HeapThaumaturgist said:
... but what about lovingly crafted rules for body-chemical-induced panic, shell-shock, and voiding yourself after getting shot?
Look up Spycraft 2.0 -- Stress Damage.
At best, stress damage prevents you from taking 10 or 20, and you take a -4 penalty to all Wisdom and Charisma checks. At higher levels of stress damage, that -4 penalty begins to include Initiative checks, Reflex and Will saves, and Attack checks. Plus, to take penalties to being able to use your Action Dice. At worst, stress damage will also temporarily drain levels.
Plus, the more stress damage you accumulate, the tougher it is to heal. A handful of stress damage will heal at 1 point per minute. One you get stress damage over five times your Wisdom, it takes a week to heal each point... you could be shell-shocked for months.
Painful types of damage (like explosions, falling, fire, acid or electricity) deal some stress damage. Also, in combat, you can use a Threaten action to inclict stress damage on an opponent. Some feats (Glint of Madness, Stone Cold, Undermine) and special abilities (Fearsome, Horrific, Unnerving) also enhance stress damage or add stress damage to a normal attack.
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Which brings up a point more relavent to the original discussion.
Our group played a few games of D20 Modern when it first came out, but ended up giving it up. The players, you see, found the system rather uninspired and dull. D20 Modern is very generic... Too generic, for their tastes. It's not even that the rules or the system are boring, but the names and descriptions of the classes, abilities, feats and such simply didn't excite their interest.
I know it's a rather superficial complaint, but it certainly does make a big difference in their enjoyment of the game, if they can say "My Grizzled Veteran Soldier just picked up the feat Hard Core, now I've got all the prerequisites for Too Ugly to Die!" or "My Witty Playboy Faceman has Not In The Face! and Bloodstain Resistant now, so maybe he won't get hit in combat so often."
It boils down to... D20 Modern is very versatile. It will model practically any modern genre well. But, in any specific genre, there is some other game that models it far, far better.