D20 modern sucks. Why?

[Kelb_Panthera]

I've heard it said a number of times now that D20 modern is a poor system for what it's trying to do. Could anyone be so kind as to illuminate why for me?

Is it just that other systems do what it aims to do better?

Is it because it strips away a very large portion of what makes its progenitor so good?

Is it because optimization breaks it to the point of unplayability? (I'd find this one difficult to believe.)

I just don't get it. Nothing really stands out as bad about it to first blush, IMO. Please, enlighten me.

[atemu1234]

I've rarely heard hate for the system, though I don't like how wealth works in the game. It seems like simultaneously breakable and annoying.

[sakuuya]

Is it because it strips away a very large portion of what makes its progenitor so good?

In my experience (which, granted, is a single campaign where none of us were familiar with the specifics of Modern), it's this one. D&D 3.X is good largely because of all the options it gives, and Modern just doesn't have enough options.

[Fouredged Sword]

What more, all the options are REALLY bland. It is really hard to make characters feel different from one another. Levels are also low, so you don't normally see play extending past 6-10th level. This causes the game to feel even more bland as challenges stop being interesting and because damage does not scale with level, combat becomes an absolute slog.

[VincentTakeda]

I started with BECMI... Where with non human races meant your race determined your job.
In 2e they opened up the floodgates a bit. You have a race but it doesnt determine your job.
Then palladium also separates out the concept of occ and rcc. Occupation and Race.

And I spent decades using the race/job combination to create unique identities...

With d20 you're not a paladin or a swashbuckler or a mage... You're a strong guy. Or a fast guy. Or a smart guy.

One type of character design has its soul built into it. The other tacitly removes it.

Even outside of play when I talk about games I play, I want to be able to talk to folks about the time I played that tengu cleric of gozreh in that pathfinder campaign... not that time I played 'that wisdom guy' in that d20 campaign.

One fills your head with wonder that makes you go 'wow!' while the other fills your head with wonder than makes you go 'huh?'

And yes. The 'loose simulation of purchasing power' is garbage. A full 50% of why we adventure is for the loot. Don't 'handwave' loot into some flabby nebulous 'approximation'.

[nobodez]

I think one of the largest problems with d20 Modern is that, well, it's old, and never received an update from the original 3rd Edition roots.

Or rather, it did, but those updates were set within the Star Wars campaign setting (look at Saga Edition after reading the d20 Modern rules and see what I mean).

Unfortunately the updates were stuck within the non-OGL Star Wars rules and couldn't be used without the Star Wars fluff.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I think one of the largest problems with d20 Modern is that, well, it's old, and never received an update from the original 3rd Edition roots.

Or rather, it did, but those updates were set within the Star Wars campaign setting (look at Saga Edition after reading the d20 Modern rules and see what I mean).

Unfortunately the updates were stuck within the non-OGL Star Wars rules and couldn't be used without the Star Wars fluff.

What about d20 future, d20 past, d20 apocolypse, d20 cyberscape, etc, and so on. I've only got d20 future so I know there's not much update there but none?

[Knaight]

And yes. The 'loose simulation of purchasing power' is garbage. A full 50% of why we adventure is for the loot. Don't 'handwave' loot into some flabby nebulous 'approximation'.

Speak for yourself. I really don't care about loot, and consider abstract financial systems a boon. I still dislike the way it was implemented in d20 modern in a lot of the specifics, but that doesn't reflect on approximations as a whole.

As for the rest of the system - d20 modern is a class based system which strenuously avoids actual classes. The entire point of a class based system is to have classes for actual archetypes which stick to those archetypes. d20 modern doesn't use archetypes, it uses an ability score focus, pretty much necessitates multiclassing, so on and so forth. In D&D, I can see why classes are used. I'm not a big fan of classes, but in D&D it's a design choice that makes sense. In d20 modern, it looks like the only reason classes were used was because they were used in D&D and the designers felt they had to have them. That's a terrible reason to use classes.

Then there's the competition. D&D is built for a very specific fantasy subgenre, it includes a lot of stuff for that subgenre, and it generally feels unique. There's a distinct D&D feel - even the detractors say that much. A large part of the 3e 4e edition wars were over that, and the question was never if there was a D&D feel but rather if 4e kept it. d20 modern doesn't have a distinct feel. d20 modern feels like a generic system, which puts it in direct competition with other generic systems. It puts it in direct competition with other non-generic systems for every implementation as well (which ones vary depending on what exactly it is being used for, but it runs into a bunch).

