d20 Modern Characters (medium)

[Skade]

So I just got d20 Modern for Christmas from my former gaming group while I was visiting in Houston last week, and of course I am expected to run a session to give it a run through, which Ihad no problem doing. I'm pretty good at running off the fly, and I already had something of a campaign setting prebuilt. For years I ran a alternate near future setting that originally came out of the World of Darkness which was imaginativly called World of Darkness 2028.

These games had always centered on corporate espionage, freakish mutants, Standard Issue Big Guns, vampire CEO's. multinational Megacorps whose finances came from Alpha Centauri, and spell wielding presidents who used to be a drug running mercernary, and actually ran for president under the name Kabal. It was always pretty over the top, bad James Bond rip off with werewolf amd mage heros.

Then I got the characters. Both were well thought out, well grounded first level charcaters. One was a hockey player from Montreal who ends up living in Houston. He works at Academy and is waiting for the next try outs. The other is a juvenile delinquent car thief who comes from a good family with money, but loves the danger.

What do you do with characters like this in the above setting? This actually is not a rant against the players. They made what they considered beginning characters in the world presented to them. My question is, how is a "normal" Smart Hero going to get involved in anything besides going to work or school?

It's not like there is such a thing as an adventurer in the modern world. Ironically I find character hooks in the modern world more difficult than in a fantasy world. It seem to me that my players felt that a 1st level character is very normal, not involved in the plots of the world.

Thoughts?

-skade

 

[Spatula]

SWhat do you do with characters like this in the above setting? This actually is not a rant against the players. They made what they considered beginning characters in the world presented to them. My question is, how is a "normal" Smart Hero going to get involved in anything besides going to work or school?

It's not like there is such a thing as an adventurer in the modern world. Ironically I find character hooks in the modern world more difficult than in a fantasy world. It seem to me that my players felt that a 1st level character is very normal, not involved in the plots of the world.

Have the characters be employed by some organization that sends them out on jobs.

Have the characters be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and as a result they get involved in dangerous world that they never knew about. This sort of thing is used in movies a lot. Either the characters accidentally stumble across something they weren't supposed to see (car thief steals the WRONG car, for example), or trouble comes to find them (smart hero invents something that catches the eye of dangerous people).

 

[Skade]

I do not want to go the employment route. That was the basis of the original game. As to wrong place, wrong time, that is what I did. Our little car thief steals the wrong car, and has some very powerful people (money not level) very upset with them. What we have though is one story when you go that route, Any sane person would walk away from the situation as soon as they could. In fact, the whole session was not trying to solve the mystery of what they saw, but running away from the people with guns.

My concern is not so much how to get them involved, its how to keep them involved after the first story. Normally this is not an issue, the characters want to change the world, for good or evil. Here I have one who just wants to play hockey, and another who just wants to steal the "perfect car".

 

[LostSoul]

My concern is not so much how to get them involved, its how to keep them involved after the first story. Normally this is not an issue, the characters want to change the world, for good or evil. Here I have one who just wants to play hockey, and another who just wants to steal the "perfect car".

Just keep the bad guys after them after the first adventure. Let them know that they've just had a glimpse of a secret world, one that nobody wants to let out. So they are wanted men. They will try to continue normal lives, but fate is a bitch. They've gotten in over their heads.

Over time, they realize that whatever's going on is going to keep them from having normal lives. But not just them; their friends, family, and everyone else, too.

Try and get the players to come up with some strange mysteries about their PCs (or do it for them). They'll want to explore this strangeness about their past.

 

[Spatula]

In any game, if you want the characters to go out and do things, they need some motivation. You don't want to use an employer/patron to prod them into action, and the characters don't seem to have any particular goals. You could push them into acting out of revenge - the bad guys that are after them find out who they are and hurt someone/thing important to them.

Or maybe a crime syndicate wants the hockey player to throw a game for money, and when he refuses they hurt him, bad, maybe so bad he can't play hockey anymore. Or some political rival of the car thief's family finds out about his illegal activities and uses that to hurt the family's fortunes.

And when they finally deal with the source of their troubles, they find that that was only the tip of the iceberg.

 

[Skade]

This is a very small group, two players, so the way I brought their quite disparate characters together is through an NPC sister and girlfriend. I had pretty much resigned myself to killing or kidnapping this character. That should get them involved.

Then you have this problem. Wealth. So I make their lives impossible. Keeping a job is not happening, friends and family are scared or suspicious, and next thing you know they are homeless. This is a modern world, so they decide to go after the villains any way, but they have to steal to do it, and next thing you know they are arrested or dead. Aside from that extreme what happens to their wealth score?

Your suggestions are fine for this situation. I will move this story along, I almost always do. Has anyone else had this problem in Modern where the characters are all homebodies? Though I guess a smart hero hacker could be fun. I liked the base class idea at first, but now i wonder. A player who makes a wheelman (Spycraft) knows he is in for action and adventure. A player who makes a fast hero is not necessarilly cruising for action. Am I crazy?