Recent content by Reynard

It sounds like you are trying to.do steampunk.

Again, I don't think we should overthink firearms. It isn't like D&D has these realistic, precise damage rules to start with. Who cares if in your contemporary fantasy a gun does the same damage as a sword?

The lethality of firearms is not a function of genre,it is a function of tone. Firearms don't have to be any more lethal than swords are in D&D to make sense within the action adventure tropes that drive the game.

The artificer is not a 5.5E core class, so I left it out.

Sure, but just like with supers settings, the tropes ad constraints of the genre over rule any "logical conclusions". Otherwise, like you said, you aren't in that genre anymore.

I was just suggesting that maybe arguing with the premise is not the best use of the thread.

Some people would say Spelljammer is not D&D.

Advanced technology looking like magic doesn't have anything to do with actual magic. How does, for example, effective vodoun necessitate sci-fi elements?

For a relatively generic or typical Contemporary fantasy/Urban Fantasy type setting, what do you think would be among the necessary subclasses? Barbarian: maybe a pit or cage fighter type? Or, in a lot of settings, maybe barbarian is where you put playable lycanthropy? Bard: rocker, for sure...

I was not entirely clear in the OP because I did say "the near future" but I did not mean Cyberpunk so much as technothriller "5 minutes in the future." Of course, these days we kind of have to consider whether we live in the cyberpunk future... I personally would place my setting in the early...

Sure, but what percentage of players would fit into that alternate paradigm? Relative to.the number of people inside the D&D paradigm, probably negligible.

I had a long running generational campaign that started with AD&D2E, then moved to 3.x, jaunted briefly to Hero, and finally ended up using Mutants and Masterminds (first 2E, then 3E) for the "modern" era of that world which was much more Silver Age Marvel than Shadowrun.

Modern weapons would be a thing, of course, and you would have to determine what counted as "simple" vs "martial" firearms, etc. There would also probably be some changes to the skill list, so deciding who was proficient in what would be necessary.

NOTE 1: This thread is mostly just musing and theorycrafting; I would not actually use 5E for contemporary fantasy, but it came up in another thread so i thought it might be fun to discuss. NOTE 2: I called it "contemporary fantasy" in order to avoid the "urban fantasy" argument happening in...

Just out of curiosity. What RPG that had multiple editions did you decide to stick with an earlier edition rather than "upgrade" to the new edition? Why? What about the earlier edition made you decide to stay with it? What about the new edition made you decide not to go with it? I used to run...