Is D20 modern Decent?

I'm running a pathfinder game right now but it's tailored to melee combat instead of firearms.
Is D20 modern worth switching to?

No.

God no, not even close.

It's a completely worthless system. Even when d20 was the ruler of games back in the day, people knew it was fucking trash.

I like the modern spell list, but the gun rules are terrible.
I used M&M 2e and gave the players limited Powers based off of the Modern spells, and it was much better.

Yes, d20 Modern is basically fine. It has most of the problems of the d20 System EXCEPT the magic ones, because magic is both much rarer and not as powerful (since you need to prestige class into magic, and spells cap out at about 5th level if I recall).

I honestly dont understand the hatred of D20 modern.

Every system is flawed. The most technically perfect systems tend to be either too narrow or incredibly over complicated. Theres no technically perfect system which hits the middle of complexity. Some have come close.

But whats the point in being so negative about it? What did it do wrong?

Interesting ideas, shitty execution.

>Every system is flawed.
And some are way more flawed than others.

One, it's boring. It's got no heart or soul behind it, and it reads more like a math textbook than a game. It's a cash grab born of desperation.

Two, it is deeply flawed. Many of the mechanics do not work as intended (wealth anyone?) and the developers really should've caught these glaring errors during playtesting. But they very obviously didn't bother and just shipped it out as soon as they could.

Three, it has a severe case of not knowing what it's supposed to be. Is it supposed to be an action movie sort of game? Then why are there so many simulationist rules? Okay, then maybe it's supposed to be a realistic sort of game. That flies clean out the window when you realize that Butch Flanksteak the Tough Hero can reliably tank shotgun rounds to the chest. The system repeatedly contradicts itself on what sort of game you should be running, and it suffers for it.

"It's really bad, but other systems have bad parts too! We should appreciate every system!"

Get the fuck out of here, it's not worth an iota of time. Every part of it is bad.

Joining the echo chamber here but the reality is that you can generally find any number of other systems that can cover the terrain that d20 modern covers in a much better way.

The reality is that WotC half-assed it just like the did a variety of other d20 variants.

If you absolutely have to play a 3.x/d20 variant for a modern game I'd possibly look at something like Spycraft (still pretty mediocre) or maybe reskin M&M for a lower power level game.

>Every part of it is bad.
Now you're being retarded in the opposite direction.

I was not being facetious, literally every part of d20 modern is bad

>I'm running a pathfinder game right now but it's tailored to melee combat instead of firearms.

d20 modern is literally D&D with guns. Less caster supremacy because less magic, and the gun rules are terrible, but I have a set of house rules that "fixes" them pretty easily. I can post if you want, OP. It's very much still the "padded sumo" slog of all D&D combat, which may not work as well with guns, but at low levels I would say it is fairly decent. Actually if you cap leveling at 6 it might work okay. As a system it is badly designed in every possible way but if you know 3.x already, might as well. I just can't hate a system that has stats for a level 8 Senator, or gnolls armed with tec9s.

Urban Arcana had some neat fluff. Also, lots of modern drow cheesecake. Pic related is in the spirit of it

> It's a cash grab born of desperation.

It was published just a few years after D&D 3rd Edition came out and more-or-less coincided with the OGL and SRD's creation. Wizards of the Coast wasn't desperate for anything, D&D had just re-asserted itself as the preeminent role playing game.

>Many of the mechanics do not work as intended (wealth anyone?)

The intention of Wealth is to abstract the monetary system so that rather than trying to give accurate prices to real-world items that are likely to inflate in value over time, things are instead rated according to how available they tend to be according to a typical consumer.

In what way did it fail at this intent?

It's kind of old, isn't it?

The vehicle rules were better than those of GURPS or Savage Worlds.

Yea, I wouldn't mind seeing your homebru rules actually.
It seems like the tread devolved pretty quickly

>Many of the mechanics do not work as intended (wealth anyone?)

Wealth works as intended. The problem is with the intent. The developers even address the flaws with it if you read the online materials for it.

I thought that Massive Damage made combat less of a slog

Not really.

>In what way did it fail at this intent?

It takes way too long to buy anything, you can't buy things in bulk, and some things hit your Wealth score no matter how high it is.

You run into situations where Tony Stark walks into a Wal Mart, spends most of his day there, buys a laptop, and is noticeably poorer for it.

