Filing Edges: Demigods

[Jonathan Walton]

I was thinking about Mike Mearls assertion that roleplaying design is just "filing off the edges" (now that I'm clearer on what he means), when I responded to a post on RPGnet with:

How many roleplaying games can you think of in which you DON'T play an enlightened and empowered individual who works for/against the ignorant and weaker masses?  I have a hard time coming up with ANY.

Think about it.

Aside from maybe "Nicotine Girls," "Soap," and "Toon," I can't think of a single one.  Even "Kill Puppies for Satan" and "Sorcerer" fit the mold.

Diagnosis: Roleplaying has an incurable infatuation with heroes and demigods.  Probable causes:

1. Tradition -- It's all the fault of D&D and traditional roleplaying genres like fantasy and superheroes.  They've brainwashed us to repeat the same playing style over and over.

2. Audience -- It's the fault of all those over-educated straight white adolescent male losers with disposable income.  Heroes are what they want.

3. Roleplay -- It's inherant in roleplaying itself; the act of taking on another persona temps people to become larger-than-life heroes.

4. Narrative -- It's the fault of storytelling in general.  Joseph Campbell was right; we keep repeating the monomyth of the hero over and over again.

So, out of this, I have a few questions:

-- How do we get ourselves out of the vicious cycle of telling the same kinds of stories over and over again.  Obviously it's an issue for indie games too.  Most of the games designed here still fit the "hero" model.

-- Is it really worth the trouble?  There's a lot of mileage left in hero stories, especially if you tell them in new and interesting ways.  Maybe Mike's right and we should just keep "filing down the edges."

[Eero Tuovinen]

The minute you frame your question as "what kind of stories we can tell?" you step into the area of literature (there being a 1:1 correspondense between rpg stories and literary stories). Thus your question is already amply answered by literature. Does it concern itself with anything else except heroism? When it does, does it fulfill any creative agendas?

I propose that if the answer is that there is no literature apart from the heroic kind (which may well be the case if you're willing to look at the logical definitions and the effect of literary focus on the protagonists), then it doesn't matter. Why? Because we have better things to worry about here than whether literature is only filing off edges. If roleplaying manages to repeat what literature does storywise, it's plenty enough for a roleplaying forum. It's more sensible to jump over to a literary forum to develop a narrative outside current ideas (trying to do definitive narratives in roleplaying just leads to aggravating participationism).

It should however be remembered, that the types of stories told are only a small part of the entirety of roleplaying experience. A central role belongs to how the stories are told, not in the literary style sense, but in the social. Thus I don't think that your revelation (which feels natural if you're familiar with Campbell) is all that significant. Story just isn't that important.

The above being said and understood, I'll just answer your questions:

-- How do we get ourselves out of the vicious cycle of telling the same kinds of stories over and over again. Obviously it's an issue for indie games too. Most of the games designed here still fit the "hero" model.

No need to get out, really. By definition (participatory story creation or whatever) roleplaying is quite capable of doing the kinds of stories literature in general does. When the time's right we'll get to it, whether "it" is docufiction or game shows (or whatever fiction you have in your mind).

-- Is it really worth the trouble? There's a lot of mileage left in hero stories, especially if you tell them in new and interesting ways. Maybe Mike's right and we should just keep "filing down the edges."

Asking it like that, of course it's worth the trouble. Effort is no excuse, you have to have a reason for laying off artistic possibilities. If the only thing you see stopping yourself from making great games with non-heroic content is that it's a bother, what can I say?

Or should we consider your revelation as a manifesto? Do you want antiheroic, realistic, commonplace stories? Is there literature or cinema examples of the kind of thing you want? Do you understand that in most of those the protagonist is still some kind of hero, and the rest (say, Finnegan's Wake) are just strange. The strange kind of games are in development, so just wait for Humble Mythologies to make it's entrance, for example. Or I could translate my Intertext, the game of bricolage experiments.

Seriously: what kind of stories are you thinking of, if not heroic ones?

[Jonathan Walton]

Seriously: what kind of stories are you thinking of, if not heroic ones?

Part of it is the Yawn Factor.

Imagine that you're browsing the Indie Game Design forum and you come across a new game that's about a select group of individuals with k00l p0wRz that have to wrestle with issues of power and responsibility.  You have to think: "Do we really need another one?"

You're right that I'm putting aside other ways that the play could be valuable and just focusing on the kinds of stories being told.

You're right too that it's important to differentiate between a protagonist (who's going to be present in almost every story) and a hero in the larger-than-life-demigod sense that I'm talking about here.

I guess I'm just worried that we've learned to tell one type of story and won't be able to tell anything else.  For example, in comic books, when traditional (superhero) creators began writing non-superhero stories, they were almost always still told in a superhero format: the pacing was superhero pacing, the angles of the "shots" were based on the action poses in superhero books, the penciling and coloring styles mimicked superhero comics (beautiful people with exaggerated proportions, bright muticolored scenes), etc. etc.

