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

[DEFCON 1]

Easiest way to simulate firearms in a near-future setting using 5E rules is for every PC to have only one hit die and 1st level hit points that never go up (except when you increase your CON). And then you make all firearms "wands of lightning bolts" and grenades "wands of fireballs". With every gunshot and explosion doing 8d6 in damage, almost all characters will get one-shotted to 0 HP when they are hit or are caught in the explosion (as they should be) and will begin bleeding out immediately.

Combat will run much differently when players realize fighting is no longer slogs of hit point attrition, and instead it's more likely one-and-done. Getting into cover and out of line-of-sight becomes hugely more important, and anything that can grant you Temp HP or increase defenses is a necessity if you wish to survive. And on top of all of that, the combat mini-game drops greatly in importance for what your game is about, because no one will survive that long if they keep getting into pointless firefights just because it's "something to do". Social and Exploration pillars will need to take a much more prominent position in what the players do.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

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.

It's stupid and immersion-breaking if you are familiar with edged weapons too. A knife through the heart will make you just as dead as a bullet. 285 people where killed with knives in the UK in 2017/18, around ten times as many who where killed with guns.

HP is just stupid and unrealistic however you swing it, but since it makes for a fun game we just roll with it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

...but since it makes for a fun game we just roll with it.

I think you mean "roll FOR it".

 

[Oofta]

A sniper rifle in the hands of someone who does not know how to use it is still dangerous if they actually hit, but most people are not trained snipers.

Fully automatic submachine guns weapons (uzis) are not the machines of instant mass death depicted in movies. They burn through ammo in a few seconds, tend to overheat and are incredibly inaccurate.

All firearms are dangerous in the right hands and under the right situation. So are swords, spears and longbows. People also don't realize how heavy ammunition is, or how expensive.

So the PCs dive out of the way at the last moment because they see the red dot from the sniper (even though sniper rifles don't work that way IRL) or are protected by that bag of Doritos like they are in movies.

Maybe just give up on the concept of XP per death and look at driving over a horde of zombies as a skill challenge since you aren't directly in combat.

There are a lot of options. If you want action-movie logic I think D&D would work fine. Real world logic? D&D doesn't even do that very well without firearms.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So the PCs dive out of the way at the last moment because they see the red dot from the sniper (even though sniper rifles don't work that way IRL) or are protected by that bag of Doritos like they are in movies.

That's the thing, so long as you apply action movie logic rather than try to be simulationist, HP works just as well for bullets as for anything else. How many bullets do Indiana Jones or John McClane take without dying (or even slowing down)?

 

[Oofta]

That's the thing, so long as you apply action movie logic rather than try to be simulationist, HP works just as well for bullets as for anything else. How many bullets do Indiana Jones or John McClane take without dying (or even slowing down)?

Hey, they slowed down and winced at least once. Put the arm in a sling to show how badly hurt they are.

The sling comes off after 2 minutes, but at least they winced to show how hurt they were from a bullet wound that would have taken months of treatment and therapy in real life. There is practically no such thing as a "flesh wound" when it comes to firearms except in the movies.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Hey, they slowed down and winced at least once. Put the arm in a sling to show how badly hurt they are.

The sling comes off after 2 minutes, but at least they winced to show how hurt they were from a bullet wound that would have taken months of treatment and therapy in real life. There is practically no such thing as a "flesh wound" when it comes to firearms except in the movies.

The Last Action Hero runs with that idea. When the fictional hero is shot in the chest and dying in the real world, they are transported back into their movie world, where it becomes "barely a flesh wound".

 

[Fanaelialae]

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.

I disagree. I think the issue has more to do with your conception of firearms. Although I agree that I can't "fix" that for you, because I don't know what it is. The most I can do is offer suggestions to potential issues. However, it may be that your conception of guns is such that no balanced gun rules are possible for you within a system like 5e.

I could, however, create firearms rules for my own group because I know them. We've played plenty of enjoyable games using the system from various editions of D&D that focused on guns as the primary weapons of choice.

That said, your own preferences don't necessarily apply to others (just as mine don't necessarily apply either).

I studied martial arts as a young man and I enjoy going to the gun range on occasion with friends. IMO, HP are an abstraction that works just as well/poorly for melee weapons, arrows, and guns. All of the above are fairly deadly in the real world, precluding medical intervention.

