Quote:
Originally Posted by natehale1971
Yeah... exactly. Thus any new version of The Morrow Project has to include something that causes people today to have that same kind of fear and horror that we had at that time. And in all honesty... pushing the timeline back to 2012 allows that easier. because most kids today would think... wait the world ended in 1989? I wasn't born yet. Screw that. I'm not playing that game.
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Nate,
My apologies for not responding to this from a while back.
The "young-un's don't care for the Cold War" rationale has been dragged up to justify a "reboot" or update of TMP, but it's never washed for me. Maybe I just hang with strange kids, who know and care about the Cold War.
Some of the best gaming I've done was running and playing Recon, set during the Vietnam war (or American war, depending on the side). This was despite it being a conflict I was similarly only dimly aware of, being born on January 31, 1968. Having played Recon was at least partially responsible for my wife and I spending over a month in Viet Nam earlier this year and visiting historical sites all along the DMZ and in Sai Gon. I'm sure you'd call me a fool if I seriously suggested that an RPG set during the Vietnam war really needed to be updated in order to keep it "relevant" for those of us too young to personally remember it or the times.
This belief is partly from personal experience, because I've run TMP for players who weren't born or were too young to remember the Cold War, yet this wasn't a big deal for them. Mostly because the ones who know any history still find the Cold War relevant (or at least learned about it in school and are familiar with it) and those who don't aren't the ones to really care about stuff like background or TEOTWAWKI, anyways (that's so Y2K, man).
(Hmmm, on the not-so-serious side, let's see...
The then-new M16 was considered a crappy weapon back then, so naturally replace that piece of junk and equip all the US forces in Viet Nam with the later M4s or maybe G36s... no wait, the HK 416 is really hip right now! So are Strykers and battlefield information networks, so give the PCs all laptops, too. And Twitter accounts. Communism is basically dead so the bad guys should be fighting not for an outdated ideology but instead be radical Islamo-fascists fighting to create a Muslim state under Sharia law in Southeast Asia. May as well rename the VC "
al qaeda in Viet Nam" and the NVA/Russians the "Chinese" just to make them much more topical and immediate. (Of course this may seem like an illogical, but the Chinese are certainly capable of
realpolitik and could be playing the same game as the Pakistani ISI.) Oh yeah, the Cold War is gone, so better change the conflict to the Global War on Terror. There, that should interest the kids! I mean, seriously, who cares about a war that was fought and lost decades ago? People can only barely remember what happened in the last 10 minutes!
Of course, I'm just kidding, no one in their right mind would make these changes and expect to still capture anything of the Vietnam war.)
For most people nowadays, nuclear Armageddon (as we all called it back then) is something that belongs in the past. Thus taking it out of the past and setting it nowadays actually removes much of the existential dread and fear that gave TMP and other games such an emotional and power. (Some people still do fear TEOTWAWKI and not without good reason, but after Y2K it's mostly spent and irrelevant as a larger cultural force. Nothing like it was during the Cold War, you have to admit.)
Tony