Why so little D20 Modern Support?

[Vigilance]

Way to make friends, influence people, and win customers Dana.

Overlord, on behalf of the community I apologize... Dana has a singular wit.

Chuck

 

[takyris]

Overlord,

What kind of support are you looking for? For d20M, at least, the combination of PDF support, hardcover support, general D&D support, and real-world input has been pretty good.

For example, in last night's game, I was writing about a small town on the Dakota Reservation that was being harassed by bikers coming back from the motorcylce rally in Sturges. Stuff I needed included:

- Time to travel from San Francisco to North Dakota: Got from AAA website.
- Similarity of Sioux language to other languages: One minute on Google, one minute in the d20 Modern book
- When the motorcycle rally is held, and for how long: One minute on Google.
- Likely abilities from a skeletal monster: D&D 3.5 SRD
- Purchase price for a Desert Eagle: d20M
- Rules for driving attacks while riding a motorcycle: d20M

You can do "Lost World" with d20 Modern, Google, and the D&D 3.5 SRD, which has a ton of good dinosaur stats in it.

In any event, if you are intent on selling your books because you believe that d20 Modern is not adequately supported, well... I disagree with you, but I wish you the best of luck.

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Way to make friends, influence people, and win customers Dana.

Overlord, on behalf of the community I apologize... Dana has a singular wit.

Chuck

First, who said I was looking to make a friend of Overlord or make him my customer? Hell, I didn't even influence him; it was pretty clear he was already prepared to dump D20M. This thread was just his ill-conceived swan song to look for false justification for doing so. The excuses thus far (with some paraphrasing because its the middle of the afternoon and I don't have 3 hours to wait for page loads for the whole thread)

"Oh, there's no support"

Then its pointed out there's a significant quantity of available material.

"I don't do PDFs"

Quite a backwards attitude to take for a fan of the modern genre.

"They're not the right format"

what? want something even less portable, like a .LIT file for Microsoft Reader? Or maybe just something as unattractive as pure text?

"They cost more to buy and print than they do to buy preprinted"

A case in point was offered for 21 books being printed at an average cost of an additional $7 each (and even then, using some very expensive DIY options like protector sheets and an overpriced printer brand). I've got most of the same books printed; $9 for binders, $22 for the HP inkjet cartridge, $6 for paper, and $3 for a bottle of refill ink for a total of a mere $40. Given the cost of PDF, that's less than $15 a book for Ralts, less than $10 for me. What's 64 pages going for in the stores these days anyway? $17.95?

"The product comes in an unusable format- I have to perform another step to make the product usable at the game table"

In other words, laziness. a few mouse clicks and occasionally feeding the printer isn't exactly what I would call hard labor and punching holes and putting them in a binder isn't much more labor intensive...

"I found another generic system with better support"

Can't help but wonder what this nameless, faceless system might be.

And best of all "Reading things onscreen is a pain", to which I can only say:

If it's such a pain or so difficult, then wtf are you doing posting here, since the site design is a lot more stressful to the eyes than any book layout I've ever seen?

Like I said, nothing but one excuse after another. All I can say is the odds are good that D20M will get better support from whomever ends up with Overlord's D20 products once he gets rid of his books.

So feel free to play kissass all you want, Chuck. I can't imagine why; it isn't like he's going to be buying much of your work, either.

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

And that's the problem with that list there is a load of stuff listed that isn't really D20 Modern, and much of that is the hardcopy published stuff.

For example the Crime Scene series by Hogshead isn't D20 Modern, its D20 in a modern setting but it doesn't build on D20 Modern's skill set it instead introduces its own, it doesn't use D20 Modern's base classes and instead introduces its own class system. So that's 4 supposed D20 Modern products that arn't actually readly useable without some conversion work.

The Horizon series is the same (That's minus another 3). X-Crawl, Real Life Roleplay, etc. etc. Most of these don't require D20 Modern and use none of its rules, in fact adapting them to D20 Modern would involve a lot of work. When you strip away all of that there isn't actually anywhere near as many products as your list makes out.

Most of what's on that list isn't immediately of use to someone using D20 Modern without some major alterations. It would be handy if you list actually listed what used the D20 Modern rules, and not there own version of the D20, or at least had a tick box to that effect.

Well, quite a few of those non-d20m products you mentioned were actually touted by their publishers as D20M books prior to the street dates. Since I don't own all of them yet, they went on the list based on what the publishers said.

