RPG systems frozen in time

[JohnSnow]

A LOT of modern games do this, and the good ones usually update their price lists periodically to reflect inflation. Savage Worlds comes immediately to mind, where they explicitly mention using the price of some normal thing to set relative prices of other objects. A good trick is to use something like a meal as your "gold standard" and adjust prices/puchase DC accordingly. As an example, the SWADE core rulebook prices a fast food meal at $8, and where I live, they're about twice that today. So just halve the real-world price of stuff, or double what the listed game prices are.

In d20 Modern, I'd just decide as a GM what the appropriate rarity of an item is, and set a purchase DC accordingly. I might be off a bit, but it's not going to break anything.

In the end, it's all an abstraction, and we're just playing a game, not filling out a tax return.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I work out modern advances. WW nWoD is my go to game for anything modern and urban. That game started in 2004. I put all modern tech in it ( smartphones, drones, fast internet, social media). It's funny, cause it's in some ways harder to brake Masquarade now when there is bunch of fakes, cgi and AI videos circling online and flooding feeds. Clan Daeva vampire doing his "vampire gimmick" in the open on the tiktok is discarded as just another wannabe influencer.

Were I ever to run an oWoD game again, I couldn't imagine running it any other time than the early-to-mid 90s.

 

[payn]

I love Traveller I tend to stick to the rules, though the computers are something id like to see updated. Though I don't have a problem using them as exists.

 

[MGibster]

Do any other GMs do this kind of thing or do you chose to work out modern advances into your games that set in the current year/tech setting?

When I run Cyberpunk 2020, and it's been more than 10 years at this point, I run it in the year 2020 as it was imagined way back in the 1980s. There are still newspapers in the form of screamsheets, there's no social media, the Soviet Union is still around, etc., etc.

 

[Bohandas]

I want to try to run Toon with my local gaming group but I'm stuck trying to update the humor in the published adventures. I want the vibe to to be less Looney Toons and more Spongebob. But that means I basically have to rewrite the whole adventure from scratch. But I don't feel comfortable doing that because I've never ran Toon before which is the whole reason why I want to do a published adventure in the first place.

 

[Bohandas]

It occurs to me that Call of Cthulhu would have to work a lot differently in a modern setting since there's not really such a thing as a rare or esoteric book anymore. You're one google search away from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Popul Vuh, the Gospel of Judas, the Enuma Elish, the Book of the Subgenius, the Zohar, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegestus, Revolt in the Stars, the Ars Goetia - whatever you want - and I'm pretty sure the Necronomicon and the Book of Eibon would be no different if they were real

 

[GMMichael]

Mo' money, mo' problems. Let the PCs buy whatever they want.