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I have no experience with 5e (and skipping most of 4e due to dislike after the first couple months of regular play) so I'm out of date when it comes to D&D rulesets. I'm a big Mass Effect fan and I saw a link posted to this elsewhere on the internet.

https://n7.world/

Has anyone tried it out? For those with experience playing 5e and the Mass Effect video games, does it look like a faithful in style and feel conversion? I'm in the process of looking it over this weekend myself but my lack of any familiarity with 5e probably won't help.

Dnd is the WORST rule set to bring mass effect to the table top.

Its not a good story telling game. Its geared towards killing monsters and taking loot. Mass effect in feel and style is about the people in the world and the consequences of their actions.

The burning wheel would function far better as a base line to make a me game.

I'd argue that Mass Effect is about shooting fools in the face and all choices lead to the same lack of consequences- being mouthy to a superior still gets you a reward and XP.

But D&D is bad at handling gunplay- they never feel particularly lethal in a leveled system. D&D will happily abstract melee combat, but it's hard to abstract sniping or shotgunning someone in the face and handwave it as X HP damage with no real effect.

Like I said, I don't have any experience with 5e but I'm a bit surprised to see the negative response here tbh. Someone out there has to like the ruleset as IIRC it wrested first place on the ICV2 polls back from Pathfinder for most popular (selling) RPG.

5e can be fine. It's not a bad edition of dnd. But it's VERY gamey. Players can recover to full health quickly with an 8 hour rest no matter the injuries. No negative impact on the players until they reach 0 health. Typical dnd things.

Again, to me at least, ME was about the stories. When you can be bathed in horrific fire or whatever and then wake up the next day from a nap without so much as a ache the stories take a second seat to the game.

While I might say it looks good, and a lot of thought went into it, I am not convinced D&D 5th is the best game system to convert into something like a Mass Effect setting. I posted a lengthy replay about Starfinder, which is basically Pathfinder in Space. The Mass Effect setting doesn't seem like D&D in Space at all, and therefore I must admit I would asume the feel to be 'not right'.

Part of the problem has been mentioned already, by Lance 845 for example. D&D 5th is a gamey system, with a levelling mechanic that toughens the characters to incredible meta strengths. As long as the damage doesn't scale with level, while the hitpoints do, you get situations that might seem off. When I bathe an opponent with the Lead Hose (full auto his behind) I don't expect him to shrug off each and every bullet as if "he dodged them, and now looks more tired and bruised" (i.e. lost only 1/4 of his hitpoints...). I expect him to drop to the ground, screaming, clutching his guts where there are a couple of painful bullet holes now. This becomes especially gamey if I score a critical hit which 'only' removed half the hitpoints or so. A flamer attack should be more than just a repurposed Burning Hands spell or similar effect. There is a reason why people fear the fully automatic machine gun and flamer, and no amount of hitpoints should take that away in my opinion.

As far as D20 systems go, I thought Star Wars D20 (Revised) Core did a good enough job in this regard. You had Wounds (basically Constitution) and Vitality (hitpoints). If you scored a critical hit, you didn't cause extra damage, but went straight for Wounds. Those 3D8 for a standard blaster rifle against that Wounds score of 13, or 14 suddenly bypassing those 114 Vitality, could become a telling blow. But D&D 5th doesn't have such a mechanic. Star Wars Saga later reverted back to just hitpoints and fell into this 'narrative invulnerability trap' again.

For converting Mass Effect into a TTRPG, I'd say you would better look to something like Star Wars (Revised) Core, or another system altogether, for example Genesys / FFG Star Wars.

While some of the aspects you mentioned are a bit unavoidable for simplicity's sake (like a flamer acting similar to burning hands), I do agree with what you're saying in theory. I would point out though that the weapons do scale in damage with level. That does open up a new issue if you have a favorite weapon that you want to keep using (like a "starter" sniper rifle at max level) similar to the video game. I suppose you could just "counts as" the weapon into the stats of the higher level one though. I also liked the d20 mechanic of split health pools (something that iirc starfinder has still currently and one of only a few things I liked with it).

 warboss wrote:
While some of the aspects you mentioned are a bit unavoidable for simplicity's sake (like a flamer acting similar to burning hands), I do agree with what you're saying in theory. I would point out though that the weapons do scale in damage with level. That does open up a new issue if you have a favorite weapon that you want to keep using (like a "starter" sniper rifle at max level) similar to the video game. I suppose you could just "counts as" the weapon into the stats of the higher level one though. I also liked the d20 mechanic of split health pools (something that iirc starfinder has still currently and one of only a few things I liked with it).

The answer is simple. Don't have levels. A person is a person and a flame thrower is a flame thrower. A person being hit by a flame thrower is always terrifying because it always has the impact that would have on a person.

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

Why make a bunch of things that you then need to scale up or have replaced because the players and their damage capacity keeps scaling up? Isn't it easier to put everyone within a limited practical range and then have the weapons and armor act as they would within that range?

As someone who has actually played (DM'ed) this system it works quite well and is a lot of fun. Some of the classes are imbalanced but I think overall the way it handles combat is fine.