Quote from Mdhe >>

Quote from gothicshark >>

Seattle mostly... Shadowrun being a fairly amazing Urban Fantasy setting IMO, and easy to convert to 5.5e.  

 Huh, I would not have said Shadowrun was easy to convert at all. How do you handle Drain? Or Essence? Or... Anything involving the Matrix?

As for the broader poll, I've tried to run plenty of these in D&D, but eventually I realized I was working too hard. Why run Cosmic Horror in D&D when Call of Cthulhu exists? Why run heist fantasy in D&D when Blades in the Dark is right there? TRPG players should be encouraged to reach for the right tool for the job; use systems for what they're good at, like D&D 5e is good at a narrow band of combat-forward fantasy with relatively prominent magic and high-powered heroes. If you're not doing that, in my opinion, you should look at another game that will likely suit your concept better and with far less backend work (and be less likely to burn out your Forever DM, to boot).

 Answer in the easiest way possible. 

5e/5.5e is a better game system to run these kinds of settings period. Keep the rules simple, if you need madness tables 5e has it: 

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/basic-rules-2014/running-the-game#Madness

If you need a specific mechanic that is outside the current rules, you can add it. 

Drain and Essence are limiting mechanics for magic or magic like abilities, no need to add them as that is covered by Spell Slots and Pact Slots. The Matrix is a bit tricky until you realize it's exactly the same as Planes Walking in the Astral sea. You might need to pull a rule or two from AD&D or even third, they fit in easy, then you just alter your skills so it's Tech/Arcana and a few other things. Most computer use is just tool use, etc. 

Shadowrun 5.5e is easy to do, Eldritch Horror set in New England using 5.5e even easier. 

The one system that is hard AF to convert to 5.5e is one of my favorites and thanks to Star Wars 5e and ME5e having the needed rules I was even able to do Traveller  5e. 

Trust me when I say Traveller is a mess, and I wish Mongoose would just make a 5e version already. Because the current rules are even worse than the 90s rules. 

Quote from Enrif >>

Quote from AEDorsay >>

In 45 years of running games, with experience in hundreds of them, the only times I have found D&D to be lacking are exactly 3: Superhero, Mecha, and wholly modern.

 

 

I think you can easily run D&D with these 3 too.

Superhero and Mecha are the easiest out of these. All your PC stuff is simply the Mecha, with the pilot being a level 0 Character on the side, or for Superhero's your PC is a superhero as they are so much above a Commoner.

Modern, i assume modern fantasy, not mundane modern, is in a way covered with Acquisition Incorporated that gives us things like Franchises, but you don't need that stuff, as the only difference between low fantasy and modern is the time period. All else can be run the same.

 yeah I have a Superhero 5e source book I use at times, real COH levels of Comic book Fantasy it has a bunch of Superhero classes and everything, it's technically fully 5e compatible but works best when using it stand-a-lone. I also have anime 5e and some others. Wonderful books, and when running in person games I have these books on the table when I tell my players "time to roll up some stats and create characters."  

Quote from Mdhe >>

Telling people to use a hammer to hit nails and a screwdriver to drive screws  isn't gatekeeping; it's advice. An RPG system is another kind of tool, and all of them are good at some things and bad at others. D&D 5e is good at *insert bolded text* and bad at most other things. I don't feel the need to defend that statement; it's obvious to most people who have played the game. Of course the people who wrote it say it's good at everything; they have a strong financial incentive for that to be the case.

It's not the case, though; you certainly can use D&D 5e to do all sorts of things it's bad at, like running low combat, high social, low magic games. You can use a hammer to drive a screw. You'll do an enormous amount of unnecessary work and the results will won't be as good as if you'd used the screwdriver, but you can do it.

You don't think Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu are fantasy enough? I could also recommend Eureka, Mork Borg, ICON, Shadowrun (I prefer 5e, but pick your poison), BREAK!!, The Magical Land of Yeld, Wildsea, Wilderfeast, or Exalted, and those are just games I've played this year. I'll be honest; I don't really feel strongly about convincing you. But I do feel strongly about convincing the struggling GM who might be reading this thinking they're not good enough or they don't work hard enough because they can't make whatever style of game work at their D&D table. It's not your fault. Try a different tool for the job.

 
Blue Text: Wholly and entirely a personal opinion, and not a factual statement.

Green Text: I never said they weren't fantasy enough. I expressed an opinion that has exactly and precisely an equal level of importance and value as yours.

Red Text: I, too, feel strongly about helping folks who are struggling to make a particular style of game work for them. Except we aren't talking about styles of game. We are talking about genres of fantasy. 

