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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teflon Billy" data-source="post: 2011215" data-attributes="member: 264">I should probably say right off that my gaming group and I are big fans of westerns in general, so to say that there was a bit of excitement on the air when I said I was going to start running Sidewinder as our fallback game (when we couldn’t achieve quorum for our Mutants and Masterminds game…superheroes being our other great passion) would be a gross understatement. Suffice it to say this was a very willing audience for the game.To be honest though, I didn’t think that D20 would be a particularly good engine for modelling “The Old West”, and I will admit straight up that I was wrong.Even when I first finished reading Sidewinder I  was pretty happily surprised. I thought it gave a decent pass at providing a mix between the “real” old west (Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven for example) and the more cinematic old west (Clint Eastwood's Fistful of Dollars for a different example).  The different classes in the book provide this granularity. Sidewinder's NPC Classes (akin to the Expert, Aristocrat, Commoner etc. from the PH) are best used when the GM wants a true-to-life , low-powered game. They are the Greenhorn, the Settler, the Hunter...this kind of thing.The “Core” Classes are for use when the GM wants a true-to-life, but higher powered game. These are the Wranglers, Mavericks, Rustlers etc.The Prestige Classes are for your classic Spaghetti Western stuff...these are the Gunslingers, Lawmen, Desperados, etc.And I can tell you , the mix of character power levels work well in play. To my mind, the genre almost [i[requires[/i] that a greenhorn be inferior to a Rustler, that wranglers be desperately outclassed by gunslingers and suchlike. And the genre conventions are well-enough known that most any player can guess what to expect (utility-wise) from the various classes.The damage rules for firearms were a joy, and simple enough that I can’t believe someone didn’t hink of something akin to them earlier. Finally, D20 is given a game mechanic that manages to track how handicapped a person becomes the more wounds they sustain so that you aren't at “peak efficiency” at 1 hp and “completely out” when you lose that hit point. I know, I know…”D20 has an abstracted combat system and blah blah blah…” I’ve heard it before. I like this system and I think it (or something like it) could very easily be slotted into stock D&D for some very simple to track “gritty realism”-type combat.Or not. That kind of thing might not be to everyone’s taste, but the mechanic works beautifully for the Old West genre (how’s that for dragging an aside back on track?<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) I didn't much care for the narrative which seemed to take the Public Domain writings of Bat Masterson and meld them with the author's work in a effort to give the impression that Mr. Masterson was involved in the writing of the game. I found it more than a little confusing at first as I had a very difficult time differentiating between Masterson’s writings and those of the author.The layout also could have used some work...it was often unclear where a paragraph ended and/or began again.And my final bitch: I wish the authors didn't have such an affection for Doc Holliday. It seemed that Doc was used as the example for nearly any point they were trying to make. The actual writings of Bat Masterson read really well, and I might go pick up the book from which they were taken.So, all things considered I think this is a hell of a good game. The author has forwarded me his re-written version of Sidewinder for D20 Modern (Sidewinder: Recoiled) and if it is 90% as good as Sidewinder, I might give it a try with D20 Modern.But my group is pretty happy with the game in its “1E” version, so that writeup might well not be a playtest review <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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