Staying distinct with a d20 system

[stewstew5]

I'm an amateur ttrpg writer hoping to go pro eventually. So far, of the 4 distinct systems I've written (each being roughly 80% done) all of them have followed the d20, 6 (or 8 in one case) 3-20 stats system. While one (the one with 8 stats) forges its identity with the world, certain combat and magic mechanics and skill tree instead of class features, the others feel more like skins for d&d with one defining feature/amalgamation of past and present D&D editions. How can I keep my games distinct mechanics wise, and where are some places I can look for similarly functioning systems?


It's worth noting that I dont have much opportunity to try out non-D&D systems.

[Koo Rehtorb]

Why is it important to you to stick to a d20?

[TripleD]

If you really want to stay within the D&D-esque style of tabletop RPGs, I suggest checking out what’s happening in the world of OSR. Stuff like “Veins of the Earth” and “Hot Springs Island” represent some of the most interesting ideas in that field.

But my real advice is to break away from D&D and try some radically different systems. Stuff like “Kids on Bikes”, “Fate”, or stuff in the “Powered by the Apocalypse” family. Even if you come back to d20 you will be able to look at it with a fresh perspective.

[kyoryu]

It's not the dice that make the system distinct.

It's really more about what decisions the player makes and, to an arguably lesser extent, what information is captured on the character sheet.

What I'd be tempted to do is forget about the actual mechanics to start. Write out a play session as if it were happening, and think about, at each point, what decisions are made. Assume mecahnics are there and have some result - the actual math is irrelevant.

[JoeJ]

Have you thought about what it is you want your game to do?

First of all, what do you want the "default" adventure/campaign to consist of? For example, are you making a game about foot soldiers caught up in a huge war? Merchants traveling in a spaceship between planets and trying to make enough money to keep flying? Treasure hunters venturing into ancient magical ruins filled with monsters and traps?

Once you have that, think about what experience you want for the players. How cooperative/competitive will it be? How much control should they have of elements of the game universe apart from their own character? Will they have something akin to hero points to let them alter the odds of success at dramatic moments? Will one player be designated the GM or will the group create and manage the game universe by some other method? How big a part of the game do you expect combat to play? Do you want combat to emphasize careful strategic deliberation, fast-paced action, or somewhere in between? Should combat even be a separate module from other forms of conflict resolution? Do you want to have some sort of "plot point" currency being traded back and forth during the game?

The mechanics are how you create the game experience you want, so focus on the experience you want first and then look at how to make it happen mechanically.

[stewstew5]

I've got the distinct mechanics of each game and how they affect the experience, but I dont want people's initial reactions to be "oh that's just D&D but with a skin and some different mechanics. The big ones for this are the 3-18 starting stats, which I default to, and the 5e turn economy which I also default to since I feel they are the most concise and fitting, but also what I feel make me too similar to D&D

[Jakinbandw]

As a fellow amateur designer I wanted to keep the Big 6 because they are familiar to people and make the game easier to learn. However through play testing and iteration towards specific design goals I ended up dropping them because I could no longer make them work.

I agree with taking a read through other systems, but also try play testing and iterating towards a goal. Think about what you are trying to do and try different ways of achieving it. Experiment!

[Willie the Duck]

I've got the distinct mechanics of each game and how they affect the experience, but I dont want people's initial reactions to be "oh that's just D&D but with a skin and some different mechanics. The big ones for this are the 3-18 starting stats, which I default to, and the 5e turn economy which I also default to since I feel they are the most concise and fitting, but also what I feel make me too similar to D&D

The first thing to say is that if the game is 'D&D, but in space,' or 'D&D, but without classes,' people will probably notice. Not that that is inherently a bad thing (the entire OSR movement sprang up because people said, 'I really like playing TSR-era D&D, except I'd rather...'). So for no one to call your game a D&D-alike, it has to be genuinely different (in mechanics, in tone, in goals that it services, etc.). However, some basic changing of things around and surface-level effects could certainly help.

