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Wafflecart
2009-03-08, 04:10 PM
Hello there fellow posters of the playground. I was considering trying to start up a d20 modern game. I was simply wondering if there were any major flaws in the system or game itself, and was also hoping for an pros or cons. Pretty much anything on the subject is welcome to be posted. Thank you all for your time.

Crow
2009-03-09, 02:07 AM
Our group has played it a little, and found it overall pretty well-balanced and enjoyable. The wealth rules are pretty slick too once you get used to them. We had fun doing an investigation-type campaign.

Sebastian
2009-03-09, 03:51 AM
D20 modern is one of my favorite systems, as far as I can remember the main problems with their rules are;

a- the wealth system is easy to abuse from the "right" kind of player.

b- the unarmed combat system is pretty wonky, there is no non-lethal damage, the only thing you can do is knock down someone and to do it you must hit for more than the target CON (and he still get a save), the problem is that a untrained character do only 1d3+STR damage. Do the math yourself.
The Brawl tree of feats that let you do 1d6 and 1d8 don't really help things.
You can always take Combat Martial Arts, a feat that let you do 1d4 lethal damage barehanded (and you count as armed and all that) but it should not be necessary to be a martial artist to knock down someone with a punch.

Aside from that is a good system, IMHO. You could want to check the various third party supplements, some of them are really good. The two modern player companions from The Game Mechanics are a must have, IMHO.

SydneyLosstarot
2009-03-09, 04:09 AM
Played it, DMed it.

Pretty transparent, quite balanced and exciting.

As a player, i rather dislike the overcomplicated skill system: there are more skills than in 3.5 DnD, some of them redundant. And most Advanced Classes have heavy skill pre-reqs, making them hard to enter with a not-intended-by-developers build.

Another flaw is melee combat: it's pretty difficult to build a good meleer at low levels. At least the one who'd outperform a shooter.

However, the classes are great. I like the idea that multiclassing is actually encouraged, as well as getting into advanced classes(the latter are closer to DnD basic classes than d20M basic classes are).

oh, and flavor-wise it's very easy to bust the atmosphere of any setting with ridiculous builds and ideas, so be careful.

Zincorium
2009-03-09, 05:11 AM
I mostly agree with SydneyLosttarot- except for the melee-vs-ranged thing. In every experience I've had with the game, ranged attacks sucked unless you carefully combed through the weapons locker or something similar and got friendly with the double tap feat. It was just too easy to combine high strength, the strong hero talent that adds to damage, and the stupidly good exotic weapons to utterly waste things. But YMMV, especially if you go more towards the sci-fi/military type games.

Oh, and obligatory shotgun ranting:

Aaaaah, where to begin?

The person who decided on the stats for shotguns had a personal vendetta against their use- it's in one of the early 'bullet point' articles, stated rather plainly. He really didn't think anyone should use them unless no other weapons were available.

The result is that shotguns are demonstratably worse than other weapons in every price range and in every situation, and have no redeeming factor.

According to weapons locker, the standard length for shotgun shells is 3", and 2 3/4" shells take a -1 to damage. This utterly fails to explain why a large number of shotguns will only take 2 3/4" shells. Anyway, a 2 3/4" with single aught buck has 9 pellets of .32 caliber. This compares favorably to the .32 round used by guns like the skorpion, and according to D20 modern the round does 2d4. So does a .22, so this seems like even if the velocity was much lower than the .32 acp (and as far as I know, it isn't), 2d4 is a good minimum damage for a single pellet.

Of course, there are 9 of these, spaced close enough together that unless sprayed out of a sawed off shotgun, they'll all hit the target at close range. Since a standard burst assumes 2 out of five bullets miss, it seems more reasonable to use the double tap or 3 round burst rules as a model, where each bullet after the first does half damage.

2d4 for first pellet + 1d4 for the second, and so on until you hit 10d4 damage. Game breaking, right? That's more power than a .50 BMG rifle- which is meant for use against a tank. But that's more a problem with the rules system.

