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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 1493475" data-attributes="member: 8461">The big appeal behind the d20 system is its open-sourced nature; many publishers use it, so you can use its rules, characters, etc. many places across the board.However, I've noticed that the d20 system seems to be starting to fragment. We now have various incarnations of the system, with subtle but tangible differences that do require some amount of converting between them (some more than others). What started out as a single unified system is slowly, like a iceberg that breaks into pieces, drifting apart. Consider the d20's that we have so far:<a href="http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35" target="_blank">Fantasy d20 Revised</a>. This is the standard D&D d20. The "Revised" part is the shift from 3E to 3.5E, which made the plain old Fantasy d20 obselete, and now there are quite a few Fantasy d20 books floating around out there that won't sell as well because they'd require conversion to Fantasy d20 Revised.<a href="http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/msrd" target="_blank">Modern d20</a>. This is the d20 used for modern RPGs. It translates relatively well to Fantasy d20 Revised, but not as well as it did for Fantasy d20. <a href="http://www.guardiansorder.com/games/d20/srd/" target="_blank">Anime d20</a> is, from what I've seen, the biggest departure from the mainstream so far. However, doing so opens up quite a few options, many of which aren't offered in Fantasy d20 Revised or Modern d20. However, that makes converting between them and this a more difficult process.Superhero d20 is, technically, not d20 at all. I'm referring to Mutants & Masterminds, which was directly released under the OGL. However, for all intents and purposes (given that it is using it's own derivative of the d20 system, just directly under the OGL; and that it has it's M&M Superlink), this is worth noting here. I don't know how different it is from any of the above d20 systems, but it is still another incarnation of d20 that requires some amount of conversion.Does it seem like that eventually, the "unification" offered by the d20 system will be undone? Will we see d20-based characters that need conversion to other incarnations of the d20 system when brought into different games? How long before a singular system diverges into many systems that are only loosely related?</blockquote>

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