I'm totally not ready for tonight's game. A plethora of time wasters popped up last night to keep me from my necessary preparation, not the least of which was the lengthy post on D&D below. In a nut shell, the cleric needs to be leveled up, and it hasn't happened yet. I'll try to do it quickly during the pre-game meal.
Anyway, I've been thinking more about creating a campaign, or some kind of campaign setting using the D20 Modern rules. I couldn't sleep very well last night, so I broke out the D20 Modern Core book and leafed through it some more. The thing is, in all honesty, it's not very good. There's just something about the system that is lacking. Two things about it bug me: 1)it's kind of incoherent, lots of rules are tossed out for different kinds of modern and future campaigns, but they're so scattershot it would take an immense amount of work to build a single coherent campaign setting from them, and 2) it borrows way too much from D&D. Creatures, classes, spells, you name it.
I think WOC would have been better off building several different games, instead of trying to fit everything in under the D20 Modern rubric: a gamma-world game, a sci-fi game, a gothic horror game etc. Also, some of the rules are just well, stupid. In particular the "Wealth check". Instead of treating money like you would gold in D&D, the D20 Modern rules want you to roll a check to see if you can, at any given time, afford anything from a candy bar to a Lear jet.
I'm thinking of getting rid of the D20 Modern book and going with a different system entirely (maybe just going with the Oriental Adventures/LO5R game setting). Of course there is also the option of building the whole thing from scratch using the Open Source D20 mechanics and making up the settings and rules I need for a totally unique game and world (and who knows, that could be good enough to sell).
2 comments:
I went back and looked at the site you got your pictures of the books from in your earlier post. Even more nostalgic for me that what you showed was the adventure module The Keep on the Borderlands. It was where my first adventures with D&D took place. That cover is so familiar, far moreso than the others. And I can still remember the map of the keep, which we used as a base for our explorations into the Caves of Chaos. Most fun.
Tripped across your blog surfing. Well written! The "open letter" from Leelu was very sweet. Best of luck to you both!
Hey, I'm in Topeka! Small world.
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