Captain Anorak's
Guide to Gaming
Against the D20 System
I really don't like the D20 system. I thought I should get that out at the start.
I don't want to pretend this is an unbiased and balanced critique. In fact, this is a rant.
Original D&D was the first commercial RPG to hit the mass market, and it had a lot
of qualities which, in terms of modern roleplaying, I would call bad. Now I don't want
to slag this early game off, because it was a different world back then. Nothing like
modern roleplaying existed. Gygax and Arneson made a big step forward with this proto-RPG,
and I salute them for it. It was an important evolutionary step that led to the growth
of true roleplaying.
But over the years, things have changed. First edition D&D is a Neanderthal to the
Homo sapiens of modern RPGs. Certain concepts made sense when the first proto-RPG
was growing out of wargames, but they don't make sense now. Ideas like character class,
levels and alignment have been gradually dropped over the years. When I started gaming in
the early 1980s they were on their way out, and by the mid-1990s they were pretty much dead.
This was good, because they were stupid, and games which used them annoyed me.
Now the D20 system has come along, and it's trying to be One System to Rule Them All.
The aim of its marketing is to make it the main game system used for all roleplaying.
The problem with this is that it's a really shit system. It's bringing back concepts that
dropped out of use over ten years ago because they were silly, and it's trying to make
everybody play like that. It's as though some corporate power somewhere has decided to
drag the world of roleplaying back twenty years into the past, and is using its financial
might to make this happen.
RIDICULOUS HIT POINTS
This is a big peev for me. By just going up a few levels you can get many times the
Hit Points of a normal person. This is just totally fucking ridiculous. It means you
can end up with characters who can just walk through a hail of bullets and not get killed.
The idea of gaming like this really really pisses me off.
CHARACTER CLASSES AND LEVELS
Character classes force characters into an unrealistic straitjacket. In real life,
there's a vast array of abilities that people can learn. They don't come in complete
packages. In the 1980s and 1990s the concept of character class became less and less popular
because people just couldn't see why their characters should be restricted in this way.
It's a ridiculous idea that serves no purpose. Bringing it back like this isa right
wanker's trick.
Here's an example of the problem. Say I'm GMing D20 Modern. I want to create an NPC
who's a highly skilled scientist. So I make him a 12th Level INT-based hero. This way
he has the skill points necessary to give him the scientific skills I want.
But now, because he's a 12th level character, he has to have 12 dice worth of Hit
Points, which makes him basically bulletproof. It's physically impossible to create
a highly skilled character who isn't bulletproof. But why is this? It just makes no sense.
THE COMBAT SYSTEM
Someone with a rational mind (this is unlikely to include D&D
players) might think the following thoughts:
- Armour should reduce the amount of damage taken when hit, but
should not reduce the chance of being hit. If anything it should
increase the chance of being hit, as armour is encumbring and
reduces dodging ability.
- Dodging skill should reduce the chance of a character being
hit. It might also reduce the amount of damage taken when hit, but
it should not reduce the amount of damage taken from drinking poison,
or the amount of damage regained through healing.
This seems to make sense, does it not? The main effect of dodging
skill should be to reduce the chance of being hit, and the main
effect of armour should be to reduce the damage taken. Yet in the D20
system it's almost exactly the opposite way around.
Your defence against being hit is called Armour Class. This has a
small component of defensive skill (there is a Dexterity bonus to AC)
but it is mostly affected by armour. So the better your armour, the
better your AC and the less likely you are to be hit. But when you
are hit, the amount of damage you take is unaffected by your armour.
Hit Points represent physical toughness (they are modified by
Constitution) but according to the rulebook they also involve
doging skill: characters can reduce the amount of damage they take
by twisting out of the way of the blow. Therefore, a single Hit
Point for a character with a better dodging skill represents a
smaller amount of physical damage than does a single Hit Point for
a character with the same physical toughness but poorer dodging
skill.
