Modiphius 2d20 System Opinions?

[Reynard]

I am sure there are. I am not one of them - I'm not currently using Cortex for anything.


The current campaign I'm running for my regular group is SWADE - Deadlands: Lost Colony. And that seems to be working well. I can see the appeal. But I also wouldn't use it for Trek.

No, I wanted to use Cortex because it starts with a structure that very easily and naturally maps the 2d20 Attributes and Disciplines, but would allow me to adapt harm to characters in a way I feel fits the genre better. I also think the way Cortex generates rising complication and tension is good for Space Opera.

Cortex is one of those systems that when people talk about it, my interest is piqued, but I have no desire to build a game from scratch using it. Maybe one day i will play it at a con, or find one of the games that used it as a core (there was a Marvel one I think, as well as Smallville and maybe Leverage?).

 

[zarionofarabel]

This seems like a fairly common thing when exploring a new game, particularly one which works differently from what you're used to.

That's the thing, it wasn't them discussing how the rules worked, as they were all familiar with 2d20 games. It was them discussing the specifics of how to apply the rules, most often the ephemeral skills and attributes. Partway through one of the players even had a momentary monologue where he went on a little rant about how he could conceivably apply his highest rated stat to every roll he made, and how he was purposefully avoiding doing so because it felt like like he was exploiting the ambiguous nature of the stats. That kind of ambiguity is an issue for me because it so often results in massive disruptions to narrative flow.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

That's the thing, it wasn't them discussing how the rules worked, as they were all familiar with 2d20 games. It was them discussing the specifics of how to apply the rules, most often the ephemeral skills and attributes. ...

Oh, yeah, I can totally see this in games like Dune. If there are 5 Scene Traits active, and you have Talents and such that interact with those, it could be a bit of a extended hash-out where "ok, so this scene trait is 2, but I have this trait which brings it down by 1, but then there is this other scene trait, and player x spends momentum and I negate that trait, and then I have this other trait and Talent which each give me bonus X"...

Yeah....

This is a thing in only a few of the 2d20 games though...

Dune and Infinity are examples of games that do not have scene traits at all.

and only Infinity has personal character traits, of which a GM can only invoke 1 (and its a negative that earns your an Infinity point, so they wont do this often), so these are in no way the same as traits in Dune.

Oddly enough, I terms of play, I think Conan and Infinity may be the 'simplest' of the 2d20 games

 

[dbm]

Cortex is one of those systems that when people talk about it, my interest is piqued, but I have no desire to build a game from scratch using it. Maybe one day i will play it at a con, or find one of the games that used it as a core (there was a Marvel one I think, as well as Smallville and maybe Leverage?).

That’s why I picked up a copy of the Dragon Prince RPG. I’m unlikely to run it but a worked example of Cortex is a handy thing to have. I have the Cortex Plus games in PDF, but Dragon Prince is Cortex Prime.

 

[jolt]

I've only played Dune, Star Trek 1E and 2E, and John Carter and those are on the lighter end of the spectrum. I enjoyed them even with groups of 6+ people and the action went by pretty fast. For any game that uses metacurrency, how the GM uses it will have a big impact on the experience.

 

[Bagpuss]

TL/DR = 2d20 is a game where players are in control of the flow of Metacurrency.
While dice rolls are the main generator of the Momentum, it is not the only way.
While the GM starts with Heat, the players from that point on "press their luck" and grant more, but also get to do more.
2d20 is far more rewarding of the flow of metacurrency.

I've played Star Trek 2nd Ed, and Dune, and run Dune I didn't get that feeling at all.

As far as I've seen successful rolls where you get over the TN of successes is the only way to gain momentum.

You can give Threat to the GM in return for the effects of momentum, but it isn't momentum itself.

My issue with 2d20 is generally on TNs of 0 or 1 you stand a chance of gaining momentum (even then you likely need a lucky roll on TN1), on TN's on 2 you are more likely to need to spend momentum (but a lucky roll you are breaking even), on TN 3 or more you are either losing momentum or gaining threat. Generally to be successful probability wise with an decent Attribute+Skill (of at least 15+) you need to be rolling one more dice than the TN. So anything above TN 1 you are running at a loss, at TN 3+ you might as well give up and accept the loss.

The GM has control over the TN and as soon as you hit a difficult TN (due to one thing or another) you end up giving threat (although they start with some anyway). So you end up in a vicious circle where you give Threat to get dice, which means he can spend the threat to raise the TN on the next roll, so you give more threat to get dice to stand a chance.