And in that, we may have hit the nail on the head -- where you see a need to play the game in a different style, I do not. I play Wild West games (Dorado, a realm in my current setting) the same way I play everything. They are just in an area that is filled by the genre of wild west fantasy.

The same thing in Durango, which is a mob town based on Gangster movies. From Top of the world ma to sorry Fredo. It is played the same way the other stuff is played. 

You mention having to do a lot of work -- but note, I haven't had to create any new systems to make any genre function in my games. The times I have had to do create systems have been as part of my whole group of players -- and that's always genre neutral stuff: we created a wholly spell point point based magic system. We redid the way Feats are done to an extent (but not really a full rewrite there). We shifted back to an older approach to doing classes, but kept the progression structure from 5e. Things like that.

The rest of the work we've done? Expansions to existing systems, and always with an eye to solving a problem. We have more than three attitudes, for example, in social encounters. We cross reference them with mood at the moment, and that gives us a DC chart. We added a fear/fright reaction set of 6 options, based on real Anxiety responses. We took the vehicle system in the game and added some small elements like piloting and handling.

Those little things?  A couple hours. The big things -- well, they are playtested and done by committee, so they take a lot longer.

But what needs to change? The archetypes? You need a Warrior, a Rogue, a Priest, a Wizard, and an Animist, and you've covered 75% of the possible generic archetypes found in over 90% of the cultures. Variations among them can come down to subclasses if you want to use that system, or you can just add more in . So, with one exception, those are pretty much covered.

That's hard to do? People been creating new classes and subclasses since the game started. They enjoy it. The homebrew here alone is enormous.

You see it as a change to play style. I see it as a change of genre. That's a really huge gap in approach, in understanding, in the way that one looks at the game and how to do it.

Now, there is one area that we may differ in as well: whenever you said a lot of work, I didn't really disagree because I think the shortest time I ever spent on creating a world, a setting, was like six weeks. And it was a place that could fit into any major metropolitan area of our modern world. Not large, single culture, etc. Easy effort for me. Most of my work went intot he dungeons and adventures around it.

If you (not you personally, a general you) have a play style that is about combat -- that is a perfectly fine, completely reasonable "go in kill them, have some fun, the game is a combat simulator of a sort" type of play style -- then you probably don't worry too much about creating a well developed world.  You may have town maps and tons of small location settings, and stuff like that, but I don't mean that -- I mean the cultures and peoples and systems around all of that.

I have a game where character growth, where stories happen, a layer driven, non-linear structured and involved setting that is changed constantly by the things that the player characters do, and where combat is something that has importance in a large story, or is merely one of several different kinds of challenges that must be overcome. And into that world I have built the underlying basis for running all kinds of adventures -- pretty much everything above. It isn't a "standard D&D world" in that it is not a part of the D&D multiverse, doesn't use the planes, doesn't have any way to link it to FR or Krynn or others. I could have done that, but my players are bored of that.

You can cast a fly spell and travel into space. Assuming you dress warmly enough. There is air in space. It is just super cold. THere, you can hop on a pirate vessel or a trading vessel and watch the solar sails unfurl as the craft travels to space stations and outposts and more.

You can indulge in a gangster setting, or the wild west, or high seas piracy, or undersea battle twixt the Tritons and Merow.  You can join in a massive sprawling battle that is part of a war that happens every year.  You can do heists, solve mysteries, fall into a comedy of errors, have a romance, indulge in political intrigue among the Nobles, Houses, and Guilds,  the whole list of stuff above and more.  You can do an entire campaign in one single genre, or have a hundred adventures in a hundred different genres.

One game, no change in play style or rules, same characters, etc. Now, that world has taken time to create. Not rules for that world, just the world. All told, with tweaks that are still going on, about two years in total actual time on it. The character classes, all seven iterations of them, have been a lot more challenging, and took longer, but a lot of that was stuff like liking new rules in the UAs and the release of the new books. 20 classes, all o them archetypes for the world itself (and yes, the ones I listed are present).

And D&D handles it well. It "does it good". As Enrif pointed out above, it is simply a matter of how you see it integrating into your table.

So, on that Red Text part, the difference for us is that I see a chance to show someone how to add the genre into their game, and you see it as a chance to change the way they play the games they love.

A buddy cop movie is still a buddy cop movie, no matter if it is in space, in fantasy, underwater, a mystery, or saving the world. It is still a buddy cop movie. That's a genre. 

