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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zerovoid" data-source="post: 150918" data-attributes="member: 283">I definately don't want to see d20 destroy all other roleplaying systems.  There are some things it just won't do very well, although by discarding rules, and adding rules, and having only one class, etc... you can manage to express any game as d20.The one thing that you can never change about d20 is that you roll a d20 + some modifiers.  If this beats the DC, you accomplish whatever task you are trying to do.  Well, what if you don't want a flat probability distribution?  In real life, people do things pretty average most of the time.  There are good reasons 1 or 20 should not be as common as a 10 or 11.  Now, you can still do this in d20, but you would have to plug the modifiers and DC into some other formula designed to emulate rolling 3d6, or 2d10, or some kind of dice pool.A lot of other things are in d20 that do not support a realistic style of play.  HP's, levels, etc...  Again, you can fix this, but then what do you have left?The thing I see as most fundamental about d20 is the drastic increase in power as characters gain level.  Basically, in d20, character effectiveness ~= level^2.  You can see this by looking at the spell lists, or just thinking about how many 1st level fighters a 20th level fighter is worth.  If you want a system where effectiveness increases at some rate less than linear, d20 will not work very well.  Alot of the other systems, such as GURPS, WW, Hero, BESM, etc... have this slower rate of advancement.  I think this is the biggest single obstacle making everything be d20.I like the idea of standardization, but I'd like the market to be divided into 3-5 standard open gaming systems, instead of just one.  There needs to be at least one system besides d20, to allow for a slower rate of advancement of character ability.Also, I agree that d20 still has too much baggage from DnD.  Rolling a d20 to determine success is very elegant, but there are a lot of things that don't use this system.  Falling damage, spell failure chance, etc...  To use a computer programming metaphor, I would rather see a simple and elegant system like scheme/lisp, instead of a language with lots of special cases like C++/Java.</blockquote>

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