D&D 5E 5th Edition Modern or Near Future Rules

[DaleDavis67]

Can anyone lead me to any 5th Edition Modern or Near Future Rules? Looking to set up a game with a modern setting where aliens, fantasy creatures, vampires, etc. could be worked in at various times. Sort of and X-Files feel.

 

[Davo3]

Taking your D&D 5E to the Modern Era or a Cyberpunk Dystopian Future

So let’s talk about Dungeons and Dragons 5E … but let’s not talk about the Dungeons nor the Dragons. Alot of players love the rules that are incorporated into the Dungeons and Dra…

auricanslair.wordpress.com

 

[Andrew P]

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

I like this one. It's not tied to any particular setting so you can build just about any kind of campaign with it.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Some 3PP are creaing their own version of d20 Modern.

But d20 system isn't ready for repeating firearms and high-tech because they break the power balance. What is the righ XPs reward or challenge rating when an enemy has got "extra help"? For example a remote-control canon, is it a trap or a construct monster? How many XPs if you can drive a heay truck to hit over a horde of zombies? Don't you remember horror survival videogames where you need to hide and lot of stealth in the begining, but later with enough weapons you are a true one-man-army to face dozens of enemies?

A dire bear could be a true challenge for Conan the barbarian, but Salomon Kane with the right weapon only would need a shot. Do you understand?

What if your PC is a ripoff of your favorite character of Mortal Kombat but the GM is thinking about postapocalypse campaign with the monsters from "Doom Eternal"? Or a monster from "d20 Overwatch" would be totally broken if the PCs were only a campaign "Street Fighters, me against the neighbourd". In the videgame Sonya Blade (Mortal Kombat) can kick-ass Robocop, Terminator and even Superman (DC vs Mortal Kombat), but in a TTRPG the things are different.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

These are all non-issues.

What is the righ XPs reward or challenge rating when an enemy has got "extra help"?

The same as it is in a pseudo-medieval setting when an enemy has extra help.

For example a remote-control canon, is it a trap or a construct monster?

It's obviously a construct, since you could destroy it with weapon attacks. But so far as XP is concerned it makes no difference. You get XP for overcoming traps same as you get XP for overcoming monsters.

How many XPs if you can drive a heay truck to hit over a horde of zombies?

The same as you would get for fireballing them. XP is awarded for overcoming obstacles, how you do it is irrelevant.

Don't you remember horror survival videogames where you need to hide and lot of stealth in the begining, but later with enough weapons you are a true one-man-army to face dozens of enemies?

Survival Horror is any time the protagonists are underleveled and underequipped compared to the monster. It works just the same in any D&D setting.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Let's imagine a videogame based in Gamma World is being developed. The first enemy is a tribal mutant, with only a shield and spear. Easy, isn't it? OK, the next encounter is the mutant, a creature with the same stats, but this time he's a sniper from the top of a tree. This time isn't so easy. Players with experencie in shooters videogames can tell about how dangerous they may be. Later there is a new encounter, same creature, same stats, but this time with an exosuit or exosqueleton, like the ones from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. This is practically a miniboss. But it can be worse, a powered armor, something like the javelins of Anthem or the powered armors by Fallout saga. Enough? Wait to face the same enemy, but this time within a mecha, for example a Titan(Titanfall), a B.R.U.T.E(Fortnite) or Jackpot, the mech rided by Prety Boy (Borderlands 3: Moxxi's Heist of the Handsome Jackpot). If a creature with a monster template becomes more powerful (and higher Challenge Rating) then the repeating rifles and machin guns break the power balance in a sword & sorcery game. Salomon Kane only needs a shot to kill Conan the Barbarian.

In the first movie, Alien: the eight passenger only one xenomorph was enough to kill almost all Nostromo staff, but in the second movie they could kill dozends, maybe hundreds, from other room with the sentry guns. Do you remember the Silverster Stallone's action movie "Cobra"? In a scene Brigitte Nielsen's character was chased by the main antagonist, the night stalker, and she only could hide and run away, but later in the end the hero, Mario Cobretti, with enough weapons and ammo, as a one-man-army could terminate all the cult of the new dawn. Resident Evil and the Evil Within are two examples of survival horror where the stealth is replaced with the shootings when the PC has saved enough bullets.

The miniature board game of Mars Attack is a good example of gameplay where high-tech has to be "nerfed" for power balance against an lower-tech enemy faction. In the movie one shot with the ray gun and hundreds of senators were killed, desintegrated.

D20 Modern isn't ready for the different subgenres. Some Game Masters want adventures in the pulp age against Lovecraftian cults, others about street fighters in the 80's, and others soldiers in the battlefield killing nazis in the WWII (or their ersatzs in a panzerpunk fictional world). And WotC would like to make money with adaptation of famous franchises of videogames, but Overwatch eats Street Fighters.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

These are all non-issues.

