D&D 5E A modern fantasy setting?

[Grendel_Khan]

In every edition of D&D, since the beginning, I have used HP to represent 'toughness'. When you get hit for damage, it is not a real wound - it is scrapes, bruises, bangs and bumps. When you get a healing spell, it replenishes you by curing these minor impacts. I only describe an attack as dealing an actual wound when it takes someone down, or if it puts them close enough to be within one strike of death. It is a subtle clue to my parties that enemies are weak.

When it comes to gunplay, or archery, or any other piercing attack, I usually describe the blows as glancing blows or near misses that had to be dodged awkwardly.

This approach has allowed me to make great narratives without treating hp as meat points. It takes some practice, and at high level gets a bit odd with so many near misses/glancing blows at times, but usually by then the players have seeped into it and do not register it the same way a stranger to the table would.

I like this approach a whole lot, and would have suggested it to my GM if we were still doing 5E. But in the context of bullets vs. HP I don't think it works at all. Maybe if people have body armor and those initial rounds are always assumed to be catching them in the vest...but that would get pretty silly pretty fast.

I'm not saying this as a knock on D&D, btw. I think systems are best when they're tuned to a given genre/setting/tone, and while I think HP can be goofy af sometimes, the way you're interpreting it fits well in a mythic, high-fantasy context.

EDIT: Forgot to add that I just don't think bullets/guns work with D&D-style fantasy, the same way that a guy charging into a modern gunfight with a wooden shield wouldn't work. I know there are tons on here that disagree, but I don't think 5E or any derivative works as that kind of general toolbox.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Even when you split HP between meat and luck, the problem still remains that in most D20 games you have so many of those points that it is impossible to kill someone with one hit and everyone knows it. Meaning modern D20 characters will have no problem with sprinting through suppressive fire even action heroes do not cross to start a fistfight. And snipers are all so bad that they will miss their first 5 or 6 shots (luck points) until they maybe hit someone.

That's not a problem, though, really, because it's simulating the kind of stories it's intended to simulate (also you can potentially get one-shot by a sniper-rifle with Luck and Meat points separate, you just need a exception-based rule that avoids the Luck points, like a special action snipers can take on unaware targets).

Enemy snipers in action movies always miss their first several shots at the main characters. They only reliably hit NPC-equivalents.

The reasons were different, but even old school World of Darkness, with all of its modern-day-urban focus, couldn't figure out how to handle guns. I liked the normal/aggravated damage mechanic, since it made perfect sense to have a vampire or werewolf regenerate pretty quickly from a bullet wound, but nurse a claw slash for a long while. But the damage for guns was just so piddly. I wound up bumping it up for every kind of gun, not for balance reasons, but because it constantly broke the fiction. A pistol was just the worst, most laughable thing someone could ever carry or pull out.

That's not my experience and I'm surprised you say that. Literally the first time I played Werewolf, one of the other PCs, despite being in Crinos form, was shot once with a normal 9mm pistol and was taken out, nearly died, and had a permanent injury, all following the default rules in Werewolf 2E.

And much later, when I was playing VtM 2E, I was involuntarily PvP'd by an extremely experience and frankly cheating WtA werewolf, and I, a puny new vampire armed only with a double-barrelled shotgun (admittedly with silver shot in it), literally "one-shot" him (straight past maximum aggravated damage to dead, despite multiple layers of defence - but I was rolling a lot of dice thanks to the WoD Combat rules - which they literally introduced lol, dude actually put the book on the table earlier in the session - for double-barrelled shotguns). It caused the most hilarious breakdown of the RPG society as multiple Storytellers conferred on what could happen (eventually they let his PC just barely live and agreed there would be no more crossover-PvP without the VtM table's players unanimous permission).

However!

I do agree re: "realistic gun damage" being an issue - the problem you're pointing to is that supernatural beings are hard to kill with guns - that's a feature not a bug - but just generally in games it can be hard to do.

Here though we don't need realism, just some mild feeling that it might not actually be an Archer-esque farce. And you're not going to get that out of HP where the HP represent actual impact of bullet into body lol.

Seems to really simulate the fact that some people can get very lucky and survive multiple bullet wounds with relatively little effect, and yet a single stray round could just straight-up murder you.

