D&D 5E A modern fantasy setting?

[Ruin Explorer]

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

I think the thing that's always bothered me about D&D, literally since I first played it, but moreso ever since we abandoned different damage against SM/L, is that IRL, a lot of weapons just don't work on big animals. Weapons that kill humans just fine. And weapons that are tough to use on individual humans are often extremely good against big animals. I don't think D&D is the game that's going to fix this, but I still want an RPG where characters choose the right weapon for the job, instead of whacking away at giants with longswords or shooting big dinosaurs with 9mm SMGs (you'd be lucky if they even noticed IRL - I read an article early today where the British armed police had to shoot a poor water buffalo that had killed a dude, and their 9mm SMGs just made it annoyed and leave - and yes they were shooting it in the head - they had to get a guy with a high-calibre rifle to kill it).

 

[Kobold Avenger]

If the rules are about supporting a cinematic style seen in action movies, then it's completely possible for a high level character to dive out of an office building window shooting a pair of pistols with 9mm rounds, and bringing down an attack helicopter mid-air (possibly by killing the pilot, gunner and everyone onboard, or just shooting out a rotor), and then glide down because they were wearing a wingsuit/sky-diving gear.

 

[Oofta]

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.

I never played D20 modern, but plenty of attacks in D&D have effects like poison or ongoing damage. I don't think having to make a save vs flamethrower is better or worse than save vs dragon's breath. As far as being set on fire by a shot, that just means your clothes are on fire, poison is fairly common in standard D&D and being stunned (not necessarily by shock) is not unheard of.

I just get a bit tired of people saying that guns are automatic death machines but weapons that could literally dismember you are not. If I can accept that a hit with the latter is a glancing blow or a strain then I can justify it with the former. I'm not sure D&D is the best system for a guns and sorcery campaign but I'm not sure any game could have a significant focus of the game be combat and not hit similar issues.

In any case, kind of academic since I haven't subjected my players to a weird west campaign yet because I've never figured out how to do the politics but that's another topic.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm not sure D&D is the best system for a guns and sorcery campaign but I'm not sure any game could have a significant focus of the game be combat and not hit similar issues.

Most TT RPGs don't take D&D's approach to damage and fewer use riders. D&D takes actually kind of a wacky approach, as they go. Which is how they avoid such things. Cyberpunk games tend to have it so either you're covered in armour (or similar), or subdermal armour, or are a cyborg or w/e, or you DO have the potential to just die if someone shoots you (or not - Cyberpunk 2020's FNFF system was surprisingly good at this if a bit crunchy to work with).

In any case, kind of academic since I haven't subjected my players to a weird west campaign yet because I've never figured out how to do the politics but that's another topic.

I'd be interested to hear how it goes if you do. I thought d20 Modern was going to go okay but it just felt too damn silly after a while. And yeah figuring out sane politics for a Weird West game (even a fantasy Wild West) that don't make the PCs on some level "the baddies" is, uh, not easy. So good luck! I've tried! Even if you somehow create a scenario that doesn't involve a Native American equivalent (i.e. unoccupied frontier) it can get really fiddly.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I think the thing that's always bothered me about D&D, literally since I first played it, but moreso ever since we abandoned different damage against SM/L, is that IRL, a lot of weapons just don't work on big animals. Weapons that kill humans just fine. And weapons that are tough to use on individual humans are often extremely good against big animals. I don't think D&D is the game that's going to fix this, but I still want an RPG where characters choose the right weapon for the job, instead of whacking away at giants with longswords or shooting big dinosaurs with 9mm SMGs (you'd be lucky if they even noticed IRL - I read an article early today where the British armed police had to shoot a poor water buffalo that had killed a dude, and their 9mm SMGs just made it annoyed and leave - and yes they were shooting it in the head - they had to get a guy with a high-calibre rifle to kill it).

