Monday, June 09, 2008

True20: D&D With a Twist

For a lot of gamers, Dungeons & Dragons serves as something of a default game system. Certainly, it is by far the most popular, though some would argue the system suffers in comparison to other RPGs. After all, there are countless systems out there, some of them very different than D&D. For instance, game designer Jonathan Tweet created Over The Edge, a system with no skills or attributes, as well as Everway, a game with no dice. Of course, fans of the White Wolf's World of Darkness series of games prefer their system, and GURPS-players like theirs.

However, in the end, D&D's ubiquity won out. Wisely, D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast licensed out the game system, calling it d20 and inviting small publishers to design products for it. The terms of the agreement, called the Open Gaming License (OGL) even allows publishers to tinker with the rules.

True20 started as a d20 variant designed for use in Blue Rose: The Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy. In the True20 rulebook's introduction, developer Steve Kenson describes the game this way: 'The idea behind Blue Rose was to introduce new players to fantasy roleplaying with an untapped genre and a simpler, more self-contained system than is currently available under the Open Gaming License.'