Advice on role playing game systems?

[Aasharu]

So, I want to run a campaign for some friends that takes place in modern times, without any supernatural aspects. The basic gist of the campaign is that the players are a group of
criminal types in a criminal run city, (think the anime Black Lagoon, if you've ever seen it,) with an emphasis on being motivated solely by money; so, having a concrete system of
money management is important. Also, some of my potential players are gun nuts to varying degrees, so some emphasis on weapon customization and such would be nice as well.
Unfortunately from my perspective, I'm not too knowledgeable on any of the "modern" RPG systems. I could default to D20 modern, but I'm wondering if there's any systems that
are better for such a campaign; I figured I'd ask the internet for advice.

[Mr Bean]

Gurps and Shadowrun both pop to mind. Spycraft as another modern game. Really the only thing you need to have is the basic mechanics to have a fight, the ability to tell a half way decent story and players who understand enough to get by. D20 modern the last time I touched it back in 2005 was very much a game of D&D 3.5 w/guns and not it's own modern setting. If D20 Modern was to be believed then we fight the same way in fantasy time with Crossbows as we do in modern times with AK's. People standing in squares exchanging shots, explosives not being common place and cover was for babies.

Gun nuts always love Shadowrun fyi because Shadowrun has books written specifically for gun nuts.

[weemadando]

D20 Spycraft is a pretty nice system.

Haven: City of Violence may be another option.

[Jub]

If you're looking for specifically not supernatural you can always go for Cyberpunk 2020 if you can find the books. The rules aren't the most balanced and the game as a whole shows more than a bit of age, but it can still be good fun. If you do go for this system you'll want to, at the very least, track down Blackhands Street Weapons it's a book entirely dedicated to weapons. The four chromebooks are also something you'll want as they're full of new things for the players to play with.

[andrewgpaul]

They're available on DrivethruRPG.com; at least the core rules and a good chunk of the sourcebooks are.

[Scottish Ninja]

D20 Modern has two very big downsides for what you're trying to accomplish, I think - one is that money management is abstracted a lot more through the Wealth system (which might actually be fine, since it's still more of an actual system than "you have x dollars, you find y dollars, you now have z dollars to spend"), the other is that it is absolutely shit for handling firearms, by trying to squeeze guns into the existing D&D ranged weapons system.

I'll elaborate on this point because it's one of the things that really makes me hate D20 Modern. The first part of the problem is based on range and accuracy. In D&D with a weapon such as a bow or crossbow, you have a range increment of a given number of feet (100 for the longbow, 120 for the heavy crossbow). You take a -2 penalty to hit for each range increment, out to a maximum of 10, which is the maximum range of the weapon. This means that the maximum range of the longbow is 1000 feet, or roughly 330 yards, with a penalty of -20 to hit. (Pathfinder's Far Shot feat reduces the range increment penalty to -1, as opposed to D&D increasing the range increment by 50%. I find the Pathfinder rule to be way better since there's no sense in how someone would physically be able to shoot a crossbow bolt 600 yards instead of 400, given the same weapon.) With Far Shot, this makes shooting out to maximum range viable for even a first level character - not against individual targets but against large formations of men. This won't be entirely effective but it's possible, and feels about right.

So how do guns fit into this system? I recall reading about a case in Britain where a woman, standing on the roof of her house, was struck in the head and killed by a .22 caliber bullet. The bullet was determined to have been fired from a military base seven miles away. This illustrates the tremendous gap, particularly with modern firearms, between maximum range and maximum effective range - and effective range is very far from being a hard number. Ideal conditions can make reliable shooting well beyond a listed maximum effective range possible - take for example Craig Harrison, the British sniper who shot three consecutive targets at a range of almost 2500 meters - two-thirds beyond the listed maximum effective range of the AWM rifle he used. So what is the AWM's range increment in the D20 Weapons Locker? It's 110 feet. Returning to the example of long-range fire against formations of men, the Lee-Enfield had up until the No.1 Mk.3* in 1915 the provision of a volley sight, which was graduated out to 2800 yards. That shows the limits of what was considered at least theoretically possible even with the simplest of iron sights, though rather optimistic - even against large formations!