It abstracted something that really didn't need abstracting. Who cares about inflation? Fuck, it dated itself anyway by putting out a real world firearm supplement.

Here's some actual art.

Lots of drow with their thongs out scattered throughout the book

This. I don't know why people are hating on d20 Modern more than 3.5 and PF. It's pretty much exactly like those games except for few rule changes and different classes.

Here's the thing OP (guy you replied to here): It's not a good game because what it's trying to do is a bad idea. It is trying to use the D&D system, a system structured around heroic fantasy, to a modern setting, which is completely different. As a result, two of its main mechanics become basically conflicted with the setting (hit points and classes). This, mixed with 3e's awful class feature design / balance, makes the whole game a mess. The gun rules are also autistic because they try to conform to 3.5's DMG rules for automatic weapons. And D&D developers are phobic of weapons with a flat +1 to damage thus the lack of differentiation between 9mm and .45 cal.

Here's how I re-stat guns in d20 modern:

Damage is mostly the same. As usual, if you take more than your Con damage in one hit you must make a Fortitude save or go to -1 hp. However the Fortitude save in my games is 5 + damage taken rather than 15 flat.

As for the guns themselves, you may need to use Wikipedia a bit here. And have some understanding of cartridges and their relative sizes and power. Personally I always changed anything in .357 Mag and .45 ACP, and around that range, to 2d6+1 damage. If it was .380 ACP, .32 ACP, or 9x18mm Makarov, I made it 2d6-1.

For rifle rounds, 7.62x39 is 2d8+1 damage (therefore an AK-47 deals more damage).

Autofire, rather than being a gay-ass area attack (except for suppressive fire which I will get to) allows you to make a number of attacks equal to the weapon's real-world RPM divided by 200. So most automatics that can fire 500-750 rounds per minute cyclic, will give you three attacks. Something like a miniUzi or P90 will give you four or five. These attacks are each at a penalty that depends on the weapon's weight, cartridge power, and rate of fire. Really you just have to eyeball it a lot of times because formulas for this tend to fuck up, as recoil is mitigated by weight of gun to some degree...maybe...

Cont below.

It does but the numbers are off. Upping the weapon damage doesn't work because it makes 1st level play even more insanely lethal, and lowering the threshold... might work? But then you are rolling Con checks every round.

A good middle ground might be a flat Massive Damage threshold, like 3.5 had. Con is still figuring in when you make your save, and it could be based on size as suggested in Unearthed Arcana. So if you take >10 damage in one attack, time to make a Fort save or go to -1 hp. That way you can still soak loads of attacks but if one hits you for more than 10, it really hit you and you might be fucked up.

Still a dumb-ass abstractions, but hit points really don't work for guns... a Deagle is harder to dodge than a .22? Or uses up more of your luck? Yeah.... okay.

It's because d20 modern is designed to do something that shouldn't be done. It's not very well designed anyways, but it is trying to do something rather difficult to be fair.

>It's because d20 modern is designed to do something that shouldn't be done.
Really? It seams pretty blank except for the whole heroic fantasy rules. It's just D&D, but more opened up for a different setting other than generic high fantasy swords and sorcery.

>do something that shouldn't be done
i.e.
>D&D, but more opened up for a different setting

So, in short, change the .45 and .357 guns to 2d6+1, change the 7.62x39 rifles to 2d8+1, if there's a .338 make it 2d10+1 instead of 2d10, but it might already be 2d12.

If you want to be simple about autofire, say that using it gives you three attacks per round at -6 each. Each attack roll uses up 5 bullets (so 15 bullets per round), then you gotta spend a round reloading. For 3 round burst, do a margin of success thing maybe. I never really worked that out myself.

For suppressive fire, you use up the same number of rounds as a round worth of automatic fire, but a 10x10 foot area must make a Will or Fortitude save (DC = your attack roll result after range penalties) or be shaken for 1 round (-2 on attack and damage, saves, checks, etc).

Shotguns are the same, but give +1 to hit inherent because of buckshot spray. It's not too realistic (although GURPS and Savage Worlds both give shotguns a bonus to hitting) but it works, and makes shotguns slightly less useless.

>>D&D, but more opened up for a different setting
But what's wrong with that? How is that a bad thing? Instead LotR the table top game, it's Die Hard/The Expendables/Rambo the table top game.

