Never On Sunday

My friend Jen is engaged in some serious housecleaning, including ridding herself of her RPG library. I am happy to take it off her hands, though I wouldn’t want to pay actual cash money for most of it, and wouldn’t pay shelf price for any of it. Even bad games can make interesting reading, if only as an example of what not to do.

Case in point: the D20 Modern Roleplaying Game, put out by WotC during the swiftly abandoned d20 open gaming license “revolution.” It bills itself as an all-purpose game for simulating action movies in a modern setting, but it reads more like a day-late and dollar-short attempt to capitalize on the supernatural shadow war cliche that World of Darkness has milked so successfully, minus all that fussy character motivation and mood-setting that made WoD such a success.

D20 Modern falls flat because it’s a system in search of a campaign idea. Rather than starting with a cool campaign idea, and working out what rules would best simulate it, D20 takes as given that Dungeons & Dragons is the ideal system for any purpose, and tries to come up with adventures to match—adventures that won’t drift so far from the original dungeon crawl as to break the basic assumptions of D&D. To illustrate the point, consider the class-and-level structure. Rigidly defined professional racks, suspect even in a fantasy setting, are totally inappropriate in a modern one. So the authors are reduced to defining classes by their primary attribute: the “strong hero,” the “smart hero,” and so on, never pausing to wonder whether there’s really any need for classes distinct from attribute modifiers, nor indeed any narrative distinction between “strong” and “tough” heroes in modern action movies D20 Modern purports to simulate.

Toward the end of the book are three suggestions for putting it to use in a campaign. Suggestion one: the PCs are monster hunters, stalking the supernatural beasts that lurk in the urban shadows, preying on humanity. Suggestion two:, the PCs are psionic monster hunters, stalking psionic enemies of the state and the supernatural beasts that lurk in the urban shadows, preying on humanity. Suggestion three: the PCs are again monster hunters, only this time some of the PCs are allowed to cast magic spells, which is totally different, somehow, from psionic powers. The book suggests the GM really crank up the irony in this third campaign by noting that spell-casting PCs may have more in common with some of the monsters than they do with normal humanity, and that the very nicest monsters might be allowed to live. (Yeah, I know. A real mind-blower, right?)

And what monsters would the PCs hunt? Perhaps you’ll recognize some of them: regenerating trolls, hyena-like gnolls, displacer beasts and mind-flayers, skeletons and troglodytes, pint-sized kobolds that rely on swarming tactics to make up for their size. In short, all the standards from the old D&D monster manual, right down to distinguishing features and elemental immunities. The “shadow war” could more accurately be described as “dungeon crawl,” with parking lots and tenements in place of wilderness and temple ruins.

Similarly, “D20 Modern” might more accurately be desribed as “D&D with a chart for guns but most of the spells and special abilities taken out.” It’s sad to think that this might just be a cheap attempt to squeeze some cash out of gamers who have more money than they have sense, or creativity. Sadder still to realize that it’s just as likely to be an honest attempt to produce something new, but that the D&D guys are still so tied to the early ’80s of RPGs that they truly can’t recognize all the wonderful ideas that have come along since, whose imaginations can’t stretch any further than “…only this bugbear has a .38 revolver!”