a druid or a monk, that is not a problem. Few adventures are dependent on having a druid in the party or revolve around situations that a druid can easily handle while no one else can. If a large percentage of the adventures need to be revised based on whether or not the party contains a cleric, then there is a problem - and that is what is being reported.

"Balanced" to me doesn't mean that they "all get their chance to shine". You can arrange that by giving the 5'th level commoner a bit of useful information, a vital contact, or a moment when the details of farm animals is vitally important. That player is still going to feel rather useless if everyone else is 12'th level in an adventuring class, chance to shine or not.

"Balance" means that a variety of mixes of character classes and types all work equally well. If the cleric is vital for general adventuring, rather than in specific situations, then the cleric is too powerful.

Similarily, "It worked for me" is not an answer to reports that "it did not work for me", or technical support jobs would be quite a lot easier. "You're getting an error message? I'm also using that program, and I'm not - so the problem does not exist" really isn't a useful answer.

"My final verdict is that Channel Energy is not overpowered at all, actually it was a basic tool for party survival!"

Again, a sufficient demonstration of the problem. If the party cannot get along without a member of a particular class, or simply does not do nearly as well, that class, or some feature thereof, is overpowered. The Cleric should not be any more vital to party survival than the Ranger, Druid, or Monk. The character classes are supposed to be balanced aren't they?

The problem there is that this mildly limits versatility but enormously enhances the number of spells which can be used per day. Limiting a combative wizard to, say, Evocation, Transmutation, and Conjuration really isn't that big a price to trade in for effectively unlimited use of most of his or her spells.

In general, this can't be made easily compatible: spellcasters get new levels of usable spells every two levels - which means that their skills will only have increased by +2. That's not a big enough spread to swamp other bonuses.

If you want to do something like this, try using a DC of 10 + (Spell Level x 5). That way, like Shadowrun, spellcasters can have essentially limitless use of lower-level spells, but powerful ones can only be cast readily by extreme specialists.

Secondarily, since Cure Light Wounds will quickly become available without limit in this system, you'll want to substitute something more long-term for damage. Attribute damage, fatigue and exhaustion, or temporary level drain might work - but regardless of what you choose, you'll have to eliminate any quick-and-easy magical or psionic cures for it.

You could also try staggering the thresholds - 10 + (x2) to successfully cast, x3 to avoid level drain in doing so, x4 to avoid fatigue in doing so, and x5 to avoid damage in doing so - but this would complicate things considerably.

Well yes - although I've no idea why you'd want to constantly play with hyperlinks instead of few notes on weekly events. This is why its so important to consider the effects of rules changes on the larger world though: it lets you keep the background events making sense and your world believable.

There still doesn’t seem to be any real definition on what called shots should actually do:

Are called shots a mechanic to take a penalty to hit in exchange for (1) increased damage, or (2) a special effect, or (3) some combination of the two?
This runs into trouble with the abstract nature of d20 combat. The normal presumption is that you’re already trying your best to hit and inflict as much damage as possible. That’s why damage is rolled to begin with - to reflect that you may connect with a variety of more-or-less sensitive areas with more or less force and accuracy. As it exists, the game handles this fairly abstractly; trading your chance to hit for more force or for hitting a more vital area? Use Power Attack. Describe it however you want. The system already handles that just fine.
Once you start getting specific, and expect results more complicated than hit point damage, this opens up a hornets nest of complications. Vital points are usually more heavily protected than non-vital ones - with thicker fur, heavier armor, or instinctive protective reflexes. They vary enormously between real species, much less in d20. (Do bone demons even have hearts?) You wind up getting into sectional armor, anatomy for fantastic creatures, whether or not particularly vital areas tend to be better defended by reflexes or training, modifiers for a wide variety of body shapes, differing estimates on just how crippling or disabling a particular blow should be, and so on. Some games are designed for that - Aftermath, Rolemaster, older versions of Runequest, and many others - but d20 is not. I’ve both played and run with this sort of system, and it does tend to be a trifle clunky in d20 games.

Are they simply more dramatic descriptions? You don’t need a mechanical system for that, just describe what’s happening in more detail. The “fact” that someone is “limping painfully” or “has blood trickling down into their eyes” doesn’t change a thing except other descriptions - “he winces as he strides forward to attack, but ignores the pain” or change “a precisely aimed shot” to “a lucky blow” for the guy with blood in his eyes. I’ve played and run lots of game like this. You can even run a hybrid: at some point during the combat - the GM will give a dramatic bit of description of his choice a mechanical effect (if you’re worried about “fairness” use the mechanics for Curses; the effect will apply until properly treated rather than having to be removed though). I’ve played and run with that too: it can be quite amusing.

Are called shots a chance to trade in damage for special effects? Passing up chances to land more forceful shots in exchange for damage to particular locations? This was the point of the experimental table above. This works fairly well for maintaining combat parity: it introduces only one new table, is purely optional, lets you either make progress towards victory by doing damage or by inflicting penalties, and offers a lot of chances for more complex battles and tactics beyond “I exhaust their hit points”: the enemy has an injury to the leg and you can now outrun them, you are forced to fall back and switch to a lighter secondary weapon because of the wound to your arm, and so on. It also limits the special effects you can produce by the creatures damage reduction, if any. On the downside, this relies on characters NOT being able to inflict vast amounts of damage with every blow since I didn’t bother to include a scaling modifier for size or challenge rating (you’d have to add modifiers based on creature size or challenge rating to the amounts you have to give up to produce particular effects), apparently conflicts with some attempts at visualization, and means that very high hit point monsters may be less challenging unless they make some effort to protect themselves against called shots.

