D&D 5E Thoughts on Divorcing D&D From [EDIT: Medievalishness], Mechanically Speaking.

[Jolly Ruby]

Firearms are not as deadly as you think they are. There are about 15K firearm homicides every year in the US, and about 115K injuries. People survive getting shot all the time. more important, as I have stated, we are still playing D&D. That means "realistic" approaches to firearms and no more necessary than realistic approaches to heavy blunt trauma ("no blood" indeed).

I was thinking more "if a couple of shots hit you you can't fight properly" but the same could be said about being hit by a sword, so I think you're right.

 

[Reynard]

I want to reiterate that I am not talking about THE modern world, or any setting in specific. Rather, I am talking about a milieu that could pass for Carnival Row or some of the Final Fantasy games, where people do D&D things in a world that also happens to have trains, guns and maybe electric light and telephones. My choices of classes to eliminate or change are, of course, just my preferences and I understand that people could make arguments for the WW1 era bard or steampunk paladin or whatever.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Think the Brendon Frasier The Mummy here for what I think adventures should look like.

So, standard D&D dungeon crawl with slightly different outfits and modern weapons that accomplish little or nothing that a sword or a crossbow wouldn't, and are therefore functionally an asthetic choice that your players could discard without consequence?

Look, I love The Mummy too, but the modern aspect of it meant very little to anything that happened.

 

[Reynard]

You would want to alter the travel rules -- or, rather, have a defined mechanical difference between Travel and Exploration: you take a steamship to Skull Island, but you have to hexplore in search of Kong.

 

[Reynard]

So, standard D&D dungeon crawl with slightly different outfits and modern weapons that accomplish little or nothing that a sword or a crossbow wouldn't, and are therefore functionally an asthetic choice that your players could discard without consequence?

Look, I love The Mummy too, but the modern aspect of it meant very little to anything that happened.

Yes. Like I said in the OP, the point is to still be playing D&D (adventures wise), just without the medieval-ish accouterments -- a modification I want backed up by some core mechanical changes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If it were me, I'd start by putting my D&D books aside and then go looking for sourcebooks from other games that are of the era that you speak of. Like I wouldn't be surprised if there was a GURPS sourcebook for Industrial-era, Victorian, or WWI-era gaming. So I'd pick up one of those... find out what the sourcebook indicates are the most important historical bits and bobs that the designers of that book felt they needed to build mechanics around... and then go back and mix and match 5E mechanics to reach a similar place (if indeed running the game using 5E matters that much.)

Because I just think that if you start at 5E and merely try to push the game forward in time-- adjusting classes, races, equipment, combat rules and so forth as you go to try and make them "Industrial-like"-- you are going to end up with a game that pretty much is exactly the same as it currently is other than a couple mechanical changes here and there. And thus not even hit upon a large amount of the actual setting material you'd probably want. In other words... pushing the Cleric or Wizard forward as a class into the Industrial / turn of the 20th century era does nothing but muddle the types of character classes you should have for classes of that era.

Make a full break of 5E staples from the beginning, create the setting and game from the time period you want to begin with... and then see if anything after that from standard 5E could be incorporated just as nod to the original game.

From @Reynard 's response to me, it sounds like that's what they want: a modern paint job on 5e.

Reynard, please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

 

[Reynard]

From @Reynard 's response to me, it sounds like that's what they want: a modern paint job on 5e.

Reynard, please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Not just a paint job -- I mentioned some of the mechanical things I think would make it work -- but I want PLAY to still be D&D style adventures.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So, standard D&D dungeon crawl with slightly different outfits and modern weapons that accomplish little or nothing that a sword or a crossbow wouldn't, and are therefore functionally an asthetic choice that your players could discard without consequence?

Look, I love The Mummy too, but the modern aspect of it meant very little to anything that happened.

I think there is quite a lot of fun to be had messing with the aesthetic. My players had fun with gnomes in trenchcoats and fedoras, and were more frightened by knife wielding clowns than any old orc.

I mean The Mummy cut the plot of the Boris Karloff movie and pasted it into a completely different genre.

 

[Micah Sweet]

D&D is not married to medievalism. Most people couldn't understand or relate to people from the medieval era, or even imagine it.

D&D is like most popular media married to heroism. And it's not coincidental that quasi-medieval trappings are popular when you are wanting to tell a heroic story. That's because the medieval period was the most recent period in human history where defensive military technology had outstripped offensive military technology. And in periods where defensive technology has the advantage over offensive technology, lone trained warriors with high tech gear are capable of taking on a dozen or two dozen peasants without their high-tech armor at once leading to heroic fiction that extols the virtues of such warriors and captures the imagination.

It's not a coincidence that most "science fiction" that has captured the imagination is actually fantasy in modern dress where this heroic age is recaptured by powered body armor, giant robot suits, personal shields, genetic super-soldiers, or magic given some pseudo-science gloss. It again lets you have a single hero who can plausibly (if you don't think about it too hard) take on dozens of less powerful beings at a time, recreating the heroic narrative. And face it, humans love a good story about a virile human punching a bunch of other less admirable humans.

Realism of any sort gives you cannon fodder and conscripts and trench warfare and horror. Realism gives you artillery randomly squashing you no matter how heroic you are.

I'm not sure you can actually achieve what you want without in some fashion playing a "supers" game. You are literally describing changing the baseline reality to have offensive weaponry more powerful than defensive weaponry, which is exactly the opposite of how you get heroic fiction. Someone has to be bullet proof in some fashion, whether having superspeed or body made of iron or whatnot.

I don't know...Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse, and the like certainly captured my imagination just fine without the fantasy trappings you seem to be insisting have to be there, at least in regards to the combat-based points you are making.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Firearms are not as deadly as you think they are. There are about 15K firearm homicides every year in the US, and about 115K injuries. People survive getting shot all the time. more important, as I have stated, we are still playing D&D. That means "realistic" approaches to firearms and no more necessary than realistic approaches to heavy blunt trauma ("no blood" indeed).

So in what way is this the modern world beyond the asthetic? It really does sound like D&D with a paint job and some more restrictive PC choices.