Dumb and Wrong: D20, III

You might be wondering if this means I'm not done with Mecha and Manga. No, apparently, I'm not: it has a thing or two on this list. The density of 'wrong' in that supplement is fucking staggering.



Benefit: Normal Appearance. "Benefit" is a catch-all category of feats that provide a small benefit such as being an actual police officer, having ties to the mafia, or even having a friend you can call who has a teleporter... or a taco truck. It's for things that will be useful but can't really be quantified by numbers.

One of the suggested benefits in Mecha and Manga is the ability to "buy off" a drawback associated with your character's physical appearance or race. A "Drawback" is a numeric penalty or drawback like the Hulk's involuntary transformation or a weakness to a particular substance, like Kryptonite. You take them voluntarily so...if...you don't want a drawback, you just... don't take one. If it's late in the game, you pay off the point(s) and you erase it. That's how Mutants and Masterminds is. Changes have to be justified in the game, but after that? You're done, re-arrange your points.

This makes me so mad. What kind of rinky-dink bullshit is this where we have to catalogue this whole process by writing down our drawback then writing "Benefit: Bought off" next to it? Why include mandatory archetypes if you're going to let people skirt the drawbacks in them? This is exactly the dumb shit I was worried about when I mentioned the racial archetypes earlier in the book. It's unhelpful and wrong. Speaking of wrong...


Benefit: Standard Features. Artificial heroes can have five points of equipment per rank installed in themselves "As part of their species racial template". I mean, you guys don't need me for this one, right? Can you think of a reason this doesn't gel with the rules? The whole point of equipment is that they're locked down, minor point value powers that are balanced by the fact that you can lose them. You can't exactly lose something that's installed, can you?

The Features powers exists for this purpose. Once again, Mecha and Manga pointlessly re-invents the wheel.


"Golden Age" Benefits. I probably don't have a lot to say about the M&M Golden Age supplement, so let's place this here. It's a book on how to run a Golden Age comics era game, the sort of comics you saw in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Apparently, an enormous part of this book focuses on WWII, like there's nothing else to that era. Regardless, the Golden Age had a higher percentage of heroes who were "normal" people than today. It was a much more "down to Earth" time. Before we go any further, I just want to say M&M isn't very good at expressing the "Normal" side of heroing. If you wanted to run a Watchmen style game, you could absolutely do that: But you're not flexing the system very well. There's a lot that the system intentionally glosses over for that hero feel, and "low power hero" games might even be better in say, D20 Modern, Spycraft, or Gurps. Basically, what I'm saying is this book is already kind of on my shit list for being a bad idea.

That said.

Golden Age didn't seem to get the memo and includes a lot, a LOT of information and rules that I can't imagine coming up. There's a benefit(with several ranks!) to be exempt from the draft. I mean, you get why this isn't okay, right? How is this not just flatly a part of your game's plot? What the fuck are you going to do, leave the guy out of the military adventures? Take away someone's PC and tell them "They got drafted, make a new PC"? If they're doing all of the adventures together anyway whether they've been drafted or not, what exactly do I get out of spending points on this? There's even a huge amount of pontificating on what "level" of exempt you are and what social stigmas you face for it. It honestly feels like it's written with no research and just reflects basic pop culture ideas of the forties and fifties. This is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in a supplement. This definitely replaces that 3.0 D&D feat that gave you minor benefits vs. hippos as the stupidest feat ever created.

There's also a benefit to be exempt from rationing, giving you a +4 to any rolls on the "Rationing Table". I couldn't even find it! I have no idea what the fuck this does! Just take it and buy out the eggs and steak in your local supermarket, I guess. Fill up your big fucking death trap 40s car with gasoline and do donuts on main street.

A depressing amount of M&M's supplements have huge sections telling you how to play and build your character. In a system that's so free and agile...that sucks.


Pathfinder's Butterfly Knife. How the hell did I miss this one in my post about bad weapons? It provides literally no benefit over a basic dagger, can't be thrown, requires some nonsense to open it, and requires an exotic weapon proficiency to use. It's a Worse Dagger.

Where do I fucking begin?

Let's start of real simple. You can totally throw a balisong at someone. Like, it's not even harder than a traditional knife to throw. I even remember hearing something about throwing an unlocked butterfly knife at someone so it flails end-over-end in the air and stuns or confuses them.

This is what I mean by cool tax. This is a stock example I can point to, forever and until the end of time, of cool tax. It provides no benefit over a regular dagger and I'm floored that they couldn't think of anything to spice it up with. Even if you don't want to do that, what's wrong with this just being an expensive dagger, a modification? What's wrong with this being martial but with a small benefit? This is creatively bankrupt.


Chalk. I'm gonna let you in on a secret. I don't always check the physical copy when I'm writing stuff. It's extremely rare that the PFSRD website is wrong or misleading. Still, when someone I know showed the entry for chalk to me, I had to go look. Here, I super try to avoid doing this, but you need a direct quote. 

"This fat piece of white chalk easily marks wood, metal, or stone. You can write with it for about 24 hours before it is expended. Chalk also comes in other colors, but these are rarer and can be more expensive."

What a weird fucking way to express how much chalk you get. You can write with it for about twenty four hours? How in the world do they expect anyone to track that? You know, the entry for ink and inkpen don't even bother explaining how much writing you get out of it. Because it doesn't matter! Sometimes it's okay to abstract mundane gear. My brawler Icke had applejack whiskey and ink on him for the entire game. Was it the same bottles of either he started with? Probably not! It's probably his hundreth bottle of applejack and millionth inkwell. It's FINE. It's an extremely small amount of resource, even for a level one character. We can calm down.

And this entry also hits on a huge pet peeve of mine. An enormous one. Vague statements like "This is rarer and more expensive" can fuck off. It's ONE COPPER, just say it comes in a variety of colors! This is never going to come up! You're just baiting people into arguments. Arguments over chalk. Again, it's one copper, so if it's "more expensive" what is it, two fucking copper? This is the purest definition of minutiae I've ever seen.

And yeah, I'm completely aware that the person who wrote that probably didn't think about it and just needed to fill a few sentences. What do you say about chalk, anyway? It's chalk. Buy some chalk. Make little drawings on the dungeon walls, it's what we're all gonna use it for anyway.