Quote from: RPGPundit;444583A GM should be able to give a sufficiently straightforward gist of a campaign that someone who is not familiar with background literature can play it, otherwise that GM has no business running it.

Yes, but that doesn't make familiarity irrelevant.  If the game is MERP and one player has read the Silmarillion seven times and another has never heard of Lord of the Rings, nothing the GM does short of spending hours per session on background will fill that gap.  There are ways to make use of that, of course - the well read player could play an elf or a ranger, while the ignorant player could play an ignorant human/hobbit, and the knowledge gap could easily be made to work in the service of the role play.  However, there will always be a gap between playing a familiar setting and an unfamiliar one - not that an unfamiliar setting is unplayable, but it is a different experience.

Sometimes, unfamiliarity is desirable - it can make the GM's work in CoC much more satisfying - but again, I would rather have all the players at about the same level of knowledge in an ideal universe.

Quote from: Aos;444364Back in the day, my wife actually boght me a dvd player for xmass- just so she could get me to watch The Matrix. I still haven't seen the sequels.

Lucky you.

I wouldn't ask players to read or watch anything. I might let them know that an upcoming campaign is modeled after a particular movie or book. That way if they want to watch, read or just look it up on wikipedia they can.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;444418I should point out that when I say "ask" I mean just that - ask.  Suggest.  I would never make it a barrier to play if a given player hadn't seen it.

I think what someone else pointed out, making a "presentation" of sorts though might be cool.  I think I'll do that with some appropriate music, maybe put it up on YT.

If you don't mind blowing through a couple of bucks, you could perhaps grab some screen caps from those movies and print them out at Kinko's for player hand-outs or tape them to whatever you use as a GM screen to reference for 'atmosphere' or something like that.

I made my group sit through Master and Commander before we made characters for the original In Harm's Way playtest. It worked perfectly! It got them into the way people acted in those days in a way nothing else could in a remarkably short time. I repeated this with IHW: Aces In Spades with The Blue Max, and again it worked a treat. For IHW: Aces and Angels, I don't think it was as effective, probably because it was set close enough to our own time that the players already knew what they wanted to do.

-clash

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reported

Quote from: Aos;444640reported

Wait!  I need a studio!

I always tell the people where I get my inspiration, and encourage them to watch / read / listen to whatever, simply because I think is cool. I never require it.

Also, we've made a lot of movie + game sessions in which we would watch a movie related to the game, and then play. The results are usually awesome, like, for example, watching "The 13th Warrior" before playing RQ Vikings. Again, nothing mandatory (people are free to arrive later, so they play the game and miss the movie). Everyone is cool with that.

Usually I'm happier if players don't know the sources where I'm getting my ideas... that way they're surprised and more likely to think I'm brilliant and creative (hah!).
It might be interesting to point them in less pertinent directions... to bust up genre cliche's a bit... such as having them over to watch Barbarella and Macbeth (the Polanski version) if we were going to play a Western RPG.
 
During a long Cthulhu campaign set in the 'Summer of Love' in San Francisco I did occasionally point them to a flavorful music video or movie from the era... more because I was immersed in the stuff and sharing vs. really expecting/hoping they'd watch, but I know some of them did.

Quote from: Esgaldil;444597Yes, but that doesn't make familiarity irrelevant.  If the game is MERP and one player has read the Silmarillion seven times and another has never heard of Lord of the Rings, nothing the GM does short of spending hours per session on background will fill that gap.  There are ways to make use of that, of course - the well read player could play an elf or a ranger, while the ignorant player could play an ignorant human/hobbit, and the knowledge gap could easily be made to work in the service of the role play.  However, there will always be a gap between playing a familiar setting and an unfamiliar one - not that an unfamiliar setting is unplayable, but it is a different experience.

Sometimes, unfamiliarity is desirable - it can make the GM's work in CoC much more satisfying - but again, I would rather have all the players at about the same level of knowledge in an ideal universe.

My feeling is that in most cases, while I obviously never forbid someone from reading source material, its almost preferable that the player receive information about MY version of the setting from me.  Otherwise you end up getting the whole "but in the book its says..." syndrome.  

What I found, amazingly, is that often players who had NO prior experience with the source material ended up correctly embodying the spirit of the source material based only in gaining familiarity with the setting as presented in actual play.  The most blatant example of this was in my Legion campaign, where many of my players who had NOT read any of the LSH comics were actually playing heroes from the comics, and often ended up interpreting them in ways uncannily true to the comic book form.  The player who plays Ultra Boy, for example, had never read a Legion comic in his life, had no prior experience with the character, and played him to perfection in a way completely fitting with the Ultra Boy of the comics.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Imperator;444658I always tell the people where I get my inspiration, and encourage them to watch / read / listen to whatever, simply because I think is cool. I never require it.

Also, we've made a lot of movie + game sessions in which we would watch a movie related to the game, and then play. The results are usually awesome, like, for example, watching "The 13th Warrior" before playing RQ Vikings. Again, nothing mandatory (people are free to arrive later, so they play the game and miss the movie). Everyone is cool with that.

this is my approach as well...:hatsoff:
for my next Viking style game I might suggest/watch "Valhalla Rising" instead/along with "13th Warrior".

Well, any such outing by me wouldn't be one of "Hey here are important plot points - you'll be trapped in a city and have to decide how to save your friends from a sniper.  Also you'll have to locate one guy trapped deep in enemy territory and bring him out."

It's more to set the tone.

I tend to do the opposite. Ask, 'what fantasy books or films do you guys like?' then 'Okay I will make the game feel like that then.'

This has the advantage of both setting the scene and getting a feel for the sort of game they want to play. If they said StarDust then the same would be different than if they said Excalibur. If they said Lord of the Rings then that is different to a Locke Lamora game. If there was no overall popular style, well its unlikely to be honest but  I would try and do a mash up for those players I thought were most hesitant or needed the most support.

And this is stuff you can do on an existing game with almost no effort. You had Conan in mind they decided Excalibur you just reskin it and put everyone in shiny field plate and have the monsters go a bit mystical and less giant snakey. Very simple really . Remember you aren't running that game you are just giving your game a flavour/feel and that is really more about determining the shared palatte you are all going to use. Symbolism and language defining ideas and all that.

I will note that also in the legion campaign, and so far exclusively in that campaign, I've posted a series of blog posts (both the "Campaign Character Profiles" and the "Raoul Duke" articles) where I give away little tid-bits of information that the players don't already know (and may or may not ever find out) in the campaign itself, creating supplementary material that essentially the Players can choose to read or not.  This has turned out to be fairly engaging for several of my players.

RPGPundit

Basically I am with Esgaldil on the MERP matter. For a licensed setting it is so much faster to get in the mood and spirit of the source material, and Clash's Master & Commander example is even better as it shows the everyday chores on board of a ship much better than I could ever explain them.
For a Firefly-type game... not so.

Quote from: jibbajibba;444899I tend to do the opposite. Ask, 'what fantasy books or films do you guys like?' then 'Okay I will make the game feel like that then.'

Ha! And at one point I did the opposite to your opposite. Before the first session of a new campaign (that would last many years) I handed the players a questionnaire listing lots of fantasy novels and movies that I have read. By their claiming familiarity with a title they decided that I would not include anything from that source in the campaign.