That's a problem, because there are some very well made generic systems out there, along with the specifics. Looking at d20 modern, I see no reason to use it instead of Fudge, GURPS, d6 Adventure, even HERO*. If I'm going for action, it bumps into Savage Worlds. If I'm going for more horror, it bumps into Nemesis, Delta Green, Trail of Cthulhu. If I'm going for an investigatory/social game, then it runs into clearly being combat based and not very good, along with hitting the general GUMSHOE system. Every single one of these matchups consists of a game being better suited to what it does than d20 modern, and more than a few of them are free games.

*I dislike HERO.

[EccentricCircle]

Feat Implants

[Ashtagon]

I think the class system killed d20m.

There is essentially only one race to pick. Fair enough - that comes with the genre.

The occupations were an interesting quirk, and very worthy of greater development, but ultimately didn't give more than trivial 1st level bonuses.

The classes? If I want a strong PC, I create a character with a high Strength score. The "classes" basically doubled-down on something I was already picking. They didn't add anything extra to that part of character design.

[Fouredged Sword]

That and the class defense system paired with the free multiclassing made a fast 1 dip almost ensured.

[Morty]

D&D 3e is built for a specific purpose, and let's be honest, it's pretty crap at that anyway. D20 Modern takes 3e's skeleton and tries to apply it to a completely different genre, which means it's effectively an exercise in furiously hammering a square peg into a round hole.

[Solaris]

I think the class system killed d20m.

There is essentially only one race to pick. Fair enough - that comes with the genre.

The occupations were an interesting quirk, and very worthy of greater development, but ultimately didn't give more than trivial 1st level bonuses.

The classes? If I want a strong PC, I create a character with a high Strength score. The "classes" basically doubled-down on something I was already picking. They didn't add anything extra to that part of character design.

I agree. They would have done better to design it by just skipping over the base classes entirely and moving on into the advanced classes... kinda like how it as done with D&D. I've had success with transplanting D&D and d20 Star Wars classes into d20 Modern, but at that point you're really just using those classes with d20 Modern equipment.
If you must have a class system, then build the classes with flavor. It's one thing to say "A class isn't bound to its fluff", and another thing entirely to say "Your class has no fluff".

[Blackhawk748]

Basic D20 modern is....... kinda lame. Now start slapping splat books in and it gets less lame, not great but better. Personally i have found that it does a decent job with Post Apocalyptic games. Exodus used D20 modern as its base and i found it a fun system to use. Then again the Advance Classes for Exodus where better than the ones in Core D20 Modern.

I also feel i need to mention D20 Past as, while i have never played it, i think you could do a pretty good pulp fiction game with that.

D20 Future i have onle ever used for equipment as Ommigawd those Spaceship combat rules sucked, if you want that i recommend looking at Blood and Space.

[Jeraa]

What about d20 future, d20 past, d20 apocolypse, d20 cyberscape, etc, and so on. I've only got d20 future so I know there's not much update there but none?

Those aren't updates. Those are expansions. Splat books. An update was like the 3.5 core rules, which were an update to the 3.0 core rules.

Simply being based on the d20 system is enough reason for some people to dislike it.

d20 Modern is a weird combination of both 3.0 rules and 3.5 rules. It doesn't totally fit in with either. While meant to be a ruleset for modern games, it doesn't work for the real world. All of the campaign setting ideas and most of the monsters indicate the idea for the game was something of a modern-day D&D setting.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Okay. So is there anything, in particular, wrong with the game's mechanics?

@Morty:

D&D is pretty crap at it's intended purpose. Really?

[NichG]

Is it because it strips away a very large portion of what makes its progenitor so good?

Basically this. d20 Modern feels like a skeleton to me - it comes from D&D, which has an extremely rich set of interactions built into the rules, and it strips away most of those. Some of the d20 Modern expansions, 3rd party stuff, etc do a much better job and add back in some of that richness, but it's actually a pretty hard thing to do and most single sources can only do so much. That said, if you did a full 'everything d20 Modern+Future+3rd party+Stargate+Star Wars d20+every other d20-based sci-fi' game it'd probably end up being pretty rich, if incoherent (though I can't believe it'd be more incoherent than D&D with e.g. Eberron+Faerun+Planescape+Dark Sun+.. would be).

I'd say there are a number of things that really make D&D. Lots of people actually dislike these things, but even the way in which people are driven to homebrew alternatives is very 'D&D' in feel, which to me says that they're things that give a strong impression be it positive or negative. The main things are:


- The game changes fundamentally as you advance. Lv1 and Lv6 and Lv12 and Lv18 all play as if they're almost different games. To a large degree, this gives the game a very strong sense of forward momentum, and it also makes it so that there's always something to look forward to. d20 Modern, as the base game, doesn't really change all that much as you advance (similar to the problem with epic levels in D&D actually - epic levels beyond the first (for casters) don't actually change the game very much).

- There's a large body of things in the system that interact and combo together. In D&D, there's a particular pattern of actions and character features I can make use of to turn my character into a levitating, sentient sandwich - and furthermore, it's actually a specific pattern; if I want to do some other ridiculous thing, it's a different specific pattern. The idea that you can dig into the materials and come up with some genuinely new trick that no one at the table will have seen before is pretty compelling, in a way that's distinct from just being able to do the end-product (e.g. 'work with the DM to stat out a sentient sandwich race'). You can call that depth or broken-ness or whatever, but it makes you feel as if there may still be new things to discover about the game even if you've played for a long time. That gives the game a sort of longevity, whereas d20 Modern sort of feels (to me) like after a 6 month campaign you'll basically have done everything there is to do in the game.

- The game is highly idiosyncratic. That is to say, there are just some things which are the way they are for totally random historical reasons. Why is this good? Well, it's a source of notable or memorable things. Some times these are problematic, other times they're just strange (why do I have to eat a spider to walk on walls?), and some times they're just very iconic (metallic color-coded dragons). d20 Modern feels to me like it's trying to be a universal system and not say anything at all about its setting or context, but that just makes it kind of pointless IMO. Without some kind of commitment to particular ideas or flavor or context, there's nothing in the system that provides sources of inspiration or ideas. In D&D I might e.g. look up a random monster or spell or bit of cosmology and get some idea for plots - 'what does it mean that Magic Jar is a thing that exists?', 'Vampires can go gaseous, so what if one hid in his lover's perfume bottle during the day and could be 'summoned' by smashing the bottle?', 'there's a Plane of Ice... what if there were a place on the Plane of Ice where words themselves froze, and the echo of the words that created the multiverse was trapped somewhere in the ice?'. For d20 Modern, with extra source books I can do that but the actual d20 Modern book itself is extremely vanilla.

- The game is broken. Maybe it's a bit too much, but I think it's actually good for games to be a little broken - it gives players things to feel like they're getting away with, gets everyone at the table to roll their eyes about this or that, encourages people to discuss the game or try things out. It's sort of like how in computer RPGs, its fun to finally reach the point where you're one-shotting everything around you or dealing absurd amounts of damage or having a late-game boss being unable to hurt you with one of his attacks (just not all of them!). If the pacing is right and you don't spend too much of the game in that phase, it's actually sort of rewarding to get there. It's even better if the game seems more broken than it actually is in practice (e.g. if its not too hard to deal with the broken stuff without just banning it), or if once you break the game, it just means you go to the next level of difficulty so you get to 'break' things multiple times - e.g. congratulations, you've mastered Uberchargers, but now you're high level and things have more sophisticated defenses than just AC. d20 Modern doesn't really feel like it's designed for that at all.


If I wanted to play a D&D-style game in a more modern or futuristic setting, I'd so something like the following:


First figure out 'what are the major progression transitions going to be?' and then try to rebuild D&D's richness in terms of those things rather than D&D's ones. So for example, maybe the transitions are 'individual -> augmented -> distributed entity'. For example, low level is, you're just a person doing person-level things. The next tier of play is, you have technological implants, genetic modifications, etc which let you break the normal limits of what a person's body and mind can accomplish. The last tier is then, each character becomes supported by massive distributed systems embedded in the world outside themselves, and can do almost magical things through interacting with that - here we have the nanite swarm controllers, the hacker with a massive network of AIs living in every machine in the world, the characters who can download themselves into people's cyberware and Agent Smith anyone they want, the characters who can meld themselves with vehicles and literally become a starship or a mecha, etc.

