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View Full Version : How would you run a Portal Fantasy game?



Silus
2017-04-19, 12:42 PM
For clarification, a Portal Fantasy as defined by TvTropes:


A standard plot/Myth Arc for Speculative Fiction: The Ordinary High-School Student, frequently his friends, and sometimes his enemies are all transported (often summoned) to another world — distant planet, a Magical Land, Alternate Universe, the past, The Future — where they find they have an important role to play in Events of Significance that are occurring at the same time as (or sometimes because of) their arrival. Usually there is no hope of their finding a means to return home until after the great threat facing them has been defeated. Occasionally, they will then question if they even want to leave, especially when there is an ongoing Fantastic Romance.

Basically things like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Wizard of Oz, Sword Art Online/Log Horizon, or similar works of fiction.

So if you were to run such a game, how would you go about it?

souridealist
2017-04-19, 01:52 PM
Oooh, this is a really cool idea. You'd have to coordinate backstories, probably, if you want the whole group to go through the portal Pevensie-style - or would you want to have a bunch of people pass through different portals and meet up in the same world?

Picking a system would be the big question here, I think; you'd need one where a certain level of comfort with the game's world isn't built in to the mechanics. I'm most used to 3.X-style d20 systems, which allows me to very helpfully inform you that they're exactly the wrong choice for this.

I'm not an expert on the Call of Cthulhu system, but it's actually built around a bunch of ordinary people stumbling into a perilous vast unknown, isn't it? It would take some tweaking, unless you want a really truly unpleasant sort of world on the other side of the portal, but it might be a starting point.

It's an awesome idea, though. Portal fantasies are kind of a classic, and as far as I've ever seen they're really underused in gaming.

Leewei
2017-04-19, 01:56 PM
GURPS Fantasy with a small twist. An entire RenFest, including PCs, has been swept into Yrth by the Banestorm.

Silus
2017-04-19, 02:11 PM
It's an awesome idea, though. Portal fantasies are kind of a classic, and as far as I've ever seen they're really underused in gaming.

I know right? I've been kicking around the idea of doing one using the 3.5 Warcraft books (As I have damn near all of them) or Wheel of Time, but the issue is 1) finding people willing to play and 2) finding people from those groups with at least some setting knowledge. And apparently there's issues with people playing characters based off themselves if you're going for the "ripped from Earth and dropped elsewhere" trope. Granted introducing blackpowder weapons to the Wheel of Time setting and throwing the main story off the rails would be pretty fun.

Then again there's always the crossover kinda ones, like a Deathwatch squad or a group of Imperial Guard troopers end up in the Star Wars universe after some warp shenanigans.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-04-19, 02:14 PM
I'd want to use something very roleplaying-focused like Fate, I think-- the emphasis in such stories tends to be more about the characters using their personalities and main-character-ness than about their skills... which tend to be weirdly applicable and on-par with whatever the new setting may be. ("My dad and I used to go hunting a lot. That's why I can keep up with all these commandos.") Fate, maybe even Fate Accelerated seems like a good fit, with their generic skills and character-defining Aspects. Definitely something generic enough that you can build characters who would be plausible in both settings.

GungHo
2017-04-19, 02:52 PM
GURPS Fantasy with a small twist. An entire RenFest, including PCs, has been swept into Yrth by the Banestorm.

I got in a little bit of trouble with this when I had the SCA troupe get trounced by the equivalent of the junior varsity fighter team.

Leewei
2017-04-19, 04:16 PM
I got in a little bit of trouble with this when I had the SCA troupe get trounced by the equivalent of the junior varsity fighter team.

Do tell?

As an aside, I think GURPS is about as ideal a system as it gets for this sort of thing due to the way it handles technology.

iceman10058
2017-04-20, 05:35 AM
God at first i though you ment Portal as in the videogame by valve. And if you were doing that, knowing players in general, i would say carefully and with a large hammer.

Knaight
2017-04-20, 05:37 AM
I've done this before, but on the off chance I do it again - generic system, group PC creation, call it a day. It's really not a hard concept to implement.

Storm_Of_Snow
2017-04-20, 07:36 AM
We got this far and no one mentioned the D&D cartoon series? :smallamused:

Biggest issue would probably be meta-gaming - say you do that idea of modern day people getting thrown into the D&D world, anyone who's played D&D before would have knowledge of it and it'd be difficult for them not to use it accidentally.

M0rdecai[QC]
2017-04-20, 09:12 AM
We got this far and no one mentioned the D&D cartoon series? :smallamused:

Biggest issue would probably be meta-gaming - say you do that idea of modern day people getting thrown into the D&D world, anyone who's played D&D before would have knowledge of it and it'd be difficult for them not to use it accidentally.

Is meta-gaming necessarily an issue though? As far as the examples in the OP go, I haven't seen Sword Art Online yet, but I remember that in Log Horizon, many of the protagonists have meta-knowledge and they use it to their advantage on occasion.