Likewise, I worry that roleplaying inevitably drifts into telling what are basically superhero stories.  Ken Hite has publically stated that he thinks Vampire is a superhero game with fangs and angst.  Honestly, I wonder if most indie games are any different.  Can roleplaying handle a solid drama or mystery or suspense tale?  Can it run away from the world-saving and the being special and the smarter-than-the-average-bear mentality?  You seem to think that we'll inevitably get to that point.  I'm not so sure.  Or maybe I'm just impatient...

[Christopher Weeks]

Can roleplaying handle a solid drama or mystery or suspense tale?  Can it run away from the world-saving and the being special and the smarter-than-the-average-bear mentality?

Are you suggesting that for the answer to the first question to be yes, the answer to the second must be?  That's how I'm reading it, but it's a false dichotomy.  It seems to be like lots of individual game sessions handle solid drama, mystery and suspense just fine.  But they usually also deal with world-saving or at least significant speciality.  Which literature are you seeking to model or emulate in which drama is maintained but the characters are in no way special?

Is Twelve Angry Men a suitable study?  Are the jurors special or not?

Chris

[simon_hibbs]

Imagine that you're browsing the Indie Game Design forum and you come across a new game that's about a select group of individuals with k00l p0wRz that have to wrestle with issues of power and responsibility.  You have to think: "Do we really need another one?"

suppose George Lucas had thought that way when he was writing the script for Star Wars. "Why am I bothering? it's just another story about select individuals with kewl powerz", and chucked the script in the bin. Or if J.R.R Tolkien had decided that, on reflection, there wasn't any point in recreating dark age mythology because after all hadn't enough of it been crated in the Dark Ages? Is the world realy no richer for containing Mulder and Sculley? It's the end of fiction as we know it because it's all been done before. Creativity ended wen Virgil published re-treads of Homer. The End of the World is Nigh! Repent ye Sinners, Repent I Say!

Surely it's not quite that bad.


Simon Hibbs

[neelk]

Seriously: what kind of stories are you thinking of, if not heroic ones?

Part of it is the Yawn Factor.

Imagine that you're browsing the Indie Game Design forum and you come across a new game that's about a select group of individuals with k00l p0wRz that have to wrestle with issues of power and responsibility.  You have to think: "Do we really need another one?"

Amen. I've been running a Nobilis game and playing in an Exalted game, and while both are fun I really feel the urge to stretch the artistic muscles and do something different, where "different" means "people without titanic superpowers".

Likewise, I worry that roleplaying inevitably drifts into telling what are basically superhero stories.  Ken Hite has publically stated that he thinks Vampire is a superhero game with fangs and angst.  Honestly, I wonder if most indie games are any different.  Can roleplaying handle a solid drama or mystery or suspense tale?  Can it run away from the world-saving and the being special and the smarter-than-the-average-bear mentality?  You seem to think that we'll inevitably get to that point.  I'm not so sure.  Or maybe I'm just impatient...

Two observations: I don't think even most power games are superhero stories. Superheroes are commercial properties, and in order to preserve their market value tales are told in a universe where nothing ever changes. This gives well-written superhero comics a very existential character[*], and any rpg with dynamic PCs and a changing world situation isn't going to be like that.

Second, I don't doubt at all that an rpg can be run without superpowers. What you need for a good story are four things: protagonists, antagonists, a conflict, and a crucible. The first three are easy, in any genre. The fourth is where we fall down, I think. Conflict is repulsive, and you need something to bring the characters together so that the conflict cannot be ignored and must be resolved. Superpowers are normally about killing people, and that makes a good crucible simply because it's damn weird for anyone to ignore the threat of death. But, you know: school makes as good a crucible as the threat of violence: students have to attend, even though people they dislike will be there....

[*] The Myth of Sisyphus. See also David Fiore's weblog, Motime Like the Present, which is where I learned how to read commercial superhero comics without getting frustrated by the permanent lack of closure or character growth.

[Zak Arntson]

RPGs are a communal make-believe session, and a lot of people like to pretend things that are beyond human ability. Part wish-fulfillment, and part enhanced abilities up the contrast of human problems. There are games out there with regular PCs:

InSpectres: The whole point is average Joes
MonkeyWrench: You're stupid, hungry angry monkeys. In fact, you lose a lot.
Dying Earth: You have no special powers. In fact, cicrumstances often have powers over you.
Call of Cthulhu: Very much regular people.
Shadows: You're just kids.

In these cases, it's ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances. The only game I can think of with ordinary people in ordinary situations is Nicotine Girls.

[Christopher Weeks]

I don't know all those games, but in the ones I do know, you're not just ordinary folks in extraordinary circumstance because you're actually ordinary folks with extraordinary knowledge -- which might as well be kewl powerz, and the circumstances may or may not be extraordinary.

Chris

[Eero Tuovinen]

I don't know all those games, but in the ones I do know, you're not just ordinary folks in extraordinary circumstance because you're actually ordinary folks with extraordinary knowledge -- which might as well be kewl powerz, and the circumstances may or may not be extraordinary.

But you see, that's exactly the point of the literature argument. If you interpret "heroism" to mean something wider than literally having superpowers, then the next line to cross is to recognize that actually every protagonist is a hero. By focusing on him the text creates a special viewpoint centered on him. Effectively he has "special knowledge" of his own situation. The protagonist is always special because he is the protagonist.

