Using preexisting fiction in an RPG

[Traab]

What do most players here think about it? By pre existing I mean things like, setting up a game that revolves around the harry potter world. Not playing through the storyline or anything, but dealing with hogwarts, adjusting fluff and crunch to fit wand magic, etc. Do you consider that sort of thing to be lazy, awesome, silly, /shrug whatever, varies depending on who is running it, etc?

[Geostationary]

What do most players here think about it? By pre existing I mean things like, setting up a game that revolves around the harry potter world. Not playing through the storyline or anything, but dealing with hogwarts, adjusting fluff and crunch to fit wand magic, etc. Do you consider that sort of thing to be lazy, awesome, silly, /shrug whatever, varies depending on who is running it, etc?

Feel free to go crazy. Most games use preexisting fiction anyways, be it from popular media or official settings anyways, with some of their own spin added. I'd just recommend being upfront about it so your players know what they're getting into.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

There's no reason not to - but be sure your game system can handle it.

Your most common issue is likely to be that Magic Doesn't Work That Way in the fiction you're borrowing from (literary magic doesn't need rigid rules, but RPG magic generally does).

[mjlush]

What do most players here think about it? By pre existing I mean things like, setting up a game that revolves around the harry potter world. Not playing through the storyline or anything, but dealing with hogwarts, adjusting fluff and crunch to fit wand magic, etc. Do you consider that sort of thing to be lazy, awesome, silly, /shrug whatever, varies depending on who is running it, etc?

You need a reference work preferably more than one, preferably digital. Books are great for flavor but if you want to look up specific detail you don't want to be flipping through the book to get chapter and verse. Harry potter has a wiki, Star Wars has Wookeypedia wiki's are searchable searchable is good

[Axinian]

What do most players here think about it? By pre existing I mean things like, setting up a game that revolves around the harry potter world. Not playing through the storyline or anything, but dealing with hogwarts, adjusting fluff and crunch to fit wand magic, etc. Do you consider that sort of thing to be lazy, awesome, silly, /shrug whatever, varies depending on who is running it, etc?

Nothing at all wrong with it. Everyone just needs to be on the same page regarding continuity. Either everyone needs to not have the level of familiarity that leads to nitpicking every detail, or else everyone needs to agree to just not correct the DM.

Odds are, you're gonna get something wrong about an existing universe, so you gotta be ready to deal with it.

[king.com]

What do most players here think about it? By pre existing I mean things like, setting up a game that revolves around the harry potter world. Not playing through the storyline or anything, but dealing with hogwarts, adjusting fluff and crunch to fit wand magic, etc. Do you consider that sort of thing to be lazy, awesome, silly, /shrug whatever, varies depending on who is running it, etc?

There are tons of games that already exist with this concept in mind. The Warhammer 40K roleplaying games, the Dragon Age games, the various Star Wars and Star Trek games etc. Telling a story using existing material is the basis of the vast majority of roleplaying. It's generally not the overriding rule that says the entire setting your operating in is custom made. This generally takes a ton of work and unless your getting a specific result/feature out of it, I would argue that its far more convenient and effecient to just take a base setting and modify it what you need it to do. This is even more reinforced by the idea that you actually like the setting and feel there are more stories to be told outside the existing fiction.

I want someone to come out with a solid Starcraft rpg system myself...

[Rhynn]

I've loved running Elric!, Middle-Earth RPGs, and so on. If the setting makes for cool RPG adventures, I'm game. The canon is, of course, completely disregarded - in fact, lately I've started completely disregarding the canon of premade RPG settings (Dark Sun, Forgotten Realms, Eberron) I use, and it's really no different.

[valadil]

I used to avoid it. I didn't think I could do those character justice and didn't feel right putting a degenerate form of my favorite character in my game. But in my last game I made an effort to break my own rules and used Elminster. I know he was made for RPGs, but I still wouldn't have used him before. Turns out he was a lot of fun and nobody thought I did anything wrong with the character.

I think using existing fiction like this runs the risk of players who know the system asserting things about it when they probably shouldn't. Now I'm of the opinion that that's a player issue and those players should be avoided regardless of the setting.

[Lupus753]

Worth noting: DnD 4E explicitly says, "Plunder from anything you can. Like Avatar: The Last Airbender!"

Personally, using established fiction wholesale is fine as long as you're deliberately trying to make fan-campaign or module or whatever.

[joe]

For me, it would depend on a few things. Using Harry Potter as an example, if I was playing a standard D&D game and suddenly ran across Hogwarts, or any specific HP characters out of the blue, that would pull me out of the world so to speak. If it was made known to me ahead of time that the game would be taking place in the Harry Potter universe, I would be a lot more okay with it.

That being said, I would be completely okay with anything inspired, even blatantly by a work of fiction. Running into a school for magic users or even into dementors, wouldn't really bother me. I think using general monsters from a work is a bit different than using specific characters from a work.

[Big Fau]

My players actually met some of the characters from the Eberron novels (namely Diran and Ghaji, from Tim Waggoner's Blade of the Flame trilogy), but I've never gone so far as to build an entire campaign around existing fiction (as far as I'm aware anyway, nothing is truly original after all). But I've never had a problem letting my players import their ideas from fiction, provided they make the character their own. I've never allowed a "Drizzt clone", but character concepts have been plundered for ideas.

[Joe the Rat]

Given that the body of written work for any given official campaign setting is enough to be called a 'Verse bible (never mind the actual prose stories set in those worlds), it's sort of expected.

(Yes, you're not running a game in Toril, you're enacting Forgotten Realms fanfiction )

You'll probably need to tweak your rules to better fit the setting, or tweak the setting to make it playable. Have fun!

[LibraryOgre]

I think the big rule is "decide how your game fits into the world everyone knows."

