d20 Modern House Rules

[Isawa Sideshow]

uh, well, Duh, we are talking about our own house rules, right? That is what this thread is about right?

Just chill. I was helping someone out, since they asked where the rule was in the book. I hadn't seen it myself yet, since they didn't exactly make it a clearly-labeled rule. It would have been better placed in the combat section with the rest of the Massive Damage rules.

Besides, since it's an official variant, I wouldn't exactly say it counts as a "house rule".

 

[Plane Sailing]

OK, chilled out now. I didn't realise that you were (presumably) talking about the massive damage variant rule, since Figits post came directly after my "active parrying" post, he wasn't specific and I'd got my stoopid head on.

No worries

 

[RedSage]

For anyone who thinks that guns in D20 Modern should be super ultra lethal...

This does anything but prove that D20 Modern does a good job of modeling a modern firefight. The issue is not making the D20 Modern combat more lethal, it's improving the fidelity and making it more realistic.

I think one of the key statments from the AAR is, ""the more I see of this stuff, the more I'm convinced that nothing hand-held is absolutely reliable." I think this sums up the basic problem of modeling modern weapon damage with a bell curve (i.e. 2 dice). This has the + effect of making the damage more predictable, and thus easier to design a game around. But, in point of fact tissue disruption from bullets doesn't really look like a bellcurve. It's flat at the bottom, where all rounds basically do roughly the same amount of tissue damage, and then as the rounds come closer and closer to center-of-mass the difference between high kinetic energy and low kinetic energy rounds becomes more pronounced.

The key is that bullets do very, very erratic things, and there are many wounds possible. Following the link (http://www.frenchanderson.org/french/forensic/report/pdf/section2.pdf) to the forensic review of the tissue damage shows that Platt essentially only received two significant wounds: a wound to the chest that damage his lung, and the final round that stopped him, a penetrating round to the chest that damage his spinal cord. Half of the other 10 rounds were 00 buck shot rounds to his feet, and the other half were to non vital, non-center-of-mass areas of his body. The important thing to understand here, is that this is not a statistically "out there" event -- Platt was extremely motivated, well trained, and not particularly lucky.

Throw into this the different penetrating characteristics of different rounds, and the ability to fire far more accurately and quickly than the D20 Modern rules would have you believe, and things start looking very fishy with D20 Modern.

Sage

 

[tensen]

I'd say that fix is overkill.

Stone has a hardness of 8, iron a hardness of 10. I don't really need 6th level heroes who can punch through an inch of iron plate without breaking a sweat.

Wulf

Makes it easier to do a Shadowrun campaign and get a Physical Adept.... oh the days of my favorite shadowrun character, Shatterfist, breaking through the side of buildings, because it was easer than breaking through the front door.

 

[Bagpuss]

The only thing I don't really like about d20 Modern is the D&D magic system. I'll be putting together something that's more skills & feats based ... probably patching together some Alternity / Dark Matter rules with D&D PsiHB...

You might want to take a look at the Elements of Magic PDF from RPGNow that sounds similar to what your looking for.

 

[Gez]

That's what bothered me. As written, the .50 cal sniper rifle has a max range of 1500 feet. With a scope, it's max range is increased to 2,250 feet. With a scope and the Distant Shot feat, you're looking at a max range of 3,000 feet. There are 5,280 feet in a mile. Naturally, one would expect a sniper rifle to already be outfitted with a scope, but even with that extended range of 2,250 feet, you are still talking about a max range less than half a mile, at a -20 penalty to the shot. With both the scope and the feat, the rifle now has a max range just over half a mile, at a -20 penalty to the shot.

That's what you get by using an irrational system. It's called "modern", and it use imperial measures...

That way, people don't see what's wrong with rifles that have a range of 1 miles to have a range of 1500 feet.

I can see these measures used in Mutant & Mastermind (because of the mutants, I'm OK with things like "there's 4 inches in a hand, and 3 hands in a foot"), but otherwise, here's my first houserule to d20M (if ever I use that game): convert everything to metric !

 

[kreynolds]

convert everything to metric !

The metric system is flawed though. It's based off of a round Earth, but the Earth isn't perfectly round. I read an interesting article on this a couple days ago.

 

[nsruf]

The metric system is flawed though. It's based off of a round Earth, but the Earth isn't perfectly round. I read an interesting article on this a couple days ago.

Of course, there may be some other advantage of the metric system than having Earth's circumference at 40.000 km exactly (or not)

Quick: how many cubic feet are in a gallon?

 

[shadowlight]

You might want to take a look at the Elements of Magic PDF from RPGNow that sounds similar to what your looking for.

I've actually been discussing that here:
http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33181

Any comments?

 

[Gez]

The metric system is flawed though. It's based off of a round Earth, but the Earth isn't perfectly round. I read an interesting article on this a couple days ago.

You do know, however, that the modern definition of the meter, now, references a fraction of the distance light travels in one second, and not a fraction of Earth's circumference.

So this don't matter.