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Thursday, June 23, 2005

Gossip: Prime Directive d20

This blogger has heard that a big part of the delay in Prime Directive d20, produced by Amarillo Design Bureau is in the fact that the publisher has said that he is uninterested in learning the d20 system in order to understand the manuscript turned into him from a respected d20 author. This disinterest has lead to internal strife between the publisher and the author, as the unknowledgeable publisher and playtesters who are just as clueless have forced enormous rewrites of the material, rewrites that in many cases do not fit with the workings of the d20 system. Many of these re-writes wouldn't even make sense to someone with a passing knowledge of how d20 works, such as requirements to spend XP at certain places in character development (which of course would mean that characters would not be able to advance as quickly due to having to use XP for things other than what they are intended for in the system.

This blogger fears that the resulting book may not even be compatible with other d20 products, due to a mistaken understanding of the nature of how d20 works. Hopefully, this will not be the case.

This blogger thought that the days of publishers attempting to exploit the d20 fan base with uninsipred and poorly implemented conversions of their house settings was a thing of the past. While Prime Directive d20 sounded interesting when announced, this blogger can not justify supporting a publisher who has expressed disintrest in learning a system and is only publishing for that system for the money of the fan base.

ADB Discussion Forum

From a posting by Steven Cole of ADB (in the above linked thread): "It is important to remember that SVC will do the production coordination and probably the page layouts but that he doesn't understand the D20 system at all (and doesn't want to)."

This blogger finds this attitude to be very disheartening.