So when should a publisher ditch d20 and develop their own system?
- Thread starter Gundark
- Start date
painandgreed
First Post
Gundark said:
Depends on the game and what you want to do with it and how do you want it to feel and flow. d20 seems to be a moderate in difficulty system that works well with heroic settings. If that's what you want to do or if you want to be compatable with other d20 games out there, why reinvent the wheel. If you want a different feel to your game, it might suit you better to go with a system that represents that feel rather than shoehorn it into another system. To me, whether a new game is d20 or not really doesn't matter unless it duplicates what D&D already does. IP is going to matter most because if a game sounds cool and like somthing I'd enjoy, I'll probably buy it. After reading it, if the system seems sounds and people are willing, I'll play it. Again, selling others on playing it will depend mostly upon the game itself, not the system, within my group of friends anyway. How ell the system works may determine if we ever play it again, and I don't think d20 is a given in that reguards because it's possible come up with a system that doesn't really fit the game with d20 as well as a new system.
One arguement might be the desire to use dice pools. Something I think dice pools (or other bell curve type resolutions) do well are sustained and contested actions. I don't think the 1-20 linear range is good for those type of things (eg chase scenes) wihtout rehacking the system so much that you might as well come up with a new system anyway.
Psion
Adventurer
eyebeams said:
No. Beings that I'm the one who made the interpretation, allow me to tell you where it came from: Looking at the rules and seeing that it wasn't the greatest implementation, with things like redundant classes, some clearly superior to others, and missing annotations and rules. (Edit: If you need further evidence that I'm not justifying this retroactively, I can point you to my non-thrilled review in the review database.)
From what I understand, the game didn't go forward because of licensing difficulties (or so we are told.) I was not aware that the initial product "bombed", but given the state of the first book and failure of follow on products, I'm not surprised it never evolved a following.
Are you aware of any licensing deals that fell through because of d20? Sounds like you are the one making things up to support demonizing d20.
That is the topic of the thread: a setting with an existing RPG fanbase, and I didn't say anything otherwise. Your emphasis isn't saying anything that I hadn't made perfectly clear in my prior post.
No. Well, that would explain why it failed to pull in more d20 audience (but I think what Dancey said years ago about people wanting things adaptable to their game is key here; this was really before the d20 bubble burst.) What did happen is the installed fanbase liked things the way that they were, unsurprisingly.
LOL. If certain successful publishers are any indication, "coherent open content" does not seem to be a priority.
That said, it's not as difficult as you are making it out. At all. Even back when some of the very first third party d20 products were going out, publishers made a fairly simple distinction of keeping fluff and proper names closed, and opening crunch. It worked then, I'm baffled why you think it wouldn't work now.
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BryonD
Hero
They also are not usually tied to Josh Whedon bandwagons either.....eyebeams said:
Again, I'm not at all trying to speak conclusively here. I'm just curious.
The theme here seems to be that it burned bright and then was done.
Is that false?
But no one is debating the success of WoD.
Can you link me to the multiple active Serenity RPG boards?
Turjan said:There has an "Actual Play" thread using Dogs in the Vineyard's Firefly adaptation been started on rpg.net just today.
I had to check the timestamp on that, since it reminds me of the time Luke Crane campaigned for AP report propaganda after I mentioned that most Burning Wheel/Empire APs were more like "actual plans to play eventually."
If you provide d20 stats for Malcolm Reynolds, I can copy them for "Balcolm Breynolds." The game trait names are open and numbers aren't copyrightable, and the idea that specific expressions of game stats (like a creature's statblock) are protected is . . . well, something I wouldn't want to hire someone to argue in court.
While this is kind of trivial from a hobby perspective (i.e, people have rarely if ever sold stuff this way), not all participants in a licensing agreement are looking at it that way.
I know a group that plays Serenity. My friend's 14 year old brother runs it for his friends. Their adventures are sequences of killing more and more people with increasingly bigger and more potent guns. I find it pretty funny that, with all the Intenet arguments about genre emulation and staying true to the property, that what could be the longest running Serenity campaign in the world is basically D&D in space.
As for Serenity's actual success, the book is showing up in liquidators like threefreegames.com. Make of that what you will.
The discussion of system is mostly irrelevant, since you can't sell a game without a compelling hook behind it. The people making TRPGs today are in their mid to late 30s, and it shows. Licenses that hit their peaks 25 years ago, endless retreads of the same old same old (pulp, pirates, supers), these are all trotted out in front of a generation of gamers that simply doesn't care. In most cases, the question of d20 or not is irrelevant, since the game or license is dead out of the gate.
As for Serenity's actual success, the book is showing up in liquidators like threefreegames.com. Make of that what you will.
The discussion of system is mostly irrelevant, since you can't sell a game without a compelling hook behind it. The people making TRPGs today are in their mid to late 30s, and it shows. Licenses that hit their peaks 25 years ago, endless retreads of the same old same old (pulp, pirates, supers), these are all trotted out in front of a generation of gamers that simply doesn't care. In most cases, the question of d20 or not is irrelevant, since the game or license is dead out of the gate.
BryonD said:
Compare to Star Trek.
You can't really call something a flash in the pan when it hits another reprint well past the first few months of sales. A 4th printing of any RPG outside of D&D, WW, Palladium is not too common.
I can link you to one right now:
http://wavesintheblack.aimoo.com/
And here's one that's been quite for a few weeks:
http://afterserenity.com/modules.php?name=Forums
And of course, threads like the below:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=17&t=20372
Feature multiple reports of playing with the official system. Aside from that one instance (which talks specifically about Serenity), I've omitted boards where people discuss Firefly in addition to the RPG or discuss multiple systems.
Asking for the game to have the same online presence as the WoD -- a setting that in various incarnations is over 15 years old -- is of course silly. But given so short a time *and* the fact that MWP doesn't even have its own forum (which is a big, big mistake on their part) for the game, they're not doing too bad at all.
Turjan
Explorer
Well, here it obviously is an "actual play" thread.eyebeams said:
There are enough games around that are shock-full of Star Wars and Star Trek material, they just don't say so. None of them sells. Material that doesn't come with the original names of persons and objects doesn't have any commercial worth whatsoever. This has been shown time and time again.eyebeams said:
But there's really no need for the umpteenth iteration of this discussion between us. There are enough solid reasons not to use the d20 system at the moment, like the unwillingness of distributors or shops to stock anything with a d20 on it.
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