JEL said:
I got the book and give it a resounding "eh." They definitely tried to cover too much in too little space and everything comes across as being half-***ed.
I have to agree. They give you a lot of rules, but not much in the way of advice on how to put it all together. They give you too many sample campaigns, but little on building your own. I was hoping for something akin to GURPS Space (and from what I hear, HERO's sci-fi book).
I was unhappy to see the Mecha Crusade rules in there; I was hoping for something better. As far as I can see there is no way to make medium-size powered armour, a la Bubblegum Crisis. Mechs need to be Large or larger and the ultratech armour is just basic armour, for the most part. Plus, I just don't get why a house-sized mech piloted by a Strength 18 pilot will do more damage than one piloted by an Strength 8 pilot if it punches something. He must push the button harder. I guess I will stick with d20 Mecha.
The starship section seems to have a lot of samples and options to modify them, but they don't have a system for truly buidling from scratch, which strikes me as odd.
They have what appears to be a modified version of the mutation rules from the Polyhedron game Omega World, just not as fleshed out. In Omega World you could improve your mutations. As far as I can tell, in d20 Future you cannot. In order to have mutations you must take drawback mutations. I don't understand why they didn't have an option for a certain number of mutation points equating to a +1 level adjustment.
They appearently couldn't find room for addressing psionics in a sci-fi setting.
The book is full color with a lot of decent to great art, but I find it hard to read; the pages are too busy. I really don't understand why they chose to make the various section headings black when WotC's normal format is to make them color in a full color book (such as d20 Modern itself). This would have helped a lot.
In the end, I find d20 Future to be mostly a disappointment. I think the the playing field is still wide open for the definitive d20 sci-fi supplement.
