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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8285382" data-attributes="member: 18">SpycraftI mean, basically the scenario is the same as a lot of the d20-boom RPGs, but Spycraft, which we played a bit, just always struck me and I think eventually the whole group as particularly bizarre in how it all fit together, and worked/didn't work. The game was clearly directed at people who wanted to run/play Mission Impossible or James Bond or similar super-spy antics - stress on the antics, it wasn't a game about serious spying, though also not broad to the point of comedy. In service of this, they had a fairly decent backstory/setting, and a lot of novel and actually quite effective mechanics outside the main body of the mechanics, which were d20 class/level based, and pretty standard. The d20 stuff did not work at all well for running something like MI or Bond, because even with what they'd added, d20 is simply too random a system, especially with levels involved, and so it always ended up feeling like chaos, which meant it was more akin to Archer, in practice, than say, James Bond. Which is not necessarily awful but definitely a different kind of thing. I feel like if they'd leaned in to more of an Archer-ish parody-ish vibe the rules might have been fine, but as it was, there was a serious mismatch between the rules, the vibe, and the target audience.Oh god even better and in the same vein:d20 ModernMy god that's a bizarre one. Really cool, really up-to-date art. Great visual design within the book. Clearly, in those senses, I was absolutely the target audience. Me and people like me - people who have played D&D, but maybe want something which is familiar mechanically but set in the modern day and allowing a whole other bunch of adventures (from stuff in the text it particularly seemed like they wanted us to be thinking of Jurassic Park, Die Hard, and so on, but weirdly this mismatched hard with ultra-modern visual style - they'd do a much better job today, like with Morrus' ACE stuff).So you've got this target audience of teen and twenties D&D players, but you're pushing a game that seems written more about a slightly older era, but doesn't look like it is. And then you have the rules, which were just even more of a mismatch with both the system and I think the audience than Spycraft, which is saying something. The target audience didn't need rules anywhere near as close to "stock 3.5E", but it got ones that were. We got a very "straight" take on d20, like excessively so, and without really any real admission that this just wasn't going to work for a lot of what they wanted to do with it. Again it suffered from the d20 system's inherent tendency to descend into farce, due to the fact that vital checks will be missed, and nothing can be done (because it was so close to stock). You could use D&D stuff with it because it was so plain, but there was little incentive to do so, because they didn't have the game built out in such a way that it made sense.So all you really had was a clunky modern-day RPG, with odd mechanics for that, really modern art, and a severe lack of direction, because it was trying to be too many different things at once. And clearly so much effort had been invested in making it "cool", but it just wasn't something anyone I knew could get excited about. Like all RPGs (no matter how bad or weird), it has the odd fan, but really, it was very strange as a product.Like with Spycraft, if they'd leaned in to the design, and maybe made it d20 Action Movies or something, and made it a little broader and accepted that the design was likely to lead to a certain amount of farce, and to be True Lies not HEAT, and that on a good day, made the feats and classes reflect an action movie vibe, it actually might have been a weird classic.</blockquote>

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