Feel the Love

Matt Forbeck - a personal favorite developer of mine - has posted his opinion of the d20 system over on Forbeck.com. 'Now why,' you may ask yourself, 'does Alex bring this up?' Well, lemme tellya.

A lot of people, my own players included, rag on the system - 'it's too much like a video game,' or 'it's too rigid,' or 'rule X suX0r!!' are common complaints. They claim it is the rigidty of the system, or the lack of XP awards for non-combat encounters, or simply 'that it's not 2nd ed.' But without d20, I probably wouldn't be here. d20 revived Dungeons and Dragons, and more importantly, the interest in gamers and designers in working on it. I had a lot of good ideas for games (which include Projects Y and Z), and even systems that worked for them, but only the OGL opened the market up enough to give me a chance to do my thing. Like Matt, I don't mind that most - or all - of my work has been on d20 system products. I don't think it is inflexible - hell, Spycraft resembles d20 in only passing ways now - nor do I think it has lost anything. In fact, I think it is evolving all the time and will remain a viable and valuable contribution to the gaming market for many many more years. So, to those of you who hate d20, I say 'Don't hate the game, hate the player.' I'm glad it's here.