WandaVision - bring the fun home!

Could something like WandaVision work in an RPG?

I’d say yes, though compared to the very RPG-friendly regular MCU and associated series, not easily.

Firstly you have a shifting background that moves between styles, and genres. That would take some effort, deciding what changes and what doesn’t.

Then there’s the reveal that the world is a construct, and the initial mystery of who’s been messing up everything.

This could be done in a “reality isn’t real” RPG - I statted out a TV hero starting to wonder about the world she’s in for Over The Edge, for example - so there’s precedent there.

Do you want to drop this into an ongoing game, or start a new one?

Having existing characters find themselves stuck in a different world is easy enough, if it fits your game’s standard Weird Level...

And then there’s the big reveal that Wanda herself is (mostly) responsible for imposing this reality.

Playing something like that would give a huge amount of power to one of the PCs.

It’s the kind of thing I’ve done in The Watch House in collaboration with the player of the affected PC, sometimes springing it on the other players. Indeed, for season six we borrowed the “make a world where they’re happy” setup from House Of M, one of Wanda’s previous brushes with manipulative godhood. I’ll note that like that series we started with the other PCs working out that it was wrong immediately. Playing it as normal, even for a session, would be a lot trickier.

And obviously it needs a player you can trust, and some ideas for how to set things right after the fact.

Starting a series as a seemingly normal example of one genre before revealing the world is an illusion could qualify as a bait and switch, but the show doesn’t do that. It sticks to the sitcom format for most of one episode, and even before that it has a little colour detail in the advert and indeed starts with the Marvel logo in colour before it shifts to black and white. The trailers also made it clear that something weird was going on from the outset, showing the world advancing through time and shifting into colour and glimpses of the outside world as well. We should know something’s up even without our existing knowledge of our heroes.

So, could you bring each of these elements to the table, separately or together? A false reality, a genre shifting adventure, a player character being responsible?

Yes, but it would take some doing...