Best Modern Game System

[Psion]

And as an aside, despite my utter, unrelenting and iron-clad dislike of D20 Modern, Chuck's 'Blood and...' books are worth the price if you go that route. They're good enough that I considered using D20 Modern, if only briefly, and are really excellent overall, whatever your preference in systems might be.

Yeah, I've said before, third party publishers MAKE d20 modern. Though there are some other good examples, RPGObjects (and the "Blood &" series in particular) are the main thing I have in mind when I say that.

 

[Vigilance]

Psion and Jim, thanks a lot for the kind words.

Chuck

 

[solkan_uk]

I'd like to suggest Spycraft d20...
-Interesting feats and a large variety of classes allow for tailoring (and if you want more get Back to Basics which offers d20 modern style classes, with more talent options...
-SC skills tend to cover more than D20 modern skills, so are more useful, but there's still roughly the same amount of skills
-Getting shot is always a concern, but usually survived due the Wounds/Vitality system, a single well rolled critical hit can take you down (though is unlikely to kill you), but your vitality lets you shrug of the majority of shots - this works well for MiB IMHO where Will Smith gets thrown all over the place by the 'Roach, but doesn't actually seem to get hurt much - just gets his vitality eaten away.
- SC has the same d20 resolution, though it does add some complexity, if your considering GURPS this will be far easier to get used to if you've played a lot of d20 (most successful GURPs games I've played we ignore quite a lot of rules, of course you can do the same in SC).

In addition Campaign Qualities let you adjust lethality, as well as several other options in the game.

 

[jaerdaph]

Yeah, I've said before, third party publishers MAKE d20 modern.

QFT

 

[Greg K]

Psion and Jim, thanks a lot for the kind words.

Chuck

Chuck,
I have to completely agree with them

 

[Jim Hague]

Psion and Jim, thanks a lot for the kind words.

Chuck

Chuck, it's a hard row to hoe when it comes to making me like D20 Modern products, but I always reccommend them to folks looking to play D20M. If you've gotta go with D20M, go with the best, I say.


We now return to the actual thread, already in progress.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I would say that d20 Modern is sort of the "Microsoft Windows" of Modern gaming. It's not the perfect system for everybody, but the sheer weight of existing product, driven by market share, means that you can probably find or make rules to do what it is that you want it to do.

Spycraft2.0 is the "Apple" of Modern gaming. It's sleek, it's cool, it does the thing it does real well and it wants to do what Windows does on top of that. It doesn't have the market share of Windows, nor the depth of support or product base. It tries to make up for it with coolness and flexibility, doing alot of what you need add-ons to do with Modern, er, Windows with it's own bundled software. For a bundle, best-in-class, but you can find each individual piece of software in a more robust form on Windows.

Then GURPS is ... LINUX ... it's got the world at its fingertips, if anybody can figure out how the hell to use it.

So I'll put it this way ... I'd LIKE a Mac ... I HAVE a Windows box. I had a choice the last time I bought a computer, and I still bought a Windows box. When Mac is sleek and cool, Windows can sort of steal the thunder with a 3rd party product.

--fje

 

[bairdec]

My favored modern rules systems are Twilight:2000, GURPS, and Shadowrun. The only downside to TW:2K is that there is no magic system for the game included. (No surprise, since it was intended to model a post-apocalyptic world after WWIII starts in 2000.) GURPS and Shadowrun are both as customizable as you could want, include magic and high-tech, and have a ton of resources.

 

[jaerdaph]

So I'll put it this way ... I'd LIKE a Mac ... I HAVE a Windows box. I had a choice the last time I bought a computer, and I still bought a Windows box. When Mac is sleek and cool, Windows can sort of steal the thunder with a 3rd party product.

So to continue that excellent analogy, Back to Basics is sort of like Spycraft 2.0 Boot Camp, so now somebody just needs to write Parallel for Spycraft 2.0.

 

[2WS-Steve]

I would say that d20 Modern is sort of the "Microsoft Windows" of Modern gaming. It's not the perfect system for everybody, but the sheer weight of existing product, driven by market share, means that you can probably find or make rules to do what it is that you want it to do.

Spycraft2.0 is the "Apple" of Modern gaming. It's sleek, it's cool, it does the thing it does real well and it wants to do what Windows does on top of that. It doesn't have the market share of Windows, nor the depth of support or product base. It tries to make up for it with coolness and flexibility, doing alot of what you need add-ons to do with Modern, er, Windows with it's own bundled software. For a bundle, best-in-class, but you can find each individual piece of software in a more robust form on Windows.

Then GURPS is ... LINUX ... it's got the world at its fingertips, if anybody can figure out how the hell to use it.

So I'll put it this way ... I'd LIKE a Mac ... I HAVE a Windows box. I had a choice the last time I bought a computer, and I still bought a Windows box. When Mac is sleek and cool, Windows can sort of steal the thunder with a 3rd party product.

--fje

Actually, I'd sort of reverse that. Of the three, I think Spycraft 2.0 is the most robust/complex system -- and I suspect that's part of what's holding back third party support. There's a huge amount of crunch -- even in the "fluff" sections like running a campaign.

I'd like to run a campaign, but since I'd also like to publish a few scenarios I want to make full use of all those various rules systems -- and I'm finding that to be a fun challenge, but definitely a challenge.

From a publisher perspective, I can see where people in it for a living would be concerned. First, you'd need pretty motivated freelancers since they'll be using up a lot of time that they could be writing learning the rules-set in depth. Second, I'd be concerned that the rules-depth would be daunting to customers, so there'd be a smaller market.

It's possible though that Spycraft 2.0 fans will produce enough support material and possibly for pay PDFs that its support would eventually rival d20 Modern -- and that could drive up the customer base.