d20 modern Failed...why? (or did it?)

[Felon]

Well, then all games "fail", eventually. All editions of D&D other than 4e have now "failed", by that measure.

Well, obviously you don't measure by edition, but by the game itself. D&D is still supported, D20 Modern is not.

Personally, I think having a miniature-based game without miniatures is a rather large flaw. There were other weird elements to the presentation too, like the core book not presenting a particular genre. Maybe they should have tried a setting-based game first, and then rolled out D20 Modern later. HERO System, for instance, was preceded by the publication of Champions (and the other less well-known games).

The covers of the D20M books were rather blah for the production values that went into them. A metal-grey cover with a self-consciously ethnically/gender-diverse trio of folks posing in a polyhedron shape. Who thought this was evocative? They could've done something a lot more eye-catching.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't necessarily want a mini-focus, because I feel it doesn't work so great in modern games with firearms. (At least not if it's supposed to be action-focused).

Given the number and quality of modern and sci-fi minis wargames chock full of firearms, I find that to be a puzzling statement.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

I own several of the books, but only really played once or twice. I'd like to give running it another shot sometime, simply because some of the setting possibilities are nifty, and the system is more or less familiar to anyone who's played D&D in the past ten years.

Expanded from above: I *love* Dark*Matter. It is one of the coolest setting books I have ever read, just chock full of cool fluffy bits, and easily adapted to just about any conspiracy you've ever heard of or seen in an X-Files episode. I got to know it while it was an Alternity book, but never was able to convince a group to play. ("We don't want to learn *another* system" they'd groan.)

Come d20 Modern, and I thought I'd have a chance again to run the setting, but I was too lazy to adapt the crunchy parts of the setting into d20 equivalents. By this time I didn't even really have a regular gaming group either, so I cared less. Once they released the d20 reissue of Dark*Matter I picked it up while thinking of running an adventure for a game day, but was generally disapointed--it was a slimmed down copy/paste of the Alternity book that didn't add much of anything, even rules-related, and subtracted quite a bit of useful setting info.

So, for me at least, d20 Modern was a failure. I got perhaps 2 genuine uses out of the books, so it cost me about $15 bucks per use.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I really dug D20 Modern when it came out, and I did a bit of design work for it (one of the D20 Future web enhancements as well as about a third of D20 Apocalypse). Rather than go into a lengthy analysis, much of which has already been covered in this thread, I'll just list the positives and negatives.

Positives:
* Designed to make it easy for GMs to make their own settings.
* Good rules for modern combat and equipment.
* Lots of good setting concepts.

Negatives:
* The class system. Making NPCs is painful, and given the fact that character generators are few and far between, there's no easy way to make the NPCs you need.
* The art. I don't feel that comic book type art was the best way to go, particularly when they have access to so many artists who can be both more realistic and more stylized.
* Almost all of the official settings depended upon magic or psionics. This is fine, though many people wanted no magic and more military or espionage.
* Definitely a victim of rules bloat.

The other thing I'll say is that I actually ran D20 Modern for quite a while. I decided to pull the plug on it when True20 came along and solved the problem of rules bloat and NPC creation. True20 has become my GURPS, and it works pretty well with the Modern materials that are available. It needs a little converting, but the limited conversion is still easier than creating new NPCs.

I'd also like to mention that I think Modern20 solves a lot of the cons mentioned as well. The only reason True20 gets support over Modern20 in my games is because I was using it first. I prefer hit points to making a Toughness save, but then I like using the ability modifiers instead of the 3-18 score with modifiers.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Skarka does with the Odyssey system. I'll definitely be checking it out.

 

[Pepster]

d20 Modern is how I met my out-of-town gaming group. I played in several convention games ran by a GM willing to run Modern and got to see familiar faces in game after game. After being in the GM's games for several cons, I got an invite to join a d20 Modern campaign at his home. This d20 Modern campaign has now been ongoing for over two years.

I have two favorite game systems, d20 Modern and Savage Worlds. I love playing d20 Modern but don't know if I have the will to prep and run it. I ended up buying a ton of books and pdfs for it.

