Ninjas, knights, clerics, and sailors

[Essence]

Honestly I never really saw the point of combining Kara-Tur, Al'Qadim and the rest of the crap into one setting. While a lot of people like ninjas and stuff, almost nobody wants to have ninjas travelling with full plate armored knights, cleric crusaders and Arabian sailors.

Mixing settings generally produces crap for storylines. Since you've got a bunch of guys from the other setting with essentially no background and no connections.

On the other hand, having only one culture in a setting in which it's fully possible to teleport across the world three times in one day seems a bit unrealistic. Everyone has a background and connections, and if they can run halfway across the world to get away, so can their 'background and connections'.


The games that I'm currently running:

Game 1:
An amnesiatic time witch from southern California hangs out with a ex-Buddhist psionic bodyguard whose life-shaping events all happened in India and China; a self-doubting technologist ex-cop pervert from the East Coast; a Sea Elf wizard from the world's evil twin (think South Pacific Islands); and a pair of gith-style elves from the world's Third Age, some 13,000 years ago (Atlantis).


Game 2:
A psionic barbarian from a magic-hating (Viking-style) dwarven city in the mountains finds his way into the nearest non-dwarven city (culturally American Frontier) and meets up with a local herbalist/druid, a gunslinger and a scientist from the distant south (Rome), a haunted soldier from an army on the other side of the continent (Turkey), and a bard from the pirate-infested coastline to the south (Arabia).

Game 3:
A griffon-riding Halfling bounty hunter that grew up in a Gnomish mountain community (he hasn't heard of Kender, or he'd claim to be one) gets trapped underground with a pirate-born ex-gogo dancer turned demon-tainted whip-wielding dominatrix, an X-games-oriented elven thrill seeker from a very Americanesque culture, and a bard who knows nothing of her past except that she's Lost Her Groove, and wants it back.

(They Fight Crime!)


The story doesn't come from the setting, the story comes from the characters, their interactions, and their decisions -- none of which need to be informed by a specific culture or idiom.

[User3]

Mixing settings generally produces crap for storylines. Since you've got a bunch of guys from the other setting with essentially no background and no connections.

Some people would say that's the fun of it, too.

Nothing brings a smile to my face like seeing a drunken billionaire, a WWII vet, and a god of thunder teaming up to kick some ass. A goddess amazon, two aliens with laser eyes, a teenager with a souped-up Cracker Jack box ring, and and a billionaire detective deciding to combine their forces makes me happy. In the pants.

Lets face it. Stories where characters come from extremely divergent backgrounds and settings tend to be the most popular. One Piece has characters who gain their powers from toys, ocean fruit (one dude becomes super hardcore when he turns into a giraffe), and ritualistic self-mutilation and Naruto has somehow convinced us that the truly hardcore ninjas can summon cartoony kaiju and hail from different parts of the globe.

Eberron and Forgotten Realms is more popular than Greyhawk and Dragonlance. That should give that argument of yours pause.

[User3]

1145834437[/unixtime]]
Eberron and Forgotten Realms is more popular than Greyhawk and Dragonlance. That should give that argument of yours pause.

Well keep in mind that popularity isn't necessarily derived from storylines. Popularity is derived from people liking some aspect of the material. The more material you have, the more chance someone will like some part of it.

It's not that Kara-Tur spirit people ninjas or Red Wizards or Al-Qadim elemental masters are bad standalone.

As for weird characters in general, their main problem seems to be a disconnection with the game world. Does the samurai really care about Faerun for instance? What's his motivation for saving the world? Hell, why is he even in Faerun in the first place? All his people are thousands of miles away.

It works fine for beer and pretzels gaming where your main concern is just setting up a series of challenges and letting the PCs try to beat them. If you're playing a more story oriented game, then I personally like to have charactes which have more real motivations in the story as opposed to just "I'm lawful good yo!"

[RandomCasualty]

The above post was mine.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

As for weird characters in general, their main problem seems to be a disconnection with the game world. Does the samurai really care about Faerun for instance? What's his motivation for saving the world? Hell, why is he even in Faerun in the first place? All his people are thousands of miles away.

