pawsplay
Hero
Eh? We ran a campaign 1st to 12th, no deaths.
"Fixing" d20 Modern - The Definitive Thread
Eh? We ran a campaign 1st to 12th, no deaths.
Patryn of Elvenshae
First Post
Man - you dodged some bullets. (Get it?)
Basically, the way criticals work, and the way weapon damage rolls work, a large percentage of the party will die to one-shot critical hits before reaching 20th-level. (Obviously, about half as many will die before reaching 12th.)
This does not include any deaths from running out of VP, spaceliner explosions, poor tactical planning, etc. - just the relatively unavoidable 1-shot-crit-to-WP deaths.
Grek K said:
Really? I always thought that Jedi essentially killing themselves to pull off somewhat minor tricks, and the tendency to pick one trick and do it repeatedly, failed to really capture the way the movies and the novels portrayed things.
Making each individual power its own skill also made it difficult to be able to do things with the Force and mundanely, so you ended up with Jedi as idiot-savants, which failed the movie test for me, as well.
I like Saga's Force Power suite much better for emulating movie, etc., fights.
pawsplay
Hero
Since there are few level 20 characters in Star Wars, that works out really well.
Really? Does Kenobi do anything other than Force Slam in Phantom Menace? What about Vader and his telekinesis? And Sidious... why does it always gotta be lightning?
That only happened if the player stubbornly refused to sink a few ranks in useful skills here and there. The upshot is that other than the Force and one or two other areas of interest, the Jedi tend to leave other characters' skill niches alone.
I think it worked pretty okay, except that some things didn't really rate their own skills.
delericho
Legend
There's a burst of speed on the Federation ship (which, curiously, he didn't use again when it would have been really useful, and would have saved Qui-Gon's life). There was a force jump when fighting Darth Maul (who had the higher ground...). He held his breath to avoid the poison gas.
And we also know he can do the standard Jedi mind trick - presumably he didn't use it in TPM because Qui-Gon was just better at it.
Patryn of Elvenshae
First Post
Yes, really. In any given fight, how many times does Obi-wan use Force Slam (or Force Jump, etc.)?
Once. Maaaaaaybe twice.
Contrast this with RCR Jedi, who pick one trick and then spam it until they run out of VP or until their targets fall down.
delericho
Legend
A topic that has been much on my mind lately: they should probably recalibrate the skill system and/or DCs.
In d20 Modern, it's possible to build a 1st level character who can Jump better than our World Record holders. (Amusingly, the best way to do this seems to be using the Dedicated Hero: Skill emphasis for +3, Run feat and Acrobatic feat for +2 each, Athlete background to make Jump a class skill, and 4 ranks. That gives a +11 bonus without any Str bonus at all.)
Now, the same feat can be achieved in any version of D&D post 3.0e, in any version of Star Wars, and so on. However, those are all clearly fantastical games. d20 Modern isn't quite the same beast, and it would probably be better to put the limits of real-world human ability somewhere higher on the level range.
(It can be achieved two ways: either up the DCs, or reduce the ability to super-optimise characters. Either can work. My preference is probably for the latter, in general, following the 4e/SWSE pattern of advancement in skills. But the designers should probably use the records to set the extreme DCs (30 is good), then decide at what level they want PCs to be able to match this, and then set the options up accordingly.)
In d20 Modern, it's possible to build a 1st level character who can Jump better than our World Record holders. (Amusingly, the best way to do this seems to be using the Dedicated Hero: Skill emphasis for +3, Run feat and Acrobatic feat for +2 each, Athlete background to make Jump a class skill, and 4 ranks. That gives a +11 bonus without any Str bonus at all.)
Now, the same feat can be achieved in any version of D&D post 3.0e, in any version of Star Wars, and so on. However, those are all clearly fantastical games. d20 Modern isn't quite the same beast, and it would probably be better to put the limits of real-world human ability somewhere higher on the level range.
(It can be achieved two ways: either up the DCs, or reduce the ability to super-optimise characters. Either can work. My preference is probably for the latter, in general, following the 4e/SWSE pattern of advancement in skills. But the designers should probably use the records to set the extreme DCs (30 is good), then decide at what level they want PCs to be able to match this, and then set the options up accordingly.)
(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
I think you should use another skill as an example. Jump is ridiculous. Any character with Strength 10, no feats or talents and no ranks in Jump at all can make a running 10 foot jump very easily. Then again, Jump was ridiculous in 3.x too.
When implementing a W/VP system for d20 modern I didn't go with pure RCR.
1: firearm damage was only increased by 1 die step, instead of adding a 3rd die.
2: Armor provides both hardness and conversion to non lethal damage equal to its rating.
3: A character can spend action points to convert some lethal damage to non lethal damage when hit (non lethal damage still takes off vitality).
This makes a critical kill against a hero less likely, significantly so if they bother to invest in armor.
1: firearm damage was only increased by 1 die step, instead of adding a 3rd die.
2: Armor provides both hardness and conversion to non lethal damage equal to its rating.
3: A character can spend action points to convert some lethal damage to non lethal damage when hit (non lethal damage still takes off vitality).