At the very least, 2d8 or less is an absurd damage, leaving the shotgun struggling, at point blank range, against a .44 magnum handgun or .223 rifle round. It also leaves it as a sucker's choice in weaponry.

Dhavaer
2009-03-09, 05:11 AM
It's quite good except, as Sebastian mentioned, the non-lethal damage system. There's a link in my sig (which hopefully still works) to a variant damage system similar, I think, to the one used in Star Wars: Saga edition.

averagejoe
2009-03-09, 05:40 AM
It's a great system, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for it, especially d20 future. The one thing I was never able to get past is being able to endlessly shoot people and have them not die, due to hit points. Somehow that bugs me more than with the standard stuff you get hit with in DnD.

Dhavaer
2009-03-09, 06:01 AM
It's a great system, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for it, especially d20 future. The one thing I was never able to get past is being able to endlessly shoot people and have them not die, due to hit points. Somehow that bugs me more than with the standard stuff you get hit with in DnD.

One houserule I liked to apply was to make the massive damage threshold equal the lowest of Constitution or half hitpoints. It doesn't really do anything at higher levels, but low level people will go down at a reasonable rate.

Neithan
2009-03-09, 07:52 AM
The one thing I was never able to get past is being able to endlessly shoot people and have them not die, due to hit points. Somehow that bugs me more than with the standard stuff you get hit with in DnD.

How that? Do you usually cause to few damage for massive damage to apply, or is the DC 15 save too easy to make?

Dhavaer
2009-03-09, 02:46 PM
How that? Do you usually cause to few damage for massive damage to apply, or is the DC 15 save too easy to make?

Average damage for a standard handgun is only 7, much too low to force a massive damage save. A bigger gun with double-tap will have a much higher average, but there's often situational reasons not to carry around a longarm.

SaiphSDC
2009-03-09, 07:06 PM
Melee is doable in Modern, and so is ranged. I've got a level 5 character, does 1d6+5 damage a hit..unarmed, so he actually averages better than a pistol user.

He's not even that optimized, fast2/strong2/martial artist 1.

Ahh, that is one other small complaint. The fast class is a very, very tempting dip for almost any character build, you get a big AC boost, a decent boost to ref saves, and evasion with almost no sacrifice in other areas. Not a huge problem, but one to be aware of.

And with the elusive target feat, shooting him while he's in melee is an additional -4 penalty (so net -8 for those without precise shot). And anybody that says not every melee user would take combat martial arts...doesn't usually feel comfortable tweaking flavor a bit. Anybody trained in self defense, be it boxing, or kung fu, could fit into that role. All I ever consider it is as a mechanical way of saying a character knows how to hit someone, and make it count.

Throw in combat throw, and he's pretty good at trips and grapples too...though grapplinig a minotaur is still a bad idea (except that he got lucky, and is now viewed, in character, as a bit scary to the rest of the team).

One of the common complaints is that armor is treated as an AC boost, instead of DR, considering how modern body armor works.

For anybody complaining about how you can shoot people all day...same goes for D&D and running people through with spears. In any d20 modern games I run (actually, any game) most blows, even if they do hit and deal HP damage, are close shots, bruising, numbing, jolting...not gut peircing, limb severing torrents of gore a-la a Torintino film.

Somebody that's at 20 hp, hit for 15hp from a gunshot has the standard heroic "should hit" but somebody at say, 40hp that take the same hit, didn't get nailed, didn't even get hit, but wrenching they did to dodge, or slamming up against the wall to avoid it, etc, has fatigued them a bit...more like an action movie star.

Lamech
2009-03-09, 10:41 PM
I've looked at it, haven't played but the rules for wealth and how buying and selling affects it... abusable. Easily, abusable.

skywalker
2009-03-10, 12:55 AM
Oh, and obligatory shotgun ranting:

Aaaaah, where to begin?

