D20 Modern

It's pretty obscure, no one probably really plays it anymore except die hard fans till clinging to it or people who have nostalgia. I played with my friends and if you were all just there for a good time it worked well enough but the money system was weird as shit. Died with 3.5 and it was never the most popular arm of 3.5 anyways.

I had a lot of good times, and it's where I really cut my teeth with pen and paper games. You could do some hilarious shit like curing a hospital with tank shells or play the Purple Man. But it wasn't super balanced if you were trying to break it.

I played a few sessions of it with some old friends from school. Had a ball, though more because of the people than the system. Ran a Charismatic Hero into Negotiator as the party face, trying to talk our way into gunfights so the rest of the party could use their talents effectively and still have reasonable excuses.

I still use the guns and some of the weapons in a section of my own homebrew campaign that's got a section of the world basically stagnated in Fallout tech levels in a diminished magic zone.

It's bad.
Charmingly bad, fun in it's own context, but doesn't play anything like you'd expect.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not 3.5e, but 3.0... it came out before 3.5e using some of the concepts they were working on, but lacked many of the big changes that were actually good for the game.
The biggest one, nerfing one level dips, was there though... so it's not all bad.
I poke it with the same stick I do Star Wars Saga edition that would follow in this way, but for 3.5e and 4e.

Speaking of which, if you like Saga, you'll find the neat super open classes are here as well.
They're really uninspired and not as open as they appear to be.

If you like the DnD3 combat, expect that with possibly less magic. Since DnD always has and always will rely on magic to keep combat interesting (4e doesn't count... it's experimental and will never happen again) we're left with the debate of Guns vs Swords.
The answer is Swords.
At the low levels guns do too much damage and upset the balance, but as characters get more durable... you wind up with them sucking royally.
Swords start off good enough to function, but scale much better.
Since you'll want to start off all your campaigns at level 4 (seriously, do this), swords are better in general.

The game relies on 3e's multiclass system.
I hate that multiclass system too much to accurately describe what's wrong with it, so I won't try.
This is actually why starting at 4th level is a thing though. It's the first level you can take an Advanced Class like Mage, Martial Artist, or Medic.
Until that point, you're just generically strong, fast, or... dedicated.

But the game does do something excellent.
It's "fully compatable" with DnD3e.
Basically, you can set up a Buffy/Dresden campaign using any monster from any 3e supplement as your baddie.
Or you can randomly place a gun or two in your DnD3e campaign.

At the time, I prefered it to the only equivalent in my collection, Hunter the Reckoning.
Now it's shelf decor.

share pdf i'll look it over?

Already happened.
Www.diasexmachina.com

speaking of which....anybody have The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game .pdf?

what it like?

some nice maps, if nothing else

2horror4me

>serious question, do americans have classrooms without windows?

sometimes.

why? are foreign schools hollow in the middle so every room has one? those wacky foreigners, what'll they do next ;P

That sounds cheap as fuck and really unhealthy. I bet here in poor southern Europe it's unheard of.

While I can't say the same for every high school, the one I went to was built in such a way that every classroom had windows.

how is it unhealthy?

there could be skylights

I have a friend who exclusively plays that game. He has a bunch of the source books too. It's not very great, and even if you take the books advice and use d&d character classes along with what the book offers, it's still just a mess. The weapon hardback book was cool though with all its little pictures of each gun.

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It's okay. Not the best system out there, but not the worst. If you like 3.5, you'll like it.

In Portugal, our schools tend to be two, three 'levels' (storied?) High, usually in a U shape with supporting buildings inside the 'area'/campus/designated school area.
Sometimes, there's more than one building for classes.

For a time, most schools were being rebuilt (thus the déficit and the europoor shenanigans) and I had classes on a shipment container refurbished for classes (and we loved it because it was high tech and comfy as fuck, despite what you'd think. We had our own shanty town of decrepid looking from the outside but hightech on the inside).

But I studied in a school built in the 60's so there was this one building with no windows but a glass ceiling. That, plus 45 degrees celsius and holy shit.

I loved it. It was super healthy.

so bad then, thats unfortunate

Yes. Not all the time, but they're there.

>are foreign schools hollow in the middle so every room has one?
Schools here are donut shape, U shaped or a long string of separate buildings. So, all classrooms have windows. Always.

Sounds dangerous in a fire situation.

It wasn't particularly good, but the art for it was absolutely fantastic, especially the Monster Manual.

>Www.diasexmachina.com

looks like shit tbqh

Essentially suffers from the fact that there aren't enough cool things to do in combat but shoot, like feats, manoeuvres or magic, unless you include magic, but then I'm not sure what the point in playing it is unless a party cannot play anything but a 3.0 type system

any torrents for this? Amethyst: Quintessence
or another type of download?