You can fire a gun fairly rapidly. But have you ever fired one rapidly and gotten a tight grouping on the target? It's not easy to do. Maybe if you're using bb guns or .22s or subsonic ammunition, but all of those are outliers that aren't typically used in combat. Now, imagine how much harder that tight grouping would be if you were trying to do all that while the target is moving and shooting back at you!

Statistics back me up. Even at close range, even with trained combatants, the majority of shots miss in combat situations. I can dig some up and post them for you if you don't believe me, but they're not difficult to find.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Hey, they slowed down and winced at least once. Put the arm in a sling to show how badly hurt they are.

The sling comes off after 2 minutes, but at least they winced to show how hurt they were from a bullet wound that would have taken months of treatment and therapy in real life. There is practically no such thing as a "flesh wound" when it comes to firearms except in the movies.

I strongly suspect there is practically no such thing as a "flesh wound" when it comes to swords and spears either (apart from, as you say, the movies).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's stupid and immersion-breaking if you are familiar with edged weapons too. A knife through the heart will make you just as dead as a bullet. 285 people where killed with knives in the UK in 2017/18, around ten times as many who where killed with guns.

HP is just stupid and unrealistic however you swing it, but since it makes for a fun game we just roll with it.

Sure, but that's only one of the problems. HP don't represent being "stabbed through the heart", anyway, which is part of the issue.

With a knife, it's very plausible to say you got a shallow cut or gash for that 4 HP you took, or they stabbed your chain repeatedly and couldn't get through but you're going to have bruises and are a bit winded. With a 7.62mm rifle bullet? Um. You basically end up getting "Tintin'd" constantly "Oh the bullet just grazed me. Oh the bullet just grazed me. Oh the bullet just grazed me." and so on, and it's a lot inherently sillier than melee weapons which are easier to explain. If they're wearing armour, it's like the plates end up being bullet-magnets as suddenly they keep being hit and causing bruises.

Modern firearms just an absolute ton of problems on top of the existing problems D&D has with immersion-breaking stuff. And whilst YMMV, for my money, they smash that immersion to pieces.

There are a lot of options. If you want action-movie logic I think D&D would work fine. Real world logic? D&D doesn't even do that very well without firearms.

Have you actually tried action movies (not SF movies or Star Wars, note) in a version of D&D, or even a close relative? Because I have. I've tried a bunch of systems. And the results are awful. This is because of a few things:

1) AC derived from DEX and armour and so on doesn't work in action movies.

2) D&D doesn't, by default, have any kind of "that didn't happen" mechanism to prevent one-shots and so on (whereas most good action movie RPGs do).

3) Rising HP with levels makes little sense in an action movie or action-TV scenario. PCs should start with a lot of HP-equivalent.

4) HP which assume you get hit make zero sense in an action-movie scenario in most cases. VP/WP can work though it has a whole bunch of problems of its own.

5) Guns firing a single time (even if it is supposedly multiple times) per attack just raises tons of questions and feels very un-action-movie-esque.

6) Guns doing more damage than melee doesn't make any sense at all in an action-movie context, because melee is extremely effective in virtually all action movies.

Can you fix all this? Maybe, but you're building something pretty far from 5E, as I said.

AC could derive from being a protagonist and so on, rather than armour.

You could add a whole subsystem which let players say "Ok I didn't get shot in the head!".

You could start with like 30+ HP and not have them go up much, if at all (instead the subsystem above could increase).

You can replace HP with something like VP/WP (a system with problems of it's own), but history relates that this is not an easy thing to get right. At the very least you probably need rules equivalent to CDGs for kill-shots and the like. Which may involve a whole separate subsystem and economy of "kill points" or whatever.

You could make all firearms have multiple attacks but whatever way you do this its going to be tricky to make work with 5E's action economy, and it's likely to mean you end up simulating on specific subset of action movies, rather than "most" action movies (which is fine, but you need to be clear about it).

You can make guns not do more damage than melee, but the whole notion of damage gets pretty fraught and complicated even when compared to D&D (which already has enough problems with "meat points" and so on).

And maybe you end up with a game that has a Proficiency Bonus, Advantage/Disadvantage, six stats, and uses d20 rolls + stat + proficiency as the main mechanic, but it's sure not going to be 5E or remotely 5E compatible.

And some game which didn't even try to do all this nonsense, but had a fundamentally different mechanic is just going to laugh at this house of cards you've built, because why not use the right tool for the job?