D20 modern worth it?

[Voneth]

Well, I'm sorry d20M is not what many of you wanted. It is no fault of WOTC however.

Never said it was WotC’s fault. Call it targeting your audience, call it pandering, the company was shooting for certain customer and I think they hit it on the mark. Unfortunately, that mark missed me.

And if the book isn’t aimed at your needs, then is it worth to purchase?

It fell exactly where I wanted it to fall, and that makes one little Trainz quite happy.

Then obviously it was worth YOUR money.

The more rules, the more people wont have it exactly as they expected. Less rules, and it will be closer to the masses expectations.

I tend to disagree with you here. It seems that MORE rules create more loyalty to a game, if the rules are internally consistency. The HERO system has survived beyond several companies and is in a 5th edition. And one of the keys to getting HERO is how to read results on the 6 sided dice. Hmmm. Sound familiar. 2nd edition had a ton of rules that had no internal consistency and they flopped. 3e, thanks to the OGL stuff now has TONS of rules thanks to 3rd party stuff, and most of it has consistent mechanics. In fact, some 3rd party companies get an earful if people don’t perceive their material to be compatible enough (d20 SAS.) For WoTC this is a good thing. It means other companies get the loss in profits if 3rd party rule changes don’t make the cut.

In fact, I beleive that to make it 100% popular, you'd end up with a piece of paper saying:"To succeed at things in d20M, roll a d20. Create the rest of the rules as suits your campaign". And even then, you'd end up with people saying :"ach... I hate d 20's, I wiched they'd used d 6's...". . [/B]

Nahhh.
They’d just demand a lot of errata.

I think that the 6 core classes are one of the smartest moves WOTC have made for d20M. They allow you to create absolutely any character concept.

Yeah, if you want to stay closely hewn to DND roots. There are other d20 publishers who now offer more flexibility at the risk of offering more radical rules. My current taste is to go with more radical. Got those rules, I'm happy and moved on.

 

[Bagpuss]

And even then, you'd end up with people saying :"ach... I hate d 20's, I wiched they'd used d 6's...".

Well 3d6 does produce a nicer bell-curve

 

[Unseelie]

Nahhh.
They’d just demand a lot of errata.

Hey, if I wanted errata I'd still be playing MegaTraveller and Star Fleet Battles.

 

[Mistwell]

Re: Making d20M a single-class system

For what it's worth, I believe they are working on this idea on the d20 Modern mailing list right now.

 

[threshel]

Let me start by saying something that I haven't heard anyone say yet: I have actually used d20 Modern.

To answer the original question: modern? Definitely, especially if you like the d20 rules already. sci-fi? You'll need more than this book, as it's intended purpose isn't sci-fi. Note here that I follow the strict interpretation of the meaning of science fiction, and there are very few instances of real science fiction in popular culture.

Last weekend, I started my campaign. It's set in the modern world, and like takyris plans on doing with his campaign, I told them nothing about were the campaign was going to go. (One thing that I did do was to let everyone know that any knowledge or lore based skills having to do with the supernatural would basically be useless in the game until they had picked up some ranks post-supernatural-stuff introduction. This was due to the nature of the supernatural stuff in my campaign, i.e. it was not based on known mythology, folklore, etc.)

We had a BLAST!

Some things I liked:

-The generic class names. In most class based games, when I ask my players to tell me about their characters, the first thing out of their mouths is a class name - "Well, he's a fighter..." In this game, I got character descriptions - "Well, he's a new age pop-psychologist/self-help guru who relies on his personality rather than his knowledge." Immersion city.

-The fact that WOTC stuck to their guns and delivered a cinematic, streamlined combat system, and didn't muck it up with "realism." I love the new Massive Damage Threshold, it keeps people from standing out in the open and eating bullets one by one. We had a good, old-fashioned, behind the car doors gunfight, and it was noted how just that one rule (MDT) made characters behave more rationally.

-Two of my players are GURPS vets, and one in particular had expressed concern over a level-based modern game. As is usually the case with such concerns, it was just a case of "never done it that way" rather than "system can't handle the genre." They both, and indeed everyone, had a great time.

As for the book itself, I think it is the best rendition of the d20 mechanic out there. It's streamlined, refined, and solves some of the problems introduced in the original. The book is gorgeous, and easy to navigate.

In the introduction, the authors state that the intention for the d20 Modern game was to emulate action movies. I think it does this quite well. I don't have any problems with it that I didn't already have with d20, and they're minor, anyway.

