Lament and d20 Modern 4E (Game Design Corner)

[kent_allard_jr]

One of the things I hate about my life is that My Calling is absolutely useless: When I'm bored my mind wanders to ideas for game design. There's no money in it, it's not sexy (as, say, playing the guitar might be), you can't do it with friends and while I've tried to find professions that need similar skill sets, none use them at entry or intermediate levels. (I liked Grand Political Modeling and wove huge, intricate tapestries of it in grad school, but of course, you're not supposed to write that stuff until you have tenure!) Whatever. I have a nice job, I have little to complain about and I'll stick to this as a hobby.

Anyway... I've thought about what d20 Modern might look like as a 4th edition game. I thought d20 Modern was a bit of a mess, personally, and rather than try to translate the old stuff into 4E, I'd rather start from scratch and see how to adopt the 4E rules to a modern setting. Here are a few ideas:

1. Start out with the Martial classes, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue and Warlord. De-Medievalize the names to (say) Defender, Killer, Brawler and Leader.
   
2. Take away all but essential skills and armor & weapon proficiencies. These elements depend on a non-class-specific Profession.
   
3. Give each class a choice of one of three tactical benefits, each based on one of the three mental attributes, Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma. (Otherwise these attributes wouldn't get enough use.)
   
4. I'm not sure whether to split powers into At-Will, Encounter or Daily, as in D&D, or to have them depend on Healing Surges. In the latter case, characters would get 1-3 free "Surge" abilities every encounter, depending on tier of play.
   
5. Obviously, you'd have to change skills and equipment to fit the modern setting.
   

Unfortunately it'd be near-impossible to make money on a project like this (WotC would charge a fortune for the rights) and I'm not willing to spend a lot of time on something that will never see print, so this will remain a thought-experiment for the time being.

Comments

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Who says you can't do it with friends? I don't have the base of known gaming systems for starting points that you do, but I used to do the same sort of stuff from scrath 25 years ago, and would have fun brainstorming with you some day.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I like the idea of powering Dailies (or extra encounters) out of surges.

[peacewood.livejournal.com]

On the fence about that. It would certainly cut down on the number of encounters per day, but I guess that's more in the flavor of the modern setting.

Unless we're talking Hong Kong Action Film modern setting.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Well to offset this I'd give each character a free Surge power every encounter, going up to 2 free powers at level 11 and 3 at 21.

[peacewood.livejournal.com]

If you're starting from scratch and building fresh classes, why wouldn't you have classes based off of mental abilities? Leader could be what we normally think of as a party leader, or it could be the Negotiator-type that discourages enemies from attacking (or at least saps their will if they do), which would be a Leader class based off Charisma.

Or the Technician class, good with explosives and would work well as a Controller-type, based off Intelligence.

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

My thinking was that class would only determine your role and abilities in combat. A technician would be someone with technician skills and feats (probably a demolitions expert), for example, but he could be any class.