Will Spycraft dominate d20 Modern?

[Kanegrundar]

For me, D20 Modern, while not showing the depth of other modern/sci-fi settings, does the genres justice better than Spycraft. Don't get me wrong Spycraft is a fine setting and system, but D20 Modern allows me to do more. WotC never intended Modern to offer depth, but a good foundation on which the 3rd party market can expand further, which companies like Ronin Arts, Adamant, RPGObjects, LPJDesigns, and so forth have done. Spycraft will have a good core audience, but I doubt we'll see AEG take over the modern gaming market if for nothing else than the more stringent hold over their IP and their more spy-centric focus.

Also, speaking from LOTS of experience here, D20 Modern is so much then simply "modern D&D." It can be played as such, but I have yet to play in a D20 Modern game that was anything like D&D. The mechanics may be similar, but they give totally different styles of play.

Kane

 

[King of Old School]

Disclaimer: I like d20 Modern quite a bit, have defended it in various on-line fora, and personally prefer it to Spycraft 1.0 (which I do own) for various reasons. I own the d20M corebook and a number of supplements, both official (everything prior to d20 Past) and third-party (all of The Game Mechanics' print stuff; Ultramodern Firearms; Blood & Fists; Dark Inheritance 1.0; the first 3 GWd20 books; and DP9's Mecha Companion hardback). So I'm not coming at this as any kind of d20M hater or as a "fanboy" of Spycraft or AEG.

I think in one sense it's true that Spycraft 2.0 is unlikely to overtake d20M in straight sales numbers for a variety of business reasons that have nothing to do with content. OTOH, in terms of mindshare -- especially among the "hardcore" gamers that tend to dominate online discussion -- I think SC2.0 stands to make real gains. There are a variety of elements in d20M that have been received less than favourably: the non-archetypal basic classes, the convoluted multiclassing required, the handling of firearms (esp. automatic weapons), the unarmed/nonlethal combat and damage systems, the blandness of the feats in the corebook. SC2.0 addresses all of these, and adds a level of generic applicability that was lacking in SC1.0. It also features a vehicle chase system that is much more popular than the default handling of vehicles in d20M, such that it's been much emulated and adapted in d20M third-party material.

I think the real question is support. When you look at official support for d20M, the trend is downwards from thick, comprehensive hardcovers to thin softcovers of debatable value. For that matter, I can't look at the decision to make d20F thinner than UrbArc as anything other than a loss of confidence in the d20M line by the beancounters at Wizards. The real strength of d20M is third-party support, though that seems to be getting more and more thin on the ground in terms of print product. Spycraft 1.0 wasn't entirely without third-party support: Paradigm Creations published Most Wanted (a compendium of NPCs) and Mythic Dreams migrated Dark Inheritance from d20M to the "Powered by Spycraft" license for DI2.0. If AEG can (will?) make it easier for third parties to publish print or PDF product under the PbS license, Spycraft 2.0 could make a dent in d20M's numbers. If a good d20F analogue was published for SC2.0 -- especially if it made ample use of existing OGL material, some of which IMO is more solid than the d20F content -- it could be a real winner.

Either way, more choice for gamers is good.

KoOS

 

[King of Old School]

I'd like to see free D20 Modern adventures like the ones at the Living Spycraft site so I wouldn't have to be forever converting Spycraft adventures to D20 Modern, or something like Modus Operandi for D20 Modern.

??? The official d20M site has a number of free downloadable PDF adventures, just like the ones at the Spycraft and LSpy sites.

I agree with you about the lack of a really good d20M fansite, though.

KoOS

 

[King of Old School]

My own personal opinion is that AEG puts together some pretty decent RPGs with great settings, but linking them to CCGs with all the metaplot that entails often makes their settings all but unusable to me. Looks like Spycraft is taking the same approach - judging by the fact that "www.spycraftrpg.com" takes me to a page labelled "Spycraft Collectible Card Game" with RPG info as an afterthought - and as such it is of pretty much zero interest to me. YMMV.

The Spycraft 1.0 corebook and the "silver-cover" SC supplements were completely free of any kind of setting or metaplot. Shadowforce Archer was the kind of convoluted, metaplotty setting you describe but it was completely self-contained. Unfortunately the mechanics weren't as self-contained as I'd have liked -- some more generic stuff (new core classes, martial arts rules) was included in the SFA "black-cover" supplements and as I had no interest in SFA, that material was lost to me. The SC2.0 corebook will by all accounts be a completely setting-free toolkit RPG, and apparently the setting supplements will be more-or-less self-contained. I don't think the problems you describe will really be an issue. At least I hope not!

Agreed about the shaky nature of AEG's web presence, but hopefully if the RPG sells well it won't be so overshadowed by the CCG and who knows, it might actually get its own website...

