Modern Games (Cops and reality)

[Dioltach]

I've run recent-past and near-future games, and both were grim and gritty. But nothing to do with real-world events, because I can't imagine that would be any fun. With fictional problems, you can solve them in the game and feel good when you stop playing - not realise when you put away the dice that the real problem is still there.

(If I played a police procedural, for instance, it would probably draw heavily on the Rivers of London.)

 

[GMMichael]

Modern games? Not enough escapism for me. But real world news is great for informing plots. You know what they say, "you can't make this stuff up!"

. . . but there's no reason why the police in your game couldn't 100% be a shining bulwark of uncorruptible decency.

...which is just as plausible as paladin characters. Those seem pretty popular.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

What's going on right now doesn't really impact any modern gaming I'd be interested.

 

[ccs]

The last time I played an RPG set in the present/modern day was a year long Vampire/WoD campaign that ended on Dec.31st 1999/12:01 am Jan 1st 2k.
Really, in real life, play literly stopped at 12:01 am 1/1/2k.
On top of whatever fictional stuff we had going on, anything & everything in real life 1999 was fodder for the game.

Other than that my only forays into "modern*" is near future WWIII 15mm miniature wargaming.
* = 1985 or so. The premise of the Team Yankee version of Flames of War is "What if the Cold War had gone hot?"
So mid-late 80s tanks etc instead of my usual WWII stuff.
As I'm not taking this seriously, my USA forces are painted up as "Tiger Force" from the G.I.Joe toy line.
Wanna guess who I painted the bad guys up as?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Modern games? Not enough escapism for me. But real world news is great for informing plots. You know what they say, "you can't make this stuff up!"


...which is just as plausible as paladin characters. Those seem pretty popular.

The rarity of Paladins makes them completely believable, outside of the magic.

 

[Nytmare]

You know what, I hadn't thought about LARPs. I was in a Vampire/Werewolf LARP in the late 90s that frequently dabbled in current events.

 

[billd91]

I'll admit that it was a cops campaign that made me appreciate the Cyberpunk RPG. Most of the other basic tropes of the genre, the hardscrabble team of mercenaries doing jobs for example, didn't really appeal to me. But cops, even dirty cops (which we were to certain degrees), were at least grounded in our daily experience. They had a day to day reason for doing what they do, as characters, to the point I was able to relate to the game. And it was a lot of fun.

There were limits to the behavior we were willing to perpetrate as PCs as well. But then, I don't see that as being all that different from playing certain fantasy-type characters. You think Charlemagne's Paladins (like Roland) or any other crusading knight were the kind of upstanding, moral people they tend to be in D&D (if you take the LG alignment restriction)? We sanitize our archetypes in many ways to play them in somewhat more idealized forms. It's part of the fantasy and escapism that the in-game reality we play isn't as gritty as the reality we experience or see in the world around us.

 

[Gradine]

Gonna be real, the fact that you basically play cops is the main reason I don't think I'm ever going to run Zeitgeist, despite how interesting it seems otherwise.

 

[Eltab]

I grew up with Adam-12 and Ironside on TV. (Mod Squad too but somehow "plainsclothes detective" never translated to "cop" the way uniformed officers did.) In a city / county big enough to have several precincts you can set good cops, dirty cops, honest-but-overwhelmed cops, horrible cops, cops in name only, or ... whatever you want to play and whatever you want to interact with.

 

[Eltab]

Well, contextually, I'm a person who's always simultaneously been extremely dubious of police and considered them a necessary evil; I suppose I still feel the same and that current events have simply made it clear my perceptions weren't far off.

That doesn't mean that you can't have a police-centric game that doesn't emphasize the problems with police culture (especially in the U.S.) without making the PCs part of that problem. Its not like its a necessity that every force and every part thereof shares some of the reprehensible attitudes and actions of big parts of it for the things we're seeing to be true.

Teddy Roosevelt, NY Police Commissioner, for NPC
This is an honest reformer with no power base inside the organization. Would the PCs like to help him out?