And don't fault back on "because D&D sucks". Fine, whatever, it sucks, but people play it. Is it really because it lacks the brand name? Sometimes I think the only reason d20 Modern failed was because it wasn't called D&D Modern.

For realistic recoil: you're going to need understand guns a tiny bit. Something like an AK I would give a -7 penalty but an M4 has slightly less recoil so maybe only -6. An easily-controllable submachine gun might give only -5. Honestly it doesn't have to be too realistic, you can go off of the feel of guns from video games if you want to. The idea is: bigger more powerful guns have more recoil thus the penalty to hit firing them on full auto is greater.

If you want to be super realistic, make the first attack at no penalty, then the second at a small penalty, the third at a larger, and so on.

So you can express recoil as -6/-6/-6, or as -0/-2/-4 if you want to be more "realistic"... but honestly realism is a slippery slope and you'll soon end up with twilight 2000.

I also allow characters to spend a full-round action to aim, getting +2 to hit with a pistol, +4 to hit with an SMG or rifle, or +6 to hit with something highly-accurized like a marksman rifle.

Also whatever you do don't play Ops and Tactics, it allegedly fixes d20 modern gun mechanics but said gun mechanics are actually kind of shit. No offense to the guy who made it, as it's better than default d20 modern, but honestly I didn't enjoy O&T much when I tried it.

>which is completely different

Why, though? I've never run into this problem, never run a d20 game and thought to myself, "wow, this isn't working right and I've made a terrible mistake."

Weren't Fast Heroes overpowered due to AC shenanigans?

>it's Die Hard/The Expendables/Rambo the table top game.
It really isn't.

Explain how it isn't.

Well there's this weird thing where in fantasy, people are okay with people getting punched by a giant and just going flying before getting up and fighting despite taking an injury that turns most peoples' bones to jelly (see: any action movie). But if someone gets shot by an all-american 9mm bullet, suddenly it's serious. It's kinda bullshit but I am guilty of it myself: I'm okay with characters taking slash after bite after bludgeon in D&D, but in d20 modern my believability starts to fade after the characters have taken the fourth bullet. What the game really needed was a Vitality / Wounds mechanic, where a crit jumps automatically to wound points thus increasing the game's lethality while remaining "heroic," but they wanted something directly compatible with D&D, which itself is not compatible with reality.

Here's the thing OP: d20 modern works. It works for playing post-apocalyptic monster hunting where the characters have to fight weird beasties on their way between safe zones, or slaughtering space aliens in a Fallen Skies-style game (which I have run myself in d20 modern and it went quite well). Just understand that combat will lack a lot of tension after a point unless you make advancement really slow. There isn't much in the way of accelerated damage for guns, so a guy with power attack can outdamage a guy with an LMG. And the default gun rules don't allow multiple hits with semi and auto guns making this even worse. You can swing a greatsword with power attack and since most people have ACs in the mid-teens (since people aren't walking around in full plate armor) can take a sizeable penalty and by level 4 or so can be dealing out enough damage to put most people over the massive damage threshold, while someone with a 9mm pistol is barely able to do the same.

The game has a lot of flaws, but it is a fun game never theless. If you know 3.PF system already, go for it.

Could be... never heard of it if they were.

It literally is though. More so than any other RPG I can think of off the top of my head. The gun mechanics might be shit but the power level just screams expendables/rambo.

>I'm okay with characters taking slash after bite after bludgeon in D&D, but in d20 modern my believability starts to fade after the characters have taken the fourth bullet.

Yeah, well, it's your own damn fault for falling into the Hit Points = Meat Points fallacy again.

It runs too slow to even come close of capturing the feel of an action movie. Plus it's so bogged down by heartbreaker "muh realism" rules that it becomes difficult to emulate anything remotely cinematic.

>Whoops, sorry Bruce. John McClane took 4 points of damage during that fall. That's take four whole nights to sleep of OR two whole days of bed rest!

>It runs too slow to even come close of capturing the feel of an action movie.
Every table top game ever.

False.

>It runs too slow to even come close of capturing the feel of an action movie.

In my experience most combat lasts less than 10 rounds, which is 1 in-game minute.

