[Necro][D20 Future/Others] Am I crazy?

[Belac]

Okay, here's the thing. Every now and then, I read something in an RPG which looks so obviously wrong that I'm amazed that nobody ever caught it. Most of the time, I point these out because they're mistakes that professional, paid designer-writers make, but mistakes that only novices have any business making. Am I crazy for always pointing these things out?

Here are my latest examples, from D20 Future, which is all-around a pretty decent book, but has some really weird problems.

1) Plasma Rifle vs Pulse Rifle
These two weapons have the EXACT same stats, with some exceptions, and are almost the same weapon. They fire almost the same type of shots and the energy types both are completely identical as far as D20 Future is concerned. (Plasma and pulse have absolutely no game difference.) Okay, here's the problem.

Plasma Rifle (Progress Level 7)
Dmg 3d10, Critical 20, Damage Type: Fire, Range Increment: 80 feet, Rate of Fire: S/A, Magazine: 50 box, Size: Large, Weight: 8 lb., Purchase DC: 19, Restriction: Res (+2)

Pulse Rifle (Progress Level 8)
Dmg 3d10, Critical 20, Damage Type: Fire, Range Increment: 80 feet, Rate of Fire: S/A, Magazine: 50 box, Size: Large, Weight: 11 lb., Purchase DC: 21, Restriction: Res (+2)

So basically, when weapons get "better", they weigh more and cost more, but don't do anything else differently at all. (In fact, in a PL 8 campaign, a plasma rifle would only be Purchase DC 17). Am I the only one that thinks this is a little dumb?

But here's the big kicker.

2) Critical Hits
(pg 111)
"MULTIPLYING DAMAGE
Sometimes a starship weapon multiplies damage by some factor, such as when it scores a critical hit. Just as in character combat, you can either roll the damage (with all modifiers) multiple times and total the results, or roll the damage once and multiply the result by the given multiplier."

No, that's not true at all. In D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, and D20 Modern (which is what D20 Future is a supplement for), you can only roll multiple times and total the results, in the official rules anyway. This is pretty much common knowledge, but someone writing for the company that made the system got it wrong.



My problem isn't that they made mistakes, but rather that the average gamer could have quickly glanced through the book and found these if they'd bothered to proofread. Other games suffer from this, too. Mutants & Masterminds, for example, had a HUGE errata list, and none of the sample characters were correct. You'd think one or two minutes of checking the book for glaring errors would have fixed that. It's particularly bad when it's Wizards of the Coast, though. Many gamers (including me) would be willing to make the very basic rules checks and cursory readings for free, and Wizards of the Coast is the biggest RPG company there is, as far as I know, and theoretically employs editors and such.

It's not like these errors really break the game or anything, it just annoys me that they would have been so easy to detect. Am I crazy to think this?

[NPC Jeremy]

I think the problem is in how they statted weapons and armor in D20 Modern.

Pretty much everything does the same amount of damage. So they can't really differentiate much. Even though some higher tech stuff does more, there's not a lot of wiggle room, so a lot of the future weapons have to have the same stats, or the system gets wonky.

This creates a dichotomy between the writeup text/description of an item and the stats.

For instance, it says how the OICW is the most lethal thing ever invented. But it has the same game stats as any other assault rifle with grenade launcher.



Also, I think the whole Starships section was lifted directly from Alternity and ported to d20. So that could be a leftover from it.

[CADmonkey]

But here's the big kicker.

2) Critical Hits
(pg 111)
"MULTIPLYING DAMAGE
Sometimes a starship weapon multiplies damage by some factor, such as when it scores a critical hit. Just as in character combat, you can either roll the damage (with all modifiers) multiple times and total the results, or roll the damage once and multiply the result by the given multiplier."

No, that's not true at all. In D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, and D20 Modern (which is what D20 Future is a supplement for), you can only roll multiple times and total the results, in the official rules anyway. This is pretty much common knowledge, but someone writing for the company that made the system got it wrong.

Have you looked at the damage ratings of starships? A Battleship has an attack which deals 24d8 normally. Rolling 24 dice and adding them up is bad enough, rolling 48 dice? get real. Multiplying the result of the roll rather than the number of dice rolled is simply a time (&sanity!) saving option given because of the huge number of dice involved in starship combat.

[AusJeb]

Have you looked at the damage ratings of starships? A Battleship has an attack which deals 24d8 normally. Rolling 24 dice and adding them up is bad enough, rolling 48 dice? get real. Multiplying the result of the roll rather than the number of dice rolled is simply a time (&sanity!) saving option given because of the huge number of dice involved in starship combat.

Yeah, one of the first things that struck me about d20F was that I was going to have to invest in a lot more d8s in order to run it.

However, I really liked the rule from d6 Space for large dice pools mentioned in today's review, and I think that such a rule would work very well for d20F. The rules is that for large pools, you can roll 5 dice and add the average of the remaining dice. So, 48d8 would instead be 5d8+194 {(48-5) x 4.5}.

Jeb

[Gelatinous Cube]

This is where Dicepro and an old Palm PDA come in real handy.

[Belac]

I didn't mean I had a problem with averaging dice or whatnot because of the huge rolls for starships.

What I meant was the statement "Just as in character combat..." The difference is that they didn't create a new rule for D20 Future that in character combat, you can just roll once and multiply, but rather that they refer to it as if it already was the standard, and it wasn't.

I let my players use both variants now, anyway. Some of the dice get numerous even for personal weapons (such as firing a pulse rifle on Burst Fire, which does 5d10) and thus get bell-curved, so I think allowing a multiplication of a single roll is reasonable to prevent excessive bell-curve. I just don't like how it looks most likely that the author didn't know the rule and that nobody proofread, rather than that the author was introducing a new rule in a particularly clumsy way (by implying that it already existed in D20 Modern by default.)

[The Unconquered Shawn]

Sorry to Necro, but what's the deal with d20 future Mecha weapon range increments.

The warpath recoiless rifle has a range increment of 40 friggin' feet! The gun itself is probably 20 ft long. Is this gun powered by rubber bands?

Am I throwing the damn bullets at my enemies?

WTFHELL?