Technology vs. magic — who wins?
One of the biggest balancing acts for this campaign was to figure out how to avoid the need for certain magical items until a point in time where the magical aspects of the world began to truly reveal themselves. The battle on top of the train in book one shows that there are people with the same abilities as Luis, and if you’ve read book two, you’ll know that there is an entire faction of people with similar powers to Morgan, so there’s no surprise that magic exists in the modern world of the Displaced, but it would have been exceptionally odd to have the players stumble across plus one swords and healing potions at a local coffee shop or in a random warehouse. Not only would that pull you the reader out of the experience, but it would also have shattered the suspension of disbelief during the game. But to leave them without healing items or other ways to power themselves up between level ups, would make for a low reward game.
Now my players are fantastic, and oftentimes the story rewards are indeed rewarding enough, but we’ve all got a bit of a Spike or Johnny in us…
Quick aside - The Magic: the Gathering crowd can explain this one better, but real quick there are three types of players:
Timmy - I wanna do this thing because I love it! (Big dinosaurs, silly character build, just lean into what creates the most fun)
Johnny - I want to figure out how to make this idea work (complicated character build, really cool synergy with another character that is highly situational, basically someone who wants to tinker with pulling off something cool)
Spike - I want to win. I will learn the rules to win. (Not usually an issue with D&D, since you can’t really win it, but there are certain villains my players REALLY wanted to kill)
Okay, we got the lingo? Great! Back to the blog!
As I was saying, we’ve all got a bit of Spike and Johnny in us, and we want rewards that will actually make it feel like we’re progressing in the game, but we’ve also played in games where we get items that are a bit lackluster because we already have something way better. So there were a few issues I was facing when designing these particular elements of the game. Here are a few aspects of how I solved the issues, or at least bandaided over them long enough for the story to progress to a point where introducing the magical elements of the reward system made sense.
Spells that are just modern made magical
In D&D, there are plenty of spells that just do what something modern already does, but with magic. The light spell is basically just turning on the flashlight on your phone… or an actual flashlight for us older folks. Creating an item for that was relatively easy… it was a flashlight. They could just buy a flashlight, or in their case, get one at a job fair from the chochkie table of one of the prospective employers. Honestly, half the reason to include that scene was to introduce Fulmer, the other half was to remind my players that corner shops existed and they could just ask me for things that were reasonable enough to pick up at a store.
Items like first aid kits took the place of potions (though they only did 1d4+2 healing and could only be used on any particular character once per day to be effective, they weren’t going to be as effective as health potions) and then I allowed items like energy drinks to help them overcome a level of exhaustion, with the caveat of having a negative effect later. What is that negative effect you ask? Well, maybe I’ll spotlight a few modern day ‘magic’ items and their stats later.
Nothing may travel faster than Bad News, guns in D&D are actually pretty limited, unlike how they are in America. Stats for guns in the game were actually relatively hard to come by. There were the ones that Critical Role made, but those were for guns that were still working on becoming the horrific killing machines they are today. My players were going to be facing something far worse in this world, so I needed to stat out a whole arsenal for both their gun slinger as well as for the enemies they would be facing. While I was able to reskin a lot of weapons that the game already had, some needed to be whipped up ahead of time or on the spot. There was a similar problem with armor, considering you weren’t likely to find hide or leather armor in the modern world, but a leather coat can offer some protection against damage (why else do you think motorcyclists wear them?) and kevlar does exist here, you just need to know where to get it.
While there are moments when the player’s magical powers are unbelievably impressive to the NPCs of the world, there are moments when they can be humbled because their magic isn’t any more convenient than the commodities of the world they’re now in. I think back to the scene where Morgan produced a flame in her hand and Smithers just pulled out a lighter. Yes, magic is impressive, but Arthur C. Clark was right, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The Wealth Disparity
As I said, if my players thought of a real world item that could help them, I usually did not deny them finding it, so long as it was reasonably believable that they could get their hands on it. One of the biggest hurdles to getting something you want in America is money, and this was back before our economy was in the toilet… well, as far in the toilet as it is the second time around with this schmuck.
Picking up a lighter or a coffee was easy, I didn’t even bother with tracking money at that point. One of the most tedious parts of a game like D&D or other systems is inventory management. “If it’s not on your character sheet, you don’t have it” can sometimes cause the game to come to a grinding halt. Sometimes it's just reasonable to assume that an item the party is looking for is on one of the characters’ persons, sometimes it's not. Do you have a key on you? Probably. Is it the key to the vault? Probably not. But sometimes you just need a key to scrape away at something or to carve a message in a piece of non-descript metal.
Games like Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade take this concept and apply it to one of the most nickel and diming areas of the game: money. Rather than tracking each dollar in your character’s checking account, you’re given a wealth bracket and all the DM or GM needs to determine is whether or not it’s reasonable that a character in that wealth bracket can afford the item they’re looking for. Can a middle class level character afford a car? Not without a lot of paperwork. Can they afford a bus pass? Probably, let’s just say you buy it and move on, no reason to just sit there and try to figure out how much it will cost and deduct it from your character sheet. In the beginning of the books, the characters were pulling money out of their fallen foes’ wallets to survive, but as time goes on they found other sources of income and we worked off of the wealth system just to keep the game rolling, allowing them to grab items to overcome the lack of magic in the world, but also allow for creativity.
Timm has one of the most amazing moments for this, and I will not ruin it for you, but it involves a squirrel, a cop car, and a lot of scrubbed camera footage.
Working in Tandem
Magic or Tech? Why not both? This is the other element that comes into play a lot as well in the game. The players are never wholly reliant on magic, nor are they wholly reliant on technology. There comes a point when Luis charges into battle, sword in one hand, gun in the other, and where the foes will mix and match as well. More often than not it isn’t a matter of what is superior, but what is superior for the situation the players are in. If an enemy is tech heavy, they may not know a lot of magic, and vice versa. I hate to always bring the blog back to the Dresden Files (okay, no I don’t, but whatever), but I do love the mentality of the main character when dealing with ancient beings: they think they’re all powerful until they get hit in the face with a .44. (Read Welcome to the Jungle, a fantastic graphic novel of the Dresden Files to really understand that point).
We also see this as the players begin to understand their abilities and how they work alongside their modern world allies. Smithers doesn’t fully understand the magic, but he accepts it as the craziness of what he’s going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future, Damian and Simon both know about it and understand it a little, and Fulmer is just about to be exposed to it all. Each one has a different reaction and relationship with both technology and magic that is going to help the main cast start to develop their own relationship with both as well.
And since you’ve been so good and keeping up with my blogs, I feel I should give you a reward as well. Here’s a little tech you can add to your own modern world D&D games. Feel free to use, modify, and enjoy!
Pepper Spray
A one-time use item. Target must make a DC 12 Dexterity saving throw or be blinded for 1 minute. At the end of each of its turns the affected creature can attempt a DC 15 Constitution saving throw to regain its sight (.5 lbs)
Energy Drink
Negates one level of exhaustion for 1d4 hours, however the creature regains lost exhaustion as well as gains an additional level after that time is up. (.5lbs)
Motorcycle Armor
Medium Armor: AC 16+Dex (Max 2). Creatures wearing this armor have resistance to non-magical bludgeoning, slashing, piercing damage, as well as resistance to Fire damage not caused by a magical source. (8lbs.)
