D&D General If you could put D&D into any other non middle ages genre, what would it be?

Sacrosanct · Jun 22, 2019

Do you ever wish forum posts were like Facebook posts, where you could turn off commenting on posts you create? And just let them die and be forgotten?

That’s how I’m feeling about this one. Went off the rails right away. I don’t know, maybe I’m at fault for presenting a discussion idea I thought would be fun to talk about without realizing how fast it would degrade into an off topic back and forth. It was supposed to be about what other genre/setting/era outside of traditional D&D might be fun for you to play with the D&D rules, and it immediately got stuck on the guns in the Wild West and how D&D sucks for that.

If you think D&D rules don’t work for that, good for you. Then don’t talk about it. Talk about what setting/genre you think would be fun. And if you can’t think of one, then this thread clearly isn’t for you. Anything else is threadcapping.

I swear, we can’t even have a basic discussion of “I think this would be fun” without people chiming in to say how that’s wrong, how it sucks, etc.

robus · Jun 22, 2019

Maxperson said:
A knife strike that hits is also often a wound that does major damage and is often lethal, yet we're okay with hit points modeling those sorts of injuries.

Not to me, HP loss is modeling the effort to turn that potentially lethal knife blow into just a scratch, requiring both mental and physical effort. For a gun fight I would say HP is simply tracking how long it is until your luck finally runs out. I could live with that I think. People with low HP are simply inexperienced in the art of gunfighting and are quick to dispatch with a single shot. Hmm that’s growing on me...

robus · Jun 22, 2019

Sacrosanct said:
Do you ever wish forum posts were like Facebook posts, where you could turn off commenting on posts you create? And just let them die and be forgotten?

That’s how I’m feeling about this one. Went off the rails right away. I don’t know, maybe I’m at fault for presenting a discussion idea I thought would be fun to talk about without realizing how fast it would degrade into an off topic back and forth. It was supposed to be about what other genre/setting/era outside of traditional D&D might be fun for you to play with the D&D rules, and it immediately got stuck on the guns in the Wild West and how D&D sucks for that.

If you think D&D rules don’t work for that, good for you. Then don’t talk about it. Talk about what setting/genre you think would be fun. And if you can’t think of one, then this thread clearly isn’t for you. Anything else is threadcapping.

I swear, we can’t even have a basic discussion of “I think this would be fun” without people chiming in to say how that’s wrong, how it sucks, etc.

How about starting it over with a “no guns allowed” proviso?

Fenris-77 · Jun 22, 2019

robus said:
Not to me, HP loss is modeling the effort to turn that potentially lethal knife blow into just a scratch, requiring both mental and physical effort. For a gun fight I would say HP is simply tracking how long it is until your luck finally runs out. I could live with that I think. People with low HP are simply inexperienced in the art of gunfighting and are quick to dispatch with a single shot. Hmm that’s growing on me...

Given the stories I like to tell, and my players like to play, I am completely content with this being how HP interact with firearms.

robus · Jun 23, 2019

And as the most recent threadcrapper, I’ll make an effort to get it back on the rails...

Other genre’s I’d like to apply D&D?

* Humans vs creatures of the night. Basically gothic horror type of thing, only humans as PCs
* Ancient World and a voyage of fantastic discovery and strange creatures.
* Alien world full of ancient ruins and strange creatures and unique character races (Zendikar would be my model)
* Virtual reality, players would have 3 characters: their human character, their custom VR avatar and a proper D&D character for playing virtual adventures.
* Jungle exploration adventure but without airdropped PCs from another part of the world.

Fenris-77 · Jun 23, 2019

I'm a big fan of voyage of discovery type adventures, whether their more realistic or more Indiana Jones-y. It's a fun kind of story. The nature of ship travel also lends itself very well to nice, manageable, self contained adventure episodes.

