Has anyone ever just blatantly stole some other story and had your players play through it? (like having everyone be wizards/sorcerers and then playing the Harry Potter series) I’ve seen some games that I think would be fun, but at the same time I can’t shake the feeling that it would go horribly.
Does anyone have any experience with this (either as a player or a DM) so I know whether to pursue or give up on this idea? I’m accepting as many responses as possible.
Novels work because the author controls the behavior of all the characters; you can't emulate a novel in an RPG because you don't control all the characters. However, taking a novel as inspiration for what the Bad Guys are up to (which the PCs will react to) is fine. Just expect your story to rapidly diverge from the source material.
I'd agree with Pantagruel. It can work as a starting point, but the campaign will probably end up very different from the book/movie/TV show. I think a good way to approach it would be as a setting rather than trying to re-create the books. Like in your Harry Potter example, put it at Hogwarts a few years after the books, and come up with your own plot. Then as long as everyone is familiar with the source material, you don't have to do a lot of explaining of setting details, which can really help with immersion. And you can occasionally thrown in a favorite character as an NPC, like they take a class with Hagrid or something.
Makes sense. I feel like they would stay along the story a bit better than you might think (considering all the modules that work), but if I do it it would definitely just be a setting with the original story as a baseline, and drop any character/choice-specific events.
Pentagruel666 is right. Novels and movies are not well suited to that task except as inspiration.
The right kind of TV series would be an easier lift because of the episodic nature. Like, take Supernatural, The X-Files, Burn Notice, or NCIS as examples. Each season has a main story arc, and usually some smaller character arcs as well. Notice, they usually start introducing some (not all) of the characters that will become relevant ahead of time, and they always foreshadow (or start) the next season’s arc during the current season to help everything blend together and make the world seem larger than the cast. That all keeps things driving forward and the whole thing feels like a continuous campaign. But episodically speaking, most of them are basically stand alone stories that each have minor elements of the main arcs. So they have the mid-episode conversations between characters that develop their personal arcs. Then there are those special 3-5 minute at the end (or sometimes beginning) of an episode where we see a meeting or something that reveals a clue or plot point about the main arc.
So you could totally use a TV show, because you could run it as a series of 1-5 shots that have little bits of a main arc sprinkled throughout. Then you can grab the episodes in just about any order you want and use that episodes story for that week’s adventure. (Just be prepared for the adventure to not follow the episode exactly because I can guarantee you that it won’t.) As to the character arcs, once you set them in motions they will develop independently from everything because those are all about the Player’s Characters and those are personal. Even if you steal them in concept, they will deviate from script at least as much if not more than the episode’s. But then, for all of that sprinkling you have to do, just cut out the 3-5 minute seasonal arc reveal from whichever episode you ran that week, and insert the one from whichever episode is appropriate to however the main story arc from your game is developing. Whenever you get to a point when the show has a “main arc episode,” so do you. Just remember not to expect it to go like that episode did because it probably won’t either.
But during session 0, you would have to let your group know you are running such a highly unusual campaign so they will have to bear with you. If you let them know it a series of interconnected 1 shots with a mad plan behind it, they would probably think it’s cool AF (I would), but if you just spring that on people they would likely get confused real fast and just keep trying to hammer away at the “main quest”
The easiest lift would be an RPG video game. But ithen you would have to do it one of two ways: either reallyreally big, or reallyreally small. Because to really pull it off you’re talking about lifting something like Skyrim, or The Witcher. (That would be the first time in history anyone ever played a Bethesda game without clipping or freezing though! 😂😂) Otherwise, you have to limit the environment to something manageable, so maybe instead of lifting Skyrim you lift its DLCs and find some way to make them all fit together.* (Or some other game of around that size.) It shouldn’t be any harder than fitting together the older, shorter modules into an overall campaign and DMs have been doing that since the ‘70s. But if your friends have played whatever it is you lift, they may catch on. Especially if you don’t at least change the NPC’s names.
*(I personally never really got into the Elder Scrolls, but Fallout 3 is one of my top three favorite video games of all time. I could figure out some way to stick at least half of its DLCs into one general area and narratively make them fit together somehow. I presume that they handled Skyrim the same way. And if not, then steal Fallout 3’s and change it from Sci Fi to fantasy. 🤷♂️)
I think novels, movies, shows, and games are most useful for defining the theme and feel of a campaign with your players. It's easy to communicate expectations of "Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter," because everyone already knows how that story feels. But, while I definitely take inspiration from a lot of different books and films, I would never lift an entire plot from one. Ultimately, the fun of D&D is telling a collaborative story that's unique to you and your friends, and following an established story is uncomfortably close to railroading, and doesn't have a lot of room for uniqueness.
