I’ve decided that if I sit down and write down my feelings about d20 I will be able to have a more rational conversation about it in the future. Right now I seem to go incandecent with rage just thinking about d20, and that just cannot be healthy. So here’s my attempt at articulating why I am trying to avoid d20 at all costs.
Just to make sure everyone understands where I’m coming from, I’ve more or less been playing and running some form of d20 for the last 14 years: D&D 3e, 3.5e, 4e, and Pathfinder. It’s been a staple of my tabletop diet for most of my career as a tabletop gamer. I have made various attempts to house-rule the system, but I actually don’t like house rules very much (even my own); why not just use a better system.
My last note: These are my opinions and reflect my feelings regarding the system. I am not implying that the opinions below will be true for everybody, or that my experiences with the system are the same that everyone who plays the game has had or will have.
Skills
Lets get this out of the way first. I have never liked the skill system in d20 very much and it is probably the thing that causes me the most grief both as a player and as a GM.
First and foremost, the skill system, by design, is very limiting for players. The normal range for skill checks are between about 1 and 35. An unskilled character has a 100% to successfully perform a DC 10 action if they are not in combat. Oddly they only have a 45% chance to successfully perform a DC 11 action. The law of unintended consquences comes to bite us here, because of this design. Players stop attempting things that don’t have a high probability of success because of the binary success/failure that these rolls impose.
As a GM I have had players who did not have a Diplomacy skill stand up and leave the table during party interaction with NPCs because “they couldn’t participate”. I can’t blame them, but it was incredibly frustrating.
Only certain classes had access to skills or skill diversity and therefore for classes that did have access to skills and skill diverity were penalized in the combat system. That does not work for me at all, I want players to be able to engage a maximum amount of the game and leaving them out of combat or out of social interactions is incredibly distasteful to me. Players are welcome to participate as much or as little as they want, but being excluded because of game mechanics should be the exception rather than the rule.
Skill points were perks that you got based on your level and had very little to do with what your character actually did in game, which always bothered me at least a little.
Others, like Pathfinder and 4e, have tried to fix it, but I find the system fundementally flawed, being tied so tightly to the level system and including all skills in one resource bucket; athletics is drawn from the same resource bucket as arcana, you can be good at combat or at social, pick.
I haven’t had a chance to delve deeply into the 5e rules but I don’t see substantial changes that would fix the above problems.
You are what you do
d20 has trained a generation of gamers that you are what is printed on your character sheet, and little more. This makes me very sad, because some very good gamer sit down at at table and are ruled by the stats on their sheet. When a roleplaying game details explicit rules for what you can and can’t do you spent a lot of time not being able to do things.
In a round of combat in a d20 system when you ask a player what their character does, they look down at their character sheet (then probably over to the minis on the game mat) and they go through the list of options based on what their character sheet says. Very few gamers will feel comfortable enough to try to perform actions that are not explicitly spelled out. Partly that is the fault of GMs, but it is also a part of a system with a rigid and unbending rule set.
Players only consider their environment from the perspective of whether it affects the power or ability they are trying to activate, like getting the most from their AOE effect. They rarely incorproate their surroundings into the gameplay because the system doesn’t have any rules for it.
Murder hobos
I would like to shake the hand of the person who coined the term. “Murder hobos” is an excellent description of most d20 adventuring parties I’ve ever encountered. It’s not their fault. The system not only rewards the slaughter of your enemies, it really doesn’t give you any other option. The only game mechanics that the d20 system encourages are the ones where you chop, stab, dice, or set enemies on fire. If a video game requires you to messily destroy all of your foes that is exactly what you’re going to do. d20 is not significantly different; arguably people have other options, but not good ones.
As a GM who likes roleplaying for the story and character interaction it creates d20 is especially bad at producing incentives for players to do things other than engage in combat scenarios.
Having re-occurring villians is really difficult in this environment. You basically have to cheat or use cheesy mechanics to bring the bad guys back into the story or prevent an ugly butchering. It feels like cheating every time I prep an antagonist with Word-of-Recall in order to escape at the end of combat before the death blow is dealt so that he can show up again.
Save or Die
The whole d20 system can be easily summed up with this phrase, taken from the spellcasting system. “Save or Die” epitomizes the system with its feast-or-famine mindset. Everything characters do is a binary success or failure setup. Pass or fail the skill check, pass or fail the save, do damage or don’t. The exceptions are few and far between, and some of the newer editions take a stab at mitigating this, but it’s still the exception.
Part of the problem with pass/fail systems is that failure is boring. In d20 a miss is incredibly boring because literally nothing happens. Life stands still until something else happens, usually when someone else goes.
Wrap up
Ok, I’ve just issued a verbal (well, written) drubbing to the d20 system. I like to think that I do so from a place of experience and a place of remembered fondness. None of these issues make the games unplayable, they just lower my enjoyment and I’m really ready to try new things and really get into some more story based games. Given the circles I run in I am certain I will participate in a d20 game again, and I will do so with a smile. In the meantime I’m going to be exploring a bigger and hopefully when I do return to d20 I’ll be more experienced and ready to deliver a better experience to everyone involved.