 

[Stormborn]

I don't know if I'm the only one but I'd definitly go buy a book with 5-6 "minigames" in Polyhedron-style containing a setting and a basic adventure/campaign idea. Preferably low or no FX. I'm really hoping for some more historic or semi-hsitoric settings (no semi-historic as D&D to medieval Europe, more like Call of Cthulhu to the 1920s or so).

Me too. At least as far as minigames goes. I would love to see a book dedicated to adapting d20 Modern to pre-modern eras. I would like to see games with FX too, but really only if it presents new FX systems.

 

[JPL]

So feel free to play kissass all you want, Chuck. I can't imagine why; it isn't like he's going to be buying much of your work, either.

And Dana fails another Charisma check.

[Chuck --- don't make him mad. He has thousands of imaginary guns.]

 

[mroberon1972]

Dana,

You have just made a personal attack on a person who asked a question and made a statment.

That was all he did. The fact his answers bother you is not the issue.

Now normally, I would allow you to prove yourself an ass, but you are (sort of) representing the rest of us as a publisher.

Now, while you have already shown that you don't give a darn about your ref in any way, I DO care about my own.

In conclusion, I would like to advise you of the following course of action:

Be quiet. Quit making the rest of us look bad by proximity.

 

[Vigilance]

So feel free to play kissass all you want, Chuck. I can't imagine why; it isn't like he's going to be buying much of your work, either.

I'm not playing and I'm not kissing his *** Dana. I love unpleasant people who assume anyone who feels that life is too short to be a Kvetching Mensch is being fake.

I don't assume everyone I talk to on the boards is a potential customer, and thus don't tie my politeness to whether or not they seem to have "potential" as a consumer of my wares. I'm polite because that's how my mom raised me.

Also, while I can assure that everyone you're polite to is not a 100% lock as a customer Dana, I can assure you that 99% of the people you are UNpleasant to will never EVER buy a product with your name on it.

I think its perfectly reasonable for people to make a format choice one way or the other, which is why I am an advocate of printing my more popular PDFs.

Chuck

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Dana,

You have just made a personal attack on a person who asked a question and made a statment.

That was all he did. The fact his answers bother you is not the issue.

Now normally, I would allow you to prove yourself an ass, but you are (sort of) representing the rest of us as a publisher.

Now, while you have already shown that you don't give a darn about your ref in any way, I DO care about my own.

In conclusion, I would like to advise you of the following course of action:

Be quiet. Quit making the rest of us look bad by proximity.

Ummm... No. You made your choice to put yourself in my proximity, so you're the one who has to suffer with your decision, not me. If you're worried I am making you look bad, then remove yourself from my proximity.

And quite frankly, I'm shocked. I've been proving myself to be an ass online for well over 10 years. You really should have known what you were getting into.

Besides, being an ass doesn't hurt when I have reputations for striving to always do better than anyone else and for always doing what I set out to do, regardless the cost.

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

I'm not playing and I'm not kissing his *** Dana. I love unpleasant people who assume anyone who feels that life is too short to be a Kvetching Mensch is being fake.

I don't assume everyone I talk to on the boards is a potential customer, and thus don't tie my politeness to whether or not they seem to have "potential" as a consumer of my wares. I'm polite because that's how my mom raised me.

Also, while I can assure that everyone you're polite to is not a 100% lock as a customer Dana, I can assure you that 99% of the people you are UNpleasant to will never EVER buy a product with your name on it.

I think its perfectly reasonable for people to make a format choice one way or the other, which is why I am an advocate of printing my more popular PDFs.

Chuck

Yes, well all the political politeness and false niceties are a part of the reason why society is rotting away like a festering cancer. Kiss up while you bury the anger, resentment, hatred and all the other negativity so it just keeps eating away at you. Ever notice how people seem to always say the mass murderers, serial killers, spree killers and the like seemed to be nice people?

I am relatively polite most of the time. But when I encounter something that annoys me, I'm simply not going to hide it under a saccharine sweet false sugar coating of politically correct nonsense.

Oh, and by the way, you can assure me all you want, but I happen to know that people who hate me make up significantly more than 1% of my sales.

And while you don't think you were kissing up, then please tell me what it was that possessed you to make an apology in my stead? Nobody does that nonsense other than the idiot politicians we hopelessly keep electing in this country.