Has enthusiasm died?

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Ha!

I've tried to chime in on this post recently three times. Each time I typed up a response and hit send, my wireless card crapped out.

Something about D-Link 802.11g wireless cards and XP Home ... the drivers will bogart your system. Just a tip for everybody. I went through and killed winsock, took out TCP/IP, reinstalled ... 15 minutes later, TCP/IP was corrupt again and bumping me offline. Moved to a Linksys card. No problems.

Anyway.

I found some initial resistance to the "flavorless CLASSES!" from players as well. But I love them and so do the people I've played with.

I find that if you look beyond "classes are archetypes, classless is KING!" then you really can build just about anything with the stock classes. And what you can't build is probably overpowered.

I've played classless and most classless systems are ripe for abuse. I didn't really like running or playing them. "options" so often means: "Crap I can get more power with."

To overcome resistance I've ran one-shots and odd games with pregenned characters. Why? Because I can show people that D20M characters are interesting, useful, and fun to play. If a character is just a Fast Character with X in this and that and Y feats ... bleh. Yea. Doesn't sound fun. But once they're made, the players have found them fun and get into it.

Same with the Wealth system. I see alot of resistance online and have encountered initial resistance ... after a few games and seeing the simplicity and abstract nature of the Wealth system in action, people love it. -I- love it. People so often see their characters as "X gp Worth Of Cool Loot" or "X Credits" or "X Dollars". Wealth really distances people from that. Abstract concepts "adjust" the "roll" for getting items. You can do an "on hand" roll to see if you have that roll of duct tape in the car without keeping a neurotic list of "Crap Every PC Should Have On Hand". Finding a gun is a gun, if the gun needs to be ditched there's no: "Duuuuude, that's like 300 dollars. Try and hide it." It's just "wealth", it'll come, it'll go. They start with little wealth, get wealth, lose wealth, adjust eachother's wealth, get an adjustment from an ally, from their employer.

"I steal that guy's wallet, how does it affect my wealth." Well you steal that guy's wallet, how does it affect your "Dollar Score"? Do you take the 20 bucks, what about the credit cards? Does the DM decide you can get 2000 dollars from the credit card? Is it just suddenly cash? What about: "You pocket the cash and try the credit card." and the DM gives you a +2 on the next wealth roll ... and the next ... and then the card is considered stolen.

I find Wealth, as a DM, to be unbelievably flexible. Stuff like stealing wallets just doesn't have to come up unless its part of the character "idea" and then it can be fit in easy with some time-limited wealth adjustments. I don't find characters rifling through people's pockets for spare change like it's "Gold Pieces" to buy "another box of exploding ammunition!". And stuff isn't always the "same price" or "same availability", characters aren't limited to Dollars On Hand. Maybe they scrape together ready cash from people in the group for a shotgun. Maybe a character is being tracked via his credit card transactions. Every purchase of DC X or higher alerts the government entity tracking him ... easy, fast.

Perfect? No. But "my character has 10,000 dollars" isn't either. Really that flat Dollars On Hand score is LESS realistic. Credit cards? Loans? Car payments? Do you buy everything with cash on hand? Does the character pay rent? Get paychecks? How much of that score is credit? Does the character walk around with 25,000 dollars in his pocket? Does he have a bank account with that much in it? Players seem to be more concerned with what happens to "their money" when it's listed as a dollar ammount. I found them much more willing to let me work storylines and problems into matters of finance when its abstracted out to a Wealth score.

In the end, people will like what they like, I guess. I just see alot of people that seem to look at a few parts of D20M out of the box, don't really playtest it, and write it off. The classes aren't any more flavorless than a classless system is flavorless, but yet the offer flexibility, balance, and speed. The wealth system is certainly DIFFERENT, but it actually models real world finance surprisingly well and very simply.