>Also whatever you do don't play Ops and Tactics, it allegedly fixes d20 modern gun mechanics but said gun mechanics are actually kind of shit. No offense to the guy who made it, as it's better than default d20 modern, but honestly I didn't enjoy O&T much when I tried it.

That's alright. I don't take any offence.

What exactly did you think wasn't good?

The were OP due to a bunch of things. High def bonus, useful traits good Attack Bonus made and alright HP let you make a viable character with only a single stat class.

>Well there's this weird thing where in fantasy, people are okay with people getting punched by a giant and just going flying before getting up and fighting despite taking an injury that turns most peoples' bones to jelly (see: any action movie). But if someone gets shot by an all-american 9mm bullet, suddenly it's serious.

This is mainly due to the mythologization of firearm deadliness.

Its more real world time taken than in game time.

10 rounds of combat is real-world like 2 hours of dice-rolling and waiting for your turn and checking your phone and getting up to get a drink and a cigarette and come back and it's still not your turn, so it "feels" slow like watching an entire movie of two dudes having one fist-fight in slowmo.

>Board games can be just as adrenaline pumping as movies
Lol, wut?

>10 rounds of combat is real-world like 2 hours of dice-rolling and waiting for your turn and checking your phone and getting up to get a drink and a cigarette and come back and it's still not your turn, so it "feels" slow like watching an entire movie of two dudes having one fist-fight in slowmo.
Sounds like 4e. Better not plan on having more than one encounter per session.

Not what I said dipshit, but thank you for confirming that you're not worth arguing with.

You implied captain salty.

>'m running a pathfinder game right now but it's tailored to melee combat instead of firearms.

No.

Everyone in this thread, more or less, has said the same thing.

Below is the reasons why.

D20 Modern is a bad system because it doesn't do ANYTHING it sets out to do.

>Action combat

It's far too slow, as MANY people have said, to be a quick action system. The D20 anchor that it is forced to hold keeps it from being any faster. Period.

The leveling/class/hero system also dampens this, as you are basically stuck using a few spans of levels as the way it's set up, you're either overpowered gods or weaklings.

Friday Night Firefight is one of the few I recommend instead of D20 Modern, for movie action type games.

>Tactical Combat

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. NO.

DO NOT USE D20 MODERN FOR TATICAL COMBAT. PERIOD.

I'm going to start out listing a few games that are miles better than this

GURPS. Unisystem. TW2000/2013, and my own homebrew, Ops and Tactics.

Now, the reason tactical combat DOES NOT WORK in D20 Modern is because it gets damn near EVERYTHING wrong when it comes to guns, armor, combat, and equipment. The combat is not suited for firearms. The stock D20 Combat in general isn't suited for range combat.

(Part 1/2)

>what is Savage Worlds

No, I implied that not all games run as slow as you seem to be.

No.

Do you want details?

There's only two classes worth playing: Smart Hero and Dexterous Hero: because one gets all skills and max skill points, and the other has the primary attribute associated with the main way of dealing damage in the game: guns! All other heroes are inherently valueless: the Strength heroes will never get in melee range because of Guns, and the Constitution heroes have to be level 4 before they can reliably tank even a single bullet. Wisdom Heroes can't heal, Charisma heroes can't do anything.

Oh, and Guns are Horribly Broken. because there is almost 0 armor available, guns do a LOT of damage and have INSANE ranges of effectiveness, and hit point totals are *very* low. Imagine if everyone could do 2-20 damage fairly easily but had a 10-12 AC and 6 hp?

The system it runs off of is 3.0 D&D, so being able to use two guns effectively requires, if i remember rightly, five feats.

Oh yes: the wealth system.
Suppose you want to buy a horse in D&D
Do you have X gold? Spend it, and buy a horse.

Now, say you want to buy a car in d20 modern:
What's your wealth level? 2?
Okay, roll a d20, add it as a modifier, now, did you overcome the difficulty of 18? No? Then you can't buy a car. No. You can't save up for a car either. The only way to increase your wealth level is through taking a feat.
Oh, you took the feat, and made the roll? Great. reduce your wealth level by this amount. you now have that piece of equipment. Did that just completely negate your feat? too bad. there's no other way unless I, your merciful GM, declare you to go up a wealth level.

Came here to say this. Run something like Savage Worlds or Basic Role-Playing.

I'll start off with my personal favorite: Armor.