That literally could happen in 2E WoD, just sayin' lol. Especially if you were a normal human or close to it.

 

[humble minion]

I don't want to force us into the kind of thread madness that went down elsewhere, re: "realistic" gun damage, but I do think this is a common system issue--how do you make guns at least feel scary, without completely sidelining all melee combat. There are setting fixes, I think, like having certain kinds of PCs and enemies be mostly or fully immune to guns (like insect spirits in Shadowrun, for example, or specific resistances in supers games), but from a core mechanics POV it's just real tricky.

Something I've been messing around (again, focusing on a Napoleonic-era tech level) is differentiating guns from bows by making bows the fast-firing, lower-impact weapon while guns fired less often but hit harder.

I haven't come up with a complete solution i'm happy with yet, but the rough ideas I was exploring:

• guns get +1d4 to hit vs targets wearing medium or heavy armour, or using a shield. There is some VERY expensive 'proofed' suits of full plate, half-plate, or breastplate that negate this quality
• guns do damage 1 dice size higher than a comparable crossbow, and they have a longer range than either bows or crossbows. In this time period, guns are just plain better than bows/crossbows and I don't mind the stats reflecting that.
• guns can not be used with Extra Attack. Instead, if you have Extra Attack, when using a gun you make a single attack but the damage from that attack is multiplied by the number of attacks you would otherwise have been able to make. And this includes ability bonuses to damage, magical bonuses to damage, sneak attack, Sharpshooter, etc etc. Creatures/NPCs using firearms with Multiattack would benefit from the same effect.
• you get disadvantage to stealth in a round when you fired a firearm (loud!)
• guns have a minimum Str score that a firer must meet or have disadvantage on the attack roll due to recoil, and this score increases for the bigger, higher-damage firearms. Elephant guns require Str 15, for instance (analogous to full plate in terms of rarity and the physical demands of use)

The idea was to make armour less attractive but still relevant in the right circumstances (ie, close combat in a cramped dungeon). Also, make Str not-irrelevant, and make guns seem legitimately dangerous even as you advance in level because with the high single-shot damage, enemies with multiattack and especially criticals become genuinely scary because they can deal massive damage with one shot if they only get a bit lucky.

What I really got stuck on was how the special Extra Attack rules above interacted with additional attacks made as a bonus action or reaction, due to dual wielding, battlemaster maneuvers, special kensai ranged weapon rules etc etc. There's a lot of special cases like this in 5e. I'd need to playtest, to be honest. Possibly I'd require the use of a bonus action to reload, or say that reloading provoked an attack of opportunity, or even that reloading replaced movement? Maybe at the trade-off of bumping up the damage one dice size higher? The dynamic i'm trying to create is that guns are a slow-firing 'preparatory' weapon, as they generally were in the time period i'm looking at. You shoot them off, reload them and fire again if you have time, but if your enemy makes it in close you eventually discard the gun for a melee weapon because reloading in close quarters is just too slow. Of course then you'd get PCs running around carrying 27 loaded horsepistols all the time so they never have to reload in combat, but PCs are gonna PC sometimes...

 

[Grendel_Khan]

That's not my experience and I'm surprised you say that. Literally the first time I played Werewolf, one of the other PCs, despite being in Crinos form, was shot once with a normal 9mm pistol and was taken out, nearly died, and had a permanent injury, all following the default rules in Werewolf 2E.

And much later, when I was playing VtM 2E, I was involuntarily PvP'd by an extremely experience and frankly cheating WtA werewolf, and I, a puny new vampire armed only with a double-barrelled shotgun (admittedly with silver shot in it), literally "one-shot" him (straight past maximum aggravated damage to dead, despite multiple layers of defence - but I was rolling a lot of dice thanks to the WoD Combat rules - which they literally introduced lol, dude actually put the book on the table earlier in the session - for double-barrelled shotguns). It caused the most hilarious breakdown of the RPG society as multiple Storytellers conferred on what could happen (eventually they let his PC just barely live and agreed there would be no more crossover-PvP without the VtM table's players unanimous permission).

I think I remember you mentioning gun lethality in WoD before, and color me just as mystified!

