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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 1754239" data-attributes="member: 18832">I think that many smaller-than-d20 (in terms of market share) roleplaying games will move towards modularity, the way that GURPS and World of Darkness already have this year.Now, obviously GURPS was always modular, because point-based systems usually are, but the Fourth Edition increases this to a large extent. Using, for example, the Innate Attack advantage to represent a robot's onboard minigun, Cyclops' optic blast, or a dragon's ability to breathe fire is one form of modularity; the other, more influenced (I think) by the d20 market, is the use of the Infinite Worlds setting as an explicit framework in which to place every GURPS campaign.When it comes to the new World of Darkness, it's even more modular. Finally, White Wolf have taken the step of standardising the creation of human characters (in the World of Darkness corebook) and treating their supernatural PC types as, effectively, templates you whack on a human character.Excellent idea, which you can see the beginnings of in, for example, the two-step Aeoniverse character creation system in Adventure!. Separating the supernatural effects of Inspiration (or eruption, in Aberrant, or whatever Trinity called it) from the process of creating a normal human was a significant departure from the old World of Darkness games, in which vampires, werewolves, and mages were created in a single step, which had the effect of blurring the line between abilities the character had before their transformation and those they possessed afterwards.It also facilitates crossovers, which may still be something the White Wolf staff don't care for on thematic grounds but which is something that a not-insignificant proportion of their fanbase did even when it was difficult. Like the d20 guiding philosophy of choices and options rather than restrictions, it's a good decision to allow for what your customers want to be doing with your products anyway.I cautiously predict that neither Werewolf: the Forsaken nor Mage: the Awakening will introduce too many concepts for which there is no equivalent in the rest of the World of Darkness. For example, I'd be surprised if we see the recurrence of problems like "How does this werewolf's Gift affect a vampire, if he doesn't have a Gnosis score?" In fact, I'll even more cautiously predict that both werewolves and mages will have humanity scores - signs point to mages' struggling with their disconnect from humanity (which makes them appear insane to mundane humans) as a major theme of the new game.As for the industry in general, I wouldn't be at all surprised if new licensed games and sourcebooks are not-insignificantly likely to be released as GURPS or Unisystem (or whatever) products - probably not nearly as many as will be d20 books, but I think the new high-profile GURPS edition (and the improvement in production qualities it brings with it) will encourage more companies and authors to look beyond the d20 market.More generally, I expect many companies to conform to the Wizards of the Coast all-hardcover production standard - GURPS and the World of Darkness are two which have already announced as much. Look to see the larger d20 companies falling into line on this one.I also would not be entirely surprised to see more falling-off of the d20 market where it's likely to be as profitable to do so. AEG's ceasing to support Legend of the Five Rings as a d20 game before too long, and instead focusing upon a Third Edition of the original game. I think changes like this are likely to become more common - though perhaps AEG is a special case, considering how freely they ignore the general d20 design standards for Spycraft (and I mean this to their credit, in most cases, since they have the courage to innovate).I would expect more publishers to concentrate on striking a balance between establishing their own standards for their d20 and OGL games and remaining close enough to the D&D standard to be useful to the wider market. I wouldn't be surprised if, for example, Monte Cook would like to make Arcana Unearthed/Evolved even more different from D&D than it already is, but contents himself with simply forging his own path within the context of broad compatibility - the Book of Iron Might, for example, sounds like a good example of a combat supplement done Malhavoc's way but still compatible with both D&D and Arcana Unearthed.</blockquote>

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