Am I the only one who actually kind of liked this piece of shit?
While the system was admittedly a fricking mess, it had a lot of interesting ideas and I always thought it could be salvaged with some homebrewing.
I've always wanted to run a supernatural apocalypse survival campaign using d20 Modern.
Has anyone ever actually tried running a game?
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... so which thread are you sliding off the catalog?
>... so which thread are you sliding off the catalog?
One bad enough that it was at the very end with nobody bumping it, so probably one of yours.
>Am I the only one who actually kind of liked this piece of shit
No I had fun DMing it for a couple of years after it came out.
I don't think I would play it again, I have become more of a Systems Matter kind of guy and the kind of games you can play with this system aren't really what I'm into these days, but I definitely had some fun, bought 5-10 source books (I'd have to check) and used most of them.
I don't really remember if this game was any good or bad, only that just reading the wealth system and the fricktarded "purchase DC" mechanics for buying equipment gave me an aneurysm and a half.
Nah, I still have a strong soft spot for it. The book itself is put together really well, even if I wish there were more talents (or, like, general talents).
The biggest problem with it was the same problem 3.5/Pathfinder got, which was that there were too many minor fiddly rules few people remembered until it was too late. 4th and 5th editions streamlining of the math would have done Modern a wellspring of good.
Played a Modern technothriller/corporate espionage game that lasted about 3-4 sessions, and an Apocalypse-set game that lasted almost ten, but got bogged down with two players REALLY wanting to dive deep (and homebrew more) of the vehicle combat rules and we sort of let everything peter out after that.
The biggest challenge was, though the gunfight rules were pretty good, the damage threshold rules meant every good hit in combat added extra rolls. Dunno how to actually fix that other than have everyone pre-roll their fortitude saves...
Which is funny, because the only D20 Modern related book that was officially not produced was the D20 Spectaculars for supers rules. I guess they couldn't come up with anything that Mutants & Masterminds hadn't already done.
>If you want a game that actually works and is actually good out of the box, you don't want d20 Modern. If you want a broken mess to frick around with and see if you can fix, then d20 Modern is for you.
Kinda this. It's sort of the successor to the worst of D&D 2nd edition, which tried to just be 1st edition with worse ideas (though there were some good ideas sprinkled around in there). And when I was young, I never had as much fun as with that poor, broken 2nd Ed. Until D20 Modern came to be.
>Has anyone ever actually tried running a game?
I sat down with every intent to last year sometime at a friends request, as we'd never actually played it but both owned the books.
After about two hours of refamiliarizing myself with the rules, I traded them all in for a couple random boardgames. There's nothing of value in there as far as I'm concerned, even as idea fodder for other games.
>There's nothing of value in there as far as I'm concerned, even as idea fodder for other games.
Mostly because the interesting ideas have already been mined out and adapted elsewhere over the past 20 years.
Good way of putting it. I do enjoy reading rulebooks of games I'll never play just to see how they tick.
Interesting ideas such as? I don't recall seeing anything innovative in it for its time.
I liked this and I'm not into 5E. Although I got into this as an extension of the Dark Matter setting which was ported to d20 Modern. I think with sites like Hero Forge and the plethora of miniatures out there now, you could do it proper justice. I've always wanted to fight a star doppleganger. If I hadn't shoggoth'd the first session, I would've.
It was decent. It had good art and a few interesting settings. Sadly, it sort of disappeared once WotC decided it was going to cram shit down out throats at record speed.
A million weapons with identical stat blocks, because of Gun Weebs.
None of the talent trees make any sense.
Average housecat can tank a mag dump. from a calico .22 pistol.
I learned things by reading the books, but I didn't enjoy playing them. The mecha book is literally what drove me to picking up dp9's Heavy Gear.
>A million weapons with identical stat blocks, because of Gun Weebs.
Less because the proto-/k/ommandos more because 3e was a bad weapon system to uses as a baseline. No real way to differentiate weapons in the same "class" aside from magazine size. The books were pretty much copies of Jane's Gun Recognition Guide entries with the stats of their weapon type added.
The proto-/k/ommandos who saw books like Weapons Locker and Ultramodern Firearms tried to figure out ways to make various calibers different.
>No real way to differentiate weapons in the same "class" aside from magazine size.
Honestly there just really aren't any game relevant differences between weapons of roughly the same class. At least, unless you're intending to be far far more simulationist than d20 ever was intended to be.
Partially tying accuracy to weapon type (like 4e D&D later did) would have helped the weapon system. Some firearms are notable more accurate over the same effective range while others have noticeably stronger kicks. These could have been represented by a +0 to +3 bonus to hit and a small Acc penalty that could have been countered by Strength bonuses.
