d20 GAMMA WORLD: excerpts, links, Pure Strain Excitement

[thundershot]

Niiice. *digs around*


Mutants and Machines has the same ISBN number and stock number as the GM Guide? Ooops.

By the way, I REALLY hope one of the three upcoming books has the plants in it. It only takes up ONE OR TWO pages... (and I'm sure they'll have a Level Adjustment)



Chris (can't seem to find the GWGMG release date anywhere..)

 

[Eynowd]

P.S. How many of you GW insiders are lurking on the ENWorld boards here? Speak up!

Another one over here (in Australia, actually).

I wrote Chapter 4 of the Player's Handbook, and I'm currently writing for one of the books coming out next year.

Hope everyone enjoys the new version of GW.

cheers
Geoff

 

[Eynowd]

By the way, I REALLY hope one of the three upcoming books has the plants in it. It only takes up ONE OR TWO pages... (and I'm sure they'll have a Level Adjustment)

Can we please put this issue to rest?

Mutant plants as PCs aren't going to be in the new edition. It was - I believe - actually part of the licencing agreement between WotC and S&SS. The powers that be felt that plant PCs were just too goofy from a market perspective (this is what I was told about 12 months ago).

There are plants in Mutants and Machines (which incidentally is probably the best critter book I've ever seen. I didn't have anything to do with it, but damn I wish I did.).

Using the normal D20 rules, you could take the plant stats and convert them to a PC class if you wanted to. Several people have already said that it should only take a small amount of thought to figure out how to do plants using the mutant rules that are already in the book.

What is it with the plants anyway? They never appeared (AFAIK) until GW 3rd ed, and they weren't in 5th ed (the Alternity version), so it's not like they've been there since day 1 anyway...

cheers
Geoff

 

[MrFilthyIke]

What is it with the plants anyway?

Hey, who WOULDN'T want to be a plant. All the food you
need is under your feed, you've got a great excuse to bask in the sun
during the day, nobody EXPECTS anything from you...cos you're a freakin'
plant!

It's like being back in college!

 

[Krieg]

Can we please put this issue to rest?

Mutant plants as PCs aren't going to be in the new edition. It was - I believe - actually part of the licencing agreement between WotC and S&SS. The powers that be felt that plant PCs were just too goofy from a market perspective (this is what I was told about 12 months ago).

In all honesty WHY should it be put to rest?

If many old time GW fans have a desire for Plant PCs, shouldn't they let their voices be heard?

Just because the increasingly out of touch marketing folks at Hasbro make a decree doesn't mean that the fans of the game should quietly accept the status quo.

 

[BruceB]

I'm most interested in how folks will react to the brand-new material. Anyone yet read the Blowing Up Your Neighborhood or Gamma World Campaign preview downloads at Sword & Sorcery, and if so, got any comments or questions?

 

[Lizard]

In all honesty WHY should it be put to rest?

If many old time GW fans have a desire for Plant PCs, shouldn't they let their voices be heard?

Just because the increasingly out of touch marketing folks at Hasbro make a decree doesn't mean that the fans of the game should quietly accept the status quo.

Well, the odds of the published books being recalled, pulped, getting rules for plant PCs added in, then sent out again, are...uhm...pretty slim. So complaining about them not being in the core book is, at this point, akin to complaining about Lincoln winning the 1860 election. It's as over and done as anything gets.

BUT...

There's a lot you can do. You could, for example, work up some variant rules and submit them to WW/Sword&Sorcery for possible web inclusion. D20 GW isn't under the OGL, but, if you were careful, you could probably find a way to write OGC rules for "Mutant Plants In Postapocalyptic Games" without violating anything. You could create a "mutant plant" base race for your house games and use the standard rules otherwise, just allowing or disallowing certain mutations on the basis of whether or not they worked for plants.

 

[BruceB]

In all honesty WHY should it be put to rest?

If many old time GW fans have a desire for Plant PCs, shouldn't they let their voices be heard?

Well, in my case the answer is "Because I'd have to drop out of the discussion."

There's really not much to say on the subject, and my authors and I have addressed all the things that there are to say. The words that might have gone to the depth of mechanics and advice I'd consider necessary for plant PCs went to other things, some of which you can find at the Sword & Sorcery GW site and at Wolf Spoor - the community mechanics, the explicit discussion of consequences to a campaign for various levels of available pre-war technology, the d20 standard for scope of coverage in monster writeups as shown with the arn and the yexil, and so on.

If the absence of plant PCs really breaks the game for anyone, then I'm sorry to hear it. But they're not going appear in any of the books, and so if plant PCs are crucial for your enjoyment of the game, then please don't purchase them. Purchase them only if there might be some hope of joy or at least satisfaction in all the rest. (Note that the monsters chapter alone is longer than the entire first edition of Gamma World.)

And if your satisfaction depends on continuing to demand something you won't get, then I'll have to bow out. My time and energy are finite, and I can't keep endlessly repeating a single set of answers. The answers won't change no matter how often someone asks - there's simply nothing more to say. All that repetition can do as far as I personally am concerned is make the forum uninteresting to me. Not that I think developer participation should be anyone else's first priority. Indeed, someone may well consider it an active advantage to drive the creators away so as to have a discussion consisting purely of people who don't know about how the game came to be, only about what it is in its end results. I would just prefer that it not come to that - I'd really rather talk about what is in the new edition and how it might be used. Hopefully, quite soon, about how it IS BEING used as people get campaigns running.

Plant PCs are not in the game because the people with the authority to approve the project didn't want them there, feeling that they broke with the general style the folks in charge wanted for this edition. And I took their absence as opportunity to get that much more in depth with other subjects. That's it, really.

 

[Krieg]

Well, the odds of the published books being recalled, pulped, getting rules for plant PCs added in, then sent out again, are...uhm...pretty slim. So complaining about them not being in the core book is, at this point, akin to complaining about Lincoln winning the 1860 election. It's as over and done as anything gets.

BUT...

There's a lot you can do. You could, for example, work up some variant rules and submit them to WW/Sword&Sorcery for possible web inclusion. D20 GW isn't under the OGL, but, if you were careful, you could probably find a way to write OGC rules for "Mutant Plants In Postapocalyptic Games" without violating anything. You could create a "mutant plant" base race for your house games and use the standard rules otherwise, just allowing or disallowing certain mutations on the basis of whether or not they worked for plants.

Well said & FWIW I don't really disagree with you. My main point is that if there is enough people who REALLY want the option available to them then they should feel free to let the designers know it.

Customer feedback is and should be a major motivating factor for anyone trying to sell a product to said customers.

If the attitude is "if you don't like it, don't buy it & get bent" then that lets me know that it isn't a company that I want to do business with.

Customers & designers share a symbiotic relationship, it certainly behooved the designer to remember that it is in his best interest to nurture that relationship.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I can live without plant PCs. They're silly. I don't understand why everyone getting hung up on such an insignifficant issue.