Coincidental Campaign Plagiarism

[Sylthia]

Not sure exactly what the term would be, but I figure that fits.

For me, my campaigns seem to have a similarity to the Elder Scrolls series, in that the PCs always start out as prisoners of some sort. It's really because it's an easy way to make everyone start out together, but I've done it since I started in 2nd ed in the 90s.

My first experience with the Elder Scrolls series was Oblivion, but it's kind of funny looking back on it now.

Anyone else have similar stories?

[TheCountAlucard]

I think you mean "Plagiarism;" plaguerism would be something altogether more horrific, were it actually a word.

That said, a character starting off imprisoned before going on a big quest is almost as old as print; the Monkey King had been sealed under a mountain for five hundred years before the titular journey in The Journey to the West.

[Sylthia]

I think you mean "Plagiarism;" plaguerism would be something altogether more horrific, were it actually a word.

That said, a character starting off imprisoned before going on a big quest is almost as old as print; the Monkey King had been sealed under a mountain for five hundred years before the titular journey in The Journey to the West.

Thanks for the catch, fixed it.

And yes, I forget who said it, but thousands of years ago, a writer already claimed that all the plots had been written, it was just how you told the story.

[Sajiri]

When I was planning a game for pokemon tabletop, it was going to begin with the playing waking up washed up on a beach with no memory of how they got there and a sinking ship off the coast. As it turned out, this was exactly how the player's favourite game (steambot chronicles) began, but it was complete coincidence. I'd had this idea years earlier when I was using RPGXP to make my own fangame until that pc died and I lost all my work, I was just converting the plot over to an RP and I'd come up with it years before I'd met the player or heard of that game.

[Sylthia]

Another idea I had worked on in the spring of 2008 involved one character taking the rap for a murder another had committed to preserve their reputation, then going on the run.

THEN... Dark Knight came out, and I scrapped the idea, so people didn't think I had just stolen it. I had really put a lot of work into that story, too.

[Kid Jake]

I ran a couple of sessions of D&D a few years back where all of the PCs woke up in a hotel room reeking of liquor and with no memory of how they got there; the whole game was them trying to piece together how they wound up so far from their original destination and dealing with the aftermath of their unremembered shenanigans, at one point an entire village gathered up pitchforks and torches and chased them down the road for whatever it was they did to a poor, poor goat.

At the end they realized it was suspicious that the party's gnome sorcerer was both enchantment focused and seemed to encourage the very behavior they were wanted for; they beat him until he admitted that he thought it'd be fun to trip balls with them and had manipulated/dominated them until he woke up too hungover to re-cast his spells without them catching on.

Naturally, that's when we all realized we'd been playing The Hangover.

[DontEatRawHagis]

Reverse of this I once created a Legends of the Hidden Temple map in my game but no one in the group had ever seen the show.

I always use the same tropes apparently enough that one if my previous players said why do you keep going back to Gods and Demons.

[Nargrakhan]

During part of a campaign we had a GM who wanted our PC's to protect an important town from a kobold horde. So we did the Seven Samurai solution. Our GM thought we came up with the most creative idea he ever encountered. It was only after the campaign finished, that we rented a VHS tape (it was that long ago) of the movie.

Never saw so many emotions go through a person's face when watching it, and realize their idea wasn't the first... and what we did wasn't original.

[EccentricCircle]

I'm in a doctor who game, which has been going on intermittently for several years now.
frequently ideas which out GM comes up with will later appear in the actual show (weeping angels in a snow storm, a train traveling through space etc).
We reckon that the folks who make Doctor Who have a psychic connection to the GM, or else are spying on our games to get ideas.

[Milodiah]

So far I've accidentally the Vietnam War, the Russian Revolution, and the Great Game in my D&D world. What can I say, history is fun.

[Sylthia]

Another I remember is I started an undead-heavy and vampire campaign right before Durkula started.

[VincentTakeda]

One of the introductions I've experienced from another gm was the 'roll up whatever character you like and pick out as much starting gear as you care to'

Followed by 'you start out chained naked in the lower decks of a ship that has started to sink. A horrible storm thrashes and sunders the ship.'