On the gothic horror front what's the mental image you have there? Mostly I default to something that feels like the show Supernatural, which is a little WoD around the edges, but I think D&D could be used for it, even if it maybe isn't ideal in a couple of ways. The Supernatural model has protagonists who play on film like D&D heroes play at the tabletop in terms of survivability at whatnot, which is why I think it would work pretty well. Lovecraftian horror seems to fit the rules set less well, but is certainly doable.

robus · Jun 23, 2019

Fenris-77 said:
On the gothic horror front what's the mental image you have there? Mostly I default to something that feels like the show Supernatural, which is a little WoD around the edges, but I think D&D could be used for it, even if it maybe isn't ideal in a couple of ways. The Supernatural model has protagonists who play on film like D&D heroes play at the tabletop in terms of survivability at whatnot, which is why I think it would work pretty well. Lovecraftian horror seems to fit the rules set less well, but is certainly doable.

It really could be anything from medieval type witch-hunter, through Dracula, and into Cthulhu (and perhaps even to some kind of Doom/Quake type scenario, so leaving the gothic there a bit

) The key part for me is (somewhat helpless) humans facing terrible horrors.

Fenris-77 · Jun 23, 2019

robus said:
It really could be anything from medieval type witch-hunter, through Dracula, and into Cthulhu (and perhaps even to some kind of Doom/Quake type scenario, so leaving the gothic there a bit ) The key part for me is (somewhat helpless) humans facing terrible horrors.

Hmm. That's a pretty broad range. I think the extent to which a given example there is going end up with a combat intense 'average' session probably determines the usefulness of the D&D rule set. In a traditionally Lovecraftian horror game that has very little in the way of combat I'd probably pick another system. Everything else on that list would be doable, with the basic question being "can I combat terrible horrors with a BFG or spell equivalent?". The more helpless the humans the less useful D&D is as an engine IMO.

Urriak · Jun 23, 2019

So... I guess here are a ideas of mine;

- Renaissance era, with things like pirates, and some gunpowder. Flying ships as blimps and stuff.
- Victorian merging things like "jack the ripper" style murders in the cities, tensions between colonial powers and local communities. Maybe mix some Cthulhu, vampires both fit well in that aesthetic.
- WWI style, with lots of steampunk mixed in. Imagine orcs in tweed and tieflings at the forefront with gatling guns.
- Gamma World style, with just a dash of sci-fi but mostly post-apocalyptic wasteland. Less Dark Sun, more Mad Max.

Those are some of my ideas; a lot of different RPGs tackle some of these ideas in different form already. I of course want to see different cultures as well (Asian, African, Middle East are sorely lacking right now in D&D) but these are ones that would require some new mechanics to truly get right.

CapnZapp · Jun 23, 2019

Fenris-77 said:
I didn't say anyone wasn't content (I am btw) with certain things, nor that the system might be better at one that the other (it i). The fact remains that, contentedness aside, D&D isn't modelling accurate damage from any kind of weapon. An individual might not be happy about how HP models faux-modern ranged combat, but really, so what? It isn't designed to do that. The point at which people find it "entirely inadequate" is because those people have very different expectations about firearms and their damage relative to melee with blunt and bladed weapons. Those expectations are based on very fictional understandings of medieval combat and less fictional understandings of firearms. You can't be ok with highly fictional on the one hand and not on the other without a willingness to admit that it's your expectations, not the system, that are the issue. Or at least a big part of the issue.

I do agree that there's more to it than that, but I also think it's pretty cogent to point out what amounts to a category mistake at the heart of the issue at hand.

My point is that anyone dismissing complaints against a hp-driven firearms-enabled campaign can't or won't see the bigger picture.

It is not, I repeat not, as easy as "if you don't like it, you're lacking in understanding".

The damage model drives behavior on the battle mat. Hit points enable melee and deemphasizes cover and tactics. The resulting way combats execute is why people complain.

That's why I participate in this thread. I see far too many unenlightened and reductive analyses, and so a deeper explanation is in order.

PS. As already discussed, D&D offers a fairly primitive ruleset when it comes to ranged-centric combat, with the ability to spend every character's turn except your own in complete safety as maybe the most egregious example. (That's not the fault of hit points, but it is a complaint that cannot and should not be dismissed with the crude notion this is only about people holding different genres to different standards, with it's undercurrent of "they're wrong")