d20 Modern and d20 Future are composed of suck

[Lord Zentei]

If you want it to. I treat combat rounds as an abstract. In T20, personal scale combat has a round of about 20 seconds, vehicle combat has a round of about a minute, and starship combat has a round of about 20 minutes.

But I don't treat these as hard and fast rules. Something like D&D might have to, because quite a few spells have a duration of several combat rounds, but you can easily fix that with a bit of work by making the duration a quantity of seconds/minutes, then have the combat rounds be whatever you want them to be.

Quite so. However, that doesn't really change the general suckiness of the damage rules. Moreover, the duration of a round is important not just to spell effects but to movement, ammunition used per round and so on and so forth.

Anyway, one's ability to change the rules for the better doesn't really mean that they aren't sucky to begin with.

[Solauren]

Prey tell then, Lord Z, how you would make a 'modern' and 'future' combat and damage system for the D20 System Rules?

Without appearing to be stealing ideas from another gaming system and setting one self up for a lawsuit.

[The Dark]

Prey tell then, Lord Z, how you would make a 'modern' and 'future' combat and damage system for the D20 System Rules?

Without appearing to be stealing ideas from another gaming system and setting one self up for a lawsuit.

Why should he have to? He never claimed D20 could be a universal system but wasn't; he claimed it wasn't good for Modern and Future games. Some systems really don't handle particular settings well - Pendragon would suck in modern, because it's designed around a medieval setting. Silhouette doesn't handle High Fantasy well, because it leans more towards scientific settings. Space: 1889 couldn't do horror, because it lacks a mechanics basis for fear or sanity issues. The entire question is a non sequitur from what Zentei said - it does not logically follow that because he believes the system sucks, that he must therefore have a superior system based on the same mechanics.

[Edward Yee]

Apologies re: the misspelling (to pounds) and misinterpretation of word.

Speaking of d20 questionability out of "one against an army" fantasy... I once saw a thing called Afghanistan d20...*

P.S. Might d20 Modern even be the best existing system for modern/future that is d20, or would that go to another I haven't heard of?

[Stofsk]

Quite so. However, that doesn't really change the general suckiness of the damage rules. Moreover, the duration of a round is important not just to spell effects but to movement, ammunition used per round and so on and so forth.

I know that.

Anyway, one's ability to change the rules for the better doesn't really mean that they aren't sucky to begin with.

My reply to you didn't even approach this point at all.

[Jade Falcon]

Speaking of d20 questionability out of "one against an army" fantasy... I once saw a thing called Afghanistan d20...*

That's not all that was done by Holistic design.

There was also a D20 Somalia, D20 Colombia and D20 FBI.

http://www.holistic-design.com/introRLR.htm

[Lord Zentei]

Anyway, one's ability to change the rules for the better doesn't really mean that they aren't sucky to begin with.

My reply to you didn't even approach this point at all.

Ah, it looked like you were hinting in that direction, my bad.

Prey tell then, Lord Z, how you would make a 'modern' and 'future' combat and damage system for the D20 System Rules?

Without appearing to be stealing ideas from another gaming system and setting one self up for a lawsuit.

What The Dark said.

But if it came to that, for starters -- how about the amount of damage dealt by different kinds of weapons and the amount of damage ignored by different kinds of armour correlating at least approximately with what one would expect from the real world?

As for instance: the hit points list for objects lists steel as having 30 hit points per inch of thickness. By that standard, an RPG-7 could reasonably be expected to deal 354 damage per hit, or about 101d6 damage (since it has 300 mm of armour penetration against homogenous steel). Yet, even a M72A3 LAW deals a puny 10d6 damage, an order of magnitude less. Incidentally, manufactured objects tend to have very low hit points relative to the materials list: a Colossal object, for instance has only 30 hit points; i.e. one inch of steel. See also the issue of the tank as previously mentioned.

Then there is the whole bizarre Break DC and hit points dichotomy, though that applies to D&D too, of course.

And how about the possibility of people actually dying when suffering a gunshot wound? Even ordinary people won't drop 83% of the time when shot by a Glock 20, never mind heroes. Note that "ordinaries" typically have several NPC levels (or failing that, they are abysmally unskilled).

On the note of heroes going down from massive gunshot wounds, the Wounds and Vitality points sytem is reasonable, crude though it is (although even here, single shots aren't going to do shit). I'd use a Cyberpunk type system, possibly combined with GW style Fate Points myself. Or an Inquisitor system with more damage dealt per hit combined with Fate Points.

[Lord Zentei]

I believe one of the game dsigners talked about small arms killing a tank in terms of not necessarily destroying it outright, just making it unusable.

Edit: This is it.

Missed this before.

He speaks about the M250. I can go with that.

The apologism does not ring true, however, since small arms are capable of getting the same job done. And the asinine justification for not having critical hits for vehicles is just painful to read.