D&D 5E Fifth Age: A hard science fiction 5e conversion

[Ed Powell]

i actually may have a suggestion, i recently realised your mod system would work really well in a looter style like diablo why not try breaking down the mods into 2 types, weapon/armor unique and generic, then you could put them in roll tables and when players get a new piece of armor thts not base, or upgrade their armor you could roll from the table to see what they get, from my time playing this amongst my group (who have a knack for finding the most broken combinations possible), it helped prevent them from breaking things outrigth and actually made them want to interact and find quests after they realised i tied gear to quest rewards. with the unique mods, the one that gives pistols the heat mode is a good example, you could make them mK3 or mk1 slot only, either one giving thses peices of gear extra value. and this could also then be applied to creating bossess or special enemies by giving certain enemies random mods on their gear. i'm myself testing this in barebones form with my group and boy there are issues i find sometimes. but its an idea i wanted to offer.

 

[HQManiac]

I was wondering, will the Ship Manual ever be updated? I fell that ship combat is lacking in description and mechanics, with ships often feeling like they are just bigger players that move in space. Also, some stats take a dose of inference-ing to get, like how it never mentions how to calculate ship acceleration outside of showing the example ship where you can see that it is ENGI/10, and how ECM has no penalty or function outside of being compared to the defenders ECCM. Like what happens if they don't have ECCM? Also on the character sheet the proficiency 'Atmospheric Vehicles' is currently 'Atmosphetic Vehicles'. Dunno if that is intentional or not. Outside of that great system, I am truly impressed by it.

 

[Capn Charlie]

Good news everyone! I just updated the main rulebook in the downloads section! Updates include:

Notes
• OGL license added for marginal legal protection
• Synthetic Security Model rebalanced
• Meet the Tah’loo, an avian species, and the Reptilians, a, well, reptilian species.
• Custom Aliens taken down a peg or two (exactly 2 AP)
• Soldiers may now drive and blow things up (or clip the red wire) from character creation.
• Gunners get a little more dakkadakka at level 7.
• Mobile Infantry armor rules brought up to date with new style of armor hp and the way modules now work. Loss of overstacking is compensated with damage threshold.
• Captain inspiration now spreads farther, easier, and should hit most parties
• Operative tool choices expanded.
• Savages in general made a bit more defensive to compensate for lack of offensive options.
• Savage Warrior abilities refined and clarified to complement new savage role and abilities.
• Savage Oathsworn capstone reworked to punish damage, not prevent it, with a slightly easier action cost.
• Covering Fire feat expanded in versatility
• Supressing fire now makes terrain difficult temporarily. (should it set move speed to 0 again?)
• Weapon base prices adjusted to accomodate magazine costs, and for general balance.
• Clarified the difference between Burstfire and Autofire
• Refined ammunition rules
• Steam Grenades added (get wrecked, lasers!)
• Armor weight and classification clarified
• Refined and expanded shield related armor mods
• Firefly armor buffed (again)
• Juggernaut armor extra attack trait now plays well with other abilities and traits.
• Added Vehicles and associated rules
• Mod system reworked for ease of use
• Spaceships gain amenities
• Resting rules specified
• New story added

Edit: The initial version was a junk pdf format, with no interactable text, I updated it (0.9) to have searchable text, copy/pasta functionality, etc. It had the pleasant side effect of reducing file size, so yay!

Also, sorry for taking so long to get back to you,

I was wondering, will the Ship Manual ever be updated? I fell that ship combat is lacking in description and mechanics, with ships often feeling like they are just bigger players that move in space. Also, some stats take a dose of inference-ing to get, like how it never mentions how to calculate ship acceleration outside of showing the example ship where you can see that it is ENGI/10, and how ECM has no penalty or function outside of being compared to the defenders ECCM. Like what happens if they don't have ECCM? Also on the character sheet the proficiency 'Atmospheric Vehicles' is currently 'Atmosphetic Vehicles'. Dunno if that is intentional or not. Outside of that great system, I am truly impressed by it.

Ship development fell by the wayside due to a lack of interest from people, but I always intended to go back, and will be doing so now. I just wrapped up a playtest campaign that was virtually shipless, but will be doing one next that revolves heavily around it. As for the overall design, yes, I did basically do a "big party controlled character in space" route, I was trying to capture what makes 5e good, being quick and smooth, and bring it to ship combat. As for specifics, I basically wrote this one night as my crib notes before a session, and called it the ship manual. You get to see some of my ideas for function and flow in the vehicle rules that are now in the core book.

