The Fish out of Water Scienario

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Torque2100

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As much as I love high concept sci-fi or weird fantasy settings, there's always a problem that you run into when trying to DM those settings: exposition.

Communicating the history of a setting that characters should know can be a daunting task. Sometimes you just have to have an in universe history lesson in Session 0 and that sucks. Exposition is boring and most of your players are going to forget half of it by the time you start, your players will have forgotten half of it.

What if there was a way for the world of the campaign setting to be as new to the Characters as it was to the Players?

This is where the Fish Out of Water scenario comes in. Your PCs are characters who are as utterly unfamiliar with the world as the players so anything the players don't know, the characters also don't. Any stupid questions whos answers should be blindingly obvious can be asked in character.

There are many ways to do this, maybe they are people from Modern Earth whisked away by magic or super science to another world/time period ("Isekai" if you're a filthy weeb like me), mayhaps your characters are from an isolated village or mayhaps they all have amnesia?

Have you ever done this before? How did it go? Is this a good idea or is this an obnoxious cliché that needs to die in a particularly hot fire on the Sun?
 
Off the top of my head, the closest I have come to this is running Call of Cthulhu adventures in the Dreamlands.

Unless you are intentionally going for comedy, I'd make extremely broad skills that can easily be adapted to the new setting. You race car driver from Earth has a high vehicle skill. As long as he has a minute to acclimate himself, he can use the same skill to pilot a starfighter or ride a dragon. That's an extreme example, but you want to be careful that the PCs remain useful in some way in the new setting. That seems like it would be the mostly likely sore point in a game like this. Other than that, getting to explore an unknown world in a game sounds like fun to me.
 
As much as I love high concept sci-fi or weird fantasy settings, there's always a problem that you run into when trying to DM those settings: exposition.

Communicating the history of a setting that characters should know can be a daunting task. Sometimes you just have to have an in universe history lesson in Session 0 and that sucks. Exposition is boring and most of your players are going to forget half of it by the time you start, your players will have forgotten half of it.

What if there was a way for the world of the campaign setting to be as new to the Characters as it was to the Players?

This is where the Fish Out of Water scenario comes in. Your PCs are characters who are as utterly unfamiliar with the world as the players so anything the players don't know, the characters also don't. Any stupid questions whos answers should be blindingly obvious can be asked in character.

There are many ways to do this, maybe they are people from Modern Earth whisked away by magic or super science to another world/time period ("Isekai" if you're a filthy weeb like me), mayhaps your characters are from an isolated village or mayhaps they all have amnesia?

Have you ever done this before? How did it go? Is this a good idea or is this an obnoxious cliché that needs to die in a particularly hot fire on the Sun?
It might be fun to do this once or twice as a novelty; I think Dumarest Dumarest's Shamballa game here is based on a premise a bit like this. However, for every single game it might be a bit wearing.

The approach I've used in the PbP games I'm running here is to do a little bit of intro at the start and then drop a lot of Chekhov's guns into the game to demo stuff in lieu of exposition. One might call this approach 'Chekhov's Arsenal.'

The other prong I've used is to mention stuff, and then write a glossary entry in the OOC thread. For something at the table, you could write up some of these definitions beforehand and hand them out at opportune moments.
 
Empire of the Petal Throne is set up this way, the PCs are people from another part of the world, just landed in Jakalla.
 
To be fair, in a Fantasy setting, unless it has a news paper like service, what the average person knows beyond the walls of their home is exceedingly limited and often rumours or tall tales.

Science Fiction games on the other hand, that's a mess.
 
I haven't done this kind of scenario, but I've thought about it a bunch of times. One thing I contemplated doing is the idea (inspired by someone's comment in another forum) of making a world where characters are new arrivals brought there by their gods. The basic idea is that each character race comes from a world custom-made by their god for their chosen people (one of many fantasy races, like humans, elves, dwarves, goblins, etc.), but the gods had a dispute about which was the best race, so the gods pooled their resources to create a dangerous world full of monsters and hazards, with hundreds of dungeons dotting out the landscape, to test out their favored race and find out which one was the greatest.

Periodically the gods will pluck out a handful of champions from each race/world and transport them into their testing grounds. Player characters would wake up in the depth of one of the world's many dungeons--encountering strange members of other races for the first time--where they are greeted by an emissary of the gods who welcomes them (Gameshow Host-style) and gives them a general overview of their predicament. And the first task that PCs have is to make it out of the dungeon alive to escape out into their new world and see it for the first time. Every NPC townsfolk in the world is an adventurer who made it out of their dungeon. Some of them settle down and refuse to further participate in the Gods' sick game, often taking up a cleared ruin or abandoned dungeon as a settlement, but others take on the life of adventure and set out to explore the world, slay fearsome creatures and overcome strange obstacles and natural hazards.
 