The players really have very little control over the flow of the metacurrency it is determined by the TN, and the GM controls the TN.

And the annoying thing is all this metacurrency bargining stuff happens before you roll. So it doesn't flow and feel like cinematic action RPG to me.

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The 2d20 roll under mechanics are nice and I like momentum in that it lets players buy assets and introduce plot points rather than just modify the dice. I am very tempted to try running the game without Threat at all and see how that plays. But I think the whole metacurrency thing slows down the game and over complicates things.

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I'm very tempted to run a hack of it where there is no Threat, you always roll just 2d20 or 2d20 +1d20 from an assist. Momentum can only be spent on creating Traits, Assets or introducing NPCs.

You can say how your Traint or Assets gives an automatic success, which help with higher TNs.

Say you were doing a Wheel of Time 2d20 version, if you have earned a Heron Marked Blade, your trait would mean you always have an automatic success in melee combat, before you even roll your dice to get more successes. Which means you would likely wipe the floor with lesser opponents.

So there isn't as much bargining or accountacy on the fly. You just roll your 2d20 and add your automatic successes, compare with the TN and earn some Momentum, unless you are doing something particularly tricky.

 

[Kannik]

I have played 2d20 under Trek, and only skimmed through the 2d20 Dune rules.* On the whole, I find it a moderate system. I like the group momentum aspect (fits well for Starfleet characters) and how they define and use Advantage/Disadvantage tags. The rest though is pretty bog standard stuff, with little to emphasize the more introspective, thematic, and character focused aspects that Trek often brings in. And while I love any non-linear system that generates margin of success, the 2d20s here is a bit fiddly and not the easiest to intuit one's probabilities.

On the whole, I enjoy playing the game enough (and made both custom character and reference sheets for it), but the system itself sits in an awkward place and isn't tuned well to what Trek style stories aspire to be. Like Umbran, my first choice would be to run a Trek campaign in Cortex Prime, easily cribbing the Divisions and tweaking the Attributes and elevating Values (and species) to a higher influence (by making them Distinctions).


* Which it amuses me to no end that the previous license holder was Last Unicorn Games which also had the Trek license... so far Modiphius hasn't suffered the same fate.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

To keep things similar I am going to use Infinity as it has some aspect of most any version of 2d20's rule set implementation

How much Momentum is earned usually?
A TN is based most often on the character as a roll. A typical value here is often Target Number 14.
roll 2d20 and any die that comes up equal to or under 14 is a success. That's a 70% chance for a success on a given die.

If my Difficulty is 3 ....
....And I roll 5d20, the probability that 3 or more of them roll equal to or under 14 is about 80%.
....If I have only 3d20, then it drops to about 35%.
....and if any come up as a 1, that counts as 2 successes, which is basically a 5% bonus to gaining a success (so on 3 dice that would bring us up to 40%)

Now lets see what the odds are for generating momentum at Difficulty 3 (OVER 3 successes in this case)
.... at 5d20 that is about 60% chance we gain 1 or more Momentum.
.... at 3d20 that is about 5% chance to gain 1 or more Momentum.

What happens to the number generating momentum at only at Difficulty 1...
.... at 5d20 that is about 98% chance we gain 1 or more Momentum.
.... at 3d20 that is about 80% chance we gain 1 or more Momentum.
.... at 2d20 that is about 50% chance to gain 1 or more Momentum.


NOTE:
If Difficulty is 3 ... "Daunting" that's 3 out of 5, so a quite hard! Difficulty 2 is considered Challenging and Difficult 4 is considered Dire. So at 3, we are Intentionally making this a high risk of failure! Difficulty 1 is "Average" difficulty, the best place to start until shi& hits the fan or they take on very prepared and competent stuff.
..............................

In a game where the GM tells the players what to do, or suddenly dumps a combat on them = this is brutal! I would not recommend running 2d20 this way! (certainly not often, a jump-scare combat once in a while is fine, hehehe)

Ideally in 2d20, it should be a player-driven entry to any given scene. They roleplay what they want, they then choose what to do, then they go about it based on their chosen approach. This means they are usually starting with probing and sneaking and subtle actions, all of which should be on the D0 to D2 side of things.
This you know... lets them generate...Momentum. It let's them build up towards taking a bigger and bigger risks.

This models preparation and observation very well!
Jump into a combat having done no preparation (built Momentum), then yeah, expect to lean into Heat and have a rough time!

............................

