How many d20 heartbreakers have you played?

[Powerdork]

A lot of people have designed games to occupy the same space as D&D. They won't ever be as popular, and that's fine. Sometimes it's good to just create things.

I was somewhat close to the development of Legend, by Rule of Cool Games, and it taught me a great deal about what you can do with d20, and where things go with particular system truths and assumptions.

Does anyone else have any that stand out to them?

[GrayDeath]

At least one too many. ^^


And standung out in a positive sense? None, aside from our second GMs Houzserules a decade or so ago. D20 isnt a complex system at its core, so Houserules usually do just ass much to change it as a total rewrite would as long as we are still talking about playing similar settings.

[Vrock Bait]

Technically Pathfinder qualifies.

[Kayblis]

To me, a good experience with d20 has been the Conan RPG, by Mongoose. It's a fairly effective system with a couple dozen splats(all very thin, about 100 pages), and centered on the Conan comics world. You can see from the design perspective how much more work was done to make mundane combat engaging and deep than in core 3.5. This system isn't afraid of sending magic to the back seat while the 'real heroes' are multiple variations of melee and ranged types.

It completely does away with the idea of magic being common, of spellcasters being able to amass thousands of spells in their repertoire, and of having magic be the only option to solve most prolems. There are about 20 schools of magic, all of which present adequate spells for its theme and focus, and each spellcaster can only have a handful. It's an SP based spellcasting system, so there aren't spell levels to fill with crap like Domains are. All spells have prereqs, and each school has a "Defensive Blast", which triggers upon hit by choice, or upon death by force. Fighting a Scholar is dangerous not because you can't kill it, but because it may very well take you to the grave with him. All in all, the system lets a caster be powerful, without being all-powerful.

The martial types are aided by having two defenses(Dodge and Parry), which favor different playstyles, and every common maneuver path(trip, disarm, bullrush) now has a feat chain associated with it, making you much better at it and netting special benefits. Grappling in particular is interesting, because its feat chain at some point lets you damage physical stats outright(with a save for half), representing joint damage and bone breaking. You can become a formidable fighter in a field, much more than usual in D&D. Also, weapons are very much expanded on, and some nice additions like the Pike(up to 20ft reach, can't hit 10ft or closer) really spice up combat in a setting with less magic than you might be used to. All in all, it does more for melee types than D&D does with 1/10 as many pages.

The icing on the cake is the Special Attacks and Manoeuvres, unique abilities you don't have to buy. Those are always available options that have prereqs and sometimes a trigger condition, but they add a lot of choice and depth to combat if you know how to use them. They include effects like extra 5ft movement if your opponent's missed attack is less than half your dodge, or giving your enemy a +4 to hit, but if you manage to parry it you gain a free attack. Those are all feat-lites, small effects that could be standard feat taxes and useless feats no one uses in 3.5, but become nice additions here for the simple fact that they're free.

That has been my best experience with d20 outside of D&D, and I have nothing but praise for it.

[GrayDeath]

Technically Pathfinder qualifies.

No.

To be a Heartbreaker a System must have gregarious amounts of Flaws (usually due to the creator only knowing one RPG and "improving" it with better" things^^) and be unsuccesful.

No matter what one thinks about Pathfinders Quality, noone can deny its Success. ^^

[Powerdork]

Commercially successful games must be purged from this thread. If you heard about it by word of mouth or saw it in a list of recommendations, odds are it's not a heartbreaker. Like, Legend is pushing it because it did get Kickstarted and did have a community, but its creators have published that final version and moved on, abandoning like one or two of their stretch goals because it's a damn disaster of a game even though I love it to bits.

The actual real definition of a heartbreaker is 'indie piece that builds on old D&D (in ways that have already been tread upon), designed by someone who's only got experience with old D&D and hasn't actually looked at other games or stopped to consider that you can have different flows of play for an RPG than dungeoncrawl'...

But that disqualifies d20 material definitionally, so I'm adapting it here to mean 'indie piece that builds on d20 (in ways that have already been tread upon), designed by someone who's only got experience with d20 and hasn't actually looked at other games', Ron Edwards don't @ me.

[Kayblis]

That's a pretty obscure interpretation, probably from an old forum post or an old article, that people will certainly not know about as a rule. The lack of any real explanation in the first post doesn't help. You're probably not getting many bites exactly because no one knows what the hell you're talking about.

So, to clarify the playing field. It needs to be indie, and it needs to not be liked by any sort of real community. This rules out any system the great majority ever heard about, because even small publishers you only see at events are already too big for this. If even crowdfunding projects are not valid entries, what exactly are you looking for? Someone's personal blog with lots of homebrew? Those 1-man projects fueled solely by dislike for anything famous? Nechronica? Maid RPG? I'm trying to see what's even legal here.

[Powerdork]

That's a pretty obscure interpretation, probably from an old forum post or an old article

It's the original, to my knowledge, hence mentioning Ron Edwards. (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/)

Just take a stab at it in good faith, frankly.