Toben the Many
First Post
Didja play d20 Star Wars before Saga?
Dude, played SW way before d20. The WEG system allowed you to take on hordes of Stormtroopers and still live. The d20 system did have the Wounds system which made it more deadly...but we had no problem surviving.
The rest of my long screed went on to explain why there's no wildly popular sci-fi, or wildly popular anything besides D&D. There's no sci-fi game with a reward system that approaches D&D's. When you kill a bunch of stromtroopers in Star Wars, what do you get? Are you going to use their weapons and armor?
Actually...yes! In our current SW game, that's exactly what we do! lol.And...we've played in numerous other Sci-Fi games where you could accumulate "stuff". No biggie.
But to the larger point...I still disagree. Numerous D&D groups I have known, seen, and interacted with did not play D&D for the accumulation of stuff. You can't boil down the "why" of why people play D&D to a single reason. There are about 100 different reasons.
What? With all due respect, no. They don't.The point is that modern games like that tend to stretch belief beyond the breaking point, and that's why people don't play them. The uber-high survival rate feels wrong. It's like the character is surviving because of the power of plot, rather than because he's a badass.
No more than D&D stretches belief. You think it's realistic for a single man with a sword to dive into the midst of a dozen warriors and come out with just a few scratches? Or for a person to get hit with an actual bolt of lightning, but still keep fighting with no penalty?
Furthermore, modern action movies, which often have their heroes doing over the top feats, have allowed for those same tropes to be envisioned for Sci-Fi table-topping. If you watch any good Sci-Fi shoot 'em up, the protagonists are often taking on hordes of bad guys with guns, surviving massive gun fights, never reloading, but few viewers complain.
And the big trump card I can play in this argument is this - look at all of the Sci-Fi games with high survivability rates: Star Wars, Serenity, and d20 Future. Now go scan some of the message boards about these games. Is the main complaint of people who play the Serenity, Star Wars, or d20 Future systems the fact that combat is too survivable? Nope.