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It had a lat of potential but was clunky and never really fixed unfortunately.

>A wonky wealth system.

The wealth system was well-thought out, balanced, and stable. Where it broke down was mostly when GMs slipped in house rules or didn't fully play the system as written.

It's telling that several systems since then have adopted abstract wealth systems in one form or another.

However, other than that, d20 modern didn't have much else to recommend it. The game was well-designed, but the D&D architecture it was constructed around wasn't a good fit for a modern game. It was always a niche that worked best in a group that was married to D&D 3.x already.

Ultimately, it was a niche product for a company that was a mass-market success. In that environment, it was never going to get much attention or support, and players moved on to other systems that handled the stories of a modern game better.

>The wealth system was well-thought out, balanced, and stable.
U wot

The wealth system was hilariously gameable.

>buy a pile of purchase DC 14 items
>once you've worked out the optimal purchase order of your wealth modifier reducing items, sell enough DC 14 items to return your wealth modifier to that point.

Shit goes completely bananas if you grab the splatbook occupation where as long as your reputation is at least +1, your wealth modifier /cannot/ drop below +10.

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and thats how they died if those arn't silver bullets lol

Nice trips.

I have the book and we had plans to play a game, but it never happened. It's totally based on 3.0 not 3.5 which makes it even clunkier...that said the fluff was interesting and the magic system was definitely not from D&D - IIRC you picked certain elements and could work weaves more easily with those...you could over-channel for more power but more risk, and you could cast a lot of little weaves all day, but the bigger ones required some kind of endurance-like check.

It also reflected the differences between channeling saidin and saidar (sp?), but I don't think the male half had been de-tainted yet when the book came out so that's not included.

I think what kept us from playing was no rules to adjudicate braid tugging or skirt smoothing.

Played a game based on Fallout using d20 Modern and enjoyed it, but the system does lack balance. You're a fool if you don't take at least a one-level dip into Fast, with two being better. Medical treatment also gets strange, although that's pretty standard in any game that allows healing.

Another game (based on Red Dawn) using the system our group played highlighted the disparity of guns even more...by the time you get to mid-levels, you can ignore anti-tank weapons (save for half damage or Evade altogether, or eat 30-40 points which is no big deal - time to fix your hair!). Automatic weapons are also absolutely useless (reflex DC 15 for half damage of a single bullet) when they should be horrifying.

In short, it was fun but there's another reason D&D is the flagship product.

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Don't forget the feat taxes. Every fucking thing you can think of takes a feat in order to do in that game, it's absolutely fucking ridiculous.

A few things I developed to make full auto more fun

>each extra bullet in a burst adds 1/2 the base damage and reduces the attack roll by one(?) point
making the difference between double-tap, three-rounds-rapid, and those odd 4-round burst weapons mechanically meaningful compared to the regular 5-round full auto rules as well as jiving with bigger automatics, longer bursts, and heavily gadgeted guns

>Reflex save against automatics is modified by firer's Defense bonus
I never tell players why I do this instead of using BAB, but they've come up with clever reasons as to why, including the idea that a character with a high DB can deny cover and evasion to his targets because he knows how to evade
>the real answer is because abilities that replace or modify defense bonus allow pulpy situations like using your reputation bonus as defense makes me giggle

>I spell out to players that automatic fire counts as one attack when making a full attack action
they didn't like learning that when they got ambushed by a (poorly) converted silenced automatic AR-15

>using a full auto burst on a single target, stacking all four squares on top of each other, is allowable but I double the range increment penalty
they didn't like me when I had a gang-banger bust out a pair of MAC-10s from his hiding spot in a squatter apartment bathroom

>gattling guns deal five-round bursts to EACH target square while doing full auto, using twenty rounds per full burst; the Ref save is also a base of 25+Def instead of 15+Def
they really didn't like me when the merc captain called in his surplus huey

>mundane advanced classes from Urban Arcana webfile and all the gribbly feats in Green Ronin's Ultramodern Firearms are up for grabs
they REALLY didn't like me when the merc captain and his sniper team hunted them down across three-hundred miles of swamp, mountains, and spider-infested jungle for revenge three missions later

No, actually, they do not. They cannot, by law, due to government fire safety laws. A classroom with no windows is considered way too dangerous to be used because of the possibility of emergencies.

A lot of schools use internal courtyards to get around this requirement, but any building in the US that has rooms like that is GENERALLY either breaking the law, is super old, or both.

tl;dr - map designer had no idea what he was doing, but that's really not a surprise.