Totally agree. I mentioned the new Twilight 2000's critical injury rules earlier in this thread, where the bigger guns are more likely to cause a randomly rolled fight-ending injury (similarly, if you have the Martial Artist talent you're more likely to do a crit in unarmed combat--so you don't always do more damage, but you're more likely to break something specific). I sometimes feel like the best way to deal with big animal damage is similar to that, in that you'd treat them like vehicles. So it's not about chipping away at their HP or whatever, but taking down their subsystems. So some weapons or some kinds of attacks might let you roll on a table to see if you've crippled a limb, blown out an eye, etc. And a standard attack with a standard weapon just doesn't. D&D sort of hand-waves that, I guess, by saying you just roll and if you beat its AC, I guess you nailed its eye...but it's not blind, just feeling a bit of an ouchy. And the next attack that gets through is another eyeball ouchy. Darn all those swords in the eye!

It's a bad comparison, but I ran something a while back using Mongoose Traveler rules, and when the players hit a cruiser with a ground-based anti-ship weapon they were able to roll on one of those big old-school tables to see what the damage effect was. They landed on a result that crippled the cruiser's propulsion enough that, because it was in gravity, forced a crash landing. No big Robotech explosion, but because in this setting a lot of big ships weren't really made to safely land in gravity, it was now a largely broken ship.

Not the same as slaying a dragon, but close enough. And a satisfying experience based on leaning into a crit table, as opposed to taking away some amount of hit points.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

If the rules are about supporting a cinematic style seen in action movies, then it's completely possible for a high level character to dive out of an office building window shooting a pair of pistols with 9mm rounds, and bringing down an attack helicopter mid-air (possibly by killing the pilot, gunner and everyone onboard, or just shooting out a rotor), and then glide down because they were wearing a wingsuit/sky-diving gear.

No offense, but that's a pretty silly action movie scene by today's standards!

There are definitely games that let you do that, though, like Feng Shui and action-y PbtA/Fate stuff. But what you're describing is verging on Last Action Hero-style parody. Seems like a low- or no-crunch narrative game is the approach for that. My sense is that the default setting for most games is closer to maybe Die Hard (not Die Hard With A Vengeance!) or Bourne Identity. Was going to say LotR, too, but the way they mow down orcs in the movies is wild, indeed.

 

[jgsugden]

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.

I think that depends upon your fiction.

I'd have to write a lot of lore for my game out here to explain how it works, but there are duels in my world that mimic the '10 step and shoot' gun duels of WIld West lore. The short version is that they've overseen by priests that use magic to set the stage, and damage is increased significantly during the duel.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

No offense, but that's a pretty silly action movie scene by today's standards!

I'm going by the standards where you could have a car jump between skyscrapers like in that Fast & Furious movie.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I think that depends upon your fiction.

I'd have to write a lot of lore for my game out here to explain how it works, but there are duels in my world that mimic the '10 step and shoot' gun duels of WIld West lore. The short version is that they've overseen by priests that use magic to set the stage, and damage is increased significantly during the duel.

Duels (using guns) are a really interesting and kind of horrific test for almost any RPG system, I imagine. Hard for me to think of a system that wouldn't play out in a completely silly, un-duel-like way. The duelists would either just keep blazing away after getting hit a couple times (assuming revolvers or multiple guns on hand) or whoever's hit worse would be the loser...and just be fine. Almost no game in existence wit rules for the fact that a wound might only become fatal a day or two later.

This is giving me agita, tbh. My trad gamer brain is frying like an egg on a hot sidewalk. But it's also really useful. Good reminder that, in a game without magical healing, you could do some really cool stuff with a "death" result for a PC or NPC, where they aren't actually dead on the spot, but there's no saving them, even if they're conscious for a long time.

Pretty cool escapism, I know.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I'm going by the standards where you could have a car jump between skyscrapers like in that Fast & Furious movie.

Excellent point. I'm apparently the one person who hasn't seen those movies past the first one.