A Cold War in D&DLand

[Prak]

So, I've been poking at this idea of a fantasy setting that's in a cold war. Here's what I know-

• I don't want either super power to be clearly good or bad
• I don't want the super powers to be clear American/Russian expies
• While it doesn't necessarily have to be based on The Cold War, that's the one with which my group is perhaps most familiar, and which most movies that would be patterns for the sorts of adventures we'd be doing were written about, so it probably should be based on the Soviet-American Cold War
• Following that, the specific reason for the cold war is the existence of weapons of mass destruction controlled by the super powers, which, if used, would result in almost certain destruction of, at least, both super powers.

And then, there are the things that aren't certain, but I'm kinda "soft planning on"-

• The setting overall will be urban fantasy, but less "Wizards in the real world!" and more Discworldian "cars and PDAs in D&D Land"
• Sigil and Planescape provides a giant heap of meat from which to tear good bits for one super power (but it's going to be pretty superficial. Metropolis full of portals and a super cosmopolitan populace, and some terms/names), and with that, I like the idea that the opposing super power is heavily religious, and with some of my preliminary work, I'm leaning on basing it on Ancient Rome's whole state religion, and some "the government is the religion, and the religion is the government, but it's all more about the hierarchy and structure of the religion"
• A potential WMD for one side, probably Psuedo-Sigil, is to combine the Utterdark spell and Create Greater Undead to turn an area over a mile in radius into complete darkness with a spawn creating incorporeal undead.

But other than two super powers, and one or two kinds of WMD that threaten mutually assured destruction, is there anything out of the ordinary that I specifically need for such a setting?

[Thaluikhain]

Rather than super powers, I might suggest power blocs. Possibly each one dominated by a large power, but requiring the support of the others.

The Peloponnesian War between the Delian League (led by Athens) and the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) always seemed very reminiscent of the modern Cold War to me, I might recommend looking into that for inspiration. In particular, one of the reasons for the breakdown of the peace between the two wasn't the conflict between Athens and Sparta, but that between Corinth and Corcyra, Corinth being a powerful member of the Peloponnesian League, and Corcyra a minor power that entered a defensive treaty with Athens.

[Username17]

Cold War on the Divine level is basically the default setting of D&D. The entire Pact Primeval is pretty much just the Potsdam Conference with subsequent delineations of the multiverse into spheres of influence. Everything that happens in a normal D&D campaign is pretty much the kind of Cold War Proxy War that could describe anything from the Korean War to the invasion of Grenada.

So if you want to do "D&D, but like the Cold War" I am going to have to ask you to take a step back. D&D was written in the 1970s, it already is like the Cold War. What elements of the Cold War do you think are left out of traditional D&D settings and adventures that you want to incorporate?

-Username17

[kzt]

Well, you could steal 'A Colder War'.
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

[Emerald]

• A potential WMD for one side, probably Psuedo-Sigil, is to combine the Utterdark spell and Create Greater Undead to turn an area over a mile in radius into complete darkness with a spawn creating incorporeal undead.

Another good option would be a metamagicked fimbulwinter from Frostburn. A maximized widened extended fimbulwinter means 7 feet of snow per day and constant Very Strong winds, in a minimum 34-mile radius, for almost 2 years. Cast that on a half-dozen major cities and you'll have yourself a miniature Ice Age in short order from the resulting climate destabilization.

Mass destruction? Check. Near-guaranteed destruction of both super powers if you cast enough of them? Check. All the Cold War puns and "invading Not-Russia in winter" jokes you could possibly desire? Check and check.

Well, you could steal 'A Colder War'.
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Or the Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis (Bitter Seeds/The Coldest War/Necessary Evil), which takes place in an alternate late-WW2/early Cold War setting where the Soviets had Nazi-engineered psionic supersoldiers and England had eldritch abomination-summoning warlocks. Said eldritch abominations can eat all of reality if the warlocks slip up, and one of the supersoldiers is a girl with near-flawless precognition with a range of decades or more who is the puppetmaster behind the whole plot, so both sides can completely screw the world in a nicely asymmetric way.

[Prak]

Cold War on the Divine level is basically the default setting of D&D. The entire Pact Primeval is pretty much just the Potsdam Conference with subsequent delineations of the multiverse into spheres of influence. Everything that happens in a normal D&D campaign is pretty much the kind of Cold War Proxy War that could describe anything from the Korean War to the invasion of Grenada.

