Modern to fantasy

[Lameth]

Question... Has anyone ran or played in a game with the theme was to have modern characters that are brought into a fantasy game?

What was the outcome of your experience? Was it fun? What was the problems you ran into that I could avoid ?

The three character ideas are for the three players are: a special forces soldier, SCA fighter/hippy, and a moden sensitive/under graduate student (that will grow real psi abilities).

The players have no idea and it will start as a moden game for one hour them....bam!

I have always ran high fantasy or modern horror... This is my first hybrid after 20 years of running.

Thoughts? Help? Advice?

Thanks!

[Refplace]

Yeah been there done that and similar drop the bomb scenarios.
The main thing is to make your players not object to being railroaded or feel ripped off.
If you can tell the players ahead of time that this will happen and trust them to not stuff the box with different skills and such then that would counter that.
Your players like the genre then that helps a ton, but if they were looking forward to something different you might have an issue.


Allow them to take advantages that may be useless once the switch happens but be prepared to make up the points shortly after arrival. Skills I would say not so much, there kind of stuck but should still come into play where you can make it.
The special Ops guy could benefit from high survival, stealth and combat training. If he has points in gun skills then well think about bringing it with him and he has it till he runs out of ammo. Gives him a special advantage early on till he gets used to things and if he saves the bullets might be a good backup weapon. If he has chemistry or one of his allies does he may be able to make blanks for it, though new bullets and the powder to shoot them without fouling the gun are highly unlikely.
His survival knife or armor would still be useful too.

[the adventurer]

I've never done this. But if I tried it, I would make my players build 150 point 'normal people'. And after their arrival in the Fantasy world, have some plot related event imbue them with another 100 character points to round them out for the new locale.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Lameth

Question... Has anyone ran or played in a game with the theme was to have modern characters that are brought into a fantasy game?

What was the outcome of your experience? Was it fun? What was the problems you ran into that I could avoid ?

The three character ideas are for the three players are: a special forces soldier, SCA fighter/hippy, and a moden sensitive/under graduate student (that will grow real psi abilities).

The players have no idea and it will start as a moden game for one hour them....bam!

That I didn't do and would never consider doing. I know that I personally would be seriously offended if I were told "This is a modern campaign" and then it suddenly turned into something entirely different. I mean at the level where I might resign from the campaign. I don't like being bait-and-switched. So I wouldn't do it to my players, either. I imagine that there are some players who would be fine with it, but I think you would need to know your particular players extremely well to be sure of not finding out the hard way about the limits of their tolerance.

When I ran Oak and Ash and Thorn, where the PCs were five present-day British adolescents who wandered into Faerie on Midsummer's Eve and couldn't readily find their way out, I told the players their characters were going to end up in a fantastic milieu. I didn't tell them much about what it would be like, and it had lots of subordinate surprises, but they knew what kind of surprise package they were buying. I really feel a lot more comfortable with getting that much buyin.

Bill Stoddard

[downer]

I agree with the above: be frank with your players about the content of the campaign. After all, people sign up for what they want to play, and if the box says modern, and there's fantasy inside, they'll feel cheated.

Rules-wise, they can't acquire TL 3 (or thereabouts) skills anyway, unless there's a really good reason for them to do so. Still, the players might reasonably want to avoid pumping oodles of CP into Current Affairs, Area Knowledge, and similar real-world applicable skills, as well as Advantages like Status, Wealth, Allies and so on. I'd let them, it's no fun having to create a character on essentially half the assigned budget, because the rest goes out of the window an hour into play. Alternately you could have them create characters with slightly higher CP totals, and tell them to spend the 'extra' points on their character's real-world connections. So, say 200CP rather than 150, with the extra 50 going to things like Status, Rank, Wealth, Savoir Faire etc. Or you could just make sure that real-world disadvantages that also fall by the wayside roughly match the cost.

I'm currently running a campaign in which TL 8 Earthlings got lost in space, and simply told the players that, within reasonable limits they could buy skills and advantages that relate to their Earth life and are part of their character concept, but have no use in the campaign, for free.