The one problem that all DMs face is railroading. Whether it's an overbearing omnipotent DM who doesn't allow for any creativity, or some players who completely disregard the plot, adopt each and every mimic they come across, and become the menace of the people they're supposed to save. So simply put, you shouldn't rely on a pre-generated linear story to be your adventure, as you're likely either to end up with a game where the DM controls everything and drains the fun, or a completely different story than the one you intended. Instead, you should take inspiration from other media, and then incorporate aspects of it into your adventure. Give your players small tidbits of familiar and fun story points, but give them the ability to control the outcome.
I'm with the consensus that other media, novels, movies, video games are good to steal "elements" from for either tone or setting reference or world building, but using D&D to "play through" a story from another medium is kinda meh. Star Wars as a brand has quite successful setting up an TTRPG set in its world, in three different rules systems, but you weren't playing through the movies. The only time I've seen "play through" done well was when TSR somehow got the rights to adapt 2001 and 2010 Space Odysseys into variant world modules for Star Frontiers. Those were really cool, and actually helped me understand the first movie a lot more.
If you want a "story" to guide you, your instincts are probably right that you're better off playing an published adventure or module. Other media is more their to reap/loot/steal ideas from, and if you want to make your own stuff eventually, here's a tip: don't steal literal setting elements because if you do you're just giving players stuff they've seen before. For example, because of "table popularity" I have to make a red herring I threw in a on a whim and give it a more significant part in the story: specifically a duck who has been revived or reconsittuted after millennia of being flash frozen. When he's referred to as a "duck" or the word "duck" is said in his presence, he says "My name is Phillip." The party really wants/is challenging me to make Phillip more of a "real" part of the story, and after me repeating "seriously?" to the demand several times, I went to work in my notebook. I don't know why I came up with "My name is Phillip," it seemed a fun idea at the time, but some mental stretching brought me to the the Hamilton song "Take a Break" where Hamilton's son begins a poem with the line "My name is Phillip" it's an ok part of the musical, but a more interesting from gaming story perspective is how Phillip's story plays out in this song:
There's a dueling culture in my game anyway (readers from a certain PBP cost, yeah, that's where that guy and his 'tude come from), and there's also some very pompous dragons. One of the dragons is a spymaster/prankster who's actually a lot more worldly in the present but "way back" was a bit of a tool (actually stolen from a published adventure and fleshed out to include an interest in abstract art with kinetic properties but that's just me forcing art appreciation into my game). Basically Phillip was a pompous dragon young dragon, who challenged the spymaster dragon to a duel and got polymorphed permanently with the vocal tic as a prank. There's more to the punchline, including the word "duck" being used accidentally on the scene during a critical moment where people on scene needed to get out of the way, but for brevity: "drake" get it? Back to the point, my table isn't playing Hamilton, but an NPC's personality and backstory is totally lifted from it (I don't know if anyone's going to know, sometimes its fun when the party gets it sometimes its fun where only you are in on the joke).
My players for the most part aren't familiar with the music catalogs of King Crimson or Emerson Lake and Palmer, Samuel Beckett's novels, or Batman: Brave and the Bold ... but they've all had bit and pieces ripped off and show up in my games on the regular.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
But during session 0, you would have to let your group know you are running such a highly unusual campaign so they will have to bear with you. If you let them know it a series of interconnected 1 shots with a mad plan behind it, they would probably think it’s cool AF (I would), but if you just spring that on people they would likely get confused real fast and just keep trying to hammer away at the “main quest”
That's a good idea. You could do something like have the party be members of the city watch and run Waterdeep Blues and pull from every cop show in existence.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
Yeah, judging from the responses you all seem to agree with me: could go well, but probably won’t be great and has potential to either be a poor railroaded game or one that ends up not following the plot anyways. Thanks for the feedback, probably going to run either CoS or PotA, unless anyone has a personal favorite module they recommend.