So if you want to do "D&D, but like the Cold War" I am going to have to ask you to take a step back. D&D was written in the 1970s, it already is like the Cold War. What elements of the Cold War do you think are left out of traditional D&D settings and adventures that you want to incorporate?

-Username17

That's an interesting way to look at D&D, and had never really thought of it that way before. I guess I'm primarily looking for a more material cold war, with temporal powers in conflict, seeking greater technology and an edge over their opponents, so you have things like amoral science-wizards capturing newly discovered creatures to study and dissect them and gain vital knowledge for the fantasy equivalent of the space race (Shape of Water), or covert agents sent into enemy territory to sabotage espionage rings that threaten their entire state intelligence apparatus (Atomic Blonde), or even adventures where someone is supposedly a sleeper agent and a defector breaks their cover and now the PCs have to decide who to believe and whether to help or capture this person (Salt, but hopefully less dumb than that actual movie was).

And I guess there's nothing stopping a group from playing out these plots in a standard setting, but they certainly come up very seldom.

[Dogbert]

• I don't want either super power to be clearly good or bad.

If both are "super powers," then both are evil to a degree since they live by expanding and imposing their way of life on others (and they want to do it on one another, or there wouldn't be a war, cold or otherwise).

Furthermore, being d&d's morality manichaeistic by definition, your only escape from this is either pitting species that share the same "Y" location on the alignment chart (ie elves vs dwarves) or going full-on "blue and orange morality."

[*]I don't want the super powers to be clear American/Russian expies

This doesn't apply since d&d-land is still in the middle ages. The bourgeoisie is still centuries from toppling monarchies (or rather, never will, since d&d land lives frozen in time). There are only more or less tyrannical monarchs.

[*]While it doesn't necessarily have to be based on The Cold War, that's the one with which my group is perhaps most familiar, and which most movies that would be patterns for the sorts of adventures we'd be doing were written about, so it probably should be based on the Soviet-American Cold War

Refer to the Age of Sail: Have each kingdom extend Letters Of Marque to bands of murderhobos, who then become super-powered privateers. Also, the clergies of opposing kingdoms (and probably opposed deities) send missionaries aggressively to contested stretches of land, creating "hot zones."

[*]Following that, the specific reason for the cold war is the existence of weapons of mass destruction controlled by the super powers, which, if used, would result in almost certain destruction of, at least, both super powers.[/list]

You already have your atom bombs in Meteor Swarm, your Death Rays in Disintegrate, and your bacteriological warfare in viral undead. All you need is enough lvl-14 spellcasters in each kingdom and there are your nuclear silos (Remember, we're still in the mud middle ages, your largest kingdom ever can't have more than 5 million inhabitants, everything is smaller).

HOWEVER...

-You could create intentionally flawed Artifacts with Artifact-degree levels of magical fuckup that could turn whole (medieval) cities into dead-magic zones on detonation. Deploy this on an enemy capital and you're seriously disrupting them.

-Wishes: What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse.

-What If: A world with more than one Tarrasque, each in custody of an opposing kingdom (this would only work in 3E since 5E's Tarrasque is a chump, but leaving the idea there).

-A botched version of Planar Shift that created "planar leaks" in the prime material (disastrous if connecting to the elemental or energy planes).

-Alternatively, and if you don't mind being ridiculously heavy-handed: A world with ridiculously interventionist deities, and prone to temper tantrums in the shape of Monty Python's foot.

Sure... "plaaaaaaaaanet destroooooooying spells" are good for mental fappery and FF-XIV's opening, but you're better off not creating anything you don't want your murderhobos to re-create and then deploy on your NPCs.

Hope that helps.

[Prak]

Ok... so... first, D&D is not medieval in anything but aesthetic. Second, there's literally no reason that a D&D setting could not have advanced beyond medieval European political models. Third, it's totally reasonable to base a D&D world on, say, Victorian England, which had 16 million inhabitants in 1851.

[Username17]

Ok... so... first, D&D is not medieval in anything but aesthetic. Second, there's literally no reason that a D&D setting could not have advanced beyond medieval European political models. Third, it's totally reasonable to base a D&D world on, say, Victorian England, which had 16 million inhabitants in 1851.

