I know, its all going to end in tears, but what the hell.

What did you *like* about the D20 system? Did you backport any of the new rules into older games? Were there any awesome 3rd-party supplements you always used?

There's a horrible little bit of me that's been working on ripping the D20 system apart and sticking it back together as a gritty, dark little dungeon crawler... Lots of OSR influence and bits and bobs of other stuff.

D&D3 was an amazing game when we played it like AD&D2.

Quote from: PiebaldWookie;885704I know, its all going to end in tears, but what the hell.

What did you *like* about the D20 system?

The fact that you could multiclass almost freely, and treat classes as skill packages (but which class you started as mattered).
Standardising some status effects.
Giving the different sources of armour class bonus different names.
AFAIK, introducing the concept of Touch Attacks.
Stating it clearly when you suffer Attacks of Opportunity.
Arguably, stating it clearly that you get full HP at 1st level.

I think that's the whole of it;).

QuoteDid you backport any of the new rules into older games? Were there any awesome 3rd-party supplements you always used?

Apart from Book of Nine Swords, I don't think so.
Arguably, I heard nice things about Iron Heroes, but I'd burned out on 3.5 and didn't really bother trying it out.

QuoteThere's a horrible little bit of me that's been working on ripping the D20 system apart and sticking it back together as a gritty, dark little dungeon crawler... Lots of OSR influence and bits and bobs of other stuff.

IMO, that game is already written, and is called DCC:D!

Having a standardised resolution mechanic was a great help to coming up with spot rulings - no more um-ing and ah-ing about whether it made more sense to do something as a D6 roll or a percentile roll or whatever, just pick an appropriate skill/stat combination and a difficulty level and go.

The skill system also put a big fat stake through the heart of the idea that only thieves could hide and climb stuff, which was very welcome. Anyone can try to do anything that doesn't require specialised class-specific training to do (like spellcasting), some characters will have more aptitude at some tasks than others - great, thank you, love it.

They immediately undermined that by presenting Feats which seemed to imply that you needed the Feat in question to try a particular thing, and by having way too many skills - Use Rope, anyone? - but the basic idea of it was sound. The more modest skill list in 5E - and the fact that there isn't really an "unskilled" penalty in that game - works much better for my money, but 3E laid the foundations of that.

I think the core of the system was basically solid. Both Conan d20 and Lone Wolf d20 were excellent games, IMO, although I'd hesitate to go back to Conan because of the need to factor in feat selection and too many special abilities when designing NPCs (although a lot of that can be hand-waved or eye-balled close enough to work in play, with system familiarity).

Quote from: PiebaldWookie;885704I know, its all going to end in tears, but what the hell.

What did you *like* about the D20 system? Did you backport any of the new rules into older games? Were there any awesome 3rd-party supplements you always used?

There's a horrible little bit of me that's been working on ripping the D20 system apart and sticking it back together as a gritty, dark little dungeon crawler... Lots of OSR influence and bits and bobs of other stuff.

It allowed for extensive character customization and remain recognizably D&D.

/tears
 :rant:
... and it didn't have the decency to fade gracefully, too.

Standardized ascending mechanic.

Use of skills.

As others have said:

Streamlined mechanics(but instead much heavier and slower in play so the positive sides gets overshadowed)

Ability score mods streamlined. Although Basic D&D had already done it.

Multiclassing that made sense

Stats for lots of humanoid races as PC's in the MM

Saving throw categories that made sense
I liked the effort, but not the results, of the skill system

Feats was a good idea, but not a very good implementation (I think 5e did them good)

It was a very complete game with just the core books

Even if the d20boom was not that great in itself, the SRD/OGL layed the foundations of the OSR. And for that I am very thankfull.

Standardizing saving throws was nice.

Standardizing Abilities and what they do, also nice.

But I think the best part was getting rid of things like THAC0.

I can sum it up simply by saying "the d20 system". It's not perfect. I would have liked it better sans feats. But it's a straight-forward system that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or teach us all yet one more not-so-clever way of rolling dice. You can plug it in to pretty much any setting or genre.

Most of my gripes about the game was that it called itself D&D while not being backwards compatible with earlier versions of the game. If it had been called anything else, there'd be a lot to like about it.

Nothing.

I wipe my ass on 3rd edition and all its spawn.

I liked a lot of the art. It was a nice middle ground between the wobbly inconsistencies of 2nd ed and the overslick generic "IP identity" stuff of 4e. I still use many 3e pieces as my definitive mental image of some creatures, items, classes and effects.

The unified task resolution system in d20 was fantastic.

Roll d20 / add bonuses / compare to a number in the GM's head.

It's simple, versatile, immersive, it gives the players lots of fiddly bits for character customization, and... the GM has the final say.

Pretty much the rest was crap...

On second thought, I like the unified XP system that allows for easy multi-classing.  I also like the higher stat modifiers and the simplification of what stats do.  I didn't mind the 3 saving throws though they lack character.  I personally like skills (sacrilege to some) though D&D is fine without them. Race/class combos made the game fresh again, for a while, but character customization options galore was more disaster than cool.

For sanity's sake I won't even mention the stuff that drove me crazy, except that Gronan can use 3rd editions pretense at game balance for TP for all I care.

The heart of d20 a good game.  I'll just say that if I want to play D&D I'd rather play DCC, Fantastic Heroes and Witchery, Crypts and Things or some mish-mash of older editions and OSR stuff.

QuoteOriginally Posted by Shipyard Locked
I liked a lot of the art.

I think art matters - and its pretty subjective - but for me the art in 3rd, 4th, Pathfinder and 5th is pretty flat and uninspiring.  Give me DCC's art any day!