D20 System

I got a starter kit for the 4th Edition D&D rules for Father's Day. It's the D20 system, and I'd sort of vowed to never dabble with such things. Real D&D geeks play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, with its sans serif font and goofy preoccupation with polearms! Or so I believed. But now that I've had a chance to look at the D20 system as manifested in the 4th Edition rules, I think maybe I was a little over-hasty.

The truth is that it might be okay. The rules are pretty well written and pretty well organized, which is a pretty welcome break with past D&D tradition, where impenetrable rules were pretty much the order of the day. They have a high level of graphical sophistication and they're nicely printed on good paper, which doesn't hurt either. But mostly I see in the generalized D20 mechanic a tidy and efficient way of abstracting out a lot of the complexity that bedeviled AD&D, and I'm strongly tempted to officially adopt D20 as my preferred D&D system. It kind of reminds me of Dragonquest in the sense that the same basic mechanic applies to practically every situation, but with the bonus that rolling a 20-sided dice produces a linear probability plot instead of the wretched bell curves produced by rolling multiple 6-sided dice, and I like my probability plots linear.

So. 4th Edition D&D, D20... Good so far!