Minimum Mage

Y'know what? Fuck it.

My M20 System Review, Abridged:

The Magic System: Slightly clearer than previous versions. Still very fiddly and prone to arguments. But arguing is part of the fun. I'll have a future post where I discuss system overhauls I might like to try, but for now, this section ranks "Pretty Good".

Chargen: Still has fucked up costs where overspecializing at chargen saves you a ton of XP down the road. Any GM who can do math can fix this themselves. Ranking:"Still White Wolf".

Everything Else Except Combat: You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll roll your eyes, but you can play a game, and again, it has some solid improvements over the previous version, particularly around writing out rules that used to be extremely vague and often handed by the GM going "Uh... I dunno, here, try this". Final ranking? "Wordy But Playable".

Combat: A flaming dumpster of burning tires, combined with the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the oh god no my eyes. Ranking: "Worse Than Watching Zardoz Sober".

It is the Year of Our Lord 2015, the Century of the Anchovy, 3181 YOLD by the Discordian reckoning. No one is re-rolling initiative every combat round. We have shit to do.

My advice for now is to run combat the way you run any opposed task: you and That Guy announce what you want to do, roll your opposed combat stats, and whoever gets more hits (sorry, successes) wins.

I'm working on a slightly more complicated combat engine that I'll post soon, now that I've gotten "actually review shit" off my to-do list, but needless to say, at no point does it involve rolling initiative.

I am so over that.