Games - D20 Modern

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	Games - D20 Modern

d20 Modern is a role-playing game designed by Bill Slavicsek, Jeff Grubb, Rich Redman, and Charles Ryan. It was published by Wizards of the Coast in 2002, and uses the d20 System. The game provides a toolbox for staging campaigns in a range of modern settings.

Due to their mutually shared core systems, a person who knows how to play Dungeons & Dragons
or any other d20 System is likely to know the basic aspects of how to play a d20 Modern game as well. While there are rules specific to the d20 Modern roleplaying game, the similarities between this game and other d20 system games outweigh the differences.

System

d20 Modern is based on the d20 System, with the following additions and alterations:

Characters

d20 Modern presents a starting character with the choice of six classes: Strong Hero, Fast Hero, Tough Hero, Smart Hero, Dedicated Hero, and Charismatic Hero. These basic classes correspond to the six ability scores used in the d20 System. The basic classes are broad, flexible, and generic, rather than the much more narrowly focused character classes from the Dungeons and Dragons rules.

A d20 Modern character can later, after meeting certain requirements, take levels in advanced classes. The advanced classes are much more specifically focused; examples include Soldier, Field Medic, and Techie.

There are prestige classes as well; these have stricter requirements, which are most likely arrived at through at least one advanced class, and are even more tightly focused in their roles, but these are not found in the core rules.

Also, d20 Modern includes the moreau character race(s) which seem to be an uncredited adaption of the background of the Moreau Series of books by S. Andrew Swann. This is later expanded on in the d20 campaign setting GeneTech.

Action Points

Each character earns a set number of points each experience level, known as 'Action Points'. These points can be spent in game to increase the effect of a single die roll, or to make use of certain abilities earned by the hero character through their experience level advancement.

Skills and Feats

Upon gaining experience levels, characters earn points which are used to purchase ranks in various skills. These skills quantify in game logic terms the character's competence in some non-combat action, such as swimming, negotiating, stunt driving, or using computers.

Feats are special abilities a character gains. Feats are less readily described because of the sheer variety of abilities they can grant the character. Unlike skills, feats don't have "skill points", but are rather a single thing you take that grants a bonus of some sort. A feat could allow a character to perform a special combat maneuver, enhance the use of one or more skills, or some other more exotic effect.

Equipment

A character can purchase or otherwise obtain an enormous array of items. Many real world objects are quantified in game terms, such as firearms and automobiles. d20 Modern uses a very abstract and potentially somewhat unintuitive system for tracking wealth, intended to model modern finances more believably than simply tracking available funds, as Dungeons and Dragons usually does.

Campaign Settings

d20 Modern presents three sample campaign settings. These settings, unlike the rest of the book, feature the supernatural.

Shadow Chasers

In this setting, evil monsters, usually from one or more parallel dimensions, roam free around the world. However, most people do not see these creatures for what they really are, seeing instead a vague approximation which is still plausible in that person's beliefs about reality. (See consensus reality.) For example, an ogre would appear to the average person as a very burly man. The player characters are somehow capable of seeing through this veil, and typically take on responsibility for defending humanity from the monsters. It originally appeared as a d20 mini-game in Polyhedron Magazine
issue #150.

Agents of Psi

In this campaign setting, magic (at least in the traditional sense) does not exist, but psychic capabilities called "psionics" do. Player characters typically work for a government agency investigating and/or using this quasi-supernatural force, but this is only a suggestion and is not strictly required by the rules. A novella taking place in this setting was published on the WotC website.

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