Play tyle is more like the difference between putting on a stage play, a film, or a TV show. Lousy metaphor, but its what I got at the moment.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Quote from Mdhe >>

Telling people to use a hammer to hit nails and a screwdriver to drive screws  isn't gatekeeping; it's advice. An RPG system is another kind of tool, and all of them are good at some things and bad at others. D&D 5e is good at *insert bolded text* and bad at most other things. I don't feel the need to defend that statement; it's obvious to most people who have played the game. Of course the people who wrote it say it's good at everything; they have a strong financial incentive for that to be the case.

It's not the case, though; you certainly can use D&D 5e to do all sorts of things it's bad at, like running low combat, high social, low magic games. You can use a hammer to drive a screw. You'll do an enormous amount of unnecessary work and the results will won't be as good as if you'd used the screwdriver, but you can do it.

You don't think Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu are fantasy enough? I could also recommend Eureka, Mork Borg, ICON, Shadowrun (I prefer 5e, but pick your poison), BREAK!!, The Magical Land of Yeld, Wildsea, Wilderfeast, or Exalted, and those are just games I've played this year. I'll be honest; I don't really feel strongly about convincing you. But I do feel strongly about convincing the struggling GM who might be reading this thinking they're not good enough or they don't work hard enough because they can't make whatever style of game work at their D&D table. It's not your fault. Try a different tool for the job.

 
Blue Text: Wholly and entirely a personal opinion, and not a factual statement.

Green Text: I never said they weren't fantasy enough. I expressed an opinion that has exactly and precisely an equal level of importance and value as yours.

Red Text: I, too, feel strongly about helping folks who are struggling to make a particular style of game work for them. Except we aren't talking about styles of game. We are talking about genres of fantasy. 

And in that, we may have hit the nail on the head -- where you see a need to play the game in a different style, I do not. I play Wild West games (Dorado, a realm in my current setting) the same way I play everything. They are just in an area that is filled by the genre of wild west fantasy.

The same thing in Durango, which is a mob town based on Gangster movies. From Top of the world ma to sorry Fredo. It is played the same way the other stuff is played. 

You mention having to do a lot of work -- but note, I haven't had to create any new systems to make any genre function in my games. The times I have had to do create systems have been as part of my whole group of players -- and that's always genre neutral stuff: we created a wholly spell point point based magic system. We redid the way Feats are done to an extent (but not really a full rewrite there). We shifted back to an older approach to doing classes, but kept the progression structure from 5e. Things like that.

The rest of the work we've done? Expansions to existing systems, and always with an eye to solving a problem. We have more than three attitudes, for example, in social encounters. We cross reference them with mood at the moment, and that gives us a DC chart. We added a fear/fright reaction set of 6 options, based on real Anxiety responses. We took the vehicle system in the game and added some small elements like piloting and handling.

Those little things?  A couple hours. The big things -- well, they are playtested and done by committee, so they take a lot longer.

But what needs to change? The archetypes? You need a Warrior, a Rogue, a Priest, a Wizard, and an Animist, and you've covered 75% of the possible generic archetypes found in over 90% of the cultures. Variations among them can come down to subclasses if you want to use that system, or you can just add more in . So, with one exception, those are pretty much covered.

That's hard to do? People been creating new classes and subclasses since the game started. They enjoy it. The homebrew here alone is enormous.

You see it as a change to play style. I see it as a change of genre. That's a really huge gap in approach, in understanding, in the way that one looks at the game and how to do it.

Now, there is one area that we may differ in as well: whenever you said a lot of work, I didn't really disagree because I think the shortest time I ever spent on creating a world, a setting, was like six weeks. And it was a place that could fit into any major metropolitan area of our modern world. Not large, single culture, etc. Easy effort for me. Most of my work went intot he dungeons and adventures around it.

If you (not you personally, a general you) have a play style that is about combat -- that is a perfectly fine, completely reasonable "go in kill them, have some fun, the game is a combat simulator of a sort" type of play style -- then you probably don't worry too much about creating a well developed world.  You may have town maps and tons of small location settings, and stuff like that, but I don't mean that -- I mean the cultures and peoples and systems around all of that.

I have a game where character growth, where stories happen, a layer driven, non-linear structured and involved setting that is changed constantly by the things that the player characters do, and where combat is something that has importance in a large story, or is merely one of several different kinds of challenges that must be overcome. And into that world I have built the underlying basis for running all kinds of adventures -- pretty much everything above. It isn't a "standard D&D world" in that it is not a part of the D&D multiverse, doesn't use the planes, doesn't have any way to link it to FR or Krynn or others. I could have done that, but my players are bored of that.

