What Happened to d20?

[Hibou]

While I rather like GURPS too, this is just hyperbole.
Everything designed by humans is broken in some way or other. :grin:

You mean a 50-point ability that annihilates all life in the universe is broken? :p

True enough that it's not perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.  D20 was good for what it did, but more than anything, I got annoyed by the railroading imposed by the class system.  The generic classes in UA were the closest thing to making me happy, but they just didn't quite do it for me.  I guess by the time I started looking for an alternative, I'd already turned my back on d20.

That's not to say that I don't miss the sense of wonder and magic that it evoked, but again, I suspect that was as much because it was my first real introduction to that sort of gaming as it was the system itself.  Even still, I try to capture some of that feel in my games, but I don't think I'll ever go back.

I remember those UA classes. I thought they had amazing potential but too many of the classic ability options were dropped for them to make them truly good. That book had a lot of great ideas that helped make the game a bit more flexible.

[LordVreeg]

classes are very, very hard that way.   It can make for a fun game, but matching the class-crunch to specific real-world organizations gets hard after a while.

[Humabout]

I found myself spending more time writing new classes to fit my worlds than I spent making the worlds themselves, and certainly more time than I got to spend playing in those worlds.  It got old.  Oh well.  Life goes on, eh?

[O Senhor Leetz]

classes are very, very hard that way.   It can make for a fun game, but matching the class-crunch to specific real-world organizations gets hard after a while.

This brings up the issue with d20 that it could not separate crunch from fluff in any of it's settings. I feel like half the time when ready the fluff, it would mention a character only to have the name followed by (Ftr 9) or some silly stuff like that. The same goes with terrible spell names.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

Aww, THAC0 wasn't that bad. The weird way that AC worked backwards from common sense was pretty bad, though, and it's good they got rid of that. Still, I think you're being a little hard on it-- or maybe I'm just being nostalgic. It's not as though d20 didn't/doesn't have its own share of wonky stuff though.

Speaking as someone that played in AD&D and even has a (little) bit of nostalgia for it, THAC0 wasn't the stupidest mechanic in the history of game design. But it makes the list--for the simple reason that the very need for such an acronym is ridiculous. Someone, somewhere before publication should have looked at the whole THAC0/AC system and asked, "do you think we're making this more complicated than it needs to be?"

If a mechanic works counterintuitively, it better have a really good reason for doing so.

[LordVreeg]

Aww, THAC0 wasn't that bad. The weird way that AC worked backwards from common sense was pretty bad, though, and it's good they got rid of that. Still, I think you're being a little hard on it-- or maybe I'm just being nostalgic. It's not as though d20 didn't/doesn't have its own share of wonky stuff though.

Speaking as someone that played in AD&D and even has a (little) bit of nostalgia for it, THAC0 wasn't the stupidest mechanic in the history of game design. But it makes the list--for the simple reason that the very need for such an acronym is ridiculous. Someone, somewhere before publication should have looked at the whole THAC0/AC system and asked, "do you think we're making this more complicated than it needs to be?"

If a mechanic works counterintuitively, it better have a really good reason for doing so.

Right.
I did my d20 bronze reto with modern DCs to hit, just because it makes so much more intuitive sense.

I played a ton of AD&D with the combat matrix, and some thaco....I don't miss it. 

[Nomadic]

I'd contend that it's range is significantly better than the beer-and-pretzels variety of hack & slash gaming, though it certainly does that very well.

It's range certainly is. I never said that was all it was good for. That is just where it shines.

[Steerpike]

That's true - fair enough.

[sparkletwist]

THAC0 wasn't the stupidest mechanic in the history of game design. But it makes the list--for the simple reason that the very need for such an acronym is ridiculous.

Yeah, by saying it "wasn't that bad" I never meant to imply I thought it was good.
It's amazing what we put up with back then. Actually, looking at 4e, it's amazing what we still put up with. I guess rule 0 really does win out. :D

[Xeviat]

It's weird. I'm called out as one of the earlier break aways (I think I was looking into M&M first, which is still d20 ...), yet now I'm one of the drifters. Then again, I think d20 is referring to the D&D3 core system, while I'm saying that I'm drifting back to D&D.

I'm one of those people that think everything can work with every system given enough wrangling, but I like wrangling. The only thing d20 doesn't do well are games where levels don't feel right, but I like levels because balancing without them is very hard.

If I don't end up liking D&DNext, I'm probably going to fudge together some amalgam of D&D3 and 4, much like Xanthan is doing, with some influence from M&M, L5R, and WoD.

I can't go back to naked D&D3, though. The fractional saving throw progressions sicken me.

[Lmns Crn]

The really, really great thing that D&D did (and still does, to an extent) is that it acted as an excellent "gateway game" for a lot of people. It's got a huge market share, it's got name recognition within the popular culture that nothing else in the hobby has got, it ends up being the first game for a lot of people, the thing that gets them interested in gaming.

Maybe most importantly for people like us, OGL was huge. I don't even know how many third-party publishers are fueled by OGL. (Even FATE uses it.) When I first started working on the Jade Stage, I had visions of publishing it as a hardcover setting book with a skeleton of heavily-modified, OGL-licensed 3.5 D&D-ish mechanics underneath it all. It is totally insane that that WotC said "here's this ruleset, it is free. Take it, distribute it, put it on websites, write your own stuff based on it and sell it for money if you want to." That is a completely crazy business move that I don't think gets enough credit. It blew the doors wide open for a ton of innovative stuff from other people (arguably including most of us here).

[Xeviat]

LC's right. I wouldn't have done as much as I did if it wasn't for the lofty goal of publishing my own setting. D&D4 killed that, and took away a bit of the magic, likely sending us running for other systems. Hopefully D&D5 brings it back, it was so magical (and I'd love to stick it to the Pathfinder players, hah).

[LD]

>>The same goes with terrible spell names.

What is wrong with the spell names?

Bigby's Crushing Hand, Tenser's Floating Disk, Melf's Acid Arrow- great names all!

[O Senhor Leetz]

>>The same goes with terrible spell names.

What is wrong with the spell names?

Bigby's Crushing Hand, Tenser's Floating Disk, Melf's Acid Arrow- great names all!

Well those are the best! They have some flavor and character about them. But a name like "Magic Missile" is terrible. We've all been subjected to it for so long that it no longer seems strange, but it's terrible.

But on the other hand, some of those names are so iconic - like Magic Missile, or the Bigby spells - that it would be a shame to change them.

[Matt Larkin (author)]

>>The same goes with terrible spell names.

What is wrong with the spell names?

Bigby's Crushing Hand, Tenser's Floating Disk, Melf's Acid Arrow- great names all!

Well those are the best! They have some flavor and character about them. But a name like "Magic Missile" is terrible. We've all been subjected to it for so long that it no longer seems strange, but it's terrible.

But on the other hand, some of those names are so iconic - like Magic Missile, or the Bigby spells - that it would be a shame to change them.

Yeah, if you step back from Magic Missile and its history, it is a silly name for a spell. And really, it was kind of a silly effect. So I shoot a wad of pure magic that never misses and deals a small amount of damage? A bolt of fire, a blast of telekinetic energy, or almost anything would have seemed more in line with sword & sorcery inspirations.

But there would be outrage if it was changed now. Hell, apparently there was outrage that 4e made people roll to hit with it as though it were, I don't know, any other attack in the game.

On the other hand, I always thought the named person spells had dumb names. My campaign setting probably never had anyone named Melf, and I'd rather the broad rules like spell names not try to insert the flavor of someone else's setting into mine. I suppose to each his own, then.