7/1/12

So, I guess I still really don't like the D20 system.


Apparently, I still have a major dislike of anything d20.

This is not me bashing the system as much as just realizing that I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

To be fair, I got into gaming playing D&D 2nd ed, and still have fond memories of that game. It was the game that got me into gaming in the first place. So without it, I may have never got into gaming at all. For that I am grateful.

It started in 1991, and I played that game (along with others such as Call of Cthulhu, cyberpunk, champions, etc.) for a good decade. Then I had a few years where I did not play anything, mostly due to not being able to find people to play with.

Then I moved to NYC in 2003 and started my own sci-fi/fantasy book club. From that I found people wanting to game, and we started playing 2nd ed again. It was fun, especially getting to introduce new people to gaming. I had a blast.

Then it changed.

I started to get bored with the game, and a few other things happened at the same time.  The first thing was an introduction to the indie game scene by playing Spirit of the Century. This changed how I viewed gaming and I started to go into a different direction. The second thing that happened is that we started to make a game and I realized our game was just a clone of D&D.

I don’t think we meant for that to happen, but it did.

Not to mention at this time it seemed like every game was becoming a d20 game.  Or it could be that I was so burned out of D&D that it ruined other d20 games as well.

So, anyone that knows me already knows this.

But last weekend we were at half-price books, and I came across and old star wars box set for 7 bucks. Part of me remembered that Wizards made a D20 star wars game, but I blocked that part of my mind and could not wait to get back home. See, I had played star wars years before it was a D20 game and it was AWESOME.

So, when I got home, I started reading the book and realized it was the Wizards version which was D20. It was so disappointing to me, and once I got a few chapters into the game, I was already done with it. It just annoyed the hell out of me. lol.

So, apparently, even though I have not played a d20 game in probably 4 years or so, I am still annoyed with the system enough that I don’t even want to read the book in a setting I love. This may never change, and if that is the case, that is ok.

I have enough indie games I love to make up for it.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting. I'm not sure I have any useful comment to share: I started to drift away from D&D as early as 1980 when I realized huge chunks of it couldn't emulate things I was interested in. My end result was to grow a game system of my own (yeah another of those "home brew" oddities)and I have used that ever since. I've written (and published) d20 stuff because there's a market for that content, but I regard that as an intellectual exercise. Certainly not my adventuring system of choice.

    What indie systems are you liking these days most of all, and why those particular ones?

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  2. Mostly, Fate. Which is what our game is being made from. Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files are my favs. Both due to system and setting. Why? I love a mechanic in the game called Aspects. They allow you to take the game in whatever direction you want it to go. As a gamer, you have bad shit happen to you all the time right? In a fate game, you get paid for it. So if you have an aspect that says "shoot first, ask questions later", the gm can compel it any time to complicate your life. But you get a fate point, which you can use for other thins (such as a bonus to your roll).

    Kind of hard to explain in a quite note on here though. :)

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