INTRODUCTION
To state my biases up front: I haven't played D&D in years, and in
fact, I've been a loud-mouthed anti-class/level guy. I tend to
advocate for rules-light systems - preferring games like FUDGE and
BESM. I've been working on my own gaming setting for a while, and
spending a lot of time looking and at considering the properties of
different systems.
When D&D3E came out, I bought a copy, mainly so that I'd know what
was going on, and so that I might be able to convert some of the reams
of D20 material coming out. I was somewhat impressed: it was
reasonably clean, and while it was a level based system, it managed to
incorporate skills into the system in a nice way. On the other hand,
it was the same old classes, the same old skirmish-based mechanics,
and the same old pseudo-medieval setting assumptions were pretty
deeply wired into the system. In the end, while I thought it
was progress, I really disliked it.
OK. So it should be obvious that I was inclined against D20 Modern
before I ever saw it. Why did I buy it, and why am I reviewing it?
While I really like BESM or FUDGE, it's hard to find BESM players
who don't want to do anime; and it's just plain hard to find people willing
to play FUDGE. So I've been on the lookout for something that I can
render my own homebrew settings into reasonably well, and use to
run my style of game, without the problems of running an unknown
system that makes it tough to find players.
D20 Modern seemed to have the potential to work around that. Early
reviews that I read sounded like the class system had been
dramatically reworked in a way that would make it quite a bit less
burdensome; and the whole system had been streamlined and reworked
to make it function in modern-day settings.
So I ordered the book from my friendly non-local gaming store. (I
buy my games from an independent game store in Massachusetts that
happens to also do mail order.)
Character Creation
In the rough outlines, character creation is D20 is pretty similar
to character creation in D&D3. Roll up your attributes (or buy them,
using the same attribute purchase system in the DMs guide) Pick a
class, which gives you your saves, hit points, skill points, feats,
etc. But the class system is very different, so I'll take a moment to talk
about it.
The Class System
D20 Modern takes a very strange spin on the basic class
notion. Instead of the classes being the old prototypical character
types of D&D, classes in D20 Modern are broad notions based on what
attribute dominates the character's behavior.
As a class system, frankly, I have to say that it stinks. But I think
that, basically, it's not really a class system. I think that for
modern settings, they really wanted to get rid of the classes, but
they wanted to keep the idea of levels as a balance mechanism. So they
created a decidedly odd class system that pretty much throws away
classes in favor of a system that lets you choose the basic pattern of
how your characters skills and attributes develop.
So you wind up with 6 classes: Strong, Fast, Tough, Smart,
Dedicated, and Charismatic. Wierd, but the end effect of this is that
it winds up feeling like a skill-based system. You purchase skills and
feats - the skills and the feats are what define what the character
can do - not the class. The class is just a rough guide to how your
character develops.
Taking the role that class filled in D&D3E, you have professions.
But a profession is a much lighter-weight thing than a class. The
profession works combined with the class to determine what skills are
easy to obtain, and what skills are hard - in D20 terms, your
profession adds a set of skills to the class skills that you can
purchase for one point per rank.
This is where D20 Modern really shines. It's a flexible skill
based system, where you can create very distinctive characters,
without stretching the system in any way. And yet you've got the
simplicity of levels to determine how much challenge a given adversary
is likely to present to your characters. I really like this part of
the system - D20 Modern provides a really nice balance between a pure
class/level based system and a pure skill system.
It works. A class system that actually works. Big plus, and a big
surprise to me.
Unfortunately, they couldn't leave well enough alone. They add
in "advanced classes", which are the D20 Modern equivalent of prestige
classes. The advanced classes are very much niche/archetype based
classes. And for the most part, they're very munchkin classes; and
they're very biased towards combat-oriented munchkin classes.
For the most part, I really don't like the advanced classes in D20
Modern. If I run a D20 Modern game, the in-book advanced classes
will go out the window, and the only advanced classes will be
more the equivalent of secret/honor societies, which is how I
interpreted the original prestige classes in D&D3E. If you handle
it that way, then they make more sense, and they sort of work. I'm
still not too happy about them.
