Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition loomed large in the gaming landscape twenty years ago. Wizards attempted to spin off a few products from its monolith. One of the most fondly remembered is D20 Modern which tore apart the chassis to Third Edition and rebuilt it with even more modularity in mind. Earlier this year, Evil Genius Games launched a Kickstarer for Everyday Heroes, a game which proposed merging the sensibilities of D20 Modern with the updated mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. Not only that, it boasted several licensed RPG books such as The Crow, Escape From New York, Kong: Skull Island and more powered by the system. The core book for Everyday Heroes and the first pair of licensed books have gone out to backers and to reviewers like me. Did they rise to the occasion of their ambition? Let’s play to find out.
Sigfried Trent, Chris “Goober” Ramsley and D. Todd Scott are the credited designers of Everyday Heroes with D20 Modern designers Owen K.C. Stevens and Jeff Grubb billed as Editor In Chief and Design Consultant respectively. The book certainly evokes the style of the old D20 Modern with a modern industrial look full of bullet holes, warning signs and slate gray backgrounds. The artwork runs from merely okay to very good with a notable diversity in body types and skin color. The book seems to be pushing an action movie world but it’s nice to see a variety of people getting mixed up in the over the top cinematic shenanigans.
There are other additions to the book that make it a little more user friendly than Fifth Edition. The book has an appendix that lists the major changes between this game and Fifth Edition. It’s a good bullet point summary for someone familiar with the original as to what they should be aware of being different, such as vehicle damage or that feats are an important part of the character leveling process. It also has a chart showing the complexity of the different archetypes and classes. I like this newer trend of designers explaining how and why different character types have different complexity. It makes those choices up front a little easier as newer players are often drawn to more complex characters such as magic users. I would have liked a little more discussion as to what the complexity ratings meant but that might be for a web enhancement or supplement book.
Characters are built from four main pieces: archetype, background, profession and class. Archetype and class are grouped like Class and subclass featuring a broad category and a specific focus for the character. The archetypes are where Everyday Heroes shows its strongest influence from D20 Modern with each one focused on the main attribute the characters use; Strong characters focus on Strength, Wise characters focus on Wisdom and so on. The Strong Hero archetype has a Brawler, Heavy Gunner and MMA Fighter available, while the Tough Hero has a Bodyguard, Commando and Scrapper. Many archetypes have classes that riff on a character type, such as the Strong MMA Fighter, the Agile Martial Artist and the Wise Master all being bare handed fighters that use their main ability to beat people up.
Smart characters are the domain of spellcasters but in a clever bit of design, the game recasts spells as Plans. They work in the same way as spells with usage slots and spells that increase in power as the character goes up in levels but they are built to service movie fantasy instead of Tolkien fantasy. The Hacker, for example, can manipulate technology to do everything from bricking a device to using an opponent’s social media profile to gain advantage on attack rolls. Given how often my friends who are IT professionals complain about “magic hacking” in TV and movies, these plans feel like an excellent substitute for massive spell lists while still filling the slot for players who like to mess with reality in games.
Everyday Heroes also shaves away some of the legacy mechanics from both games. Levels run from 1-10 with explicit milestone leveling determined by the GM. Players gain feats every even level and class abilities on every odd. Feats really drive home the customization in the design. There are major and minor feats and when a character gains feats they can pick one major or two minor feats. The vast majority of feats are minor, which mean those levels allow characters to take two. Most of the boring stuff associated with leveling up are covered by minor feats such as gaining attribute points or extra skill proficiencies. Most of the major feats cover a very specific style of attack with the most interesting ones being multiclass feats. These feats let players dip into other archetypes and classes and it’s a much more elegant way to make modular characters than what’s currently available. Between this main use of a feat tree and the way Pathfinder 2e handles multiclassing in a similar manner, I hope the designers of One D&D are paying attention.
The first two cinematic adventures are Escape From New York and The Crow. Each one offers a similar structure: world information, at least one new unique class, mechanics focused on the specific world and a full adventure in the setting. On the one hand, the adventure takes up the majority of the page count in each volume, which means if you want the cool backgrounds, classes and other bits for your home game and aren’t a fan of the property, it can feel like you’re buying a lot of useless material. There’s some neat stuff in these mechanics and for a game built on character customization its always good to have more options. On the other hand, one of the best ways to get people into the hobby is to find their fandom and run a game based on that story. While I think I would have preferred more generic genre books with advice on how to run stories in urban fantasy or urban post-apocalypse, I also like that I can take this game to friends, find a movie they like and spin up a game with little prep to see if maybe we want to take Everyday Heroes out for the long haul.
If you want a more modular version of Fifth Edition centered on modern day adventures, Everyday Heroes is an excellent choice.
