So, the "this" is 'use RL-based RPG settings to learn stuff'.

Nothing major- like, when I was in a western set in the southwest, I looked up the real history of the places we were supposed to be. (Which was entertaining.) When I was playing a game set in New Orleans in 2010, I looked up about what was going on in 2010. Same when I had a character from Sheffield, UK. I grew up in New England, but I've learned more about RL New England history from doing character backgrounds than I ever did in school.

If I were to say my RP hobby ever benefited me in a real way, this is how. (When I do realistic SF games, I learn all sorts of crap about albedo and escape velocities and stuff, and even a fantasy game can do it if you're (say) trying to figure out where the snowline is on Mount Colossal, so it turns to winter conditions halfway up when you go, but that's another thing.)

Anyone else?

Oh yeah, without a doubt I do that! Research on locations, occupations, history... I've learned some really interesting things, even picked up some RL favorites that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. For instance, over a decade ago I was playing in a military game, and needed to do a little research about Lance Corporals, which led me to finding Terminal Lance (probably the best Marines-related web comic ever) right when it was starting up - and although the game has long since been defunct, I've been reading that strip ever since.

Even in fantasy games you can learn things about combat styles, historical armor & armor-making, clothing styles (since a lot of fantasy games are at least pseudo-set in something akin to a historical culture), architectural styles for describing buildings, down to the nitty-gritty things like 'how fast can a horse REALLY walk a mile?'.

The real problem is not going down the rabbit hole when I go to research something, there's so many things to find and learn!

Do you know how hard it was to find accurate floorplans of the NORAD base under the Cheyenne Mountains back in 2004 ?!!!

Spoiler - I just lifted a map from a Top Secret module for an underground base and used that.  The D&D party that went in never noticed the difference.  ;P

I could probably teach courses on 13th century Ukranian history just from playing Ars Magica in Novgorod for so long.

Definitely not just you.

Definitely!

I was playing a djinni in a superhero game that had just been released from her bottle. I spent a lot of time researching ancient cultures of the middle east for her, so she could make references in game to certain events, even if it was just an off-the-cuff comment. One of the other players was a historian, and was thrilled by some of the posts, since he never expected anyone else to have ever heard of them. If not for the game, I never would have. Likewise, the last time she free of her bottle was right before WW1- so that again required research. What modern technologies would she recognize? Did they exist at the time, and more importantly- had they made their way to the Arabian peninsula where she might have seen or heard of them?

Likewise, in a Vampire game set in Florida, the DM uses a lot of real world places and businesses. We can actually plan things using actual maps and media based in the area, deciding territorial markers and the like, so doing some basic research there has only been a help.

And I spent a lot of time going through the differences of the Insular, Northern, Central, and Southern Scottish dialects in an attempt to not use the wrong 'pronunciation' or slang for the region. (I eventually had to give that up and just use a mish-mash of Glasgow and Highlands, which I am sure would be absolutely the cringiest thing to our Scottish rpol members.) ^_^;

For another game, one of the other players just told me they researched the water consumption needs of camels.

So many more examples could be made, but you get the point. You find a lot of arcane, but fascinating things being looked up all the time. It's one of the things I love about playing. As SunRuanEr said, the hardest part is not going down the rabbit hole! ^_^
This message was last edited by the user at 14:52, Tue 09 July.

 for me, I try to get as much 'real' history in the game, while  i also add (or delete )  things... Scifi game has its  own Time line, and most of 'history' doesn't account  for much ..Earth folks  are built on political  stereotypes  as who would side with bad guys  and who wouldn't.

 Football game is a  bit in the future , so anyone playing RL  doesn't effect the  game

 Fanatsy has its  own world and thus  i make it how i wish

I use  Maps of cities to  give usreal  feel as i point out landmarks  or  use  hotels ect ect

There was a guy i talked into starting a game  here ( tried to get the DMs  from the other site to move here, instead of that god awful site)..anyway..he started  a  1940's   game using a  small system..it was  fun as he used  real  sites  and such, as well as Historical figures..sadly he  let the game die.

.............

 so? After all that,reaserch is good, I'll give you the one  piece of advice i stand  by... Run the game  as you, yourself  would  want it run for  you...Detail is always good,, and don't be afraid to  'make up' some items , and names , like a good Video game or Book would ( Nuka Cola..film titles,food,,ect),it helps enrich  the  world..have  fun...

I run a D&D setting based on a fantasy/fictional/legendary/mythival version of Earth. Even tot he point of pulling out the opld elf att he north pole in december.

For my Siberia game I researched actual cossacks and their origins and geography (yes, I know they aren't from Siberia, but they're russian, everyone wants to play one, so i needed to know what one was in the early days). For my Lost Continent game I researched Meso America and the actual reach and interaction of Aztecs and Mayans. I place non humans according to where in myth they originated (more or less), etc.

Mind you, it's not always in dpeth research, half an hour to an hour on the internet is often more than enough for guidelines for a regional setting for a (potentially) world spanning game.

Absolutely. Recently I found a two hour rabbit hole about modern London slang.
Lost a couple hours on what passes for entertainment at ice cap research stations, and tried to find out how high an oven has to be set to ignite rice.
Never stop learning.

Yes, definitely.
I think I often used to spend more time researching for the background of a character than I did going through the mechanics of their stats and skills. Now I'm older, wiser (maybe) and considerably more cynical I tend to leave the background as vague as I can get away with until I know the game isnt going to die before I can get going.