You can cast a fly spell and travel into space. Assuming you dress warmly enough. There is air in space. It is just super cold. THere, you can hop on a pirate vessel or a trading vessel and watch the solar sails unfurl as the craft travels to space stations and outposts and more.

You can indulge in a gangster setting, or the wild west, or high seas piracy, or undersea battle twixt the Tritons and Merow.  You can join in a massive sprawling battle that is part of a war that happens every year.  You can do heists, solve mysteries, fall into a comedy of errors, have a romance, indulge in political intrigue among the Nobles, Houses, and Guilds,  the whole list of stuff above and more.  You can do an entire campaign in one single genre, or have a hundred adventures in a hundred different genres.

One game, no change in play style or rules, same characters, etc. Now, that world has taken time to create. Not rules for that world, just the world. All told, with tweaks that are still going on, about two years in total actual time on it. The character classes, all seven iterations of them, have been a lot more challenging, and took longer, but a lot of that was stuff like liking new rules in the UAs and the release of the new books. 20 classes, all o them archetypes for the world itself (and yes, the ones I listed are present).

And D&D handles it well. It "does it good". As Enrif pointed out above, it is simply a matter of how you see it integrating into your table.

So, on that Red Text part, the difference for us is that I see a chance to show someone how to add the genre into their game, and you see it as a chance to change the way they play the games they love.

A buddy cop movie is still a buddy cop movie, no matter if it is in space, in fantasy, underwater, a mystery, or saving the world. It is still a buddy cop movie. That's a genre. 

Play tyle is more like the difference between putting on a stage play, a film, or a TV show. Lousy metaphor, but its what I got at the moment.

 

 While I do love me some Deadlands , and Traveller, and a few other games from the GRUPS era. Unless you have players willing to learn the new rules, ie CP2020 and a stack of D6's VTM and a stack of d10's, just importing a setting to 5e has worked for me, most of the rules can be used for any setting, and it's easy to limit which classes or subclasses are used for a setting. 

BTW later today the FFXIV RPG book will be delivered to me... can't wait. I will probably convert it to 5.5e at some point, and might even run a game. But I need to read the rules first. 

for me, it's about player availability, the vast majority of players know 5e. Not so many have even heard of Deadlands and Traveller, some might know about CP2020 but they only know the video game, and VTM has a solid fan base, it's hard to build a new game group for it, esp one that respects table taboos. 

But I can very easily get a bunch of people to make Vampires in the Old West using 5.5e rules, and use a mix of Deadlands and VTM lore to make a homebrew world. "ohhh... I have ebil Ideas now." 

Quote from gothicshark >>

Quote from Mdhe >>

Quote from gothicshark >>

Seattle mostly... Shadowrun being a fairly amazing Urban Fantasy setting IMO, and easy to convert to 5.5e.  

 Huh, I would not have said Shadowrun was easy to convert at all. How do you handle Drain? Or Essence? Or... Anything involving the Matrix?

As for the broader poll, I've tried to run plenty of these in D&D, but eventually I realized I was working too hard. Why run Cosmic Horror in D&D when Call of Cthulhu exists? Why run heist fantasy in D&D when Blades in the Dark is right there? TRPG players should be encouraged to reach for the right tool for the job; use systems for what they're good at, like D&D 5e is good at a narrow band of combat-forward fantasy with relatively prominent magic and high-powered heroes. If you're not doing that, in my opinion, you should look at another game that will likely suit your concept better and with far less backend work (and be less likely to burn out your Forever DM, to boot).

 Answer in the easiest way possible. 

5e/5.5e is a better game system to run these kinds of settings period. Keep the rules simple, if you need madness tables 5e has it: 

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/basic-rules-2014/running-the-game#Madness

If you need a specific mechanic that is outside the current rules, you can add it. 

Drain and Essence are limiting mechanics for magic or magic like abilities, no need to add them as that is covered by Spell Slots and Pact Slots. The Matrix is a bit tricky until you realize it's exactly the same as Planes Walking in the Astral sea. You might need to pull a rule or two from AD&D or even third, they fit in easy, then you just alter your skills so it's Tech/Arcana and a few other things. Most computer use is just tool use, etc. 

Shadowrun 5.5e is easy to do, Eldritch Horror set in New England using 5.5e even easier. 

The one system that is hard AF to convert to 5.5e is one of my favorites and thanks to Star Wars 5e and ME5e having the needed rules I was even able to do Traveller  5e. 

Trust me when I say Traveller is a mess, and I wish Mongoose would just make a 5e version already. Because the current rules are even worse than the 90s rules. 

