Partyinception - Creating alternative universes in your rpg - #gm tips - How to be a great gm

hello and welcome to this episode of how to be a great game master, well as promised in our teaser which is going out on the various other social media channels and if you haven't seen them then that means you are not part of our Facebook group and I suggest you head along and go and join that so you can see what's coming up next week and make comments and suggestions there as well as here on the channel. So today we are of course looking at alternative universes, alternative dimensions. now this is a particular type of adventure that you can send your players on generally speaking it's a once-off within a bigger campaign so it's not going to be an entire campaign unless that's what it's about much case it's very similar to the time travel video that I did a couple weeks ago insofar as you're changing the location all the time and your players are experiencing slightly different variants and variations and versions as they go through the different spaces but alternative dimensions alternative universes have a whole lot of information that comes with them that we have to follow we have to make sure that we as game masters comply with otherwise our players are going to feel very very very disenfranchised they're gonna feel as if the opportunity was there but that it wasn't taken so these are my six points or notes on how to make sure that when you're running an alternative dimension alternative universe type of game you get the most out of it now the first thing that we need to look at is we need to understand what is it that our players expect now alternative universes universai multiple universes alternative universes pop up primarily in science fiction but we have them in modern-day dramas where it tends towards science fiction there are of course a fantastical version as well that come out every now and again with fantasy people move into an alternate dimension here and there but generally speaking it's in a science fiction setting you can of course said it in any type of setting that you like because whilst you're the boss now so what we expect is that we expect to encounter ourselves and that's the biggest thing about an alternative universe that we expect and the reason for it is because that's what being taught to expect that's what we've been taught will happen and we expect those alternative universe selves to be different from how we are so that's a burden upon you as the game master and I'm going to come back to that a little bit later that's step 2 in terms of how to make sure that you are going to be able to portray the PCs as NPCs that are slightly different from what they are in the actual game itself so that's one thing that they expect we expect obviously a slightly different setting something that sets this universe apart from the other again our players are going to expect that this one is more militant or that some kind of Cataclysm has happened or that this is some kind of paradise with an evil undertone there's all kinds of things that the players expect but it is generally accepted that it was it is going to be slightly different and so that's something that you have to do now the more subtle the differences you make the less liked that the players are to realize that they're actually also nervous now there's a reason why these universes have to be different and there's a particular reason why these universes have to be different and worse the reason why these universes that you're creating these alternative dimensions the reason why these dimensions have to be worse for the player characters in other words whether it's there's a war going on maybe all elves have been put into concentration camps and cannot leave maybe there is some kind of environmental effect maybe the planet is being and being attacked by aliens whatever the reason you have to come up with some kind of negative and the reason for that is that you want the players to want to get their characters home if the alternative dimension or the alternative universe that you sent them through to is nice why should they bother going back so it's your job your responsibility to make them want to come back now if this is the beginning of a campaign of course you have a tough time they have very little loyalty to the universe that they've just left but if they've been playing in the campaign for quite some time they will probably want to get back anyway you can just make it a lot easier if you give them a little nudge making the universe that much darker or worse than the one that they left so we expect that we expect that we ignore the crazy notion of chance and that we assume that everyone is predestined to do pretty much the same thing now in any alternative history it doesn't matter which one you have a look at because the idea is to examine yourself in a different space you ultimately have to always end up meeting yourself otherwise it's basically like there's going to another country isn't it yes it's got a slightly different this or a slightly different that but unless you are meeting unless the party is actually meeting they're doppelgangers they're equivalents in the universe that they're going to or particularly NPCs are they're very fond of that they know very well in an alternative dimension there's really no point in doing it so we have to ignore random chance now if I look at it and I were to pop to an alternate event dimension for myself what are the chances that there is someone who is living in Japan who happens to watch my youtube channel invite me to move over to Japan and I accept the circumstances and the reasons for moving me from South Africa to Japan are extraordinarily small and yet it happened here so when I now teleport to the alternative dimension and I happen to teleport to Japan somehow my character from that alternative universe needs to have moved literally across the planet so that I can bump into myself and meet myself and follow the adventure that as a result happens so we ignore those kind of chances we assume that although this character is evil and your character is good you've had similar career paths this one has ended up as an admiral whilst you're still an ensign but you both kind of have the same friends you move in the same circles you know the same people because while the rest of the part you want to meet themselves as well and presumably the party is working together so it's an interesting twist it's an interesting space that you can play in in terms of doing that but you must do it otherwise it's not really an alternative dimension it's just another space so bear that in mind now number two when we look at the PCs being different this is where it becomes a challenge for you as the game master and it can be quite daunting it really can be now the trick that you have to take into account here is that the PCs are played by players whereas the ones they meet are NPCs and they're played by you so that means that you need to try now mimic your players and that can be particularly daunting and particularly difficult especially if your players of either fairly neutral and in their approach or have rather unique accents or mannerisms that you yourself can't achieve so how do you do this effectively well for me what I have found the best way to do it is to find some quirk that my player that I'm trying to emulate does whether it's sniffing or tapping a pencil or it's a phrase that they use