Cross-Realm Travel in RP

[Magus the dark prince]

I want your opinion on the topic of realm-traveling in RP. I imagine most of you have run into some characters from totally different cosmologies and Role Played with them before, and now I'm asking how you explain that, ICly.

With my character, it's pretty simple, since he uses 'Gate travel', a concept taken directly from the game I got him from. (All hail the copywrite killers..lol.). He sometimes runs into Gates, or portals, which can transport him to different times, and universes (cosmologies, or realms.).

If you've ever brought your characters to a new realm outside their 'home realm', how do you explain it?

I've noticed most characters (at least in Ayenee, I'm not familier enough with Gaera yet to give an opinion about this place.) are pretty powerful, a lot of times more powerful then the base characters of a particular realm. An example of this would be to take an uber-powerful DBZ-esque type power character and put him in the world of something like, say, the Lord of the Rings. The power scale is way off balance here.

I use a method of toning it down a bit. Whenever my character changes cosmologies, he loses those powers that don't exist the same in the new realm. That means, when Magus finds himself in Faerun (Forgotten Realms, a very popular version of D&D), his powers are all but nulled. Magic doesn't work the same way in Ayenee (or insert other freeform realm) as it does in Faerun, which has set rules, and that means Magus must relearn all the magic he lost, keeping it inside the boundaries of Faerun's (or any other realm) physics.

Anyway, I just want to know what you guys do if this situation arises with your chars, and if you adhere to any 'handicaps', so your characters balance out with others ofthe new realm.

Payce,
Magus <p>"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown." -HP Lovecraft</p>

[Archmage144]

My characters would be "underpowered" for any other worldset I could drag them into, so I have very little trouble with that.

Also, for the sake of logic, I only have one character who has ever (and likely will ever) travel to "alternate worlds." He's been to both Ayenee (well, somewhat) and the world of the ADVENTURERS! RP forum. Too much dimension hopping is just screwed up. <p>

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[Banjooie]

Hm, should be in OOC, but okay.

The Neo Vanists. Keep in mind it's AU from Lunar 2. Incredibly.

Now, Diran came through due to some sort of odd dimensional disturbance when he was sort of crashing in an airship. The other 7 came through due to the magic school adopting the dimensional magics Will Baseton was capable of, and from there, the Neo Vanists learned how to dimensionally travel between Gaera and Neo Vane. That being roughly it, however.

That, and very few are actually willing to do it. Long story.

[Capntastic]

The game you referred to that you got the concept of 'Gate Travel' from.

You wouldnt mean Shadowbane, would you?

[Squintz Altec]

I think he's talking Chrono Trigger. *points to his avatar*

[PriamNevhausten]

My usual method of porting characters from one scene to the next is to take the method which is described most recently and popularly by the movie The One. The character has the same basic personality traits, attributes, and such; but everything else is tweaked based on what the situation will allow. Usually I don't take the characters too far out of line for this (for example I wouldn't take Rache Kaine, my cybernetically-enhanced sniper, into a swords-and-sorcery realm without a damned good explanation already in mind)--if a character, as a significant trait, uses magic, then I will keep them to worlds where magic exists in some form or another. You get the idea.

This is not to say that 'crossover' ideas cannot be interesting, and fun. Lord knows we've had some of our cyberpunk-esque characters invade the swords-and-sorcery setting briefly, for no good reason OOC-wise besides the fact that the two worlds existed.

As far as IC legitimizations go (and don't fool yourself into thinking they are anything less than justifications for PC playtime), there's a whole bunch of reasons. A high tech/magical device explodes/malfunctions, causing a portal/rift to open/swallow the world, or maybe a demon/archmage/dragon wants to try out a new spell/item/ability on some random people/adventurers/friends/enemies. Maybe a catastrophic event caused a deity/archmage/mad scientist to take a look at the way the world was going and decide to stop its current progression by means of time/realm travel.

That's a lot of options in there already. And they don't even have to be so logical or reasonable. Perhaps the PC's just got caught up in a temporal storm when a chronomancer was passing through. Perhaps it was just a simple chance happening, a being-in-the-exact-right-place-at-the-exact-right-time during the eclipse on the seventh moon of the blah blah blah and the characters NATURALLY time travel. Maybe there's jigawatts involved.

There's as many reasons as you have fingers, presuming you have a lot more than ten fingers. Maybe like two hundred. <p><span style="font-size:xx-small;">"It's in the air, in the headlines in the newspapers, in the blurry images on television. It is a secret you have yet to grasp, although the first syllable has been spoken in a dream you cannot quite recall." --Unknown Armies</span></p>