First of all, take some D&D-isms which are genuinely arbitrary, and change them. D&D has six stats with some of the divisions and combinations being relatively arbitrary, and whether any individual one needs to be one of a character's primary units of variance. Change them (or at least re-examine them)! Wisdom has developed into this weird combination of willpower and perception-- analyze whether that fits in your game world. Constitution has become this other weird stat -- not weird in that it doesn't represent anything or represents a whole bunch of different things, but because viable PCs basically have two strategies: keep it in the 12-14 range (but almost never lower), or try and max it out. Does that belong in the same section as other stats (where you will see the entire 3-18 spectrum)? Charisma is an interesting choice for a stat in a combat-centric game in that no two people seem to agree whether a hideous and terrifying, but effective, leader (perhaps a demon lord or orc chieftain or the like) should have a very high or very low charisma score. Consider using a different 'social attribute' instead (as an example, Champions uses 'Presence' which works really well for emulating four-color comic books).

The absolutely simplest thing you could do, however, is either change what bonuses various 3-18 scores map to (-4-+4 is certainly not the only thing one can do) or move more quickly to using only the bonus and treating the 3-18 part as only important during initial creation, or something like that.

For the turn economy, you can tinker a little around the edges -- even if you are only familiar with, say, 3e and 5e, you can still see how a lot of things have changed even with those two. Switch some stuff around, make Opportunity Attacks a separate action from reactions, or something like that. There aren't a lot of games that don't follow the whole 'everyone makes an initiative check, and then take turns playing out their characters' actions while everyone else is effectively frozen' motif, but the games that do (RuneQuest, for instance) are well-lauded for the distinction. You can also make actions-per-turn use a different mechanic. Champions/Hero System (again, sorry) have each character have a different speed score (paid for in build-currency), which indicates how many times in a 12-second segment that they get a turn to act. Likewise Feng Shui and early (and maybe later, but I haven't read them) Shadowrun games had mechanics where you rolled initiative, and the higher you rolled the more times you could act in the round (FS had 'bullet time' where actions took 'bullets' off of your total initiative. SR had you roll initiative and you acted on your initiative... and then again on your initiative-10 (if initial initiative 11+), and then again on your initiative-20 (if initial initiative 21+). Something like that could work.

Out of curiosity, what systems (both D&D editions and other games) are you familiar with?

[Khedrac]

As a fellow amateur designer I wanted to keep the Big 6 because they are familiar to people and make the game easier to learn. However through play testing and iteration towards specific design goals I ended up dropping them because I could no longer make them work.

I agree with taking a read through other systems, but also try play testing and iterating towards a goal. Think about what you are trying to do and try different ways of achieving it. Experiment!

Very much this. The comment about "keeping the Big 6 because they are familiar to people and make the game easier to learn" is incorrect because they are only familiar to D&D players (which I think Jakinbandw found out and moved on from).

If you want to design a new system that does not resemble D&D, don't start from D&D - ask yourself what you want your system to do and then think about how to do it.

If you like D&D but think it has issues that need fixing, then start that way, but be prepared for your system to end up like D&D (it need not - some of the early systems started that way and came out completely different)

[JoeJ]

If you want to get away from a D&D feel and still stay within a d20 system, you might want to look at how Mutants & Masterminds does it. It doesn't have classes or levels or hit points or armor class, shen a attack hits the defender rolls to resist instead of the attacker rolling for damage, and the ability scores are what D&D calls the ability score modifiers (that is, they are applied directly rather than used to look up a value on a table, and they can be negative as well as positive).

[kyoryu]

So, what non-D&D/d20 games have you played?

[stewstew5]

The first thing to say is that if the game is 'D&D, but in space,' or 'D&D, but without classes,' people will probably notice. Not that that is inherently a bad thing (the entire OSR movement sprang up because people said, 'I really like playing TSR-era D&D, except I'd rather...'). So for no one to call your game a D&D-alike, it has to be genuinely different (in mechanics, in tone, in goals that it services, etc.). However, some basic changing of things around and surface-level effects could certainly help.