This makes a critical kill against a hero less likely, significantly so if they bother to invest in armor.
giant.robot
Adventurer
For the most part I think Spycraft is a much better put together game than d20 Modern and has a lot of the features I would add to it.
In Spycraft armor provides a minimal bonus to defense and instead it's protection is in the form of DR. The concept of armor making it more difficult to do damage to someone makes sense when you're talking about melee combat. AC/defense is an abstraction of your character dodging or performing minor parries against attacks and some measure of protection your armor gives against a glancing blow actually causing damage. This doesn't make sense with modern soft body armor. Soft body armor doesn't help you "roll with the punch" but instead reduces the penetration damage of a bullet hitting you.
It also has a wound/vitality point system. I like this system better than straight hit points because characters face penalties when they're out of vitality points. They could end up unconscious (but alive) and at least end up with strength penalties showing that they are winded from absorbing damage and rolling with punches. Like the Star Wars RCRB supernatural powers in d20 Modern should be powered by vitality points. This would mean you use supernatural abilities at the risk of becoming vulnerable in combat.
In either game I would like to see firearms do a bit more damage in relation to the average number of WP/VP characters have. With a Con of 10 a character would have 10WP and 10VP. If they get hit square in the chest with a 9mm service pistol they'll only suffer at best 12 damage and on average 7. This means a 1st level character with no body armor can not only take a gunshot to the torso and keep going but suffers no ill effects.
I don't know that guns should do more damage but maybe they should just have a much wider critical threat range. This lets higher level characters maintain their level dependent plot armor (vitality points) but face a real danger of a lucky shot by a mook doing significant damage to them. This will inspire characters to take cover when the guns come out.
As already mentioned I find the d20 Modern talent trees and existing classes to be lacking. I'd like to see V-shaped base classes and more interesting talent trees. I like the way occupations fit into the generic classes (like Lenses in GURPS) and expand the number of them.
I'd also push more specific skills into talents or feats. This would cut the skill list down but then let characters have specialties. Two characters could have high Computer Use skills but one of them has Hacker feats/talents while the other is a historian with Research feats/talents. In general both can use computers well but the hacker character excels as hacking while the historian is better at data mining and research. Since their feat/talents wouldn't be tied to specific skills their Hacking or Research abilities could provided bonuses to different skill checks in situations where they were germane. Hacking could also provide a bonus to bluff checks when doing some social engineering or an insight check when looking for where the executive wrote down his password.
In Spycraft armor provides a minimal bonus to defense and instead it's protection is in the form of DR. The concept of armor making it more difficult to do damage to someone makes sense when you're talking about melee combat. AC/defense is an abstraction of your character dodging or performing minor parries against attacks and some measure of protection your armor gives against a glancing blow actually causing damage. This doesn't make sense with modern soft body armor. Soft body armor doesn't help you "roll with the punch" but instead reduces the penetration damage of a bullet hitting you.
It also has a wound/vitality point system. I like this system better than straight hit points because characters face penalties when they're out of vitality points. They could end up unconscious (but alive) and at least end up with strength penalties showing that they are winded from absorbing damage and rolling with punches. Like the Star Wars RCRB supernatural powers in d20 Modern should be powered by vitality points. This would mean you use supernatural abilities at the risk of becoming vulnerable in combat.
In either game I would like to see firearms do a bit more damage in relation to the average number of WP/VP characters have. With a Con of 10 a character would have 10WP and 10VP. If they get hit square in the chest with a 9mm service pistol they'll only suffer at best 12 damage and on average 7. This means a 1st level character with no body armor can not only take a gunshot to the torso and keep going but suffers no ill effects.
I don't know that guns should do more damage but maybe they should just have a much wider critical threat range. This lets higher level characters maintain their level dependent plot armor (vitality points) but face a real danger of a lucky shot by a mook doing significant damage to them. This will inspire characters to take cover when the guns come out.
As already mentioned I find the d20 Modern talent trees and existing classes to be lacking. I'd like to see V-shaped base classes and more interesting talent trees. I like the way occupations fit into the generic classes (like Lenses in GURPS) and expand the number of them.
I'd also push more specific skills into talents or feats. This would cut the skill list down but then let characters have specialties. Two characters could have high Computer Use skills but one of them has Hacker feats/talents while the other is a historian with Research feats/talents. In general both can use computers well but the hacker character excels as hacking while the historian is better at data mining and research. Since their feat/talents wouldn't be tied to specific skills their Hacking or Research abilities could provided bonuses to different skill checks in situations where they were germane. Hacking could also provide a bonus to bluff checks when doing some social engineering or an insight check when looking for where the executive wrote down his password.
The answer is interpretation; if a guy was attacked but is fine, mechanically (just lost some hit points), then he obviously didn't "take a gunshot to the torso". He was clipped, or whatever. In-fiction description comes after we determine the mechanical result, because it's a game.
Conversely, if the fiction says definitively that he "took a gunshot to the torso", you don't treat it as an attack and damage roll, you just apply the result of that, the character is dead or severely wounded (and probably dying) at best. This is not something you do as part of gameplay, but as consensus of the group during non-"gamed" narration. Maybe they come upon a helpless foe and determine they want to dispatch him; they do, no invocation of game mechanics is necessary.
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