mthomason said:It could be said that deciding to make the mechanics non-d20 was a marketing goof I've been in stores where the d20 stuff is on the main shelves near the entrance, and the non-d20 at the back. People are usually gathered around the d20 material, with the odd stray customer wandering into the back for the more "specialist" items.
Sutek said:mthomason said:Plus, and this is a fear I have with Conan, there are some hard-core nutters out ther that know the world and the stories backwards and forwards and those folks were constantly slamming Decipher for poor representation of either the book version, the movie version or both.
Arkobla Conn said:Let me tell you - I'm a huge LOTR fan
But tell me it's a d6 base game....and I won't even read it.
Like it or not, d20 is the way to go. It's easy - most players understand the mechanics and you can easily inject flavor and special rules. Decipher goofed big time...my guess is, they took a bath on the fact that the masses don't want a different system...they wanted a different (familiar) world.
Same feeling here. The "sameness" (everything look/feel the same) of D20 is both a boon and a curse. Some settings requires specific rulesets and not just variations of an heavy hack'n slash system like D20 (which is fine for Conan, of course). I just hope the Linux and other OS/2 of the RPG industry will not die on us. :xOdovacar's Ghost said:D20 is the Microsoft of the RPG world.
Once you know the rules on how to play, just about everygame you play is identical. The feats are the same. Everything is the same.
Odovacar's Ghost said:D20 is the Microsoft of the RPG world.
Odovacar's Ghost said:Once you know the rules on how to play, just about everygame you play is identical. The feats are the same. Everything is the same.
Anonymous said:Arghhhh, d20 is taking over the world, and the system isn't really that good either. I buy games that are _not_ d20 just to support those publishers, and to diversify the market. The RPG market does not need a standard system to work and be great.
I have the old Judge Dredd RPG from Games Workshop, and although it is an archaic system, it works for me and I'm not interested in Mongoose's d20 variant.
Have already pre-ordered the upcoming Fireborn from FFG, which seems very cool. And uses a new d6 system.
Conan is very good as OGL, at least I didn't have to buy the D&D 3.5 rulebooks. I'm not saying that "all games should not be d20", I'm saying that some are it just to sell better, even if the game would have been better with another system.
Kudos to Decipher for not making LOTR a d20 product.
[/rant]
Busty Wench said:The rules are fairly simple. This means you can easily introduce the game to new players, especially younger ones. This brings more fresh blood into the gaming community which will in the future give us more designers, writers and of course, players.
Yes, yes it is. My experience is that d20 falls just to the "easy" side of "average" as far as systems go. There are systems out there, mostly narrative type and some dice-pool, that you can jump right into within 10 minutes of picking up a rulebook (Buffy/Unisystem comes to mind). Then there are the more complex dice-pool systems (Shadowrun) and bell-curve systems (GURPS) that make d20 look like an excersise for first-graders. All things considered, d20 is a very good mix of mechanical simplicity and game complexity that services a supprisingly broad range of gamers. Also, however many other faillings and shortcommings a level-based system may have there is one thing it does well, and that is scale the player challenge well. Learning to play d20 at low levels is very accesssable for someone new to the hobby and I think that, with the OGL, it has defenaetly been a gateway product to bring many new players into the hobby.Anonymous said:The rules are not fairly simple! They are actually very cumbersome. There have been lots of games that went to d20 from a much easier and faster system. I don't want to get into details, but I find that point quite obvious. The only thing that makes it easier in other games is many players have already taken the time to learn the system. But its still not simple.
Faraer said:I'm English, but if I was doing a roleplaying game based on the works of an American author I'd want to do it in American English. As it is, there's a slight, unnecessary discord between the Conan stories and the Conan RPG books. (I'd also have kept Howard's spellings, such as simitar instead of scimitar.)