The person who decided on the stats for shotguns had a personal vendetta against their use- it's in one of the early 'bullet point' articles, stated rather plainly. He really didn't think anyone should use them unless no other weapons were available.

The result is that shotguns are demonstratably worse than other weapons in every price range and in every situation, and have no redeeming factor.

According to weapons locker, the standard length for shotgun shells is 3", and 2 3/4" shells take a -1 to damage. This utterly fails to explain why a large number of shotguns will only take 2 3/4" shells. Anyway, a 2 3/4" with single aught buck has 9 pellets of .32 caliber. This compares favorably to the .32 round used by guns like the skorpion, and according to D20 modern the round does 2d4. So does a .22, so this seems like even if the velocity was much lower than the .32 acp (and as far as I know, it isn't), 2d4 is a good minimum damage for a single pellet.

Of course, there are 9 of these, spaced close enough together that unless sprayed out of a sawed off shotgun, they'll all hit the target at close range. Since a standard burst assumes 2 out of five bullets miss, it seems more reasonable to use the double tap or 3 round burst rules as a model, where each bullet after the first does half damage.

2d4 for first pellet + 1d4 for the second, and so on until you hit 10d4 damage. Game breaking, right? That's more power than a .50 BMG rifle- which is meant for use against a tank. But that's more a problem with the rules system.

At the very least, 2d8 or less is an absurd damage, leaving the shotgun struggling, at point blank range, against a .44 magnum handgun or .223 rifle round. It also leaves it as a sucker's choice in weaponry.


Ya know, d20 Call of Cthulhu did a lot of things wrong. But one thing it got right was shotguns. They absolutely ripped at close range, but then got less and less effective as you got further and further from your target.

Side note: The .50 BMG rifle is designed to be used against certain parts of tanks. It's just a machine gun round. It will hurt you, but not like .00 buck at close range. It's the same caliber bullet as a desert eagle, albeit with much more power behind it.

My point was, 12-gauge .00 buckshot hurts a lot more at close range than any .50 round.

Now that I look up the d20 modern pistol stats, the Glock 17 is listed as "always mastercraft" while the desert eagle is not.

I think the moral of this story is, change shotguns, and don't use the firearm descriptions/stats verbatim. Just think of them as guidelines. Because they screw a ton of stuff up.

Sebastian
2009-03-10, 05:07 AM
Also, you could be interested in modern20 that is essentially the unofficial modern D20 2.0 from rpgobjects. I have yet to check it but what I have heard sound interesting.

Neithan
2009-03-10, 05:40 AM
Now that I look up the d20 modern pistol stats, the Glock 17 is listed as "always mastercraft" while the desert eagle is not.
That's because Glock is an austrian company, which makes it kind of a german gun. And we all now german stuff is always masterwork. ^^
Also, Desert Eagle is a silly weapon. It's only good in fiction, but in the real world it's more a novelity item than a weapon. It has a lot of punch, but it's far to large and too heavy for almost all people to aim with.

SydneyLosstarot
2009-03-10, 05:53 AM
Also, Desert Eagle is a silly weapon. It's only good in fiction, but in the real world it's more a novelity item than a weapon. It has a lot of punch, but it's far to large and too heavy for almost all people to aim with.

Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work you can always hit them with it.©

Wafflecart
2009-03-10, 05:27 PM
just on a side note, i dont much care for the range inc on the python (i found an srd)...personally, if you cant hit something out to 50-100ft (srd says 40ft) you haveno business using a freaking python

Altair_the_Vexed
2009-03-10, 06:57 PM
just on a side note, i dont much care for the range inc on the python (i found an srd)...personally, if you cant hit something out to 50-100ft (srd says 40ft) you haveno business using a freaking pythonRange increments are the range before you take a penalty to hit. That penalty starts at -2, and increases for every multiple of the range increment.
Range Increment: Any attack at less than this distance is not penalized for range. However, each full range increment causes a cumulative –2 penalty on the attack roll. Ranged weapons have a maximum range of ten range increments, except for thrown weapons, which have a maximum range of five range increments.

