It seems fairly obvious that White Wolf has accumulated a veritable treasure trove over the years and has informally entrenched itself as the authority on role-playing games in the modern setting. In this light, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has decided to enter this arena with the hope of providing some useful competition. As the self-proclaimed leaders of the fantasy genre of RPGs since it took TSR under its belt, they now present: D20 Modern. The name is short, with only two words, and too lackluster compared to the other games of its genre. However, there is a reason. D20 Modern sports not one but three game settings and promises to develop each beyond the scope of the Core Rulebook. Hence, what the name reflects is its versatility.
By their very nature RPGs have a tendency to pit the players against the Game Master. You supply the challenges, the monsters and if you are an Evil GM, all the horrible things the players will encounter. Being one such Evil GM I have noticed the players in my group tend to band together for protection. They stand back to back against the worst I can throw at them, and have learned to trust, or at least tolerate, each other.
I have to say I'm a lazy GM. I don't have the time or the energy to prepare a vast amount of background, labyrinthine plots, or hundreds of stats for monsters. So I spend an awful lot of time winging it during a game. My plots may be complex, and the background detailed, but this has little to do with the preparation I put in; mostly they are player lead adventures, and so I rely upon them for a lot of the inspiration and development of the game.
A lot of things can ruin a game when it's being written and assembled by developers. Unwieldy or unsound systems, derivative story concepts, an uninteresting setting, bad art, or even an overabundance of typos and spelling errors can all make a gamer set down a book in disgust and consign it to the hindmost reaches of the bookshelf, where it will never again see the surface of a gaming table, or even the light of day.
As a gamemaster, your most important job is keeping the players happy. There are mundane reasons for this: if you don't have happy players, soon you won't have players at all. Ultimately you want to keep the players happy because roleplaying is a recreational activity; whether you're telling a good story or presenting difficult tactical problems, the point is to have fun.
A large part of role-playing is creativity. People have a desire to build, to create, and gaming with friends offers various outlets of this drive. Game masters produce entire worlds for players to exist in. Players in turn, establish roles and enrich this newly established existence. The ultimate innovation, however, comes in designing a set of rules for this universe to subsist in. While the majority of people use one of the many systems available, others have a passion to create one of their own.
It's easy for a LARP staff to see a bunch of players sitting around the town square and think, 'Hmm, they're bored. Let's throw some orcs at them.' This is fun once in a while, but after two or three orc attacks, it gets a little old and a lot unbelievable. Think about it: if your favorite hangout got hit by a drive-by shooting every other week, how long would it stay your favorite hangout? But at the same time, the staff needs to be able to throw a low-stakes, hack'n'slash encounter at idle players every now and then. With that in mind, here is another Away From the Dinner Table low-stakes LARP module. The Critters in the Barn was a modified dungeon crawl. This one is a search-and rescue.
So your player's characters are extremely powerful and all you can do is throw larger and more powerful monsters at them to slow them down, but there is really no way to stop them. Or maybe your campaign is growing stale, but you don't want to scrap all of your hard work and start over. My advice to you is to simply destroy everything and cheat while you do so! All you need is a piece of your campaign world that either is unmapped or unexplored by your players and a technologically advanced, expansion minded society to overwhelm your player's world. To illustrate this idea, we will look at a sample fantasy campaign world, design a society to overwhelm them and then look at the results.
A very long time ago back in the mid 1980s I discovered role-playing. Not surprisingly the game that introduced me was Dungeons and Dragons. I was in my first few years of grade school, and although some of the concepts in the red boxed basic D&D set were difficult for my friends and I to puzzle out, there was still a giddy sense of fascination.
Generally in our gaming sessions we are accustomed to all our PCs being on the same side. We are also accustomed to their side being the side of the just and good. What if one of our PCs was playing for the wrong team? What if the amazing way this PC predicts the enemy's movements is no accident? Moreover, what if this PC is the great enemy the party will finally face to end the campaign? An ultimate challenge for both the GM and one of the PCs, the subterfuge storyline can be the biggest shocker you have ever seen in a roleplaying session.
