Why Can't d20 Handle sci-fi?

[JoeGKushner]

there was some talk about Traveller and one of my friends has it, and it's simimiliar to standard d20 stuff but different. You can convert, but that brings me to my next bit.

Why aren't rpg companies trying to make a unified d20 sci-fi system?

Dragonstar, Fading Suns and even Darwin's World are pretty standard fantasy d20 in space.

Farscape, Traveller, and a few others, don't seem to be d20 in space, but kinda like d20, not like it where conversions become a bit more of a pain in the but.

Am I the only one that feels this way?

I tell ya, it's one of the things that stops me from using Wheel of Time stuff in my game right off the bat. At least Call of Cthulhu had some ideas on converting the material and regular CRs for the monsters.

 

[Danzilla]

I asked a similar question on the Wotc Boards a few days ago and didn't receive anything positive as an answer...

I had originally read that D20 modern was being engineered to cover "anything from current time period to near-future"

Also being talked about at the time was that a number of companies were currently working on sourcebooks and campaign books involving future time periods... (pretty much what you're talking about in your original post)

My question to this was...Is WotC planning a D20 Future Book? (Intending a book like D20 modern that would give a good baseline for others to build from, since WotC from what its own people had been saying wasn't planning on Modern being used for far future)

The answer I got was to point out that many of the companies are currently working on sourcebooks and campaign books involving future time periods... (Yeah, exactly what had already been talked about)

Sooo...yeah, I've noticed how everybody is taking things in their own directions and saying just use our rules when it comes to characters and other things used from our system and use rules from other systems for things from their respective systems...

It would be nice to have a unifying set of rules...come to think of it, we call them D20...just everybody has their own interpretation...

 

[RPGRealms]

You want a 'unified d20 sci-fi system' but you have not stated on what you want that based. You mention in another thread that you wished these games were compatible with Star Wars. But I pointed out that they could not be because there is nothing from Star Wars that is OGL. Yes we could have possibly licensed the mechanics from d20 Star Wars, but honestly what it would cost just wouldn't be worth it IMO, on top of the fact I doubt would be allowed by WotC. Lucasfilms is pretty tight on their property licenses. So that leaves compatiblity with the base d20 system.

Dragonstar is just that. D&D in Space, quite literally. It is what is was designed to be from the ground up.

Fading Suns and Farscape I can only conjecture about. They took the base d20 system and then tweaked it to fit the settings they were using. From what I have seen of these two, there is little or no need for much conversion to play them using the straight d20 rules ala D&D.

As for Traveller, again we chose to make some additions to the system to better capture the flavor and feel of Traveller. The additions we made were built on top of the base d20 mechanic, making it very easy to strip them away if you want to play using the baseline d20 rules.

Traveller also is the only game of all of them to offer just about everything you need to run a science-fiction based campaign for d20 in a single book. Characters, Personal/Vehicle/Starship Combat, Vehicle and Ship Design Systems, World Buildings, Animal Encounters, and tons of other useful material for a science-fiction based campaign of any type. You can easily take parts of Traveller 20 to enhance your Star Wars, Fading Suns, Dragonstar, Farscape, or any other d20 campaign.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

Why aren't rpg companies trying to make a unified d20 sci-fi system?

What do you mean, unified?

They all use a ''Roll D20, add modifier, beat DC'' mechanic and in that sense they are unified and very easy to learn.

But beyond that, what do you want to unify? I fully expect each game to have a certain feel and part of it is different mechanics.

Yeah, it's fun to grab inspiration from certain setting and port it in another one. But when I'm buying, for example, Star Wars, I'm not buying a sourcebook for D&D. I'm buying Star Wars.

 

[Alzrius]

The way I understand it, WotC still sets the bar on these things.

D&D is d20 Fantasy, and every other d20 publisher makes their stuff to build on that.

While some people have tried modern d20 settings before, d20 Modern is going to be the baseline for that once it hits the shelves, especially considering that the d20 companies are already planning on releasing supplementary material for the book literally a day after its released.

Futuristic sci-fi is simply going to follow the same paradigm. There are a couple out now, but nothing anyone considers "the definitive book to have to play d20 future sci-fi."

Why? Well, in my guess, its probably just because we rely on WotC to set over-arching blueprints like that. Its one thing to make up how to introduce superheroes into a game, its another to say how to run an entire sub-genre of games. d20 is WotC's pet, so it probably isnt too wrong to say they are the best qualified to do that.

Sadly for us, we probably won't see such a book for a while.

Im the guy who asked about d20 Future at the d20 Modern seminar at GenCon, and, as Danzilla said, the question was turned aside. My theory is that, as long as WotC is already making a d20-based sci-fi game (Star Wars), they won't undercut themselves with a more generic book, and also, they just dont plan on getting to d20 Future for a while.

I still think we will see one eventually, but it`ll be years. Until then, we`re probably just going to see specific sci fi campaigns from various d20 publishers that are good, but not what a WotC-released futuristic sci-fi genre book would be.

 

[Tsyr]

Uhhh... why do you need conversion notes for WoT? Except for the magic system and defense scores, both of which are so obvious and transparent that you shouldn't need any help with (Either use defense or not, either use channeling or not. Replacing either one with the D20 standard, or vis versa, is as simple as deciding "yes" or "no". ), it _IS_ DnD.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Uhhh... why do you need conversion notes for WoT? Except for the magic system and defense scores, both of which are so obvious and transparent that you shouldn't need any help with (Either use defense or not, either use channeling or not. Replacing either one with the D20 standard, or vis versa, is as simple as deciding "yes" or "no". ), it _IS_ DnD.

I disagree. The classes are a tad different and playtesting shows this out. For one the skill points are a little unbalanced towards the WoT characters. The monsters, as a GM, are another thing I didn't want to sit there and fiddle with for CRs.

 

[mikeryan]

I think one reason that you don't (and probably won't) see a "unified sci-fi" D20 game is, unlike fantasy, science fiction doesn't have a commonly accepted basis. There's a common ground for fantasy: magic, pseudo-medievalism, dwarves, elves, dragons, etc. This common ground comes from past history and myths that we all have some passing familiarity with.

The same doesn't exists for science fiction. With science fiction, you have to make up a lot more of your basic setting. Most of this is in the technological and societal basis. In short, almost everyone has a different conception about what the future will be like. This applies both inside and outside of D20, BTW.

 

[Psion]

Just as I said over on the publishers board, I just don't see the point you are harping on here. D20 SW, FS, and Farscape are all adaptations of d20 to play a specific game. It's not the intentions of these games to have complete plug-and-play compatability -- though I would assert that plug-n-play compatability is not as bad as you imply.

T20 is the closest game to truly trying to be generic space SF, but I think trying to emulate other titles (even if they were available when the game was being designed) would have kneecapped their efforts to make a truly generally useful SF game... which I think T20 is.

 

[PosterBoy]

Why aren't rpg companies trying to make a unified d20 sci-fi system?

Since we (RPGObjects) mostly work in Sci-Fi d20, we would love to see some standards in cross setting rules (equipment, combat, etc...). Right now we try to stick close to dnd to make porting other material as easy as possible. We will certainly make some use of the new d20 modern rules (but there some changes in d20M that we don't really like so we haven't decided what we'll use).

Dragonstar, Fading Suns and even Darwin's World are pretty standard fantasy d20 in space.

Just for the recoard, Darwin's World does NOT take place in space.