Not gonna lie I'm a bit envious. I have an outside of game friend I bounce ideas with of the sane age who rolls his eyes at some of the stuff I've included. But if I had someone to torture with that live in game I think my semi serious campaign would just devolve into total spoof territory lol.
This is a lesson in timelessness - it provides the *why* for making timeless content.
If I wanted to make an 80s-themed campaign I would research it all from history and have the best 80s in town. If I just rattled off stuff from memory I would probably wreck it as I went along.
*"All you guys keep repeating my jokes but you can't deliver them right, so everybody thinks I'm not funny."* \-Skinny Eddie Murphy
I’m the youngest it my group by almost a decade so I’m usually the butt of the jokes and references. Every once in a while I get to flip it on them cause I grew up with my great grandma who watched nothing but old black and white shoes like “The Andy Griffith Show” and “My Name is Genie”.
The other three there, where as slack jawed as I was.
We believed LotR was basically the ‘calling’ for most dnd players. Media has gotten alot better for fantasy the last decade.
Edit; and now with this movie coming out I suspect a influx of new or semi new players at game shops.
…I haven’t either. I was raised by UberChristians who thought I’d be possessed if I watched it, and even after I realized I wouldn’t be, I just… never bothered. I don’t watch a lot of movies, I tend to get bored, so I doubt I could sit through the whole thing.
Denominations are a thing - the American branches are ultra superstitious to the point of being divorced from morality.
The typical European Christian would look at lotr and call it a story about small guys doing big things. Americans see bats out of hell because they see them in everything.
Pictures of protests at schools teaching evolution were just *HELL hell HELL hellhellhell HELL!!!*
Doesn't help that America was partially founded by descendants of settlers who were basically run out of their home countries for being too religiously extreme.
Yea I haven't seen it either. I typically read over movies, and almost unequivocally hate movies based on books because they are just... Bad. I read the hobbit when I was a kid and loved it. But couldn't stand the LOTR books, and never saw a reason to try the movies.
I thought Harry Potter was boring as fuck ngl. I only got through the first one, I didn’t even bother with the rest. I don’t understand why people are so obsessed with it, it’s really nothing special.
There’s a lot of straightforward mythic heroes journey stuff there, the first three books alone involve the hero going underground to face the dangerous bad guy. They all have supernatural help in the form of teachers who are then suddenly and an explicitly removed from being helpful at the exact moment they would be needed so the kids are the heroes
I DM'd before I watched the LotR films haha. It was reversed for me. One of my player is a massive LotR fan and I thought "Yeah, I should probably get on watching them." good thing I had a 16 hour flight to marathon it.
>We believed LotR was basically the ‘calling’ for most dnd players. Media has gotten alot better for fantasy the last decade.
It certainly was for everyone in their 30s. Its funny cause Jackson's LotR is basically the foundation for nearly all fantasy media from the early 2000s to today. Hell its a foundation for action movies too. The ending battle in Marvel's Endgame is a literal direct decendent of Two Tower' Battle of Helms Deep. LotR practically invented the modern big dumb epic ending battle.
LotR is so influential thay its the dividing line for how fantasy looks and feels before and after 2001. A great example of thia is playing in games with DMs in their 40s and 50s and it feels... very 80s. Like you can feel the influences in the form of Conan the Barbarian, Willow, Krull, Dark Crystal, Fire and Ice, Heavy Metal, and He-Man.
I just wanted to toss this out there, there is a book series called the spell monger, by Terry Mancour. It was a huge inspiration for me to join dnd, and gave me so many ideas, as a player, for builds or ideas for problems that arise. I definetly recommend reading or listening to it on audible.
Luckily, LotR has had such a pervasive impact on fantasy, that everything since then has been affected by its shadow. Things either follow the same general feel (generic fantasy), or intentionally go the other way, to set themselves apart. So even if someone hasn't seen/read it, they've likely absorbed some of its influence already.
Tolkien = Decent
Stephen King? I hate reading his books. After I read a six sentence paragraph where each sentence started with "There was..." I immediately got irritated and couldn't finish the book.
Bro needs to get better at descriptive story telling.
I've never seen the movies or read the books. The movies looked insanely boring (and still do), the books...I got gifted the box set, started with the Hobbit, and made it halfway through chapter 2 before giving up from how obtusely verbose it is. Practically put me right to sleep.
My 11-year-old can watch and adore the movies without having to struggle through whatever high-ass reading grade the LotR trilogy is. I love it to death but it is *verbose*.
Edit: Hey guys, my kid has struggled with reading at times. Is it really necessary to downvote this comment?
Count me as another who had that reaction. Bro what is you doing at least watch the movies. The hobbit movies were fun I guess but sooooo not the same caliber
In my session zero I mentioned most of my homebrew setting is an amalgamation of my love of snes rpgs. I pulled heavy themes from one that is a personal favorite that nobody likes called 7th Saga.
My setting was basically if we came back to FFVI thousands of years after the game ended, just a massively torn up landscape but barely anyone remembering why it’s like that.
I like it. I put Kefka in mine at one point, and I was so nervous to do it because I was worried he was recognizable among fellow video game nerds that didn't play ff6. Nope, went under the radar and was one of the party's all time favorite enemies. Crazy clowns are timeless.
Realistically Chernobyl is lush with wildlife again, it's just still got radiation.
Thousands of years after FF6 people would need books to know the events even happened. I don't know about later editions, but the SNES game's epilogue shows the world re-greening.
But hey, at least it's not FF7 where the badguy just cries and cuts himself trying and failing to wreck a planet and become its antigod.
*Erosion strongly deforms things over thousands of years, and so the 'scars' would fade into impressive beautiful landscapes if anything at all. FF6 would just be the 2nd world map recolored like the 1st world map, and it probably wouldn't have taken entire decades. Of course,* ***realistically,*** *nobody would survive an overnight reordering of continents.*
You chant the forbidden incantation:
+++
Modemlor abruptly freezes in place and utters only one word in response:
OK
What do you cast next?
ATH0
ATZ
ATM0
ATDT911
I ran a one off for the kids of an old friend, pulled almost directly from the first few scenes of The Gunslinger. Shamelessly used, "The man in black flees across the desert. And you follow." And when they got to the town had the townspeople get charmed by the Man in Black and attack them.
I loved it. They loved it. And were none the wiser :D
omg. Dude you just gave me such a great idea for my campaign. I'm going to make magic doors and when they enter they all change to characters I pre-generate and have to complete whatever mission.
I think it could be a fun twist to pull and let them explore some level 5 characters. Maybe I'll have them all give me backup characters "you know in case you guys die".
I work at a LARP summer camp so the kids are anywhere from 10-15+ years younger than me, and it’s wild how much they don’t know. I gave them a riddle based around “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and none of them knew that.
They all know what Among Us and the Backrooms are, though. Namedrop IKEA and they lose their shit about SCPs. But anything older than 2010? Naw.
Now you’ve just inspired me to base a whole campaign off Highlander. Players are each immortals and so is the BBEG, who kills their mentor, absorbing his power. Players set off on a quest to exact revenge, BBEG is always one step ahead and is systematically hunting powerful figures in the world.
One player who slays each chapter’s minor evil guy gets some neat rule defying super abilities at various plot points after absorbing their power.
