D&D 5E Bringing a Real World Character to a Fantasy World

[Shades of Eternity]

Ever since A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (to say nothing of the Dungeons and Dragon's cartoon), there has been this idea of bringing a person from the real world and ending up in a fantasy world.

Have you ever used this (either as a player or gm)?

Would you allow this or would it be too meta?

Use this thread as a reason to post the following 3 part instruction manual:
Rob-prepping – Surviving a Fantasy Kingdom - Part 1
Rob-prepping – Surviving a Fantasy Kingdom - Part 2
Rob-prepping – Surviving a Fantasy Kingdom - Part 3

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Technically, Connecticut Yankee was time travel.

But no, it's an irritating cliché, and I wouldn't do it.

 

[jasper]

I know the secret to gun power I win. Jasper is then killed by the commoner's two cats. Like Paul no would not allow it.

 

[Oofta]

I have, we basically just wrote them up like any other character. In 5E that would give them a special background and you need to decide what to do about classes and proficiencies.

In my case we had a couple of sessions where they were level 0 PCs (no weapon proficiencies, no spells and so on). I basically hand-waved the language barrier as "magic" and they had to find somewhere to train. Fortunately for them some elves took pity on them and were quite fascinated with the group's story even if they could never decide if they were just insane.

It was a fun, but fairly short campaign by design as just a fun one-off to take a break from our ongoing campaign. As far as being meta, we operated under the rule that similar to The Walking Dead that the people came from a world where D&D didn't exist. Tolkien still wrote his book, there were other fantasy novels, but it was assumed that they had been influenced by the magical realm without realizing it.

 

[Shiroiken]

I've done this back in AD&D and found one HUGE problem with it. Players simply cannot accept their "real" ability scores, since most of use would really have average scores. Someone might have a high (or low) ability score, but that would most likely be only a 13 or 14 (7 or 8) not 16 to 18 (3 or 4). The arguments during character creation alone ended the campaign...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I've done this back in AD&D and found one HUGE problem with it. Players simply cannot accept their "real" ability scores, since most of use would really have average scores. Someone might have a high (or low) ability score, but that would most likely be only a 13 or 14 (7 or 8) not 16 to 18 (3 or 4). The arguments during character creation alone ended the campaign...

Why not...just let the characters have high scores?

 

[Li Shenron]

Ever since A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (to say nothing of the Dungeons and Dragon's cartoon), there has been this idea of bringing a person from the real world and ending up in a fantasy world.

Have you ever used this (either as a player or gm)?

No, I've always thought it was a lame idea.

 

[Mecheon]

My favourite weird thing about the whole "Person in real world enters fantasy world" genre is just how ridiculous Japan got with it. Thankfully things have slowed down a fair bit now, but they kind of went a bit, nuts for it.

 

[Warren Ellis]

My favourite weird thing about the whole "Person in real world enters fantasy world" genre is just how ridiculous Japan got with it. Thankfully things have slowed down a fair bit now, but they kind of went a bit, nuts for it.

Most of those are due to the fact they were adoptions of webnovels. So they were easy to pick up because everything was already written down.

Like imagine your own original fiction where your SI lands in some medieval European fantasy setting. And then it gets picked up some company to publish as a book (and cleaned up), before it then further gets adopted into a comic and cartoon.

 

[Coroc]

I think while many players would have an Int score of 15 or 16 IRL maybe even more, and maybe some would have high charisma, only very few really would surpass 14 or 15 in all the physical stats.
Str 18 or 20 is like this guy playing the mountain in GoT eventually
Dex 18-20 would be amongst the best circus artists and I doubt even the (Dalai Lama would have a wisdom of 20 Greta for sure doesn't have that IRL score btw...) trigger warning just ignore the part in Paranthesis
Ups that trigger warning came to late...