Skills and Feats
So, I spent a lot of time talking about how I like the fact
that D20 Modern has a working class system, which ends up being
a scaffold for a very functional skill system.
But there are really two components to a working skill
system: the structure of the skill system, and the particular
set of skills that the skill system provides.
Here, I'm disappointed again. The structure of the system is
skills and feats, where skills are specific things that you've learned
to do well, and feats are special abilities that you've gained through
your training. The structure of the system works well. But the
provided skills and feats are very biased towards combat. They make
sure that you never forget that this is still a thin RPG layer
over a skirmish system.
Even skills like computer use end up getting expressed in
terms of a very combat-like "hacking" system. Everything comes
back to skirmish rules.
Equipment and Wealth
Moving on, another major innovation in D20 modern is the
adoptions of a totally abstract system for purchasing equipment
and measuring wealth. It's a very interesting system, but I can't
quite decide whether I like it or not.
Wealth is totally abstracted in D20 Modern. Instead of keeping
track of how much money you have, things are totally abstracted into a
wealth bonus - a skill like measure of your current wealth. To
purchase things, you make a "wealth check", rolling a D20 your
wealth bonus against a difficulty class set by the value of the thing
you want to purchase. If the check succeeds, you were able to purchase
the item; if not, you weren't. If the thing you purchase had a cost
above your wealth bonus, the bonus is reduced after a successful
purchase.
It's an interesting notion. I'm not sure how well it will work in
practice. I find it difficult to imagine how it will work: it might be
great, or it might make purchasing things much too unpredictable. I
won't be sure unless I actually get a chance to try it in-game.
Combat
Yep. It's D20 combat. If you like D20 style combat, you'll be
happy. If not, well, ick. The one good thing is they use a massive
damage threshold more like CoC-D20 than like D&D. So a guy with a big
gun has a chance of killing you in one shot, even if you're a level-10
tough character.
I don't mean to gloss over this too much, since really, it's the
heart of the rules. But I had a hard time making myself read it, and I
really doubt that I'll actually use 1/10th of it in actual play.
In its favor, they do manage to make things like Attacks of
Opportunity much clearer than they did in D&D3E. On the other hand,
from the moment I saw them, I've hated AoO - they're typical of the
kind of miniature-skirmish oriented rules that I've always hated. It
turns combat in a slow, terribly dragged out, terribly dull chess
game, instead of something dramatic.
They do manage to introduce ridiculously voluminous rules covering
just about every reasonable or unreasonable case in modern combat -
from improvised weapons, to archaic weapons like swords, to firearms,
to heavy artillery, to grenades, to molotov cocktails, to acid
splashes, to car chases. It just keeps going, and going, and going, to
make sure that you get good and bored, unless you're bigtime into
miniatures combat.
I'll admit that things like the carchase rules actually work; on
the other other hand, I still think that taking a carchase, and
playing it out according to those rules will be unbearably tedious.
Game Mastering
They provide a sort of miniature D20 Modern game mastering
guide. Roughly speaking, there are two parts: a beginners guide
of advice for how to GM a game; and a lot of GM specific rules.
The beginners guide to game-mastering is mediocre. It's reasonably
thorough, and covers all of the required territory in a complete, if
uninspired fashion. It's far from the worst that I've seen (I won't
name a worse - there are just too many competitors!): it is reasonable
advice on how to run a game. It's also far from the best I've seen
(which is the GMs section of Unknown Armies 2): it's very dull
reading, and they often give you mechanical advice like:
"First and foremost, a game session is a story. It should
make sense and hang together, complete with a beginning, a middle, and
an ending. Of course, after you set the adventure in motion, the
players help provide what happens in the middle and how the conclusion
plays out."
But that's about it: they never give you particular good advice on
how to build a playable story that will make sense and hang together.
(That, incidentally, is one of the places where UA2 is particularly
strong: they give really excellent advice on how to craft the
structure of a story in a way that gives you a good outline for a
story that's easy to adapt to the unexpected actions of your players.)
