|
Interesting little point on d20 Modern firearms. They intended on making them into basically the same except with 'gadgets' attached to them. The thought behind that was: "If the Mankiller 9000 is the hands down the best pistol nobody will take anything else." and by making the various pistols the same, except maybe ammo capacity, they thought to balance firearms a little bit. Another thing was that people thought that the damage was extremely low, but most people missed the massive damage check section of the book and the rule during development was a Fort Check DC: 10+Damage which was supposed to make firearm combat extremely dangerous. So the firearms look a little janky if the design decisions and the MDC isn't known about. But wait till you get to the vehicles, where a man armed with a katana, a certain strength, and a couple of feats and cut through an M1A1 hull.
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2014 06:16
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:49 |
|
|
Majuju posted:oops poo poo, sorry to jump it early. I spent a lot of time on d20 Modern (I was even involved with the early pre-publishing work) and there's a lot of weird things that happened with it. If you want I can edit out my post and you can edit out the quote in your reply and we can keep it a surprise for anyone who didn't read it or has me on ignore. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2014 21:12
|
|
|
Majuju posted:No it's cool, nobody reads these things anyhow. What's your favourite d20 Modern splatbook, for when I finish the core? Go with d20 Future or d20 Apocalypse. I've basically got all the official d20 Modern stuff as well as some of the more popular early d20 works by other companies. I'd love to see your take on them. Gotta say, I'm really looking forward to when someone does the d20 Future book, since I was pretty heavy into the playtesting (I have an early release plastic ringbound copy without all the artwork and poo poo) and want to see how many people ID the obvious problems that were pointed out and ignored. Neat Fact about d20 Modern vehicles: The reason why military vehicles and weapon ranges were actually cut down so far is because the designers felt that it wasn't fair to players. The tank was brought up and one of the designers was talking about how his tank during Desert Storm was disabled due to small-arms fire, and when pressed admitted it wasn't disabled but deadlined. It was still combat capable, but just was missing 2 lights and an antenna. Then they tried the 'it wouldn't be fair to the players to have an enemy with a tank be invulnerable to their weapons' to which a lot of us responded with "Uhh, it's a TANK!" and said that it was a GM/Player problem. With the firearms ranges they were all talking about about how 'the ranges aren't for some guy who made a world record shot' but when it was pointed out that in order to qualify for Army basic training you'd need a handful of feats in order to just get 26 out of 40, since you're expected to hit out to 300m. I used to recommend that the range in feet was changed to meters. Then the magic problem. Oh, God, the magic problem. Wanted to play "Charmed" with d20 Modern? Forget it unless you're ready to put in 3-6 levels in a class before you can even toss off one underpowered spell. Although some of the spells were funny, mixing magic and modern technology. Nothing like texting a foe a swift kick in his balls. Goddamn, d20 Modern used to result in HUGE flamewars back in the day.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2014 22:16
|
|
|
Yeah, that was half the problem. I told them "Just use yards instead of meters, it's pretty basic." The power creep was terrible in Urban Arcana, and although the book was full of all kinds of good stuff, a GM really had to be careful or the mage would outshine and outfight everyone in the group. The Wealth system wasn't too bad, but it wasn't explained very well and was pretty thick because the examples weren't very good. I liked the abstract system for money, and I loved the resources from d20 Apocalypse. I really felt the system could have done a lot better if Wizards had given it even the most modicum of support. I used to talk to one of the writers of d20 Apocalypse all the time, and I've got my advance copy around here somewhere. I'd love to see people's take on it. Although I have to say I hated the Zombie Apocalypse as it was presented in the Apocalypse book. EDIT: Kobold Special Forces troops, gently caress yeah!   Meepo loving rocks. If you didn't play at least one game as kobold military troops you weren't playing right. Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Jan 9, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2014 22:45
|
|
|
Majuju posted:d20 Modern Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook - Part 8 OK, I've heard two different stories involved exactly in that. The first, is that WotC, like most people doing d20 at the time who wanted to have good reputations, contacted the various companies PR department, asked to speak to someone, and got a quick fax permission. That's what a lot of us did, and Coke, Pepsi, Ford, Cold, Detonics, and the like, just went "Yeah, yeah, whatever, we ain't paying you though." and you went with it. The other story is regarding a secondary story. IIRC there was someone who used some real life products in their product and when taken to court, since it was just a namedrop (George ordered a Coke Zero from the bar...) the judge ruled that it was exposure for the company. Another story had it that if you approached certain companies with the offer to highlight their stuff in the work, they might pay you. A lot of people tried this, but I don't know of anyone it succeeded. The last was that the major companies basically don't give a gently caress as long as you aren't badmouthing their poo poo. This is commonly accepted, and usually if you called Colt or Ford or Chevy they'd just say "Whatever, man, just don't badmouth our poo poo" and things go on as normal. No contact really needed, you just do the writeup and everyone walks away happy. But, I'm inclined to believe story #1, or the last one. I was getting help putting together products back then, and the advice given to me was to contact those company's PR departments, to the point where someone leaked me a contact list, so I really put a lot of claim on the first one. Additionally various people who worked on said that including the names of vehicles made