Then I'd want to take whatever looked to be too generalized and knock out random holes in it, that just exist 'because of the constraints of the setting'. Even if one can conceive of a technological character who can merge with any vehicle, but in this setting the vehicles need to have a particular pentagonal geometry in order to synchronize with the pilot's neurology, and the problem of 'universal vehicle synchrony' simply hasn't been cracked. Maybe the people who will eventually be able to make duplicates of themselves to act at multiple places at once have to literally segment aspects of their persona in order to do it - each copy has to be identified with a particular aspect of themself (with a corresponding limit on the kinds of abilities it can use, e.g. one copy can use skills, a different one can use tools, a different one can communicate, etc) - and if a copy is destroyed then it takes some time for the original's psyche to mend. And so on. Those random idiosyncracies are best tied together with some underlying conceit to the setting, such that eventually one might be able to say 'there's a reason it was that way, and the reason is interesting'.

An example of an idiosyncracy like that is how in Shadowrun cyberware damages your Essence. It prevents some character concepts from being easy, but it also establishes a particular constraint that everyone in the setting has to deal with - if you want to be a mage, you have to eschew invasive tech. It also motivates stories about people trying to bypass those limits, or people trying to work within them in new ways.

Then I'd salt the setting with things that seem to break the rules just a bit, as well as things that just obey a different set of rules entirely. Another good thing to add is places where it seems that they are even more restricted than the rules that limit the PCs' society. That stuff becomes basic plot-hook candy for power-hungry PCs - 'lets go to the primitives and give them tech that breaks their limits, and they'll make us kings', 'lets investigate the thing that seems to be doing the impossible, and maybe we can take advantage of its abilities', etc.

[thorr-kan]

See, I'm in a distinct minority (VERY SMALL) here: I think D20 Modern is *better* for DnD for than 3.0 or 3.5. I cut my teeth on Basic/Expert, but mostly I play 2ED. I will play and like 3Ed, but...I'm definitely an old school gamer. I like my games to feel like Tolkein and Conan and The Black Company.

To me, D20M feels like those books. I think WotC missed an opportunity when they didn't publish D20M Fantasy (Sword & Sorcery!) and D20M Ancients (PL0-2? 3?).

[Blackhawk748]

Okay. So is there anything, in particular, wrong with the game's mechanics?

Outside of the usual 3e wonkiness? Not that i can recall, except that wealth check thing, but then again i didnt really like that, so i never used it.

[Ashtagon]

...While meant to be a ruleset for modern games, it doesn't work for the real world. All of the campaign setting ideas and most of the monsters indicate the idea for the game was something of a modern-day D&D setting.

To be fair, it never claimed to be a model for the real world. Its stated intention was to model cinematic movie reality. Think Die Hard, Pirates of the Caribean, Buffy, Flash Gordon, The Avengers, Dollhouse, and Dr Who, rather than Coronation Street, Bridgit Jones, or mad Men.

[Blackhawk748]

To be fair, it never claimed to be a model for the real world. Its stated intention was to model cinematic movie reality. Think Die Hard, Pirates of the Caribean, Buffy, Flash Gordon, The Avengers, Dollhouse, and Dr Who, rather than Coronation Street, Bridgit Jones, or mad Men.

And, personally, I feel it does do Action movies fairly well.

Also ya the base classes are lame but you refer to your character generally by their occupation then instead of their class, unless their in an advanced class then by all means use that.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Since it was brought up; what specific flaws are there in d20 future. I read something about the space-battle mechanics being terrible?

[Blackhawk748]

Since it was brought up; what specific flaws are there in d20 future. I read something about the space-battle mechanics being terrible?

I brought it up here, several others brought it up on other threads, its one of those "general consensus" things

Im looking it over again now and i forgot that they virtually cloned normal combat. So ya, your space battles are pretty much identical to your ground battles.

Some good things though, the gear is nice. I especially like a bunch of the guns and armor. Also they have Time Machines if you feel like being Dr Who or Hubert Farnsworth.

Other than starship combat the book just has some rules for other planets and dimensions, so basically suggestions for adventures as well as a bunch of gear. Oh and it has Mechas too. Dont ask me how those rules are, ive never used them.

[frogglesmash]

Since it was brought up; what specific flaws are there in d20 future. I read something about the space-battle mechanics being terrible?

Most of the feats were pretty meh not worth taking. Along the same lines as those feats that give you +1 to a couple skills.

[Jeraa]

Since it was brought up; what specific flaws are there in d20 future. I read something about the space-battle mechanics being terrible?

It is basically normal character combat. But with 500 foot squares instead of 5 foot squares. And fighters mount 3 weapons - dreadnoughts mount 12 (which for the most part are exactly the same, so a dreadnought has the firepower of 4 fighters.)

