Tips for a Modern Game
With my challenge firmly behind me and easily a month since my last game, I find myself looking forward to the next time I sit behind the GM screen and plot the eventual deaths of my players. If my challenge has taught me anything, it’s that I can draw inspiration and thought from anywhere, so I started looking around my everyday life trying to draw ideas for my modern game.
Keep the Pace Moving
When taken at a snail’s pace, life can be pretty dull. We pretty much move quickly from one event to the next, ever busier, until we finally crash into the night’s sleep. This is a bit of a fatal flaw I’ve found in most modern games; the GM gets caught up in it being realistic and moving at a “normal” speed. Why do we punish ourselves so? Just because we pay taxes and work for a living doesn’t mean our characters necessarily have to. Focus on the meat of the adventure and keeping your players dialed in. Why do we let something so obvious get away from us in a modern setting?
Information is Power
Wikipedia has to be one of the hardest things for me to express in game terms, and something I always forget my players have access to in a modern game. In my fantasy games it’s easy to fall back on the fact that the characters are likely undereducated and may not always have a firm idea of what is going on in the world. With access to blogs, Wikipedia, and the rest of the internet, it’s hard to say the same with modern characters; they know a bit of everything. Thus, what you can successfully keep from your players is all the more powerful, as it will truly blindside them. Try using subtly placed misinformation to keep them on their toes and hankering for more.
Strive for a Fuzzy Morality
Our world is not black and white. In fact, Dungeons and Dragons is really the only game around that has a strict alignment system. We here at Apathy Games prefer our fuzzy evil and fuzzy good alignments. It’s one of the reasons I like playing in a modern setting. Modern life encourages fuzzy morality in a way. You can’t be strictly good or evil; sometimes you need to bend the rules to get to where you need to go. Let’s also be honest with ourselves: our world isn’t strictly good or evil, so why should our modern games be?
Modern trappings are similar to any other game, with an interesting caveat: gritty realism is part of the setting. Still, don’t go too far or bother altering the rules. Instead, use only a few “reality sprinkles” on top of the basic game mechanics. Keeping a realistic head on your games without letting it go to overboard is always the ticket.
What do you do for your modern games, what trappings do you follow?