How do you handle real life personalities like local celebrities and politicians in your games? Do you avoid them or fill their roles with fictional characters? Do you just introduce them when it comes naturally, but you don’t make a big deal out of it? Or do you go out of your way to include caricatures of well known locals and uncover their supernatural ties and dirty secrets?
How do you handle real life personalities like local celebrities and politicians in your games?
How do you handle real life personalities like local celebrities and politicians in your games?
So what you’re asking is, is it OK to use my likeness in your US game?
We have Chicago’s real mayor in our game. He’s having secret trysts with one of our characters.
Live in DC. Once had Obama in a superhero game. Typically, I avoid it because the PCs need to be the main characters, and senators and crap are extraordinarily powerful.
We have mostly avoided it without even meaning to. I’m not into local sports or celebrities, but some famous personalities have been referred to in passing. (Like, Whitey Bulger’s “Winter Hill Gang” was actually an arm of the Winter Court of Fae, but the PCs only interact with them through wholly fictional characters.)
My gaming groups have always avoided them completely. What are you gaining other than the barest bits of creation effort. Do you really know enough about those people to get much beyond name, face and a very vague personality?
Take the face and personality and put a new name to it and you have more room to play IMO. If Donald Trump shows up as a head of a group of wizards, you run the risk of a lot of sidetalk, people reacting to the real world person and not the storyline or the actions of your fictional Donald.
As always though, YMMV
I’m inclined to avoid them myself. I’m not very confident or comfortable with pre-existing settings in general. I prefer making things up together so everyone is on the same page.
I’m also not that in tune with the world so I often don’t know how to portray them or sometimes even who they are if other people introduce them. I’ve had fun with them though, and they work well in a light-hearted and satirical game with other locals.