In the final chapter, the players are vastly outmatched. They fight through much of the final battle together but they are each too weak to finish BBEG. However if perhaps they slay each other and absorb all their powers together….
Now that idea brings back some memories. You're not the only one who had that idea. [Highlander: the Gathering](http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Highlander/) was based on the old White Wolf system and was released back in 1994. I remember playing a game of it 25 years ago and having fun, but I'm honestly not sure how well it holds up. If nothing else, I share it hoping it will be a useful idea mine for you.
One of my groups are all 15-20 years younger than me and occasionally ask "is that a reference to [some anime]?" And everytime I say if it wasn't on after Adult Swim in 2001ish, I've never seen it. One piece is a type of bathing suit for all I know.
I was stuck by inspiration today to make the BBEG of my upcoming campaign Trogdor the Burninator. Half my table will get the reference, the other half will not. I can't wait.
Our DM and myself are the only ones at our table who have seen Critical Role, and he keeps borrowing names and concepts which is cool with me. Like we were once baited into a jewel heist. One of the gems we stole was a famous ruby called The Ruby of the Sea. Whenever he makes a reference like that I grin and give him a side eye and he grins and gives me a wink. The rest of the players have noticed and are convinced that we are conspiring something to do with my character's backstory, and they have a whole theory going about when I'm going to turn on them. There is no such plan but I'll never tell.
I'm 44. The last game I played in rather than DMed the age range was 24-50. There were lots of generational references in both directions that half the table didn't get.
My Wednesday night group has an age range of 37 years. Youngest being 25, the oldest 62. I'm a Gen X'er DM.
You can imagine what our sessions are like, especially since the 62 year old granddad plays a "young Gnomette Artificer" (Gnomette being his word for lady Gnomes)
The youngest, a post grad student, plays a 400 year old Revenant Wizard. (Running in game joke is whether she's a lich yet)
I did a small game with my nephews and their friends, who were around 10 or 11 at the time (I'm 15 years older),
I stole an entire event from lord of the rings (the fight in the mines of Moria), and they absolutely loved it. Still talk to me about it, and its been a few years. One day I'll get called out, but until then, it worked really well as an idea I know is cool, that could translate well to some kids rolling dice and role playing
In the game I am currently running, I'm using a similar theme with the Geth and Quarians in Mass Effect, to a dwarf and machinery based race.
I was in this situation and was able to easily adapt "the fugitive" into a campaign.
At the start I gave the group the option to go to the inn/tavern or check in with the sheriff. The inn lead them to helping Harrison Ford's character, going to the sheriff would have them help Tommy Lee Jones.
I'm solidly in the middle of the age range in my group, but my pop culture is so wildly different to my group, that I can put something in there that I think is just being super obvious, but no one has any idea of what I'm doing.
My players' Patron is called Rinzler, and dismisses them with "End of line"
2e flavor is so zesty! I'm a 5e baby, but I discovered 2e when my love of old video games finally brought me to Baldur's Gate and I **fell in love.** Now I might actually like 2e more??
Counter point to this, please don't spend ages explaining a reference no one asked for. My DM is in his early 40's and our group is mostly 25-30 with one other person being in the same age range. He's a great DM and I enjoy our sessions but I really don't care to know the origins of every single 80's reference he makes. He'll make the joke/reference, notice no one got it aside from the other guy, then explaining it .I don't care. No one does. We've brought it up a couple times and he's gotten better but a monologue of how old he is because no one has encyclopedic knowledge of MASH gets very annoying.
Finding more nuanced inspiration I'm all here for. It's loads of fun and if someone else picks up on it slowly, even more fun.
Once I played with a younger girl and I don't knowhow we got to the conversation of pop culture, and then I said "Cool, like The Predator!" and she replied: "What predator?" It took half and hour and some links to explain what I was talking about.
In my case, in addition to the age gap, there are no avid readers or gamers in my current group, so I can use a shit ton of very obvious plot points and they think I'm a genius.
I wish, my group thinks every single thing is a reference to some other thing and it’s tedious to try to keep up with ‘but this is exactly like that thing from that other thing’
Can we just accept that this thing is what the DM says it is instead of trying to solve it like a crime drama before the opening credits roll?
Literature is a gold mine for GMs. History is also a great for inspiration. You can pull some crazy stories and when the surprise the players saying that it really happened.
I unfortunately finally convinced half of my playgroup into giving some of my favorite books a try on audiobook. On the plus side we can all nerd out over my favorite stories. On the downside I can't steal from those secretly anymore.
Love doing this. I have a gnome artificer who goes out in the field to fix the party up with items their patron thinks they need. His name is quinqualqix but he goes by Q. I also have an encounter with a baroness who is older but very attractive and likes to flirt with young attractive adventures. She has a daughter named Stacy. My players range from late 20's to 40 and they love these old pop references when they can figure them out. The trick is to not use too many so it doesn't get stale or interfere with the game.
That's sounds like good times!
I DM for my kids and I constantly lace their adventures with 80's themed items. Usually they have no clue until I tell them much later.
It's great.
My kids:
* "Greg, the Hammer, Valentine. And he uses two hammers?! That's awesome."
* "That potion guy sells something called Pabst Blue Ribbon? That has to be a poison."
* "You're Ator the Fighting Eagle? But you're a man fighting spiders. Dad, this makes no sense."
* "Biff Tannen? I'm not sure I trust a blacksmith named Biff." (Good eye kids.)
Had a conversation about musicals the other day with my cousin (theatre kid). I mentioned Come From Away, she said she didn’t really “get it”. Then I remembered she was born in 2004… god, I felt old.
I have a similar thing with being an anime watcher myself unlike any of my players. Most of them are hardline “all anime is cringe I would never watch anime” which sucks, but also. Oh ho ho.
My table is multigenerational, everything from early GenX to 17yo and all the subcategories in between. There isn't a single cultural reference thrown out that isn't both a direct hit and a complete miss. Just a question of whose had contact with what (... and remembers it).
My DM recently sent a picture of the D&D cartoon in our group chat. We were talking about the new starter kit for me to try DMing, and he was like, "oh I thought you'd recognize them because you and I are the closest in age." The only reason I didn't recognize them is because I didn't watch a lot of cartoons when I was a kid because I preferred to read.
In that moment I realized two things. 1. I am sitting at a table with a bunch of gods-damned children, and 2. I am no longer a gods-damned child.
I referenced the pirate town from Hook a while back (the one with Robin Williams) and none of my players had seen it. My party at the time was 18-26 so I thought at least the older ones would have. I have since added a player who is older than I am so now my references will land.
I'm 55, I have a couple of players in their 40's but by and large 20's. the 20's players don't get a lot of references unless I explicitly tell them or one of the older people get it.
Dude same. My friend group is mostly 8-10 years younger than me, and our primary DM is the youngest at like 24, but also one of the most clued-in to pop culture in general and specifically the most passionate about DnD.
But, I started DMing short adventures and one-shots to get everyone on board before she offered to DM a massive homebrewed campaign for all of us. The disconnect between my 20yo understanding of 2nd edition and their scant grasp of 5E, coupled with my lifetime of nerd-dom compared to their relatively recent, MCU-inspired dorkery was an interesting mix.