it easy to look up on the internet, used commonly known vehicles, so it made it a lot easier to people who weren't gearheads or whatever, to identify the vehicle in question. By adding in the names of firearms it made it easier to envision, by using common action movie weapons. Rambling, yeah, but you get the basic point. Another big point of contention was the armor section. I asked the local Sheriff's department if I could try some of their armor on, as well as the local National Guard unit, to compare it to the kind of poo poo I'd worn over the years, in order to see just how hard it was to put it on untrained. Turned out it wasn't that hard. Which led to big disagreements on the way armor ate up feats. Coming from Shadowrun and a few other games where the only armor that ate up something like feats was power armor or robot power armor and poo poo like that. Something that you wanted a mechanical hit to offset the serious bonuses you got from the major armor, ala mechs. Now, in d20 Modern you had to pay light, medium, and then heavy armor feat chain to be able to use the hot poo poo armor. Which was bullshit, supposedly to keep everyone from wearing heavy armor as they ran around. On top of that you took a hit to your Defense bonus (according to some guesses) from your class as well as your Dex bonus. So your Fast Hero had all kinds of armor bonuses that don't slow him down and weigh a ton, but for a Strong or Tough hero to meet them they had to blow three loving feats. The feat problem was really bad, like I said earlier. For a guy who passed basic training in 2005 he'd have the equivalent of like 8 feats, some of which he wasn't even eligible for until like 4th or 6th level, just to pass basic training. Which led to a lot of design arguments, that basically boiled down to "But then my guy/pet class isn't special!" Which is why you say most PC's crossclassed into at least 1 level of Fast Hero just for the loving Defense bonuses. There was even talk of adjusting feats big time, to put the difference between combat feats, social feats, and technical feats, but in the end it was decided to leave feats alone. I did most of my work with milporn d20 Modern works, where everyone was assumed to have access to heavy firepower, operated in Post Apocalypse settings, or were in some other kind of unrestrained setting, which meant that there was plenty of adaptation work to do on d20 Modern. Sitting down and just making basic soldiers from any modern army was an exercise in madness. Despite having someone who was a tanker in Desert Storm, the combat section of d20 Modern and the feats surrounding it, as well as the gear, was loving laughable, since it just reminds me that the only thing dumber than a tanker was an orderly room clerk. Take the Military background and you still don't have anyone who can pass basic training. Same with police. Someone who was technically savvy was still tough to make, since skill point adjusting feats were next to useless. Mainly because the feat system was still hilariously broken. Not as bad as regular d20, but still hilariously broken, and that's without getting into Urban Arcana, where magic and monsters got an (un)needed boost for d20 Modern. But that was a personal problem with character generation. Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Jan 14, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2014 04:53
|
|
|
Christ, Twilight 2000. A lovely game where your character could die or end up crippled by radiation/chemical exposure before even character generation was over.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2014 22:48
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:That was 1st edition and Traveller would just squash you like a bug... Yeah. I had both of them. Traveller was funny because to get even a shot at getting a decent ship at chargen you had to risk death bigtime.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2014 03:56
|
|
|
Rockopolis posted:Twilight 2000 Goodness One of the funny things I remember from the 1E book was a section where the narrator group had 2 vehicles. They painted "Advance Party" on one, and "Main Body" on the other. It was a funny joke.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2014 03:56
|
|
|
That's the book that gave my campaign the fun stuff because I stopped trying to make it make sense. Brodkil on jetskis!
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2014 19:06
|
|
|
I figured she was building/modding infiltration units.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2014 21:07
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:M-1000 Panther Ding ding ding. Check out the eyes and the weird faux-humaniod bit going on with the weird preying mantis look-alike vibe. If you have the OLD version of Mechaniods, check out the difference between the old and new ones, then take a good look at those images. Those are mechaniods. Dammit, you doing this makes me want to go resurrect the Palladium thread. drat you.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2014 02:15
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:It wasn't a 3rd party book. I've got that. I can see it from where I'm sitting here right now.
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2014 22:46
|
|
|
Ryuujin posted:Don't forget that Sean K. Reynolds, aka must nerf monks whenever I can, apparently had something to do with the book. And has more or less gone on record of saying that he purposefully made options terrible so that no one would actually play as monsters. It's poo poo like that that makes me wonder why people still consider him a professional when he can't put aside his own bullshit in order to make a product a good product rather then act like all of D&D is his own personal homebrew game.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2014 01:27
|
|
|
Ignoring ECL could work. Hell, there was tons of workaround posted that made monsters viable PC's. poo poo, having a party of monsters taking the war to the pinkskins/smoothskins were great.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2014 01:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:49 |
|
|
If your gonna play a spy game, you gotta look up the old Top Secret module http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Sprechenhaltestelle-Secret-Administrator-File/dp/0935696172 It's got all the poo poo you'd want to base any spy poo poo out of.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 29, 2014 20:56
|
|