D20.

Is this another hatchet job? Yes. Why? Because I can. Because it’s true. Because I’m playing in two play-by-post AD&D 3.5 games right now on what I call “The Mormon Forums”, actually International Discussions RPG/Member Wars section, and my half-orc rogue just lost all 6 HP in two turns and went down, in one game.  Because I participated in a realtime virtual tabletop session a few weeks ago, and spent an hour and a half AFTER COMBAT trying to figure out how to get our dwarf cleric out of the dead giant’s mouth and THEN how to extract the giant’s teeth from him, causing him damage every time we did – BEFORE we even got to the “looting”.

“But, JP,” you may say, “that sounds like shitty GM’ing!”, and you’d be right and then I’d tell one of your parents or legal guardians that you’re using naughty words. But I’ve had worse GM’s (though not by much), but he couldn’t DO half that shitty GM’ing if he didn’t have an abortion of a gaming monstrosity that encouraged that kind of ridiculous fiddly pixelbitching. Can you blame a game system for the user misusing it? Yes, if it is made badly enough. Some would say you can’t blame someone for misusing a tool. You couldn’t blame a hammer’s manufacturer for someone using it to kill someone else – that’s true, but you could blame the maker of a frisbee with deadly razor blades that squirt acid and shoot laser beams for killing a crowd of ten people.  God, that’s awesome – where was I going with this? Oh, yes…

So What is Wrong with D20?

Needlessly overcomplicated, intimately inter-dependent to the point where it almost gets to the point one rule refers to another rule that relies on the rule you’re referring to in the first place.  “Help! I’m at the corner of First and First, how did I get here?!”

Everything needs a Feat or you get a massive penalty to do something most other games foolishly think heroes or even normal people do can without tripping over their own feet and impaling themselves with a plastic ice cream spoon. Where did you get that anyway, cheater? You only start with 3D6 gold pieces, which is actually enough to feed 3 medieval families for a year each, but in D20 land can only buy half a cow. Need to sneeze? Better have the Sneeze Feat  or you’re out of luck and your head will just implode for 10D12 damage. How do you get them? You level up and get them arbitrarily, even though you did nothing during all the intervening time to work toward getting them.

Sorry you can’t use a sword, you’re a wizard. It’s against wizards’ religion to use weapons that can provide effective self defense and don’t make them look like weenies. You memorize a certain number of spells per day and have to sleep to get them back, or read them off a scroll, which usually disintegrates – just like all the famous stories and movies! Oh wait… You can’t read or detect magic until you cast a spell that lets you read or detect magic – since you cast a spell, isn’t IT magic? Shouldn’t it be glowing and detecting itself?

Clerics have actually improved somewhat from how they used to be treated but they’re not in any better positions than wizards, really.

Weapons in D20 systems have more stats than ACTUAL real-life weapons. That’s too many.  Why do weapons do less damage to larger creatures? It’s almost like they feel it less, or they have more Hit Points. Oh wait… THEY ALREADY DO.

Attacks of Opportunity! Everything you do gets them! Whisper to your friend? ZAP! Move 10′ and attack? POW! Backstab? GANK! Breathe? AoO!  If you don’t happen to have a micrometer on you, just assume that your character can move one foot in any direction, then cut that in half to be safe, and now you can perform any single action, knowing you won’t draw any AoO. Probably.

Critical Hits are awesome – except when they’re not! Except when it looks like a critical hit but NO it wasn’t after all. You have to make TWO successful hit rolls in a ROW, with one having to be 19 or better. That seems very realistic, seeing as how this is being done on one twenty sided die, which generates a purely random non-bell-curve distribution comparable to the size of the Gulf of Mexico – thank goodness they’re all about realism.

McMagic Items. Sunrods. Thundersticks. Gluebobs, Taffyjerks. Why go adventuring to find cool magic items when you can buy them off the shelf at your local general store like you’re stocking up on batteries or ramen noodles?

You’re good at what I say you’re good at.  Level up, here’s your new stats! Wait, what? No, I’d like to up these things over here. What – those – oh no, I don’t think so. You’re going to take Improved Extreme Ballroom Dancing and like it.

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This entry was posted by J P on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Humor, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.