The 3e system was perfectly fine for it as a baseline, the moronic thing they did was not change the stats enough. If you're going to add guns to the system, you need to do more than just give them all 2D6 or 2D4 damage and a fire rate, they need a Penetration value as well as different crit values, on top of needing a "Control" value for how easy it is to control the firearm when firing rapidly or automatic.
They just gave every gun 2DX damage, 20 crit range, made all of them shoot between 30-80 feet, and called it a day.
>on top of needing a "Control" value for how easy it is to control the firearm when firing rapidly or automatic.
They did have that, in general as penalties to BAB, and sometimes with specific guns being treated as though they gave certain feats that lowered those penalties. Plus the mastercraft bonus.
>Despite guns being much easier to use than swords, shooting need a more intricate rules set than fencing
How does it feel to be the most wrong person on /tg/?
>A million weapons with identical stat blocks, because of Gun Weebs.
Not in the core book. If you bought Ultramodern Firearms, you're kind of setting yourself up as a Gun Weeb, that's on you. (I purchased Ultramodern Firearms, it was not a good book)
>Not in the core book
It was pretty bad in the core book too. The core rules had stats for 17 handguns which realistically could have been 4-5 with a note that magazine capacity varies between models.
>17 handguns
Shit really? It's been like 20 years since I played it, I plain forgot. I remembered a pretty reasonable looking weapons list.
>A million weapons with identical stat blocks, because of Gun Weebs.
Nah you can’t blame that on the gun weebs. D&D has a long and proud tradition of wasting space on identical weapon statblocks.
I remember it as quite decent. Rules were actually trying to adapt d20 to a modern setting instead of the usual “just use the same rules and throw some new rules in there too with no regard for balance or consistency” approach that a lot of OGL shovelware did and still does.
The setting was a little confusing to me. I remember it being ambiguous how secret supernatural elements were but that they definitely weren’t normal. At the same time it was kinda implied monsters and humanoids would just casually have everyday jobs. I guess it was meant to be up to the GM, it just struck me as a bit of an odd balance.
Still, it gave us art of a gnoll pimp, and that alone should ensure its legacy as an above-average d20 shovelware product.
Urban Arcana was trying to go with the "Masquerade" style Fantastic/Mundane separation that most Urban Fantasy was running with at the time. Harry Potter, Anita Blake, The Dresden Files, etc. all inspired the setting.
So I never ran base d20m. Just was never interested in modern as a setting. I did however run Blood & fist as a modern martial arts setting in what would later become familiar to some through Kengan Asura or Baki or the like. Frankly, it has one of the best martial arts systems since Dragon fist and up until Righteous blood ruthless blade. I heard about Legends of the Wulin, but I never read it. I really should though.
Anyways, you get to either pick a style, which really are just feats, or you get to design your style. You have certain things your style can do, give bonuses, and focuses on different types of attacks and defenses. It also differentiates between punches, kicks, headbutts, each further split, say punches get open hand, closed hand, and elbow, and the maneuvers are also also disarm, grapple, throw, trip, and feint, and each modified further by feats. It's really detailed, and, as I said, one of the more detailed martial arts games of its time. Especially considering the others (Hong Kong acton movie theatre, Feng Shui) are a lot more narrative focused, rather than trying to codify all the martial arts. It's not the best, has issues. Having styles as feats kinda breaks it, especially since they only give one specific bonus and the rest has to be based on the maneuvers, which will make your character sheet extremely bloated.
Ah shit. I forgot about this. Thanks anon.
I love this system and I use it all the time to run my pulp action games. I've done some house rule tweaks, such as getting rid of the credit system for a more conventional cash system, and home brewed era specific fire arms. But other than that, I run it as is. My players have a great time and I get to run what I want to run in a system that works well enough to run it. Sure it's got jank and bloat, but we don't really care that much about all that anymore. We've had action and adventures, horror and insanity, car chases, bank raids, gun fights, from Brazil to China, on submarines and in opium dens, and we're still going strong.
I had a lot of good times with it. It was a flawed thing, but quite honestly it was a blast throwing some D20 future, Cyberscape,and Apocalypse together into one absolutely fricking bonkers game experience.
>Also Dark*Matter was legit
I played and ran d20 Modern with my school friends for years back during the height of the d20 everything days. Honestly we houseruled the game so fricking heavily that it got to the point we weren't even using the core rulebook anymore and our rulebooks were a mess of printouts and notebooks with all our houserules in them.
