How Much Borrowing Is Too Much?
Recently in a game session, our characters encountered a room with a magical energy pattern drawn on the floor. As anyone who is familiar with Roger Zelazny’s Amber books knows, sure enough once a character stepped on the pattern he had to complete the pattern and every step was a test of willpower. Once the pattern walk was completed, the character was able to teleport the group as desired. I should point out the game setting is not the world of Amber.
While I don’t fault the GM for borrowing an idea, I do think this particular encounter is a poor example of borrowing. Before I get any further, please understand that these concepts can apply to an encounter’s design, a campaign plot, or even a particular character’s background. With that out of the way, my point is that when you borrow an idea and it is a distraction to the other players or where their out of game knowledge would be too useful, you have borrowed too much and too directly.
While players should strive to avoid using out of game knowledge to overcome a challenge, a GM should at least take a basic step or two to avoid the issue. In the case of borrowing the pattern from Amber, that might be OK with some other changes. Perhaps instead of the pattern walk requiring some willpower tests, this pattern could cause fear. Or perhaps at key turns in the pattern the character must fight a creature. Or perhaps the powers granted to someone who successfully walks the pattern could be something other than teleportation.
In addition to the out of game knowledge problem, borrowing directly from another source makes the players feel like they are playing in that other setting instead of your game world.
Similarly players developing character backgrounds or selecting names need to be careful. If a player takes a name of a popular fictional character sush as “Conan” or “Skywalker” or “Legolas” the other players will occasionally think of that other character and this will make it harder for that player to define that character. If a character’s background is similar to Batman (orphan from a rich family, studies martial arts in the far east, etc.) then that may also make the other players think of Batman. At the very least they may think that character’s player doesn’t have a great imagination.
None of this is meant to say it is wrong to borrow an idea. In fact, most ideas can be traced to borrowing an idea and putting a unique spin on it or taking two or more ideas and merging aspects of those ideas. For example, you can have an elven bow expert that is also a bit of an acrobat (a la Legolas) but give him a different name (and vary it by more than just one letter, please) and change or add something in his background that will make him stand out to your players. Maybe he is disgraced and had to leave the elves, or maybe he loves cities unlike most elves, etc.
Effective borrowing comes down to taking an idea and making it yours in one way or another. Whether you combine the idea with another borrowed idea or put your own spin on it, doing so will help everyone see your creation as at least partly your own idea.
It’s worth emphasising what you mention above: that whether it’s distracting or not is most important in judging how to borrow something.
For myself, a rich orphan who studied martial arts wouldn’t recall Batman to me, because that’s not the origin story I associate with that character. Similarly, an acrobatic bow expert wouldn’t make me think of Legolas because the Legolas I’m most familiar with—the one in the books—never surfed a shield or did gymnastics up a war Oliphant.
I once played in a game of Robotech that had us infiltrating a moon-based research station cut off from communication recently. After about 30 minutes of play I realised that the adventure had been ripped off wholesale from the a DOOM level (fireball-throwing imps and all). The other players didn’t recognise it, but it ruined it for me and annoyed the GM when I acted like I knew where the enemies were hiding. (I wasn’t the best at avoiding meta-gaming back then.)
Knowing your audience and their media tastes is key for effective borrowing.
Every GM borrows, and often wholesale, obviously it is better to use plots and devices that are not easily recognised by the players, and one of the easiest ways of doing this is to swap genres. I still remember the shock I felt when someone pointed out that ‘The Magnificent Seven’ was just a remake of ‘Seven Samurai’! But this feeling of the familiar is a great tool for the GM as well. In the film ‘The Shootist’ they had an aging John Wayne and in the opening credits the showed clips from many of his earlier westerns, those credits saved 20 minutes of preamble in the film explaining how the character that Wayne played was an aging gunfighter now past his prime! I quite often have plots that are very similar to known stories. I once did a whole series of Star Trek scenarios that were based on previously aired episodes of the show, the one thing the players found out very quickly was that if they tried to use the same solutions used on TV, then they were in for a whole world of pain! GMs are in a situation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If you only used bought scenarios, then you still have the possibility that one of the players will have read, played or even GMed it previously, and if you try to only write your own scenarios, you will occasionally dry up and run out of plots. Each of us has to find their own path!