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Everyone hates d20 so much

I think its WotC they don't like very much.

Hawke wrote:Everyone hates d20 so much

Not a true statement.

dorpond wrote:Not a true statement.

But that one is.

For me I don't hate d20 or WotC really. I just prefer games that are far less restrictive when it comes to creating a character that I want to play and that allows for realistic skills and abilities. D20 has far too many shortcomings to really make me want to play it. That said, I have played in many d20 games, and in fact I GM it at home for my kids. The reason I use d20 for them is that there are a several XBox games that use a similar system or d20 itself and the kids are familiar with the character development and terms. Once they get a little older I'll start introducing them to other systems - the systems I prefer. So I look at d20 as basically an introduction into roleplaying, but for hard core gaming there are so many other better systems out there, IMO, YMMV, etc.

As for WotC, they have done a great job developing and expanding roleplaying and keeping D&D alive, but there are many other things that I don't like the primary one being that they really don't seem to care that much about gamers. They care much more about revenue and because of that kill off games with no concern for the gamer. I'm referring to both board games and roleplaying games BTW. Don't get me wrong I think every business should care about revenue, that is why they are in business, but they should also care about their customer and that's where I think the problem lies.

Hawke wrote:Everyone hates d20 so much

I think d20 is a very clever and adaptable system. But it also has huge constraints and is really dumbed down in certain areas (and significantly over-built in others.) For revenue reasons, it is also a sprawling behemoth with some pretty poor quality controls.

But my biggest beef with it is that it "killed" AD&D, instead of upgrading it. It kept the basic content structure but totally flushed a tried-and-true system into the toilet, purely for profit. It's almost like it just carried the name to keep the fan base, but essentially produced an entirely new game. I found it to be disingenuous. Like when a sequel to a movie comes out and it only plays lip-service to that which spawned it (i.e. "Highlander" to "Highlander 2.")

For example, Greyhawk, after being really poorly treated in the 2.0 era did essentially become the "default" 3.0/d20 world... but they didn't truly embrace it. They just stole some of the basic framework, hollowed it out to to be generic, and cut 'n pasted it into the books. The real campaign worlds they wanted to promote were heavily developed outside the core books because they would build new fan bases and generate new income. Greyhawk was just a shell, the name of which they didn't even like to mention for fear that they would go too far in supporting the old regime.

I don't blame d20 completely though. The "evolution" to 2.0 was very poorly executed. d20 is a masterpiece in comparison. 2.0 was a dark period at TSR in my opinion... and the primary reasons it failed. I'm sure that 3.0/d20 was as much a response to that as anything.

Ultimately, I think d20/WotC simply suffers from being the market leader the same way that Microsoft does. Their power and influence within their particular sphere is so vast that their actions ripple against everything else. It's a measure of control that seems to suffocate much of what happens around it.

If anybody is demoing any other systems (ala Savage Worlds & Snikle) please let me know. I'm always willing to learn...

Jeez, I've successfully caused the hijack of another thread.... apologies.

Hawke wrote:If anybody is demoing any other systems (ala Savage Worlds & Snikle) please let me know. I'm always willing to learn...

I think I just might try a demo of the Hero system, but I think I'll wait until they get more of the functionality into the various RPTools just to make it smoother. That said, if you want to see it in action there is an entire site dedicated to it with games running pretty much 24/7, but they are PbP games. You can find it at http://www.herocentral.net I'm currently working on a new campaign called Gunslingers & Greenhorns. Can you guess the genre?

Hawke wrote:Jeez, I've successfully caused the hijack of another thread.... apologies.

Yup. You sure did.

Hawke wrote:Jeez, I've successfully caused the hijack of another thread.... apologies.

That's ok... I think the topic itself got some decent input before things went spinning off into oblivion...

If people actually tried to stay on topic too much we wouldn't have all these brilliant discussions going on.