I think you're way overselling the idea that there's "no reason" that you couldn't do D&D with 19th century trappings. There have historically been some attempts to do that (Mask of the Red Death, Iron Kingdoms, etc.), and I think it's completely safe to say that all of them have been "problematic."

The fundamental issue is that D&D is about heroes conducting invasions and hauling off sacks of treasure. That's a very Iron Age or even Bronze Age way of interacting with the world, and the last time anything remotely like that was considered vaguely normal or had a reasonable chance of success was the 16th century. Even by the 17th century, wars were conducted with cannons and ships full of replaceable men rather than by having adventurer champions personally solving things with swords.

Having anything remotely like anything in the 19th century for your D&D setting is a non-trivial bit of world building, because the 19th century kicked off with the Napoleonic Wars, where individual swordsmen meant something between "bupkiss" and "fuckall." The era of D&D-like action in our world begins with Gilgamesh and Enkidu fighting monsters, but it fucking ends with Cortez sacking Teotihuacan. Everything that comes after that is a really hard fit for D&D style adventures, because D&D still adventures didn't really happen anywhere on Earth after 1600.

-Username17

[Prak]

And yet there is plenty of fiction set all across human history (and even before it, and in the future) where a handful of personal badasses go deep inside enemy territory (ie, conducting an invasion) kick a bunch of ass, and haul off ...stuff--weapons, intel, valuable assets, whatever (ie, sacks full of treasure and mcguffins).

I mean, hell, Leverage is a D&D party of a bunch of different styles of rogue. The Avengers are a tenth-ish level D&D party of a ToB guy, an artificer, a Tome Monk, and a Barbarian. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are a D&D party of a archer, a barbarian, a vampire, and a rogue who happens to be naturally invisible. The fucking swaggering white men of Dracula are a D&D party. Ocean's 11 is a low-combat D&D style adventure that has 11 goddamned players. Fucking Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones are D&D style adventures in everything but their protagonist count. Are they fighting massive armies? Well, two of them are (notably the super powered ones), but that's besides the point. Hell, Leverage and Avengers both include walking off with sacks full of loot, with Leverage playing it straight and it being literally money, and Avengers playing it less straight, with Tony walking off with new spellsthings he ran into and can now build a suit to handle, and pieces for super AI.

Maybe the D&D style antics of heroes going about and kicking people in the nuts to take their shit didn't exactly bear out in actual history (I mean, other than heists. And the proverbial "elite squads") but they certainly exist in stories all over the place. And D&D isn't a real life simulator. I cannot think of a single real life event that is supposedly (still) source material for D&D. That went away when it changed from Chainmail to an RPG.

D&D can take cues from Victorian England in much the same way that it takes cues from Medieval Europe, while keeping a core of Iron Age mercenariness. Hell, Discworld does that, with an increasingly psuedo-Victorian London-esque Ankh Morpork and virtually every story line having at least one book that takes a group of heroes that have to go kick people in the nuts and walk off with cash and prizes. Death and Susan have to fight the Auditors and walk away having saved the world. Vimes, Carrot and 71-Hour Ahmed go off to Klatch to literally end a war, and Vetinari, Leonard, Nobby and Colon do... the same thing, and they walk away with the usual rewards for the watch and lack of political consequences respectively. The Monstrous Regiment go to war as a small squad of women pretending to be men, and they win the right for women to serve in the army openly. A Cleric and a Witch go off to fight Not!Dracula, and win renewed faith and the ability to bless literally any item he holds as a holy weapon, and some goddamned peace and quiet, respectively. A rogueWizzard gets dragged around by a bunch of martial characters and overcomes tons of D&D-style threats, and eventually gets a reward of being able to loaf around in Fantasy Australia and eat some potatoes for a while.

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.

[Username17]

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

[Thaluikhain]

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.

[Koumei]

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.

[Iduno]

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.

[Omegonthesane]

I'd go with pointing out the utter hypocrisy of D&D's notion of objective good and paint "defies the literal cosmic definition of Good" as a philosophically defensible position instead of pure selfishness. Because why even retain the otherwise restrictive idea of a literal in-setting objective notion of good if you can't then contrast it with what makes people's lives actually better in practice.

[Lokathor]

Cutting out Alignment and its rules is actually quite easy. If just a handful of weapon powers, class features, and spells go away then you're done. Like, probably less than 25 well known things have to go away, and then a bunch of obscure stuff you can line item veto as it comes to light.

