Tips for a Modern Game

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/04/20 – 00:00 -

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?


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Categories: Game Masters |
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Heroes with Fuzzy Morality

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/02/26 – 00:00 -

I’m currently reading The Belgariad and I keep finding myself comparing the characters to a party of PCs and finding the similarities striking. Most notably, our heroes have a rather blurry moral compass, and that seems to hold true for almost every roleplaying game I’ve ever been a part of.

Killing, lying, stealing, and intentionally intimidating people are only a handful of the tricks players tend to play on NPCs in order to save the world. Perhaps the ends do justify the means, and perhaps roleplaying is just an escapist fantasy, but if I were to meet most player characters in the real world, I’d run in terror.

Not that this is a bad thing. The truth is, it’s fun to play this way. While we may not want to play someone who is downright evil, there is a desire to throw out some of the constraints thrown on us by reality and play sort of a Fuzzy Good. In fact, I’m officially adding that to the Alignment system.

Saving the World, My Way

Fuzzy Good characters actually make sense in the “Save the World” type scenario. The goal is what matters, and a party who can bend the rules is far more likely to succeed. I’ve played games, like Slipstream, where you’re expected to play the strong jawed hero of thirties sci-fi, but to make that work, they keep having to be attacked by things like space pirates, and have the plot come to them. There really isn’t any problem solving in that style of game.

On the other hand, Necessary Evil replaces Fuzzy Good with Fuzzy Evil. There, you play super-villains who have to save the world after all the heroes have been captured and destroyed. The only rule is that your party should probably work together, making Necessary Evil, perhaps, the most sincere RPG ever made.

In parting, I’d like to know. Have you ever played a character that wasn’t Fuzzy Good? If so, how did it turn out?


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Categories: Behind the Bar |
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