Without question D20 Modern was a shit game. It was broken, its splats were broken, its ideas were stupid, its feat taxes were stupid, the whole fricking game was stupid. But there was something weirdly fascinating about trying to "fix" it. The game only lasted as long as it did because of people fricking around with houseruling it.
If you want a game that actually works and is actually good out of the box, you don't want d20 Modern. If you want a broken mess to frick around with and see if you can fix, then d20 Modern is for you.
This is the whole of 3e for me. Yes, it's trash, but I love it anyway.
Modern setting games with classes, levels and no skills are just a fricking travesty.
Go gurps if you're autistic or traveller if you aren't for modern settings.
Honestly hate this whole era of d20 games. The 3.0e and 3.5e books gather dust on the shelf. Third edition was so bad I lost all interest in the hobby for a decade.
The Order of the Stick guy did a worldbuilding colum for a while, and it failed comically (he tried to break D&D stereotypes at every turn, then realized that his setting didn't work in D&D, lmao), but one cool idea that he had was to use the financial credit system from d20 modern, as a way to represent calling in favors from your feudal patron. It's one of those systems where you don't spend discret dollars, it's more like you have an abstract 'credit score' and any time you try to make a big purchase you have to roll for it, and rolling may or may not reduce your credit score. I don't know if it's the best system to represent banks and loans and stuff, but if the king owes you a few favors and you're asking him for some aboleth-slaying weapons and a sailing ship, that makes perfect sense.
I really liked the D20 Future that built of D20 Modern. I used that and D20 Mecha for a homebrewed Gundam-ish space opera campaign.
Yes. You were.
I've played it, a few different games in fact. It was awful. Truly awful.
What would be a better system to replace d20 modern? Don't care if it involves the d20 die or not.
Aiming towards the same modernish setting, but it doesn't necessarily need the supernatural, monsters, or what have you. Basically average or above average joes.
M&M 2e, I ran multiple genres with it, including several modern games.
It doesn't really do horror well.
Everyday Heroes for 5e is basically the, uh, modern d20 Modern equivalent.
Once you realize that if a character takes more damage than their CON score, they have to Save-or-Die, its makes the game alot more playable, since one shot from most of the plinkers can oneshot all but the Tough hero who speccs heavily into CON + con saves.
This is, imo, why a "D20 Modern but with the bounded accuracy of 5e DnD" would make things interesting. If humans can't get any ability score above 20 until 20th level without some kind of powerful magic, and CON score governs your massive damage threshold, the game suddenly becomes QUITE interesting if your baddies are equipped with little more than mid-spec shotguns and half-decent ability scores. And in D20 Future, you might easily get to the point where you don't even need to role damage half the time (or more), since the lowest roll would still exceed many/most PCs CON score.
The Improved Damage Threshold feat could help, but most 5e style feats can only be taken once, IIRC, so no more stacking that to get a damage threshold of near or above 30. You might have to combine that feat with the 5e-style Toughness feat, though.
And Professions slide nicely into the Background concept.
It's also why modern armor should grant damage reduction, not increase your AC.
I liked it, wish we had gotten D20 Spectaculars before it was canned at the end.
I had fun with it. It had potential to be better, but I think the end product was poorly thought out, because it absolutely needed more. Off the top of my head:
>Firearms: Trying to make a modern RPG with a huge list of different firearms with individual stats is absolutely a terrible idea.
This probably could have been fixed by making a 'firearm system' where you chose various things like magazine capacity, range, damage, fire mechanism, etc. In other words, if you want a 1911, it gave you a template to make something that matched up to a 1911's specifics. Or, you could just simply make 'my gun, Shooty McPistolface' and not bother with manufacturers, models, etc.
>Core default setting was... confusing.
I couldn't quite make out what it was supposed to be. It felt hollow and generic, and it was probably meant to serve as more of a basic foundation to work with- I think they expected players to build on it and flesh it out to their own liking.
>Supplemental Material like Future/Past/Cyberscape/Apocalypse was a cool idea, but a pain in the ass to navigate through
More of a nitpick- I hate having to go through five or six different books to find where a skill, feat, or weapon originated. I think I'd have been happier if the D20 core rules, classes, etc. were included in each of the other books as if they were a standalone product- but only if they were also available as they are.
>In a nutshell, it could have been better.
And honestly, I'd love to see something like it today- perhaps an improved version. If anyone can point me to something like this, I'd like to check it out
>(Frick off GURPS people, I already know about yours and I've got some of the stuff on the way, we know you can do everything.)
