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

[CapnZapp]

A theme to this thread seems to be "D&D doesn't work with firearms because people won't fight because people won't approach combat the way I expect them to".

But end of the day I don't care what tactics my players use, it's up to them. I don't care if they play "the right way" as long as they're having fun.

Thank you for finally coming aboard.

Yes, at least I have never had the intention to call out your game as badwrongfun. Only explain to people why you might want to reconsider using hit points in a "modern" genre (with a focus on ranged fire, cover and tactics; as opposed to brawn and courage), and why this desire is not merely based in misunderstandings, double standards, or otherwise dismissable arguments.

Good luck with your game!

 

[CapnZapp]

You persist in conflating no-hp with cover, when they are actually two separate and unrelated features.

I am saying hit points make cover less relevant and enables you take shortcuts to your target in ways you simply wouldn't without them. Hp is a kind of "portable cover" in how they both act to delay or prevent your death.

Still think I can't keep them separate?

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Indeed, it can work very well that way. The Shadowrunesque game I ran made absolutely no changes to the base classes, only introducing some new optional subclasses and backgrounds.

Similarly the X-Crawl game that I ran some time ago. When the party engaged in adventures outside the confines of the dungeon, guns featured prominently, and required no house ruling or changes whatsoever (except deciding how machineguns worked).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I am saying hit points make cover less relevant and enables you take shortcuts to your target in ways you simply wouldn't without them. Hp is a kind of "portable cover" in how they both act to delay or prevent your death.

Still think I can't keep them separate?

In my experience, cover acts more like AC than hp. You are either 100% safe or are at the mercy of a bad dice roll.

Games like Mass Effect and Shadowrun manage to combine hp with a cover based combat system, because cover and hp do not work the same.

So yes, I think you can't separate things that are actually quite different.

 

[Oofta]

FWIW, in one instance I statted a minigun as an Area Effect that attacked everyone/thing in its beaten zone.

Yeah, I'd probably do something similar - area effect in a cone maybe. The primary purpose of machine guns is primarily suppression fire.

 

[Oofta]

If we are discussing westerns, gatling guns fired 200-900 per minute or 20-90 per round, depending on caliber. 6000 is for modern versions, and would be 600 per round, not 100.

Still a lot (and I meant to go back and check to see if I had a typo). But my google-fu just failed me. Serves me right for just looking at the search page result and not clicking the link.

 

[Maxperson]

Still a lot (and I meant to go back and check to see if I had a typo). But my google-fu just failed me. Serves me right for just looking at the search page result and not clicking the link.

Oh, yeah. Still a ton of shots for sure.

 

[Aldarc]

Much like [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], I like Bronze Age, early Iron Age, and Antiquity, but I think that most setting writers have a shallow historical grasp of these time periods beyond their aesthetics.* ("Look, here's a guy dressed like a Spartan hoplite fighting a minotaur!") And that's always disappointing to me. The same is probably true for D&D's relation to the Middle Ages. And other settings/systems do a better job emulating these other historical societies. Harn or even Pendragon will probably be better choices for Middle Age questing. RuneQuest takes a Bronze Age worldview of the mythos and turns it into a cosmic reality. So I would probably, instead, prefer if D&D explored its own sense of D&D-style fantasy.

As such, I would like to see another setting like Dawnforge from the 3e era. Dawnforge was a setting about a world prior to the world that D&D frequently presumes: essentially D&D's "prequel setting." It presents a time before the drow became drow. It presents a world where there are no clerics but there are shamans of spirits and disciples of demigods who walk (or are found on) the earth. It was meant to be a mythic age for D&D as opposed to the mythic age for us. D&D could also draw on the lore for 4e's Points of Light setting with its Nerath and Arkosia Empires and such for such a "prequel setting." A world before its dungeons became ruined dungeons.

* Here I am also reminded of how by the time of Homer, people had clearly forgotten how the prior society of their stories engaged in warfare. Historians and literary scholars point to, for example, how Homer describes Achilles and other Hellenes in the Illiad riding their chariots to the front lines and then jumping off to fight one-on-one. But we know based upon how contemporaries to the Mycenaean Greeks in the Mediterranean that the chariots were used more like tanks. So the purpose of chariots in combat had been forgotten by Homer in the Greek Dark Ages. The aesthetics of chariots are a part of the story, but the aesthetic is divorced from its actual contextual use.

 

[Tony Vargas]

D&D is *definitely* a game constructed to allow the Barbarian to break cover and rush into melee.

I'm not saying it isn't able to allow a Barbarian to rush into melee even in the face of twanging crossbows or dragon's breath or the like - given the right sort of character, at the right levels, wearing the right armor, with the right good save. Just that: 1) it doesn't do it without some willingness to be flexible when it comes to visualizing the character and what hps mean in the story and 2) it wasn't designed explicitly to do that one thing and prevent doing anything else, rather, with the same degree of flexibility & imagination, you can use the hp mechanic to model the plot armor that crops up in wildly different genres. \
That's possible precisely because it is such an abstract mechanic.

Referee: Alright! Walk ten paces forward, dive for cover, then turn and shoot!

That's a European pistol duel. An Old West "Showdown" had no referee or seconds, and you faced eachother the whole time.

But that'd probably require it's own special rules in a 5e adaptation.

Yeah, I'd probably do something similar - area effect in a cone maybe. The primary purpose of machine guns is primarily suppression fire.

Yeah, it was the equivalent of a 5e cone, IIRC. Oh, also, the suppression fire comment just reminded me: the minigun (I think I mistakenly referred to it as a chaingun at the time) was an AE that attacked everyone in the area, /if it missed, it knocked you prone/. Not because it was shooting out bolas or anything, but because dropping prone is just a very plausible & genre-appropriate way of avoiding being hit by a hail of bullets.

There's probably a lot of things you could apply on a miss (or even a hit that does less than some threshold of current hps, perhaps), that way, to enforce genre conventions.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Just wanted to say thanks to some of you folks for bringing this thread back on track. Some of those ideas sound pretty cool. And I like the AoE affect for high RPM weapons. Gives me thoughts...