D&D 5E A modern fantasy setting?

[PsyzhranV2]

You're assuming they get shot. I've never assumed a "hit" in D&D does direct physical damage. When it comes to firearms, it's a grazing wound, a bruise but your armor stopped the bullet, a bit of shrapnel from the bullet that hits the wall, it's the pulled muscle as you leap out of the way as you see someone pointing a gun at you, it's luck and plot armor.

Until you get hit by incendiary rounds, or a poison dart, or a remote taser, or any other status effect inflicting weapon that needs to actually touch you to work.

 

[Oofta]

That thread got so weird so fast. I don't recommend it to anyone!

And this thread is not weird? We have people saying that being shot multiple times and surviving is odd in a game where a bus sized reptile can use you as a chew toy and you walk away just fine.

 

[Oofta]

Until you get hit by incendiary rounds, or a poison dart, or a remote taser, or any other status effect inflicting weapon that needs to actually touch you to work.

Or get hit by a dragon's breath or swallowed by a creature that can burrow through solid rock or stung by a wyverns tail and take poison damage. In other words, it's no more unrealistic than the normal game.

 

[bentleyml]

Definitely!

Your description reminded me of the Alloy of Law supplement for the Mistborn RPG, which is western themed with magic. But that's less D&D and more Brandon Sanderson's novels.

I've seen this suggested a few times. Sadly I could never get into the original Mistborn books. Sandersons writing style just doesn't click with me. Thanks for the suggestion though.

 

[Fanaelialae]

As an addendum to my previous post, in case there are those unfamiliar with it, anydice.com is invaluable for this sort of work. It calculates dice probabilities for you.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You're assuming they get shot. I've never assumed a "hit" in D&D does direct physical damage. When it comes to firearms, it's a grazing wound, a bruise but your armor stopped the bullet, a bit of shrapnel from the bullet that hits the wall, it's the pulled muscle as you leap out of the way as you see someone pointing a gun at you, it's luck and plot armor.

Realism and games don't often mix. That's not just D&D, that's all games whether TTRPGs or video.

Sure, but the d20 Modern rules don't really allow your interpretation to be correct, because rider effects from attacks land when attacks land - like poison, being set on fire, damage multiplication against certain types, or stun, or even impalement. And a lot of characters in that either don't wear armour or barely do. If you get set on fire by a shot, you can't exactly claim you "pulled a muscle" or something lol.

If you have a game that totally avoids riders, or makes all riders into vague things open to interpretation - and there are games like that - that works. But not with d20 Modern.

You end with what I'd call a "Tintin" situation - which is essentially a farce. Someone keeps getting shot and every single time it's "just a graze". It's just like how Tintin is frequently shot in the head, and it's always "just a graze", and at some point, that stops being remotely believable, even as an "action movie" thing and becomes clearly a farce.

I think what maybe you're not really looking at here is that, any individual shot, you can probably, if you work hard enough (and it can be hard work) justify how this hit for 22 damage which also poisoned you, was "not really a hit", and in D&D that works. But you keep doing that, long enough in, say d20 Modern, and I dunno - you might be fine - but my experienced crew of long time D&D players? They weren't fine. And from discussions of d20 Modern, a lot of other people who were fine with in D&D just found it over the top in d20 Modern.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

And this thread is not weird? We have people saying that being shot multiple times and surviving is odd in a game where a bus sized reptile can use you as a chew toy and you walk away just fine.

That other thread almost instantly became a bizarre, branching argument not about rules or guns-in-fantasy but rather about how swords made by YouTubers kick butt, and also every historian is wrong because actually the real-world damage inflicted by guns is somehow overblown, again, because YouTube. Then came the charts. The charts!

I'll take dragons-vs.-muskets musings over muzzle velocity calculations any day.

But I also think it's fair game to talk about D&D HP in general, not related to strict, real-world realism, but to the tone and specific sense of realism within a given setting. In other words, does it feel "right" for the setting if a gunshot is gradually ticking away at your will to live, like everything else, or is a homebrew rule more appropriate here and there? I think that's a matter of how you want guns to feel in the game, and what rules can support that goal.

As for getting chewed by a dragon...I mean, this is why I don't play D&D anymore. Fights against enemies at that scale never felt interesting or satisfying to me in 5E. I think giant monster fights should be something you deal with plot-wise, not by bravely slashing and getting smashed until the math works out in your favor. And going back to the modern fantasy focus of this thread, one of the fun things about that kind of setting is that you often have more options to deal with mega threats. There's more tech, more tools, less stabby stabby.

 

[Sithlord]

I've seen this suggested a few times. Sadly I could never get into the original Mistborn books. Sandersons writing style just doesn't click with me. Thanks for the suggestion though.

I think I could watch his stuff as tv or movie. But I can’t get into it as a book. And i really don’t like his prose. He has ideas that don’t click with me. But i can see why others may like him. I have this problem with many modern writers that even have good ideas where i feel like they are describing something as it would be on a television screen as an episode. And that doesn’t mix well with me. I think there is a new writing style emerging like that (not sure). And I’m not saying it’s bad, just something that doesn’t appeal to me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And i really don’t like his prose.

He's not a great prose writer. Or character writer (motivations tend towards the implausible and he himself admitted that he feels like too many times the hand of the author - him - has changed what a character might do away from what they'd really do). Or dialogue writer (with most of his characters, if you just had the dialogue, you could barely tell the characters apart).

What is confusing is sometimes he suddenly gets better, or worse. And I had no idea why until I found out he wrote most of his books in basic form 10+ years ago (maybe more 15 years ago now), and then they've been released in a different order to which he came up with them, and he's re-written a lot of them before release. So they're kind of all over the place quality-wise. You might seem improvement, but there's often a whole lot of turgid nonsense that an author who is now as experienced as him should have cut, but he doesn't because he already basically laid out some entire giant series of books and I think he wants to avoid getting into a GRRM situation where he changes too much and then gets stuck.

Anyway the end effect is that whilst he's great at devising sort of "easy to imagine, easy to mentally game" magic systems, and often quite good at describing action scenes, he absolutely definitely writes like he's describing a TV show/movie, as you say. You're right to say some other authors do it, but I think he's particularly obvious in doing it.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The key is how to design the right power balance in a encounter of katanas vs kalashnikovs. The players have to choose between to be shooters or martial-artists. The most of players aren't going to choose a specialist in hand-to-hand combat (barbarian, monk, paladin) class if there are firearms.