NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lugh" data-source="post: 1163913" data-attributes="member: 9404">To me, d20 has several advantages.It is a flexible toolbox of options.  It is very easy to add or subtract rulesets without upsetting the fabric of the game.  You want psionics?  Create a set of feats, skills, and powers.  Maybe a class or two.  Boom, you've got your system.  Drop it into your game.  As long as it's reasonably balanced (e.g., not simply more powerful than magic), it doesn't ripple significantly across the rest of the rules.  A player doesn't HAVE to take psionics into account when designing a character.  You don't want magic?  Yank it.  Check feats and class abilities to see which ones assume that magic is there, and either yank those or tweak them.It's a set of very simple mechanics.  Roll a d20, add your bonus, roll over the DC.  Movement is calculated in 5' increments.  As your character gains experience, you add on skill points, feats, and class abilities to expand their options.  Unlike some systems out there, you do not need a calculator, protractor, and set of charts to determine the outcome of your action.  Everything has been rounded off for simplicity.You can build any character you can think of.  As d20 matures, this becomes more and more the case.  But, with open multiclassing, feats, and a pretty robust skill list, you can achieve just about any concept with relative ease.  And, characters are different.  One of my biggest problems with 2nd Ed. was that any two 9th level fighters were pretty much the same, mechanically.  Now, you can build two different 9th level fighters that are radically different, on every level, but still both fighters.The language is precise.  You don't have to guess whether or not a given monster is of a fire subtype.  You don't have to negotiate with your DM about bonuses stacking.  You don't get taken by surprise when an ability suddenly doesn't apply to a situation you thought it would (well, assuming you pay attention).As many people have noted, it's an open license, and an open system.  GURPS did a great thing for the industry in demonstrating how a single system can be used across a wide variety of genres.  d20 takes it a step further.  Now, not only can you apply it to pretty much any genre, but any publisher with a cool idea can develop and market that idea without also having to convince people to change systems.Does d20 have limitations?  Certainly.  The class/level system assumes that characters are supposed to get better in a fairly linear fashion.  That doesn't work as well for systems in which characters should start powerful, and advancement should be minimal (I point to the superhero genre as the obvious example, despite a number of excellent d20 superhero products).  The system tends to encourage min-maxing (although I strongly disagree with the sentiment that it discourages role-playing, but that's another rant).  Players have a tendency to feel that if there is a feat called Do A Really Cool Thing, then they can't do a really cool thing without that feat (not the case, but again that's another rant).  And, the entire system does tend to encourage results over description, but a good DM who is aware of that can counter that tendency.The problem is not a numbers-heavy vs. verbal-heavy.  The problem is that one of the features of d20 (and one of its big selling points, to me), is that it uses very precise language.  But, that language is somewhat artificial.  The best instance is named bonuses.  I know that armor gives an "armor bonus."  I know that if I see a spell that says it gives an "armor bonus," it does not stack.  If it says it gives a "deflection bonus," it does stack.  There is no need for interpretation or discussion among the group as to whether or not Mage Armor is redundant with leather armor.  It's laid out, precisely.  However, because the language is somewhat artificial, translation can be tricky.</blockquote>

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