An Old Friend Returns

My 8 year old has been quite a pain lately. I suspect he may be a bit neurodivergent, with some of his behaviors. In my D&D game last Saturday, he started the session by being a jerk when Denis tried to introduce his new character to the party. A little later, he was staring at his smartphone (my wife's old phone, which we gave to him to be in contact after school if needed, but he's definitely addicted to it). When I took the phone away, he had a meltdown, started annoying his brother, and eventually fell asleep. The sugary tea he drank probably didn't help with that. After the game, we discussed other drinks he could get at the cafe, and he's willing to try a non-sugary drink next time. So at least that part was a victory.

For a while now, he's been wanting to "run" a campaign, but a modern one. He loves the idea of guns (from movies, games, etc.) and wants to run a criminal campaign inspired by what little he knows of games like GTA. He has plans for an open world, do anything type game set in the real world. Oh, and maybe there are Pokemon, maybe superheroes too, and maybe or maybe not we'll be fighting monsters. 

A few months back (this campaign idea has been percolating in his head for a while), I mentioned that I'd always enjoyed d20 Modern for contemporary setting RPGs, but that it was a complicated game. Much more so than the modified D&D game I run, which sits somewhere between BECMI and AD&D, but closer to BECMI. But he was intrigued, so I pulled up the PDF of the game that I still have. And of course the Ultramodern Firearms supplement that I also have in PDF. 

I sold off my d20 Modern books before I left Japan. Gave them to a friend who ran a short campaign with them before he and his wife returned to the states. Even though I couldn't stand to play 3E/3.5E/Pathfinder 1E these days, and a quick look through the old d20 Star Wars book when I was considering joining a PbP game on RPOL has confirmed my pleasure with running the d6 WEG Star Wars system, I still have a soft spot for d20 Modern. 

As I've mentioned before, a few times, but not a whole lot, in my estimation a good modern setting game needs a more skill based approach rather than a class based approach, but the generic archetype classes of d20 Modern, mixed with the fiddly skill/feat system of the d20 family of games, works pretty well for that. It's not too hard to multiclass, the backgrounds round out a lot of concepts, and the system emulates the "laws of action movies" fairly well. 

So, at my son's urging, we went on DriveThru and ordered a POD copy of d20 Modern. I did check Amazon and a couple of used book sites for original copies, but they were pretty pricey. POD plus shipping to Korea came out to around $60 (of course the exchange rate isn't so good right now, so the price looks worse in Korean won...). Since it was on DriveThru, I was able to use profits from Chanbara and my paper minis to pay for it. 

After weeks of my son insisting the book was overdue, and me double checking the order date to tell him that no, it's not overdue yet, the book finally arrived today. 

The POD version is thicker than what I remember (and a dimension check on Amazon confirms this). The paper quality must be better. The pages do feel a bit thicker and they're not as smooth as the paper WotC uses. The binding seems pretty good, on first glance, too. 

This evening we went over the basics of character generation. Even though my son wants to run a game, he really just wants to free-form game. He kept telling me that he just wants everyone to start with X, Y, and Z guns, plus a grenade, and everyone should have 100 hit points, and he wants to use money because the abstract wealth score is too abstract for his 8-year old cognition. Which I can understand. He just wants to have fun. We really need a more loosey goosey story game type rule set for him. But we've got d20 Modern (again), so might as well let him use it as a framework for his imaginings!