[Prak]

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.

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.

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).

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.

[Username17]

As was shown by the existence of Call of Cthulhu and Traveler in the fucking 1970s, if the relationship between the player characters and each other, society, and their adventure is not the standard for Dungeons & Dragons, and the expected solution space of adventures doesn't match the standard for Dungeons & Dragons, carrying over the rules for Dungeons & Dragons makes little sense. This isn't new information. It's not controversial. We're not having a debate on this point. D&D rules do not work very well in a vaguely modern setting. They just fucking don't. D20 Modern wasn't a clusterfuck because the conversion wasbad, it's a clusterfuck because trying to use D&D rules for that sort of thing is a fucking terrible idea.

Dungeons & Dragons fucking shits itself and dies if the economy is advanced enough that the player characters could apply for a small business loan. It fucking shits itself and dies law enforcement is ubiquitous enough that their actions might be investigated by the authorities. These are not new observations, and you aren't going to convince anyone otherwise because there are literally decades of results from thousands of trials that say that you are wrong.

-Username17

[Prak]

Welp, fortunately, I don't have to convince you, I just have to say to my group "hey, want to play cold war adventures in D&D land?" and get them to say "sure." And, hopefully, convince one of them who's interested in running, but unsure of himself, to say he'll run it.

Sure, if you were playing in this setting you'd wonder why you can't go apply for a small business loan and spend it on guns and coke, or whatever. But, honestly? You and your playgroup are the exception, Frank, not the rule. My characters fuck the setting more by saying "hey, can I take this massive battle royale and devote it to a dark god as a sacrifice? Can I just say I take 20 on the Kn Religion roll instead of rolling 400 times? Awesome, here's a list of my mods, and the word doc with my wish" than saying "Oh, so we're in a modern setting? I wanna apply for a loan."

[kzt]

If you are trying to play a game where your adventures charge tanks counting on their +5 plate armor and 300 hit points to protect them from machine gun fire and flamethowers, then sure.

[maglag]

Dungeons & Dragons fucking shits itself and dies if the economy is advanced enough that the player characters could apply for a small business loan.

Frank please, you're always saying how D&D's totally happening in the bronze/iron age, and in the real world you could perfectly ask loans during that time.

And funnier thing is most of those loans were literally to buy a boat and equipment, do a voyage of business/looting, pay when they got back.

As for enforcing law in D&D, there's literally an army of robots dedicated to pursue those that break contracts.

[Prak]

I mean... I never specifically said anything about Cold War era tech... but also I see nothing wrong with that as a potential playstyle.

[Pariah Dog]

D20 Modern wasn't a clusterfuck because the conversion wasbad, it's a clusterfuck because trying to use D&D rules for that sort of thing is a fucking terrible idea.

Because in a modern setting, breaking into someone's home, stabbing them in the face, and carrying off all their valuables in a sack is a good way to walk outside into a group of police with weapon's drawn or having your door kicked in by a swat team. Even if the guy you did this to is objectively a bad guy.

[erik]

More than murderhobo being an unacceptable lifestyle, I thought it was that the d20 system is just a shit system for a modern style game. A simulation engine for people who become so powerful that jumping out a 10 story building isn't a big deal and at a certain point you can just walk through armies of guys with deadly weapons. Doesn't really sound like a modern setting game engine. Unless it's like the Matrix or something. Having a system that is designed to push people off the RNG is contra to most modern settings.

Modern setting games should also care especially about skills since that's how you interact with the world a lot more than combat... and that remains one of the weakest aspects of d20. Good for tactical combat, garbage for skill resolutions.

[hyzmarca]

In order to have a Cold War, there must be a reason why the war isn't hot. In the real world, that reason is nuclear weapons.

In an older paradigm, maneuvering and threatening each other without actually fighting just doesn't work, because eventually someone is just going to fight.

In a magical system with actual gods and shit, you can do this with external enforcement, let's say you've got some magical doodad, spell, curse, whatever that enforces a peace between the two superpowers, and will come down hard on whoever breaks it, but not so hard that they can't win. So it becomes a game of calculation. Do you want to eat the curse, possibly lose most of your population to it, but potentially come out victorious, or do you trust the other side to keep their word and not sacrifice so many of their people.