Weapon fluff doesn't match the stats at all - PL 8 sliver guns are fluffed as "tearing through a yard or more of heavy armor", yet deal less damage than the PL 5 tank cannon in the core rulebook. The 1 megaton nuclear missile (1000 kilotons, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons) only does 72 damage on average, not even enough to take out a launch (evacuation pod).

Spaceship weapons have a shorter range then even modern-day weapons.

[Blackhawk748]

It is basically normal character combat. But with 500 foot squares instead of 5 foot squares. And fighters mount 3 weapons - dreadnoughts mount 12 (which for the most part are exactly the same, so a dreadnought has the firepower of 4 fighters.)

Weapon fluff doesn't match the stats at all - PL 8 sliver guns are fluffed as "tearing through a yard or more of heavy armor", yet deal less damage than the PL 5 tank cannon in the core rulebook. The 1 megaton nuclear missile (1000 kilotons, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons) only does 72 damage on average, not even enough to take out a launch (evacuation pod).

Spaceship weapons have a shorter range then even modern-day weapons.

This is why i always recommend Blood and Space, its got rules for shooting non starships with starship weapons. Also it covers starship combat waaaaay better, weather you want hard sci fi or space opera (in the case of the latter you just have more options for what you get to do) Though its personnel sized weapons are kinda lousy, thus you just take those from D20 Future.

[Urpriest]

Okay. So is there anything, in particular, wrong with the game's mechanics?


The wealth system is a bit one, in that it's really easy to break. You can sell things for substantial one-time wealth bonuses, use those wealth bonuses to buy expensive stuff, sell that stuff for higher bonuses, until before long the whole party has helicopters. This is why I had to strip out the looting rules entirely when I ran a hybrid d20 Future/3.5 Psionic Tippyverse game.

Huge hit point numbers are kind of weird, even when death by max damage happens at rather low numbers. It's unclear whether they really got the scaling right.

[Fouredged Sword]

I always felt that the character's equipment did more to define them than their stats. That is really just how bland the classes are.

[NichG]

To be fair, I don't know that I've seen any system that has done multi-scale vehicular combat well without having cross-scale issues. If starships have comparable hitpoints to characters, then characters will tend to attack them with small arms. If starships have gadzillions of hitpoints, then people will try all sorts of things to do have a starship do their person-scale fighting for them. And in either case, the guy who plays a dedicated pilot might find that he's either useless half the time, or that everyone else is useless half the time.

[Fouredged Sword]

The problem with such a scale difference is you are actually playing two different games. Starships ether dominate the game and IC stuff is a sideshow or IC stuff is the main event with some starship minigames thrown in.

[Aracor]

It's also probably worth noting that the different "scales" don't really make sense. Basically, it seems like each "module" (vehicle combat, mecha combat, starship combat, etc) was designed without consultation with whoever was designing the rest. There is no internal balance or consistency between them at all. I'd have to look more specifically, but I seem to recall large starships basically being unable to kill each other.

[Fouredged Sword]

Also, no matter how many guns you mount, you can't fire more than one attack a round.

[Ashtagon]

...I'd have to look more specifically, but I seem to recall large starships basically being unable to kill each other.

I've not actually run numbers, but as an RP feature, that actually makes a certain amount of sense. You don't want the starships to blow each other up, because that leaves zero room for PC heroics. Or PC survival, for that matter. Far more interesting if they blow each other into derelict hulks, then one maybe gets caught in a terminal orbit into a gas giant and they need to use its momentum to somehow slingshot the other away (or just plain flee the falling one and into the safe one), then some how jury rig a repair that gets the other derelict hulk in good enough shape to either find rescue or make a survivable landing on a hospitable planet. Of, and what are those primitive tribes down there?

You can't do that if they simply blew each other up. You can't even look for treasure if that happens.

[Blackhawk748]

I've not actually run numbers, but as an RP feature, that actually makes a certain amount of sense. You don't want the starships to blow each other up, because that leaves zero room for PC heroics. Or PC survival, for that matter. Far more interesting if they blow each other into derelict hulks, then one maybe gets caught in a terminal orbit into a gas giant and they need to use its momentum to somehow slingshot the other away (or just plain flee the falling one and into the safe one), then some how jury rig a repair that gets the other derelict hulk in good enough shape to either find rescue or make a survivable landing on a hospitable planet. Of, and what are those primitive tribes down there?