Also, to add another example, there is the (I believe) more obscure manga/anime "Overlord", which has a similar premise to Sword Art Online and Log Horizon, but with only a single person trapped in the other world.

Silus
2017-04-20, 11:02 AM
;21934426']Is meta-gaming necessarily an issue though? As far as the examples in the OP go, I haven't seen Sword Art Online yet, but I remember that in Log Horizon, many of the protagonists have meta-knowledge and they use it to their advantage on occasion.

Also, to add another example, there is the (I believe) more obscure manga/anime "Overlord", which has a similar premise to Sword Art Online and Log Horizon, but with only a single person trapped in the other world.

I would argue that metagaming would be one of those things that would have to be HEAVILY regulated, but otherwise allowed.

Personally the way I'd run it would be at character creation that they players submit a one page cheat-sheet totally all the knowledge they possess at that moment regarding the setting with no outside help (internet or books basically) and that is the information they are allowed to metagame with.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-04-20, 11:15 AM
;21934426']Is meta-gaming necessarily an issue though? As far as the examples in the OP go, I haven't seen Sword Art Online yet, but I remember that in Log Horizon, many of the protagonists have meta-knowledge and they use it to their advantage on occasion.
Depends on tone. If you're going for more of a classic Narnia-type portal, it's more about becoming part of the existing setting, and bringing real-world knowledge into the game to equip the King's Legion with machine guns is kind of inappropriate. On the other hand, the uplift fantasy is also pretty common-- see something like 1632 or, hell, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In a game along those lines, kick-starting the Industrial Revolution is half the point.

Knaight
2017-04-20, 11:25 AM
Depends on tone. If you're going for more of a classic Narnia-type portal, it's more about becoming part of the existing setting, and bringing real-world knowledge into the game to equip the King's Legion with machine guns is kind of inappropriate. On the other hand, the uplift fantasy is also pretty common-- see something like 1632 or, hell, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In a game along those lines, kick-starting the Industrial Revolution is half the point.

I'd be half tempted to throw in "metagame the heck* out of it" to the initial campaign guidelines when making the pitch.

*Word is a substitute.

Grod_The_Giant
2017-04-20, 11:31 AM
I'd be half tempted to throw in "metagame the heck* out of it" to the initial campaign guidelines when making the pitch.

*Word is a substitute.
Works best when you've got a group full of engineer types. (Works worst when you have some of those guys as players, but the DM has no clue.)

Knaight
2017-04-20, 11:49 AM
Works best when you've got a group full of engineer types. (Works worst when you have some of those guys as players, but the DM has no clue.)

A mismatch in types of engineers could also cause a problem - my group is mostly engineering students, but electrical and chemical/biological have somewhat limited overlap, and that's without getting into the computer science, welding, and medical prostheses students or specialists in the group. It all works smoothly with a certain level of gloss and knowingly running things cinematically, trying to go for hard realism is likely a mistake. If anyone else gets into chemical engineering or computational biology I'll start spotting flaws, if anyone but one player (including me) gets deep into electrical phenomena they'll start spotting flaws, if I decide to go for realistic hacking instead of cinematic hacking half the group is going to notice the holes because my basic MATLAB proficiency is not the same thing as a computer science degree, most of a computer engineering degree, or work as a professional programmer.

Still, if everyone can be trusted not to BS the GM, there's not much of a problem, and it does help that the entire group at least has some of the basics.

souridealist
2017-04-20, 01:20 PM
There's some interesting perspectives in this thread, because running a game hinging on or super-heavily involving topics my players know way more about than me is definitely a level in my personal gaming Hell. (What gaping plot holes exist that I don't have the capacity to spot? What glaring weaknesses will my players exploit to skip half the adventure and which I won't have the tools to roll with or counteract? What hideous lack of verisimilitude lies in wait to ambush me as I saunter along, all unknowing? Augh! Please, no more!) That's definitely a personal thing, though, I don't expect everyone to have my neuroses.

If I were running a game like this, I think I'd drop my players into a custom-made world, rather than Faerun or Golarion, so that they would be as new to it as their characters. Then again, I'm the kind of person who spent three hours last night meticulously naming taverns, magic shops, and their proprietors, instead of picking out encounters like I'd intended to do, so... personal styles.

Beyond that - well, if you want people to be able to invent gunpowder and penicillin, then they can do that, and none of the following is relevant. If not, I think there's two options.

One: Lay down certain ground rules at character creation. No med students, no trained engineers, no weapons manufacturers, et cetera et cetera. This would probably depend on gaming group - if those people are your players, that could easily translate to NO FUN ALLOWED, but if you play with a bunch of people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to go about mixing gunpowder, telling them their characters shouldn't know that either will go over a lot better.

The other way is to say that fundamental rules of the new world don't work the same way, and therefore technology doesn't function the way they expect. Either certain fundamental substances and rules are different, or any technology past a certain level suffers from a kind of hyper-entropy field and breaks down, like in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books.

Crap, now I want to run one of these. I'm already running one game and I have multiple other games I've been wanting to run!