I hate that kind of intro so badly that I've used it like 4 times now. Every campaign, no matter the characters, no matter the genre... Star ships in space... I don't care.

You will find yourself naked, chained in the lower decks of a sinking ship.

So far I've gotten a good laugh out of the players each time since each time i've been able to make it fit more or less seamlessly with the actual plot, occasionally having to resort to using cheap tropey devices like 'and then you wake up' or somesuch. It is horrible and I will beat it to death.

[gom jabbarwocky]

I had idea once that I was developing for an Unknown Armies game that involved PCs discovering that they could access the Universal Consciousness of mankind through magical televisions. It was inspired mainly by stuff written by PK ****, Jack Kirby, Neil Gaiman and stuff, just really trippy Jungian ridiculousness. Then my friend told me about this game he was playing called Persona 4 and I had to scrap the whole dang thing.

Still a tad bitter about that, especially since superficially my idea so closely resembled this game but was way, way different in terms of theme, scope, and plot.

EDIT: Woah, are you serious? The naughty word filter blotted out the name of one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th Century? That's kinda kooky.

[Milodiah]

The sad thing is I have no idea who you could be talking about, but I feel like I would if I could...you know...read it...

[Jeff the Green]

Yup. whitetext

[TheThan]

I think I’ll just leave this gem here from a previous thread:

Not so much a plot but a character.

For an iron kingdoms game I created a NPC; specifically a Llaelese noble of dubious reputation. His home base had been moved to Corvis ahead of the Khadorian invasion of Llael (suggesting he has either impeccable timing or that he knew the invasion was coming). This guy had his fingers in everything, he had connections to the Llaelese resistance, was mixed up with the Kayazy and a ton of other stuff. He was basically a gangster and a major part of the campaign.

In order to show how corrupt this guy was I made him grossly obese. Almost every time the party had dealings with him he was eating. I mean he had a feast laid out in front of him. He drank expensive wine, would take a bite off a piece of food and throw the rest away, that sort of stuff. I gave him a pretty “slave girl” to hang off of him; I even gave him a weasely majordomo to introduce people to him.

It wasn’t until one of my players referred to him as Jabba that it dawned on me. I had nearly strait up copied Jabba the Hutt.

[Lord Torath]

EDIT: Woah, are you serious? The naughty word filter blotted out the name of one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th Century? That's kinda kooky.

To get around the filter for words that shouldn't be filtered, like when you're discussing one of the nicknames for Richard, or prepping a firearm, you can set the first half of the filtered word to be color black. That breaks up the word so the filter misses it. If you get around the filter for words that should be filtered, like ***, ****, *****, ******, and of course, everyone's favorite, **********, expect severe punishment from the moderators to follow. For example, "It's important to cock a revolver before firing it." If you Quote my post, you can see what I did. That way you can tell us who PK **** is.

Again, misusing this feature brings severe consequences.

[Jeff the Green]

To get around the filter for words that shouldn't be filtered, like when you're discussing one of the nicknames for Richard, or prepping a firearm, you can set the first half of the filtered word to be color black. That breaks up the word so the filter misses it. If you get around the filter for words that should be filtered, like ***, ****, *****, ******, and of course, everyone's favorite, **********, expect severe punishment from the moderators to follow. For example, "It's important to cock a revolver before firing it." If you Quote my post, you can see what I did. That way you can tell us who PK **** is.

Again, misusing this feature brings severe consequences.

The other way is to use a character that looks like the letter but isn't. Cyrillic can be useful.

[GPuzzle]

I had a campaign setting for a very weird Exalted campaign that drew heavily from the Cthulhu mythos. Namely, one Elder Horror found a way to insert itself into clothing, giving people power but also consuming them. And then one friend made a character who carried one of her late father's swords and was searching for the other.

Then I started watching Kill la Kill with said friend.

[Marlowe]

Not RPG-based. But I'm amused that ZZ Gundam and Aliens , both from 1986, start with essentially the same, fairly specific scene of a deep-space escape pod being found by salvage-hunters who find a character from the previous installment deep-frozen inside.

Of course; in the one case its an implacable, unstoppable badass and in the other it's Yazan Gable. But still amusing.