To end, a rebuttal:

"It isn't worth a whole new book." What if I don't want to buy D&D, but want the advantages of the open gaming system in a modern game? What if I'm (gasp!) a new customer. Y'know, I think that the whole "they could've done it smaller cause we've got everything already" attitude is short-sighted. Marketing to those that have all the stuff already is what Killed (that's right, with a capital K) TSR. Besides that, reviewing a book based on what you already own makes no sense to me. Neither does the phrase "realistic rpg." Realistic? Realism is what I get when I walk out the front door. As one of my players says "Don't put your realism into my fantasy." NOTE: He's not talking about the genre "fantasy," but refering to what you do when you play: "fantasizing."

Have a killer (DM) day.

J

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

No, reviews are opinions not facts. Just like a messageboard!

Read closer, that was my point. I spent a paragraph or so making it.


As far as having one generic class... It's an interesting idea, but I'm not missing it in it's absence.

I have GURPS, it's ok I guess. How you can have so many rules and so little structure is mind boggling.

 

[Hollywood]

Yeah, if you want to stay closely hewn to DND roots. There are other d20 publishers who now offer more flexibility at the risk of offering more radical rules.

Well, yeah, more radical rules in comparison to d20, but stuff thats been done for many years too. Picked up M&M just because of that [its OGL too] and have Traveller [I remember the old Traveller box and have fond memories] too because I want the game for keepsake, but also to explore their services and "pre-adventuring history" concept.

I have GURPS, it's ok I guess. How you can have so many rules and so little structure is mind boggling.

Yes, GURPs has way too many rules. But so does D&D [ala d20] in many cases and many other systems. The less abstract you get and the more you concetrate on the individual character, the more rules you end up generating.

I love the new Massive Damage Threshold

How so? The only change is its based on Constitution score not an abstract number [although I use the size variant from the DMG].

I think it is the best rendition of the d20 mechanic out there

Still missing called shots and body specific hits. To me, this is extremely important when you talk about modern and sci-fi settings which almost exclusively use ranged weapons and people are always hiding behind things. When you hide, there are limited parts of the body to shoot at.

As one of my players says "Don't put your realism into my fantasy."

Dunno, my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. I don't necessarily want exacting realism, but would prefer the abstract system to follow the generally follow the lines of realism so that things make sense. Unless of course the setting is all about NOT making any sense as our human brains understand it.

 

[Unseelie]

Still missing called shots and body specific hits. To me, this is extremely important when you talk about modern and sci-fi settings which almost exclusively use ranged weapons and people are always hiding behind things. When you hide, there are limited parts of the body to shoot at.

Exactly, which is why they get a cover bonus... there's less to hit, therefore they're harder to hit.

d20 combat is abstract when it comes to whether you hit or not. Armor adds defense because it's 'more difficult to hit them and do damage'. If you roll high for damage, you hit them where you can do more damage.

I don't see the problem. d20M is effectively a hollywood action movie RPG... not ultra-realistic.

 

[Henry]

Learning d20M is like learning Spanish to an English speaker. Learning Cyberpunk is like learning Chinese to an English speaker.

Even closer than that - we're not even talking completely different languages, more like dialects of the same one!

 

[Henry]

Still missing called shots and body specific hits. To me, this is extremely important when you talk about modern and sci-fi settings which almost exclusively use ranged weapons and people are always hiding behind things. When you hide, there are limited parts of the body to shoot at.[/B]

My only difficulty with this is that I have not yet seen it implemented in any game in such a way as to be easy to use.

I have looked at GURPS, Alternity, Rolemaster, Harnmaster, and several D&D variants trying to do this thing - and every one of them was too slow, too chart oriented, amd destroyed the action. To me, heroes are supposed to rise above these kinds of things, a la Wesley and Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride.

Dunno, my suspension of disbelief only goes so far. I don't necessarily want exacting realism, but would prefer the abstract system to follow the generally follow the lines of realism so that things make sense. Unless of course the setting is all about NOT making any sense as our human brains understand it.

This comes down to where d20 Modern is placed. My contention is that, having read the d20 Modern book, that the system comes down pretty firmly in "TV reality" - the reality you get from action shows all the way from "Chips" to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." There is a laundry list of TV shows that d20 modern could emulate with little trouble.

However, Ryan Dancey made an excellent point about this at www.gamingreport.com - if there were a system as easy to use as hit points, that had specific wound locations, but did not slow the heroes down appreciably as to prevent them from taking heroic actions despite their disabilities - I would be all over it in a flash, and d20 Modern would be the primary candidate for such a system.