First of all, take some D&D-isms which are genuinely arbitrary, and change them. D&D has six stats with some of the divisions and combinations being relatively arbitrary, and whether any individual one needs to be one of a character's primary units of variance. Change them (or at least re-examine them)! Wisdom has developed into this weird combination of willpower and perception-- analyze whether that fits in your game world. Constitution has become this other weird stat -- not weird in that it doesn't represent anything or represents a whole bunch of different things, but because viable PCs basically have two strategies: keep it in the 12-14 range (but almost never lower), or try and max it out. Does that belong in the same section as other stats (where you will see the entire 3-18 spectrum)? Charisma is an interesting choice for a stat in a combat-centric game in that no two people seem to agree whether a hideous and terrifying, but effective, leader (perhaps a demon lord or orc chieftain or the like) should have a very high or very low charisma score. Consider using a different 'social attribute' instead (as an example, Champions uses 'Presence' which works really well for emulating four-color comic books).

The absolutely simplest thing you could do, however, is either change what bonuses various 3-18 scores map to (-4-+4 is certainly not the only thing one can do) or move more quickly to using only the bonus and treating the 3-18 part as only important during initial creation, or something like that.

For the turn economy, you can tinker a little around the edges -- even if you are only familiar with, say, 3e and 5e, you can still see how a lot of things have changed even with those two. Switch some stuff around, make Opportunity Attacks a separate action from reactions, or something like that. There aren't a lot of games that don't follow the whole 'everyone makes an initiative check, and then take turns playing out their characters' actions while everyone else is effectively frozen' motif, but the games that do (RuneQuest, for instance) are well-lauded for the distinction. You can also make actions-per-turn use a different mechanic. Champions/Hero System (again, sorry) have each character have a different speed score (paid for in build-currency), which indicates how many times in a 12-second segment that they get a turn to act. Likewise Feng Shui and early (and maybe later, but I haven't read them) Shadowrun games had mechanics where you rolled initiative, and the higher you rolled the more times you could act in the round (FS had 'bullet time' where actions took 'bullets' off of your total initiative. SR had you roll initiative and you acted on your initiative... and then again on your initiative-10 (if initial initiative 11+), and then again on your initiative-20 (if initial initiative 21+). Something like that could work.

Out of curiosity, what systems (both D&D editions and other games) are you familiar with?

This is a lot of good advice all at once. I've only really played Ae before the popularity boom, moved up to 3.5 once I found this site, then lately moved a lot of my parties to 5e.

I know a each of my systems has a handful of core mechanics that they're based around that upon further inspection makes them very unique with what they do. It's just that my initial inspiration for each has been "what if D&D but... and then I'd end up inventing a whole new system, but whenever I domt know how to fill a certain set of rules (like cover or different actions in combat) or the D&D version is just the best way to do it (like damage types, actions/bonus actions/reactions, or difficult terrain) I'll cut and paste unless I think of something else that's really good and now that's all I can see when I think of what makes it stand out

[JBPuffin]

It's not the dice that make the system distinct.

It's really more about what decisions the player makes and, to an arguably lesser extent, what information is captured on the character sheet.

What I'd be tempted to do is forget about the actual mechanics to start. Write out a play session as if it were happening, and think about, at each point, what decisions are made. Assume mecahnics are there and have some result - the actual math is irrelevant.

This is a cool idea I’m gonna save for later

[lightningcat]

Both M&M and Spycraft (2e) took the basic d20 system down to the bare bones and rebuilt it to do what they wanted it to do. While they may have the same framework as D&D or Pathfinder, they are distictively their own games. You could even say that both D&D 4e and 5e used the same method to get to their designs. d20 Modern almost did it, but stopped early, and is basically considered D&D in modern time as a result.

[Knaight]

At least read more games, even if you don't play them - otherwise you tend to design within a limited space, unaware that space outside that even exists. You might not actually use anything unconventional, but just knowing it exists lets that be an informed decision.

[stewstew5]

At least read more games, even if you don't play them - otherwise you tend to design within a limited space, unaware that space outside that even exists. You might not actually use anything unconventional, but just knowing it exists lets that be an informed decision.

Yea, I started a thread a while back called expand my horizons and now I'm just chasing down srd-style pdfs for this exact purpose