[Milodiah]

Aaah, Phillip K Swear-Word-Man. Finally clicked with me when I realized those are actually initials that mean something...

If he only saw people on the Internet referring to him as Swear-Word-Man on account of the S****horpe Problem...

Oh, hey, really? This forum has the S****horpe Problem too?

[Sylthia]

Yup. whitetext

Ah, I had forgotten what that thread was called.

[tomandtish]

As others have said, this is a very old plot. AD&D module A4 "In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords" had the party start as captives (although it was supposed to be a continuation of A1-3, with you being captured at the end of A3 if running the series). And that module came out in 1981. And it wasn't an original idea back then.

Heck, take the movie "The Dirty Dozen" (1967). Your party of 12 (not including DMPC Lee Marvin) all start out as prisoners.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand - Most of your main characters are slaves (gladiators) and start that way (with Spartacus becoming one in the first episode).

Generally speaking when it comes to stories, a very base idea is not going to be plagiarism. Even Lucas will admit that the plot of Star Wars was nothing terribly original. "Avatar" is "Dances with Wolves" with space elves.

For example:

A young man is heir to an old power that is held in awe in legend. He'll be initally trained by an older mentor who also had the power. That mentor will die at the hand of the enemy. He'll join up with a group of rebels to defeat the Emperor who also uses this power.

Star Wars? Or Eragon? Or numerous others.

[Lodraygazagtar]

I get around this problem as a DM by starting with the characters waking up dressed like Santa Claus glued to the ceiling of a slaughterhouse.

[Psykenthrope]

My friend set up a one shot built around gladiatorial combat, where our characters would wake up to find themselves in a cell with no memory of how they got there. The terrain was going to be changing throughout the session, but we never got to that because we wound up breaking him. He was trying to make things hard and deadly for us, but I don't think he understood how the CR system worked. Some of the other details escape me, but both myself and one of the other players commented that the GM had effectively re-come-up with the Hunger Games. This judgement by the two of us was made separately and independently at different times and locations, and neither of us had heard the other make the judgement.

[Milodiah]

Forget campaigns, I recently realized the system I was working on is more or less a simplified version of the Palladium skill system. I only had passing knowledge of Rifts at the time, and all I deliberately took inspiration from was "there's a ****-ton of skills that you pick from, instead of everyone having the same list", but...yeah.

Not that a simplified version of Rifts isn't a noble undertaking.

[Frenth Alunril]

Just throwing this out there:

The term your are looking for is trope.
Ye olde "players meet in a bar" trope.
Coincidentally, I've never gone on adventures with people I meet in bars...

Plagiarism would be starting each game with exactly the same dialogue that someone else used.

[nedz]

I think you mean "Plagiarism;" plaguerism would be something altogether more horrific, were it actually a word.

I once started a game where the party were the only survivors of a plague which wiped out their home village.

So far I've accidentally the Vietnam War, the Russian Revolution, and the Great Game in my D&D world. What can I say, history is fun.

I deliberately used the Paris Commune for one game. The army leaves the city because of a foreign threat, ..., and soon there is a revolution.

[Jay R]

I usually don't have that problem, because I know exactly where I take my ideas came from. Most recently I ran my characters through a setup based on Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. The last superhero game I ran was based on the early sixties Justice League.

But I just had to scrap a planned adventure series in which the PCs were going to head north to face the city of frost giants, because in the game I'm playing, Mike just had us go north to face the frost giants.

[As an aside, as far as the characters know, there are no dwarves, though there are legends of them. The truth was going to be that the entire dwarf race, or at least as much of it as had survived the dwarf-giant wars, was currently enslaved by the frost giants. Anybody have any good idea of what race could have enslaved them? It should be a race that is comfortable underground and in the cold, doesn't do its own metalwork, but is capable of having a big enough society underground to have a contingent of hundreds or thousands of slaves. I don't mind a non-D&D race, since I'm already re-writing many races.

It can't be the drow, because there are no elves on this world. The elves will eventually appear, but they will be the glamorous, terrific, enchanting, evil elves of Terry Pratchett’s Lord and Ladies.]

[TheCountAlucard]

Trolls, perhaps?

Or maybe a race of elementally-blooded monstrous humanoids?