4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

There are a number of D20 systems out there, and it is getting a bit confusing.  Some systems, like Deadlands D20 and 3rd Edition D&D, are apparently eminently compatible so that you can throw an element from one into another game.  Others, like Mutants and Masterminds, are quite a bit different.

I thought it might be helpful to have a thread sorting out the D20 worlds landscape, discussing the advantages and disadvantages, and whether features from one system can be easily transplanted into another (e.g., using Deadlands classes in a Star Wars game, or using Cthulhu monsters in a D&D game.)

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following D20 systems:

Dungeons & Dragons 3.x almost definitely has the most stuff published for it.  It is a bit complicated because there’s a 3.0, a 3.5, and I guess a 3.75 now.  But at least for 3.0/3.5, I’ve been converting on the fly—very little has changed.  I’ve not yet studied Pathfinder, but I would not expect it to be a radical departure from 3.5.

Star Wars D20 A major difference in the STar Wars game is probably the system of Wounds and Vitality.  I don’t have enough experience to say what else is different, besides obviously the classes and technology.  The ideas are still the same.

D20 Modern An annoying system designed for the modern era, but with D20 Future and D20 Past supplements.  What I don’t like about D20 Modern is that the base classes are IMHO lame ("Strong Hero”?  Give me a break!) and that advanced classes are necessary.  But it is a popular system, and once I figured it out, I suppose advanced classes are easier to generate than D&D prestige classes, and so it may be a bit easier to generate a new D20 Modern setting than it is to generate a new D&D setting with modern technology.

Deadlands D20 and Masque of the Red Death are adaptations of D20 rules to 19th Century technology.  They are both very similar to Dungeons and Dragons, essentially creating new classes for the modern era.  The company that publishes Deadlands also publishes Wierd War II adapting D20 to World War II, and Hell On Earth, adapting D20 to a post-apocalyptic world.

BESM D20 This is designed to allow Dungeons and Dragons or D20 classes and monsters to be incorporated with a minimum of effort, although the combat system is radically different to emphasis the kind of one-on-one combat found in anime cartoons.  This makes many D&D feats inapplicable.  It looks like a good system, and I have ideas for a science fiction campaign based on this ruleset.  I’ve also incorporated a stripped-down version of their character points system for my Dungeons and Dragons game.

Mutants and Masterminds A very radical change for this game is that there are no classes, and levels are really optional.  I haven’t tried it yet, but after finding out that the Hero System rulebook costs fifty bucks, I’ve been considering using it for a supers game.

Cthulhu D20 This system basically tells the players to roll their own class by choosing whether to concentrate on attack or skills, and decide which skills are class skills.  Characters made in Cthulhu D20 will be considerably weaker than characters made in other systems.  The monsters can easily be dropped into Dungeons and Dragons games, and I’ve found that the rules for guns also work very well in a D&D game.

True D20 I don’t know much about this game system.  I think it is the system used with Mongoose Publishing’s OGL Ancients and other such offerings.

I’ll post some more about d20 Advanced a little bit later.

True20 is published by Green Ronin, and it ports over a lot of the innovations from Mutants & Masterminds into a class and level-based system that’s appropriate for a lot of different types of games. Mongoose doesn’t have anything to do with it.

A few you missed…

After the initial d20 release, Star Wars Saga Edition played around with a lot of the concepts that would appear in 4e, like saves as defenses. It also used an interesting condition track to resolve a lot of different status effects in the game.

Arcana Unearthed & Arcana Evolved are Monte Cook’s variant PHBs, complete with alternate races, alternate classes, a modified Vancean spellcasting system (where everyone essentially picks spells from the same list, but from what amount to different “domains"). The more specialized you are in one type of magic, the more powerful spells associated with that type of magic you can pick. Monte also released Ptolus, but that’s more a campaign setting than any unique material.

Mike Mearls released Iron Heroes, which used an interesting token-based system to resolve special abilities in combat. As you took certain actions in combat (or had certain things happen to you), you would build up tokens which you could then spend on special abilities later (such as the Archer gaining tokens by taking actions to aim). He wrote it as a very low-magic alternative to D&D, but one that kept the same basic power level, even without spellcasters or magic items.

Bad Axe Games released Grim Tales, which cranked up the versatility of d20 Modern and created a plethora of features for gritty-type games. A lot of 3pp have used Grim Tales as the basis for other products.

I believe Mongoose released Conan d20. I don’t know a whole lot about it, to be honest.

Troll Lord Games released Castles & Crusades, which drips nostalgia. The SIEGE Engine it uses to resolve skills is actually very interesting for rules-lite games, but a lot of the design decisions in the game were made for nostalgic purposes (such as ending the unified XP chart, bringing back the illusionist as a class when the wizard was already there, giving the monk a 12-sided hit-die). A game that started with interesting ideas which, unfortunately, suffers from its desire to play to nostalgia.

I believe it is Adamant Publishing that just recently released Modern20 in the interest of fixing a lot of common complaints with d20 Modern and making it more skill-based, but I can’t remember off-hand.

Obviously Paizo is releasing Pathfinder, which is 3.5 D&D with some tweaks (some major, some minor). It’s going into beta soon, and Paizo has been incredibly open with the game’s development.

AEG’s Spycraft is a much-beloved modern d20 game, which skirts the borders between classless and point-buy, did some interesting things with combat (since modern combat relies on gunplay and makes attacks of opportunity difficult), and had an excellent NPC-creation engine. Spycraft 2.0 was even better.

I can’t remember the company behind them, but some enterprising publisher released Northern Crown for D&D-ish games set in early colonial America. A similar game was released for African adventures, but I don’t remember the name.

Another one from Monte Cook: you might remember the hubbub over Monte doing d20 World of Darkness. The magic system is very fluid, resembling EN Publishing’s Elements of Magic in a way, where you select elements of a spell literally as you cast. This one got very mixed reviews for obvious reasons: the quality of the d20 System as seen by White Wolf fans is mixed.

Adamant Entertainment is also on the cusp of releasing a new d20 house-system for Thrilling Tales 2e called the “Odyssey System”. It was supposed to be released last month, but it hasn’t been released quite yet. They’re describing it as “stripped-down, hot rod d20”, and it’s supposed to be classless but level-based.