Ways to gain Momentum =
- Dice rolls (see above)

- Infinity Points (each game of 2d20 call this different but its just a very lot player currency for oh-sh#t moments). Spend 1 Infinity Point and set one of your 2d20 to "1", which counts as two successes already. roll the rest.

- Group Momentum Pool. Sometimes someone will gain a ton of momentum, they can dump the overflow into the player pool and you can pull from there.

- Talents. 2d20 games have Talents that grant Momentum, or make it easier to get some. The most common Talents are some variant of each of these (yes you can have all of these apply to a given roll!), they require NO spends of any kind, they just 'work', always on, etc =
"Expertise 1: The character may reroll one d20 when making an NNN test."
"The character reduces the difficulty by one rank, to a minimum of Simple (D0)."
"Any Momentum spent to add extra dice to the skill test add two d20s to the dice pool instead of one."
"The character generates 1 bonus Momentum on any Athletics test, fail or succeed!"
"They gain 2 bonus Momentum on successful NNN rolls."

- Equipment: Each game as some version of a equipment special property of "Expert X: On a successful skill test, the expert system grants the user X bonus Momentum."

NOTE:
Talents change the game a LOT. If your character is acting within their Talents, it is 10x more likely those rolls gain you Momentum. Which can lead into some set-up, built-up, knock-em-down style player action chains. good stuff.
Equipment or spells can make this even MORE bonkers to get Momentum....

..................

- Heat. If you are desperate most 2d20 games let you give the GM Heat/Doom/Threat etc etc. You can't 'keep' this, its not a Momentum point to keep, but it spends 100% like a Momentum, so use it.

Note:
So technically you are never fully out of Momentum to spend, you just have to give GM Heat to get it... This at least means you are never locked out of using an ability or talent or any given Momentum use....

This really is important here, because this is where the game shows that it is about Press Your Luck and Building Momentum more than just a sequence of events the players are never in control of.

Kinda like PBTA, I feel that 2d20 can't be run like D&D... not a huge difference, but a bit of a approach shift...

 

[Blue]

That's a very strange account of DH that makes it sound like something pretty weird was going on, where people only got anything done by spending Hope (???), and constantly ran out. Also where the DM spending Fear made the game miserable, which sounds like straightforward bad DMing (the more Fear than you can spend issue is real if the PCs are taking out enemies efficiently but it's not game breaking - and it's easy for the DM to run low or out in a combat). Not sure why the players with lots of Hope weren't using it for tag team rolls or to give advantage to others either. Doesn't really make much sense to the rules or ethos of the game.

I've only played the Quickstart of DH, but "Tag Team" gets mentioned in a short list of something you can spend Hope on, and is never mentioned again, at least from the player side. We had no idea what it does, how to trigger it, what it meant. The Quickstart is for the GM as well, they aren't supposed to need an understanding outside what's in those rules to try to teach players.

So maybe that's what they played, in which Tag Team is effectively off the table because it's an unexplained mechanic, and there's no discussion at all (again, from the player side) about the Ethos of the game so that would also be meaningless in that situation.

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that if they came from where I did, of only playing the Quickstart, this makes sense.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I've played Star Trek Adventures. In terms of core gameplay I think it's a wonderful system. The basic 2d20 resolution mechanic, applying focuses and such, does a great job of elegantly giving characters the feel of having skills for manifold different strange tasks that come up in Star Trek. The values system (though I think it could use some work) does great job of making sure characters are more likely to succeed in their spotlight moments without making all the other rolls to easy. The momentum metacurrency evokes the feel of a starship crew pulling together. Having people play secondary characters when their main character is not in the scene is an awesome way to get around the "overly co-dependent adventuring crew who always implausibly does everything together" problem.

Unfortunately the elegance of the system is marred by lots of complicated talents, officer role abilities, etc. Many of these add rules complexity without really being particularly evocative of any sort of ludonarrative, and perhaps more importantly many come up so rarely that most players will need to look up how their talents work when they do come up, or will forget them.

In my experience combat was, indeed clunky, though part of the problem is that we did combat so rarely that I had no practice with those rules. What was supposed to be the big action climax was just me struggling to figure out how the rules worked. But even optimally played I don't think 2d20 combat rules would do a particularly good job of evoking Star Trek action to be worth to trouble. Zones are mostly just stupid, like I think I get what they're going for, but the frustration of being able to move exactly 30 feet and not 35 feet to where you need to be in a round of D&D, is nothing compared to having your movement an action be constrained by where a zone line was arbitrarily drawn.