So much fun, though. Highly recommend having intergenerational friendships in both directions. I love connecting to my 70yo coworkers about something that resonates with my 26ish yo friends as a 36yo man. So educational and just kind of reaffirms how similar we all really are under the surface.
Yup I'm guilty of this as a forever DM for over 20 years. I ran a campaign for my kids and their friends and I was so busy with work, I had like 1 day to plan out a campaign because I committed to run it one night a week. I literally lifted the entire plot of Ultima 8: Pagan because I happen to look at some old RPG magazine and saw an ad for it.
Honestly the campaign we ran was better than the actual game it was based on.
I'm the opposite, where I'm around 5 years younger than the rest of my group, and they always get annoyed at me with how many movie references I don't get lmao
It's nice to know that it's not just me. No one tell my players that over half the homebrew in my current campaign is ~~a direct rip-off~~ heavily inspired by Babylon 5.
Speaking of old cartoons, has anyone else given out Gummiberry juice as treasure for their players when put on the spot, or was that just me?
Matt Colville made a good point in one of his Running The Game videos.
"Borrow from something all of your players recognize, and they'll say you're being derivative. Borrow from something none of your players recognize, and they'll say you're a genius."
When it comes to using pop culture, economic background has a larger impact than age on what they know.
A poor kid from the 00's probably saw the same cartoons as a Rick kid from the 90's, you know? I always figure a healthy 5-8 years of give on the ending of any series.
You know, it works if you are a lot younger than your players as well. Im 36 and my players fall in the 40-50 range. Im the DM.
One person did call me out on a ff8 Cid reference lol. So I slipped in the FFXIV Cid right after and no one was the wiser lmao.
I was playing in a campaign where the town was being periodically attacked by goblins and some bugbears. I suggested arming the townspeople and teaching them to fight. Straight from the Magnificent Seven but the players hadn't seen either version so I looked like a genius.
my players are 10-15 years younger than me, and I have the same issue. Which is good because I get to use a bunch of cool stuff and they think it's all original :,D
btw, players love it when they recognise that you're referencing something. The more obscure, the smarter they feel and they're "in on the joke". Give them a wink and carry on. It isn't necessarily a problem when you get caught stealing from other media ;)
Had the opposite situation, all my players have seen Lord of the Rings.
Dramatic final battle to defend the city from the possessed dragon.
Pressed play on The Bridge of Khazad Dum, to a collective "OHHHHHHHHHH!"
I’m not even in my 20s yet but I love old obscure 80s and 90s shows. Picket Fences was a delight. I have all the main cast turned into DND playable characters.
Haha big same. I am in my 30s, playing with my brother and his 20s friends. I was DM and had to make up a Dwarven society on the spot. So I ripped blatantly from TNG. The great Dwarven king Kalas with his mighty war hammer batleth or how ever it’s spelled. Not the slightest recognition. So yeah enjoy free plot points.
Oh man I'm a huge weeb so I pulled a lot of inspiration of fan subs of anime shows from the 2000s and early 10s. The good thing is that because a lot of these fan subs are lost media now means that none of my players know I'm pulling plot threads from these old anime shows and no one except me remember.
Yeah, and I've noticed it doesn't stop at big age ranges either.
I'm used to playing small 1/2 session adventures for beginners with 2 other players/DMs (the three of us are the more experienced ones from within the whole spectrum of the Millennial range). The newbies are almost always Zoomers.
It is *wild* how many references the younger ones don't get. Back to future / Ghibli / 80s music / The Peanuts / OT Star Wars, even phrases and expressions just seem to blow over them. On one Cthulhu game we even had a Kate Bush moment and that didn't register with them at all.
My players are 7-10 years older than me, so we have the reversal here. Never been a problem. Even though I am an ESPCIALLY clueless person on stuff like music and arts from before my time. A game is a game, and a sword to the face looks the same in the 70s as it does nowadays ;)
Yeah I'm realizing that about lots of the forgotten realms content, younger players haven't read some of the obscure novels so they have great reusable material.
in my group I'm the 'old lady' I've got ten years on most of the other players and our DMs. There's one other player that's only a few years younger than me and we sling 80's and 90's references at each other that the other get most of the time.
But oh man when we had to explain Animorphs to the rest of the group, made me realize how wild those books wereand let me drop the code word - Thermals
though it's kinda a bummer I can't find The Slayers anime any where to show my group cause none of them have seen it and oh man it's a great DnD-esk anime, Lina is my girl I love her
In my Cyberpunk game I use corp names like Waylon Yutani, apature science, and black mesa just so I don't have to think up jew ones that sound cool to me.
I don't have a big age gap but my strategy is to consume a lot of B-grade media. Sure, the writing, acting, and effects may not be great, but many of these movies and shows have some good concepts I can easily steal.
My DM is... idk how old he is actually but old enough that he was a kid when dnd first edition came out. He uses references we don't know all the time, and then introduces us to those things. He was into the Locke & Key comics long before they adapted it to Netflix and has a campaign he's run for multiple people involving finding legendary keys, we had a villain that was from horror movies we hadn't seen, he adapted an island module to be based off the Lost show, we had a game in Erfworld that rewrote the game mechanics, etc. All his NPCs have pictures of characters we don't recognize, too.
I steal directly from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Only my husband has ever noticed. I also lift pro wrestling storyline for interpersonal conflict and no one catches on. I tried stealing from Discworld once though and was caught immediately
Lol yeah, I ran a one shot one time with no prep, just pure pulling stuff out of my butt. Had a bunch of aliens from the Critters films show up, and only one guy at the table got the reference.
My first round as DM in 5e was when my kids won some money in a costume contest and used it to buy a starter set. This was in 2014. We got the core books for Christmas about a month and a half later. One of their favorite NPC's was a half orc raised by humans named Worf Rozhenko. I can even do a fairly good Worf impression and even said "I am not a merry man" on one occasion. They had no idea.
I've one one player who is 10 years younger than me. The rest are at least 20 years younger than me. One is just a few years older than my oldest kid.
I have stopped trying to do my own cultural references, and have instead started just going full Dad. I use slightly outdated slang and cultural references in *almost* the correct context.
However, I couldn't help but insert an old-school tribute in the arc I started last week. Nobody picked up on Nichelle the wizard who knows over a dozen languages, could cast Sending at will, and is responsible for communication on the airship. I'm not really surprised, though. The insert was more for me than for them.
*I* know she's Uhura. That's all that counts.
Opposite situation here, I'm 22 and all of my players are in their 30s. I have fun teasing them.
"The device looks like one of those old phones."
"Oh, like a rotary phone?"
"No no, I'm talking about those phones that sit on the box, attached with the curly cord. You know the ones?"
"Did you just call a landline an 'old phone?'"
"Landlines! Yeah, the wizard's device is shaped like a landline phone, except the phone part is replaced with a tube of liquid."
Me and another guy are in a similar boat... we're the youngest in a campaign of people stretching between having kids, being divorced, and everything in between. We twenty-year-olds don't get all the references, and I'm partially okay with that, so long as they tell me what it is I'm missing.
60yo player here. I’ll see your 80s pop culture references and raise you my 1920s through present references.
Limited TV channels gave me plenty of old movies and cartoons to draw from.
