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True 20 - Is it really Simpler?

iwatt

First Post
Well, I'm sold on True20... just started downloading the pdf :)

I've got to say that what really convinced me was the great work done by those involved in True Star Wars thread in the greenronin forums.


About the Spiral of Death: Maybe eliminataing the stunned, dazzled, lost actions as well as eliminating the attack penalties would remove this effect. You'd have to keep the toughness penalties to reflect the wearing down.

would this work, or would it lead to extremely long combats?
 

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Nahat Anoj

First Post
iwatt said:
Well, I'm sold on True20... just started downloading the pdf :)

I've got to say that what really convinced me was the great work done by those involved in True Star Wars thread in the greenronin forums.


About the Spiral of Death: Maybe eliminataing the stunned, dazzled, lost actions as well as eliminating the attack penalties would remove this effect. You'd have to keep the toughness penalties to reflect the wearing down.

would this work, or would it lead to extremely long combats?
I think it would work fine. The only thing I can think of right now is that combats may be a little less dangerous (and therefore less exciting) without those damage conditions, but I don't think it will change the length of combat too much. But I've never tried it, so things still might still be interesting.

My advice is to use the system as written for a while and, if you find you don't like it, make the changes you suggest.
 

Jack Morgan

First Post
Jonathan Moyer said:
My advice is to use the system as written for a while and, if you find you don't like it, make the changes you suggest.

I agree with this. Conviction points are a pretty good buffer against the lethality of combat, anything else might well take away the excitement.
 

iwatt

First Post
Jonathan Moyer said:
My advice is to use the system as written for a while and, if you find you don't like it, make the changes you suggest.

That's what I usually do. It's just that I can't help but start fiddling with any new ruleset. :D
 

DnDChick

Demon Queen of Templates
That's what I've found to be the best course, and I am a consummate house-ruler and home brewr.

The more I tinkered and house ruled, the more I realized that I didn't really need to. After my first few read-throughs, I came up with a few alternate house rules, a new role, etc. and all of that was done away with once I actually started playing the game and saw how things worked.

So far, the only "big" change I am going to make is nerfing the Lucky feat a little bit. I've added a few feats and skills here and there from other sources, but that's not so much "house ruling" as it is just adding new feats. Overall True20 as-written has been working fine.

I like True20, and am a solid convert -- heck I even worked on the True20 Bestiary, am involved with the Agents of Oblivion setting, and plan to continue to work with Green Ronin in the future. True20 is my (d20) game of choice these days, and I really don't want to go back to "core" d20.
 

Wraith Form

Explorer
I'd really love to hear more GMs' experiences with True20 vs. d20.

I'm on the fence about using the True20 rules, but if things go easier & more smoothly, I'm all about that in my game! (I also have equal numbers of "casual" gamers at my table to "powergamers".)
 

JBowtie

First Post
I switched to True20 shortly after Blue Rose came out, and haven't looked back since.

The biggest hurdle was getting used to the damage track (as it seems to be for everyone). As soon as we had a couple of combats beneath our belt, however, it all fell into place. Now it's second nature.

My big wins:
I used to hate running NPC spellcasters, especially high-level ones. Now they're easy to stat and run. In fact, I can create spellcasters on the fly in True20.

Combat runs smoother, larger, and faster. The minions rule lets me run largish encounters quickly, while the PCs come out as heroes and villains stand a cut above their minions. They also use moves such as disarm, grapple, trip, and so forth far more readily. The Combat Unit template in the True20 Beastiary is absolutely inspired and perfect for handling followers, epic battles, and really big encounters.

I can improvise NPCs for combat or casting without statting in advance! Pick attack bonus, damage bonus, defense bonus, and toughness save. Attack and defence are level-based (and both based off same combat stat), damage and toughness are Str+weapon, Con+armour. Since I put weapon and armour on DM chart that means I can "reverse engineer" the stats later if I need to flesh out an improvised NPC. Skill checks and magic use are also level-based, so I can estimate numbers here if the NPC needs to make a check or cast a spell.
Now, you could do this with d20 if you knew the rules really well, but estimating HP is frankly harder than estimating Toughness (especially if you're trying to balance the encounter). Estimating skill ranks isn't hard, but good luck improvising a spellcaster. I was really bad at improvising NPCs for d20, but I actually ran an entire campaign without once fully statting out an NPC.