In damn near EVERY tactical game, armor AT LEAST provides some kind of damage resistance/buffer against getting shot. It may help you not get shot, but by and large it slows down bullets and makes them hurt less or not at all.

D20 Modern did not do this. D20 Modern took D&D's "To hit system" and co-opted it DIRECTLY from D&D 3.0. The second BEST armor in the fucking game is fucking PLATEMAIL. Now it is heavy, and does require the full feat tree to use, but it's still better than wearing a fucking light bulletproof vest.

Next is Firearms, and weapons in general.

Firstly, I'm going to state the fact that D20 Modern basically treats ALL firearms pretty much the same with a few facelifts, magazine sizes. Calibery by-and-large does not matter. All firearms have a damage rating of 2d(Something). No deviation whatsoever.

There are TWO kinds of upgrades for guns. Flashlights and suppressors. That's it. Nothing else.

Now, with all this, and guns not doing much damage, you get to the problem with Health. Health in D20 Modern grows WAY out of control in relation to damage. If I'm not mistaken, a "Tough" hero can take a shotgun blast to the face at level 2. This is level 2 of 20, and with armor basically helping you "Dodge' bullets, this blends back into the first problem. Not only do guns not do anything, but it's a matter of IF they hit at all, not how much damage they do.

(part 2/3)

What? How? You get a move action, an attack action, and maybe a free action each turn. There is no reason why 10 rounds of combat should take two hours, or one hour. Maybe 10 minutes on the outside.

Say that to Feng Shui.

>two people simultaneously deriding D20 Modern at the same system
Glorious.


Combat is my all time fucking favorite thing to ride on.

Games are judged on their combat based on how effectively they convey a scene into dice, numbers, and narrative, and how many tools generally they give both the players and the GM.

D20 Modern? Does not do any of this.

It's literally a carbon copy of D&D 3.0. No deviation except when necessary, and even then it's confusing.

(As an example, when you throw a grenade, it goes off IMMEDIATELY, and you must pick a CORNER OF THE SQUARE YOU THREW IT IN in order to determine what 4 squares(wtf?) it hits. Grenades are fireballs.)

EVERYTHING GOOD is locked behind feats. You want to McClane that MP5 even though you know you've never used a full auto weapon in your life ever? TO GODDAMN BAD, Instead of the autofire attack, you do a standard attack and waste the NINE OTHER ROUNDS BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE GODDAMN FEAT. No penalty, no negatives, you straight up ARE UNABLE TO EXECUTE IT!

Speaking on that, the combat is HILAROUSLY bland. You have very few choices besides "Single shot attack" or if you have the feat, you can double tap, burst fire, or autofire. Melee combat is just as bad: I swing a sword/Bat/Staff. And again, it follows the same rules as 3.0, where it's a free/move/attack action.

I personally don't like this system, but it works fine for what D&D is, a duengoncrawler. it does not work for high flying action where you fired one goddamn bullet in six fucking seconds.(I have personally emptied my glock 19 into a 5' by 4' piece of paper at 30 feet in 3 seconds, and got all shots on paper, most were in the 10-7 rings)

The combat is bad, built on a bad system, with bad feat structure to back it up.

I'm also going to note a minor issue here: Skills. Bloated as all hell, AND has 3 skills that ABSOLOUTELY DO NOT BELONG IN AN RPG OF THIS KIND WHATSOEVER

(Part 3/4)

Because those are different things, and so D&D is not designed for it. Fuckers like you would try to run Jane Austen in D&D

In a fairly light game with streamlined rules, and 4 players, I figure each player's turn takes a couple of minutes on average*, along with maybe a minute for each enemy. If you figure a number of enemies roughly equal to the PCs, that's 3 minutes per player, or 12 minutes per round. Now if everybody was quick, decisive, and knew their way around the rules, and you didn't go into much detail, you could probably cut that down by half (though you run the risk of making things bland in the process). But this assumes there are no distractions or breaks, and everybody stays focused solely on the game (and not cracking jokes and shit) the entire time, which is an unrealistic expectation for something that goes on for 10 rounds. So let's split the difference and say 9 minutes per round. That's an hour and a half for 10 rounds of combat in a game where people have their shit together.

*Including a little bit of thinking, maybe some questions about the scene or rules, possibly a quick lookup of a rule, the detailing of the action, the rolling and resolution, and some description on the part of the GM.