And sure, the BOOK is chock full of D&D monsters. But look who made the game. D&D is their biggest seller. They want crossover traffic. Mature, adult, eloquent, concerned players ARE NOT the majority of gamers. The majority of gamers I've met around here are young hack-and-slash "Dude this monk is SO COOL" guys. Who do you think they were marketing for when they put hot drow chicks with guns on the cover of Urban Arcana? Who would think shooting a troll with a shotgun would be SO COOL? ... yea. Them. They buy lots of books. You wouldn't believe. I'm a long-term gamer and I have few books. This new guy I know owns pretty much everything WotC has released. Why?

To get more l33t feats and prestige classes for his characters. Why else?

--fje

 

[Spatula]

The classes aren't any more flavorless than a classless system is flavorless, but yet the offer flexibility, balance, and speed.[/b]

That's not really true since each base class has stereotypes and assumptions built into it. You can't really say that the Modern base classes are more flexible than a classless system.

The wealth system is certainly DIFFERENT, but it actually models real world finance surprisingly well and very simply.

Well, no, it doesn't. Go through the Bullet Points Q&As on the WOTC site and take a look at all the questions involving the wealth system ("Can't my players just do X and get infinite wealth?" "How do I handle X?" etc.) and the designers' response is generally, "Don't let your players do X."

Things like rent, car payments, whatever are already hand-waved away by the Wealth system. What's the effect on your Wealth if you're living at someone else's home and not paying rent vs. living in a fabulous Manhattan apartment? Nada. There's no reason you can't do the same using real money. With the Wealth system, your job, or lack thereof, has no impact on your finances beyond your starting money. To recover spent Wealth via your job (not that you actually need a job to get the money) necessitates that you raise a level - that's not a raise, that's just income. And receiving Wealth from "found" money is a big headache because the cash values for Wealth aren't linear (and the relationship between cash and your Wealth bonus is not clear).

And sure, the BOOK is chock full of D&D monsters. But look who made the game. D&D is their biggest seller. They want crossover traffic.

The crossover traffic already has access to the monsters through their D&D books.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Well I wrote up a nice point-by-point about it all. Decided to delete it.

In the end it's "YMMV".

Wealth, for me, does alot of things that a "cash" system doesn't do. I believe that the relationship between money and Wealth is really quite clear. I believe that where "Cash Value" and "Wealth" become distant that instead of being problematic or a headache, it saves me time and problems.

The classes, for me, solve alot of problems. I see more variety in D20 Modern characters than I ever saw with GURPS or WW:The Munchkining. It gives options without bogging or abuse.

And the monsters, I'm asking for an official "why" but, in the end, if its too much for people to handle then, hey, whatever.

In the end ALL your mileage may vary.

--fje

 

[Pagan priest]

Yeah, the wealth system is so horrible, that folks on the T20 Traveller message boards are talking about how to incorporate it into the Traveller game. As far as the bullet point questions, I'd have to look again to be sure, but I seem to recall that most of those questions could have been answered by repeating "It's in the book, try actually reading it for a change." But then, I feel the same about most of the questions in Sage Advice too.

 

[Ranger REG]

i think what he was talking about (and i believe this is a fair objection) is that the monsters chosen to be in the d20 Modern core rulebook support mainly the "D&D in the modern world" campaign model and don't work very well for a "modern myths and legends" type of campaign.

if you take the average non-gamer off the street and ask him to name some "monsters", chances are he's not going to name gnolls, kobolds, mind flayers, and yuan-ti. he's going to say stuff like zombies, vampires, werewolves (all in the d20 Modern book, thankfully), but also bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Grays, and such which aren't in the book.

While you may have a good point, a non-gamer is not likely to pick up d20 Modern.

the stats that they give aren't really that significantly different from the versions in the Monster Manual, and i'd assume that anyone who wants to play "D&D in the modern world" is already going to have a copy of the MM anyway. so it seems like a waste of space in that regard. also, if they really did want new versions of those monsters, i think they should have waited to put them in Urban Arcana, which specifically is a "D&D in the modern world" style of campaign, rather than displacing monsters (such as the aforementioned bigfoot and Gray) which would be more appropriate over a wider range of d20 Modern campaigns.

