What If: nature vs nurture isot

[Strange Aeons]

I was thinking of a story for my homebrew setting and got an idea that I want feedback on. The exact setting isn't relevant but the basic idea goes like this:

ROB takes a party/community/city and places them on magical virgin earth; except he really makes six copies of the group on six different versions of the same earth. Each earth is physically/metaphysically forced to conform to different genera or set of conventions.
The main them would then be to explore how and why the different versions of the groups diverge as they conform to the conventions of their new world.

There are some immediate questions to be asked as well.
1. how large is the community sent? a smaller group would give more individual focus but a larger one would show societal effects,
2. should the groups be able to communicate with each other?
#. should there be native to interact with and at what scale?

 

[Anchises]

All of these questions depend on the goal the ASB is trying to achieve.

Having natives would be interesting if we had a spectrum of conventions from hyper social darwinist to hyper altruistic.

 

[Blaflaix]

Each earth is physically/metaphysically forced to conform to different genera or set of conventions.

Click to shrink...

This seems like it would undermine the study.

"Look, that city is full of clumsy young men who constantly trip and accidentally grope beautiful women... and the city is full of beautiful women."
"That's a genre convention."


You would have to clearly specify exactly what each world forces people to do, what is the common sense result of that, and only then could you look at the 3rd degree cultural differences as some kind of nature/nurture difference.

 

[Strange Aeons]

I had the idea that one realm was easily modified by your perception, like a psychological 'Alice in wonderland' thing.
another where the environment influences your mental state.
one that is basically a 'monster hunter' adventure realm and another that is steampunk variant.

In the last two, I was reasoning a life/death theme. life was a 'slice of life' realm with lots of growth vs basically the afterlife.

 

[Strange Aeons]

the thing that I found interesting was the idea that people will change in different ways according to different situations. Like how the jock would end ups as a major adventurer in monster land but would be a blue-collar worker is steampunk heaven. (names are just generic descriptors)

the inspiration for the setting itself was how physics and history could be set up to enforce some set of actions over another.
thou how directly you need to influence people to set a genre is a good question.
my plan was to set one or two ground rules of each realm and have various kinds of elementals act of the rest of the themes.

 

[Blaflaix]

The trick will be to thread the needle between "dumb luck" and "railroaded" for the differences.

The story about how Jack the Mechanic adapted his job easily for Steampunk Heaven, but lost his job and became a shiftless bum adventurer in Monster Land where machines don't work makes perfect sense but isn't that interesting.
The story about how his machine shop was crushed by a falling Sword of Destiny is just a generic fantasy story.

You'd have to get really deep into exactly how the same person, with the same goals, ends up choosing completely different paths based on the world.
To really drive it home, he'd need to have almost identical opportunities and deliberately chose different paths.