Imagine two characters, Bob and Jim. They are equally tough, but
Bob is twice as good at dodging. So Jim and 10 HP and Bob has 20 HP.
A single HP for Bob represents only half as much physical damage as
1HP for Jim, purely because of the difference in their dodging
skill - there is no difference in their toughness.
This means that if both characters drink poisoned water and take
5 HP of damage, Bob's higher dodging skill means that he only takes
half as much physical damage. If both characters receive magical
healing that restores 5 HP, again Bob only regains half as much
physical damage because he is better at dodging and for no
other reason. Why should dodging skill have these effects?
Conversely armour, which any sane person would expect to reduce
the amount of damage taken on a successful hit, has no such effect:
a blow is either turned by armour or it goes through completely with
no reduction. How can anyone think that that makes sense?
Does this mean that if I attack someone with a net, the chance of
my net successfully entangling the target is reduce if he has better
armour? How can that possibly be justified?
The combat system could be made to work much better by a few
simple changes which would make it no more complicated:
1. Instead of Armour Class, a character has a Defence stat
representing dodging skill. This would be derived from the
characters's Dexterity.
2. Armour has Armour Points. When a character takes a hit, the
damage inflicted is reduced by the target's Armour Points.
3. Hit Points represent only physical toughness and are
unrelated to dodging skill.
This would involve no more stats and no more dice rolls than the
present system has, and it would be a lot more sensible. It would
avoid the stupid artifacts described above, whereby a character with
better doging skill take less damage from poison and receives less
benefit from healing.
The combat system of D20 is in essence the old combat system of
D&D. When Gygax and Arneson first wrote D&D, they were doing it the
first time and we can excuse them for making mistakes. But by the
time the successor systems AD&D and D20 came out, the system had been
played by thousands of people and it must have become clear that it
was shit. When 'new' games were written, ie. AD&D and D20,
the old problems should have been fixed: there was no justification
for keeping such stupid rules in once people realised they were
stupid. Keeping in the old drivel defies the point of creating new
games (unless you believe that the point of making new games is to
generate more sales, which was probably Gary's point of view).
Of course, the real reason that dodging skill is treated as a
factor in Hit Points is simply to justify the Hit Points being so
high. The game was created with ridiculous Hit Points, and then
when people pointed out that this was stupid, the idea that they
represented dodging skill and not just toughness was invented as
an excuse to justify the high HP levels. This stupid excuse has
been kept in the game because people want to have characters that
can walk through a hail of bullets without being killed, and this
excuse gives them something to say in reply when other people point
out how stupid the game is.
Why have these people introduced so many stupid, unwieldy and
ridiculous rules into the game? The answer is that they wanted to
preserve elements of the old D&D system. But why would they want to?
They've kept bad rules when there are other rules that are
obviously better.
I can see why they did it. The D&D family of games is by far the
biggest selling group of game products; I've heard that before the D20
system came out, D&D and AD&D combined sold more than all the other
RPGs in the world put together. Whether that's true or not, (A)D&D was
certainly a very big seller. And, crucially, a lot of (A)D&Ders would
not play anything else. The purpose of the D20 system was to get these
people to play other games by telling them that the game was
essentially D&D with a different setting. I think it's done that,
taking backgrounds other than standard hack-fantasy to a much wider
audiences.
But in order to do that, Wizards of the Coast couldn't remove too
much of the traditional D&D drivel from the game. If they had,
established (A)D&Ders would have said 'this isn't D&D' and would not
have played it. So they didn't do the really courageous thing and
give it a more sensible combat system. In particular, the D20 System
still gives high-level characters a ridiculously huge number of
Hit Points, because (A)D&Ders wouldn't want to play a game without
them.
So I can see that the D20 System has some redeeming virtue: it has
allowed a group of primitive troglodytes to take their first steps
toward a wider world. But this doesn't alter the fact that it is a bad
game system.