This coming semester in college I'm DMing a modern day DnD campaign where the characters are all diseased in horrifying ways, but that's beside the point, I'm wondering how DMs make up plots for campaigns and missions set in the modern day. Do you look to movies and TV for inspiration? I thought I'd start with that, then add my own flair. What do you recommend?
Get drunk and wing it.
Alternatively, ban something innocuous. That's guaranteed to get the players motivated.
I go out of my way to completely avoid any overt references to contemporary political issues or figures.
>>44474877
I sort of already did ban some innocuous things by cripplingly nerfing the players from the get go with diseases.
>>44475000
Well, first off, being horribly diseased and crippled and all that shit doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. If your players are into that, that's cool. I'm just throwing my two cents out here.
Second, you gotta metagame ban shit. Like, if you say "guys, you can't have guns because blah blah reasons" then sure as shit your campaign will be the players trying to get fuckin' guns man! The players won't know why they want 'em, and you won't know why either, but you'll have a game out of it.
>>44475091
We've played before traditional 3.5 and I've had trouble with the players being too strong, so I think nerfing will force them to be creative with how they approach the missions they're on.
As for the metagame that sounds really interesting, are you talking about making the players want something more than the game's laid out objective?
>>44475196
If the players want something man, then their characters will want that thing. Even if that something is "do what the GM told me I wasn't allowed to do."
>>44475260
Ah, okay. That could be interesting.
>>44474838
Whenever the question of "how do you come up with X" pops up, the most important answer is always "read/watch tons of X, take the stuff you like".
Like, at the moment I'm preparing a Nights Black Agents campaign, which is modern spies versus vampires. I've been watching films around spies and the military to get the lingo down, and also to get me thinking about how much combat there should be. Like, I recently watched A Most Wanted Man which is a really interesting but also frustrating film in that it's basically all about the main character planning this great operation, only for someone else to come in and nab his prize at the last minute. That's it, that's the end of the movie, he can't do anything about it and it's totally believable in a shitty mix-up of bureaucracy, European politics and American interventionism.
But I also know my players would fucking hate that and not accept a "nope, credits roll here" at that moment if I ran that scenario. So while I definitely will have the game be about putting together that sort of operation but with room for stuff to go wrong, for players to fuck up and then deal with it and keep going.
I've also been reading Charles Stross books because he does a lot of spy fic that intersects with the supernatural.
Then there's the whole thing with vampires, but that's another issue entirely.
Bro there's so much movies, dramas, literature, anime, and video games set in modern media I don't know how you COULDN'T get inspiration.
Hell sometimes I take old works of fiction and try to modernize it (which has also been done 100's of times before).
Just get a plot hook that keeps your characters together and go from there, the only difference you have from fantasy is that there aren't technological limitations to the things that you can do (i.e. fly to the other side of the country at will).
Also are you sure you wanna run a "DnD Campaign" in the modern world? Gun combat gets silly at that point, unless this is some metaphysical or superhero shit you're running.
Check out World of Darkness or Savage Worlds.
not just with modern campaigns:
A) Steal stuff from several works that you like til it becomes your own unique thing
B) Take something you didn't like, change it into something you WOULD like.
or a combination of the two.
