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TV characters you base game characters on.


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Base is a good word, let's say I 'based' these NPC's on television characters. I started a campaign as "street level", but it lasted long enough to outgrow that. This campaign included, at various times:

  • The gang of thieves using code names Top Cat, Benny the Ball, Choo Choo, Brain, Fancy-Fancy, and Spook.
  • The medical examiner, Dr. Quincy, who was always crusading about some social issue.
  • The Wonder Dog and his hench-people, Wendy and Marvin.
  • A group of villainous aliens that finished out the campaign included Zok, Igoo, Tundro, Gloop, and Gleep.

Yeah, those characters were 'based on' television characters, yeah, let's call it that.

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Oh, if you want direct rips, well, to make a long story short, a friend is very bummed about real world events in the political sector.

 

So to cheer her up, I ran her with a solo superhero thing where I had tweaked something about the universe by direct insert of a TV show she had only now seen but was really enjoying...

 

Her superheroine saves the day, wakes up in a top secret hospital, hears two voices talking about how she's great for the program, or is she? then...the President of the United States enters the room, shakes her hand and introduces himself

 

"I'm President Jed Bartlet, and I'd like you consider joining a program I'm restarting and improving for a superhero team under the auspices of the Executive Branch."

 

In short, in the gaming world I dropped her in, the West Wing TV show crew is currently in charge.

 

 

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  • 2 months later...

Pretty much every Monk I play is based on Ichi - that's Zatoichi of the Blind Swordsman series.  Not that I make blind monks, just that I base their personality and demeanor on Ichi's.  Kind of one part bumbling idiot, one part idiot-savant, one part a man kind and wise beyond his years.

 

I'd actually love to try to do the actual "Blind Swordsman" thing in an RPG, but it is actually harder to pull off than it looks.  

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On 1/9/2018 at 8:54 PM, Cassandra said:

Liberty was inspired by Denise "Jo" Mahoney from Scrubs.  She was a competent doctor but had a problem with relating to her patients.

I loved that she was the one resident Dr. Cox wouldn't mess with, apparently because he could see how little it would take to make her snap and go on a murder spree.

 

None of my HERO characters are based on a TV character, but I made an NPC as part of a team thought experiment who was basically Joel Grey's Chiun from Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

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Not a TV character, but I ran a game in which Project Icarus from the film Suspect Zero was real and the player hero's were a classified unit of FBI agents who worked with the "remote viewers" amidst a deep state civil war that had a balkanized host of competing black projects and interest groups that drew liberally on down-the-rabbit-hole conspiracy theories from the real world and fiction.

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On ‎11‎/‎13‎/‎2017 at 2:01 AM, Lucius said:

I once based a fantasy ranger character on Ranger Gord from the Red Green Show.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

I often base a tagline on a palindromedary

 

To give you an idea of the character - one scene in the show had Ranger Gord lying on the ground talking about how he never gets bored out in the woods all by himself because he can always play the old children's game of finding shapes in the clouds. He describes the things he sees in the cloud shapes. Then the camera pans up and we see a clear blue sky with no clouds. Red Green says in a voice over "Ranger Gord doesn't have his head in the clouds. He has clouds in his head."

 

Lucius Alexander

 

I have palindromedaries in my taglines

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I cannot recall his name, but you all know him: an Asian American actor who was maybe fifty forty years ago and is maybe sixty today.  He's been in damned near everything, from M*A*S*H to Big Trouble in Little China, and was the voice of Po's adopted father (the Goose) in the Kung Fu Panda movies. 

 

Any time I need an endearing yet irritating-as-hell just slightly deranged  NPC, no matter where it starts, it ends up as him. 

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Don't have any at the moment;  I probably use books more than TV, too.

 

And there's something of a serendipity factor...you need the TV character concept and the campaign to dovetail.  Had one great situation like this...a Vampire game where coldly calculating and incredibly efficient made sense.  The character's style was based on Michael from La Femme Nikita...which also tells ya how long ago that was....:(

 

I've also taken inspiration from a song.  Vampire again.  The song:  Charlie Daniel's Still in Saigon.  Good song, good story.  PERFECT for a creepy Malkavian.

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