Perhaps but they wanted to give a core rulebook complete with monsters, as well as ordinaries for non-FX games, so you can start off right away, be it an FX or non-FX game. That way, you don't have to spend time doing any conversion, however simple that may be, from D&D. They also serve as example creatures when creating monsters based on the monster class mechanics.

Besides most D&D gamers tend to complain about having to do the conversions themselves, albeit a few would take the challenge (such as that other discussion thread where posters are offering additional mutations for Gamma World's scarce list).

Besides, it took many months before Urban Arcana came out. (Yes, you can extend your complaint to the way they release their products, even though they have so many lines.)

the selection of monsters chosen for d20 Modern enforce the the misapprehension that the game is just for "D&D in the modern world" which is unfortunate.

Perhaps, but we all know that Wizards' largest fanbase is D&D gamers. So it is no surprise they marketed this product to appeal to D&D gamers while it appeals others who prefer a modern genre game. To do otherwise, when d20 Modern is not a commonly popular brand as Star Wars would be following the same business plan as TSR, and you know how that company fared. It's best not to resist the D&D stigma that Wizards inherited from TSR. It's always going to be there, as well as their largest pool of RPG customers.

 

[buzz]

I just wanted to chime and say that I think the Wealth rules are the bomb. Anything that eliminates having to track wealth penny-by-penny (or gold piece by gold piece) in a game that's supposedly about cinematic action and adventure is fine with me.

Frankly, in a game that simulates a world with ample credit and a stock market, I find the alternatives to an abstract wealth system to be too horrifically complicated to contemplate.

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

You know I have no idea how many pennies I have in my apartment, or even upon me, or in my car etc. Why would I want to know how many my character has?

I honestly haven't used the wealth check allot as my games the players have always had their equipment supplied to them threw the government either by military or secret agency

 

[Douane]

I play in a 7-months-old campaign following the exploits of a squad/platoon of paras throughout WWII.

While we started out with a mixture of D20 Modern and "V for Victory" (from Polyhedron), we have since changed to mainly using D20 Modern. Since all PCs are soldiers, the "flavourless" classes from D20M madee a great toolset for building varying and very different characters. Wealth of course doesn't really come up.


Folkert

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Well, I asked E Cagle over at the Wizards boards exactly why the main D20M book is so chock full of D&D-specific monsters. This is his reply:

"The answer is very simple: you CANNOT assume that every d20 Modern player out there also plays D&D, and thus owns a copy of the Monster Manual. Now, I know that you may scoff at the idea, but think about it for a second. d20 Modern is not a "companion" to D&D--it is its own separate beast with its own rules and books. By putting in some of the creatures from D&D into d20 Modern, that allows those people without the books to play those creatures. It also means that those players that are both D&D and d20 Modern players to utilize those creatures without having to tote along their Monster Manual and do any conversion (yes, there are some minor differences between the critters in D&D vs. d20 Modern).

The same thing happens in D&D. Wizards intentionally stays away from having non-core books refer to other non-core books, using the argument that you can't assume that all players have both of those. Everything points back to the three core books, as those are the ones that are assumed that every gaming group has."

So the reason the monsters are in there is so that people will use and identify D&D monsters, I guess. I imagine that when D20 Future comes out there'll be alot of D&D monsters in that too. Some sort of common theme among WotC products.

Next up, Kobolds in power armor.

--fje

 

[buzz]

Well, I asked E Cagle over at the Wizards boards exactly why the main D20M book is so chock full of D&D-specific monsters. This is his reply:

"The answer is very simple: you CANNOT assume that every d20 Modern player out there also plays D&D, and thus owns a copy of the Monster Manual."

I've heard this before, and I have to say I still don't quite buy it. Sure, you can't assume that every d20 Modern player will have a copy of the Monster Manual, but it's a safe bet that almost every one who's interested in Urban Arcana does. The problem was the assumption that every d20 Modern player would be interested in Urban Arcana. If the re-hashed D&D mechanics had been in Urban Arcana alone, I woulnd't have a beef with WotC. Taking up valuable space in the core book, however, was not the best idea, IMHO.