Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 carteround Dec 12, 2010 8:28:36	Hey.   I'm new here, but nowhere near new to the D&D world. I've been playing and DMing 3.5e for about 6 years now, and plan on starting up a d20 Modern campaign mid-January. The group interested ranges from some people who haven't played d20 before (but have played a year or so of D&D) to expert D&D players who have played in multiple d20 campaigns.   As someone who's never DMed d20, I was wondering what the fundamental differences I will see and need to adhere to are. Will there be many style changes from 3.5e D&D, or will it simply be new and different material? I've always felt a little insecure about my DMing ability, if only because I'm constantly surrounded by DMs and players who have been involved in RPGs for twice as long as I have. Thanks, Carter
#2 rustam1 Dec 12, 2010 14:41:39	Welcome to d20 Modern.  I've found that overall, d20 is the same wheither playing DnD or Modern or even Star Wars. Yes, there is some cosmetic variance in the base rules but not enough to worry over. DMing becomes GMing. The genre change does require a change in style of play but nothing difficult.
#3 chitoryu12 Dec 24, 2010 0:32:30	The thing to be most careful of is weapon damage; especially at level 1, a single bullet is enough to knock a player into the negatives. This forces the players to be a lot smarter, but you'll also have to scale your campaign to this difficulty; with a small group of people all facing a much larger force, simply making them a level or so lower than the PCs will still make it very difficult. So always take into account the fact that not only can your players kill enemies in a single turn, the enemies can kill them just as easily. Battles are less of the D&D "Take turns swinging and hitting the person upside the head until the collapse" and more "Roll to hit, then see how close you came to blowing their face off." The GM for my current d20 game didn't know how powerful the standard weapons were, and his first enemy was killed with a single shot. I believe the change in defensive bonuses over armor class also affects survival; a high level character with little or no armor is more likely to avoid being killed than a low level character in top armor. There's nothing wrong with starting your guys off at level 4 and seeing if they can properly handle the danger; in our d20 game (World War II alternate history) we started at level 1 despite the GM's original intentions and almost ended up dead before we even saw combat due to our low health and defense.