I recently stumbled across a copy of an old "What if... ?" comic from Marvel (#15 What if the Fantastic Four had lost the trial of Galactus?). The premise of this series of comics is to take something from Marvel canon, alter it, and see how things would have progressed.

This got me thinking about old characters I have played and old games I have run. I started wondering how the game would have played out had so-and-so not died, or if the game was set in the Forgotten Realms instead of Greyhawk, or if we used game system X instead of game system Y.

Has anyone done anything like this? Is it something you'd be interested in? How do you think the game would play out?

Big one would be playing differently an old campaign where our half-orc archer gal got the whole group into massive trouble with an elven council. Which snowballed into us being kicked out of said elven realm. Which allowed a villain to gain a foothold in the forest because we couldn't get in and stop him and none of the elves would believe us.

Eventually we succeeded in suckering the villain into blowing his friendly cover in public and things rolled from there to a conclusion far far longer after than otherwise.

So allways wondered how things would have gone had I just cast silence on her or something before things got out of hand. We likely could have headed the villain off far earlier in his plot before he was established and had a gang to back him up.

I've been GMing for 37 years now, and I keep old campaign notes in a (very, very large) folder, going back into the mid-80s comprehensively, with a bunch of materials going back a few years earlier.  I've also usually run two groups at the same time, so yeah ... I've had occasion to recycle old stuff and run the same premise more than once.

I don't change history, though: that'd be, in my mind, deeply disrespectful to the many great gamers who've played in my sandbox.

Quote from: Ravenswing;712028I don't change history, though: that'd be, in my mind, deeply disrespectful to the many great gamers who've played in my sandbox.

Yeah, the thing with Marvel's "What if..." series is that they don't change existing canon. It's merely an issue where they explore how things could have unfolded had one particular element been different. I was thinking of a one-off session, essentially creating an alternate universe for a short period of time. And the players absolutely would have to be in on it; otherwise I don't think the concept would work.

For example, we had a four character campaign set in-and-around the Shield Lands. Around 5th level, one of the players had to leave the game. We retired his character and brought in a new player and character. That introduction session really set the tone for the rest of the campaign. He played a braggart who managed to fail miserably at his first task. So the "What if..." session would be: What if Artrii succeeded in dismantling the trap? And then play out the session, again, from there.

It seems genre-appropriate for a supers game. I'm curious how it would play in another genre.

I think it'd work as well as in any other genre; there's nothing about supers that makes the What If? premise any more valid than in any other genre.  

Not sure if this counts as the same sort of thing...
One of the handful of Whispering Vault games I ran had the Circle going to the 1920s where they met the PCs that the same Players had ran in a CoC campaign a couple years earlier (where most everyone had died, horribly). The Stalkers had to decide whether to save the CoC PCs or use their deaths as a distraction to take out the main Unbidden (big bad). They chose the greater good and so they got to watch their characters die all over again.

My Cthulhu Traveller campaign ended in a TPK...for an entire sector. I always wanted to run a new campaign with PCs trying to find out WTF happened and deal with the repercussions.

I've never tried this; except in one-shots. Then I've tried it lots.

TSR put out at least one MSH module about an alternative earth where things went differently. Then having the players meet them.

One of the old TSR one-on-ones I believe had the Thing dealing with alternative What IF worlds stemming from his attempts to cure himself.

Which leads to the possibility of the players in D&D encountering a parallel what if universe, or being invaded by such.