You can't do that if they simply blew each other up. You can't even look for treasure if that happens.

I believe he was talking about just killing each other in general. Otherwise i agree with you. Burnt out hulks are a lot more fun.


Also you can have Starfighters vs Ground troops, its a lot like having air support. Most of the good Space Combat rules ive sen for d20 (Star Wars Saga and RCR as well as Blood and Space (yes i know im mentioning it a lot, i love it) have it be harder to hit things on the ground for the benefit of doing a ton more damage. Tends to work fine in my experiences.

[Sith_Happens]

I've read through all of the D20 Modern classes a few times and there's literally not one of them that I'd actually want to play. Nearly every talent and feat in the game is incredibly bland, which is especially bad considering that the base classes consist entirely of talents rather than set class features. The rules as a whole are a weird mash-up of 3.0 and 3.5, with a lot of clunky results.

That about cover it?

[A_S]

Basically this. d20 Modern feels like a skeleton to me - it comes from D&D, which has an extremely rich set of interactions built into the rules, and it strips away most of those. Some of the d20 Modern expansions, 3rd party stuff, etc do a much better job and add back in some of that richness, but it's actually a pretty hard thing to do and most single sources can only do so much. That said, if you did a full 'everything d20 Modern+Future+3rd party+Stargate+Star Wars d20+every other d20-based sci-fi' game it'd probably end up being pretty rich, if incoherent (though I can't believe it'd be more incoherent than D&D with e.g. Eberron+Faerun+Planescape+Dark Sun+.. would be).

I'd say there are a number of things that really make D&D. Lots of people actually dislike these things, but even the way in which people are driven to homebrew alternatives is very 'D&D' in feel, which to me says that they're things that give a strong impression be it positive or negative. The main things are:


- The game changes fundamentally as you advance. Lv1 and Lv6 and Lv12 and Lv18 all play as if they're almost different games. To a large degree, this gives the game a very strong sense of forward momentum, and it also makes it so that there's always something to look forward to. d20 Modern, as the base game, doesn't really change all that much as you advance (similar to the problem with epic levels in D&D actually - epic levels beyond the first (for casters) don't actually change the game very much).

- There's a large body of things in the system that interact and combo together. In D&D, there's a particular pattern of actions and character features I can make use of to turn my character into a levitating, sentient sandwich - and furthermore, it's actually a specific pattern; if I want to do some other ridiculous thing, it's a different specific pattern. The idea that you can dig into the materials and come up with some genuinely new trick that no one at the table will have seen before is pretty compelling, in a way that's distinct from just being able to do the end-product (e.g. 'work with the DM to stat out a sentient sandwich race'). You can call that depth or broken-ness or whatever, but it makes you feel as if there may still be new things to discover about the game even if you've played for a long time. That gives the game a sort of longevity, whereas d20 Modern sort of feels (to me) like after a 6 month campaign you'll basically have done everything there is to do in the game.

- The game is highly idiosyncratic. That is to say, there are just some things which are the way they are for totally random historical reasons. Why is this good? Well, it's a source of notable or memorable things. Some times these are problematic, other times they're just strange (why do I have to eat a spider to walk on walls?), and some times they're just very iconic (metallic color-coded dragons). d20 Modern feels to me like it's trying to be a universal system and not say anything at all about its setting or context, but that just makes it kind of pointless IMO. Without some kind of commitment to particular ideas or flavor or context, there's nothing in the system that provides sources of inspiration or ideas. In D&D I might e.g. look up a random monster or spell or bit of cosmology and get some idea for plots - 'what does it mean that Magic Jar is a thing that exists?', 'Vampires can go gaseous, so what if one hid in his lover's perfume bottle during the day and could be 'summoned' by smashing the bottle?', 'there's a Plane of Ice... what if there were a place on the Plane of Ice where words themselves froze, and the echo of the words that created the multiverse was trapped somewhere in the ice?'. For d20 Modern, with extra source books I can do that but the actual d20 Modern book itself is extremely vanilla.

