Portal Fantasy: Is there an ideal system for this?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

Hamsters need not apply. I wouldn't want you to think I'm prejudiced but...

Yeah, it was a vague question and I need to firm up my own ideas first. (Which are sort of floating around the idea of group of people with no Destiny entering a world dominated by it.) .

So a group of people enter a world dominated by Destiny. But they didn't have any Destiny, so nothing interesting happened to them. They got jobs as chartered accountants and manual laborers. The end.

[Irish Wolf]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

So a group of people enter a world dominated by Destiny. But they didn't have any Destiny, so nothing interesting happened to them. They got jobs as chartered accountants and manual laborers. The end.

Other hand, in such a world, people without Destinies can really mess up prophecy.

"It is foretold that only the Chosen One can destroy the Evil Overlord! And the Chosen One shall use this weapon right here to do it!"

"Have any of you tried using the weapon to destroy the Overlord?"

"Of course not - that's not what the prophecy says!"

"Screw prophecy. Give me that thing." <promptly destroys Overlord; Chosen One loses Destiny>

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Yeah. I kicked it into touch after it turned into psychedelic word salad and more or less gave up on being a webcomic (or anything else known to man). Still, I couldn't figure out the exact genre of portal fantasy involved - had Parson actually been transported, or was he, as he believed, lying in a hospital bed Thomas Covenant style? This sort of impinged on whether his players were actually present or merely represented by the characters he had created for them ... I'm guessing Charlie, for example, was another player, or at least a PC.

I don't think I made it that far - my memory is a bit hazy of exactly where I stopped (it was more a "I read too many webcomics and need to cut back" decision than a "Wow, this webcomic sucks now" one), but I remember there being a lot of mostly-prose updates exploring the backstory of the Croakamancer (Wanda, maybe?) around the time I stopped. And yeah, it was hard to tell if Parson had been isekai'd into a world that used wargame rules (and IIRC into a scenario similar to the one he was springing on his players), or if he'd had a stroke and was stuck in some bizarre fantasy-land of his own making. I suspect the former, given we see events Parson wouldn't be privy to (including his summoning), but it's hard to say. I honestly never considered the idea other characters were actually players (Charlie and his Archons were clearly a reference to Charlie's Angels), but maybe there were hints of this after I stopped reading.


Now that I think of it, that's also a question for OP. Personally, I think of "Portal Fantasy" as a subset of isekai in which the character(s) have a means of traveling back and forth between the two worlds, but I think it may be more common to think of it the other way around, where it's all Portal Fantasy but in some cases the character(s) get stuck. So, are you talking about a setting where the characters will be regularly traveling between Earth and NotEarth, or one where Something happens and they get transported to NotEarth and are stuck there unless they can find a way back? Or something else - say, a setting akin to Sliders where the characters are traveling from one NotEarth to another?

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

Other hand, in such a world, people without Destinies can really mess up prophecy.

"It is foretold that only the Chosen One can destroy the Evil Overlord! And the Chosen One shall use this weapon right here to do it!"

"Have any of you tried using the weapon to destroy the Overlord?"

"Of course not - that's not what the prophecy says!"

"Screw prophecy. Give me that thing." <promptly destroys Overlord; Chosen One loses Destiny>

More likely: Everyone now treats the PC as the Chosen One, since they fulfilled the destiny.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

Other hand, in such a world, people without Destinies can really mess up prophecy.

"It is foretold that only the Chosen One can destroy the Evil Overlord! And the Chosen One shall use this weapon right here to do it!"

"Have any of you tried using the weapon to destroy the Overlord?"

"Of course not - that's not what the prophecy says!"

"Screw prophecy. Give me that thing." <promptly destroys Overlord; Chosen One loses Destiny>

No, the GM does not toss away the Chosen One's 15 points invested in plot importance that easily. The Overlord doesn't stay dead, or the weapon refuses to work for an unauthorized user, or the Chosen One's real destiny was to kill you after you inherited the Sith soul, or something. That's a kind of plot twist that works when people think destiny is a thing and it really isn't.

