Have you ever used real individuals (historical, celebrity or otherwise noteworthy) as prominent characters in your historical or modern games? I mean more than background color or very brief cameos but more fleshed out encounters like the PCs talked tactics with Rommel, attended one of Caligula's infamous banquet/orgies or dated Marilyn Monroe (). How did it work out? Do you feel you handled the figure well and did the encounter feel believable? What did your players think?

Quote from: Nexus;911703Have you ever used real individuals (historical, celebrity or otherwise noteworthy) as prominent characters in your historical or modern games? I mean more than background color or very brief cameos but more fleshed out encounters like the PCs talked tactics with Rommel, attended one of Caligula's infamous banquet/orgies or dated Marilyn Monroe ().

Yes, and another of these events is happening now.

QuoteHow did it work out?

Just fine, IMO. They only learned later that this is a real person, which was a real kicker...

QuoteDo you feel you handled the figure well and did the encounter feel believable?

Yes.
I'm modest like that:).

QuoteWhat did your players think?

They said they like it, and some of them laughed a lot;).

My players don't like meeting real life people as they are afraid of changing history or the game's path. I think they are more concerned with not being able to kill someone because they are important.

The way I see it is that history tends to happen, so if they kill a Mongol hunter who would have become Genghis Khan, then a different Mongol warrior would do the same.

Yes.

Though even in heavy real world history themed RPGs like Furry Pirates and Furry Outlaws I tended to keep the instances low and at least twice Im pretty sure the players didnt realize the person they met was a real historical figure.

One DM for Oriental Adventures was running it in something more historical a setting and while I am not positive. I suspect we met at least one or more historical figures of the era.

Its really a YMMV sort of thing. Personally Im not fond of players who get off on trying to, or successfully, killing a historical figure unless we know the setting is intended to go a divergent path, if it hasnt allready. From experience it can devolve into a "Hah! I killed Washington and fucked up your campaign!" sort of dickery.

A few times.  Most of the time it's happened it's been in Western games.  Since most of the real people that would stand out historically have become part of Wild West Legends there usually isn't too much dissonance.  I remember the look on one guy's face when he realized the guy he was starting to get into an argument with on a train was Wild Bill Hickok.  I think he would have rather been talking to Asmodeus at that point.  Sometimes people don't recognize the characters and a little bit later I hear from a player that they looked up an NPC and found out it was a real person.  

In a 40's campaign, as a player, we had taken out a mob boss in Los Angeles (working for another mob boss, natch) and found a box of ridiculously expensive cigars.  One of the PCs was a WWII vet, so on a lark, we sent the cigars to Winston Churchill.  A couple months later we got a thank you note.

I think real characters are better as seasoning rather than the main course.

Most recently, I ran an adventure set in 1937 Shanghai, and of course I used a lot of historical figures. The characters ended up on the nationalist side and helped Xie Jinyuan and Yang Huimin to prepare the defense of the Sihang Warehouse (although they cheesed it before the war actually started). All but one player were totally oblivious to the fact that the adventure was based on real historical events, and the NPCs were based on real historical figures, but that one liked it a lot.

I ran a Third Crusades "special forces" thing back in the day. All the characters were based on real(ish) historical folks, all turned up to eleven.
For example, the squire in the party was a fourteen-year-old calling himself "Robert Lockhart". Surprisingly handy with a longbow.

They got caught up in the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat, they snuck into Acre while it was under siege, and they dealt directly with Richard the Lionheart.

Quote from: soltakss;911732My players don't like meeting real life people as they are afraid of changing history or the game's path. I think they are more concerned with not being able to kill someone because they are important.

The way I see it is that history tends to happen, so if they kill a Mongol hunter who would have become Genghis Khan, then a different Mongol warrior would do the same.

You definitely need the excellent, just-published, TimeWatch.

I enjoy bringing in historical figures but will admit they are very much 'seasoning' and not main course as said above. I script their appearances pretty strictly so as to get maximum effect but minimal risk to them. If they do actually take part in the adventure they are, well pretty damned lucky let's just say.

I tend to steer the action to fit history rather than changing it. My players think it's cool too, sort of confirms that what happened in game, really did.

In a recent game the New Orleans voodoo queen Marie Laveau had a part and was injured and nearly killed. I allowed her to survive and used it as the reason she bowed out of public life and let her daughter carry on. That's been theorized for years to explain her seemingly prolonged youth. Now when the players read about it, they'll know why.

Quote from: soltakss;911732My players don't like meeting real life people as they are afraid of changing history or the game's path. I think they are more concerned with not being able to kill someone because they are important.

The way I see it is that history tends to happen, so if they kill a Mongol hunter who would have become Genghis Khan, then a different Mongol warrior would do the same.

Sometimes only a very specific person with very specific circumstances could have become or done whatever was become or done.  In other occasions, there were like a dozen or a hundred people who could have if things had been different.