This is a huge issue, because the D20 ranged weapons system doesn't have the flexibility to cover both the difficulties in increasing range and the possibilities of shooting at extreme range, given its system of linear penalties, one which makes a lot more sense when shooting at longer ranges means you can't just adjust your sights to the appropriate range, line up your target, and fire. (In fact, the M1903 Springfield rifle had its battle sights - ie not the longer-range ladder sights - set by default for a range of 400 yards. American soldiers were trained to aim low at closer targets!)

So how does Bill Slaviscek deal with the huge contradiction created when you decide that modern rifles are shorter-ranged than longbows and crossbows? Simple, D20 Modern just reduces the range increment of bows to 30 ft. Sure. If you want a real mindfuck, and have the 3.5 DMG; turn to page 145, which lists the range increment of a musket as 150 feet, making it more accurate than a longbow or heavy crossbow (and having the simultaneous effect of increasing its maximum range, which was probably the desired goal). Then turn to the next page, which gives the range increment for a hunting rifle as... 80 feet.

Who read those two pages together and thought, "Yeah, that sounds right, let's send this to publication"!?

The next big issue is armor. This is a fairly simpler topic: armor is equally effective against all weapons. Whether it's a quarterstaff, .32 ACP pistol... or a 14.5mm anti-tank rifle capable of penetrating 40mm of steel plate at 100 meters, you have the same probability of getting past the armor and doing damage.

Some Pathfinder release had a gun-wielding class which simply treated gun attacks as ranged touch attacks. This is an equally simplistic, sloppy, and bad solution, especially since the term "bulletproof" comes from armor being tested by shooting it, and marking where the bullet had failed to penetrate. The D20 system does not handle armor effectiveness against different weapons well at all. (Note, however, that through the AC mechanic, a decreasing ability to penetrate armor at longer range is baked into the range increment. The difference doesn't bother me that much in regular D&D.)

Then there's automatic fire.

Ugh.

I don't know who specifically thought of this but I'm going to go ahead and blame Bill Slaviscek again: Burst fire (which has to be taken as a feat before it can be used) can be used at a -4 penalty to hit.

What world do these people live in where firing more bullets at someone makes you less likely to hit? It's true that succeeding shots may be less accurate but the first round at least will always be at least as accurate as any single shot you fire.

In the end, your players may not care about any of this, but if there are gun nuts among them, they might be as bothered about it as I am, and that draws people out of the game when realistic choices can't lead to realistic actions.

[Simon_Jester]

Slaviscek himself did a better job of modeling modern combat with the Alternity system; he's certainly capable of it. The real problem, IMO, is that he had to make D20 modern and D20 'fantasy' at least vaguely compatible, which meant using pretty much the same mechanics.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Tensided is much more realistic than d20 Modern and much less cumbersome than any other realistic modern system that I know of. I can send the files to you if you PM me your e-mail address.

[Gunhead]

GURPS is good overall system but it's not light. I wouldn't recommend CP2020 unless you are willing to tweak it, a lot. Breaking CP2020 is what earns players their 1st munchkin badge.
Since you want something that is both modern and gunbunny friendly, there aren't all that many options available out of all the major titles. As far as money management goes, I think GURPS has a lot going for it since it has rules for contacts, allies and wealth beyond just money right out of the package. Additionally GURPS has source books available for example cops and that can be really helpful when designing a crime oriented RPG.

-Gunhead

[weemadando]

Fuck. How could I forget to plug Hong Kong Action Theatre! The first edition (http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=1564) not the second. If you want quick, fun gunplay and the ability to go a little wild, then this is the place.

I could also throw you a copy of this (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/1 ... bat-System) but it might be a little too far into simulation.

Also it has a lot of issues that you'd probably want to houserule out. Gotta get around to editing up a second ed.

[Stark]

Is the first reply to a request for a game with no supernatural aspects really Shadowrun? Is this a commentary on American literacy, or just that phenomena where any request for suggestions just gets a list of people's favourite shit?

If you care about mechanical stuff beyond 'hit y/n', the stuff discussed above for D20 is important and you shouldn't use it. D20 sucks anyway etc etc. Arthur Tuxedo's recommendation is good; the core engine is good and its not part of some money-extracting media empire.

Hey hey, you could always play Millenium's End. Overlay to hit for hilarity, character creation that will take four hours a guy, but it's simple, fast, and setting agnostic.

[weemadando]

Another option is Recon. The original is a decent system. Haven't played the Palladium versions.