- The game is broken. Maybe it's a bit too much, but I think it's actually good for games to be a little broken - it gives players things to feel like they're getting away with, gets everyone at the table to roll their eyes about this or that, encourages people to discuss the game or try things out. It's sort of like how in computer RPGs, its fun to finally reach the point where you're one-shotting everything around you or dealing absurd amounts of damage or having a late-game boss being unable to hurt you with one of his attacks (just not all of them!). If the pacing is right and you don't spend too much of the game in that phase, it's actually sort of rewarding to get there. It's even better if the game seems more broken than it actually is in practice (e.g. if its not too hard to deal with the broken stuff without just banning it), or if once you break the game, it just means you go to the next level of difficulty so you get to 'break' things multiple times - e.g. congratulations, you've mastered Uberchargers, but now you're high level and things have more sophisticated defenses than just AC. d20 Modern doesn't really feel like it's designed for that at all.


If I wanted to play a D&D-style game in a more modern or futuristic setting, I'd so something like the following:


First figure out 'what are the major progression transitions going to be?' and then try to rebuild D&D's richness in terms of those things rather than D&D's ones. So for example, maybe the transitions are 'individual -> augmented -> distributed entity'. For example, low level is, you're just a person doing person-level things. The next tier of play is, you have technological implants, genetic modifications, etc which let you break the normal limits of what a person's body and mind can accomplish. The last tier is then, each character becomes supported by massive distributed systems embedded in the world outside themselves, and can do almost magical things through interacting with that - here we have the nanite swarm controllers, the hacker with a massive network of AIs living in every machine in the world, the characters who can download themselves into people's cyberware and Agent Smith anyone they want, the characters who can meld themselves with vehicles and literally become a starship or a mecha, etc.

Then I'd want to take whatever looked to be too generalized and knock out random holes in it, that just exist 'because of the constraints of the setting'. Even if one can conceive of a technological character who can merge with any vehicle, but in this setting the vehicles need to have a particular pentagonal geometry in order to synchronize with the pilot's neurology, and the problem of 'universal vehicle synchrony' simply hasn't been cracked. Maybe the people who will eventually be able to make duplicates of themselves to act at multiple places at once have to literally segment aspects of their persona in order to do it - each copy has to be identified with a particular aspect of themself (with a corresponding limit on the kinds of abilities it can use, e.g. one copy can use skills, a different one can use tools, a different one can communicate, etc) - and if a copy is destroyed then it takes some time for the original's psyche to mend. And so on. Those random idiosyncracies are best tied together with some underlying conceit to the setting, such that eventually one might be able to say 'there's a reason it was that way, and the reason is interesting'.

An example of an idiosyncracy like that is how in Shadowrun cyberware damages your Essence. It prevents some character concepts from being easy, but it also establishes a particular constraint that everyone in the setting has to deal with - if you want to be a mage, you have to eschew invasive tech. It also motivates stories about people trying to bypass those limits, or people trying to work within them in new ways.

Then I'd salt the setting with things that seem to break the rules just a bit, as well as things that just obey a different set of rules entirely. Another good thing to add is places where it seems that they are even more restricted than the rules that limit the PCs' society. That stuff becomes basic plot-hook candy for power-hungry PCs - 'lets go to the primitives and give them tech that breaks their limits, and they'll make us kings', 'lets investigate the thing that seems to be doing the impossible, and maybe we can take advantage of its abilities', etc.

This...is such a good post.

I have nothing constructive to add to this discussion, just wanted to throw that in there.

[nobodez]

I've read through all of the D20 Modern classes a few times and there's literally not one of them that I'd actually want to play. Nearly every talent and feat in the game is incredibly bland, which is especially bad considering that the base classes consist entirely of talents rather than set class features. The rules as a whole are a weird mash-up of 3.0 and 3.5, with a lot of clunky results.

That about cover it?

I think the way it was supposed to work was that the first three levels, before you could take an Advanced Class, were for the "formative" experience of the character, grabbing the bits and bobs needs before becoming a "full" adventurer and taking your first Advanced Class, which were much more similar to standard Base Classes in D&D. Plus, there were different ways to get to each advanced class (or at least, there was supposed to be). While each advanced class in the CRB had a "most efficient" Basic Class to use to enter it, any of the Basic Classes could get into any of the Advanced Classes with a bit of work. That difference, for instance going Fast 4 into Soldier rather than Strong 3 into Soldier made a big difference in the type of Soldier you played.

IMO the Basic Classes weren't designed to be taken for a full 10 levels, but rather used as a basis for how you entered your Advanced Class, and eventually Prestige Class.

[T.G. Oskar]

I've read through all of the D20 Modern classes a few times and there's literally not one of them that I'd actually want to play. Nearly every talent and feat in the game is incredibly bland, which is especially bad considering that the base classes consist entirely of talents rather than set class features. The rules as a whole are a weird mash-up of 3.0 and 3.5, with a lot of clunky results.