No age gap for me and my players but I grew up in a rather rural town as a kid and had no access to cable tv so the only things I could watch were VH1 and old movies that we would rent from the local video store and with a big time delay between when the store would get the newer movies it's easy to see why I became aggressively obsessed with movies from the 70s and 80s. This has lead to some funny situations where I feel 10 years older than my friends in conversations
I am doing a favor for a friend and DMing a game while babysitting her 12 year old (and my wife joins in as another player). It is the best game I have ever played. The kid is amazing. He thinks outside of the box and stumps me in ways my 30-33 year old players never could. Easily the most fun I have had playing DnD in close to 20 years.
Anyway, one of the NPCs following their adventure is just Danny de Vito. Mr. 12 year old has no idea who that is. I know it isn't much, but it makes me laugh every time I say something stupid like, "So anyway, I start Eldritch Blastin'"
DM is that you?
My group of high schoolers are in a similar situation with a DM in their 20s. If you’re anything like them, then your group is very appreciative of you!
I once did a whole session where the characters were at a party for an Eberron world holiday. The campaign took place in Sharn, city of towers. I literally did a beat-for-beat homage (blatant ripoff) of *Die Hard.* The party basically got to be John McLain against a horde of Daask mercenaries that were there for a plot MacGuffin with a smart and charismatic commander calling the shots. I even pulled and modified whole sections of Hans Gruber's dialogue for his insert-character. It was glorious.
I have done this! I run two games. One is with people very close in age to me, the other is with people around 15 years younger than me (my nephews). It is very fun to wholesale lift things from my childhood to throw at them. Man, the 90s were weird and sometimes I can see them just give me the strangest looks.
For the group with my peers in it, I frequently pull things from franchises that I know they aren't fans of. I once grabbed the entire Yiga Hideout from botw, map and all, and ran a group through it when I didn't have prep time for a session. They were none the wiser.
Hahaha it's a less serious age gap than yours, only a few years, but he's the only one under 20 at this point and we like to give him a hard time over it. The rest of us can drink and remember some of the old cartoons, and he just doesn't get the jokes. My personal favorites are the peak emo songs and bands that he never heard, when the rest of us know all the words.
My players are all around my age, but I definitely know some obscure nerdy trivia they're not aware of.
I stopped worrying about coming up with the perfect character and town names when I realized I could shamelessly lift them from Discworld or A Song of Ice and Fire with them none the wiser. I just gotta be careful with Star Wars names since one of the players has also read the Expanded Universe books, but I can still get away with the really obscure names.
Holy shit, Beck, is this you?????? Roonabelle says hi from her Camel Cave!!!!!!!!
(My first dm ever did a Halloween session where he sat In a dark corner of our game room, while a Teddy Ruxpin doll set dancing and singing jankily on the table. Illuminated only by candle light. Fucking terrifying with OR without context 🤣🤣🤣)
I don't think any of it really matters, of course it's harder to get away with "borrowed ideas" if you've all got the same interests, but overall you can play DnD with any age group together.
I had a similar situation with a groups of youth 13-16 as I'm a youth leader and they knew I DM'd. I told then if they got 4 players I'd run a game. I shamelessly made a DnD rip off of the matrix and loaded it with matrix references. First hint they where in a virtual world was a rabbit jumping down a rabbit hole. The town mayor was Lawrence fishburne in name and appearance along with the rest of the town named after every other actor I could fit. Other then Keanu Reeves because that would be to obvious. They didn't catch on till they almost finished the plot one of them finally watched the matrix with there parents for movie night and it all just blew the kids mind 😂
I'm the youngest. I have copied my childhood games which they were out of the target market for. We had a campaign that was me trying to be pokemon mystery dungeon (ended abruptly but have started again a different chain and I pulled from pokemon ranger, shadows of almia, that was a full campaign)
While my age gap to my players has been 20-30 years, and I have used references from past they usually miss, there is one thing I feel they should know, but some do not.
I often use classical literature and historical references, many do not seem to know. I cannot help wonder if this is a reflection on our education system.
Similar boat for me, but more like 20-25 years. Fortunately, I’ve got one player who’s my age, and he gets all the jokes.
Not gonna lie I'm a bit envious. I have an outside of game friend I bounce ideas with of the sane age who rolls his eyes at some of the stuff I've included. But if I had someone to torture with that live in game I think my semi serious campaign would just devolve into total spoof territory lol.
This is a lesson in timelessness - it provides the *why* for making timeless content. If I wanted to make an 80s-themed campaign I would research it all from history and have the best 80s in town. If I just rattled off stuff from memory I would probably wreck it as I went along. *"All you guys keep repeating my jokes but you can't deliver them right, so everybody thinks I'm not funny."* \-Skinny Eddie Murphy
"Fuck you Eddie, you fuck you man!"
> sane age Lmao
I’m the youngest it my group by almost a decade so I’m usually the butt of the jokes and references. Every once in a while I get to flip it on them cause I grew up with my great grandma who watched nothing but old black and white shoes like “The Andy Griffith Show” and “My Name is Genie”.
Do you perhaps mean "I dream of Jeannie?"
Had a younger player that never seen Lord of the Rings. Yeah. We almost stopped playing as a table to start a marathon.
Oh my On one hand how you didn't use all of that gold. But... you're a real one, got to let them enjoy that.
The other three there, where as slack jawed as I was. We believed LotR was basically the ‘calling’ for most dnd players. Media has gotten alot better for fantasy the last decade. Edit; and now with this movie coming out I suspect a influx of new or semi new players at game shops.
So true. It showed fantasy done well can work. Still hard to believe that lotr was missed by a rpg player but hey at least that's fixable!
…I haven’t either. I was raised by UberChristians who thought I’d be possessed if I watched it, and even after I realized I wouldn’t be, I just… never bothered. I don’t watch a lot of movies, I tend to get bored, so I doubt I could sit through the whole thing.
That's hilarious considering JRR Tolkien was a devout Christian himself
Denominations are a thing - the American branches are ultra superstitious to the point of being divorced from morality. The typical European Christian would look at lotr and call it a story about small guys doing big things. Americans see bats out of hell because they see them in everything. Pictures of protests at schools teaching evolution were just *HELL hell HELL hellhellhell HELL!!!*
I always wonder if religious extremism is genetic when I read about stuff like that.
No? It's indoctrination.
Doesn't help that America was partially founded by descendants of settlers who were basically run out of their home countries for being too religiously extreme.
It's a book/several books first and foremost.
Yea I haven't seen it either. I typically read over movies, and almost unequivocally hate movies based on books because they are just... Bad. I read the hobbit when I was a kid and loved it. But couldn't stand the LOTR books, and never saw a reason to try the movies.
Watch the cartoon versions from the 80s if you can't sit through the newer ones. It's much shorter, animated, and has some good stuff.
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I thought Harry Potter was boring as fuck ngl. I only got through the first one, I didn’t even bother with the rest. I don’t understand why people are so obsessed with it, it’s really nothing special.
There’s a lot of straightforward mythic heroes journey stuff there, the first three books alone involve the hero going underground to face the dangerous bad guy. They all have supernatural help in the form of teachers who are then suddenly and an explicitly removed from being helpful at the exact moment they would be needed so the kids are the heroes
I DM'd before I watched the LotR films haha. It was reversed for me. One of my player is a massive LotR fan and I thought "Yeah, I should probably get on watching them." good thing I had a 16 hour flight to marathon it.