Looking at VtM 2nd Edition right now (1992), and a Glock 17's base damage is 4. That's it! The average bouncer will do that with their fist. And that's not 4 damage, that's just 4 dice to roll, looking for 6's. Granted, you can add dice based on successes over the target's dodge, but a stray shot probably wouldn't take that into account. So, on average, you're doing 2 points of damage to a bystander with a stray 9mm round. And then that bystander can roll Stamina to soak, probably getting at least 1 success. So you get caught in the crossfire of a Glock shooting and...you take 1 damage. Like a painful paper cut.

Now things do get a lot spicier with shotguns, and a double-barreled one with silver shot, at that. And Vampire had some stupid explosive/fire rounds for shotguns, too. Those are a special case, to me--WW just not getting that PCs and eventually NPCs would escalate to super-special guns right away. But take that stuff away, and look at base 12-gauge shotgun damage, and I maintain that it's silly low. 8 damage per round, average of 4 damage before soak. Just really not great. And I don't mean that in relation to supernatural creatures shrugging off bullets, which fits the fiction kinda well. I mean walking into a room with your Glock blazing against a couple of people is just wacky stuff. Like lightly slapping them.

There are things they could have done to address this, like making humans unable to soak bullets/knives/etc. And maybe later editions addressed it. But when I was playing and running, guns (without special ammo) were just pathetic, even against non-supernaturals.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Looking at VtM 2nd Edition right now (1992), and a Glock 17's base damage is 4. That's it! The average bouncer will do that with their fist. And that's not 4 damage, that's just 4 dice to roll, looking for 6's. Granted, you can add dice based on successes over the target's dodge, but a stray shot probably wouldn't take that into account. So, on average, you're doing 2 points of damage to a bystander with a stray 9mm round. And then that bystander can roll Stamina to soak, probably getting at least 1 success. So you get caught in the crossfire of a Glock shooting and...you take 1 damage. Like a painful paper cut.

Yeah but now you're talking about a sliiiiightly different issue to what I thought, which is that WoD can't handle situations with literally stray bullets.

And I agree, WoD balanced the system definitely based on the idea that you'd always be working with bullets which were coming out of a gun that someone was aiming. As soon as you're getting that added in, you get situations like a glock dropping a Crinos-form Werewolf in a single shot (fired by an extremely low-end Fomorian with no special abilities and like 2 DEX and 3 Firearms or something).

Like another situation WoD can't handle is if someone drops a gun and it goes off, because without any chance for it to exceed dodge or the like, it just likely does a mild injury (1 wound isn't a paper cut but it's at worst sitting in the ER looking bored as all the actually-urgent cases go before you) and literally can't kill (IIRC).

To be totally honest, I'm thinking about WoD now and... I actually did adjust gun damage in my home game in 2E. Several years after the Crinos incident (and my table rules weren't in effect with the VtM incident, obviously, someone else's table), but yeah I'm pretty sure I boosted most normal guns by 1-2 damage at least. So mea culpa for forgetting that.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Something I've been messing around (again, focusing on a Napoleonic-era tech level) is differentiating guns from bows by making bows the fast-firing, lower-impact weapon while guns fired less often but hit harder.

I haven't come up with a complete solution i'm happy with yet, but the rough ideas I was exploring:

• guns get +1d4 to hit vs targets wearing medium or heavy armour, or using a shield. There is some VERY expensive 'proofed' suits of full plate, half-plate, or breastplate that negate this quality
• guns do damage 1 dice size higher than a comparable crossbow, and they have a longer range than either bows or crossbows. In this time period, guns are just plain better than bows/crossbows and I don't mind the stats reflecting that.
• guns can not be used with Extra Attack. Instead, if you have Extra Attack, when using a gun you make a single attack but the damage from that attack is multiplied by the number of attacks you would otherwise have been able to make. And this includes ability bonuses to damage, magical bonuses to damage, sneak attack, Sharpshooter, etc etc. Creatures/NPCs using firearms with Multiattack would benefit from the same effect.
• you get disadvantage to stealth in a round when you fired a firearm (loud!)
• guns have a minimum Str score that a firer must meet or have disadvantage on the attack roll due to recoil, and this score increases for the bigger, higher-damage firearms. Elephant guns require Str 15, for instance (analogous to full plate in terms of rarity and the physical demands of use)

I like those rules a lot, with the exception of the multiplied damage for extra attacks. As you noted, that can get pretty crazy, and I feel like extra attacks are maybe just better off as a melee thing, or a way to let people fire a couple of pistols in a turn, before (most likely) switching to melee.

