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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5492940" data-attributes="member: 93119">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.</blockquote>

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