 Hey, if that's working for you, great. I'm gonna pretty strongly disagree with your assessment of Shadowrun's mechanics, though. Drain is absolutely not just another limiting mechanic, functionally interchangeable with Spell Slots; Drain is the thing that kills your mage when they try to pull too much power. This is key to what magic is in Shadowrun: a phenomenally powerful, but also very dangerous and fundamentally unpredictable force. That, in turn, is crucial to what Shadowrun is doing. Everything in Shadowrun costs something; every form of power opens characters up to danger. If you take that out by removing Drain, Essence, the omnipresent Matrix... What's the point?

As for Call of Cthulhu, that's a game about being powerless in the face of things the kind can't comprehend; everything about the game is structured towards that purpose, starting with the fact most CoC characters are really bad at most things. You can't just slap a Madness Table on a game full of hypercompetent D&D 5e characters and get that effect. This is why just adding mechanics to 5e isn't sufficient; game systems have baked-in opinions about the kinds of worlds they take place in and the kinds of stories they tell, and mechanics interact with other mechanics to further the overall thesis of a game. It's certainly trivial to inject the trappings of a genre into 5e; the problem comes when you want to engage with what that genre means to people--with the things that genre does uniquely--and you find the what you have is a system built quite narrowly for high-magic medieval fantasy dungeon combat with a few out-of-place genre mechanics bolted on.

Quote from Mdhe >>

 Hey, if that's working for you, great. I'm gonna pretty strongly disagree with your assessment of Shadowrun's mechanics, though. Drain is absolutely not just another limiting mechanic, functionally interchangeable with Spell Slots; Drain is the thing that kills your mage when they try to pull too much power. This is key to what magic is in Shadowrun: a phenomenally powerful, but also very dangerous and fundamentally unpredictable force. That, in turn, is crucial to what Shadowrun is doing. Everything in Shadowrun costs something; every form of power opens characters up to danger. If you take that out by removing Drain, Essence, the omnipresent Matrix... What's the point?

As for Call of Cthulhu, that's a game about being powerless in the face of things the kind can't comprehend; everything about the game is structured towards that purpose, starting with the fact most CoC characters are really bad at most things. You can't just slap a Madness Table on a game full of hypercompetent D&D 5e characters and get that effect. This is why just adding mechanics to 5e isn't sufficient; game systems have baked-in opinions about the kinds of worlds they take place in and the kinds of stories they tell, and mechanics interact with other mechanics to further the overall thesis of a game. It's certainly trivial to inject the trappings of a genre into 5e; the problem comes when you want to engage with what that genre means to people--with the things that genre does uniquely--and you find the what you have is a system built quite narrowly for high-magic medieval fantasy dungeon combat with a few out-of-place genre mechanics bolted on.

It might not have occurred to you, this is not a General RPG forum, but an Official Forum for D&D 5e. Some of us prefer to work within the system related to these forums. Working out how to do a particular type of story inside the mechanics of 5e D&D is highly rewarding. Lots of players, low levels of rules explaining, easy to start gaming. Sure playing a specialist game with veterans of the specialist game works, and yeah can't fully 100% recreate that special feeling when you player character dies making their Traveller Character. 

But when you break down each part and it's purpose and mechanical function you can easily bring the settings and vibe into 5th, also while D&D is billed based on the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and "high-magic medieval fantasy dungeon combat" D&D has always been useable in a multitude of settings, as the basic core rules are system agnostic. It's why there has been Call of Cthulhu d20, d20 Modern, Deadlands d20, and many others. Gawd I miss the old d20 games. (Aka OGL SRD D&D advertised by WotC with full WotC support ended with 4th ed.) 

So yeah, maybe you can do better with a system specific ruleset, but 5e is perfectly good at running any of these settings and capturing the feels and game stresses. And if you are unsure how to do it, grab the d20 book based on your rules and convert it to 5e. (Which is really easy) 

Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy game, but that broad category encompasses a lot of variety. Many different flavors of fantasy exist in fiction and film. Do you want a horrific campaign inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith? Or do you envision a world of muscled barbarians and nimble thieves, along the lines of the classic sword-and-sorcery books by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber? Your choice can have a impact on the flavor of your campaign.

Deep in D&D’s roots are elements of science fiction and science fantasy, and your campaign might draw on those sources as well. It’s okay to send your characters hurtling through a magic mirror to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, put them aboard a ship traveling between the stars, or set your campaign in a far-future world where laser blasters and magic missiles exist side by side. The possibilities are limitless.

Rules As Written, D&D is not only for high-magic medieval fantasy dungeon combat. Explicitly so. Saying otherwise is dishonest opinion.