Forums: Forums -> The Death of d20 Final Horizon

Though three months old news in my heart and mind, I think I'm compelled to relate to those few that have examined my blog about the death of my experimental d20 Future setting.

My work on Final Horizon d20 taught me a number of things. Firstly, you can't alter the basic mechanics of d20 too much. Even balancing everything else against itself, everything was unbalanced. The chinks and cracks in d20's foundations were magnified and exploded under the pressure.

And you know what? It turned out to be pretty boring. That's what I hate the most about the conclusions I've drawn from all of this. For all the effort, for all the care and attention that I have lavished on this setting - from it's earliest incarnation to its most recent, heavily BSG influenced rendition - it just did not translate to a fun RPG setting. Part of that was my own inept planning - I threw my players into the biggest mystery and conundrum of the entire setting almost from the get-go, which served to make them paranoid when they should have been bold and bold when they should have been paranoid. Part of it was my artificial magnifying of d20's flaws, which was both avoidable and unavoidable when dealing with d20 Modern/Future, especially. Designing starships proved better than Rules As Written, but the mechanics for fighting proved just as tedious and broken.

Part of it... part of it was just that Final Horizon doesn't have the stuff of heroes in it. It's a setting about ordinary people in extraordinary times and circumstances. There's no magic, little mystique to the setting - it's grim, it's dirty, it's all too human in its fragility and it's all too close to home in its realistic strangeness.

Thok the Barbarian and his kick-down-the-door style has no place in Final Horizon. Heroes wind up dead more often than not, and when you die, that's it. No magical technology will save you. No divine intervention is awaiting to patch you up. A Combat Medic can only do so much and they better do it fast if there's to be any hope at all. Duck and cover or fly and fry - most RPG players' worst nightmare. The NPC's, depending on who you offend, almost certainly have more firepower. A small, purely PC ship with some NPC crew has not a prayer in hell against an NPC ship-of-the-line. Information is need-to-know when it comes to the deeper and darker pits of the setting - and players usually won't dig.

It makes for a good read in my biased opinion, but an RPG? Not so much. At least, not as it stands these days.

Maybe, if and when Final Horzion and/or Teltesh make it big, I'll revisit Final Horizon d20 and do it proper, build it from the ground up into something of the scale the Teltesh CS is currently experiencing. D20 stripped of all but the name, and made into something suitable for that setting.

But for now, Final Horizon d20 is going the way of a Predator-class cruiser... decommissioned and placed in mothballs, in case it might need to be reactivated again someday...