Why does the D20 system work better than other RPG systems?

[souran]

The core of the d20 system is now 15 years old. Its flaws are well known. However, what games have been produced that really function as well as the d20 games do?

This is not to say that the d20 system is perfect, or that its the right system for every genre/style/game. Only that the d20 games, or specifically the d20 D&D variants (3.X, Pathfinder, 4E, 5E) are easer to play such that you get the "intended" user experience.

For comparison, the chaososium "Call of Cuthulu" game system has been well described here. The general experience is that while the game is supposed to capture the investigative and maddening qualities of the fiction, it tends instead, to become a game of comic ineptitude as the "investigators" fail repeatedly at things they should not. A similar problem plagues the 1st and 2nd editions of Warhammer fantasy roleplay. While it canbe fun to be a rat catcher with a small but viscious dog for an evening, the fun generally tends to be how horribly mutilated and disfigured your hero becomes in the attempt to do something like "fight a single Orc warrior."

White-Wolf games (and to a lesser extent shadowrun) have issues with the opisition being to strong or to weak and having no good baselining math for PCs. Additionally, while it is fun to roll handfulls of dice it tends to be slow, especially on the GM side of the screen.

There are plenty of good RPGs, there are some really good really complex RPGs, but my groups tend to find their way back to playing some d20 game because its so easy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Long story short:

1.) d20, or rather 3.0E when it first came out was playtested pretty thoroughly for the first 10 levels. The game starts falling apart pretty spectacularly at around the halfway point but the vast majority of games finish before that point.

2.) d20 has probably the best melee tactical positioning system of any major RPG. This is a huge benefit and probably its biggest strength.

3.) d20's class and level system is very robust. It's set up in such a way so that people can easily compose new classes using pre-existing elements and have a remarkably good idea of the end data point. It's difficult (but possible, as we can see from Pathfinder) to make a class that's too weak to participate at all by level 5 and it's significantly harder to accidentally make a class that's too powerful by level 5.

4.) Because of point 3, d20 does a very good job of delineating expected challenges. The system does fuck up at times as we can see from shadows and lantern archons and giant crabs, but having a good idea just how hardcore 4 orcs are for a 1st level party and how many orcs or ogres or trolls you'd need to add to make the encounter a challenge for a 3rd-level party is invaluable.

[OgreBattle]

D&D is synonymous with tabletop role playing games so they have name recognition. Their early success got their game in book and game stores across the US (and parts of Europe).

They were challenged by White Wolf in the 90's but ultimately D&D was a broader gaming experience and not everyone wants to play as vampires in modern day. They were challenged by RIFTS in the early 90's with it being able to cover even broader settings than D&D, but (my own specultion) D&D3e came out and was a much more mechanically sound game with a much better marketing and distribution team... and the d20 OGL.

The OGL seems like the clincher, it convinced 3rd parties that imitating not only the aesthetic of D&D but its very mechanics. That attachment to the mechanics as brand identity is also how Pathfinder overtook D&D4e

[Username17]

I think the question was more of why when you actually run D&D, it seems to work better than most other games. When the players bust out hammers and pitons to crawl along the wall to avoid a pool of acid, when the players look at the iant onyx serpent idol and want to drag it away, when the players carry torches into a dark and blustery canyon... the game spits out results that are pretty reasonable. For the most part, when characters do human scale things the game gives us real answers as to what they can do and those answers are pretty much OK. And that, I think, is because 3rd edition D&D was made in part by people who had been tweaking numbers on 2nd edition AD&D for more than a decade.

The rules for carrying capacity, wind, darkness, and climbing are all there, and they are actually amazingly good. At least, if what you want to do is have your rules output actions of moderately skillful normal human beings. They don't scale up to the superheroic levels that characters need to be aspiring to terribly well, but in the levels 1-4 when chaacters genuinely are supposed to be "pretty strong guys" the game is incredibly tight. People worked on those numbers for years. Some of those were probably based on research started during the Reagan administration.

And that is why when you read the carrying rules in Shadowrun you immediately facepalm and thank your lucky stars that 4th edition equipment doesn't even have weights listed. But when you apply the carrying capacity rules from 3rd edition D&D, the results are actually just passively realistic and don't really bother anyone.

-Username17

[Harime Nui]

Yea, I've been playing D&D 3.x for fifteen years at this point. In all that time I've only run one campaign that got over level 10 and never played in one that got even close. The longest lasting character I ever played made it from levels 1 to 7. And that's not because my characters tend to die or anything, it's because virtually every game I've ever played in simply folded before we got up to double digit levels. And what I think is, my friends, the people I game with, they're not optimizers but even they realize that once you get to high levels D&D turns into a different game and shit gets weird.

So for what it is, the d20 system is extremely simple at its core, and intuitive and flexible. Attacks, skills, saves, all basically go off the same mechanic: roll a d20. High numbers good, low numbers bad. Yes it breaks down if you look at it too closely but it's great for casual gaming. After a few sessions max, anybody should be able to run a D20 game and not suck at it. Also, once you actually read through the Combat chapter the whole way and learn about cover, elevation, kneeling/prone, if you want to play D20 Rambo or D20 Buck Rodgers and switch to gunplay you can pretty much totally do that. The game will only work for five levels but it can be a lot of fun. So yeah, no, D20 can't handle different genres---it's set up for action and adventure and if you try to play a D20 survival horror game goofy shit's gonna happen--but you can switch up the milieu pretty well, to space or urban fantasy or the wild west or whatever.

The other thing, of course, is that D20 is incredibly modular. It's like my honda, you can see how they put together the dashboard with modular parts so the steering column could have gone on the right or left depending on what country they were shipping to. You can pile on as much shit on top of the core mechanic as you want until it looks like GURPS-plus or you can strip it down to a step away from freeform and you're still basically playing a d20 game. It actively invites people to tinker with it which is awesome, even if a lot of the stuff people come up with will in the inevitable course of things not be awesome.