Academically Speaking: College Life, a D20 Modern Supplement
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/dx20020401a
Rating: 5 stars out of 5
This latest offering by Wizard of the Coast shows why they’re renowned as some of the best game makers on the planet. Combining everything everyone liked from Magic, Pokemon, Robo Rally, and D20 RPGs, WotC’s newest book adds something original: a social life. An unprecedented leap forward in the science of game design, Academically Speaking will be to d20 what accordians are to playing chess.
Overview
D20 College Life (as Academically Speaking has come to be called around my campus since I introduced it to the university president) is formatted mostly like d20 Modern, with its first six chapters clearly and directly letting you make characters and begin your first few adventures. However, to take advantage of the persisting craze for collectible card games, each D20 College Life rulebook contains an additional four random chapters of additional material, including three uncommon chapters and one rare. I bought two copies of the book, and though I got two copies of Chapter Thirty-two: Oxford, I know that Chapters 86: Long-Distance Relationships that Work, and 124: Conservative Campuses will add a lot of spice to my campaign. Just like colleges, no two D20CL campaigns will be the same. Also just like college, WotC can keep pulling in income by steadily increasing prices for its products by slowly reducing the value of future expansion chapters, a procedure they refer to as Collectible Tenure.
Each expansion set of chapters is only $5, so they’re easy to pick up with some spare cash, and they’ll be sure to keep your games fresh and ever-changing. Next Spring they apparently plan to release a set of chapters called The Fifties, which will reduce Fuzzies’ powers a bit, and introduce a new class, the Beatnik.
Specifics
The first five chapters really don’t showcase the true brilliance of this game, since they mostly rely on concrete, specific rules and guidelines, whereas as we all know college is all about abandoning the idealism of your high school graduation and turning in half-assed assignments that only get good grades if you can guess what your teacher wants. Still, the first five chapters are necessary, so sit tight and wait for the good stuff.
Chapter One: Races presents over two hundred different ethnic groups and racial backgrounds you may choose for your character (plus optional gender and sexual preference backgrounds). All of them provide the same bonuses, except for heterosexual white male, which lacks the Resist Discrimination ability.
Chapter Two: Classes is mostly already covered on the WotC site, and should be added to the d20 SRD fairly soon. My only complaint is that the classes tend toward a more Americanized bent, though apparently Chapters 30 through 45 cover English, European, and Japanese colleges in great detail. If any of you have a spare Todai Daigaku, I’ll trade you an Oxford for it.
Chapter Three: Skills and Feats is relatively average. Though there are hundreds of different skills and feats listed (and more available in future expansions), I’m assured that everyone’s feats and skills are all perfectly valid and equal, and that no one is better or worse than anyone else simply because of their choices.
Chapter Four: Equipment handles such necessities as computers, alarm clocks, pixie stix, and the MLA Handbook, plus pretty much anything else you’d need. Except for cars (Chapter 52), anime (Chapter 53), and drugs (Chapters 54 to 68). If anything disappoints me about this game, it’s that drugs aren’t in the core rules. It really makes it hard to suspend my disbelief without them. I always use drugs during my games.
Chapter Five: Challenges presents the rules for combat, protests, and all-nighters. Solid stuff, though I think I found my first errata in this chapter: “After a long night’s work of cramming and BSing a term paper, it’s all a college student can do to shuffle the 5 ft. to his bed, and collapse. This incurs an attack of opportunity.” We all know 5-ft. adjustments don’t cause AoOs.
Chapter Six: Cool. Just read that again. Chapter Six: Cool. It doesn’t even need to be a real noun like the other chapter titles, it’s that good. The stuff in this chapter is so good, I can’t possibly recount it here, but after my last session, the writers of Cowboy Bebop swung by to ask if they could use my game for their next movie. This chapter isn’t for every character, and I guess you could have a college experience that isn’t Cool, but you’d be missing out on the real benefits of attending a institution of higher learning.
I think it goes without saying that this book (and its various binders’ worth of expansions) deserves to be on every gamer’s shelf. If nothing else, each expansion chapter provides a small sample adventure, so you can give it a swing, and if you still don’t want it, you could probably trade it away for some Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
Sample Adventure from Chapter 55: Coffee
Protest at Grind Daddy's
Ten of your friends have ventured into Grind Daddy's - the local coffee stop - four hours ago, and they have yet to return. Your clique (the term used instead of 'party') braves the dangers of a police patrol car and bad rush hour traffic to reach Grind Daddy's and find out what has trapped them there, what cruel injustice they are protesting. Once inside, though, the dangers have not passed. Will you be strong enough to endure eight grueling hours of a sit-in, and can you resist the lure of smooth, steamy mocha?
Protest at Grind Daddy's, a d20 College Life adventure for characters level 1 - 3.
- but to introduce a collectable gameplay within a fantasy campaign. Yes, it's not really collectable for the GM and for the Players, as the rules and all the monster/card/etc. entries are in the book, but for the fantasy characters it is - to give a well-known example: they get a little L1 Goblin to care for, drag around and battle other monsters, catch them to fill their collection, the go to a big tourney and prove their skills and brag to NPCs or between each other. Of course, this is the most simple of examples and I expect much more serious and well-thought concepts for a collectible elements within a fictional world.