Objectively: it doesn't hold up. Its a mess.
However: its aesthetic, and flexibility lent itself well to its era. It was so easy to mod and run so many game types... I'd say it was my favorite system ever because of the campaigns it spawned.
There's elements to it that vastly surpass the majority of whats available today. It didn't have a super defined setting; rather, it was a toolbox of inspiration so you could, ironically, homebrew and improvise your own. Lending towards RUNNING games the way they ought to be- and unlike how most people do nowadays. You know, where they think in terms of cinematic sequences better suited for a novel rather than providing an appreciable world for you and the players to explore together. Unbiased DMing (for the most part, you naturally should appreciate your players and arbitrate effectively) is the ambrosia of gods.
I ran a pretty good post apocalyptic campaign in it once. Finale ended with a bank robbery in Portland that accidentally ended up destroying the city and giving Oregon a new port.
A guy I knew ended up getting so pissed off at the stats of the guns he ended up writing his own d20 Modern, called Ops and Tactics.
I never got a chance to play it but I read through a Ghost in the Shell homebrew based on it which had a really neat approach to hacking.
It essentially functioned as magic with hacks per level and whatnot, but not in a moronic way. You had a prepared spell list equivalent but you could swap out slots in a minute so the main limitation was just not being able to pull every trick in the book mid-combat, and you regenerated half your Int in hack actions every ten rounds.
The other big thing was that everyone had access to it, but the hacker classes could do the big stuff way more reliably, since you had to roll your skill against the DC of whatever hack you were trying to pull off.
It incorporated hacking into the combat and general flow of the game far better than it ever was integrated in Shadowrun or Cyberpunk.
It was stupid, VERY stupid, primarily because guns were weak as shit. .45 Automatic did something like 1d8+1 lmao
>.45 Automatic did something like 1d8+1 lmao
It did 2d6, equivalent to a greatsword. With the massive damage threshold rules, that was actually surprisingly lethal.
I think most of that is actually pretty reasonable, if you're not trying to add a bunch of new mechanics to the system. The only thing I have a problem with is the crit range. It should definitely be at least 19-20, and I'd argue for 18-20.
I ran a few good games with it but I had to bash the shit out of it with some Spycraft and other d20 stuff. I used the mecha from Future and monster advancement rules from D&D to have the PCs fight giant aberrations, kaiju essentially, in space and on the planets they were exploiting for resources. Sprinkle a little factional politics on there with mega-corps, religious zealots, a sadly aborted android uprising, and it ended up being a the bastard child of Dune and Tranzor-Z.
I can't claim it always worked mechanically but it was fun, over the top robot on alien violence. We played it for close to a year and all the guys I used to play with remember it fondly. There was definitely some jank shit though. I misjudged some stats and we had colossal mecha tearing apart spaceships almost single-handed and some really poorly implemented advanced classes. And weapon damage scaling got pretty weird too.
I don't think I'd use it again if I really wanted a d20 action game. There's other systems that are more coherent. Grim Tales, Spycraft, and the Saga system do a lot of the things d20 Modern was meant to better.
D20 modern was literally the first tabletop I was ever involved in, and as such I will always have something of a soft spot for it. It would never be my go-to these days, but I have fond memories.
You're not the only one, but without having read this thread I'm going to guess it's full of elitist shitters who hate fun.
The creators made a new version based off the 5e ruleset.
I own it, but I haven't played it.
>"The creators"
> 1 of 4 names from the original book reappear on the new book
...?
Okay, one of the creators. My bad.
Bill Slavicsek is the lead writer for ESO and I'm pretty sure he took Chuck Ryan with him. No idea where Rich Redman ended up, but it's not in the industry. Technically Jeff Grubb is out too.
I do want to try this one out at some point, even though I'm no big fan of 5e. One of my earliest RPG experiences was in d20 Modern and it was a huge shitshow but not because of the system. I always wondered what it would have been like if competently run and with a good party.
I played it in my teens a little, between campaigns of 3.5, PF and Star Wars d20. I remember about the same thing as you, OP. Good times, though, would try again. Can't help but feel that a different system or some kind of cyberpunk shit might scratch the itch and do it better, though.
I think The Expanse began its life as a d20 Future game, so someone else liked it.
I liked it too op. It was the kind of game you'd play in the back room of an FLGS in an old warehouse in the 2000s with some autistic goths eating chips while the refresh rate on the florescent lights lulled you into a sense of detachment from reality.
I enjoyed it. Was it good? No. But, it was fascinating. It felt pretty creative, despite being a mess. Even reading it was fun somehow.