fectin wrote:Stargate was sort of okay, and the protagonists are basically normal humans (I.e. Not wizards). It was built on Spycraft, which I've heard less good things about, but which had a massive update since I paid any attention whatsoever to it.
Edit: Traveller isn't d20.
Spycraft 2.0 is a massive toolkit. It's better in many ways than the original version, but it takes some getting used to.
For example, instead of creating a set of mooks for one adventure, you create a class of mooks (ie: tissue paper, good fight, and nearly-have-a-character-name) and the actual NPCs scale with the character levels. Damage for minor NPCs is done via saving throws that get cumulatively harder as you inflict damage.
The chase rules are some of the best I've ever seen for any RPG, period. They are fairly successful and are very cinematic and fun. In my Spycraft game there was generally an argument over who got to be the wheelman it was considered so much fun.
2.0 expanded this system for brainwashing, dragnets looking for people, and about four or five other "dramatic systems" that handle complicated series of events in a montage sort of way.
Even better, the chase system can be lifted wholly from Spycraft and dropped into any other D20 system, since it's based on a handful of skillchecks and it's own mechanics.
The characters are *way* powerful though. Level 14 powers (and level 10 prestige class powers) are essentially "game-breakers" that change the rules in some fundamentally beneficial way once or twice a session.
You're considered highly proficient, so you receive a pseudo-skill called "education", where if you think your character would know something you don't, you roll vs education and see if you've picked it up in the past. Kind of a neat way to ask the DM for help.
The system uses a wounds/vitality split, but it's not quite so lethal as Star Wars, since you have action dice, and among other things you spend them on activating critical hits *and* failures (so you can force the DM to critical failure, which he can ignore by awarding you extra action dice). Armor is mostly damage reduction with the occasional buff to AC, whereas class level helps determine AC. Action dice also can buff your AC for one round too.
Combat deals with a "fluid initiative" system where it's easy to increase your initiative count. At a certain point, if you're past I think 21 init, you can subtract 20 initiative to turn that head start into pure action, and you gain an extra half-action. It's a little more paperwork but it's nice for the one poor PC who's going last to spend a round gathering his wits and vaulting up in the initiative order.
Multiclassing is highly encouraged, although you may end up sacrificing your "game-breaker" at 14, the earlier levels all include significant abilities stacked early in the level progression to make shallow dipping an attractive option.
The system allows for some incredibly bullshit setups though. A military sniper with sniper levels could easily crit on a 10-20 (I'm not exaggerating) if he aims for 2-3 rounds. If memory serves, a level 10 sniper then has the ability to "take 10" on his attack roll, meaning he's going to crit once every 3 rounds so long as his action dice hold out. At that level he has something like 4 or 5 action dice available to him per session, plus any extra the GM hands out (which he needs to hand out, since he gains action dice by awarding them to the players).
The feat system is huge, and allows you to design your own martial art by combining different areas of martial arts into a fairly passable system.
My main complaint about the system is that the wealth/gadgets system is slow. Not as slow as the original spycraft, but still pretty slow. Mostly it's decision paralysis, since you can build your own gadgets from the ground up.
The rules support "gritty" military up through techno-thriller, and is aimed at a power level somewhere around the 007 movies (Casino Royale in the early levels, and some of the more bullshit movies in the later levels).
I liked the system. I never got any complaints when I ran it, everyone had fun, and it felt like a different enough game that it wasn't just another soulless D20 clone. It's also one of the bigger D20 toolkits at around 500 pages.