[*] He's been sent into the world by his master to gain information about the outside world, either in preparation of trade talks or invasion plans

[*] He's a ronin, having failed his lord and his people so severly that he has been exiled from his homeland, and now wanders the globe looking for a means of redemption or at least a quiet place to settle down and forget a past which keeps catching up with him,

[*] He's been dispatched on a mission to capture someone (Perhaps a criminal, perhaps a petulant noble, perhaps a kidnapee) who has fled into Farun and return them home.

[*] He's been sent by his master to locate some artifact of power that his advisors have scryed the location of outside of Kara-Tur, and the retrieval of said item is vital to his master's continuted rule.

[*] Do you really think the Red Wizards, having conquored the rest of Toril, will stop at Kara-Tur's borders saying "But those guys are offlimits, we have wizards and knights, they have ninjas and samurai. Our genres are incompatable". Of course not. Something that threatens the world threatens the WORLD, and our Samurai is part of (Perhaps head of) the delegation from his kingdom to oppose a bigger threat.

[*] Perhaps this Samurai is powerful and jaded, and having tired of facing down his enemies at home, he has decided to set out into the world in search of greater enemies. This could work for any character too, not just Samurai, and works very well with oriental assassins.

[*] Perhaps he's not a Samurai at all, but a performer out to seek fame and fortune in lands where his or her styles of performance are strange and novel

And that's all just what I thought up while sitting here right now. RC, you lack vision.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

Well Desdan, a lot of those ideas are cool and all for a one shot game, but it really limits the rest of the party, since now everyone is basically forced to follow along on the quest of this singleminded character.

Because lets face it. When you don't care much about the land or its people, you're going to be very focused on your one goal. So it'll be "lets find the item my lord needs and get it back to him." And that's it then the DM needs to think of another contrived reason for the lord to send the PC back to Faerun, and so on.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

None of those require the character be singleminded by nessissity, no more than any other character's backstory requires their own personal subplots to be singleminded. Most of those are sidequests that the character works on while he adventures with the rest of the party.

-Desdan

[dbb]

I'm splitting the difference here, really.

Some games you just don't want a lot of exotic weirdness. Say I'm running a game set in the Great Dale, where the largest town has a total of about 200 people and where there is no significant industry besides subsistence farming, no major natural resources, no government, and not a whole lot of anything; and the campaign is supposed to be about young people growing up and going from tremulous adolescents to the protectors and heroes of the whole Dale. Now, if the players come to me with a party composed of an ancient Elven Shugenja, an outlaw Gnome Artificer from Lantan, a hard-bitten ex-hooker from the Vilhon Reach and a gladiator from the slave pits of Thay, I'm going to be a little put out.

That, however, is not necessarily the fault of the players. If I just said "I'm running a Realms campaign in the Great Dale, have it it", then the fact that the players came up with characters that don't fit the campaign I had in mind is my fault, because I didn't give them enough information. If, on the other hand, they come back with those characters after I told them what the campaign was going to be like and gave them sample characters that consisted of a goatherder's fifth child, an orphaned runaway from Uthmere, a naive wood elf curious about humans, and the son of a family of settlers from Impiltur -- then it still might be my fault -- maybe the players really hate the idea of playing naive kids in a quant rustic setting, and I didn't bother to find that out before I put together the campaign.

Or maybe the players are just being jackasses. The point is, whether characters with vastly different backgrounds work in the same campaign is extremely campaign dependent. In some games, yes, it is a problem, and encouraging players to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the character designs is a bad idea -- but it's one which the GM needs to take responsibility for kiboshing. In other games it's just fine, even expected, and having Samurai rub elbows with Dwarven Battleragers is not even a problem.

--d.

[erik]

1145856505[/unixtime]]None of those require the character be singleminded by nessissity

Ahhh, but you're forgetting that Samurai are even more single-minded jackasses than paladins. If they're not played that way then the player is, ah, how do you say? cweary cheating.

The master samurai is obedient to his lord.
It is a master samurai's right to protest against bad judgements or orders from his lord and death is the final protest a master samurai can make.
The master samurai is ready to die at any time.
There is no failure, only success or death.
To die in the service of one's lord is the greatest service a master samurai can perform.
Dishonor to one's lord or family is dishonor to the master samurai.
All debts, of honor or vengeance, are repaid.
An enemy derserves no mercy. Cowardice is dishonorable.