That about cover it?

Even advanced classes and prestige classes? Half the fun is to make complex builds and see if you can take a Dragon Emperor at 20th level with them.

The thing is that Base Classes are intentionaly designed to feel bland, because the idea is to leap into Advanced Classes quickly afterwards. It's also designed with cinematics in mind; for once, the spells/psionic powers are called "FX", and there's a lot of focus on making small "campaign settings" that use the same "hub" world (Earth) but with some changes, often referring to one known TV series or movie in particular (Shadow Chasers is mostly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Grimm, Agents of PSI is either The X-Files, La Femme Nikita or Alias but with psionic powers, and so on).

There's also more races if you dig through the supplements. Urban Arcana brings all base D&D PHB races, plus a few monstrous races into the mix; d20 Future adds one or two more, and Dark*Matter adds three more races (Fraal, aka "little green/gray men"; Sandmen and Sasquatches). The Core Rulebook assumes human just because they're the usual protagonists, after all.

Indeed: playing d20 Modern just with the Core Rulebook can be a bit boring, but playing with the SRD can make it more interesting, and with full supplement coverage it turns even more interesting. It's a good change from 3.5 after a while, particularly after the constraints, and making "campaign settings" (or rather, scripts for a movie) is easy when you know the secrets behind it.

[Pluto!]

It's a class system with all the constraints of class systems (packaged abilities that are difficult to get without the rest of the pacakge) but without any actual archetypes to support (ie. no reason to deal with those setbacks).

Character building is a drawn-out process that involves excessive involvement and metagame considerations for prerequisites, etc.

It's a rules-heavy system with the same hack-and-slash assumptions of D&D, where per the rules, a pair of dice rolls will resolve a plot of courtly intrigue in 20 seconds, but a assassination attempt will become a tactical minigame lasting an hour.

It's a wargame with a large amount of attention in rules and character building oriented toward combat. But with poor game balance, it fails to be a wargame worth playing.

In its favor, it does have a very high number of usable splatbooks. But systems that take d20's basic mechanics and actually warp them for specific genres and purposes, like D&D, Spycraft 2 and Mutants and Masterminds, make for drastically better games.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

http://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/57359777.jpg

I always felt the gericness of the classes was appropriate. It allowed for modern storytelling conventions like the rag tag military unit, a group of police from the same precinct or something like the scooby gang from buffy or everyone but clark from Smallville. They're all soldiers, cops or kids, but you differentiate them mechanically as Smart, Strong, Charismatic, etc.

It's a lot weaker when the character concepts are more divergent. If I want to tell a story about Veronica Mars, Young Lex Luthor and Bender solving crimes then I'm fine with Determined/Smart, Charismatic/Smart and Tough. If i want to tell a story about a detective, a dilettante, and a badass redneck then I probably want some more developed classes.

These classes were also meant to be generic and you're expected to Prestige out of them at relatively low levels. They even broke PrC's into Advanced and Prestige classes. Most Advanced classes could be entered at level 4. This actually fits perfectly with the Child/Teenage Action Adventure genre where in one episode the nerd uses a R/C helicopter to spy on someone then before long it's eing used in every other episode. Then in the Season 3 finale they have multiple drones with weapons mounted on them.

@other books

Kind of like how there tend to be a few magic PrCs in books like Complete Warrior and a non magic PrCs in books like Complete Mage most books have some things you really with were in Core or an expanded Core book. Like Future has a feat that gives you two talents from a class (which cannot come from the same tree).

d20 Apocalypse was actually a lot of fun. It has an alternate loot system based on salvaging and parts different repairs and items cost a number of mechanical and electrical parts (and maybe chemical? My memory is foggy) you also had to roll a check like a wealth check against the number of parts you have to see if you have an appropriate part. You also had to track fuel, food, water and bullets which doubled as money. Its tables did depend on the DM to be original though it will just say 2 food and you need to call them protein bars or canned soup or nuka-cola depending on where they're looted from.

d20 future's cybernetics and genetic engineering were bland and very abusable.

[NichG]

So I guess the question is:

Anyone want to take this to the Homebrew forum and do it right?

[Solaris]

So I guess the question is:

Anyone want to take this to the Homebrew forum and do it right?

It's been done. I call it 'd20 Star Wars RPG without lightsabers or blasters'.