Monday Musings...Saints Row: The Third as a Premise for a Modern Day RPG (mildly NSFW)

This was the NSFW one!

I realized as I was playing Saints Row: The Third this weekend that the D20 Modern system would work really well for this sort of game. You'd have level progression, hit point mechanics, a rule set just buff enough to handle some weirdness....

I suppose it goes without saying though that Hero System or GURPS could both do the "Saints Row" genre (because it really is its own weird thing) rather well, too....GURPS especially if you do it with every possible cinematic rule and quick-use short cut turn on (i.e. the group skills and such). Not sure how fun such a game would be, though....Saints Row: The Third has the distinct advantage of being so wild because of it's medium (open-world GTA-esque game in which you run around causing trouble for a virtual city) which not only allows for characters with remarkable resilience, but in a break from convention it sort of assumes that the game universe really is a "game" universe, the sort of place where the rules can and are broken Just Because There Are No Limits. Hyper deadly Japanese game show? Sure, why not! Gun which fires mind-controlling cephalopods? You got it. Gun which sprays targets with chum, attracting ferocious burrowing land sharks? Absolutely! There are no bad ideas in Saints Row: The Third, only fully realized dreams and madness. Hell...it's sequel (#4) features an all-out alien invasion of the city....so there ya go.

Anyway...the thing I get from playing this game is that sometimes it pays not too take one's fantasy realms too seriously. Also, internal logic is only as reality based as you care to make it. I am definitely considering how I can apply these lessons in some future game campaign...

Okay, the SR3-inspired idea I have: a world in which the most flamboyant and over-the-top super villains won, and society has been operating for decades (or longer!) based on some principles (such as they are) established by those winning villains long ago. While society madly plunges along into a state of increasing anarchy, it turns out that the super villains won so long ago due to the meddling of clever aliens, who are pulling strings behind the scenes; the aliens have a massive ship in space powered by a reality-warping engine, which is accidentally responsible on occasion for especially strange and bizarre manifestations on Earth, up to and including worm holes to other times and dimensions (pulling in everything from dinosaurs to cowboys and zombies). Meanwhile, the heroes --okay, protagonists-- are out to profiteer from the whole sordid mess....

One game I haven't considered, but which I really should: Mutants & Masterminds 3E. Seems like this sort of crazy would be very easy to execute in MnM!