But researching is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to writing scenarios, characters or just fiction - I've lost count of the number of times I've found those interesting little nuggets that you can turn into interesting plot hooks or just good bits of flavour text.

Occasionally things work out really well; Most memorably for me was a WW1 game with a supernatural bent (might have been Savage Worlds Weird War 1), where our characters were members of the newly formed Royal Flying Corps and had seen some weird stuff when flying over the battlefields. The Pilot positions were all quickly filled so I came up with an idea for a sharpshooter/sniper type character who'd transferred to become a backseat gunner. As Britain hasn't really got a gun culture I figured a good backstory would be to make him a gamekeeper rather than someone who'd never held a rifle until he was called up and turned out to be a natural crack shot.
So, gamekeeper, from a country estate, how about Sandringham in Norfolk? Royal connection might provide a useful plot hook or two later in the game.
Then I found there was not only a Royal Norfolk Regiment in WW1, but E Company, 5th Battalion was made up almost exclusively of men who had worked on the royal estate at Sandringham.
It gets better.
In 1915, whilst attacking Turkish positions in the Dardanelles, E Company advanced through a forest into battle and were never seen again. No survivors, no bodies found, no POWs.*
Then in 1965 a former ANZAC soldier and four of his fellows claimed to have seen several mysterious clouds hovering over the area where the Norfolks were fighting, and the men actually marched into a cloud as it reached ground level. The cloud then rose, joined the others and they all flew away.

Thus, a nice spooky link between my WW1 Norfolk gamekeeper and the Spooky WW1 game.

*Post war investigations in 1918 found the bodies of most of the lost men buried in unmarked mass graves near where they were last see, many having been shot in the head - apparently the Turks at the time didn't really do prisoners.
This message was last edited by the user at 22:45, Tue 09 July.

Oh, absolutely.

As someone who works predominantly in historic settings, it's one of the most enjoyable bits in terms of taking a general concept (say, Vampire the Requiem in the High Middle Ages) and actually moving that into a real time and place, both in terms of actually finding historical places and settings into which to slip the idea and make it real, and indeed in bagging some verisimilitude into the setting. Equally, I take the same approach to more modern settings, especially ones which are urban and where the feeling of, say, Philadelphia, needs to be different from Boston or Seattle.

The process can be really satisfying, and getting both the right level of detail and understanding can be really satisfying, especially when you've got a player who perhaps is less familiar with the nitty gritty than you are and you have the opportunity to both slightly subvert their preconceptions and indeed show off something cool which allows them to take a step deeper into that setting. Obviously, that's caveated with the need not to be a total *censored* about it or indeed having a go at a player if they miss a cue or don't quite get it.

My only advice would be with anything is that there's a point where detail, accuracy and realism goes from your friend and becomes your enemy. Trying to use real people then opens bags of worms about trying to represent them correctly, and indeed you end up potentially drowning a player with caveats and the need to create a three dimensional image which is true to fact as opposed to making something which suits your needs. Personally, I tend to read and absorb and then find a gap in history into which I can worm my way, and create a canon for the game which exists between the bricks of recorded fact.

More generally, and perhaps addressing OP's question more on the head, yes, I have absolutely learned about subjects I would never have previously considered through character and setting creation, and I would say it's one of the joys of those processes in terms of adding to a knowledge base.

Yes .. Do this all the time.

Its one of the reasons I wrote the "Rifts - why the Coalition can't exist" piece on my website..

Yes, I do. Including the etiquette and social norms of the setting. Because why else choose a historical setting, if you're not even gonna remotely try be at least a tiny bit historically accurate?

Here's my update:

In one of my most recent campaigns, I've been playing a Filipina-American girl from Louisiana (outside New Orleans) who starts the game with a severe head injury. Here's what I've been rabbit-holing into:

The history of Filipino-Americans in Louisiana (and in general), how near-traumatic brain injury works (ie, not Flintstones Amnesia), The New Orleans Crime Family, streetgangs in New Orleans, the "Crustpunk" subculture in New Orleans, the history of the city in 2010 specifically, more Jazz, Cajun and Zydeco music (by year) than I can shake a stick at), exactly what type of nuclear plant New Orleans has, how shrimp-trawling works, how exactly the pumps that keep New Orleans from flooding work, the 2010 Census (there are government documents that are basically free sourcebooks, the census is really easy to make into a Randomized Character Creation Table for a region it turns out), schools in the area, the organization of the New Orleans Police Department (including major reforms since the mid-2000s), how alligators "normally act"....

I don't even wanna get into the stuff I did for the Fallout RPG about the New England area. My wife has been telling me to go get course credit. ;)

The important thing is: this is fun for me. I learn a LOT of good stuff this way.

PS: It turns out that the highest "natural" point (that is, not a building) in New Orleans was a manmade hill that was created just so children could know what a hill looked like. That is... probably the coolest thing I've learned this month. :)
This message was last edited by the user at 06:52, Tue 16 July.

but what if i play DnD where everything is based in the 17 hundreds and i dont have access to a good device?
im on a kindle paperwhite, so i cant see color on it....( ￣ □  ￣)
very very bad when looking at maps.... and i prefer to dm...aggghhh help me someone.... my brain cells are deteriorating....