Makes sense. I feel like they would stay along the story a bit better than you might think (considering all the modules that work), but if I do it it would definitely just be a setting with the original story as a baseline, and drop any character/choice-specific events.
I think it's only fair to point out that writing a module is way more difficult than simply telling a story. Modules are written with choices and divergent paths in mind while many novels hinge on a long series of events playing out in exactly the right way.
Yeah, judging from the responses you all seem to agree with me: could go well, but probably won’t be great and has potential to either be a poor railroaded game or one that ends up not following the plot anyways. Thanks for the feedback, probably going to run either CoS or PotA, unless anyone has a personal favorite module they recommend.
To be honest, neither of those are really “modules” at all, they are whole campaigns
Instead of one long story like those, my personal preference is to actually use real modules from back in the day. They were called “modules” because they were actually modular. They were designed for people to put together any which way people could think of. They were a little light on the narrative in some aspects, but that was to make room for the DM to fill in their own narrative that they were using to piece them all together to tell a cohesive story and create a unique campaign. You could do the same thing, just use newer modules like some of the ones on sites like DM’s Guild since they are already designed for this edition and won’t take much work.
Huh, I didn’t actually know the difference (in terms of DND). Most people I’ve talked to use those words interchangeably. In that case, I’m definitely looking for a campaign, not a module.
There are some DMs who take adventure ideas from different books that they've read, and them modify them a small bit. It makes life easier for a DM to not have to continually have to think up of new plots for adventures.
I've done this with movies. I've adapted Beverly Hill Cop and Sneakers into the D&D game, (2nd or 3rd Edition I cannot recall which.). I took the base plot and had the 'set pieces' defined then let the game organically play out.
Never not even once - now if you excuse me I have to get back to penning my 100% original campaign material about a group of heroes that are randomly coming across eternal stones of power and a villain that wants to use them to wipe out large amounts of life to save the world from itself
Never not even once - now if you excuse me I have to get back to penning my 100% original campaign material about a group of heroes that are randomly coming across eternal stones of power and a villain that wants to use them to wipe out large amounts of life to save the world from itself
I've done this with movies. I've adapted Beverly Hill Cop and Sneakers into the D&D game, (2nd or 3rd Edition I cannot recall which.). I took the base plot and had the 'set pieces' defined then let the game organically play out.
Oh, you gotta tell me about how Sneakers in D&D played out. I loved that movie.
Never not even once - now if you excuse me I have to get back to penning my 100% original campaign material about a group of heroes that are randomly coming across eternal stones of power and a villain that wants to use them to wipe out large amounts of life to save the world from itself
Oh, I like that. Can I steal it for my own game?
How dare you try and plagiarise my completely original and unique content!
Never not even once - now if you excuse me I have to get back to penning my 100% original campaign material about a group of heroes that are randomly coming across eternal stones of power and a villain that wants to use them to wipe out large amounts of life to save the world from itself
Oh, I like that. Can I steal it for my own game?
How dare you try and plagiarise my completely original and unique content!
What are you even talking about? We're asking for permission.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
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Has anyone ever just blatantly stole some other story and had your players play through it? (like having everyone be wizards/sorcerers and then playing the Harry Potter series) I’ve seen some games that I think would be fun, but at the same time I can’t shake the feeling that it would go horribly.
Does anyone have any experience with this (either as a player or a DM) so I know whether to pursue or give up on this idea? I’m accepting as many responses as possible.
Novels work because the author controls the behavior of all the characters; you can't emulate a novel in an RPG because you don't control all the characters. However, taking a novel as inspiration for what the Bad Guys are up to (which the PCs will react to) is fine. Just expect your story to rapidly diverge from the source material.
I'd agree with Pantagruel. It can work as a starting point, but the campaign will probably end up very different from the book/movie/TV show. I think a good way to approach it would be as a setting rather than trying to re-create the books. Like in your Harry Potter example, put it at Hogwarts a few years after the books, and come up with your own plot. Then as long as everyone is familiar with the source material, you don't have to do a lot of explaining of setting details, which can really help with immersion. And you can occasionally thrown in a favorite character as an NPC, like they take a class with Hagrid or something.
Makes sense. I feel like they would stay along the story a bit better than you might think (considering all the modules that work), but if I do it it would definitely just be a setting with the original story as a baseline, and drop any character/choice-specific events.
Probably just going to do a module though.