It's doesn't need to be an isolated village for fantasy, just start them on a ship and drop them in a foreign port for 'reasons'. Then it's natural that they wouldn't know anything about anything. The "we come from a backwater jerkwad place" is an easier sell in Sci-Fi, where they can just be fresh off the moisture farm or whatever. SO long as the characters wouldn't know much, the players won't feel like they should, and you can unveil your masterful world building at your own pace. I'll often have players who know the setting play more worldly chraracters and have the newbs play Luke Skywalker types.
 
It might be fun to do this once or twice as a novelty; I think Dumarest Dumarest's Shamballa game here is based on a premise a bit like this.
1930s Earthmen on a transatlantic zeppelin voyage get sucked into some sort of interplanetary or interdimensional vortex and end up in a whole new world. It's moved very slowly but they've visited I think 4 or 5 of the inhabited moons, made some friends and enemies, and one of the players who instigated the whole thing went AWOL long ago so his character has just now reappeared as an NPC:
 
There's an old Tri-Tac game called Incursion that uses this trope. Modern-day Earthlings are kidnapped by alien slavers. Circumstances allow them the chance to eventually fight back and take over the starship you're on, but by the time you do, you're a long, long way from home. You have to explore and survive and learn about the various worlds among the stars as you try to find your way home.
 
I have run a campaign like this. It was a d20 Darwin's World campaign where the first PCs were soldiers who had been cryogenically frozen before the War. They were supposed to wake up 2 or 3 years later with either the USA victorious or occupied in which case they would lead a resistance movement. Instead they found the whole planet devastated and irrevocably changed by nuclear war. Everything they fought for was gone, nothing to do but set out across a wasteland inhabited by strange mutants and where pure humans were an endangered species.

That was a fun campaign, though perhaps not the most realistic example. I struggle to imagine the average person waking up to find out that everything they singed up to fight for was gone, everyone and everything they ever knew and loved had burned to ashes in nuclear fire centuries ago and still being able to function.

Maybe next time I should have an NPC with them who, upon learning the fate of the world, decides the best option is to jam the barrel of his service rife into the back of this throat and pull the trigger. Grim, but fitting for a post apocalyptic world.
 
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1930s Earthmen on a transatlantic zeppelin voyage get sucked into some sort of interplanetary or interdimensional vortex and end up in a whole new world. It's moved very slowly but they've visited I think 4 or 5 of the inhabited moons, made some friends and enemies, and one of the players who instigated the whole thing went AWOL long ago so his character has just now reappeared as an NPC:
And we're now planning to use a gladiator revolt to try and off the Emperor and his Slavelord, and save the princess:grin:!
 
A LOT of games and settings run with that premise: Tékumel, Hollow World, Ravenloft, most n00b starts in WoD mosters w/ secret societies, Kult, IN SJG, Star Children, etc.

As for how it runs? :quiet: You'd think it'd run better than it does nowadays. It used to run great! Yet of late I still come up against a lot of 'fish out of water' confusion from players just trying to do socializing basics.

:blah: I blame geese, social media, and cell phones... but mostly geese.
 
I've never really like the idea of all PCs being from Earth. It doesn't sit right, because it multiplies the traditional genre trope somewhat.

But really if just one PC is from Earth it can still work quite well. You still need to explain how things appear to that characters point of view and this will give the rest of the PCs a chance to learn what they need.

And of course it doesn't have to be from Earth - it just needs to be from far away - if the campaign is never going to go there is doesn't really matter.

But this is a perernnial issue in all games. It's why D&D games are so often full of non-human outsiders of weird races and why WFRP's integration of its setting to character creation is such genius.

Sometimes I find it useful if I'm running a somewhat weird setting to just do a one shot before the starting the main game by way of introduction and with Pre-gen PCs - this gives players a better idea of what they're in for and they can usually make more appropriate pcs to the setting.

Certain historical settings lend themselves to fish out of water very well. Varangians arriving to join the Emperor's guard in Constantinople or silk road merchants arriving in Tang dynasty Chang'an for the first time.
 
A LOT of games and settings run with that premise: Tékumel, Hollow World, Ravenloft, most n00b starts in WoD mosters w/ secret societies, Kult, IN SJG, Star Children, etc.

As for how it runs? :quiet: You'd think it'd run better than it does nowadays. It used to run great! Yet of late I still come up against a lot of 'fish out of water' confusion from players just trying to do socializing basics.

:blah: I blame geese, social media, and cell phones... but mostly geese.
You mean the sticking point is that the players don’t have the ability to talk and question NPCs?
 
You mean the sticking point is that the players don’t have the ability to talk and question NPCs?

Yes. :cry:

Often too busy with blank stares, memes, fucking over fellow PCs, widget juggling, or stuck trying to guess what I am thinking for the 'right answer'. I don't remember "Let's Pretend!" being this difficult for the general populace over a few decades ago. But then I also don't remember people crumpling at basic human interaction in person or over the phone either. :errr: Something's weird going on... I still blame geese.
 
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