Nobody really ever expects, or gets reasonable structural design from dungeon/adventure maps.

You're forgetting rule zero and rule F

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Well, say what you will about it, but the fact that all the Magic-using classes capped out at 10th level and 5th-level spells meant that that it managed to avoid the Caster Edition problems that plagued 3.5.

>Shit goes completely bananas if you grab the splatbook occupation where as long as your reputation is at least +1, your wealth modifier /cannot/ drop below +10.

Yeah, the Heir occupation from d20 Future was stupid shit. It makes sense for someone high-up in a megacorp, but in practice, it probably just lets you turn your guy into a superhuman cyborg at chargen.

>If you like the DnD3 combat, expect that with possibly less magic. Since DnD always has and always will rely on magic to keep combat interesting (4e doesn't count... it's experimental and will never happen again) we're left with the debate of Guns vs Swords.

d20 Modern does have other stuff that can make fighter-types interesting, though, especially once you mix in stuff from d20 Future. Things like mutations, cybernetics, power armor (Large size Mecha), robotic upgrades (if you're playing a robot as your race), etc.

Mutations were pretty interesting, too, since you could start with them out of character creation, and unlike all the others, they didn't cost you piles of money to acquire: instead, you had to take negative mutations to balance out the positive mutations you had.

>You're forgetting rule zero and rule F
This is never a valid argument concerning if a rule is broken or not.

Map designers may make mistakes, but this is not one of them.

I went to a high school that had classrooms with no windows.

South Side school district, San Antonio Texas; some of the classrooms on the 'inside track' of the hallway had no windows.

You're also forgetting the time limitation on purchase checks as well; while Joe the Trader is making a killing on eBay, the villain is murdering his friends in a basement somewhere and sent a hitman after Joe to make sure all the loose ends were tied up

Reading this thread has reinspired me to reread some of my old d20 Modern stuff.

So, for instance, the following is a viable starting PC in a near-future/cyberpunk campaign: a robot designed to mimick the appearance of a dragon-person, designed for forestry work, with a flamethrower built into its mouth and a chainsaw attached to one arm.

Mechanically, you're an Heroic Biodroid, based on mimicking a Winged Half-Dragon. This gets you +4 Strength, +2 Intelligence, flight (ducted rotors, most likely), and clawed hands that do 1d3 damage. If you take ranks in the Profession skill (why wouldn't you), you get 2d4+1 starting Wealth, averaging 6 points. This means that you can buy a Flamethrower license (should be DC 10 (Licensed), not 20 (Military) - the developers obviously didn't know that flamethrowers are legal for civilians to own), a Flamethrower (DC 15), and some Resillium Armor (DC 17), which will likely bankrupt you (it'll cost you 1d6 Wealth, and you'll have 4 left). If you've got anything left, buy a Survivor Array (you can always buy the License later if you've only got one point left). Then, you can buy as many DC 10 or less items as you want to, so buy two Weapon Mounts, a Chainsaw, and whatever pieces of miscellaneous equipment you want.

You would, of course, spend your level 1 Feat on Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Chainsaws), but it's worth it to be able to deal that sort of damage in melee. Flamethrowers don't require a Feat to use, anyway, since they don't make attack rolls, and your inbuilt robot armor gives you the protection of a Tactical Vest (the best Medium Armor) without any of the drawbacks or Feat requirements.

Downside is that you've only got a Charisma score of 5, so you're basically Data from one of the early seasons of TNG.

>in the US

I understand that the majority of you people don't know or care about this, but there's a whole fucking world outside North America.

Actually went to a school in europe that had some weird unreachable middle "outside" section so the "inner" classrooms had windows to the outside.

Later construction had then placed more building on to the building so some of the "outer" classrooms now had no windows so they had sky lights installed in all the classrooms because it was a wide one story building.

Generally though, school buildings with more than one story will have an inner "quad" or quadrangle area, so a long corridor in the center of the toroidal building with rooms to the sides so every room had windows.

later went to a university where the architecture had been fucked with extensively - so the exterior of all the buildings looked like hogswarts still but the interior had been fucked with so that there were now these immense corridor spaces with all the windows, and itty bitty modernist lecture theatres with no windows at all where they extracted your soul and placed science into your hollow, windowed interior.

>but there's a whole fucking world outside North Americ

Well yeah, obviously there's canada and mexico.

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It's a basically serviceable game, but it's not good by any stretch of the imagination.

If you want to be a complete combat monster, focus on melee. Firearms look impressive, but don't scale worth a damn.

Take a single level dip in fast hero. You'll never regret it.