FrankTrollman wrote:Prak wrote:I mean, hell, Leverage is a D&D party of a bunch of different styles of rogue.
No. They are not.
The characters in Leverage are ensemble protagonists. And there are ways that they are like a D&D party. They have a diverse skill set that allows the team to complete missions that individual characters would not be able to complete, for example. But they are not a D&D party. They do not ever break into an enemy facility full of traps and treasure to murder all the occupants and sell off the contents. They don't slay dragons or equip themselves with more powerful magical swords.
Shadowrun characters are about as close to D&D characters as you are likely to find in a modern or futuristic setting. And that's obviously by design, since Shadowrun was a conscious attempt to adopt as many D&D tropes into Cyberpunk as possible. However it's still very much the case that there are substantial and substantive differences between a Shadowrun team and a D&D party. The fact that they get jobs through Johnsons as a mercantile endeavor rather than shaking down villages for quests is a big one - as is the fact that they are explicitly outside the law and have to care about not getting caught by the authorities is even bigger.
The reality is that CSI: Miami
is not cleanly mappable to Dungeons & Dragons. And attempts to make RPGs that covered other genres by porting tropes directly from D&D into other genres were disastrous failures. And those were disastrous failures in the 1970s and 80s! It's been almost forty years since people have been able to tell you what is wrong with your idea.
-Username17
I think we have very different standards for what constitutes a "D&D style adventure." For you, it requires traps, murder, dragons and magical equipment. For me, it requires an ensemble cast of diverse skills undertaking missions that individual characters alone could not accomplish, where they face some form of strong, targeted opposition which must be dealt with, and dealing with it can involve avoiding it, knocking it out, killing it, or befriending it. Breaking into an corporate office building with personal guards and high tech security systems to steal the designs for a plane, and being forced to bluff and fist fight guards is a D&D style adventure to me. Breaking into an enemy factory hidden in the antarctic and having to fight your group's dark mirrors to stop the production of never-before-seen-weapons and super soldiers based on your crew, and save the world, is a D&D style adventure to me. Descending into a long forgotten tomb of an ancient culture, dodging traps, wild creatures, and an opposing force that also wants the magical items there is
literally a D&D style adventure and that's what the Tomb Raider games and at least two* Indiana Jones movies are about.
[*]Note, I've only, to my recollection, seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
So, again, Society Marches On, but fiction seldom does. And the game doesn't need to be perfect. I'm not selling this except in the sense that once this setting is usable, I'm going to try to sell one of my friends on running it so I can fucking play again rather than always be DM. It just needs to be captivating and enjoyable, and even if I did decide to put the setting in a book and sell it, it still doesn't need to be perfect.
Thaluikhain wrote:Prak wrote:So, I'm not going to argue history or espionage with you, because it doesn't matter. D&D isn't history, and it's not real life, and it doesn't even have to be a phenomenal story, it just has to be enjoyable, and there are totally D&D-style adventures set in literally every era you could care to name. Seriously, give me some time, and I bet I could find a D&D-style adventure set in pre-human history.
Um, to clarify, when you say a Victoria Era setting for D&D, do you mean a setting based on real research on what the Victorian Era was like, or do you mean take D&D, put corsets on the women and have an absolute monarch named Victoria be personally hiring adventures to track down a serial killer in a foggy city?
The latter would work fine (personally I find that sort of thing irritating, but that's just me), the former, not so much.
I mean a setting with enough research on what the Victorian Era was like to have a starting point for design, but stopping myself from getting bogged down in bullshit. I spent a decent bit of time researching street-level Victorian society when writing my last D&D setting, I'll be honest, I don't know off the top of my head what the government is like for Roloste, the Victorian London/Selhoff inspired city in my "D&D in a Dracula costume" setting, but I do know what law enforcement looks like practically, I know what people do for jobs in a general sense, and I know what a reasonable living set up for itinerant workers (ie, sellswords) looks like. And it works fine. Maybe not for your game or Frank's game, but my players like it.
Koumei wrote:Just adding a reminder here that at its core, D&D has a bunch of primeval forces/Elder Evils, deities, demon royalty/nobility and whatever that actually do want the end of everything, so the whole "If you fire your nukes, they fire theirs and then we ALL die" is just a plus side to them, you're doing half the work for them!
So basically you need to be able to explain why those things don't exist, or use something that such things can't easily get their hands on, because the very possibility turns the game from a cold war scenario into an action hero movie with a count-down to the Apocalypse. You know, with someone like Tom Cruise, Vinnie Jones or Jason Statham playing the lead role.
Which is a perfectly serviceable plot to go with, it's been done a great many times in some form or another and for the most part people don't seem sick of it, but it is significantly different to what you're after. I think.
That's a good point. I still don't know what the cosmology looks like for this setting, but I'm working on it. Also, this setting is definitely intended to be more Atomic Blonde, or even Salt (but less dumb) than Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or Red Sparrow. So a plot where James Bond, Jason Statham and Angelina Jolie have to covertly enter Fantasy!USSR and stop wizard-scientists from conducting a mass sacrifice to call down Cthulhu on Fantasy!America is... actually pretty much what I'm going for, interspersed with
short political intrigue adventures with opportunities for a warlock to go around and sling invocations (because my best role in political intrigue is "tactical violence", and I want to play this).
Iduno wrote:Prak wrote:I don't want either super power to be clearly good or bad
Isn't alignment pretty well ingrained in most versions of D&D? I agree the idea is interesting, but D&D seems like a poor fit for it. I guess you could go with super good who want to genocide everyone who isn't good enough for them, and super evil who want to genocide everyone who isn't evil enough, with neutral-only PCs, which would make neither side more right or wrong.
You'll probably also end up with the PCs being profiteers who make their mercenary living off causing suffering for one side or the other, but that may or may not be intentional.
Perhaps I should rephrase that. I don't want either super power to objectively have the higher moral ground. And also what Omegon said. I would prefer to have the struggle be somewhat morally ambiguous, but I'm ok with both sides being outright malevolent by any modern terms.