So...I'm going to try to keep this short and hopefully there are people out there that understand where I'm coming from and I'm not alone here.
I'm guessing my story is similar to a lot of middle-aged gamers out there. I'm a guy in my 40s who cut his teeth on RPG with the "BECMI" rules and ran campaigns using the AD&D 1e version shortly thereafter. I stopped playing for a while when other necessities grabbed my attention (building a career, girls, etc, not necessarily in that order), but recently have decided that I need a hobby and have come back around to wanting to get into gaming again.
I've picked up some of the Pathfinder material and in general, I like a lot of the changes and additions to the rules since the old school days, with skills and feats, and domain spells for clerics and such, along with the idea to create an "Open Gaming" idea and not be locked into a particular product line. With this in mind, I spent some time thinking about a campaign I'd like to run, creating a "homebrew" world, which to anyone who's spent time in the 1e era, homebrew was highly encouraged back in those days.
I've also been spending time lurking on message boards and listening to real play podcasts to get an idea of how a gaming session is run nowadays. It is here where I'm starting to have some problems. The game, from a player and even a GM standpoint, has really changed, and I have to say, not for the better.
The idea when I was younger when playing was that we could close our eyes and imagine this world we were in. The first time I played, I was eight years old and my cousin was running us through the old classic "X1 Isle of Dread" module. To this day, I can still remember being in that humid jungle, battling against a group of panthers that eventually ended up killing our guide that was preventing us from getting lost. Dice rolls and player stats were absolutely necessary in order to make the game playable, but in our characters' mind, they didn't know what level they were or if they had a 14 in Dexterity. They just were who they were.
This is where the problem has been starting with me. When I read or listen to some real gaming sessions, I honestly can't envision most of the characters that are being described on here. As an example, if I'm a GM and I'm hearing someone with their half-orc "build" where they start off as a bloodrager and then "dip" into a wizard class before moving into taking some levels as a bard, my first question is, "Hold on just one second, how did your half-orc survive the first ten minutes of his life?" Much less what caused this feral barbaric meathead from deciding to take up scholarly work and composing poetry, to say nothing about who would teach him these skills or how long it would take to train his brain to make such a bizarre career change.
What's worse, is that the game rules seem to encourage this type of behavior, and GMs and the rules alike, will actually tend to penalize players who try to develop characters that feel more realistic or at least reasonable.
Is there anyone out there who feels like this or am I alone in thinking this way?