This is no longer a placeholder for the system notes page, but where I bitch about the system.
You were warned.
d20 Modern was designed to simulate modern life in a quick, and fairly easy way. Using all the standard 3rd edition D&D rules we are familiar with, with one exception... the Wealth system.
New classes, limited magic, odd feats. All of that within a standard that was easy to accept. But Wealth. Oh.. Wealth.
After the test sessions, and making numerous NPC's for the upcoming campaign, the wonderful ease at which you can potentially abuse Wealth became quickly apparent. Response to complaints to WotC's d20 Modern crew about that leads lengthy, and repetitive defenses that center around "good players won't abuse the obvious flaws!"
Well, everyone I play with is a pretty good player. In the last five years we've all gotten very familiar with 2nd edition and now 3rd. We're really good with crunching our numbers and getting out the most we can.. so easy to exploit flaws are easily exploited.
There's two players from another group on the WotC forums who started their Department 7 game as soon as Modern came out. About two months ago they were level 12 and in addition to enough magical gear to make the average Faerunian adventurer wet their pants, they each had a Wealth bonus of over 50. Anyone want to buy a flock of Black Hawks? They're pretty much free.
Which is why after much (about 3 minutes of staring at the ceiling) debate, the lengthy task of rewriting all the equipment and purchasing lists into Excel, using dollars. The convenient part of the Wealth system, was actually not that it "simulated" modern finance and costs of living, as much as it "ignored" it... and so that made it easy. I don't have to bug them to have characters pay rent or buy gas, pay phone bills, or other crap like that.
And so basically, that was that. The conversion to money is "done" though the lists of equipment expands frequently as new pieces are added and the occasional pointless item is removed.
So beyond the lack of Wealth, the game is basically the standard d20 Modern, Urban Arcana setting... the list of other changes was pretty short. We also continue to use a lot of our D&D rules in Modern. Like attacks of opportunity.. via the rules, a person can only provoke a single attack of opportunity from one opponent per round. So after casting a spell and getting hit, a mage could close his eyes and dance around an ogre without danger. Certain WotC staff do not find this as stupid as I do.
| Shotguns threat range was expanded. | As a simple 20/x2 weapon, there was no reason at all to carry one. They had 1/3 of the rounds of an assault rifle with the same damage. |
| Armor spell failure | Fixed spell failure of 10%/20%/30% on all modern armor was... silly. They now have failure percentages based on their interference with spellcasting gestures, based on D&D armors |
| Vehicle acceleration | All vehicles do not go from 0 to 28mph in 6 seconds, nor 0 to infinite speed in 12 seconds. Lots of math based on 0-60 and 1/4 mile times resulted in an acceleration statistic. Yay for pointless additions! |
| Magic items | Very quickly I'm going to
need to come up with rules on the creation of magical items. Urban
Arcana's Artificer class is crap, and one of the writers freely admitted
that most of the class' abilities were cut, because of space
restrictions in the book. The creation system will be based around the Incantations system, with D&D standard XP costs in order to have the item become a permanent effect. |
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This is where the Back
button would be if I wasn't lazy.
The code would have been easier than writing this, but who cares.
Use your alt-arrow keys dammit.