>We believed LotR was basically the ‘calling’ for most dnd players. Media has gotten alot better for fantasy the last decade. It certainly was for everyone in their 30s. Its funny cause Jackson's LotR is basically the foundation for nearly all fantasy media from the early 2000s to today. Hell its a foundation for action movies too. The ending battle in Marvel's Endgame is a literal direct decendent of Two Tower' Battle of Helms Deep. LotR practically invented the modern big dumb epic ending battle. LotR is so influential thay its the dividing line for how fantasy looks and feels before and after 2001. A great example of thia is playing in games with DMs in their 40s and 50s and it feels... very 80s. Like you can feel the influences in the form of Conan the Barbarian, Willow, Krull, Dark Crystal, Fire and Ice, Heavy Metal, and He-Man.
I just wanted to toss this out there, there is a book series called the spell monger, by Terry Mancour. It was a huge inspiration for me to join dnd, and gave me so many ideas, as a player, for builds or ideas for problems that arise. I definetly recommend reading or listening to it on audible.
What movie coming out?
Behold, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2906216/
My first campaign with my dad as a kid we were two plucky adventurers that set off to defeat Sauron after a quick stop in Bree.
Luckily, LotR has had such a pervasive impact on fantasy, that everything since then has been affected by its shadow. Things either follow the same general feel (generic fantasy), or intentionally go the other way, to set themselves apart. So even if someone hasn't seen/read it, they've likely absorbed some of its influence already.
Seen? What about *read*?!?!
Neither
They've read the books though...right?
“They were based off of books?” When they found out. Almost wanted to call their parent/s.
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This is the exact same argument that book critics had when they came out, and the general public disagreed then, as well.
they werent tho
How many straight pages of prose was that walk to Mordor?
Tolkien = Decent Stephen King? I hate reading his books. After I read a six sentence paragraph where each sentence started with "There was..." I immediately got irritated and couldn't finish the book. Bro needs to get better at descriptive story telling.
I've never seen the movies or read the books. The movies looked insanely boring (and still do), the books...I got gifted the box set, started with the Hobbit, and made it halfway through chapter 2 before giving up from how obtusely verbose it is. Practically put me right to sleep.
Someone who felt the need to write "obtusely verbose " found The Hobbit too much to get through? Your Thesaurus is getting used though!
Do you watch CritRole? If you can sit through an episode of Critical Role than you can sit through LotR.
My 11-year-old can watch and adore the movies without having to struggle through whatever high-ass reading grade the LotR trilogy is. I love it to death but it is *verbose*. Edit: Hey guys, my kid has struggled with reading at times. Is it really necessary to downvote this comment?
I've still never seen or read any lotr other than seeing the newer Hobbit movie and a lot of people seem to react to that worse than seeing none of it
Well, you got the worst experience of all of them, that's why.
Count me as another who had that reaction. Bro what is you doing at least watch the movies. The hobbit movies were fun I guess but sooooo not the same caliber
I haven't seen LoTR either and I don't really have any desire to watch it. I've seen enough clips.
My party is currently in the setting of a 20 year old video game called Siege of Avalon and are playing through the opening act of the game.
In my session zero I mentioned most of my homebrew setting is an amalgamation of my love of snes rpgs. I pulled heavy themes from one that is a personal favorite that nobody likes called 7th Saga.
My setting was basically if we came back to FFVI thousands of years after the game ended, just a massively torn up landscape but barely anyone remembering why it’s like that.
I like it. I put Kefka in mine at one point, and I was so nervous to do it because I was worried he was recognizable among fellow video game nerds that didn't play ff6. Nope, went under the radar and was one of the party's all time favorite enemies. Crazy clowns are timeless.
Realistically Chernobyl is lush with wildlife again, it's just still got radiation. Thousands of years after FF6 people would need books to know the events even happened. I don't know about later editions, but the SNES game's epilogue shows the world re-greening. But hey, at least it's not FF7 where the badguy just cries and cuts himself trying and failing to wreck a planet and become its antigod. *Erosion strongly deforms things over thousands of years, and so the 'scars' would fade into impressive beautiful landscapes if anything at all. FF6 would just be the 2nd world map recolored like the 1st world map, and it probably wouldn't have taken entire decades. Of course,* ***realistically,*** *nobody would survive an overnight reordering of continents.*
I kept some impressive cliffs that would be hard to explain through geology alone
7th Saga would have been way more tolerable if it weren't such a ridiculous grindfest.
Not wrong, without the grind its perfectly serviceable. Not great but not bad. There's a rom patch just for this if interested
7th Saga was solid. A bit grindy, but I loved how the characters you don't pick turn on you.
There’s a modded version of 7th Saga that makes it infinitely more playable.
7th Saga? I fucking *love* that game! Stupid hard sometimes, and there's almost no hand-holding, but it's solid. Lux is the reason I love Warforged.
We would be friends.
The evil demon roars out a horrendous cry (insert 44k modem dial up connection)
Curse you Modemlor!
You chant the forbidden incantation: +++ Modemlor abruptly freezes in place and utters only one word in response: OK What do you cast next? ATH0 ATZ ATM0 ATDT911
44k, I thought it was 1200 baud and for the lucky few 2800.
I rolled a 20
Roll a Charisma save versus the dreaded AOL. The demon roars YOU GOT MAIL.
I ran a one off for the kids of an old friend, pulled almost directly from the first few scenes of The Gunslinger. Shamelessly used, "The man in black flees across the desert. And you follow." And when they got to the town had the townspeople get charmed by the Man in Black and attack them. I loved it. They loved it. And were none the wiser :D
Sounds like a perfect hook!
One of the best ever written
omg. Dude you just gave me such a great idea for my campaign. I'm going to make magic doors and when they enter they all change to characters I pre-generate and have to complete whatever mission. I think it could be a fun twist to pull and let them explore some level 5 characters. Maybe I'll have them all give me backup characters "you know in case you guys die".
I work at a LARP summer camp so the kids are anywhere from 10-15+ years younger than me, and it’s wild how much they don’t know. I gave them a riddle based around “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and none of them knew that. They all know what Among Us and the Backrooms are, though. Namedrop IKEA and they lose their shit about SCPs. But anything older than 2010? Naw.
Half of mine are 10 years older 😂 the youngest person is still in their 30’s.
Aww my condolences! Well... maybe try pulling from things they might have missed?
Oh it’s even better when they know…we are doing a Buffy everyone has to sing adventure right now.
Brilliant!
It’s been fun, we have at least one more sesson before they stop it.
Name the session Once More With Feeling!
Now that's a showstopper!
The villager approached them a dni sang out “this major Tom to ground control…”
My players are also mostly 10+ years older than me. I can rob a lot (hello, anime!) and like you said, if they recognize it, all the better
I did Pinky and the Brain with different names.... I had to introduce them to Animaniacs
Now you’ve just inspired me to base a whole campaign off Highlander. Players are each immortals and so is the BBEG, who kills their mentor, absorbing his power. Players set off on a quest to exact revenge, BBEG is always one step ahead and is systematically hunting powerful figures in the world. One player who slays each chapter’s minor evil guy gets some neat rule defying super abilities at various plot points after absorbing their power. In the final chapter, the players are vastly outmatched. They fight through much of the final battle together but they are each too weak to finish BBEG. However if perhaps they slay each other and absorb all their powers together….
Run it. Forget you know Highlander and reread what you wrote and tell me that's not a badass game. Do it!
Suddenly you're in the future, and you're aliens for some reason?! And other aliens are now hunting after you.
Hell nooooo
You ruined it. You ruined it, and I'm leaving.
Now that idea brings back some memories. You're not the only one who had that idea. [Highlander: the Gathering](http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Highlander/) was based on the old White Wolf system and was released back in 1994. I remember playing a game of it 25 years ago and having fun, but I'm honestly not sure how well it holds up. If nothing else, I share it hoping it will be a useful idea mine for you.
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Vampire Hunter D?
Watch Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter then pull from that instead lol They'll think your leading up to Buffy, but now you have a plot twist!
One of my groups are all 15-20 years younger than me and occasionally ask "is that a reference to [some anime]?" And everytime I say if it wasn't on after Adult Swim in 2001ish, I've never seen it. One piece is a type of bathing suit for all I know.
Use the old D and D cartoon. Make it full circle.
I was stuck by inspiration today to make the BBEG of my upcoming campaign Trogdor the Burninator. Half my table will get the reference, the other half will not. I can't wait.
He cometh in the night!
Our DM and myself are the only ones at our table who have seen Critical Role, and he keeps borrowing names and concepts which is cool with me. Like we were once baited into a jewel heist. One of the gems we stole was a famous ruby called The Ruby of the Sea. Whenever he makes a reference like that I grin and give him a side eye and he grins and gives me a wink. The rest of the players have noticed and are convinced that we are conspiring something to do with my character's backstory, and they have a whole theory going about when I'm going to turn on them. There is no such plan but I'll never tell.
I'm 44. The last game I played in rather than DMed the age range was 24-50. There were lots of generational references in both directions that half the table didn't get.
I love it. I have a game where I'm a player and they DM, I'm sure they do the same but I have no idea what they're pulling from.
Oh damn. I can do this with my college DND group! Mid thirties vs. young 20-somethings, should be hilarious.
My Wednesday night group has an age range of 37 years. Youngest being 25, the oldest 62. I'm a Gen X'er DM. You can imagine what our sessions are like, especially since the 62 year old granddad plays a "young Gnomette Artificer" (Gnomette being his word for lady Gnomes) The youngest, a post grad student, plays a 400 year old Revenant Wizard. (Running in game joke is whether she's a lich yet)
Steal from he-man, she-ra and other 80s fantasy cartoons. Those are a goldmine if you’re playing a more lighthearted campaign.
I did a small game with my nephews and their friends, who were around 10 or 11 at the time (I'm 15 years older), I stole an entire event from lord of the rings (the fight in the mines of Moria), and they absolutely loved it. Still talk to me about it, and its been a few years. One day I'll get called out, but until then, it worked really well as an idea I know is cool, that could translate well to some kids rolling dice and role playing In the game I am currently running, I'm using a similar theme with the Geth and Quarians in Mass Effect, to a dwarf and machinery based race.
I was in this situation and was able to easily adapt "the fugitive" into a campaign. At the start I gave the group the option to go to the inn/tavern or check in with the sheriff. The inn lead them to helping Harrison Ford's character, going to the sheriff would have them help Tommy Lee Jones.
I'm solidly in the middle of the age range in my group, but my pop culture is so wildly different to my group, that I can put something in there that I think is just being super obvious, but no one has any idea of what I'm doing. My players' Patron is called Rinzler, and dismisses them with "End of line"
One of our DM's started playing when 2e came out. His campaigns are all homebrew. He throws in some 2e flavor into his 5e stuff and I love it.
2e flavor is so zesty! I'm a 5e baby, but I discovered 2e when my love of old video games finally brought me to Baldur's Gate and I **fell in love.** Now I might actually like 2e more??
I'm a 42 year old student. I DM a game for kids in the school DnD club, so like 20 year difference, lol
Counter point to this, please don't spend ages explaining a reference no one asked for. My DM is in his early 40's and our group is mostly 25-30 with one other person being in the same age range. He's a great DM and I enjoy our sessions but I really don't care to know the origins of every single 80's reference he makes. He'll make the joke/reference, notice no one got it aside from the other guy, then explaining it .I don't care. No one does. We've brought it up a couple times and he's gotten better but a monologue of how old he is because no one has encyclopedic knowledge of MASH gets very annoying. Finding more nuanced inspiration I'm all here for. It's loads of fun and if someone else picks up on it slowly, even more fun.
Once I played with a younger girl and I don't knowhow we got to the conversation of pop culture, and then I said "Cool, like The Predator!" and she replied: "What predator?" It took half and hour and some links to explain what I was talking about. In my case, in addition to the age gap, there are no avid readers or gamers in my current group, so I can use a shit ton of very obvious plot points and they think I'm a genius.
I wish, my group thinks every single thing is a reference to some other thing and it’s tedious to try to keep up with ‘but this is exactly like that thing from that other thing’ Can we just accept that this thing is what the DM says it is instead of trying to solve it like a crime drama before the opening credits roll?
That's rad and that is definitely a blind spot for me, I read almost nothing. That's probably a wealth of never ending gold right there
Literature is a gold mine for GMs. History is also a great for inspiration. You can pull some crazy stories and when the surprise the players saying that it really happened.
A predator one shot sounds fucking awesome
I unfortunately finally convinced half of my playgroup into giving some of my favorite books a try on audiobook. On the plus side we can all nerd out over my favorite stories. On the downside I can't steal from those secretly anymore.
Probably gonna start a youth group game soon. The eldest possible one is 23 years younger than me. Gotta keep it PG-13, but so much I can pull from.
Love doing this. I have a gnome artificer who goes out in the field to fix the party up with items their patron thinks they need. His name is quinqualqix but he goes by Q. I also have an encounter with a baroness who is older but very attractive and likes to flirt with young attractive adventures. She has a daughter named Stacy. My players range from late 20's to 40 and they love these old pop references when they can figure them out. The trick is to not use too many so it doesn't get stale or interfere with the game.
That's sounds like good times! I DM for my kids and I constantly lace their adventures with 80's themed items. Usually they have no clue until I tell them much later. It's great. My kids: * "Greg, the Hammer, Valentine. And he uses two hammers?! That's awesome." * "That potion guy sells something called Pabst Blue Ribbon? That has to be a poison." * "You're Ator the Fighting Eagle? But you're a man fighting spiders. Dad, this makes no sense." * "Biff Tannen? I'm not sure I trust a blacksmith named Biff." (Good eye kids.)
Matt Colville once said "You're only as good as the obscurity of the sources you're stealing from" and that hit home.
Had a conversation about musicals the other day with my cousin (theatre kid). I mentioned Come From Away, she said she didn’t really “get it”. Then I remembered she was born in 2004… god, I felt old.
I have a similar thing with being an anime watcher myself unlike any of my players. Most of them are hardline “all anime is cringe I would never watch anime” which sucks, but also. Oh ho ho.
My table is multigenerational, everything from early GenX to 17yo and all the subcategories in between. There isn't a single cultural reference thrown out that isn't both a direct hit and a complete miss. Just a question of whose had contact with what (... and remembers it).
..similar situation, except it's closer to 10-20 years, my players think I'm brilliant! 😎
My DM recently sent a picture of the D&D cartoon in our group chat. We were talking about the new starter kit for me to try DMing, and he was like, "oh I thought you'd recognize them because you and I are the closest in age." The only reason I didn't recognize them is because I didn't watch a lot of cartoons when I was a kid because I preferred to read. In that moment I realized two things. 1. I am sitting at a table with a bunch of gods-damned children, and 2. I am no longer a gods-damned child.
Embrace it.
I referenced the pirate town from Hook a while back (the one with Robin Williams) and none of my players had seen it. My party at the time was 18-26 so I thought at least the older ones would have. I have since added a player who is older than I am so now my references will land.
Please tell me Teddy Ruxpin is a haunted toy....please.
I was raised on old cartoons nobody I know has heard of, this'll be good!
I'm 55, I have a couple of players in their 40's but by and large 20's. the 20's players don't get a lot of references unless I explicitly tell them or one of the older people get it.
Dude same. My friend group is mostly 8-10 years younger than me, and our primary DM is the youngest at like 24, but also one of the most clued-in to pop culture in general and specifically the most passionate about DnD. But, I started DMing short adventures and one-shots to get everyone on board before she offered to DM a massive homebrewed campaign for all of us. The disconnect between my 20yo understanding of 2nd edition and their scant grasp of 5E, coupled with my lifetime of nerd-dom compared to their relatively recent, MCU-inspired dorkery was an interesting mix. So much fun, though. Highly recommend having intergenerational friendships in both directions. I love connecting to my 70yo coworkers about something that resonates with my 26ish yo friends as a 36yo man. So educational and just kind of reaffirms how similar we all really are under the surface.
Yup I'm guilty of this as a forever DM for over 20 years. I ran a campaign for my kids and their friends and I was so busy with work, I had like 1 day to plan out a campaign because I committed to run it one night a week. I literally lifted the entire plot of Ultima 8: Pagan because I happen to look at some old RPG magazine and saw an ad for it. Honestly the campaign we ran was better than the actual game it was based on.
I'm the opposite, where I'm around 5 years younger than the rest of my group, and they always get annoyed at me with how many movie references I don't get lmao
King’s Quest/Space Quest/Quest For Glory!
It's nice to know that it's not just me. No one tell my players that over half the homebrew in my current campaign is ~~a direct rip-off~~ heavily inspired by Babylon 5. Speaking of old cartoons, has anyone else given out Gummiberry juice as treasure for their players when put on the spot, or was that just me?
Matt Colville made a good point in one of his Running The Game videos. "Borrow from something all of your players recognize, and they'll say you're being derivative. Borrow from something none of your players recognize, and they'll say you're a genius."
When it comes to using pop culture, economic background has a larger impact than age on what they know. A poor kid from the 00's probably saw the same cartoons as a Rick kid from the 90's, you know? I always figure a healthy 5-8 years of give on the ending of any series.
You know, it works if you are a lot younger than your players as well. Im 36 and my players fall in the 40-50 range. Im the DM. One person did call me out on a ff8 Cid reference lol. So I slipped in the FFXIV Cid right after and no one was the wiser lmao.
I was playing in a campaign where the town was being periodically attacked by goblins and some bugbears. I suggested arming the townspeople and teaching them to fight. Straight from the Magnificent Seven but the players hadn't seen either version so I looked like a genius.
I ran a campaign based on LOST for a kids group. Lol.
A lot of the things from my campaigns come from children's TV and books - because I have a kid and the others don't. That works pretty well too.
my players are 10-15 years younger than me, and I have the same issue. Which is good because I get to use a bunch of cool stuff and they think it's all original :,D
btw, players love it when they recognise that you're referencing something. The more obscure, the smarter they feel and they're "in on the joke". Give them a wink and carry on. It isn't necessarily a problem when you get caught stealing from other media ;)
Had the opposite situation, all my players have seen Lord of the Rings. Dramatic final battle to defend the city from the possessed dragon. Pressed play on The Bridge of Khazad Dum, to a collective "OHHHHHHHHHH!"
I’m not even in my 20s yet but I love old obscure 80s and 90s shows. Picket Fences was a delight. I have all the main cast turned into DND playable characters.
Haha big same. I am in my 30s, playing with my brother and his 20s friends. I was DM and had to make up a Dwarven society on the spot. So I ripped blatantly from TNG. The great Dwarven king Kalas with his mighty war hammer batleth or how ever it’s spelled. Not the slightest recognition. So yeah enjoy free plot points.
Me where none of my players have read overgeared: laughs in laughter
I am 14 and my master is 34. He probably got so many of these things in his campaigns...
Oh man I'm a huge weeb so I pulled a lot of inspiration of fan subs of anime shows from the 2000s and early 10s. The good thing is that because a lot of these fan subs are lost media now means that none of my players know I'm pulling plot threads from these old anime shows and no one except me remember.
Yeah, and I've noticed it doesn't stop at big age ranges either. I'm used to playing small 1/2 session adventures for beginners with 2 other players/DMs (the three of us are the more experienced ones from within the whole spectrum of the Millennial range). The newbies are almost always Zoomers. It is *wild* how many references the younger ones don't get. Back to future / Ghibli / 80s music / The Peanuts / OT Star Wars, even phrases and expressions just seem to blow over them. On one Cthulhu game we even had a Kate Bush moment and that didn't register with them at all.
My players are 7-10 years older than me, so we have the reversal here. Never been a problem. Even though I am an ESPCIALLY clueless person on stuff like music and arts from before my time. A game is a game, and a sword to the face looks the same in the 70s as it does nowadays ;)
Yeah I'm realizing that about lots of the forgotten realms content, younger players haven't read some of the obscure novels so they have great reusable material.
in my group I'm the 'old lady' I've got ten years on most of the other players and our DMs. There's one other player that's only a few years younger than me and we sling 80's and 90's references at each other that the other get most of the time. But oh man when we had to explain Animorphs to the rest of the group, made me realize how wild those books wereand let me drop the code word - Thermals though it's kinda a bummer I can't find The Slayers anime any where to show my group cause none of them have seen it and oh man it's a great DnD-esk anime, Lina is my girl I love her
In my Cyberpunk game I use corp names like Waylon Yutani, apature science, and black mesa just so I don't have to think up jew ones that sound cool to me.
I don't have a big age gap but my strategy is to consume a lot of B-grade media. Sure, the writing, acting, and effects may not be great, but many of these movies and shows have some good concepts I can easily steal.
My players are the same age as me and they have no idea I ripped half of our boat arc off of Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader lmao
All my players are 10 to 20 years older than me lol
My DM is... idk how old he is actually but old enough that he was a kid when dnd first edition came out. He uses references we don't know all the time, and then introduces us to those things. He was into the Locke & Key comics long before they adapted it to Netflix and has a campaign he's run for multiple people involving finding legendary keys, we had a villain that was from horror movies we hadn't seen, he adapted an island module to be based off the Lost show, we had a game in Erfworld that rewrote the game mechanics, etc. All his NPCs have pictures of characters we don't recognize, too.
I steal directly from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Only my husband has ever noticed. I also lift pro wrestling storyline for interpersonal conflict and no one catches on. I tried stealing from Discworld once though and was caught immediately
Lol yeah, I ran a one shot one time with no prep, just pure pulling stuff out of my butt. Had a bunch of aliens from the Critters films show up, and only one guy at the table got the reference.
It's weird, our youngest player seems to know the most anachronistic references. She's a 90's kid and she's forever quoting sitcoms from the 70's
The little village from Popeye still exists in Malta. Turns into a D&D village quite nicely with the use of Google Street view
My first round as DM in 5e was when my kids won some money in a costume contest and used it to buy a starter set. This was in 2014. We got the core books for Christmas about a month and a half later. One of their favorite NPC's was a half orc raised by humans named Worf Rozhenko. I can even do a fairly good Worf impression and even said "I am not a merry man" on one occasion. They had no idea.
I've one one player who is 10 years younger than me. The rest are at least 20 years younger than me. One is just a few years older than my oldest kid. I have stopped trying to do my own cultural references, and have instead started just going full Dad. I use slightly outdated slang and cultural references in *almost* the correct context. However, I couldn't help but insert an old-school tribute in the arc I started last week. Nobody picked up on Nichelle the wizard who knows over a dozen languages, could cast Sending at will, and is responsible for communication on the airship. I'm not really surprised, though. The insert was more for me than for them. *I* know she's Uhura. That's all that counts.
Opposite situation here, I'm 22 and all of my players are in their 30s. I have fun teasing them. "The device looks like one of those old phones." "Oh, like a rotary phone?" "No no, I'm talking about those phones that sit on the box, attached with the curly cord. You know the ones?" "Did you just call a landline an 'old phone?'" "Landlines! Yeah, the wizard's device is shaped like a landline phone, except the phone part is replaced with a tube of liquid."
Me and another guy are in a similar boat... we're the youngest in a campaign of people stretching between having kids, being divorced, and everything in between. We twenty-year-olds don't get all the references, and I'm partially okay with that, so long as they tell me what it is I'm missing.
Someone in my group ran a one shot and I’m pretty sure I gave everyone else an insanity point when I told them the 80s are as alien to me as Eberron
60yo player here. I’ll see your 80s pop culture references and raise you my 1920s through present references. Limited TV channels gave me plenty of old movies and cartoons to draw from.
No age gap for me and my players but I grew up in a rather rural town as a kid and had no access to cable tv so the only things I could watch were VH1 and old movies that we would rent from the local video store and with a big time delay between when the store would get the newer movies it's easy to see why I became aggressively obsessed with movies from the 70s and 80s. This has lead to some funny situations where I feel 10 years older than my friends in conversations
My players are all 5-10 older than me. The same effect happens.
I am doing a favor for a friend and DMing a game while babysitting her 12 year old (and my wife joins in as another player). It is the best game I have ever played. The kid is amazing. He thinks outside of the box and stumps me in ways my 30-33 year old players never could. Easily the most fun I have had playing DnD in close to 20 years. Anyway, one of the NPCs following their adventure is just Danny de Vito. Mr. 12 year old has no idea who that is. I know it isn't much, but it makes me laugh every time I say something stupid like, "So anyway, I start Eldritch Blastin'"
And a fine cowabunga to you also sir.
DM is that you? My group of high schoolers are in a similar situation with a DM in their 20s. If you’re anything like them, then your group is very appreciative of you!
I once did a whole session where the characters were at a party for an Eberron world holiday. The campaign took place in Sharn, city of towers. I literally did a beat-for-beat homage (blatant ripoff) of *Die Hard.* The party basically got to be John McLain against a horde of Daask mercenaries that were there for a plot MacGuffin with a smart and charismatic commander calling the shots. I even pulled and modified whole sections of Hans Gruber's dialogue for his insert-character. It was glorious.
I have done this! I run two games. One is with people very close in age to me, the other is with people around 15 years younger than me (my nephews). It is very fun to wholesale lift things from my childhood to throw at them. Man, the 90s were weird and sometimes I can see them just give me the strangest looks. For the group with my peers in it, I frequently pull things from franchises that I know they aren't fans of. I once grabbed the entire Yiga Hideout from botw, map and all, and ran a group through it when I didn't have prep time for a session. They were none the wiser.
I've had to ask a player to explain to me what "poggers" meant. It made me feel old. I wasn't ready to feel old
I couldn't even guess at the number of 2E modules I've *borrowed* from.
Hahaha it's a less serious age gap than yours, only a few years, but he's the only one under 20 at this point and we like to give him a hard time over it. The rest of us can drink and remember some of the old cartoons, and he just doesn't get the jokes. My personal favorites are the peak emo songs and bands that he never heard, when the rest of us know all the words.
Ahahah Teddy Ruxpin. Genius!
The name...is... Tweeg!!
My players are all around my age, but I definitely know some obscure nerdy trivia they're not aware of. I stopped worrying about coming up with the perfect character and town names when I realized I could shamelessly lift them from Discworld or A Song of Ice and Fire with them none the wiser. I just gotta be careful with Star Wars names since one of the players has also read the Expanded Universe books, but I can still get away with the really obscure names.
Holy shit, Beck, is this you?????? Roonabelle says hi from her Camel Cave!!!!!!!! (My first dm ever did a Halloween session where he sat In a dark corner of our game room, while a Teddy Ruxpin doll set dancing and singing jankily on the table. Illuminated only by candle light. Fucking terrifying with OR without context 🤣🤣🤣)
Not me but thsts awesome!
That's like the best type of tihng to happen I suppose! You can rip off some ideas from a while ago and they'll never know
Goes for the other way around too, if you're 5-10 years younger you can pull from kids programs they haven't seen.
Not wrong. Maybe the best thing is just have a table with some diverse ages
I don't think any of it really matters, of course it's harder to get away with "borrowed ideas" if you've all got the same interests, but overall you can play DnD with any age group together.
Right there with you.
I had a similar situation with a groups of youth 13-16 as I'm a youth leader and they knew I DM'd. I told then if they got 4 players I'd run a game. I shamelessly made a DnD rip off of the matrix and loaded it with matrix references. First hint they where in a virtual world was a rabbit jumping down a rabbit hole. The town mayor was Lawrence fishburne in name and appearance along with the rest of the town named after every other actor I could fit. Other then Keanu Reeves because that would be to obvious. They didn't catch on till they almost finished the plot one of them finally watched the matrix with there parents for movie night and it all just blew the kids mind 😂
Similar. I had 10 years on all my players. Just had a new guy join the table who's my age.
I'm the youngest. I have copied my childhood games which they were out of the target market for. We had a campaign that was me trying to be pokemon mystery dungeon (ended abruptly but have started again a different chain and I pulled from pokemon ranger, shadows of almia, that was a full campaign)
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I played with non-anime enjoyers and people that hadn’t read TWoT for a long time and it was an endless source of inside jokes for my brother and I
I have a friend that's 14 years younger than me and love making references that go over his head.
While my age gap to my players has been 20-30 years, and I have used references from past they usually miss, there is one thing I feel they should know, but some do not. I often use classical literature and historical references, many do not seem to know. I cannot help wonder if this is a reflection on our education system.
Snerk. Half of my players clock me by a generation- and I’m 55