D20 Modern & Spycraft

[Chingerspy]

Hi,

I have a pretty large Spycraft collection but have recently been bitten by the bug to purchase PDFs from rpgnow. Great another outlet for my money I have a few wonderful documents now and more to get but its lead me to a quick question for you all...

Is the D20 Modern book worth getting if I already have lots of Spycraft? I also have the Stargate book.

I have not had much experience with D20 Modern, only playing with the rules in a homebrew setting ran at a local con. I liked some of the ideas but didn't immediately see any advantages over the Spycraft rules. Is it a case of stick to what I know and convert or are there some decent crunchy bits in D20 Modern and the purchase of the book is worth the hassle of not having to convert everything?

 

[ragboy]

Hi,

I have a pretty large Spycraft collection but have recently been bitten by the bug to purchase PDFs from rpgnow. Great another outlet for my money I have a few wonderful documents now and more to get but its lead me to a quick question for you all...

Is the D20 Modern book worth getting if I already have lots of Spycraft? I also have the Stargate book.

I have not had much experience with D20 Modern, only playing with the rules in a homebrew setting ran at a local con. I liked some of the ideas but didn't immediately see any advantages over the Spycraft rules. Is it a case of stick to what I know and convert or are there some decent crunchy bits in D20 Modern and the purchase of the book is worth the hassle of not having to convert everything?

It depends on what you want to do with your modern gaming. Spycraft is very genre focused. d20 Modern is not. In fact, d20 Modern is about as vanilla as you can get. There are some toggling mechanisms for high magic/low magic and gritty/fantastic type games. The d20 Modern book presents three campaign settings (horror-ala Buffy, arcane-ala D&D modern day, and one other one I can't remember at the moment), but the rules are set up to run a modern game however you want.

I really like Spycraft, and there are some rules I stole right out of there for my modern game (including the 'mood' in some adventures - but specifically the chase rules), but like you probably already know...it's a spy game. If no one wants to play spy, then you're out of luck.

I was leery of purchasing d20 Modern, but it totally converted me when I started creating characters from movies (Kill Bill 1 and 2). It scales pretty well, and you can bolt on any genre you want. And, in that, you can please most of the players most of the time. Still waiting on d20 Future...and waiting...and waiting...grrr.

Oh. Check out some of the story hours in my sig for d20 Modern in action.

 

[Chingerspy]

Thanks for the response man. I am looking at running a modern day military spec ops game. I have the so far excellent Blood & Guts PDFs, these are Modern specific. I also have the two Countdown PDFs - read Winter Kill and it was very well done IMO so hence wanting to run them. The Countdowns are more Spycraft friendly including stat blocks and rules varients throughout.

I guess I will pick up Modern tomorrow or at the weekend then, I just didn't fancy the £24 price tag too much and wanted to know the major difference between it and Spycraft - which I think you presented me with in your post.

I've had a leaf through Future. It sounds good, not wanting to de-rail my own thread but I would looooooove to use it for a Bill The Galactic Hero campaign (Harry Harrison ) That purchase will have to wait a bit though!

 

[trancejeremy]

I think there are a couple of military books coming out for Spycraft.

I like d20 Modern's broad focus, but IMHO, as a game, it's just not that great. They made it too much like D&D, which is good for compatibility, but not great in a modern game.

Like hit points, and how armor works. I also think they tried to make the d20 Modern classes to be comparable to D&D classes, but this results in a lot of broken things. For instance, strong martial artists are better with guns than gunfighters or soldiers. Almost no one has that many skill points. Etc.

OTOH, it's hard to run anything but a spy game with Spycraft. And only certain types of spy games. The classes aren't very broad at all.

 

[Masada]

Save the dough and look at the SRD first. You can look over the rules and decide if you want to buy the book.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/msrd

That includes a ton of material from Urban Arcana and Menace Manual.

 

[ragboy]

Thanks for the response man. I am looking at running a modern day military spec ops game. I have the so far excellent Blood & Guts PDFs, these are Modern specific. I also have the two Countdown PDFs - read Winter Kill and it was very well done IMO so hence wanting to run them. The Countdowns are more Spycraft friendly including stat blocks and rules varients throughout.