or it doesn't matter I look for something during previous sessions earlier sessions so that I can get a sense of what they like and then I try and focus in just on that I don't worry about the rest so if they've got a strange accent and icon do the accent I'll focus on a mannerism or a phrase or something that allows me to do just enough that the rest of the players will be going oh yeah yeah that's you yeah yeah yeah yeah we've met your character we know who that is oh yeah that's what you want is you want them to be able to pick up that you are trying to mimic of that character and then you just use that device moving throughout for the rest of the players so that's how I usually do it now another thing is that when you look at trying to make them different in an alternative universe is you've got to try and decide how are they going to be different there are stories examples where people are good in both dimensions in both alternative spaces but the circumstances of one forces them to behave in different ways the administrator who's running a city very well in dimension one in alternative dimension to that very well run city they might be doing their best but it's actually now a mud village and instead of wearing a business suit they're now wearing a loincloth with heavy fur because they never advanced out of the Stone Age so you can not necessarily change the character but change the circumstances that they're in again although that is interesting it might not be great to have the characters meet themselves and they pretty much the same thing maybe one of them is like that that's the quirk the others are either usually evil where they've been buried body their dark side or have some kind of moral difference the priest who's always talking is now a quiet contemplative individual because 20 years ago instead of helping a bar fight get along he stopped it pick a an alternative outcome now that is another way in which you can decide how the character is different as you look at the player character the player's character might pose you look at the player's character and you look at their past and you go well this is what they did in that adventure this is what they did in that adventure and this is what they did in that adventure alright if in this adventure that had happened how would that have changed the character and then you just tweak that that way when the character is interacting with the NPC the NPC says oh did you manage to overcome the chasm well we stopped at that point and we turned around and went back home and so-and-so died enroute all this happened all that happened and that changed their entire demeanor so look at events in your own campaign history and tweak those now something that becomes very fun to do is to look at the events in your campaign history and tweak them if the players had been good or the players have been evil and see the outcomes and then that becomes the alternative universe the alternative dimension that you use it's always better in my opinion if the universe is different because of some of the characters did or did not do as a result we're going to come back to that a little bit later on when we look at how to create these alternate so if we then look at our tone the tone of an alternative universe because this is a setting so we go through the usual setting steps but the tone is generally darker and edgier and the reason for it as I've already mentioned we don't want the players to decide this is actually better than where we came from we're not going back we don't want that we want our players to want to head on home we want them to well go back to where they came from because generally speaking that's something that our players expect as well is that they are stuck where they are and they got there by accident or by chance all and we're gonna come to that also a little bit later on so there's a lot coming up so hang in there now the tone is generally set by what causes the difference so what causes this alternative universe to be different from that one and from base reality was it choices that were made was it environmental factors was it the actions of PCs that change wasn't the inaction of pcs that changed it although this is more of a time shifting story than a alternative universe story in one of my games my characters were a little bit paralyzed with inaction they would see a situation they wouldn't know what's happening or they would know what's happening but they wouldn't know what to do and that's more from the character perspective they were paralyzed with do I save that person or do I let that happened do I do this do I do that and ultimately the result was that the event occurred and they hadn't done anything and it was too late to do anything so what I wanted to do was I wanted to encourage the players to do certain actions and to not do other actions to not act rashly but to think about their actions and I had them project in this pool where they suddenly saw themselves in five years time and what had become of them so they were seeing an alternative version of themselves which because of an action had led to their character becoming x y&z that worked really well several of the players took that as a sign of what not to do and they corrected and change their behavior and can I say it was for the better it was a very good change that they went through and I think it it made the adventure that much better so that was a mini alternative you know when ative dimension alternative universe view to give my players a little bit of perspective on how they were playing the game yeah number four things to avoid now the challenge with an alternative universe is that you want to throw everything in to the alternative dimension at once you have lots of alternative dimensions there's no mandate on how many alternatives there are if you look at one of the theories we have the trousers of time which every time there's a decision that splits it bifurcates or traffic eight so it turns into fifty different options or whatever it is depending on whether the snail goes left or right just before it hits that cloverleaf to eat so you have all of these alternative universe running in parallel and your people can move between them as many of them as you need so don't overwhelm the players by changing too much stuff change one significant thing and then obviously you change the characters themselves and then the rest you keep the same it's the familiarity that will show up the difference if everything is different well again you might as well just be in a different country rather than an alternative dimension now another thing that's important to bear in mind is that everything doesn't have to be evil just for evils sake and the players their characters don't have to all be evil one can be evil one can be neutral one can be good if you want to go with alignment sort of idea morally they can be the same there can be opposite there can be an opposition to one another so instead of a United Party that meeting a split party really play around with the dynamics of the group and how things changed and altered and did that kind of thing and that will really help you in terms of developing this world and making it feel as if it's been ticking along just as much as the main campaign world has been as well something to think about is instead of showing a character that is evil or a character that is morally corrupt you could show a character who is morose or sad because an inaction