KoOS

 

[King of Old School]

I'm curious because I'm considering abandoning GURPS for modern and sci-fi games. GURPS is a great game that I can customize any way I want but as of late I don't have the time to do all of that customization myself. I LIKE the d20 Modern class system b/c it seems a good middle ground between free-form character creation and archetype-based classes. However, while GURPS has numerous full-fledged supplements of high-quality for the modern and sci-fi genres, WotC has adopted a much weaker approach to supporting the game with sourcebooks of comparable quality/thoroughness to their D&D sourcebooks.

Since I haven't yet played d20 Modern, I'm not invested in the system from a campaign perspective. (I do own several d20 Modern books and some Blood-&-____ supplements.) If I'm going to change rules on my players however, I'd like to do it once and for it to be successful. So I thought I would get the opinions of those who had played or at least read, both games. Crazy, I know.

Well, what kind of modern and sci-fi games do you like to run/play? Cinematic or gritty? High-powered or mundane?

KoOS

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

??? The official d20M site has a number of free downloadable PDF adventures, just like the ones at the Spycraft and LSpy sites.

I agree with you about the lack of a really good d20M fansite, though.

KoOS

Spycraft has more. A lot more. At least 25 as of March 24th (and there have been new ones since), and I think all but three had no FX elements at all. While I'm not particularly fond of those kinds of adventures, my group doesn't have enough GMs to give me the time to write my own.

There's also LR games (which does D20 Mafia, but it's not D20 Modern from what I can see), which has as many non-FX adventures as WotC does.

I think there are more free Spycraft adventures than D20 Modern adventures available for sale - at least when it comes to non-FX.

 

[Karl Green]

I doubt very much that Spycraft will impress me that much.

I thought 1st was ok BUT I am not a fan of WP/VP. At first I loved the idea but after playing with them a lot I have come to NOT be that interested in them. Straight Hit Points with Massive Damage Save works just fine for me and I don't need to worry about that stuff.

Plus the thing I REALLY dislike about Spycraft 1 was the HUGE list of Feats and the same old "you only get a few". I much prefer D20 Moderns Talents/Feats every level. NOW if Spycraft goes that way I might be interested and take a look...

But again it is all about taste and some people like and want different things

 

[King of Old School]

Spycraft has more. A lot more. At least 25 as of March 24th (and there have been new ones since), and I think all but three had no FX elements at all. While I'm not particularly fond of those kinds of adventures, my group doesn't have enough GMs to give me the time to write my own.

There's also LR games (which does D20 Mafia, but it's not D20 Modern from what I can see), which has as many non-FX adventures as WotC does.

I think there are more free Spycraft adventures than D20 Modern adventures available for sale - at least when it comes to non-FX.

Oh, that's certainly all true. I was just confused by your initial post, which implied that you thought there weren't any free d20M adventures.

I think one of the great failings of d20M is that the development team assumed that Urban Arcana / Shadow Chasers would be the default mode of play for the game and the initial support materials heavily pushed this -- but it went over like a lead balloon, and Wizards is still struggling to figure out the best alternative. The Spycraft developers seem to better understand the appeal of non-FX modern gaming, at least IMO.

KoOS

 

[Kanegrundar]

I wouldn't say that Urban Arcana went over like a lead balloon. It's been said a few times that it was a very good seller. Not sure where it ranks in the D20 Modern line, but I'd be wiling to bet it has sold more copies than D20 Future, but less than the Modern core book.

Kane

 

[takyris]

Agree with a lot of what's been said. I'm all about the modular nature of d20M at this point, and I'd be annoyed at the idea of going back to archetypes long-term. I'm running a d20 Past (well, D&D-world using the d20 Modern classes) game right now, and my players have the flexibility to make really unique characters.

Add to that the fact that with d20 Modern, we only needed to learn a few new rules -- and even fewer for the 95% of the world that house-ruled nonlethal damage into accumulative rather than instantaneous. I'm not wildly in love with the autofire rules, but I'm sure if I were playing Autofirea, the Game of Autofiring, in which Automatic weaponry was really important, I could find a system to override the existing rules without too much trouble.

I tried to come up with my own take on the d20 system -- a bit of Conan Dodge/Parry defense, a bit of True20's damage saves, a bit of Grim Tales damage-conversion-armor -- and my players completely and totally balked. Too many new rules, too little time to learn 'em. We all have jobs and lives. So now we're doing d20 Modern, because we all know the rules for D&D, and it's moving along just fine.

For my money, right now d20 Modern is the D&D cleric of roleplaying systems. It's not the best at anything, but it's decent at almost everything, and you can specialize and tweak to make it really good at the things that matter to you.