Do you feel it is out of place to use real life to inspire story lines?

Maybe, but I do it all the time, after all inspiration has to come from somewhere. Just last game I used the two canadians being killed in mexico to spark a story hook for a player who owns a hotel.

Absolutely not. I've run games based on famous unsolved crimes in the past - to speak of the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme (today), I had a group of players take the roles of the police men digging into one of the wackier conspiracy theories for the assassination I could come up with.

But I've used personal more "mundane" situations as well. We had a miniature con in a summer house out by a lake in the middle of nowhere. I took an afternoon scouting the place, then in the evening ran a horror game where the participants at a miniature con were under siege by a lurking horror. Every question when someone asked "can I do X" we just looked around and figured if he could, based on what was available in the cabin. How they cursed the lack of firearms in the house.

Absolutely not.  I routinely base npcs off of people I know--their mannerisms and character traits.  I alter history and real life stuff to develop stories.  The real world is a great inspiration for games.

I can't see where it would ever be out of place to use real life as an inspiration for story lines.

Well... if one of your players had a particularly tragic event in their personal history and you leverage that to use as a new plotline in your game, that could be in poor taste.

So:  Real life inspiration, good!  Having your player's recently passed away mother show up in your All Flesh Must Be Eaten game, bad!

if dreams count as real life then... yes.....

psst Kyle, you held Shift too long while typing in your user name...

Quote from: VarajDo you feel it is out of place to use real life to inspire story lines?

I think real life is incredibly useful as a basis for certain elements of a story.

A "for instance"...

I've always had real difficulties creating a real sense of political intrigue in my campaigns.  It's just not something that I do particularly well.  The ideas are either tired, or more commonly either are too simple or too convoluted.

Read the front page of the morning paper.  I guarantee you there is a story there that could form the basis of a great thread within your campaign.  Of course, it need not be the main story, but as a means of introducing an element of politics, I think its a great trick.

For years, the kingdom's scholars warned of dragon attacks from the Southern Realms.  As is often the case, however, politicians with more pressing agendas  failed to heed the warnings of their more learned colleagues.

After a recent dragon attack destroyed the southern villages throughout the realm, a powerful noble family vowed to investigate whether the king and his followers had adequately prepared the realm.  The noble family is leveraging popular support for its investigation...but to what end?  Theirs or the realm's?

A nobleman of the family sends for the PCs and asks them whether they would be willing to try and bribe an official for information relating to the attack...

This could have easily started as an article about Katrina.  The ports contract, Iranian facility testing, etc.  It's all a gold mine if you look.

So yeah.  Real life is great!

Sure.  I just draw the line at *boring* RL events.  That's what has struck me as so whack about "Dogs of the Vineyard" -- the storylines that have been trotted out as "wonderful" strike me as "whack".  But I don't like soap operas, either...

Check out the thread I just started: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?p=837#post837

I did just that.

I think some things can be "too close" to use yet - for example, an I had an idea for a superhero game using the events of 9/11 as the trigger effect for causing a bunch of survivors to gain superpowers (leading to the eventual realization that great tragedies and disasters have an innate ability to grant powers) - but decided against it.  I guess I could just use some other event as the trigger - but really 9/11 being one of the closest one in recent history (though I guess the tsunami last year, or hurricane katrina could also be "too close"), if the game was a modern one it would come up eventually anyway, if not explicity, at least in the minds of the players.

Using real life events to inspire games is good, but I've seen it where DMs took something from history that's very memorable and made it part of their game, and well....it was about as subtle as getting hit in the head with a hammer.  Recognizing the inspiration is fine, but getting beat over the head with the real life inspiration sucks.  I'm talking about DMs who have replaced Nazis with Orcs and had them in charge of concentration camps, etc.  There's a world full of shitty GMs out there.

TS Eliot once said, "Bad poets borrow; good poets steal."

How that applies here: if you simply lift something and place it in your story, it will probably feel like someone else's story (as TiQuinn describes). You can use a real life event as a kind of inspiration, but realize that you have to make it your own, and also change it so that it opens itself to role playing rather than railroading.