Heh, the most stubborn and singleminded character I ever played with was a friend's master samurai. Since cowardice was dishonorable he decided he'd rather die than flee. And eventually he did.

However even that character would have no trouble doing many of Des's mission/hooks with an adventuring party in such a way that a lengthy campaign could endure.

[Josh_Kablack]

You know, I've recently been playing a bunch of Soul Calibur, and I'm pretty impressed how the backstory of that game manages to integrate all of the following characters into a mostly coherent storyline:

-A fallen Christian knight who slew his crusader father and seeks redemption
-A disciple of Hephasteus seeking to destroy weapons that threaten the god of the forge
-A samurai seeking to prove that his swordsmanship is the match of the rifle
-A sumerian necromancer who seeks escape from his cycle of eternal resurection
-The ghost of a dread pirate who seeks to regain the memories of his life
-A member of the Ming Dynasty's imperial guard on who has abandoned her secret mission.
-A nobleman fencer with a blood curse who might just be the inspiration for Count Dracula...and his adopted daughter.

Plus a golem, a sentient evil sword which at one point forms itself a body to possess, and the requisite demon hunting ninja.



...with that as my example of the moment, I don't really think it matters how disparate the source materials or genres are, but it does matter a whole lot how skillfully the players and DM can weave their particular combination together into a coherent whole.

[PhoneLobster]

What annoys me about forgotten realms rolling in various exotic settings is not that they did it and that those settings (and potential characters) are there.

Its that there is no real support for those settings or characters.

And its that kind of thing that often makes exotic characters in parties and mixed settings etc... suck.

Take the first of desdans samurai examples...

He's been sent into the world by his master to gain information about the outside world, either in preparation of trade talks or invasion plans

Now if you have a good deal of support material with which to build Mr Samurai spy, his potential ninja contacts, subbordinates or overseers, the potential invasion or commando forces from the motherland, and some good support material for the way in which he will view and interact with the "normal" setting that can work.

But without that you can't tell the exotic side of the story, the samurai is suddenly just left hanging there, out of place and two dimensional. His spy story no longer is a starting point for anything, it just reads as an exceptionally lame excuse for why he is there wandering around pointlessly in some other settting and will never and can never develop into anything that is actually good.

If you want to see it as if it were an animated series on the one hand you have samurai spy man who has his own running sub plot and dedicated episodes, because his setting and source material actually exists for these things to be generated from.

On the other hand you have the fighter with a katana who introduces himself as a samurai spy and never gets more of a story and just hangs around being convenient (or inconvenient) for the rest of the series. Because the only dedicated material for how to produce his potential backstory doesn't actually extend beyond "and a katana is a masterwork bastard sword that counts as an exotic weapon".

Of course with the oriental adventures handbook there is SOME support for the kung fu sword master roaming the forgotten realms proper but only indirectly via the ninjas and samurais of the god damned legend of the five rings setting.

And its worse for the poor old ship wrecked Sinbad rip off. All he gets is a scimitar and a forgotten realms region which amounts to "Al Quadim Extra-Lite", now with even more generic FR flavour inconveniently swamping it for your gaming displeasure.

[RandomCasualty]

1145868994[/unixtime]]
Now if you have a good deal of support material with which to build Mr Samurai spy, his potential ninja contacts, subbordinates or overseers, the potential invasion or commando forces from the motherland, and some good support material for the way in which he will view and interact with the "normal" setting that can work.

But without that you can't tell the exotic side of the story, the samurai is suddenly just left hanging there, out of place and two dimensional. His spy story no longer is a starting point for anything, it just reads as an exceptionally lame excuse for why he is there wandering around pointlessly in some other settting and will never and can never develop into anything that is actually good.

Yup, the thing is that running a character with a starting mission, like the spy mission, requires a lot of research and design work on the part of the DM. Questions like "Who is this mysterious master the samurai is working for?" "What are his motives?" and so on have to come up in play if that backstory is going to be anything other than a lame excuse.

Half the time the DM is going to be swamped with enough work to create an entirely new campaign, so he probably isn't going to be thrilled that he has to design a spy network and research Kara-Tur or Al-Qadim or whatever to try to fit in one new character.

