[RPG] How to combine very different role-playing systems with D&D 5e

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I'm planning on making a D&D 5e campaign for my friends so they can experience what an okay DM is like rather than a bias and railroading DM which is so far their only experience of Dungeons and Dragons.
In the campaign I'm creating, There is going to be magical artifacts that distort reality, time, and space. One of the ways I want to do this is for reality to shatter/merge with other realities to make it so different RPGs have melded with their world.
These are the RPGs that I either have a solid understanding of or an okay understanding of:

  • Honey Heist
  • Call of Cthulhu
  • AD&D 1e
  • Monster of the Week
  • Rifts
  • Twilight 2000

I really like the idea and I want it to work but I have a lot of flaws and complications in my plan:

  1. Almost every one of these RPGs has a different game system and has different game mechanics.

  2. The list of RPGs that I know have varying levels of complexity, and I'm afraid that going from Honey Heist to Twilight 2000 is going to give a player whiplash.

  3. Calculating what your rolls are can be extremely confusing if you don't have a good grasp of the game and these fusions of RPG systems are going to be the same length of a one-shot which is not enough time to fully grasp the rules.

  4. Weapons and armor and all of that would be confusing to transition to some games like Call of Cthulhu where fighting back isn't that much of an option, well it is but it'd be a TPK. But in D&D 5e, class revolves around the way your character fights and what do you add to help the party not die in the encounter. This is also an issue for Honey Heist where it'll be hard to skills if someone gets the Hacker role and the closest thing to technology in their world is some oil lanterns and a bunch of healing potions.

I have many ways to implement these games into 5e like

  • Making only the NPCs use different gaming systems
  • Creating a homebrew gaming system so they can easily go from RPG to RPG
  • Have them continue to use the d20 system no matter the game
  • Scrap the idea
  • Let them use the other RPG character classes like subclasses and tone down their abilities a tad
  • have only small portions of the other games be included like just the and that's it.

Here's my problem:
How do I include these different RPGs into 5e, and how do I do it in a way that is simplest for the players and myself?

Best Answer

This is hard work and probably a bad idea

This is not the answer you want to hear, I suspect, because you've offered a bounty for it. But, this is mostly a bad idea, for all the reasons you listed above dealing with mechanics.

RPG mechanics systems are tools-- they're designed to achieve certain effects and to support certain game worlds, and almost none of them are designed to be compatible with any other ones. Heck, even most of those game worlds are not compatible with the other ones: What obvious, or even plausible, translation exists between a D&D cleric and the Twilight 2000 game world?

Then realize that you have to do that at least six times (for your six desired games) and you have to do it faithfully enough that all the various characters and support gear from each system translates correctly.

There is no 'simplest,' here, this is an inherently complex task.

But if you absolutely must....

...Then at least use a tool designed for it. Do not fixate on translating everything into 5e. This is emphatically not what 5e was designed to do. At all.

There are a few RPGs that are at least deigned to emulate multiple genres, usually referred to as "generic" RPG systems. As it turns out, I have some limited experience in going to and from these generic systems. If you must do this, translate everything into that one chosen generic system and run with it.

One is GURPS, where I contributed an answer along these lines. This, at least, is sorta what GURPS is meant to do, although in my direct experience, it won't do it very well, and you will still need to do a lot of heavy lifting to convert all those systems. But it will be better than trying to use 5e.

There are other possibilities and I'm certainly not going to list them all, not least because I don't have experience with them all. I will list one more, though, for a particular purpose: Everway was not designed with genericity in mind, but it does seem particularly well suited to it. (I include that link not because it has details on how to adapt Everway, but only to demonstrate that I'm not the only person who thinks this.)

I have experience playing in an off-genre Everway game, and it works very well for what we want it to do-- well enough that in my copious free time, I am also adapting it for a Star Wars game.

The real reason I bring up Everway, though, is to drop one more observation and contrast on you: Some generic games (like GURPS) are detailed and rules heavy. Some (like Everway) are very rules light and abstract. If you go this route, I strongly encourage you to go toward the rules-light end of the spectrum. In my experience, it just works better because there's a lot less work to do.


Now, I realize that what I've just said is, "Don't do this. This won't work, and if it does it won't work well. If you really must do this, do this substantially different thing instead."

But that's the best honest advice that I can provide with well over three decades of gaming experience.

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