I concur. I don't think 5E-style rules work at all well for most modern settings for a number of reasons (principally that rapid-firing high-velocity firearms are totally incompatible with the entire design of D&D combat), those particular reasons are not real issues. In a firearms-light, melee-heavy setting (Buffy-like, for example), 5E could work pretty well.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Other option would be to create different leveling-up pillars, one for power (hit points, bonus to save checks), other for talents (knownledge, for example number of learnt languanges), a third for shooting and the fourth for hand-to-hand fight.

Try to imagine in a zombie postapocalypse campaigns some GMs would rather hand-to-hand combat, and others shootings. For example the beat'em arcade "Zombi Revenge" supposedlly is in the same universe of "House of the Dead", one of the most famous rail shooters.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I concur. I don't think 5E-style rules work at all well for most modern settings for a number of reasons (principally that rapid-firing high-velocity firearms are totally incompatible with the entire design of D&D combat), those particular reasons are not real issues. In a firearms-light, melee-heavy setting (Buffy-like, for example), 5E could work pretty well.

Provided one is willing to accept a degree of abstraction, I disagree. One attack roll does not have to equate to one bullet (or burst).

One attack roll equating to a flurry of bullets (most of which miss) is entirely plausible and more realistic (in real world gun fights most shots miss).

One of the places where it really fails is in the case of sniper fire (one shot one kill), but that arguably deserves its own rules if it is to be included in the game (which can be a bit tricky to begin with).

If what you're suggesting is that 5e rules favor melee attacks, that can also be solved fairly straight forwardly, depending on your issue.

For example, if the problem you're looking to solve is melee combatants rushing gunners, you can modify guns to discourage such behavior. You could add a gun phase to combat which preempts the melee phase. And/or you could have guns force a save vs fear to avoid being frightened when shot at (or even when pointed at you). Since anyone who fails that save is frightened, they will be unable to approach the shooter until they shake off the fear. To encourage seeking cover, you could only allow a retry against fear if the target finds cover (or simply grant a bonus for cover, or have cover negate the fear entirely while behind it). Lots of options.

Then, if you want to include the steroetypical action movie martial arts character who can take on gun wielders, you can give him abilities that counter these advantages.

So on and so forth.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Provided one is willing to accept a degree of abstraction, I disagree. One attack roll does not have to equate to one bullet (or burst).

One attack roll equating to a flurry of bullets (most of which miss) is entirely plausible and more realistic (in real world gun fights most shots miss).

I've just never seen a d20 system with rising HP make this remotely plausible. As a teenager I did a lot of fencing and shot a lot of guns (of various kinds, in various situations, kind of unusual for the UK, but anyway), and I've just never seen anything in d20 with rising HP which didn't feel incredibly stupid and immersion-disintegrating compared to my actual experience of firearms and so on. With melee I can totally buy you might well only get one good chance to connect in six seconds. It's completely plausible to me. With archery or the like? Sure. Draw and firing arrows is not necessarily a speedy process. Same with throwing weapons.

With a semi-automatic or multi-barrelled gun? You have to be kidding. Someone with L1-equivalent training could certainly fire multiple shots in six seconds (potentially empty the clip - people often do), and if at close range, many of them might hit.

And HP, which works okay conceptually in other situations, just doesn't do well with this whole idea, both because its less plausible (you're constantly having bullets either slightly clip people, or hit armour plates or whatever and bruise), and because of the way HP steeply rise in D&D, which just makes everything even more questionable.

AC also doesn't really work well with modern firearms.

I know people love to say "I SOLVED THE PROBLEM!!!!" and I'm sure I've done it, but this isn't one problem, and you're not the first to tackle it. It's a constellation of problems that combine to create a situation that grinds immersion into dust. It's not like I haven't played tons of games which thought that they "solved it". I have - obviously including d20 Modern and Spycraft. They just don't end up plausible, not even as action movies.

Whereas loads of other RPGs have fundamentally different mechanics that handle this sort of situation both gracefully and plausibly. Using 5E for a modern-day type game is like deciding to use a hammer to cut wood. The only times it can work, in my experience, are far-future, Buck Rogers-esque fantasy, where ray-guns and the like don't necessarily work like RL guns, nor does the "space armour" you're wearing, or in Buffy-esque games where guns just simply make themselves scarce 90% of the time, and aren't good tools for the job most of the rest.

I do think you could do a d20-based system that loosely drew from 5E mechanics to make this work, but I think you'd need to rework HP and AC massively, and likely make it so you had multiple attacks/round as a matter of course and at some point it's probably just going to cease being 5E in any meaningful way.