New Flavors of d20
 

As we all know, the d20 System comes in a variety of flavors. In addition to the 3.0/3.5 D&D rules and the upcoming Pathfinder (which could almost be called D&D 3.75), numerous publishers current and defunct had put their own stamps on the system.

One way I can think of to introduce ourselves to the capabilities of the Authoring Kit might be to adapt one of the varying d20 flavors to HL. Is this something that people are interested in?

One of the many things on our todo list is to release a core set of d20 functionality that authors can use as a foundation to build their favorite d20-derivative game system upon. Unfortunately, we have one serious hurdle before we can do that. The current d20 data files were first written two years ago. Over those two years, we have added extensive new functionality to HL. Many of the mechanisms upon which the d20 files are built have long been replaced by better solutions. In some cases, the d20 files were revised to use the new mechanisms, but not in all cases. Consequently, the d20 files still use some of the old mechanisms, which are comparatively quite crude and complex compared to all the new stuff.

Before we can release a core set of d20 material, we need to first fully retrofit the d20 data files to use all the new stuff. That takes time, and we've had too many other things on our plate to be able to get it all done. We're a tiny company, so we don't have the resources to do everything we'd like as quickly as we'd like. If there is enough desire for something like this, then we can see about deferring other tasks to make time for this.

How important do you think this is? Would you rather forego major campaign capabilities to have this? Let us know!

My Individual and singular opinion is that I am unlikely to even buy hero lab until there is at least such ground work on which I can build either a Traveller for d20 or a d20 star wars file. Of course ideally it be more fun if someone else did ALL the work but some sort of 'core cusomizable' D20 would be a minimum in order to reduce the capital investment in time to make the purchase worthwile. until then I shall keep my money and continue preparing my campaigns with paper and pencil. The work of creating a datafile from scratch is much greater than the time savings on even weekly game. at least for me.

As someone who's adapted d20 to other genres, like post-apocalyptic and Conan-esque sword & sorcery, this sounds interesting to me. But I guess it depends on the relative benefit from each course of action. What "major campaign capabilities" are we talking about here?

On the other hand, while the d20 mechanisms may not be state of the art, they seem to work just fine for this simple user. How much improvement would we see from updating to the new functionality?

As a non-expert without as much time as I'd like to create new content, though, I think I'd appreciate additional capabilities I could use right out of the box more than better development tools.

We've got a very extensive set of tools mapped out and partially implemented at this point. Unfortunately, I'm not able to actually discuss the exact contents publicly at the moment. But it's a lot of really cool stuff IMHO.

From a user's perspective on the outside looking in? The improvements would be relatively minor. However, the differences would be dramatic internally. Anyone trying to adapt the files for use with Conan, d20 Modern, or Star Wars would have a vastly easier time of it.

In that case, my vote goes to waiting for these major improvements.

Still a difficult question, since both are improvements I would like to see. If you would have to re-do the major campaign capabilities after cleaning up the core files anyway, I'd say the priority should be the retrofit. Otherwise, my vote would be for the new capabilities first, then the retrofit. Just my $.02