[Formless]

It hasn't been mentioned yet, but Mutants And Masterminds is far more flexible under the hood than its superhero shell might lead you to believe: mostly because it runs on a point buy system. It even has a dedicate offshoot for playing Anime inspired games. Its D20 under the hood, so its not hard to learn. Low level play is perfect for non-superhumans (like Batman), and the level up mechanic is stripped out since Superheroes rarely gain or lose power unless there is dramatic reasons for doing so. The only rules tweak is that for Superhero play it automatically assumes everyone pulls their punches and does less-lethal damage, so always use the rules for lethal injury when using firearms.

D20 modern the last time I touched it back in 2005 was very much a game of D&D 3.5 w/guns and not it's own modern setting.

False. D20 Modern is based on D&D 3.0, not 3.5. And it never received an update. There is at least as much difference between those two systems as there is between 3.5 and Pathfinder. Furthermore, it actually did change several important aspects of the game, such as the six generic "ability score" based classes that only went up ten levels before forcing you to play normal character classes (they call them advanced, but if it were more like D&D they would have been the basic classes) as well as tweaking and lowering the Massive Damage Threshold so injuries from firearms would be appropriately dangerous.

Far fom the firearms being the worst design element of the game, I think its really their inability to decide whether or not it should have had generic (and therefor unobtrusive) classes that went up to twenty levels, or Archetypical classes a la D&D. Personally I would have preferred the former, since there is far more variation of genre in stories set in modern times. I certainly wouldn't want Rambo to walk into my James Bond film, for instance, or to have my alien invasion story overshadowed by an appearance by Harry Potter.

And yet I do still have an admiration for Modern. It did show how to do a generic or universal RPG without going into point buy like GURPS (which I've always perceived as too complex to appeal to me). Its just a shame that they stopped supporting it after they revised D&D.

*about Range Increments and stupidity*

Frankly, most gun battles in either gaming or real life happen at fairly short ranges anyway, so unless you are playing a Modern Warfare campaign and have a dedicated team sniper it shouldn't be an issue most of the time.

The next big issue is armor. This is a fairly simpler topic: armor is equally effective against all weapons. Whether it's a quarterstaff, .32 ACP pistol... or a 14.5mm anti-tank rifle capable of penetrating 40mm of steel plate at 100 meters, you have the same probability of getting past the armor and doing damage.

Some Pathfinder release had a gun-wielding class which simply treated gun attacks as ranged touch attacks. This is an equally simplistic, sloppy, and bad solution, especially since the term "bulletproof" comes from armor being tested by shooting it, and marking where the bullet had failed to penetrate. The D20 system does not handle armor effectiveness against different weapons well at all. (Note, however, that through the AC mechanic, a decreasing ability to penetrate armor at longer range is baked into the range increment. The difference doesn't bother me that much in regular D&D.)

This is true, but really speaks to the weird abstract nature of D&D's combat system in general where you need to take a feat to know how to Dodge ordinary attacks, but for fireballs anyone can hit the deck . I do have an idea of how to make it work, though: degrees of success. Basically, make a compromise between the way D&D treats armor and Modern treats armor. Give every piece of armor worn a modifier to your Defense Bonus (I.E. Armor Class in D&D terms). Then when the difference between a hit and a miss is the difference between wearing kevlar and wearing a T-shirt, say that the person took a hit, but to represent armor stopping the bullet apply damage reduction. Use the 3.5 rules for DR, and make sure that different types of armor have their DR overcome by different types of damage. A kevlar vest able to resist Ballistic Trauma can be overcome by slashing or piercing damage, for instance, unless its specifically knife rated-- in which case it may still be overcome by slashing damage such as from swords or fragmentation grenades. Or maybe its damaged by those sources and only provides protection until its destroyed. Your call.

If applied to medieval armor, you could say that a chainmail vest protects against slashing damage and possible piercing (again, your interpretation), but is overcome by bludgeoning damage. Full plate might overcome bludgeoning and slashing, but piercing can still get through. Padding helps against bludgeoning damage, but sucks pretty bad against anything else on its own. This is useful to know in Modern settings because flack jackets used chainmail; likewise, the suits used by bomb squad professionals are hard armor. And someone will probably want to try that old "metal plate hidden under their poncho" trick from V and "For a Fist Full of Dollars".

Its a kludge and I've never tested it, but that might work to make armor more realistic. The only thing I'm unsure of is how to deal with shields (medieval and modern riot shields both).