If you're playing a game set in Hogwarts, when is the game set? Are you setting it in the 90s, so the PCs are contemporaries of Harry & Crew? Are you setting it today, so the PCs grew up on stories of the Boy Who Lived? Maybe it's set in the past, and they're contemporaries of James & Lilly, or it's set in the distant past, and you're planning an Ars Magica tie-in.

There are three basic options.

1) Distant Past. Everything the characters do is so far in the past that they can't really have an effect on the story everyone knows. Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: The Old Republic is this way... set ~4000 years into the past, you can do pretty much anything you please and it can get handwaved away as having been fixed in the meantime.

2) Future. Either set right after the story, or long after the story. The story is past (of varying degrees of reliability; the PCs may fervently believe Snape was a horrible traitor, since that was the official story), and the PCs can't affect it in any way.

3) Contemporary. Either "right at the time" or "soon before the time." What players do can conceivably have an impact on the story everyone knows. Does your Jedi youngling, through some highly improbable rolling, manage to kill Anakin Skywalker when he comes to the temple? Maybe a fumble in a duel with Malfoy leaves Draco permanently crippled, and so unable to take part in books 4-7?

Options 1 and 2 are relatively easy to deal with. You tell them the set-up, and play it like a normal game. 3 is much harder, at least if you want to stay in the environs that are familiar from the story... you can play a Star Wars game set during the movies, but if you spend a lot of time on Tattooine or Bespin, you run into the "Well, what are my players going to do when X event catches up to them?"

IMO, if you're playing contemporary, then the worst possible answer you can have is "The players cannot affect the story." But also bear in mind that some players WILL know the story, and may try to use that to their advantage.

Think about your time and answer the questions. If you're playing contemporary, let the players know the degree to which they can mess up the story as laid out.

[snoopy13a]

I think the big rule is "decide how your game fits into the world everyone knows."

If you're playing a game set in Hogwarts, when is the game set? Are you setting it in the 90s, so the PCs are contemporaries of Harry & Crew? Are you setting it today, so the PCs grew up on stories of the Boy Who Lived? Maybe it's set in the past, and they're contemporaries of James & Lilly, or it's set in the distant past, and you're planning an Ars Magica tie-in.

There are three basic options.

1) Distant Past. Everything the characters do is so far in the past that they can't really have an effect on the story everyone knows. Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: The Old Republic is this way... set ~4000 years into the past, you can do pretty much anything you please and it can get handwaved away as having been fixed in the meantime.

2) Future. Either set right after the story, or long after the story. The story is past (of varying degrees of reliability; the PCs may fervently believe Snape was a horrible traitor, since that was the official story), and the PCs can't affect it in any way.

3) Contemporary. Either "right at the time" or "soon before the time." What players do can conceivably have an impact on the story everyone knows. Does your Jedi youngling, through some highly improbable rolling, manage to kill Anakin Skywalker when he comes to the temple? Maybe a fumble in a duel with Malfoy leaves Draco permanently crippled, and so unable to take part in books 4-7?

Options 1 and 2 are relatively easy to deal with. You tell them the set-up, and play it like a normal game. 3 is much harder, at least if you want to stay in the environs that are familiar from the story... you can play a Star Wars game set during the movies, but if you spend a lot of time on Tattooine or Bespin, you run into the "Well, what are my players going to do when X event catches up to them?"

IMO, if you're playing contemporary, then the worst possible answer you can have is "The players cannot affect the story." But also bear in mind that some players WILL know the story, and may try to use that to their advantage.

Think about your time and answer the questions. If you're playing contemporary, let the players know the degree to which they can mess up the story as laid out.

I agree with your advice, but I have a just a little add-on about playing a "contemporary" game. Essentially, to quote Yoda, "always in motion is the future." If you set a game in the middle of a fictional universe, major events do not have to play out as they did in the actual work of fiction. Rather, the future can be a blank slate once the game begins.

For example, suppose you are GMing a Star Wars game and the players begin as Rebel soldiers at the Battle of Hoth. Once you begin play, anything can happen to off-screen NPCs. Perhaps in your universe, Luke doesn't survive his snowspeeder's crash. Perhaps Han and Leia die in the asteroid field. Perhaps a Rebel sniper--maybe even one of player characters!--takes out Lord Vader as Vader enters Echo Base.

This discourages players from metagaming based on future events in the source literature. For example, suppose our Hoth players successfully escape the battle. As the players are familiar with The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, they know that Boba Fett will take the captured Han Solo to Jabba the Hutt. Armed with this metagaming knowledge, the players decide to travel to Tattooine and wait around to ambush Fett once Fett arrives--a rather stupid plan as it is Boba Fett. Nevertheless, they plan to kill Fett, save Solo, and become heroes in the Alliance.

All well and good, but in your universe, Lando, Chewie, and Leia rescued Han before Fett could leave Cloud City. So, the players are simply wasting their time.

Conversely, players can obviously alter future events. Just make sure to tell your players beforehand that your universe is now an alternate reality from the "canonical" fiction and events will not necessarily transpire the same way.

[Jay R]

I just looked at my games shelves. My games include Middle Earth Role-Playing, Pendragon, Flashing Blades, and Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective. I've also played Call of Cthulhu and Star Wars. I have modules or setting books based on Zorro, the Lensmen series, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, and the Scarlet Pimpernel.

I have no problem using pre-existing fiction.

It's not inherently lazy, awesome, silly, or anything else. It can be any of these or none of them.

And yes, like every other RPG experience, it depends on who's running it.

(And to avoid the red herring, yes, I know there are games with no referee. In that case, "who's running it" are the players, or at least the subset of them that learned the rules, and they can make the game lame or awesome.)