Easier to tinker. Sort of a side effect of having a lighter system, it's easier to focus attention on pet subsystems without overloading the GM. The crafting rules are very straightforward in comparison to d20 - great if you're not interested, and few/no dependencies if you want to swap in something more complicated. No alignment built into the system, so super-easy to attach your own complex moral code. Thanks to the simplified combat rules, you can even choose to de-emphasise combat (see Caliphate Nights as a great example of this!) in favour of, say, storytelling.

Less dependent on minis. Building on the last point, there's much less need for tactical awareness. In practice I've found that (my) players are more imaginative and engaged when they don't have to count squares or worry about optimizing iterative attacks. ;)

Better customisation. You may need to provide heroic paths (sample level 1 characters) for your casual players, but the "feat every level" design means that people can come up with off-the-wall concepts and actually reflect that in their characters. I'm playing an illiterate dwarven skald who uses his shield as a percussion instrument. One of my companions is a greatclub-wielding giant mage. We're both first-level characters who already fit our character concepts.

Finally, the magic system is fantastic. Spells are much-more freeform and with a little experience a DM can make up DCs for any effect on the fly. Players use a bit more imagination since the spells are so much broader in scope.
 

I played my first True 20 game at GenCon and won't play it again. The DM was good, the scenario was fun, but I don't like the rules.

Almost everyone there was new to the system. I and one other player had some M&M experience, the rest were complete novices. The learning curve seemed to be as steeper than it should have been. (For comparison, there were four casters in an Arcana Evolved game that were new to that, and they picked up on the changes real quick).

I didn't like the casting system. I was rolling well (the only time all week I did :lol: ) and I made almost every fatigue check. The other guy had bad luck, and was basically one and out. (We did have 'conviction' to burn to reverse it, but it didn't help him much.) So two characters of roughly similar abilities, one that was firing away and the other that was largely useless.

I really dislike damage saves vs hitpoints. It works well for a supers game, but I don't think it translates well to anything further up on the 'realism' scale.

We did one big combat, and it didn't run appreciably faster than say Old Ones Grim Tales game, or the AE game, or pretty much anything else I've played. Prep-time might be lower, but I've no way to know. I don't think prep-time for stock d20 is that high anyway though.

So, it was fun to play once, but I can't see the attraction. The 'five mini-settings' book looked pretty neat, though. With Malhavoc, I like the crunch, not so enamoured of the fluff. Looks like with True20 it'll be the other way around.
 

Skywalker

Adventurer
iwatt said:
About the Spiral of Death: Maybe eliminataing the stunned, dazzled, lost actions as well as eliminating the attack penalties would remove this effect. You'd have to keep the toughness penalties to reflect the wearing down.

There is not a death spiral in True 20. Most penalties are to Toughness only. If you receive a Wounded condition it does impose a -2 but these is relatively minor (a 10% penalty) and certainly not a "death spiral".

Add in that Conviction can be used for automatic recovery checks and Toughness checks. This means that Conviction (which is based on level) will smooth this out a lot to acheive an effect that is very similar to D&D i.e. high level PCs are likely to survive longer even with a few wounds.
 

Acid_crash

First Post
bento said:
I play with a group that is half D&D only, and half "up for anything" and we've played with the True20 rules once so far. I picked it up for the same reasons you're considering - combat was becoming too bogged down, and players were gravitating towards combat rather than a balance of combat and character interaction.

I'm always looking for something that's easy to run, but with lots of options for unique character creation and development. Streamlined is a good description for True20. I like it because if players are already familiar with D20 concepts and flow of combat, there's really no learning curve to convert over.

The quickstart guide doesn't do the game justice - it's primarily there to highlight some of the differences and what to expect in actual game play. I've handed it out to my players, who don't own the full rule book.

Where do you get the quickstart guide for true20?
 

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