Anyone played official version of Pathfinder?

[Cynical Cat]

Save or die isn't a problem. The problem is instead fundemental flaws of the d20 system. D&D is an attrition based system. Players use up spells, hitpoints, magic item charges, special ability uses, healing potions, etcetera until they're too low on resources to continue. Monsters and PCs whack away each other until someone runs out.

The problem is that D&D also wants to model all the cool stuff of high fantasy: witches turning people into toads, gorgons turning people to stone, the deadly poisonous breath of the ancient wyrm and so on. As these effects completely sidestep the attrition based system of the rest of the game, the game starts to break down. You can see the results in the ridiculous poison pricing in 3rd edition D&D, the power of high level spellcasters in the system, the powering down of such abilities to "save or be fucked up" in Arcana Evolved, and the beating such abilities with a bat until they are 100% pure nerf in 4th edition.

Its much less of a problem for games with modern of sci-fi settings (or some other fantasy games), because while players may be willing to suspend disbelief about how many times you can inflict serious wounds on a dude with a sword before someone goes down, it doesn't really work with guns. Players and they're enemies are already carrying one-shot kill weapons so the game system has to move away from a stricktly attritional model into one that can handle high lethality attacks.