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Impractical Applications (Acclimation and Adaptation)

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This week, I focused on acclimation to new cultures, particularly in game. It’s a skill I pride myself on—though I’ll admit, my usual strategy is one part Miller’s Law and one part “This looks like a culture I know” and suggesting quirks to the GM—but more interesting, I think, has been watching my players’ interactions with new cultures.

One that I’ve already mentioned was the incident when Sky met Solace. This was a case of player of character absorbing culture and then letting the player reflect it—though in Sky’s player’s case, it helped that he was a voracious rulebook-reader, and that we’d been playing together a long time in that particular part of the setting, including with the player’s last two characters and at one point in his version of the same part. By the time we got to the Solace incident, all he really needed to do was make the character reflect his surroundings—and given that all of his wrath was based on Solace breaking one of their cardinal rules by betraying several of their own, I think it’s safe to assume he succeeded.

Sometimes, partial but not complete familiarity with the setting—or the part of the setting—can come in handy, and not just in avoiding the cultural version of the uncanny valley. This was demonstrated by recent group addition Samar, not long after her player first joined my game (in this case, most of the background was her independent research and our discussions of spirit-diplomacy). Samar was raised as a shaman; dealing with spirits and elementals is pretty much her schtick. Since she was trained while still a mortal, most times this comes with the addendum “with the utmost respect”, even now when she technically outranks almost everything she’s likely to run into groundside. So there she is, three or four sessions into her tenure, the group’s running around the slums of the Celestial City, and Samar, using language that would have been perfect in her old position but is definitely a tad over-polite in the new one, addresses a small swirly-flame-spirit-thing as “Esteemed”. To say the little guy is unused to flattery is a bit of an understatement—he decides he likes the new lady.

This isn’t to say that my group has always been successful in their adaptation. I have two players whose characters had a gift for giving offense on accident—one by being somewhat impolite, the other by being so utterly idiosyncratic nobody could get his intent right on the first try (the deadpan sarcasm didn’t help). And then, of course, there was the Native Language incident, demonstrating that the worst possible thing one can do when pretending to be a native of a city is admit to not being very good with the language!

As far as I’m concerned, half of the fun of fictional cultures is watching how the players interact with them, whether it’s well or poorly. Have any good culture-acclimation stories from your games?


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