General Information

So I am apparently not allowed to post in the Red Dawn blog, so I'ma just put this here...

I've been looking through the rules for d20 Modern, and I've got a few comments re: capturing the "feel" of Red Dawn.

Follow up:

First off, the MDT - massive damage threshold - rules need to be modified. As an example, the light antitank weapon described in the d20 Modern SRD deals 10d6 damage, so we're looking at, tops, 60 points. The problem is that higher level characters can take this - to the face! - and be utterly unscathed. "Ah," you say, "but the MDT will save us from utter cat-girl-killing nonsense such as this!" Except that the MDT requires a Fort save against a static DC of 15. The kinds of characters who won't be taken out immediately by this are going to be the higher HD classes, which - as a general rule - have pretty solid Fort saves, anyway, making the save probably way easier than it should be.

This, of course, is ignoring the Reflex save the weapon grants (also static, but getting into why static DCs are silly is a whole other issue, and probably doesn't need to be brought up here). Take that into account, and you're only looking at 30 damage max... which should still be over most character's MDTs, but still. 30 isn't that much.

So I propose the following fix. Instead of the static Fort DC 15 for MDT, instead use the following formula: for every 2 points over the character's MDT they take, increase the Fort save for avoiding dropping by 1.

Example: Bob has an MDT of 18, and takes 28 damage. 28 - 18 = 10, so the Fort save to avoid dropping is 15 + (10 / 2) = 20.

This slight modification makes the idea of a character laughing off taking a rocket-launcher to the face a little less feasible, which is awesome in terms of getting the right feel. Red Dawn is, IMO, supposed to be a little heroic/cinematic, so the standard HP system still works and all that fun jazz. This modification just makes the extreme cases more in favor of reality, without which you start getting into superhero land, which isn't quite the direction Red Dawn is going for, I think.

I might have more comments later.