Pentagruel666 is right. Novels and movies are not well suited to that task except as inspiration.
The right kind of TV series would be an easier lift because of the episodic nature. Like, take Supernatural, The X-Files, Burn Notice, or NCIS as examples. Each season has a main story arc, and usually some smaller character arcs as well. Notice, they usually start introducing some (not all) of the characters that will become relevant ahead of time, and they always foreshadow (or start) the next season’s arc during the current season to help everything blend together and make the world seem larger than the cast. That all keeps things driving forward and the whole thing feels like a continuous campaign. But episodically speaking, most of them are basically stand alone stories that each have minor elements of the main arcs. So they have the mid-episode conversations between characters that develop their personal arcs. Then there are those special 3-5 minute at the end (or sometimes beginning) of an episode where we see a meeting or something that reveals a clue or plot point about the main arc.
So you could totally use a TV show, because you could run it as a series of 1-5 shots that have little bits of a main arc sprinkled throughout. Then you can grab the episodes in just about any order you want and use that episodes story for that week’s adventure. (Just be prepared for the adventure to not follow the episode exactly because I can guarantee you that it won’t.) As to the character arcs, once you set them in motions they will develop independently from everything because those are all about the Player’s Characters and those are personal. Even if you steal them in concept, they will deviate from script at least as much if not more than the episode’s. But then, for all of that sprinkling you have to do, just cut out the 3-5 minute seasonal arc reveal from whichever episode you ran that week, and insert the one from whichever episode is appropriate to however the main story arc from your game is developing. Whenever you get to a point when the show has a “main arc episode,” so do you. Just remember not to expect it to go like that episode did because it probably won’t either.
But during session 0, you would have to let your group know you are running such a highly unusual campaign so they will have to bear with you. If you let them know it a series of interconnected 1 shots with a mad plan behind it, they would probably think it’s cool AF (I would), but if you just spring that on people they would likely get confused real fast and just keep trying to hammer away at the “main quest”
The easiest lift would be an RPG video game. But ithen you would have to do it one of two ways: either reallyreally big, or reallyreally small. Because to really pull it off you’re talking about lifting something like Skyrim, or The Witcher. (That would be the first time in history anyone ever played a Bethesda game without clipping or freezing though! 😂😂) Otherwise, you have to limit the environment to something manageable, so maybe instead of lifting Skyrim you lift its DLCs and find some way to make them all fit together.* (Or some other game of around that size.) It shouldn’t be any harder than fitting together the older, shorter modules into an overall campaign and DMs have been doing that since the ‘70s. But if your friends have played whatever it is you lift, they may catch on. Especially if you don’t at least change the NPC’s names.
*(I personally never really got into the Elder Scrolls, but Fallout 3 is one of my top three favorite video games of all time. I could figure out some way to stick at least half of its DLCs into one general area and narratively make them fit together somehow. I presume that they handled Skyrim the same way. And if not, then steal Fallout 3’s and change it from Sci Fi to fantasy. 🤷♂️)
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I think novels, movies, shows, and games are most useful for defining the theme and feel of a campaign with your players. It's easy to communicate expectations of "Game of Thrones" or "Harry Potter," because everyone already knows how that story feels. But, while I definitely take inspiration from a lot of different books and films, I would never lift an entire plot from one. Ultimately, the fun of D&D is telling a collaborative story that's unique to you and your friends, and following an established story is uncomfortably close to railroading, and doesn't have a lot of room for uniqueness.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
The one problem that all DMs face is railroading. Whether it's an overbearing omnipotent DM who doesn't allow for any creativity, or some players who completely disregard the plot, adopt each and every mimic they come across, and become the menace of the people they're supposed to save. So simply put, you shouldn't rely on a pre-generated linear story to be your adventure, as you're likely either to end up with a game where the DM controls everything and drains the fun, or a completely different story than the one you intended. Instead, you should take inspiration from other media, and then incorporate aspects of it into your adventure. Give your players small tidbits of familiar and fun story points, but give them the ability to control the outcome.
I'm with the consensus that other media, novels, movies, video games are good to steal "elements" from for either tone or setting reference or world building, but using D&D to "play through" a story from another medium is kinda meh. Star Wars as a brand has quite successful setting up an TTRPG set in its world, in three different rules systems, but you weren't playing through the movies. The only time I've seen "play through" done well was when TSR somehow got the rights to adapt 2001 and 2010 Space Odysseys into variant world modules for Star Frontiers. Those were really cool, and actually helped me understand the first movie a lot more.