[sn0wball]

I have done this to everyone´s satisfaction. Back in the day, in my very frist GURPS campaign, I threw a dimension travelling device onto a group a 100 pt modern day 3rd edition characters and their unsuspecting players who had expected an investigative mystery camapign. The next real time decade they spent travelling from one world to another, many of them being fantasy worlds (often worlds out of newly acquired GURPS volumes or novels I just read).

Of course, you have to make sure that they create characters which are suited to this kind of game. Also, you should hint that they mustn´t focus on social relations and such, neither game mechanically nor conceptually - no Status, Dependents and such. And if you are not sure if your players are ok with such shift of genre, you could clearly state that the camapign will eventually include a shift of genre, without giving away the kind of shift of genre. Strongly hinting about the potential presence of a supernatural element should be neough in my eyes, though.

[combatmedic]

I am a pretty flexible player, and I would probably be cool with the sudden switch-up...But most players would not like it, IMO.


If I were to run a modern to fantasy campaign, the PCs would be children. Point budgets wouldn't be very high. PCs would not have 'kewl powerz' at the start of play. Kids are not normally going to have tubs of points in adventuring/combat skills, but they won't have as many 'wasted' points in modern skills, either.

If I wanted to power them up later, that could be done in a number of ways. Magic items are a good method. Heck, Lewis used it. So did the D&D cartoon.


:)

YMMV

[roguebfl]

There is a pyramid article somewhere about players coming toy Yrth via the Banestorm much like this.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Lameth

Question... Has anyone ran or played in a game with the theme was to have modern characters that are brought into a fantasy game?

What was the outcome of your experience? Was it fun? What was the problems you ran into that I could avoid ?

While you will probably get a number of desenting oppinions I have never seen a campaign with this kind of premise work to the satisfaction of either the players or the GM.

The problem is not so much wasted points, although this is certainly a factor, as mismatched expectations. Chainging that setting radicaly after the characters have been built (and particularly without warning) is frustrating and tends to undermine chatracter concepts. In the campaigns of this type I have played in this tended to create a 'defensive' mentality where the PC's ended up keeping quiet and keeping their heads down because they didn't believe that they had the skills to do anything else.

In these campaigns I also found that this problem was agravated by the GM's emphasis upon running the fantasy portions of the game as 'business as usual' running a conventional high fantasy adventure completely neglecting the presence of modern people with modern skills.

As an admittedly extreme example, I actualy had to sit through several sessions with a GM who simply had not considered that the PC's being a randon collection of western europeans and north americans transported to a pseudo-asian world probably lacked a large number of common skills needed in a less developed society. The same GM also seemed to be incapible of considering what the same group could bring to the table at least until a series of incidents involving modern knowledge or technology broke the campaign completely.

If you are determined to run this kind of campaign I would sugest that there are four critical things to take onboard. First whatever you do, do not spring it on the players without warning, let them build characters who will have some immediate utillity.

Second, give them a clear and achievable goal from the outset I don't realy think it matters what it is as long as it makes sense for the characters and has enough urgency that they can't simply go to ground.

Third at the risk of contradicting the previous point give them time and opertunity to adapt to the situation.

Fourth and last, remember that these are not standard fantasy characters and that this is not a standard fantasy game. If the players try to pass messages between a divided party using a jury rigged heleograph or use the rifle they have carefully husbanded for the past four sesions to break up the phalanx of soldiers that is about to roll over them let them (assuming that they have the skills in the first place).

[Dragondog]

I'm running a modern to fantasy campaign right now, though I told the players that that was what it was going to be from the beginning. I would have to agree with those that say that giving your players certain expectations and then breaking them completely may not go well unless you know your players very well.

Running a combat scenario shortly after they have arrived in fantasy land might not go as planned if the travelers don't have any weapons.

I gave the players their point budget and told them that whatever they didn't use at character creation would go with them into fantasy land and could be use to update their character.