For those that don’t know what I’m talking about, think Halo combined with Dungeons and Dragons, minus the stereotypes associated with the latter.
A short explanation:
I’ve known about Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) for some time. It’s a part of pop culture and has a lot of concepts associated with it. It even has a lot of video games based on it, including an MMORPG. I played some of these games, but never imagined that I would actually play the tabletop. My friend, Rookey, told me a little bit about it a few years ago and opened my mind to it. A month or so ago, I actually played the game for the first time. My mind was blown by the creative freedom that the game allowed.
I’ve partaken in forum-based roleplays for nearing a decade now and have always enjoyed the freedom they allow to express your creative side. The problem with them is that they are hard to ground in reality and, sometimes, things can get a little… larger than life. There is not really a system to keep it in check other than one’s self-restraint and peer review.
That is what D&D does so well. Through a series of dice rolls, you can determine if you can move without getting hit, if you can hit an enemy, how much damage you do to said enemy, if you dodge a swing from an enemy, if you can find something hidden in a room, if you can jump across a chasm, and much, much more.
The D20 system simply refers to a set of rules centered around a 20-sided die. There are other dice, too (i.e. 4, a standard 6-sided die, 8, 10, 12, a percentile [10%, 20%, etc.], and others) that can be used to account for a weapon’s damage where you can roll say a 6-sided die to account for a simple pistol, or maybe an 8-sided die for a rifle, or perhaps even a 12-sided die that you roll twice and combine the total to account for an explosion.
It also allows you to tell your own story. You make a character unique to you, whom you portray based on what you have written on paper and the choices you make. In the universe of Halo, you could be a no-ranked recruit in the UNSC learning his place in the universe. What about a marksman who prefers to leave the up close and personal to another and instead likes to fire precision shots from afar? You could be an intelligent ONI agent trained to hack computers who also has a knack for bending the truth. Perhaps you are a battle-worn Helljumper with a dozen drops under your belt and a scar for each one. If combat isn’t your finesse, you could be a corpsman, intent on keeping your friends from falling into the eternal slumber. If none of these suit you, you could perhaps be a pilot who considers yourself to be an artist, with a pelican as your brush. What if you don’t want to be human? You could be a Sangheli youth who opposes the old ways and understands that Humanity is not the enemy, even if they think differently of you. You could be a Kig-Yar pirate who spends more time worried about your next big haul than whether or not the human rebel you just killed for double-crossing you had a family.
What if you are a Spartan? Heck, you could be one of the last of the Spartan-IIs. You could have been awoken from a decades-long sleep in cryo after which you discover you “died” during your augmentation mission and have been reinstated after delicate operations to return you from the twilight under the category of “Class 2.” You could be a Spartan-III, baptized in battle defending Earth after leaving the hidden planet of Onyx. You could even be a Spartan-IV, the newest generation of Spartans. You were picked, for one reason or another, to join the elite branch in the protection of Earth. Maybe you’re a new recruit, or maybe you were on the UNSC Infinity when it was pulled into Requiem.
The Halo universe is a perfect fit for a Modern D20 game. From a gameplay aspect, it could easily be made. People have already made their own versions, but none of them are complete or as in-depth as Halo deserves. From a storytelling aspect, this gives ultimate freedom to the player and through rule and story books to go along with the game, More story, history, and mystery could be added to the Halo Universe. Holes in knowledge could be filled and others could be made that add new intrigue to what possibilities are out there.
Consider this my pitch: What if 343 Industries and Wizards of the Coast (The creators of D&D, the Magic card game, and more) partnered up? I’m still new at D&D, but the possibilities… My mind spins with “what ifs” of the adventures that would spring forth from this untapped well.
What would you do? Discuss!
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