Anyway, I run a d20 Modern game regularly, and I've house ruled a few things: that non-lethal damage works the same as it does in D&D that automatic fire can hit more than once if a creature is larger than Medium (at point blank range, you can hit up to all of the 5ft spaces that a creature has facing you, rolled randomly on the closest applicable die) that shotguns (using buckshot) do 4dx up to Range Increment / 4 3dx up to Range Increment / 2 2dx at greater ranges Autofire against vehicles and their occupants:Where using autofire to hit an area requires hitting a defence of 10, hitting a moving vehicle with autofire requires either a 10 or the vehicle’s defence, whichever is greater.
If a vehicle is subject to autofire, the crew must all make Ref saves + the cover adjustment of the vehicle.
The crew’s saves must exceed the DC (usually 15 as per normal autofire rules) without the vehicle’s cover bonus to avoid all damage. A result of less than 15 but more than 15 – cover bonus means that the character has taken half the weapon damage, minus the hardness of the vehicle.
If the vehicle gives 100% cover, the save is at +10, and is only required if the vehicle itself is damaged (i.e. if the weapon’s damage penetrates the hardness of the vehicle).
Aside from those rules, it works great.

Wafflecart
2009-03-10, 08:04 PM
I must say that the biggest turn-off for this game is the wealth and buying system....why couldn't they just make a price list and money.

The Rose Dragon
2009-03-10, 08:07 PM
Because most people don't actually have doing their taxes as a hobby.

Wafflecart
2009-03-10, 08:12 PM
Because most people don't actually have doing their taxes as a hobby.

i just think it would be easier and make more sense to have DNDish loot and buying system

infinitypanda
2009-03-10, 11:11 PM
Heavy is good, heavy is reliable. If it doesn't work you can always hit them with it.©

Notice how your guns say, "Replica," while my gun says, "Desert Eagle point-five-oh." Piss off.

skywalker
2009-03-11, 01:44 AM
That's because Glock is an austrian company, which makes it kind of a german gun. And we all now german stuff is always masterwork. ^^
Also, Desert Eagle is a silly weapon. It's only good in fiction, but in the real world it's more a novelity item than a weapon. It has a lot of punch, but it's far to large and too heavy for almost all people to aim with.

I'm sensing some joking in here but not quite sure.

Heaviness actually makes the gun more comfortable to shoot.

And I know that it's a silly weapon. The fact that it's a silly weapon doesn't change the fact that it drives a .50 bullet (which will cause you damage), and that it was designed originally as a target pistol. No, it's not the most accurate pistol on the list, but it is far more accurate than a Glock.

The Glock is a great many things, many of them good. But "accurate pistol" is not one of them.

Sebastian
2009-03-11, 03:44 AM
i just think it would be easier and make more sense to have DNDish loot and buying system

It depends on what you are trying to do, I know that i would be annoyed if I wanted to play a, let's say, a superhero game and the players keep looting the bodies for money and items to sell. ;)

But seriously the wealth system is good because it give a little less emphasys on the loot and money and reduce the "take everything that is not nailed down" attitude that some D&D (and not only D&D) games seems to have.

And if you really want to use money just use them, it is a modern game, prices for items can be found everywhere, both on the internet or in other RPG sourcebooks. An advantage of the wealth system is that is pretty easy not to use it if you want so.

Sebastian
2009-03-11, 04:28 AM
Another advantage of Wealth is that it is time-period indipendent. Being an abstraction it don't matter if you are in 1890, 1920 or 2010, a DC 15 wealth check is always a DC 15 wealth check, no need to make conversions (most of the times.)

gabado
2009-03-11, 10:42 PM
my main problem with the system is the point shopping thing.
i mean come on who really wants to shop with points as opposed to mounds and mounds of cash?
i sure as heck don't.

beyond that, go for it kid, the world is your oyster!

:smallwink: