Guys, I'm currently planning a game that is pretty much an adaption of a bunch of video game settings.
The worlds I was gonna run with were:
Bioshock - Rapture
Halo
Fable - probably 1
Kirby's Dreamland
Borderlands
The Darkness - video game version
Mortal Kombat
The players would get an artifact like a teleporter that would let them move between the worlds, bringing weapons and abilities with them. Anyone got any advice?
Hey, another incarnation of Multiworld Madness! You should definitely do that, I'd say. Don't take too many players, though. It'll bite you and it'll bite you badly.
I was thinking four players at most, maybe three if that was too much to keep track of. The entire idea of this is that it's pretty much a writing exercise for me; trying to combine so many genres and somehow finding a way to balance Will, ADAM, future weaponry, the power of the Darkness and straight up fist fighting.
Sounds loopy and amusing.
My advice would be as follows:
1. Make sure you have a way to control the players. Left to their own devices, players tend to be aimless and oddly docile, grinding skills wherever they happen to be standing, sometimes while waiting for something interesting to happen. Getting the feel of cycling through worlds will probably work better if they have a reason to or can't avoid it, as opposed to waiting for them to get enough consensus to world-hop for a new skill or a daft plan.
2. Consider what you want the worlds to mean, if possible in a very uniform sense. It's fine to just sort of wing how Heroism compares to ADAM if that's what you want to do, but players tend to be very creative and strange- given the option,
someone will inevitably skip over Time Slow and Fire Breath to attempt to puff-double-jump like Kirby, enhance themselves using Borderlands gun mechanics, ADAM themselves into having more Will, figure out how to wield The Light instead of The Darkness, see if Hell exists in Halo, use a plasma core to power their lightning hands, and see if ranged aiming perks work with attempts to rip a foe's heart out of their chest with their bare hands.
Again, if you want to just shrug and deal with all that when it happens, that's fine. If not, you might want to give some thought to how worlds and powers and skills and the like will work in a more general sense, rather than just dealing with it on the fly and with no particular overarching philosophy.
3. Consider some kind of overarching enemy. It's cliche, but having a coherent, recognizable foe can be more satisfying and interesting than just battling the locals whenever they pop up.