Re: [WW] No more WW D20?[SHANE]

[PEGShane@aol.com]

In a message dated 4/20/2002 11:03:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time, grandmasternilus@hotmail.com writes:


> Are you sure about this?  This board has been a little slow lately but if 
> there was going to be a big change to WWII I think Shane would have posted 
> it here first.
>
> Can we get a confirmation from Shane about this.  Personally I like PEG 
> house system,  but I don't think it fits a WWII game.  But something sound 
> fishy here,  Why would a company stop making D20 products...There a gold 
> mine supposedly.  It sounds like someone got there facts wrong
>
> Dan
>
> Dan


Well. . .I was going to post here first--the magazine came out faster than it was supposed to. ;)

Sooooo. . .without further spin. . .

Weird War Two will remain D20. The following D20 books are on the way:
Hell Freezes Over (The Russian Front)
Land of the Rising Dead (The Pacific Front)
Horrors of Weird War Two (Monster book for all fronts)

What we do with Weird War Two after that depends on sales, but this schedule takes us through August of this year anyway. For instance, I have several good adventure submissions that we'll likely find a home for in another collection. Weird War Two *may* continue as a line--a d20 line--that has nothing to do with the other Weird Wars releases in 2003.

I'll talk only about WW2 D20 in this post, and then tell you about the new stuff in the next one. Please don't reply until you've read both.

Why the switch?

There are many. I'll list them with as much detail as is appropriate.
1) Sales: Sales on Weird Wars are no greater than anything else we do (Deadlands, Hell on Earth). The initial reason to use D20 was to break into a whole new sales level for us. This hasn't happened. It seems most D20 players are D&D players, and aren't particularly interested in switching genres.

That said, Deadlands D20 and the upcoming Hell on Earth D20 *have* done very well for us. They've gotten a new crop of people to look at those games, which helps us sell the immense amount of backstock we have for those games. If DL D20 and HOE D20 were brand new games, sales would have been *much lower* than the initial DL and HOE releases. I don't want to spill confidential sales numbers, but in the first year of DL's release (in '96), we sold over 30,000 copies. Deadlands D20 looks like it'll sell about 8,000 copies in one year. Far fewer, but still a healthy dose of new players into the game (though I estimate about half of those are regular DL players who just wanted to see what we'd done with the system).

2) The System: I don't hate D20, but neither am I its greatest fan. While playing in Jason Nichols' Russian Front WW campaign, it became painfully obvious that D20 is not cut out for battles with even 10 characters per side. The first thing every GM did (in both Hopler's West Front campaign and Jason's Russian game) was to kill off all the allied NPCs so we didn't have to deal with. "You're crossing the street and a MG42 opens up. (Fakes rolling dice.) Oh, no! Everyone in the squad is cut down except for you five!" Right.

Without modification, D20 is really goofy about not awarding experience for *avoiding* fights, good roleplaying, etc.--something you really need to do often in Weird Wars games.

3) Perception is Reality: D20 works best for melee combat. When you hit someone with a .50 cal, they should die. In D20, they take 2d10 damage. It just doesn't *feel* right, and we got more than a few eye-rollings, groans, or sighs from convention-players, particularly "gun guys" who know what should happen when a .50 bullet hits flesh.

4) D20 Modern: Recently, WOTC announced the release of D20 Modern. This will be the new *official* rules for modern D20 games. I'm on a special list, and know some of the designers personally, and what they're doing with D20 sounds pretty decent--but it's still D20. Since it isn't coming out until November, it also means Weird Wars won't be using what gamers everywhere will consider the "official" rules for D20 games with guns. Where does that leave us? I have no idea, but I can't see it as a positive thing. If WOTC had designed a game that was built for other genres from the beginning--as I feel they should have given the OGL--the field wouldn't be such a mess right now.

5) There is better: This is the subject of the next email.

Shane