Melan said:
As sympathetic I am to your views, my advice is: let it go. Just let it go and walk away. You will not accomplish anything.
My advice is comb through the SRD. Decide what to keep, and what to toss. Look at other OGL materials (Monte Cook's work springs to mind, as well as some of the OGL monster books) and start designing your new system. Then add some new systems based on what isn't in the OGL, slap a D20 System logo on it, and market it as a seperate game in pdf form. If you kept the cost down, you would get some form of return. If you could combine the structural strength of 3.X with the fluidity of older versions, I would buy it in a heartbeat. Then I would encourage everyone I know to do the same.
I do agree that you would need three PDFs representing the three core books, but I would make the DMG contain a lot more advice and be more rules lite. You might be able to combine the DMG and MM if the PHB had enough core rules to run the game.
In my own case, I decided I want to run something based off of
Doctor Who. At first I thought the 3.X minutia-heavy approach would work well for this (I could differentiate Mark I vs. Mark III K-9s! I could make each era Cyberman and Dalek different!). I had specifically thought that I could run it as a form of d20 Modern/Future/Past. But some of these recent threads caused me to reconsider.
I am still using the basic d20 mechanism, but I've dropped most of the tables. Basic descriptions of what skills are, and a basic overview of DC, opposed, and complex checks ought to be enough, especially when combined with the DS system from
Fairs and Tournaments. Basic ideas of what DCs 5/10/15/20/25/etc mean should remove the need for complex rules about the DCs of each individual skill.
I dropped levels entirely, starting with HP = Con, and starting skill points = Int. Progress is by Action Points, skill points, and Knacks. Knacks are sort of like light feats, similar to some of the ideas in the FASA version of the
Doctor Who rpg. Some Knacks take an action point to activate, other Knacks are always on. Hit Points and defense can be improved by Knacks.
Attacks are resolved by DC. If you are trying to hit AC 14 and your total roll is 16, you do 16 - 14 = 2 damage. Your weapon might have a damage multiplier that alters this amount of damage. Weapon skills can be used to attack or defend. No AoOs.
(I resolved the Time Lord problem by giving humans more action points to counterbalance the automatic Time Lord Knacks, and by making Time Lord characters round-robin....when they regenerate they are passed on to another player.
)
A lite version of D&D might use some of these ideas. It's an easy system that doesn't get bogged down in minutia.