But the +1d4 to hit vs armor/shields is, I think, a revelation. I hadn't thought about essentially reducing AC as a way to do armor-piercing. Only change I'd suggest there is to just do the same for light armor, too. I don't think leather armor is going to do much better against a bullet. But it sounds like you have your reasons for disincentivizing non-light armor, and I'm just steamrolling that.

In general, though, I think the dual-wielding, battlemaster, etc. stuff that you're rightly stressing about can just be chalked up to close-range melee carnage. A D&D-style Fighter would be terrifying in melee, and once that Fighter is in close, it should be hard for most enemy NPCs to fire at them without risking hitting their allies. Not sure how fiddly you want to get, but I could imagine that +1d4 vs. armor/shields disappearing in close combat, since knocking barrels aside and generally causing mayhem in the scrum seems appropriate.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Yeah but now you're talking about a sliiiiightly different issue to what I thought, which is that WoD can't handle situations with literally stray bullets.

And I agree, WoD balanced the system definitely based on the idea that you'd always be working with bullets which were coming out of a gun that someone was aiming. As soon as you're getting that added in, you get situations like a glock dropping a Crinos-form Werewolf in a single shot (fired by an extremely low-end Fomorian with no special abilities and like 2 DEX and 3 Firearms or something).

Like another situation WoD can't handle is if someone drops a gun and it goes off, because without any chance for it to exceed dodge or the like, it just likely does a mild injury (1 wound isn't a paper cut but it's at worst sitting in the ER looking bored as all the actually-urgent cases go before you) and literally can't kill (IIRC).

To be totally honest, I'm thinking about WoD now and... I actually did adjust gun damage in my home game in 2E. Several years after the Crinos incident (and my table rules weren't in effect with the VtM incident, obviously, someone else's table), but yeah I'm pretty sure I boosted most normal guns by 1-2 damage at least. So mea culpa for forgetting that.

I'm being very pedantic about the stray shot thing, to be sure. But even with an aimed shot, the fact that you could just dodge bullets meant that, to me, it all kind of evened out. You get a few successes to hit, I get some to dodge. I remember working out that the only way you could reliably murder someone with a single 9mm round was if you got all the aiming bonuses possible, and the target had no way to defend, and was also at point-blank range. So basically a ninja doing a mafia-style execution.

Granted, there are tons of games where a single pistol round is basically never lethal. And I don't think it always should be, at all. That's why I brought this up, since it's a persistent design challenge. But WoD is always my go-to with this problem, since it was sort of my D&D (combat-heavy system that I cut my teeth on, pun intended).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But the +1d4 to hit vs armor/shields is, I think, a revelation. I hadn't thought about essentially reducing AC as a way to do armor-piercing. Only change I'd suggest there is to just do the same for light armor, too. I don't think leather armor is going to do much better against a bullet. But it sounds like you have your reasons for disincentivizing non-light armor, and I'm just steamrolling that.

I was think "But that makes guns optimal against light armour and would often exceed the AC bonus it gives!", but maybe that's fine? Like DEX ain't getting you out of the way of bullets much son. So maybe just apply to all shots which aren't hitting "proofed" armour - even against unarmoured targets.

 

[humble minion]

But the +1d4 to hit vs armor/shields is, I think, a revelation. I hadn't thought about essentially reducing AC as a way to do armor-piercing. Only change I'd suggest there is to just do the same for light armor, too. I don't think leather armor is going to do much better against a bullet. But it sounds like you have your reasons for disincentivizing non-light armor, and I'm just steamrolling that.

At the end of the day, this was a choice I made based on the maths more than anything else. Light armour generally only gives you ac 11 or 12, so if you applied this system to light armour, on average rolls of the 1d4 (2.5) you’d be worse off wearing it than you would be going stark naked. Whereas getting an extra 1d4 to hit against medium or heavy armour merely reduces the efficiency of the armour rather than actually making armour detrimental. You still get SOME benefit from wearing chain mail against a musket, just not very much.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Then again, if we're talking about some sort of modern(ish) setting where guns are pretty common, certainly the armours are more advanced too? They're designed to stop the bullets.