Notes on ECM: The intended function is that you target a weapons subsystem and make an opposed roll, ECM vs ECCM, and if ECM wins, disadvantage is applied to a weapon's next attack. The typo is intentional, I do my best to catch them, but with just one man and so many... they get through. I'll try to get this one fixed. My main pc went down last year, and took most of my productivity software with it, and I never quite got back to speed. I'll see about getting the software to edit the sheets, and make a pass on them again.

i actually may have a suggestion, i recently realised your mod system would work really well in a looter style like diablo why not try breaking down the mods into 2 types, weapon/armor unique and generic, then you could put them in roll tables and when players get a new piece of armor thts not base, or upgrade their armor you could roll from the table to see what they get, from my time playing this amongst my group (who have a knack for finding the most broken combinations possible), it helped prevent them from breaking things outrigth and actually made them want to interact and find quests after they realised i tied gear to quest rewards. with the unique mods, the one that gives pistols the heat mode is a good example, you could make them mK3 or mk1 slot only, either one giving thses peices of gear extra value. and this could also then be applied to creating bossess or special enemies by giving certain enemies random mods on their gear. i'm myself testing this in barebones form with my group and boy there are issues i find sometimes. but its an idea i wanted to offer.

I would love the idea of a random item generator, with inherent "locked in" mods. Probably the only thing I miss about standard treasure tables is the random fun. I tried to replicate some of that with the specific loot drops in the hazard handbook, but they don't really drop combat gear.

 

[HQManiac]

The page background stops at page 122 in the new manual. Is this intentional?

 

[Isaac Ward]

On Encounters

So, one question (or maybe a dozen, depending).

How are we to build encounters? Should we do it the same as 5e's Dmg states for combat encounters? I'm running version 0.9 this Thursday and was just curious to know how this system behaves in combat and if there were any tips to running this 5th age sci-fi combat that may differ from 5E sword and sorcery styled fights.
I noticed this and ship to ship combat weren't exactly addressed, and was wondering how I should run those.

 

[TSmitty]

In my experience combat feels more lethal in this system than 5e. The first actual combat my players saw ended in less than a round when the tank-y combat oriented player sprayed with an autofire blaster rifle and killed two npcs as the first move. The characters don't have much HP and even a mildly lucky shot or spray can do a lot of damage. Because of this I made sure to give my players lots of cover opportunities when facing more enemies and the cover rules on p.129 of 0.9 worked well for me. This also provides good opportunities for car chases because the vehicles have built in cover. As far as putting together enemy units for my players to face I re-skinned and adapted some of the hazards listed in the hazard handbook and Indra adventure and followed the challenge rating listed. 2 of my 3 characters were zeroed in combat, but they had the chance to escape and died going back for a bonus objective. Luckily 1 of them rolled a Nat 20 on his death save and managed to save the other one who rolled a Nat 1 on his save before he died. Ultimately I feel that the combat in this game is more similar to Call of Cthulhu than 5th age in that the lethality encourages combat to be more of a narrative tool than an objective.

We haven't had very much ship combat yet, but it has come up a few times. My strategy was to treat it like submarine warfare and Star Trek for a tense atmosphere with bouts of Star Wars/The Expanse combat for excitement and thrills. Everyone has to work together to scan, hide/track (move), and strategize during the Star Trek portion and then work together to take evasive maneuvers, fire weapons, navigate escape routes, emergency repairs, talk your way out of the space battle - whatever the players decide to do and the consequences. I then have the players roll their applicable skills with the stats and consoles from shipbuilding and have the ship respond accordingly. For the enemy I found that in the moment I only really rolled one d20 against the PC ship and then flavored the result. When the player's ship takes damage one of my favorite things to do is throw an emergency situation at them and have them solve it during combat to make it more interesting. I've had them vent atmo and have to make an emergency repair, which they solved by the skin of their teeth and was a lot of fun. I've also had them deal with the ship hitting something which caused a power outtage that they had to solve in zero G because it also stopped their rotation. One that I want to try is the players losing power to a main weapon and having to solve it during battle while the pilot is giving it all s/he's got to evade the enemy.

I'm not sure that these are the best ways to do it, but this is my experience after DMing about 10 or so games. If anyone has any other suggestions I'd also be interested.

 

[Capn Charlie]

The page background stops at page 122 in the new manual. Is this intentional?

This is an issue with... something, to do with the method I use to export the word document as a pdf file. Every time I export it, it returns a document with a different number of pages displaying the background correctly. I have tried, at length, to find a solution and failed. I fear this might be the new normal.

So, one question (or maybe a dozen, depending).

How are we to build encounters? Should we do it the same as 5e's Dmg states for combat encounters? I'm running version 0.9 this Thursday and was just curious to know how this system behaves in combat and if there were any tips to running this 5th age sci-fi combat that may differ from 5E sword and sorcery styled fights.
I noticed this and ship to ship combat weren't exactly addressed, and was wondering how I should run those.

TSmitty gives some good advice, so I'll not echo it. Basically it comes down to feeling out your party and putting them up against the odds you want them to face. Something to keep in mind is that we are portraying a world where people have something to live for. Have enemies retreat after taking losses, you can likewise have reinforcements arrive if they get wiped out. Just try to pretend like its emergent gameplay, and all going according to plan. I make it up as I go along, too, encounter building is more art than science.

Just give your people access to cover, don't be unreasonable, and be nasty when the situation calls for it. One of my favorite tricks is having npcs wait outside of line of sight, and ready actions to fire at the first player to come into sight. Doors and corners, that's where they get you.

In my experience combat feels more lethal in this system than 5e. The first actual combat my players saw ended in less than a round when the tank-y combat oriented player sprayed with an autofire blaster rifle and killed two npcs as the first move. The characters don't have much HP and even a mildly lucky shot or spray can do a lot of damage. Because of this I made sure to give my players lots of cover opportunities when facing more enemies and the cover rules on p.129 of 0.9 worked well for me. This also provides good opportunities for car chases because the vehicles have built in cover. As far as putting together enemy units for my players to face I re-skinned and adapted some of the hazards listed in the hazard handbook and Indra adventure and followed the challenge rating listed. 2 of my 3 characters were zeroed in combat, but they had the chance to escape and died going back for a bonus objective. Luckily 1 of them rolled a Nat 20 on his death save and managed to save the other one who rolled a Nat 1 on his save before he died. Ultimately I feel that the combat in this game is more similar to Call of Cthulhu than 5th age in that the lethality encourages combat to be more of a narrative tool than an objective.

We haven't had very much ship combat yet, but it has come up a few times. My strategy was to treat it like submarine warfare and Star Trek for a tense atmosphere with bouts of Star Wars/The Expanse combat for excitement and thrills. Everyone has to work together to scan, hide/track (move), and strategize during the Star Trek portion and then work together to take evasive maneuvers, fire weapons, navigate escape routes, emergency repairs, talk your way out of the space battle - whatever the players decide to do and the consequences. I then have the players roll their applicable skills with the stats and consoles from shipbuilding and have the ship respond accordingly. For the enemy I found that in the moment I only really rolled one d20 against the PC ship and then flavored the result. When the player's ship takes damage one of my favorite things to do is throw an emergency situation at them and have them solve it during combat to make it more interesting. I've had them vent atmo and have to make an emergency repair, which they solved by the skin of their teeth and was a lot of fun. I've also had them deal with the ship hitting something which caused a power outtage that they had to solve in zero G because it also stopped their rotation. One that I want to try is the players losing power to a main weapon and having to solve it during battle while the pilot is giving it all s/he's got to evade the enemy.

I'm not sure that these are the best ways to do it, but this is my experience after DMing about 10 or so games. If anyone has any other suggestions I'd also be interested.

It sounds like you really "get" the system, and are running it very similar to how I do it. Space is still rough, I haven't done any more than session improv in nearly a year, but I am working now on some new treatments for how to run it as a more cohesive system, and less ad hoc.

 

[jvc gzz]

Nicem I'll expect try it soon

 

[grixis.alon]

So i have a question. My players and I are used to grid combat. With the ship to ship combat i have 500km for each square (easy to remember since characters use 5ft per square). Short range is 0 - 2,500km (5 square radius max), medium is 2,500km - 5,000km (10 square radius max) and long range is 5,000km - 7,500km (15 square rafius max). That helps me because i have actual distances to weapon systems now and my players because of the visual representation. My question lies in ship movement per round. Given that my grid is 500km per grid square, how would I translate your ship engine rules to movement in a combat scenario? And also this might apply to weapon projectile speed since there is ruling for escaping fire.

 

[EliteHatter]

Quick question for clarification, ar the only things that use strength Unarmed attacks, melee attacks, and certain armors?

In other words are 90% of the weapons Dex based? Or Am I overlooking a paragraph?

Also I LOVE this setting. My friends and I are gearing up to play here soon, hence the ask for clarification.