For me, it was a success. I still have all my d20 Modern books but traded in all my WotC Star Wars books for online store credit...

Pepster

 

[Krensky]

For me, d20 Modern likely 'failed' for two reasons.

First was the paucity of support, or perhaps more accurately, the perception of lack of support. WotC published a decent number of books compared to a number of other games, but compared to their other game or some other modern game systems (d20 and other) it felt like it was unsupported.

The second, and this is the bigger one for me, is that there were so many other games in the non-fantasy niche that (at the least for me and my group) did the job better. Mutants and Masterminds, Spycraft, Fuzion, Hero, GURPS, Silhouette, D6, etc. d20 Modern was not the first, or even really in the running for when we wanted to do something with a 'generic' system. Even in the d20 space it was competeing with M&M and Spycraft almost before it came out. Then, once True20, M&M2, Spycraft 2.0, came out it was even further behind the eight-ball. Modern²⁰ and a number of other OGL rewrites of d20 Modern further hurt it's prospects.

 

[Greg K]

The second, and this is the bigger one for me, is that there were so many other games in the non-fantasy niche that (at the least for me and my group) did the job better. Mutants and Masterminds, Spycraft, Fuzion, Hero, GURPS, Silhouette, D6, etc. d20 Modern was not the first, or even really in the running for when we wanted to do something with a 'generic' system.

For myself, GURPS would be a better choice for a certain style of game with a specific group of players. M&M, well that is my default supers. Silhouette, d6, Hero, Spycraft and Fuzion, I'll never player again.

Even in the d20 space it was competeing with M&M and Spycraft almost before it came out. Then, once True20, M&M2, Spycraft 2.0, came out it was even further behind the eight-ball. Modern²⁰ and a number of other OGL rewrites of d20 Modern further hurt it's prospects.

This I can agree with despite not liking Spycraft 2.0.

M&M is already my favorite rpg while True20 rivals d20M for second. Out of the box, I think True20 is a stronger system than d20M, but I really like some third party supplements for d20M.

However, with Adamant bringing Imperial Age to True20 and having released Pulp Archetypes for M&M, True20 and M&M could replace d20M for most of my modern games. The one exception may be modern magic campains- I don't like the default power system for True20 (although I prefer to the default fx systems for d20M). My preference is with Elements of Magic: Mythic Earth and Green Ronin's Psychic's Handbook so d20M wins out when we are not interested in using point buy.

Now, I haven't seen Modern20 except for a couple of small previews (despite Charles Rice being one of my favorite d20M/d20 supplement authors). So I cannot really comment on it.

 

[jaerdaph]

I voted yes. I loved d20 Modern when it came out, and I still like it now even though I'm more inclined to run games with True20. I'd still go back to d20 Modern if the opportunity came up. The quality of the crunch in WotC's d20 Modern products always outshined the fluff (I'm looking at you Urban Arcana!), with the exception of some of the last official products like d20 Apocalypse, d20 Dark*Matter and Critical Locations, which I thought were exceptional products. When WotC finally discontinued the line, at least they went out with a bang.

I thought where d20 Modern really excelled was the quantity and quality of all the third party publisher support products, print and PDF. If I couldn't do it with the core WotC books alone, I could always rely on finding a 3PP product that could fill the gap.

It was a golden era.

 

[renau1g]

I played in about 4 different campaigns of Modern and it just didn't fit for me. As others pointed out you really needed magic or psionics to make it work. I know our GM struggled with coming up with interesting adventures that wouldn't alert police or other authorites. I also didn't like wealth bonus, it just seemed to awkward to me.

 

[Greg K]

. As others pointed out you really needed magic or psionics to make it work..

This I completely disagree with. As much as I dislike the fx systems, you didn't need magic or psionics to make ithe game work. You could run military games, westerns, and other stuff that didn't require magic or psionics just fine. It's just when running a campaign utilizing magic or psionics that default systems fell flat for me.