If you're running a modern day realistic spec ops game, you'll probably want to tweak several aspects of d20 Modern. Not sure how Blood and Guts handles it, but the d20 Modern weapons are not geared toward a realistic modern military game, especially the heavy weapons and heavy vehicles (tanks and such). Take a look at a few of top threads (currently) in the d20 forum (one about guns and another about WP/VP) for suggestions from others that have a lot more experience with the system than me.

I guess I will pick up Modern tomorrow or at the weekend then, I just didn't fancy the £24 price tag too much and wanted to know the major difference between it and Spycraft - which I think you presented me with in your post.

No problem. If you're not in a hurry, you may be able to pick up d20 modern on ebay for a bargain. I got a gently used copy for $10 a couple of weeks ago.

I've had a leaf through Future. It sounds good, not wanting to de-rail my own thread but I would looooooove to use it for a Bill The Galactic Hero campaign (Harry Harrison ) That purchase will have to wait a bit though!

I've got so many d20 Future ideas they're leaking out of my head. Too many sci-fi books to name + a bunch of homegrown stuff from Star Frontiers and others. My copy should be here on Friday...

 

[Chingerspy]

Thanks for the SRD link.
I'll have a look through it, already had a quick one and it seems to have everything bar the setting info which I don't need from what has already been said, I mean I have the setting info in the media daily at the moment!

It seems that I really just need the rules and not the fluff that probably makes up a fair chunk of the book? I'll grab the RTF files from WOTC and see if the Blood and Guts stuff start to make more sense. I won't need any creatures or magic either so I am guessing thats a 3rd of the book useless in respect to my current ideas.

I've just been reading the other posts at the top of this forum, some good stuff in there, I was particularly interested in the military NPC creation thread.

 

[ragboy]

I think there are a couple of military books coming out for Spycraft.

Oooo. When?

I like d20 Modern's broad focus, but IMHO, as a game, it's just not that great. They made it too much like D&D, which is good for compatibility, but not great in a modern game..

I think it has more potential than Spycraft (or D&D) for building any type of genre modern/historical game you want. The advanced classes are very generic and can be easily tweaked. The basic classes are by definition generic. Don't get me wrong, I really like Spycraft, especially the way that adventures/campaigns are built, but in the end, it's a spy game.

Like hit points, and how armor works. I also think they tried to make the d20 Modern classes to be comparable to D&D classes, but this results in a lot of broken things. For instance, strong martial artists are better with guns than gunfighters or soldiers. Almost no one has that many skill points. Etc.
.

This is being hotly debated in a lot of different venues. (not sure I understand the 'strong martial artist' comment. I guess you mean because their BAB advances at every level from Strong to Martial Artist. But still, you're taking some feats (or at least one feat) that doesn't jive with your character type. And soldiers and gunslingers are taking feats that make them much more effective at weilding guns.) I think the biggest thing that's perceived as 'broken' is that d20 Modern is toggled to a pretty high (read D&D) cinematic level. It's still melee focused, rather than guns (which is counterintuitive to the modern setting in most genre games), and it's meant for that four-person team of cross-specialized skills (including magic/FX). The tweaks to get it down to a nitty gritty level or even up to an anime level don't look that hard. I haven't had a lot of playing time in the system yet, though, so I may encounter the same problems you're mentioning.

 

[Chingerspy]

Alderac Link

US Militaries and World Militaries. Just compiled some of the SRD rtfs into Word and printing them off, will have a read of some before sleep sets in... no cat naps for me tonight, I'm shattered!

Thanks for all the assistance tonight people!

 

[Karl Green]

I personally like D20 Modern better then Spycraft. I have played both a lot, and after a while I was very turned off with VP/WP and much prefer the MDT =CON better. There are a couple of things that you can twick with D20Modern that can make it more realistic... the best one is that the more damage from one hit the higher the MDT save will be. Just makes more sense to me...

Now I do like DR better then AC bonus but that is not that hard to do, especially if you use the ideas from UA...