Then there's automatic fire.

To be honest, I seriously can never understand why this is a breaking point for so many people. Modern is a game where you aren't supposed to have easy access to automatic weaponry. Machine guns are illegal damn near everywhere unless you are in active service in a military or law enforcement. It just should not come up that often, unless you are either doing a wargame campaign or are regularly getting into shootouts with SWAT.

I mean, my friend Sorchus can not get over the fact that the normal Full Auto mode is treated as an area attack, whereas I always thought it was an elegant way to represent Covering Fire and untrained Spray And Pray.

What world do these people live in where firing more bullets at someone makes you less likely to hit? It's true that succeeding shots may be less accurate but the first round at least will always be at least as accurate as any single shot you fire.

Uh, if I remember correctly, Burst Fire did apply the penalty only to the followup shots. Because that makes perfect sense-- the muzzle climb makes it hard to keep on target. And if the rules don't work the way I remember it, that's one of the easiest house rulings I've ever seen.

In the end, your players may not care about any of this, but if there are gun nuts among them, they might be as bothered about it as I am, and that draws people out of the game when realistic choices can't lead to realistic actions.

I'm a semi-gun nut, and to be frank, I'm more concerned with how hit points abstract away the debilitating nature of injuries. But then, I already have an idea for tweaking the Massive Damage threshold so that it more closely resembles the Injury system used in M&M and described in Unearthed Arcana. I guess that's just how I roll-- when something is broken, I seek to fix it, rather than STRAKKING about it futilely.

[Mr Bean]

D20 modern the last time I touched it back in 2005 was very much a game of D&D 3.5 w/guns and not it's own modern setting.

False. D20 Modern is based on D&D 3.0, not 3.5. And it never received an update. There is at least as much difference between those two systems as there is between 3.5 and Pathfinder.

Conceded, in my memory 3.0 and 3.5 have all become 3.5 as I played lots of 2nd Edition, started getting tired come 3.0 then came back a year after 3.5 had launched. Memory turns all 3.0 into 3.5, I could probably roll up 2.0 or 3.5 characters from scratch from memory and DM from memory (Only needing to look up spells and maybe grapple rules) but 3.0 is a a space that never saves in my head.

Far fom the firearms being the worst design element of the game, I think its really their inability to decide whether or not it should have had generic (and therefor unobtrusive) classes that went up to twenty levels, or Archetypical classes a la D&D. Personally I would have preferred the former, since there is far more variation of genre in stories set in modern times. I certainly wouldn't want Rambo to walk into my James Bond film, for instance, or to have my alien invasion story overshadowed by an appearance by Harry Potter.

As was pointed out by a friend of mine way back when. A grizzled cop in the wrong place at the right time (Bruce Willis as John McClain), a Hong Kong Supercop (Jacky Chan in... anything) or a hand cannon toting doesn't play by the rules cop (Clint Eastwood as Harry Callaghan) are all three cop characters that make good concepts for D20 Modern characters. But in D20 the dividing line between Smart/Strong/Tough/Fast/Dedicated are so generic it's hard not to end up with a dozen tough/strong's with maybe a single fast or dedicated in there. It's generic enough that it's not generic enough because mixing and matching would make things so much easier but we must be constrained by a class system that does not allow you to mix and match since each class is based around an attribute and even in 3.0 most characters had two, a major and a minor. I might be misremembering but making a Smart/Tough or a Fast/Strong was designed to be hard by default.

[Formless]

As was pointed out by a friend of mine way back when. A grizzled cop in the wrong place at the right time (Bruce Willis as John McClain), a Hong Kong Supercop (Jacky Chan in... anything) or a hand cannon toting doesn't play by the rules cop (Clint Eastwood as Harry Callaghan) are all three cop characters that make good concepts for D20 Modern characters. But in D20 the dividing line between Smart/Strong/Tough/Fast/Dedicated are so generic it's hard not to end up with a dozen tough/strong's with maybe a single fast or dedicated in there. It's generic enough that it's not generic enough because mixing and matching would make things so much easier but we must be constrained by a class system that does not allow you to mix and match since each class is based around an attribute and even in 3.0 most characters had two, a major and a minor. I might be misremembering but making a Smart/Tough or a Fast/Strong was designed to be hard by default.