The rules section is good. Given that D20 Modern is intended to be
a story-light, action-heavy skirmish based system, the GMs rules are
solid. They tell you everything you need to know, in reasonably clear,
organized fashion. In particular, they do a nice job of explaining
the challenge rating system, which is very important to the game.
Monsters
This section is sorely out of place. You've just finished the
GameMaster's section. So far, the whole book has been very oriented
towards "real-world" fantasy - action adventure kinds of stuff,
without any magic, and monsters, or anything like that. Every once in
a while, they make an allusion to the fact that there might be magic
in a setting, but they never say much, and refer you to the last
chapter, called "FX Abilities". Then, you get here, and suddenly
you're looking at Displacer Beasts, Gnolls, Mind Flayers. This section
is mostly very much non-real-world monsters, many of which possess
magical or spell-like abilities - but we haven't seen magic or
spells yet.
Again, it's quite thorough, if pedestrian and dull.
Settings
They call this section "Campaign Models", but really, it's
a group of sample settings. There are three settings here:
Shadow Chasers, Agents of PSI, and Urban Arcana.
Shadow Chasers and Urban Arcana are, pretty much, different spins
on the same settings. In both, the setting is pretty much the normal
modern world, with something called shadow that allows all of the
trappings of D&D to emerge into the modern world, in a form
that won't be noticed by most people.
Shadow Chasers puts a very angsty World of Darkness spin on
it; Urban Arcana is pretty much the same deal, only without the
angst. Neither is particularly interesting or imaginative: they're
just ways of playing D&D in a modern setting rather than a medieval.
Agents of PSI is a X-files-esque psionics setting - basically
taking the modern world, adding D&D style psionics, and putting
a conspiratorial gloss over it.
All three settings include some rules extensions, and some
new advanced classes customized to the settings. All are perfectly
adequate, but uninspired.
FX Abilities
Finally, they get to magic, psionics, magic items, which
they've been talking about for the last two chapters. As a matter of
organization, this is player specific material, and should really have
preceded the GM's section, particularly since some of this is
discussed in the GM's section with the assumption that you already
know something about it.
Magic and Psionics are, pretty much, the same old D&D
magic and psionics systems. No surprises here.
The magic items could use a serious dose of imagination,
particularly in the names. I mean, does everything really have to be a
"X of Y"? Could they really not come up with something less awkwardly
dull than the "Leather jacket of damage reduction"? Ick. (Although I
must admit that I rather like the magic "duct tape of repair".)
Miscellaneous
Artwork
I don't tend to care terribly much about things like art
in games, but many people do, so I'll include my comments on that
here.
The art, quite frankly, stinks. It's incredibly dull, static, and
lifeless. Things that should appear dramatic are somehow totally
deprived of any sense of motion, life, or drama. It's not necessarily
ugly or poorly drawn; it's just utterly lifeless and dull. To be
honest, I'd rather see art that was ugly, but had some life to it,
than this kind of dull drudgery. (For example; I recently read
Unknown Armies 2: I often found the art dreadfully ugly; but it
was lively, and helped create the mood of the game.)
Typesetting
The typesetting is functional, if not great. It's not awful like
the D&D3e player's handbook, where the first page of each chapter was
almost unreadable brown-on-beige text. On the other hand, it's not
particularly beautiful either. On a functional note, I found that the
different levels of headings within a chapter weren't distinctive
enough, so that if I was looking for, say, where the magic section
ended and the psionics section began, it was very difficult to find.
But overall, it was pretty easy to read; the layout is
heads and shoulders above the utterly horrible crap that
passes for layout in most gaming books.
Conclusions
If I had to sum up my opinion of D20-Modern in one word, it would
be "uninspired". There's very little about it that stands out as
particularly bad; but there's also very little about it that stands
out as particularly good. The writing style is very tedious; the
example settings are bland; the artwork is dull.
On the whole, I find it very hard to recommend to most
people. There's nothing particularly awful about it that makes me hate
it - but there's not much that stands out about it to make it worth
buying.
If you want well-designed rules for firearms combat, or
for car chases, or other modern combat rules, this is probably
worth your money. For pretty much anything else, it's just not
worth it.
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(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)