Just play Ops & Tactics, you'll be grateful for it.

>Yeah, well, it's your own damn fault for falling into the Hit Points = Meat Points fallacy again.

Okay. Explain why a Deagle (2d8 damage) is harder to dodge than a Glock (2d6 damage)? Negligible difference in bullet size doesn't count.

>things that can put holes in you and kill you
>broken

Jesus Christ, if anything guns are not powerful enough.

>tripfag who wrote Ops & Tactics is ITT
>coincidentally another """"user"""" is shilling the same game

>Savage Worlds

Savage Worlds is a shitty system that tries too hard to reinvent the wheel. The exploding die and raise mechanics make any form of encounter balance/planning impossible. A rank 1 novice can one-shot a dragon with lucky die rolls using his fist. The system boasts that bennies are used for "cool things" like players changing narrative or pulling off impossible stunts, but players just hoard them for use as extra hit points. The chase system (any iteration of it) is an absolute shit storm of retardation. The 3-wound limit is just plain bad game design. The community is full of sad 40-something-year-old zealots who foam at the mouth at any notion of house ruling the assy mechanics. Shotguns are utterly broken and despite having the same average damage as a rifle, end up dealing twice as much because of exploding dice. The entire game works on a fucktarded tabletop scale so you either have to use miniatures for EVERY combat or have fun doing extra math every time you want to figure out range penalties.

It's like the worst parts of FATE and GURPS put together, with none of the upsides. Don't play it. Leave it in the trash where it belongs.

Minirant: Skills

Research, Investigate, and Profession.

None of these should exist in this game. Why?
I'll tell you!

>Research
Researching a topic takes time, skill, and some luck. The GM determines how obscure a particular topic is (the more obscure, the higher the DC) and what kind of information might be available depending on where the character is conducting his or her research. Information ranges from general to protected. Given enough time (usually 1d4 hours) and a successful skill check, the character gets a general idea about a given topic.

You roll for plot points. In a game with the internet. Story points? Actually figguring thigns out in game? what's that all that? Nah we can roll for that!

>Investigate
I'm going to post this excerpt from Investigate

"...If the character has access to a crime lab.."

Which means if you took this skill thinking you were going to be using this anywhere OUTSIDE of a GODDAMN laboratory, you can kiss that shit goodbye.

It's literally ONLY for fucking lab use. It's a newbie trap if anyone ever existed

>Profession

Profession concerns money. It's literally your money skill. That's it. Nothing else.

(Part 4/5)


FUCKING THIS.


I don't care if you hate Ops and Tactics with a seething anger.

Play literally anything else. Do NOT play D20 Modern. GURPS is a VERY good game and does a DAMN good job at tactical combat.

Literally anything is better than d20 Modern. You could fucking de-cyberpunk Cyberpunk 2020 and get a better, more stable game with less effort than it would take to unfuck d20 Modern.

>There is no reason why 10 rounds of combat should take two hours, or one hour. Maybe 10 minutes on the outside.
If you figure there are 10 people involved in combat (PCs and NPCs including enemies), then that's 100 different turns you have to resolve in a 10 round combat. If your combat is over in 10 minutes, that's only 6 seconds for each person to take their turn, without so much as a heartbeat between turns. Now, obviously some people will die during the combat, but if we say that half the people are alive at the end up it (hopefully all the PCs), then that gives us an average of something like 75 turns to execute in 10 minutes. Awesome. Now we're up to 8 seconds per turn. Half the players won't even have begun saying what they do by the time 8 seconds is up.

Equipment is probably the shortest part of this.

There isn't enough. Not for a modern game.

The gun book(Weapons locker) Follows this formula: An interesting point of information about a gun, some very identical stats to the last gun, line art of the gun in question, and any "other" models that may exist in the same family.

Also it's VERY apparent that the people who wrote Ops and Tactics had very little, to NO knowledge on firearms, armor and just equipment in general when it came to a tactical nature. Of which I can understand since this book(Allegedly) was shit out in 9 months by 3-4 writers who REALLY didn't want to write it in the first place, in 2001 of all times.

In short. There are a TON of tactical games that exist that could better well fit the tactical gun combat that are NOT D20 Modern.

I've listed a few, but a few more have popped up that I've forgotten about.

