I'm the other way around.

In general, I'm of the opinion that it's more important for a game to be playable and fun than for it to be realistic.

(Case in point: In Ultima 7 you have to manually feed your characters or they'll take damage due to starvation. It doesn't take long before the character starts starving (unlike in, say, Dungeon Master), and Ultima 7's inventory is particularly cumbersome, so this mechanic can quickly get annoying. Also, survival isn't a major gameplay focus of the game, so this mechanic feels unnecessary.)

(Did you track encumbrance precisely?)

I think we are saying the same thing here. I wanted players to feel like they were in the world as the best fantasy books make you feel. Such books do not make you tally up encumbrance points or count calories, nor did I do so in my world. In fact, I made my games easy to play for anyone off the street (or anyway I tried pretty hard). No familiarity with the rules or investment in books required (though a set of dice came in handy - but in a pinch, I could roll for them too).

Any math part was all on my side. I might, from time to time, tell them they were getting pretty tired and ask them if they had anything to eat.

I recall one of my guys decided that he wanted to run an inn. I had no idea how to handle the requirements or supplies or income/loss. So I took the next week between sessions to cobble something together for me to follow. However from the player's side he was required to paint the picture of what the place looked like inside, how he ran the place etc. And then I sent him on some stories to find a supply of alcohol to offer. The important part for the players was to have a vivid image in their minds of what this place was like and what it was like to be there. And then I had to come up with a bunch of encounters and stories concerning the place.

You mention fantasy, but what I find interesting is what might be called a "kitchen sink" setting. Basically, you might have some areas of the setting that have a fantasy feel, with there being wizards and the like, perhaps with dragons, but then other parts of the world might have much more advanced technology than you'd expect, to the point of it being clearly science fiction.

Some examples of this sort of thing would be this:
* Pathfinder's Golarion setting has some areas with higher technology, typically of alien origin.
* The "ancient technology" approach is also seen in older Final Fantasy games, with the first 5 games being mostly fantasy but still having high technology (in 3 of those games, you can end up fighting robots, with one of the game even having the possibility of that robot firing nukes at you).
* Some SaGa games are like that, specifically 1, 2, and Frontier 1. (Not Frontier 2, as that game opts for a common-magic medieval setting.) In SaGa Frontier, you have one main character who just graduated from a magic school and seeks to acquire all the spells, while another scenario involves playing a robot who at one point has to deal with viruses in virtual reality.

I've been starting to work on a CRPG of my own, and it's looking like it will have a "kitchen sink" sort of setting. After all, how else can I make both witches and robots playable?

And this reminds me of one part in Dragon Quest 4 (Chapter 3 specifically), where you're playing as a merchant. Your goal, for this chapter, is *not* to slay a great evil or to rescue the kids/princess (which you have to do earlier in the game), but rather to get a shop of your own and become wealthy. (Too bad you don't get to keep that money, though later remakes have an exploit that lets you do so anyway.) Yes, you do have to fight enemies, but there's no bosses, and enemies often drop items to sell. (There's also the fact that you can buy an item in one place and sell it elsewhere for a profit; in many games this might be considered an exploit, but here it's clearly intentional; it makes perfect sense that you could buy armor from one location, take it to a castle that has a severe shortage of armor, and sell it there for a profit.)

Breath of Fire 1 also has a place you can be a merchant.

There's also that game that used to be on GOG but is no longer where you are the owner of an item shop, and have to make enough money to pay back your loan or else it's game over.

Wtf I never said otherwise.

Obviously some of them are pretty useful. But others you never actually use.


Unless my memory fails me, the rules say that you get maximum hitpoints on character creation.

Which is also how BG does it on core.

From what I remember, 2e does not have any such rule in core.

There is, however, one book that suggests doing that for fighters, but not for other classes. (I don't remember whether other fighter-types were included.)

Also, 1e Rangers get 2 hit dice at level 1, meaning they are significantly less likely to end up with too few HP to be viable. (Interestingly enough, Wizardry's Samurai are also like this.)

With this said, I really thing that random HP growth, and in fact random stat growth, is just bad design for a game with level/XP growth and a level cap of any form, whether soft or hard.

(Note that this doesn't apply to games with SaGa-style growth, where you don't have a limited amount of stat growth to go around, even though it is random when stats grow in such games.)

I couldnt agree more.

There should be a difficulty level between normal and core, which gives fixed instead of random hitpoints per level:

3 HP for d4
4 HP for d6
5 HP for d8
6 HP for d10
7 HP for d12

I find this "on normal you only get 3/4 damage" rule just weird and judgemental "oh you're a wheeny you cannot handle full damage if you dont like the annoying rules".

I personally think the randomness, or lack thereof, of HP rolls should be independent of the difficulty setting that affects the damage you take.

Ideally, the game should allow for in-depth difficulty customization much like games like Dungeon Hack, Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous, and Solasta: Crown of the Magister.