If it's a world where Destiny really is a thing, than just not having a Destiny won't let you change things. After all even if everyone is issued a Destiny at birth, half of the people around don't have one because it's already been fulfilled for good or ill.

Of course it's possible to have prophecy without destiny, a prediction of the future that will only come true if people don't act on the prediction to avoid it.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

Other hand, in such a world, people without Destinies can really mess up prophecy.

Depends on how destiny works. Not having a destiny could easily mean you're totally incapable of altering the outcome of anything important.

[Polydamas]

The ancient western (Babylonian, Greek) way of thinking about destiny and prophecy was that it was the thing which had been set out by the gods in advance. It was not and never was everything in life. A wise person did not ask the gods a question unless he was prepared for all possible answers, because once they decided that was fixed.

I'm with those who say that the system should be one which works like the setting. GURPS is best for games which work basically like our world except the weird stuff.

[Michael Cule]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The ancient western (Babylonian, Greek) way of thinking about destiny and prophecy was that it was the thing which had been set out by the gods in advance. It was not and never was everything in life. A wise person did not ask the gods a question unless he was prepared for all possible answers, because once they decided that was fixed.

I'm thinking of a world where everybody can know their destiny... but not everybody chooses to. Because as you say, it is fixed by looking.

The incoming PCs would horrify the seers because they are not confined to the coils of fate and destiny: they can break the schemes of the Gods!

Or perhaps... Hmmm.

My players include 1 (one) Catholic and two (2) atheists.

Hmmm, set it in a world where the Gods are dead? Where the last lot of incomers killed them? And the PCs have the chance to fix the world.... In one of several ways.

Hmmm. Too cosmic?

And yes, I have read Erfworld but a long time ago.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I'm thinking of a world where everybody can know their destiny... but not everybody chooses to. Because as you say, it is fixed by looking.

The incoming PCs would horrify the seers because they are not confined to the coils of fate and destiny: they can break the schemes of the Gods!

If you take the position that the gods (or one of the gods, holder of the tablet of destinies?) are responsible for making sure that prophecies are fulfilled, maybe the incomers mess up their planned Xanatos Gambit? "Oh no, she was supposed to marry him and start that civil war, but now she is snogging her and they ran away together! How can I salvage this?"

Back to the OP, though, the right system for a destination which works like Star Wars is different than the right system for a destination which works like Spiderman is different than the right system for a destination which works like a Tom Clancy novel.

Something terrible happened to the Erfworld guy, I hope he / she / they can find peace. The webcomic became rambling (like a lot of self-published stories) but something bad happened to the person or couple which ran it.

[Inky]

I've just been reading Erfworld, thanks for telling me about that. I'm on book 4 or so.

I'm thinking Charlie is in fact a player or Parson's memory of a player (if it is a hallucination) or from Earth (if it isn't), if only because in the epilogue of Book 2, it's revealed that

Spoiler:  

Charlie was once the Wizard of Oz, and Dorothy Gale (although in Erfworld her name may have been Judy Gale) was another "perfect warlord from another world" he'd summoned to kill the Wicked Witch of the West so he could steal the Arkendish. And in the usual version of the story, the Wizard is also from Earth.

If he is, he seems to have come down with a galloping case of Signamancy since then. As well as, very obviously, Charlie of Charlie's Angels, by the point I've got to he's at various times shown obvious resemblances to

Spoiler:  

Charles Xavier (of X-Men), Charlie Brown, Willy Wonka, and possibly Davros from Doctor Who (just going by the design of the wheel-chair on that one). He actually seems to be somewhat aware of this. At one point he's trying to send a Thinkagram to somebody while exhausted and somewhat high, and can only manage to appear as what is obviously Willy Wonka, and grumbles to himself that "that's not even a Charlie". Which is possibly another hint that he's from Earth or how would he know?

Anyway, back on topic, there was a thread somewhere on the forum a while ago about how portal fantasy messes with point totals (since many traits, such as Area Knowledge, Reputation or a character's TL, will be worth a different amount or disappear altogether in a different world). It suggested various ways of dealing with that, such as "buckets of points" and so on.