MCDM's Talent is presented in large part as a product of comic book superheroics - the Talent NPCs that are presented as exemplars of their subclasses wear form-fitting costumes not unlike a superhero and I think MCDM's approach to marketing the class is done with the popularity (albeit a diminishing one) of superheroes in today's pop culture zeitgeist.
But I suspect that the greater inspiration for the class was likely the kind of psionic archetype that exists in stories like Stephen King's Firestarter, or for a more recent piece that borrows from King's work, Eleven from Stranger Things. (King's a big fan of the psionic ability trope, to the extent that there's a part near the end of his opus, the Dark Tower series, in which many psionics from other stories of his have all been kidnapped and forced to work as "Breakers" to destroy what is effectively the last leyline holding the universe together).
Personally, I've fallen in love with the whole aesthetic of the kind of late-20th-century secret government-funded experimentation into the power of the mind. There were real experiments like MKUltra that involved testing various drugs to see how they could be used for the purpose of interrogation, but especially with Jung's theories (as I've written a lot about in my Alan Wake posts,) there's a sort of circling back around to the idea of supernaturalism via a rationalist, scientific worldview that just intrigues me. It's probably no coincidence that my dad is a professor at a world-class scientific institution, and so the kind of vibe and even scent of scientists who were working on cutting-edge stuff (in my dad's case, computer science) in the 1970s is something near and dear to me.
The Dark Tower really opened my eyes to the idea of fantasy as existing outside of a medieval fantasy context - I loved Lord of the Rings, but the kind of story I'm more interested in telling is one where the castles are replaced by secretive bases and bunkers, and where everything is just a little weirder and more uncanny.
The Talent, conceptually, fits very well into that more modern or recently modern aesthetic (both the game Control and one of its inspirations, the Southern Reach Trilogy, are modern stories that also have an enforced retro vibe to them because of their respective institutions' concerns about basically the technology of the computer age).
I think the most popular alternative to medieval fantasy is the space opera - Spelljammer is a weird case that is really just fantasy in space, but Starfinder is fully futuristic but still has things like wizards and demons and explicitly supernatural stuff.
But it seems that usually we're finding ourselves looking to a pre-industrial past or a super-advanced future, and I'd love to set things in something closer to the modern world.
Now, there is precedent. In fact, I suspect that Brennan Lee Mulligan, main DM and creator of Dimension 20, has similar tastes, because two of the campaigns from their show that have gotten secondary seasons both involve a modernized D&D world. Fantasy High, the first D20 show, was something like a fusion of D&D with a teen movie such as the ones John Hughs made (albeit a little more modern because the kids all have cell phones). In Fantasy High, the world itself is mostly a fairly traditional medieval fantasy world, but the particular nation in which it is set has, through some confluence of magic and technology, approximated a kind of 80s/90s/00s America. In season two (Sophomore year) they leave their home country to journey to other places, where people don't really know what to make of things like a motorcycle or a van (each of which has the soul of I believe a demon and an angel, respectively). Another of their popular series (and one of my favorite stories I've seen told in actual play) is The Unsleeping City, which takes a kind of urban fantasy/magical realist approach, setting the game in the real world, specifically New York City, but one in which, unbeknownst to all of us, there's actually tons of magic and monsters that we just don't see because of the unique nature of the New York mindset, which is extra-well-trained to ignore anything weird and rationalize it (as an example, a centaur police officer is just seen by most people as an equestrian officer).
Personally, I think I gravitate more toward the Fantasy High approach here, though I'd probably do a world where everyone's living at a modern technological level.
Now, I don't think Mulligan works very hard to change the rules of the game to fit the setting. The Unsleeping City's paladin character is not described as wearing armor, but simply gets a normal Paladin AC, and I suspect that "on the character sheet" he is actually wearing armor.
On a mechanical level, I think that a modern-set D&D game presents the following pressures:
First, you need to figure out a way to balance firearms. In D&D, most "martial" classes tend to focus on melee weapons. The Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue can all go ranged (with the latter two probably doing so more often than not) but Barbarians, Paladins, and Monks are basically obligated to stick to melee. To be sure, in the modern day there are still opportunities for people to fight hand-to-hand, but I think that if this happens in a military context, it basically means that things have very suddenly gone very wrong for both combatants. That said, you might come up with a conceit that justifies the re-emergence of melee combat (not to say that it's remotely modern, but the far-future sci-fi of Dune has the existence of personal shields that make high-velocity attacks like from bullets impractical) or you make the player characters the strange exceptions (and if they're fighting non-humanoid monsters, their lack of projectile weapons might simply be part of their nature).
The other I think is vehicles. While D&D has various beasts that can serve as mounts, the existence of high-speed vehicles in our modern day is pretty ubiquitous. So I think you'd need to hammer out rules for high-speed encounters (I actually like the way Starfinder handles this).
Actually, there's a third thing: you'd need to figure out ways to use various skills to represent modern concepts. What is the check to use or understand advanced technology like computers? Does a set of thieves' tools include a Raspberry Pi with some hacking code on it? And what is the proper skill for driving a car or piloting an airplane?
But on a more interesting level, I also feel like there's some questions to be asked as to what sort of character concepts one could have.
The Talent is a full new class, but I could also imagine creating various subclasses that would involve modern ideas. WotC tried this many years ago with its Modern D&D Unearthed Arcana, but it never went anywhere. Still, we got things like the City Domain Cleric (used in the Unsleeping City) and the Ghost in the Machine Warlock Patron (basically what if your patron is a supercomptuer?)
I do think the best thing one can do these days is just a lot of re-skinning. But I keep coming back to the hope that one of the new campaign settings that they teased years ago might be a modern world. Granted, the last couple setting books (even if I liked the Planescape set) have been somewhat light on new rules ideas, but a guy can hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment