Over my prolonged absence from the site, I have been working on making my collaborative adaptation of Mass Effect up to snuff. I think that the reception of Andromeda really provides the fan community an opportunity to tell our own stories in the Mass Effect universe.
The tactical movement and cover-based shooter mechanics really lend themselves well to the powers system in 4E. Marrying the simplicity and elegance of D&D 5E and some of the very, very crunchy mechanics of 4E was not easy. However, the results have been very satisfying and now I am hoping to share this with you.
Dustin & Dragons 
This looks amazing
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hey, really loving this: I’m probably going to run a campaign using this system. On the read through, it really does seem to achieve simplicity and elegance and will be easy for my newbie players to pick up (I play almost exclusively with players with no RPG experience).
Couple of thoughts though: as a guy who has only been playing D&D for 1 year and only has experience with 5e, it took quite bit of work for me to figure out various mechanics that are 4e based. It might be helpful to explain certain nomenclature like [W] or how saving throws work in 4e (as they are completely different from 5e. I was trying to figure out the spell save DC for all those powers, and then realized that perhaps saving throws work differently in 4e).
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Hey Kevin, thanks for checking it out. What Brian and I intended with saving throws was that it is a straight d20 roll (with a few small and limited modifiers based on class) and you need to get above a 10 for a success. We found that saves we made more often than not though. What was going to go into an update is that the DC for powers is based on 10 + Power Rank (Ex. Throw 1 has a DC 11 vs. Throw 3 has a DC 13).
We were also going to further define some aspects of 4e. I have a beginner’s guide to 4e that I want to adapt for use in our Mass Effect game.
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Was wondering if there’s been any updates to this.
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Unfortunately not. I would love to further flesh this out some time, but I am focusing on getting Dwarves of the Realms done.
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I’m about to start GMing the whole ME Trilogy to a friend, who will play Shepard. I was considering which system use, there are some pretty interesting ones on the web (Savage Species, DnD5 and the french Mass Effect: Nouvelle Ere which was my #1 choice because no translation needed) but yours feels the closer to the actual experience of the video game. I still have to figure somethings because I’ve never played DnD4 (Recharge rolls?? ^^)
Thank you for this nice piece of work.
Keelah Se’lai.
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The rules for Mass Effect are based more on 5E. Page 11 of the Monster Manual describe how recharge rolls work.
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