Cross campaign characters only work in one of the two conditions.

A) The campaign is set around a cross campaign theme anyway. So you've got Kara-Tur included in the plot already.

B) The cross character has already integrated himself into the campaign world. So you meet him as some guy working for the Harpers or the Purple Dragons or whatever, the fact that he used to be a samurai doesn't enter into the plot much, since he interacts with the world of Faerun via his new position.

[User3]

I've never had to sweat it having a cross-campaign character introduced into a more homogenous adventuring group.

I put the onus of 'seamless integration' squarely on the shoulders of the player. And I've never had a such player grouse over having to write-up such a detailed background story.

[Crissa]

Why would a DM be swamped by 'adding' something to something that doesn't exist yet?

Or is this back to the part where you and your DM don't go in for the whole collaborative roleplay thing?

-Crissa

[Book]

Cross campaign characters only work in one of the two conditions...

No. Cross campaign characters can work in *any* condition given enough effort by both the DM and the player(s) in question. I'm not talking about the kind of effort that annoys people. I'm talking about the kind that is fun in creating collaborative interlaced stories where there were none before.

Most DMs and players I know who care anything about storytelling and RP love that kind of stuff.

[RandomCasualty]

1146109741[/unixtime]]Why would a DM be swamped by 'adding' something to something that doesn't exist yet?

Or is this back to the part where you and your DM don't go in for the whole collaborative roleplay thing?

Sure, because if the Samurai's lord wants him to spy on whoever, then whoever is obviously the focus of the quest, and the forces of good just got a new ally, not only from the samurai himself, but from his new master who wants to send him there, and some new spy network.

Now, the DM could play the lame backstory where this master just sent one samurai, but that doesn't really make much sense does it? Chances are the master is going to hav esome kind of spy network there, and that calls for more work on the DM's part to describe it. Basically the PC hasn't merely created a character, he's created a new faction, with its own goals and agents.

And yeah, that's a lot of work.

[fbmf]

Now, the DM could play the lame backstory where this master just sent one samurai, but that doesn't really make much sense does it?

You mean there is no set of reasonable circumstances that you could contrive wherein one samurai was sent? In the last ten seconds I've thought of two.

Game On,
fbmf

[RandomCasualty]

1146118614[/unixtime]]
You mean there is no set of reasonable circumstances that you could contrive wherein one samurai was sent? In the last ten seconds I've thought of two.

Honestly, not really. Lets remember that you've got some random lord, who has done nothing as of yet in the campaign world, decides to send a single samurai thousands of miles away to a foreign land to act as a spy on a faction that he will likely never see acting in his life time.

Of course, despite this enemy being threatening enough to warrant a three thousand mile trek to spy on, he decides to send only a single samurai there, and a low level samurai at that.

I don't know man, but I'm just not seeing a lot of great ways to fit this character in wtihout it seeming completely lame.

There has to be a heck of a lot of backstory added to that to make it even remotely believable.

[Neeek]

1146119758[/unixtime]]

Of course, despite this enemy being threatening enough to warrant a three thousand mile trek to spy on, he decides to send only a single samurai there, and a low level samurai at that.

I don't know man, but I'm just not seeing a lot of great ways to fit this character in wtihout it seeming completely lame.

There has to be a heck of a lot of backstory added to that to make it even remotely believable.

Umm. No. Not really.

"My lord heard something about this land, and was curious, so he sent an agent to learn about the area. It was not an important mission, so he sent an expendable novice."

This is with 20 seconds of thought and being more than a little drunk. If you can't integrate characters who are a little odd, that's a problem with *you*, not a problem with it being hard to do.

[dbb]

Or you can do it just like "Shogun", only in reverse: "My lord sent a whole battalion of us, actually, but then a storm sank the ship and everyone else drowned, so I guess it's up to me."

Or like "The 13th Warrior": "My lord caught me looking sideways at his wife, so he sent me on a trip to the middle of Nowhere to make sure that didn't happen again."

Or the "Usagi Yojimbo" method: "Well, my lord and most of his retainers got slaughtered in battle, so now I'm kind of a ronin, but I'm still a samurai at heart."

