Grade the Modiphius 2d20 System

[Yora]

I flipped through the Conan 2d20 rules twice and knew that I really did not want to invest any time in trying to understand how the game works. It seemed very unsuited for a Conan game due to appearing overly complex. No clue if it might be decent for other applications.

 

[Reynard]

I flipped through the Conan 2d20 rules twice and knew that I really did not want to invest any time in trying to understand how the game works. It seemed very unsuited for a Conan game due to appearing overly complex. No clue if it might be decent for other applications.

This the sort of "analysis" I find frustrating: admitting making next to no effort but still making a proclamation. Maddening.

Also: who says Conan game requires simplicity?

 

[Parmandur]

This the sort of "analysis" I find frustrating: admitting making next to no effort but still making a proclamation. Maddening.

Also: who says Conan game requires simplicity?

I think when people say that about 2d20 Conan, what they mean is that they as Conan fans wanted a game like DCC Lankhmar or DCC Dying Earth.

 

[damiller]

This the sort of "analysis" I find frustrating: admitting making next to no effort but still making a proclamation. Maddening.

Also: who says Conan game requires simplicity?

I found Conan very complex for what I wanted from a pulp genre angle. For me the pulps were broad brushed and I found the complexity at odds with the theme.

That said. I had wished that the simplifying they did with John Carter had been applied to Conan. THEN I would have ate that game up. Wasn't much a fan of John Carter.

 

[schneeland]

Also: who says Conan game requires simplicity?

Conan tells us what's best in life and reading complicated rules tomes is not among the things he lists

More seriously: I acknowledge that it is, for the most part, simply a matter of preference. Personally, when I think of Conan, then I think of pulpy, fast-paced action in a sword&sorcery world, and I would like to see that reflected in the rules. DCC Hyboria, as @Parmandur suggests, would work for me. My immediate choice for a foundation would probably be Barbarians of Lemuria. Having recently read Neon City Overdrive (and half of Hard City), I could imagine an adaptation its light-weight, narrative system, to work well, too.

 

[overgeeked]

I found Conan very complex for what I wanted from a pulp genre angle. For me the pulps were broad brushed and I found the complexity at odds with the theme.

That said. I had wished that the simplifying they did with John Carter had been applied to Conan. THEN I would have ate that game up.

Conan tells us what's best in life and reading complicated rules tomes is not among the things he names

More seriously: I acknowledge that it is, for the most part, simply a matter of preference. Personally, when I think of Conan, then I think of pulpy, fast-paced action in a sword&sorcery world, and I would like to see that reflected in the rules. DCC Hyboria, as @Parmandur suggests, would work for me. My immediate choice for a foundation would probably be Barbarians of Lemuria. Having recently read Neon City Overdrive (and half of Hard City), I could imagine an adaptation its light-weight, narrative system, to work well, too.

Exactly. Conan is as pulpy as it gets. A fast-paced action-adventure game with minimal rules getting in the way of the action is a fairly obvious starting place. As I said up thread, John Carter would be my absolute max on heavy rules for something like Conan. As much as I love DCC RPG, I think Barbarians of Lemuria is a far, far better system for something like Conan.

 

[Reynard]

Conan tells us what's best in life and reading complicated rules tomes is not among the things he names

More seriously: I acknowledge that it is, for the most part, simply a matter of preference. Personally, when I think of Conan, then I think of pulpy, fast-paced action in a sword&sorcery world, and I would like to see that reflected in the rules. DCC Hyboria, as @Parmandur suggests, would work for me. My immediate choice for a foundation would probably be Barbarians of Lemuria. Having recently read Neon City Overdrive (and half of Hard City), I could imagine an adaptation its light-weight, narrative system, to work well, too.

It's interesting. I'm a big Howard and Conan fan, too, and when I think of Conan from the actual stories (as opposed to comics and other media) I often think about how deliberate it is. He (unsurprisingly) dungeon delves like an D&D character. I think some crunch in combat is good for that milieu too because it helps differentiate what would otherwise be pretty similar characters in a lighter system.

 

[schneeland]

I think some crunch in combat is good for that milieu too because it helps differentiate what would otherwise be pretty similar characters in a lighter system.

I guess that's one of the key differences between our perspectives: I don't really feel I need a lot of mechanical distinction in combat for a Conan system. If Conan is a bulky fighter and thief, and Belit is a slender thief and sailor, then it's fine for me if Conan is good at stuff related to combat and skulduggery, and Belit excels at seafaring-related tasks, but is also competent in terms of larceny (both would probably be equally competent at climbing the tower of the elephant). I don't actually need them to be good at different weapons or such a thing - each character would just use what makes sense for them narratively.

 

[Kannik]

I've played ST:A, read through Dune, and from that perspective I rate it as "Pretty good minus." It's got a a Margin of Success core resolution system, Momentum is both a fun mechanic to play with and has some nifty ways to leverage it, ST:A (mostly) matches the source material feel, Dune's design seems properly broad (able to shift from personal action to more 'abstract' scale of inter-planetary action/politics/etc), and there are plenty of options. On the other hand, the die rolling is a bit fiddly (a roll-under base, having to look for total numbers as well as whether you rolled under your discipline to get 2 successes, the funky effect/damage dice), in ST:A it feels like Values could have been leveraged more/more often (as these kinds of questions are often the core of the show's stories, and more narrative tools like that would have it work even more completely), and the common 'thousands of talents' design issue.

I really enjoyed playing in our ST:A game (even made an opening sequence video that we'd run to start each session!) and despite the items I noted above (and thinking of some other systems) I would still happily play in it again. And I would also be very keen on trying Dune to see how it runs under that flavour of 2d20.

(Also... how amazingly funny is it that Last Unicorn Games had the Trek License and got the Dune license to be released under the same system, and now, decades later, another gaming company has gotten the same two licenses released under the same game system? )

Edit: Oh, and to answer Clever's question above, I would indeed recommend ST:A as the game to use to try out the 2d20 system.

 

[MGibster]

I really cannot stand it. It’s far too complicated. The lightest version they’ve done, John Carter, is still far too complicated. And pointlessly so. STA and Conan are just absurdly heavy versions of the system. Robert E. Howard is one of my favorite writers and I absolutely love Conan.

I own both Fallout and Conan from Modophius but have only played the former thus far. The 2d20 system is a lot easier to understand with Fallout than it was with Conan.

I flipped through the Conan 2d20 rules twice and knew that I really did not want to invest any time in trying to understand how the game works. It seemed very unsuited for a Conan game due to appearing overly complex. No clue if it might be decent for other applications.

It's not nearly as bad as the Conan rules makes it out to be. The rules are poorly written which makes it seem a lot more complicated than it really is. Though, like I said, I haven't actually played Conan yet, but one of the things I like about the 2d20 system in Fallout is how momentum works. Momentum are points the PCs share and they can spend them to add extra dice to their roll and you fill the pool back up by rolling more successes than needed for any given task. It's nice to see the players get into it by encouraging each other to use the pool and then work to fill it back up again.