If you want a "story" to guide you, your instincts are probably right that you're better off playing an published adventure or module. Other media is more their to reap/loot/steal ideas from, and if you want to make your own stuff eventually, here's a tip: don't steal literal setting elements because if you do you're just giving players stuff they've seen before. For example, because of "table popularity" I have to make a red herring I threw in a on a whim and give it a more significant part in the story: specifically a duck who has been revived or reconsittuted after millennia of being flash frozen. When he's referred to as a "duck" or the word "duck" is said in his presence, he says "My name is Phillip." The party really wants/is challenging me to make Phillip more of a "real" part of the story, and after me repeating "seriously?" to the demand several times, I went to work in my notebook. I don't know why I came up with "My name is Phillip," it seemed a fun idea at the time, but some mental stretching brought me to the the Hamilton song "Take a Break" where Hamilton's son begins a poem with the line "My name is Phillip" it's an ok part of the musical, but a more interesting from gaming story perspective is how Phillip's story plays out in this song:
There's a dueling culture in my game anyway (readers from a certain PBP cost, yeah, that's where that guy and his 'tude come from), and there's also some very pompous dragons. One of the dragons is a spymaster/prankster who's actually a lot more worldly in the present but "way back" was a bit of a tool (actually stolen from a published adventure and fleshed out to include an interest in abstract art with kinetic properties but that's just me forcing art appreciation into my game). Basically Phillip was a pompous dragon young dragon, who challenged the spymaster dragon to a duel and got polymorphed permanently with the vocal tic as a prank. There's more to the punchline, including the word "duck" being used accidentally on the scene during a critical moment where people on scene needed to get out of the way, but for brevity: "drake" get it? Back to the point, my table isn't playing Hamilton, but an NPC's personality and backstory is totally lifted from it (I don't know if anyone's going to know, sometimes its fun when the party gets it sometimes its fun where only you are in on the joke).
My players for the most part aren't familiar with the music catalogs of King Crimson or Emerson Lake and Palmer, Samuel Beckett's novels, or Batman: Brave and the Bold ... but they've all had bit and pieces ripped off and show up in my games on the regular.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
That's a good idea. You could do something like have the party be members of the city watch and run Waterdeep Blues and pull from every cop show in existence.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Yeah, judging from the responses you all seem to agree with me: could go well, but probably won’t be great and has potential to either be a poor railroaded game or one that ends up not following the plot anyways. Thanks for the feedback, probably going to run either CoS or PotA, unless anyone has a personal favorite module they recommend.
I think it's only fair to point out that writing a module is way more difficult than simply telling a story. Modules are written with choices and divergent paths in mind while many novels hinge on a long series of events playing out in exactly the right way.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
To be honest, neither of those are really “modules” at all, they are whole campaigns
Instead of one long story like those, my personal preference is to actually use real modules from back in the day. They were called “modules” because they were actually modular. They were designed for people to put together any which way people could think of. They were a little light on the narrative in some aspects, but that was to make room for the DM to fill in their own narrative that they were using to piece them all together to tell a cohesive story and create a unique campaign. You could do the same thing, just use newer modules like some of the ones on sites like DM’s Guild since they are already designed for this edition and won’t take much work.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Huh, I didn’t actually know the difference (in terms of DND). Most people I’ve talked to use those words interchangeably. In that case, I’m definitely looking for a campaign, not a module.
There are some DMs who take adventure ideas from different books that they've read, and them modify them a small bit. It makes life easier for a DM to not have to continually have to think up of new plots for adventures.
I've done this with movies. I've adapted Beverly Hill Cop and Sneakers into the D&D game, (2nd or 3rd Edition I cannot recall which.). I took the base plot and had the 'set pieces' defined then let the game organically play out.
Never not even once - now if you excuse me I have to get back to penning my 100% original campaign material about a group of heroes that are randomly coming across eternal stones of power and a villain that wants to use them to wipe out large amounts of life to save the world from itself
Oh, I like that. Can I steal it for my own game?
Oh, you gotta tell me about how Sneakers in D&D played out. I loved that movie.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
How dare you try and plagiarise my completely original and unique content!
What are you even talking about? We're asking for permission.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale