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

[Capn Charlie]

That error on page 100 is actually my current stopping point, as it is a work in progress, that gobbledegook at the end is a mix of my notes and fluff I haven't yet structured.

Yeah, the setting is fun, though incredibly vague, mostly just written to back up mechanics. It is not my intention to create too large of a background for the setting, I mostly just want to create a workable rules set.

I like where the spaceship rules are going, it is fairly deep in terms of what all you can build. I'll upload the ship sheet, it's sort of rough, I am no graphical designer, but does everything I need it to. We've been printing it out single paged and passing out the relevant sections to the party members who need that part.

View attachment ship sheet.pdf

 

[aramis erak]

Just looking at the title of the thread the old game Dragonlance: The Fith Age came to my mind.

Maybe you want to change the title of your work, just to avoid more confusion?

I also was going to suggest a change to avoid disappointed Dragonlance fans. (It was a good game.)

My second thought was "The dark ages of the Bab5 setting following the next shadow war...

 

[nomotog]

I like it. I haven't got to read it all yet, but a hand full of thoughts. Some of your background features seem more like actual abilities. Like the tank born's double proficiency bonus. (Also isn't tank born a subrace why have them both?) I would have made computer use a tool proficiency with computers.

I'll read some more of it latter.

 

[Flamestrike]

It's certainly inspired me.

I would suggest simplified spaceship combat rule, particularly if youre going to keep it ToTM.

 

[Capn Charlie]

I like it. I haven't got to read it all yet, but a hand full of thoughts. Some of your background features seem more like actual abilities. Like the tank born's double proficiency bonus. (Also isn't tank born a subrace why have them both?) I would have made computer use a tool proficiency with computers.

I'll read some more of it latter.

Yes, I wanted the backgrounds to have more meat to them. I wanted the backgrounds to feel like they mattered, and that means that a few have combat relevant abilities, this mostly makes sense.

As for the interaction with tubeborn and tanker, I wanted them to represent two different things. Tubeborn are literally just gestated in the tubes, and then grown normally. Tankers are grown to maturity inside the tube, and hae no normal life experiences, just what they are programmed with. I will look at the descriptions to try to make that more clear.

 

[Capn Charlie]

It's certainly inspired me.

I would suggest simplified spaceship combat rule, particularly if youre going to keep it ToTM.

Well, by default the combat is pretty abstract, just three general ranges, which I know ToTM doesn't usually pay much attention to, but here it seemed more meaningful, especially given the ranges. As for the rest, you can either go with HP by system, or a generic hp total for the ship, this really just depends on if a group wants to be fiddly with flying their spaceship. If they want to reinforce certain systems and do stuff like targeting engines and so on, well, these are the rules that make that happen mechanically.

Last week at my session I had not yet fully fleshed out these rules and just ran it by the seat of my pants, and let the players think of what they wanted to do, it was all about disabling weapons and engines, shutting down their comms so they couldn't radio for help, that sort of thing. All this could be done with minimal dice rolls, just I wanted a clearer method for my own tastes.

 

[Yaarel]

It seems fine to treat spaceship hitpoints exactly like any other hitpoints.

The first half of hit points represents no serious damage, just glancing blows and dents (≈ scrapes and bruises) and burning up fuel (fatigue). Mostly a paint job and fueling station can fix this. However dipping into the second half of hit points means more extensive damage (bloodied), but still superficial. Systems need real repair. The spaceship itself may even have regenerative self-repair systems in place (healing while resting). Reaching 0 hit points, means massive system failure (≈ death).

 

[ccooke]

Hmm. [MENTION=58172]Yaarel[/MENTION] has some interesting assumptions about the future, but they look too optimistic for me.

That's not to say that the singularity isn't possible, just that there hasn't been the evidence necessary to believe that it's happening. In particular, the predictions made about specific technologies definitely look to be unlikely to me. Technology doesn't spring into the mainstream fully formed; it appears gradually, in stages. Take the example of mind-to-mind telepathy over computer interfaces.

For that to be mainstream, there has to be a mainstream market for advanced mind-machine interfaces. That would require a mainstream market for basic mind-machine interfaces, which would require at least some market for rudimentary ones, which would require an actual product capable of bidirectional communication with the brain, which would require years worth of testing before governments would declare it safe.

That's just one part of it. We'd also have to be able to understand the brain in a vastly more complete way than we do now; the inklings of such technology seems to exist right now, but it's years away from being bidirectional and able to interface safely with the brain's sense of self.

We do not, at this point, actually know if two human brains are similar enough in the way that consciousness is implemented within them to be able to use a mass-produced system to interface at all; our current forays into the brain have not dealt with the conscious mind directly at all.

That's not, as I said, saying that this technology will never appear. But I do not believe it is possible for it to be mainstream by 2025. If a major breakthrough was made this year, and the ability to transmit a sentence trivially from one brain to another was proven and tested (and if some more profitable means of using the tech existed - controlling computers, vehicles, etc), then I'd expect the mainstream to have maybe the first rudimentary versions of the hardware coming out by 2025. Think the equivalent of the old brick mobile phones - and remember, mobile phones were not mainstream until the late 1990's or early 2000's - but they had been around since the early 1980s. Even with the accelerating pace of technology, it took about twenty years.

Speculation about the future is interesting because we simply cannot at this time know what is possible. Sometimes it's interesting to think about what it would be like if some of our predictions don't come true. What if there's no possible way to travel faster than light? What if there is, but we are never able to make a working AI that is more intelligent than we are?

 

[Yaarel]

[MENTION=6695890]ccooke[/MENTION]

The prediction for telepathy is about 2035. See post 11.

The previous post concerning 2025, is specifically about a normal computer being as intelligent as a human brain. If it proves true, it confirms the acceleration of technology is a fact.

 

[unnatural 20]

I wonder how well this would mesh with say Dragonstar? It's basically D&D in Spaaaaaaace.

I've just started reading and enjoying it so far. Thanks! It looks great.

Edit: You included the BFG!