Okay, try to follow me on this one.

Even in real medieval society adventurers were rare. Most people had homes, families, and other responsibilities that precluded going off to see what was on the other side of the mountain.

The premise we start with is that the people in a 'standard' adventuring party are a bit off-beat by society's standards. For some reason they have no stability, wandering around from place to place. To make a game about these people more fun, we pretend that it makes sense. An adventuring party goes into a lord's castle or to a tavern's job-board and accept a quest. These quests pay cash money, also a rarity in medieval society, for short-term jobs usually involving violence.

Weird. What kind of society is that? Not one I live in. I have to fill out a job application with references and sign a contract to work for someone, and hardly anyone tries to kill me.

So, here's the premise.

What if I created a world that looked a lot like a medieval fantasy adventure, but using the D20 Modern rules? You could be a party of a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard Lumberjack, Car Salesman, Pediatrician, and Astronomer. Each of you buys gear and meets at the local cafe to look at their job board. Hey, look a that: Baron Mayor Fowler has asked someone to clear the nest of hyenas out of the water treatment plant! And while doing that, you find a +1 Chainsaw and a carbonated potion of spider-climb.

A light-tone campaign where most of the world is pretty normal, but your adventuring party functions like an adventuring party. What do you think?

Make it a +2 tire iron and you might have something.

Seriously, it sounds more realistic, but I have to ask myself, do I want realistic?  Most people will be intrigued by the idea, but will they stick with it?  Not sure on that front.

There WAS a fantasy supplement for D20M. I think it was called Urban Arcana.

Interesting idea.  It could be a lot of fun, but it needs to be almost any other system than D20.  It just doesn't do modern well.  Most of the skill based systems would be a vast improvement.

The concept is worth pursuing.

In reply to Bornite (msg # 4):

I'm super into the AGE system, which doesn't do skills at all, but attribute focuses.

All me to explain my terrible choice.

D20 modern feels to me like a reskin of 3.5 designed to take place in our world. Is not intended, I, to be a serious contemplation of a realistic group of special agents or any such thing. You can create virtually any character present in the modern world, despite how completely inappropriate most of those would be to any sort of adventuring at all. Rather, consider everything is a sort of palette swap of bows for guns and swords for different kinds of swords. It seems to me that that's more or less what I was going for. If I was trying to make a more realistic modern game, I would take those any of those options before D20 modern.

I got the idea & i think its interesting!

Im picturing a butcher armed with a cleaver & the star defenseman of the college hockey team holding off the troll while the harry krishna is trying to revive the ex-con with a rap sheet that failed his backstab and the old lady that owns the local occult shop is trying to work up a spell from her paperback copy of the "Magic for Dummies".

Oh the ideas abound!

This sounds like a ton of fun and you're right - without using d20 modern, it loses a great deal of its lampoon quality.

I'm not sure anyone here would go so far as to say that it's a terrible choice, and some of us wouldn't even say it was a bad choice. I think the point being made is closer to


This occurs outside d20 modern as well. Often better because a lot of modern systems have a sort of social mobility that makes "classes" kind of obsolete. The one mentioned has professions, backgrounds, and drives which define starting character features, but don't really rein in players much beyond that.


Yeah, a lot of the ones that cater to a more modern experience don't "palette swap" anything because swords and bows coexist, along with the firearms that have become obsolete since swords and bows became wall hangers. I also don't think realism is what's at concern here, its the idea that d20 modern is limiting by virtue of being a game spawned from Murderhobos Incorporated and lacks many of the refinements that separate current iterations from "I kill things and take their stuff, we talk at NPCs until you get the point to make us kill more things and take their stuff."

That is an oversimplification--more in today's market than the market of what like 15 years ago? But there is a marked difference between what games encourage now, and what they encouraged in semi-old school games of the era. If all you're looking for is the murderhoboing with minimal rewards enforced for other ways of playing the game other than what you houserule, d20 modern is gonna be great for it. If you're looking for something else--perhaps something deeper--it's... not gonna be wrong for it. It's totally gonna be ok for it.