You'll have to excuse me if these don't work for every individual character, as it took me almost thirty seconds to think of them. Really, for every character trait, there's some reason why the character's a really long way from home.

--d.

[Crissa]

1146117832[/unixtime]]Basically the PC hasn't merely created a character, he's created a new faction, with its own goals and agents.

And yeah, that's a lot of work.

Yeah.

We wouldn't want the Players to be involved in deciding what game we're playing, would we?

*snirk*

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

You know I since he spring boarded his latest DM can't do that claim off my response here I'd like to clarify that I don't agree with RC.

I think the DM CAN provide the story line to make the samurai spy story work.

That wasn't my point, because I remain fixated on my boundless hate for FR where the exotic sub settings are neglected by the source material, which somewhat presupposes therefore that the DMs relying on the preprepared source material will be neglecting exotic settings and characters.

Now you like exotic fantasy aztecs turning up in generic fantasy land? Options include... 1) FR and Maztica, where you can play by the book and neglect the Maztica characters as they wander FR proper (and sure as hell can't wander Maztica, unless there's a likely shite book I missed).

Or 2) You go and write up your own aztecish stuff. Sorta like Frank's one for that game round here that never happens.

I hate that option 1 is how it is, but I differ from RC in that I don't actually think option 2 is like impossible or something, or that there aren't further options.

Summary...

I hate FR (among other reasons) because it does pretty much what RC seems to.

(Edit: Teehee, I said preprepared, redundancy is funny)

[User3]

Having played in over 20+ Forgotten Realms campaigns over the years (with multiple groups), I can categorically state that PhoneLobster's assessment of FR "inflexibility" is incorrect.

It's the most pancultural and panethnic campaign world I've ever adventured in. And it promotes the grouping together of a wild array of adventuring group composites.

All facilitated by Portal Magic.

[RandomCasualty]

1146152765[/unixtime]]
Yeah.

We wouldn't want the Players to be involved in deciding what game we're playing, would we?

Well, it is the DM's world too, and asking the DM to read up on an entirely new area of the world just to incorporate your new character is a bit selfish IMO.

It's obviously different if your DM is already familiar with Kara-Tur or Al-Qadim or whatever, but in alot of cases he's not. Lets face it, the Forgotten realms are *huge*. Forget about Kara-Tur, maztica and Al-Qadim... Just Faerun itself. There are areas of core Faerun that I'm not particularly familiar with. And yeah, that's a lot of work, in addition to all the other stuff the DM has to do, like ya know, plan the quest out and go over the PCs characters to make sure they're not blatantly abusing anything, and so on. I'm not sure where this odd conception came out that DMs have absolutely no life beyond the game and can afford to work out huge amounts of material at the player's whim.

Show a little gratitude the guy is running a game at all... because running a game is hard work and it's not nice to pile huge amounts of work on the DM because you can't think of a reasonable backstory to fit into his game, and instead want to try to force him to incorporate some crazy setting thousands of miles away.

And while you can do a 13th warrior style thing where your character is an exile, why would you want to? In my opinion, those backstories tend to be the kind of thing that produces boring disconnected characters in the first place and overall lead to boring campaigns and to your character being little more than a sore thumb most of the time. Lets remember that unlike the 13th warrior, the camera isn't going to be featuring that character as the only star, there are plenty of other PCs that are going to be getting camera time, so it's likely that your sidestory about trying to fit in probably won't get all that much attention.

Now, none of that really mattes if you're running beer and pretzels tactical dungeon crawl adventures. In that case nobody realyl cares. You get a quest and you try to accomplish it, and you're mostly worried about the mechanics. But in a storyline based game, I've found that it's a lot more fun when the characters are actually conected to the story as opposed to being outsiders. It's much more involving when they're fighting to save their homes or their land. It tends to involve a lot more emotional response than simply "I'm an exile and have nothing better to do than go on some pointless quest that I don't even care about."

Now I'm not saying you can't run a story like that, it's just that it won't be nearly as good as something where PCs are actually connected to the game world in some way.

[fbmf]

But we're not talking about the Forgotten Realms. Why do you have to create a part of the world that a PC won't reasonably ever go to?

Game on,
fbmf