Monday, December 23, 2024

(d20 Modern) d20 Future

Finally! One of these books is exactly what I remember it to be! d20 Future (Christopher Perkins, Rodney Thompson, JD Wiker) is a broad, but shallow overview of the sci-fi genre for d20 Modern games. It's jam-packed with intriguing new ideas and useful systems. We get rules for genetic engineering, robotics, starships, dimensional travel, mecha, cybernetics, and comics-style mutants. There are nine suggested campaign models, ranging from the mystical sci-fi horror of "From the Dark Heart of Space" to the mil-sf of "Bughunters" to the post-apocalyptic adventure of "The Wasteland." There's also a ton of new character options - new feats, new advanced classes, and rules for playing eight different alien species.

The main drawback is that all of this good stuff ends just as it's getting started. There's a one-and-a-half-page write-up of "Star*Drive" that captures approximately none of the setting's appeal. The brief overview made a complex, ambitious, and distinctive space opera setting sound like a knock-off Star Trek. And look, the nature of d20 Future as a book may have demanded that one of its nine campaign models be a knock-off Star Trek, but as someone who saw Star*Drive in all its glory, I couldn't help but notice the wasted potential.

I'm not mad at d20 Future, though. In order to waste potential, you must first have potential and to an experienced GM, there's something just a little bit magical about a book that gives you plenty of potential to work with. This is a book that practically dares me to do the worldbuilding legwork for any of a dozen different settings . . . and that's a challenge I'm eager to accept, because I love worldbuilding legwork.

On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much of a specific use-case for this particular book. It's kind of a book you read if you don't know what you want to do. It's got that weird D&D-adjacent . . .  aspiration for genericness, much like Alternity, pre-3.0.  Why, we've got a book we can use equally well for every type of sci-fi, but once we narrow in on any one singular type of sci-fi, something specific would work much better. As a thought experiment, I imagine running Eclipse Phase with the d20 Future rules and I think you could almost do it, but you'd run into the problem that a lot of the stuff you earn with your level ups would be classified as morph traits but the structure of the game really needs levels, skills, and feats to be tied to an ego. Likewise, doing Star Wars would require a custom variant of the psionics rules. Star Trek would probably work fine, though even then the rules don't really capture the feel of the setting. 

I think the blame for this "kind of okay at everything, no better than sort of good for anything" vibe can be laid firmly at the feet of the "Progress Level" concept. 

Progress levels are what you'd come up with if you looked at the history of technology with a kind of naive modernism - it started with the Stone Age (PL 0) when people used stone tools because those are the easiest kind of tool to build and no one knew how to make better ones. Then, over time, people learned about metal and how to work it to make better tools, so it became the Bronze/Iron age (PL 1) and so on and so forth, through successive eras that map quite well to the chapters in a European History textbook until PL 5, the Information Age, when human beings finally figured out computers, the past turned into the present, and all subsequent ages (it goes up to 9) are pure sci-fi speculation.

However, this approach has serious problems. For one, it's misleadingly Eurocentric. Sort of. Progress levels don't actually capture the true history of European technological development, but they do reflect the common colonialist technological tropes. Technology is universal. Progress is linear and directional, from the past to the present, and as a result, you can say one group has "more" technology and another has "less." There's no geographical or cultural component to the account, no acknowledgement that a people's tools are shaped by locally available materials and the people's ongoing needs. Like maybe there are methods of stone working that have been perfected over hundreds or thousands of years to be every bit as sophisticated as a complex industrial process. 

Which isn't to say that a science-fiction game needs to devote pagecount to detail maximally-efficient flint-knapping, but it does need to think of its future technology as something more akin to a theme or set of genre trappings, than as a historical narrative of "progress." The purpose of technology, in a (good) sci-fi story is to put some aspect of society or the human condition under the microscope and ask "what if this thing that we all thought was immutable somehow changed?" You introduce mind back-up technology not because it's a logical outgrowth of developments in biotech and cybernetics, but because you want to delve into heady issues - identity, mortality, authenticity, the objectification of the self and what life is like in a society that not only places a price on human life, but sets that price equivalent to a relatively small amount of computational power. 

Likewise, it's not particularly useful information to tell me that time machines are a PL 8-9 invention. Because a story about a society that must cope with the invention of time travel (which is what the assigning of a progress level implies) is very different than the story of a group of adventurers with access to a time machine (which is almost certainly what you're going to want to do in a d20 Modern game). There's a reason most time travel stories have the time machine being built in some weirdo's garage. And I think, if you want to make a generic reference guide for science fiction stories, this is a distinction that you need to make. You can't just count on the readers making it for themselves.

And it's not as if d20 Future is notably bad at this. You're not going to have to fight the book to tell interesting sci-fi stories. It's more that its presentation doesn't synergize with the book's ostensible goals. The equipment lists are organized by Progress Level, but the Progress Levels aren't really considered as whole units. They're more like tags in the equipment stat block, so the whole thing reads like a leveled treasure table. The stuff with the smaller bonuses appears before the stuff with the larger bonuses and instead of feeling like four different equipment lists for use in four separate campaigns, it feels a lot like one big list that a character might work their way through. The setting and mechanical implications of a 1st level character picking up a plasma pistol or cybernetics that give them +8 to skill checks (because such things are completely mundane equipment in their respective progress levels) are never fully explored. We're given no useful advice (or even a courteous warning) that playing in a PL 7-8 game will effectively compress d20 Modern's first 3-5 character levels into one long, highly unpredictable mega-level.

I think, overall, though, you have to give d20 Future credit for taking some risks and trying something new. It fills a niche in d20 gaming that wasn't really being served by other WotC products (maybe Star Wars d20, at a stretch) and there is something undeniably fun about being given a big box of pieces to play with, even if you need to figure out for yourself how those pieces are meant to be assembled.

Ukss Contribution: Abandoned and malfunctioning utility fog (a cloud of general-purpose nanomachines) will sometimes just build pointless roads. It combines three of my favorite things - infrastructure, melancholy at the lingering detritus of a bygone age, and the existential absurdity of a useful thing, deployed without purpose.

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