Now, every computer, smartphone and internet connection the protagonists use is a liability, because you never know when someone’s watching. Solution: throw in ubiquitous surveillance as a plot tool, and make your protagonists people who the government are going to have a problem with: hackers, private investigators, foreign secret agents, UFO truth-seekers, journalists or the like. But what if you want to explore the current day? Isn’t up-to-date realism kind of the point of a modern-era RPG? It’s for this reason that many D20 Modern GMs set their game in the 1990s, before computer use was ubiquitous. This forces the GM to come up with a lot more answers than a mediaeval Dungeons & Dragons game, and that gets tiring.
Set your D20 Modern scenario in the current day, and any character with a $100 smartphone has the sum total of the world’s knowledge at his fingertips. This is bad news for privacy, but it finally solves the biggest problem in modern-era roleplaying: characters fearlessly solving all their problems with computers and the Internet. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s now literally the world we live in. The citizens know, but they’re powerless to do anything about it. The Agency infiltrates powerful corporations, hacks private networks and plants backdoors in computer security standards. But a clandestine government agency monitors all of its citizens in secret: what they read, who they talk to, and even their location. Digital communications networks have become a necessity of life. It is the 21st Century, and over half the population is hooked on portable technology.
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