Everyone’s a Conan: Growing up in a world where wyverns are as common as raccoons means everyone is an olympian. Every monster hunter human is like Bo Jackson, and having your PC’s all have a genetic makeup that makes Samoan bodybuilders look shabby means you can crack the glass ceiling of what “fighter” types can accomplish without people’s suspension of disbelief breaking.
They eat like this, that's some Michael Phelps shit
A Primitive World: The MH world is very primitive and very dangerous. It’s also a place where basically every settlement is a military fortification because if your village can’t repel a T-rex then it doesn’t get to stay there. Technology is relatively primitive with people still crafting things out of bones and monster hides. The one exception to this is gunpowder, which they do have, which on some level makes sense because I kind of imagine they’re trying to militarize literally every rock and ore they ever find because dinosaurs eat their houses. Still a classic part of MH is that you kill a monster and then get to make gear out of it and I think that’d be easy to port into any edition of D&D. You just create different minor magic effects that each type of weapon or armor can give you and boom you’re golden. Wearing the Rathalos armor makes you resistant to fire so you’d wear it if you knew you were tangling with fire beasties.
Like more Rathalos's
Monster Discovery: The MH world is largely undiscovered. Roads are bad to nonexistent because going anywhere is terrifying and I imagine most people die in the village they were born in. In every game you’ll go into new places and discover new wildlife and see what tries to kill you. The sensation of discovering a new monster, learning what it is and what it does and how it fights until you can beat it with relative ease is one of the core parts of the games fun: A thing going from undiscovered, new, and mysterious to understood and mastered.
Group Fighting: In MH you have an adventuring party that kills dangerous monsters for your society, that’s a perfit fit for D&D. There is also a feeling to the fights I would like to maintain which is very teamwork focused. You’re usually trying to get the best hits in you can but calling out when a monster is going to do some big attack, or trying to hit it at the right time to stop those big attacks, as well as doing things like paralyzing it or mounting it to let the whole group get a few seconds where they can come hit the monster with everything they have free of worry. To me getting the “feeling” of fighting the eponymous monsters is perhaps the most important and challenging idea of a D&D mod.