or an action or an event occurred which caused them sadness which caused them to be in a state of decay perhaps it's the noble Paladin from the real dimension the real world and then the alternative dimension he's a drunkard and a dropout because he didn't save the child now your character your players characters change from being antagonistic towards the evil character or working with themselves to being someone who wants to help themselves and ultimately that engenders that embodies the idea of an alternative universe where we get this space that's as breathing and living as the one that they're in so think about it if the character was born under different circumstances tenses what would they be like and if you go the sad route or the pathetic route or the fallen route or maybe they didn't take their vows that can be as interesting to the players as if they're just meeting their exact opposite doppelgangers now something that I did say that we're going to come to in I'm coming back to it now and number five is how do our characters get from reality to the alternative dimension and how they get back how do they get back that's the important thing that MacGuffin that device whether it's whether it's a device or a spell or an emotional accident or it's an event that has to occur like the alignment of the planets whatever that is you need to make sure that your players and their characters know how to get back if they can't if they don't know if they if they arrive and they're going so how do we get back we've now stepped into an alternative universe where um there's no electricity Edison didn't live long enough he was assassinated by Tesla and Tesla was murdered two days later by Edison's wife in a fit of revenge so there's no electricity it never never never developed how do we get our electrical power device back in time now back to our present reality although it is a time-traveling show the Back to the Future series had this exact problem Marty goes back to the Wild West where there's no electricity there's no petroleum for their vehicle and they need to reach a speed of 89 miles per hour 89 kilometers an hour or whatever the the speed is that the DeLorean needs in order to jump through time so that was a very clever solution to this problem the players need to know how to move between dimensions if they don't then they have no hope of getting back which means that you don't have an adventure more so if they arrived by accident they need to over here they need to get a clear picture that in that building over there or there's a crazy scientist who lives out on the mountains or those are this orders of that if they don't get that they are not going to be invested in your story so bear that in mind that is something that's very important to give your players and I mean give don't make them work for it if they need to figure out how to get back give them enough clues and hints that they can actually figure it out don't be afraid to make that an obvious plot here we go this is it don't be afraid to do that now finally if we look at if we look at inspirational content we look at films and television shows that handle alternative universes the first one that springs to mind of course is Star Trek which is replete with alternative universe mirror universe alternative dimensions this then the next thing current show I haven't been able to catch up with it after season 1 is all about dimensional or alternative universe travel and it became quite a thing in the shows for each of the series to have an alternative dimension to go to and that alternative dimension ran in parallel for as long as the series ran so whether the next generation went to that dimensional Deep Space nine or Voyager it was always still linked to the alternative dimension that had been established way back in the 80s the 1980s so that's a that's a fairly good example of it but at the same time I felt that it was also a fairly bad example of it they they didn't change up enough things the federation becomes militant so their starships have a slight modification i know they didn't do it because of budgetary restraints but there are certain things that honda mentally have to change so bear that in mind use it as an example of what not to do if you have a peace-loving nation and the alternative universe is that they're militant and warlike their architecture is going to be significantly different now something that comes to mind when we are talking about this kind of thing is a very good example the man in the high castle which is a phenomenal series in which the Nazis have taken over most of the USA they defeated the British and they managed to get into the USA and that was the end of that so the story follows the lives of the people that are in this world but it is established that it is an alternative world or from their perspective they're the real world and there's an alternative world that runs parallel to it now what does that mean and how do they get across and all those kind of wonderful things hasn't been answers at least not as far as I know season 3 isn't out yet there is an example of where they've changed up certain things it's the 1950s and yet technology hasn't moved as far forward as it had by the by our standards by our real-world standards so there's a good example we've got there's a show called sliders which was done in the 90s where they were sliding between dimensions between parallel worlds and discovering the changes and difficulties that they had there too then if you look at another option something that may not necessarily present itself immediately as an alternative universe is the Harry Potter series Harry Potter and his companions have to step through that magical 9 and 3/4 platform on the train station to get to their magical world and they have this transition between reality and this fake space so it's almost an alternative dimension where magic works and all these amazing creatures still exist and then you've got real world which they have to return to from time to time The Chronicles of Narnia is a similar kind of idea but again we've got the situation where reality in Harry Potter's case is definitely the darker side even though you've got all these horrid things running around and Lord Voldemort running around there doesn't really matter it's a happier brighter place because you've got magic so why go back to it is the real question that I don't think was ever successfully answered and then of course later on was a fantastic piece that was totally ignored there's broke barriers no mr. although maybe I'm getting it wrong I'm not a big Harry Potter fan so that is in a nutshell I think how one can use alternative dimensions and I think they're very good to use as a prompt as a poke as just a bit of fun maybe someone doesn't turn up for a session so you run an alternate-dimension game with the same characters but this is different and that's different that's also an option to to to explore until next time I hope you enjoy the show so hit the like button if you did hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet joined us find us on Facebook we're there and there's a community that's growing there we're on Instagram or on Twitter we're just everywhere and the more people that participate and join in the bigger the community they're happy the community and the more options and alternatives we get and gather to learn how to play our remarkable game until next time wish you and yours the happiest