R U Playing?

[kamosa]

We aren't playing d20 modern. We have the books, but they don't seem to get much use or garner much interest. The problem is that we all want to play, but no one wants to GM the game.

To me it suffers from three main problems

1) The enemies are mostly human. With D&D you have lots of monsters to through at the party in unmoraly ambiguous combats. We kill the orcs because the orcs deserve to die. With a world full of humans the solutions are often not that straight forward. Do we kill the guard at the secret lab, he might not be a bad guy, just a guy that needed a job. To some people this provides needed depth, but to many it just gets in the way of exercising the combat mechanic, which is a large part of the draw for RPG's.

2) We play to get away. I like D&D because it has nothing to do with my daily life. Modern, not so far away. Dark stories in modern remind me of how crappy the world around me is. For some reason fantasy doesn't do that, even in games where the world is going to be destoryed. For some reason I don't get as strong a sense of victory in modern campaigns either. The characters tend to be darked and more flawed, which is cool, but it draws away from the hero aspects.

3) Character leveling seems less satisfying in modern settings. In D&D we level, we get more powerful, we face new enemies. The fantasy genre is littered with stories of characters that grew more powerful and able to take on much much bigger challenges through the course of a book. So, the meme of fantasy leveling feels right. In modern systems if feels like your character never really grows in power, or if you do it feels wrong. Our heroes should always be able to be gunned down by a machine gun toting chump. But if we don't ever advance beyone the machine gun toting chump, it feels like the character isn't growing and isn't changing enough to sustain interest over the 100 of hours a campaign lasts. In short, low character development works in movies and books, where you have one story and you never have to go back, but in games it falls flat. Unfortunatly growing in power doesn't seem to work well in modern stories (IE the matrix).

I'd write more, but I gotta head to the game.

 

[Threedub]

My group is not playing d20 Modern. We aren't playing it because:

1) Our main staple is high-fantasy d20, which usually means D&D.
2) We take breaks from high-fantasy with games such as Spycraft and Mutants & Masterminds which we haven't come close to getting bored of yet.
3) Other genres are more interesting to us if we do purchase another game, like Skull & Bones, Testament, OGL Cyberpunk, Darwin's World.
4) It would be another investment of time and money. Most of our minis and dungeon/overland terrain was built with high-fantasy in mind, not modern settings.
5) I don't have a really good reason to buy d20 Modern. I do have disposable income, if WOTC could suck me in with a setting or material that made me want it--I'd buy it and GM it.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Glen,

I play D&D, Star Wars and d20 Modern; I DM D&D and occasionally GM Star Wars and d20 Modern. When I DM, I strictly use my own stuff. I almost never use modules or adventures written by others. When I play, I'm willing to play anything from pre-made stuff to home-made stuff.

I've paid attention to 12 to Midnight material pretty much since you guys first started. I've never bought anything though because, like I said, I always GM from my own material.

However, to get to your questions more specifically, I do draw heavily on other sources. When I DM D&D, I have no problems stealing material from novels that I've found useful. When I GM d20 Modern, I am more likely to pluck ideas from movies or video games than from novels (mostly because I don't read much sci-fi, or anything that would be considered modern).

In the one d20 Modern group where I've been a player (my older son's campaign), the scenarios were based almost entirely on the Perfect Dark (C) video game. And, for me, it was great fun because I'd never played the game (some of the other players found things a bit dull because they had knowledge their characters didn't).

From this I will draw an admittedly gross overgeneralization. The next generation of gamers is going to be heavily influenced by the PC and console game market and less so by movies. I'm not suggesting that James Bond or Jason Bourne aren't suitable models for the game (contrarily, I believe they certainly fit perfectly for d20 Modern), but I think that companies hoping to tap into the market will also have to draw on other sources.

Dave