d20 Modern
I had a chance to do some old fashioned, face-to-face role playing gaming earlier this week. My wife was out of town with the kids to visit some family on the other side of the state, so I decided to take advantage of an empty house to get a game together. Normally, my RPG gaming happens online over Fantasy Grounds, a “virtual tabletop” built for playing pen and paper over the Web. This would be the first time I’ve played face-to-face at the kitchen table in probably 15 years (which, also marks about the same amount of time I’ve been married… odd coincidence, that.)
Rather than dive into our ongoing Eberron campaign, we decided to run something completely new, almost as a one off convention-style game. We settled on trying out d20 Modern – we already owned the rule books, and we’ve been itching to try something “not fantasy” for awhile. Plus, I’ve developed a horrible addiction to Supernatural, and liked the idea of a paranormal, occult hunter style of game.
To keep prep times down, I decided to run the “Exit 23” mini-adventure published in the back of the Dark Matter source book. To keep things simple, we went out to coffee one afternoon and worked through the group template, with the idea that I (as the GM) would then pre-generate the characters based on what we came up with. The setup goes something like this: a group of people from all walks of life end up stranded at a small gas station by a horrible snow storm off a remote blue highway in Idaho. At first, it just seems like bad luck, until a couple of corpses show up, and you realize that something horrible is waiting out in the storm…
We ended up landing on the following core characters:
Once we started rolling dice, the game came off great – there was just the right mix of paranoia, desperation and fear to set the mood. Three of the four characters survived the night’s events (the poor sheriff didn’t make it) and the DEA agent was hanging by a thread in the end. We lost a few civilians in the process, nine cars suffered massive depreciation, and every window in the gas station was blown out. Total play time was about 4 hours. A good night’s work.
I’m a firm believer that miniatures really help to visualize the action… But, I’m not a huge fan of really tactical combat rules (I prefer to keep my miniatures games and RPGs separate). I do like being able to “see” what is going on, and a few minis on the table can go a long way to clearing up confusion. For our game, I drew out the entire gas station on a big vinyl game mat. Then I started looking around for miniatures, but unfortunately couldn’t find much that worked well. I considered just using plastic army men, by then I stumbled across the Cardboard Heroes: Modern product from Steve Jackson Games. These little guys were awesome, and the offered us the full variety of what we needed: cops, guys in suits, dirty truckers, a teenage girl and a matronly waitress. Sure, they aren’t quite as cool a real miniatures, but they were a lot cheaper and a lot faster to get on the table – not to mention finding good miniatures for real-world Modern games is a challenging proposition in the first place.
In the end, I would have to say that our first outing with d20 Modern was a smashing success – I had a great time, and now I think we are going to try and extend it out into a full blow campaign, or at least pick it up more frequently as a "fill in" game. Playing around a table again was a lot of fun as well, but it did make for a very different game. Collaborative things like combat were a lot easier and went much faster. As a GM I had the benefit of being able to read my player's faces and quickly see when they didn’t really understand what I was describing to them. At the same time, the RP suffered quite a bit compared to what we do online. When we play online, we play almost exclusively with text chat, which makes talking and emoting in character much less… well, embarrassing, I guess.
Rather than dive into our ongoing Eberron campaign, we decided to run something completely new, almost as a one off convention-style game. We settled on trying out d20 Modern – we already owned the rule books, and we’ve been itching to try something “not fantasy” for awhile. Plus, I’ve developed a horrible addiction to Supernatural, and liked the idea of a paranormal, occult hunter style of game.To keep prep times down, I decided to run the “Exit 23” mini-adventure published in the back of the Dark Matter source book. To keep things simple, we went out to coffee one afternoon and worked through the group template, with the idea that I (as the GM) would then pre-generate the characters based on what we came up with. The setup goes something like this: a group of people from all walks of life end up stranded at a small gas station by a horrible snow storm off a remote blue highway in Idaho. At first, it just seems like bad luck, until a couple of corpses show up, and you realize that something horrible is waiting out in the storm…
We ended up landing on the following core characters:
- Sheriff Roy Higgins (dedicated hero), the 62-year old county sheriff who has spent his night pulling wayward travelers from the storm and bringing them back to the truck stop to weather the storm.
- Troy Walsh (tough hero), a 28 year-old mechanic, fix-it man, and local tough guy. He was repairing a bad compressor on one of the café’s coolers when the storm hit.
- Jason Beckett (charismatic hero), a DEA agent who just finished a two-year long under cover assignment in Salt Lake City to bring down the biggest meth trafficking operations in the mountain west. He is driving to a cabin in Montana to meet his high-schools sweetheart after a reconnecting with her through the internet when he is caught by the storm.
- Private First Class Brian Sparks (fast hero) has recently finished his tour in the army and is returning from a tour in Baghdad. He feels like a stranger in a strange land now, and is struggling to find his place back in the real world. He is driving north, returning to his hometown in northern Montana.
Once we started rolling dice, the game came off great – there was just the right mix of paranoia, desperation and fear to set the mood. Three of the four characters survived the night’s events (the poor sheriff didn’t make it) and the DEA agent was hanging by a thread in the end. We lost a few civilians in the process, nine cars suffered massive depreciation, and every window in the gas station was blown out. Total play time was about 4 hours. A good night’s work.
I’m a firm believer that miniatures really help to visualize the action… But, I’m not a huge fan of really tactical combat rules (I prefer to keep my miniatures games and RPGs separate). I do like being able to “see” what is going on, and a few minis on the table can go a long way to clearing up confusion. For our game, I drew out the entire gas station on a big vinyl game mat. Then I started looking around for miniatures, but unfortunately couldn’t find much that worked well. I considered just using plastic army men, by then I stumbled across the Cardboard Heroes: Modern product from Steve Jackson Games. These little guys were awesome, and the offered us the full variety of what we needed: cops, guys in suits, dirty truckers, a teenage girl and a matronly waitress. Sure, they aren’t quite as cool a real miniatures, but they were a lot cheaper and a lot faster to get on the table – not to mention finding good miniatures for real-world Modern games is a challenging proposition in the first place.In the end, I would have to say that our first outing with d20 Modern was a smashing success – I had a great time, and now I think we are going to try and extend it out into a full blow campaign, or at least pick it up more frequently as a "fill in" game. Playing around a table again was a lot of fun as well, but it did make for a very different game. Collaborative things like combat were a lot easier and went much faster. As a GM I had the benefit of being able to read my player's faces and quickly see when they didn’t really understand what I was describing to them. At the same time, the RP suffered quite a bit compared to what we do online. When we play online, we play almost exclusively with text chat, which makes talking and emoting in character much less… well, embarrassing, I guess.
Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, RPGs