Yeah, cross classing in D&D went in and out of favor over the years, didn't it. 3.0 still had some of 2e's cross-class rules (like that stupid "favorite class" racial component that never made any fucking sense), then they eased up on it in 3.5, then they got rid of it entirely in 4. Again, Modern inherited some of the problems like this from 3.0.

Then again, of those three characters you just described, the difference between McClain and Harry really comes down mostly to persona more than anything else. That's the difference between an effective character and a mere vehicle for generic Superheroism. And hey, they could have avoided that trap simply by turning the Advanced classes into Talent trees without changing the core game mechanics one bit. Or if those six generic classes don't work (and really, who wants to play a character class based on fucking Charisma, the most illogically metaphysical ability score in the game?), they also had the three generic classes in UA (Fighter, Expert, Mage) that were better at distinguishing the mechanic of hte classes. True 20 took those and ran with them. Of course, the Mage class is problematic if you were to use those in Modern, unfortunately. Don't know what I would replace it with.

[Aasharu]

Thank you all for all the suggestions! I'm really happy I got quality feedback so quickly. The comments and critiques on D20 Modern were informative, and really just reinforced my opinions on the system in general. Spycraft has been on my list of things to check out for a while now, and since it has been recommended, I'll definitely hunt it down and give it a read. I'm also interested in this Tensided system; Arthur Tuxedo, I tossed you a PM with my email. I should also check out that Modern Combat System that Weemadando recommended. One of the big things about this campaign is that I want to encourage my players to approach problems strategically and intelligently, and if they decide to solve a problem with the "Bolshevik Muppet" solution, (props to anyone who gets the reference,) I'd like a system where massive overkill can reliably eliminate any given threat. A Modern Combat System seems like it would work well with that, and the fact that it has stats for so many different types of weapons is icing on the cake, so it's on my list of things to check out.

[Edi]

One thing that can be easily adapted to a modern day world is the sci-fi RPG system Star Frontiers, which while primitive has a fairly robust basic system. The skill system would need some tweaking, though. You can get most of the stuff from here. For a basic modern world game, all you need is the Alpha Dawn set, you can skip all the rest.

The Alpha Dawn system also plays quick, because it is not very burdened down with hopeless minutiae and specific rules for each and every situation.

[RatPatrol]

after reading the fine responses, I wanted to add my .25


I always like the 'look and feel' of the 'quick and dirty'

Friday Night Firefight from the Original Cyberpunk 2013

Attack: Ref Stat + Skill [weapon or attack type] + Weapon Accuracy + 1D10

Def: Ref Stat + Athletic Skill + Range + 1D10

roll for each bullet with a penalty for successive shots fired ..... [ROF how may shots can be fired in 3.2 Sec]

for an M16 or AK 47 that is most of the Mag - but after the 4th or 5th round, shots are landing anywhere but the intended target ....

but Hey it is Cyberpunk ...... you want to empty most of a mag - Go for it ... if you managed to connect with 2 or 3 of those shots, your target is most likely dead ....

7.62 Soviet -
Point Blank / Close: 7d6+3 - 0-1 / 100m
Med / Long: 5d6+3 - 200 / 400m
Extreme: 3d6+3 - 400m +

for snap shot and FA - there is a random hit table for any shot past the 1st

bonuses for steadying your shot -

I carefully wait for my target to pop his head back up and look over the table ...




dmg tables for muzzle energy for calibers - makes it easy to extrapolate other ammo types

if 7.62 Nato has a Muzzle Velocity [MV] of 2700 .. and you know 7.62 Russian has similar specs you can use the 11d6 +3

or 6.5mm Mauser is maybe 2300 fps - so maybe you use 10d6 or 10d6+2

the point being, if you can read ballistics tables, you do not need EVERY WEAPON cataloged

then there was 'The Edge of the Sword' with 100's of Modern Weapons



GURPS is also a fine system ....

[Raw Shark]

I'm going to have to fourth the rec for GURPS here. There is, IMHO, simply nothing anywhere near as good for doing a realistic modern game, from the injury rules to the social/personality rules, and they have several entire books published featuring equipment (much of which in High Tech and Ultra Tech is inevitably devoted to guns) and shooting (including two separate 4e genre-support books called Gun Fu and Tactical Shooting for emulating crazy over-the-top Wanted/Equilibrium shit and extremely granular realistic stuff written by actual shooting enthusiasts, respectively) that blow away anything else I've seen for a modern game. Hardcover catalog here / PDF catalog here.