Either way though, once the original dude is gone, things are going to get more different from there. In the first of the two situations I outline above, it will be RADICALLY different. In the second, considerably less so, but still different in many smaller but important ways.

Quote from: Nexus;911703Have you ever used real individuals (historical, celebrity or otherwise noteworthy) as prominent characters in your historical or modern games?

Yes. I've used a number of real people in Call of Cthulhu, most recently they ran into a number of historical figures in 1920s Shanghai. It worked fine, though the players didn't really notice at the time who was historical and who was not. I've never done the Young Indiana Jones style of play where the point is for the PCs to interact with historical figures that the players were likely to already have heard of.

In my H+I campaign there are hundreds of real life NPCs. Most are cameos. Some aren't. It seems to work fine. Occasionally the players notice the NPC is an historical figure. Often they don't unless I tell them. Given that most of the figures from the 1620s aren't as well known as Cardinal Richelieu, Anne of Austria, or Louis XIII the players don't have any specific expectation for the historical person's personality. They've interacted the most with Richelieu and his eminence grise, Pére Joseph. Based on player comments, the personalities of the game versions of the real people seem to have worked out OK.

As to the OP, since I run many historical and quasi-historical games, the answer is "all the fucking time". Dark Albion is obviously full of real historical characters.

Quote from: Nexus;911703Have you ever used real individuals (historical, celebrity or otherwise noteworthy) as prominent characters in your historical or modern games? I mean more than background color or very brief cameos but more fleshed out encounters like the PCs talked tactics with Rommel, attended one of Caligula's infamous banquet/orgies or dated Marilyn Monroe ().

All the fucking time.

My Flashing Blades campaign was filled with historical figures, some of them prominent, others incredibly obscure. In our Boot Hill campaign, my character played cards with John Chisum and Clay Allison, and got in a fight with Allison afterward. The legionnaires in my d20 Modern Algeria counter-insurgency campaign were decorated by Gen. Raoul Salan.

Quote from: Nexus;911703How did it work out? Do you feel you handled the figure well and did the encounter feel believable? What did your players think?

It's awesome, especially when the characters realize they're facing a historical figure unexpectedly. The adventurers in my FB campaign were sent to negotiate the ransom of a Savoyard noble held prisoner in the duchy of Milan by the Spanish - a translator was there to assist the Spanish commander to speak with the French envoys. The translator was a Roman (as in Papal States) soldier named Mazarini who was destined for a career in the Church. The expression on the face of the player who recognized the future Cardinal Mazarin was priceless.

I had the most fun roleplaying Cardinal Richelieu, of course.

I ran a Street Fighter: The Roleplaying Game campaign set in 1973, that revolved around the death (by vibrating palm, of course) of Bruce Lee. We didn't get as far along as I had planned, but the PC's did get to train with Bruce a bit (although, because he was going by his original given Chinese name, they didn't realize it was him until a little later).

I also ran a steampulp game of Adventure! set in 1899 that had a young Aleister Crowley as a guest star. The PC's were a newly-formed club of adventurers, and their patron invited Crowley for dinner aboard their armored battle zeppelin, to see if Crowley was the sort of bloke they might want to invite to join up. Everyone decided that he was an overbearing dork who shouldn't be invited back, but one player blew all of his Inspiration points to beat Crowley in a drunken game of chess, just so he could brag that he had done that. (He still brings it up now and again.)

I also ran a game of Vampire: The Masquerade set in 1991 in San Francisco, using as many canon details about San Francisco (spread out over half a dozen books, I might add) from the different OWoD games as I could scrounge together--so the PC's managed to speak to and politic with undead Oscar Wilde several times in his super-secret underground (as in buried-under-the-ground) yacht/vampire nightclub. And undead Harry Houdini turned up at a Toreador party, and had a fun conversation with one of the PC's about seances. The PC's also had a run-in with that one Malkavian from Los Angeles by Night who looks just like Bela Lugosi (and his Ghoul that looks just like Dwight Frye), but probably isn't, so that might not count. The players thought I was just being crazy weird, and didn't believe me at first when I told them that I had taken all of those vampires out of actual sourcebooks for the game, and hadn't just made them up myself. If the game had gone on long enough, the PC's would have run into vampire Aleister Crowley, too. (My goal with that game was to deliver an authentically gonzo 90's game of Vampire, and I think I nailed it.)

Oh, and when I ran Dead Man Stomp for Call of Cthulhu, the showgirl PC used her contacts to get Louis Armstrong's phone number; she called him, and he swore up and down that he never gave Leroy that peculiar trumpet. (I did the voice, and everything.)

So my answer is: yes, I do that sometimes, only when I do it, it comes out fucking ridiculous.

Fun, though!

All the fucking time! Sometimes I even add them to fantasy settings:).
Most of the, few players ever guess which ones are real character:D!