That’s always the first step in creating a house rule, system add-on, or supplement. What do you actually want this to do?

What sort of effects are you looking to have the called shot system produce? Short-term annoyances? Purely dramatic descriptions? Permanent injuries? This sort of thing will drastically change the tone of combat and will add a complicated range of damage calculations. Is it better to go for the vitals shot and take the -6 in exchange for double damage? What if I Power Attack? Maybe this is a good time to try True Strike and go for the crippling leg shot?

If you want something like real wound effects, try letting people trade off damage for inducing penalties or other benefits. For a quick example, you can trade in...

2 Points (removable via Bandaging): Leave an easily-identifiable nick in a conspicuous location. Provoke someone into striking at you next round even if there are better targets. Get a compliment on, or impress someone with, your combat skills. Get a free chance to indluge in some witty repartee. Get a chance to dwell on and describe your mighty blow.

3 Points (removable via Cure Light Wounds or an hours rest): Target will leave an easily-followed trail of blood if/when it leaves. Target suffers a -2 penalty on its next roll. Target gets an ugly scar unless magically healed. Give the next attacker a +2 bonus on his or her roll.

5 Points (Removable via Cure Moderate Wounds or a days rest): Inflict a point of attribute damage. Inflict a -1 penalty to attacks with a particular limb. Bruised and aching, target will be miserable tomorrow. Target must make a DC 15 Reflex check to avoid being knocked down. Get a free 5' step as you force an opening.

8 Points (Removable via Cure Serious Wounds or two days rest): Reduce their movement speed by 5' to a minimum of 1/2 normal. Target is bleeding, and will suffer 1d6 damage/round for the next three rounds. Target cannot speak clearly for 1-4 rounds, any spells with verbal components suffer a 20% failure chance. Slow mortal blow, target will die in 1d6+1 hours without treatment.

12 Points (Removable via Cure Critical Wounds or three days rest): Target loses next attack. Target must make a DC 15 Fort save or be stunned for one round. Inflict a -2 penalty to attacks with a particular limb. Massive bleeding, target will die in 1d4+2 minutes without treatment. Targets movement is reduced to 5' for 1d4+1 rounds and remains reduced by 5' until the wound heals.

Critical Hit/Give up all critical damage (Removable via Heal or a weeks rest): Carve your initials on a target. Injure a limb, inflicting a -3 penalty on any actions using it. Knock a shield or piece of armor loose (only needs to be healed if inherent to the target). Target loses next attack sequence. Target suffers 1d4 rounds of blindness. Target cannot use a chosen special attack, such as a breath weapon or gaze weapon, for 1-2 rounds. Target suffers 2 points of attribute damage to a chosen attribute. Target can no longer fly if it fails a DC 18 Fortitude save. Target cannot speak clearly, any spells with verbal components suffer a 20% failure chance. Target sterilized and stunned for one round, next round it gets a bonus attack against the perpetrator at its highest BAB.

Lets see now. This provides quite a few strategic choices - should we go for straight damage, try to cripple the target, goad it into attacking the unwounded fellow while the cleric works, or what? It shouldn’t (or at least it shouldn’t after a bit more balancing and, perhaps, a rule that limits “called shots” to one per round, or only allows them on a critical hit) make the characters too much more effective in combat since they’re giving up damage to get the special effects. It avoids all the complicated calculations involved in coming up with modifiers for all kinds of called shots on creatures with different body shapes. It doesn’t involve any actual permanent injuries, so we don’t have to deal with the characters being gradually whittled away, allows the monsters to spring a few surprises - such as getting that heavily-armored fighter in the leg and thus allowing them a chance to either split or outrun the group - and to inflict a few more interesting injuries.

Hm. I may have to polish up and expand the chart a bit and give it a try.

Well, it works for some things and, like all rule changes, has consequences elsewhere.

For example, take a level-one dip as a Cleric. Continue putting skill points into the appropriate spellcraft skills and - by the midlevels - you'll be one level behind on (say) fighter progression in exchange for limitless use of a few first-level spells - such as "cure light wounds". Even if you fail a check and take some damage, you can heal that right up. There's no automatic failure on skill rolls, so once you hit higher levels, you can use every low level spell you've got forever.

Once you get to +33 on an appropriate roll - say with high level, a good attribute bonus, a skill enhancing feat or two, and maybe a skill-boosting item - you'll have limitless use of all spells of level nine and below. If you have time to take 10, or a feat or special ability which allows you to do it "under pressure", you'll only need a +24.

If you just want to cast - say - "Heal" without limit out of combat where you can "take 10", you'll need a total of +17 (10 Base + 12 for spell level + 5 for not taking fatigue). Hm. Attribute 18 (+4), you don't acquire the spell until level 11 (+11), throw in +3 from a Feat - you can get unlimited use of Heal - and near-unlimited use of Harm - just as soon as you acquire the spell.

Now, there's nothing wrong with this if you want to really heavily favor casters and multiclassing to casting classes, or if you simply want a magical free-for-all - but you might as well throw out everything thats ever been writen in the way of monsters, settings (why farm when you can create food?), and non-primary spellcaster classes. Forget sorcerers of course: why would anyone want to restrict themselves that way?

Shadowrun works because (1) the mages there are competing with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and other essentially limitless-use munitions and because "damage" and fatigue there is much harder to get rid of magically.

Systems like this can be made to work, but they'll probably need to be considerably more complicated.