Savage Worlds works better than this shit
Spycraft Works better. The 2nd edition is far better.
GURPS.
BRP.
ORE.
HERO.
Ops and Tactics. (Disclamer: I wrote this. Take this recommendation with a grain of salt.)

All of this is directed at the core rulebook. I haven't read any other books as to the same level of the core rulebook, but I do know for a fact that D20 Future is at least as bad as the core rulebook.

(Part 5/6)

Enemies tend to act on the same turn. Or with the way I DM, minion-type enemies all act on one turn, and important NPCs like bosses act on their own turn.

I know at this point suggesting GURPS for everything is a meme, but tacticool rootytooty-point-and-shooty gun combat is legitimately the one thing GURPS can boast to actually being one of the best at.

modern d20 is probably the most under rated system ever. its literally almost perfect.

Here's your (you)

fuck you fag boi, only pathturder players dislike it.

Regardless, if you manage to get a round done in 5 minutes you are absolutely flying. That would take you to 50 minutes for a 10 round combat, and that's assuming there are no distractions or pauses in that time.

Pretty sure OP is one of those scumbags who refuses to play anything other than d20.

All the suggestions of better games in this thread are wasting their time on him.

Easy there young fella I've only got so many (you)s

>How the fuck do you know all this shit?

In 2009, I took on the monumentus task of trying to "Fix" D20 modern. That fix started out as a simple gun caliber damage sheet for the guns. This worked for about a month, until I realized that I was not going to get away with such a small "fix", and that the system had to be rewritten.

I literally poured over every single rule in D20 Modern, playtested TONS of rules, and blew through a fuckton of things that I learned about first hand. Things that are commonplace and said here, like "System mastery", and "Newbie trap", I had no idea until I started reading it like it was a text book, and comparing it to other systems.

I used what I learned as I went along and put it into Ops and Tactics, my homebrew, which orignally started out life as "D20 Modern but minor fixes to armor and guns"

8 years, 8 versions, and a lot of playtest and rewrites later? Everything that made D20 Modern what is is was stripped from Ops and Tactics. It had to be, because at it's core it's quite possibly the worst system to build a Modern Combat system on. The things that are left are either in name only, or the few good parts about it.(I will give credit where it's due, the occupation system is a good idea.)

So no, do not use D20 Modern. Do not think about using D20 Modern. There is no reason to use D20 Modern. In this day and age, there are TONS of BETTER games that SUCCEED where D20 Modern failed.

It is a monument of failure. A corpse standing to remind gamers, homebrewers and professionals in the industry alike, what NOT to do when you write an RPG.

6/6

I don't care. I refuse to stand by and let someone play this -10/10 shit game.

yeah d20 modern is pretty awesome. your a troll. so is anyone who doesnt like it. this is why i hate tabletop getting popular again newfags who only play pathshitter and dnd 4/5 think its the only sytem besides the other shit kickstarter flavor of the month....

>Now, with all this, and guns not doing much damage, you get to the problem with Health. Health in D20 Modern grows WAY out of control in relation to damage. If I'm not mistaken, a "Tough" hero can take a shotgun blast to the face at level 2.

A Mossberg deals 2d8 x2 damage and a Tough hero will have 1d10+Con Hp per level.

With a Con of 15 max starting hp and then average every level after, a level 2 Tough will have 19 hp and a +4 Fort save. If the tough takes 15 or more damage from a single attack they have a 50% chance to drop to -1.

A shotgun will do between 2 and 16 damage (9 average) on a hit and 4 to 32 (18 average) on a crit.

A level 2 Tough Hero can take around 3 hits from a shotgun. A Crit has a pretty good change of taking one out so its hardly a level 2 tough hero can take a shotgun to the face.

That's fine because there's better d20 systems to use than d20 modern

>A level 2 Tough Hero can take around 3 hits from a shotgun. A Crit has a pretty good change of taking one out so its hardly a level 2 tough hero can take a shotgun to the face.

Called shots do not exist in the rules. Getting shot in the face is the same as getting shot in the torso. There are no rules to criticals to the face.

Discounting edge cases(5% critical chance, 4.69% chance to roll a 15-16 on 2d8) you can indeed take a shotgun blast to the face as a level 2 tough.

>these faggot newbs who hate d20 modern because it isnt pathfinder

fucking die. back to redbit with you niggers.

>>these faggot newbs who hate d20 modern because it isnt pathfinder

I don't hate d20 modern because it isn't pathfinder, I hate it because it's a bad fucking game.

I'd argue that a 15 to 16 would be getting hit in the face and not every hit is getting hit in the face. This is were simulationists can be very thick headed.

sure


i bet you dont even own it. mainbook, dm screen and modern firearms book with time stamp or you can fuck off back to your home site kiddo.

>inb4 pdf
>inb4 but but i played it, i swear!

Did you just seriously reply to a very, very obvious troll?

Wow man, that's all kinds of dumb.

even more proof no one hear even played modern d20(or even any game before dnd next)

>i bet you dont even own it. mainbook, dm screen and modern firearms book with time stamp or you can fuck off back to your home site kiddo.
>PDFs

You damn right.

Yep. But I didn't get anywhere by not yelling angrily at people for no profit whatsoever.

>And the default gun rules don't allow multiple hits with semi and auto guns making this even worse. You can swing a greatsword with power attack and since most people have ACs in the mid-teens (since people aren't walking around in full plate armor) can take a sizeable penalty and by level 4 or so can be dealing out enough damage to put most people over the massive damage threshold, while someone with a 9mm pistol is barely able to do the same.
Double Tap and Burst Fire were feats for that.

>feats
This is not a positive point. D20 Modern's feat taxes were atrocious.

d20M sucks because it has all of the flaws of 3.PF (which also sucks) *BUT* it lacks the veneer of fantasy that makes those flaws more palatable. Here are a few key points:

>Everything is tied to combat level (this is the big one)
All of your traits are tied to your level, which mostly defines your combat ability (HP and BAB mostly) but also caps your skill points. This sort of makes sense in a fantasy game, as you've got awesome heroes and monsters, and then you've got uneducated peasant farmers. In a modern setting, though, this falls apart almost immediately. When everything is tied to combat ability, you get weird things like experienced investment bankers being able to take down a small army of street thugs in hand-to-hand combat without breaking a sweat because -- in order to get their skill cap high enough -- they're all mid- to high-level characters with redonk levels of HP and BAB.

>A ton of stuff hidden behind feat chains that shouldn't be hidden behind feat chains.
A lot of actions are heavily penalized or simply cannot be attempted in d20 without the requisite feat. This makes sense because special maneuvers take special training, and in d20, that training takes the form of feats; further, most of use aren't professional MMA fighters or battle-hardened swordsmen, so we lack context for what is and is not manageable by everyday users. This lack of context is most certainly *not* the case for many of the aspects of modern life, including firearms thanks to Hollywood if nothing else, so the feat system falls apart; standard actions considered a part of core competency are locked behind feats which A) make no sense, and B) exacerbates the earlier issue of people needing to be really high level to do regular things and thus being weirdly killy and 'ard.

>1/2

This.

Not enough feats for the characters per level, and most of them are terrible.

>Classes and class abilities are restrictive
Classes can fly in fantasy games; they're (broadly speaking) what your character is good at, so it makes sense to divide characters up along those fairly hard lines. In modern settings, though, it's easier to see how oddly restrictive they can be. Want to be able to read people really well? No, that's not something you can do or just pick up as a feat, only one class can do that, and they only stop sucking at it after a few levels; to be able to do that one thing you want, you have to tie yourself to this class with a whole host of other abilities you may not want for your character.

To restate, the issues with d20M are not *solely* issues with d20M -- they are issues that plague d20SRD across the board (and the first issue across all editions of D&D) -- but removing the fantasy lens makes the issues a lot more noticeable.

>2/2 fin.

>my face when in the time it took me to write this up, a dozen other anons have already said the same thing, but better.
>my face when I have no face.

see, look at this nu gaymer


i actually fucking OWN d20 modern and a shit load of supplements, because im a real player. not some kid who read some pdfs and probably nver played in a real game at a game store.poser.

But they sucked and made no sense. To be fair, Savage Worlds' burst fire rules are even worse.

>Not enough feats for the characters per level, and most of them are terrible.


>hurr durr i need 50 feats per level to be a special snowflake

disgusting. im out of this thread. i hate you all. fake gamer posers from le meme-it

Nah.

>played in a real game at a game store.poser.
Who the hell does this?
Why play at a game store when I can just play at my house with my friends?