This is what I meant above. Jonathan's questions are IMO empty because you have to either interpret his "hero" to mean titanic superpowers, in which case there are many games available where this is not the case, or you have to consider moral position, in which case again there are games that aren't heroic, or, as the last option, you have to consider the mere fact of being there and then with the right context to do something interesting heroic - in which case every protagonist ever is a hero.

The mere fact of D&D being unrealistic, Vampire being shallow and superhero games being popular is not enough to claim that there's any special glut of hero games. It's a popular theme, as well as in literature and movies, and nothing more.

[Christopher Weeks]

But you see, that's exactly the point of the literature argument.

Oh, yeah.  I agree with you completely, in both of your notes to this thread.

Chris

[Jonathan Walton]

Are you suggesting that for the answer to the first question to be yes, the answer to the second must be?

...Which literature are you seeking to model or emulate in which drama is maintained but the characters are in no way special?

First question: No.  Yes, drama and suspense can happen in hero tales, but I'm more interested in seeing them happen in non-heroic tales.

Second Question: Take your pick really.  This is a general question, without a specific project in mind to back it up.  If you need to, imagine a game about a group of normal high school kids or about the members of a prehistoric tribal community.  How's that?

Suppose George Lucas had thought that way when he was writing the script for Star Wars. "Why am I bothering? it's just another story about select individuals with kewl powerz", and chucked the script in the bin.

You're missing the point entirely.  I'm not saying "Hero stories are bad";  I'm saying "Let's figure out how to tell some stories that aren't hero stories, for once."

I've been running a Nobilis game and playing in an Exalted game, and while both are fun I really feel the urge to stretch the artistic muscles and do something different, where "different" means "people without titanic superpowers".

That's exactly where I'm coming from Neel.  I look at my shelf and there's Nobilis, Exalted, Mutants & Masterminds, Unknown Armies, Call of Cthulhu, Continuum, Rifts, Nightbane, and In Nomine.  And I really don't feel like playing any of them.  Can I play something without powered heroes, please?

In these cases, it's ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances. The only game I can think of with ordinary people in ordinary situations is Nicotine Girls.

See, Zak, I think ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances often become powered heroes in the way I'm trying to avoid.  CoC is based on the pulp genre, which gave birth to modern superheroes.  The characters are still an elite crew of enlightened individuals who save the world from the horrors from beyond.  I think Chris is right that "special knowledge" can often replace powers and end up creating the same kinds of stories.  Replace Cthulhu with Dormamuu and you get Dr. Strange.  I don't think this ALWAYS happens, but I think you have to be careful, or you'll end up running CoC and InSpectres just like you would run D&D.

Eero, I think I'm talking about something much more specific here than the general heroism of protagonists, as I've already said.  I'm talking about individuals with special powers or knowledge that allows them to save the world.  You can run WWII games in this style, where the larger than life Special Forces soldiers have to fight Nazis and save the world from the horrors of the Third Reich.  But you could also run games in the style of "All Quiet on the Western Front," which is not a heroic story at all, at least not in the sense that I'm talking about here.

[Zak Arntson]

I see what you're getting at. Well, here are my answers to your questions.

How do we get ourselves out of the vicious cycle of telling the same kinds of stories over and over again?

We just write games that don't fall into the extraordinary situation/people mode. I'll pimp Shadows for this one: There is nothing in the rules that state the shadow is real. In fact, the game can be played straight without any extraordinary circumstances: A group of kids are woken up by a noise, and they have to investigate before the parents wake up. No superpowers, no imaginary friends come to life, just Good and Bad Outcomes: Does little J.D. get to the cookie jar safely? Or does it fall and smash open?

I also wouldn't call it a vicious cycle. It's just a play preference.

Is it really worth the trouble?

Yes, if you are willing to write the game. And if you can find people to play and enjoy it, all the better. Personally, my tastes lean towards the exciting whiz-bang action, but I'd certainly be willing to try out an "ordinary circumstances" game.

---

Technical Aside:: Lovecraft's original fiction doesn't have the pulp heroes. You're thinking of the Howard-style protagonists, who are larger than life and very much the pulp hero. Lovecraft's protagonists tended towards journalists and scholars who couldn't do anything more than a normal person; which is why the stories wind up with the narrator going insane. Call of Cthulhu tries to mirror this, with ordinary people going insane or getting eaten. I don't know about the various CoC supplements and adventures, but saving the world is low on the priority list in CoC as presented in the core book.

(edited to add the technical aside)

[Eero Tuovinen]

Eero, I think I'm talking about something much more specific here than the general heroism of protagonists, as I've already said.  I'm talking about individuals with special powers or knowledge that allows them to save the world.  You can run WWII games in this style, where the larger than life Special Forces soldiers have to fight Nazis and save the world from the horrors of the Third Reich.  But you could also run games in the style of "All Quiet on the Western Front," which is not a heroic story at all, at least not in the sense that I'm talking about here.

To which all I can say is that I don't see superpower games as that prevalent. They're common in fiction, and they're common in roleplaying. Might be that roleplaying culture, young as it is, is still bound by it's origins in genre literature. That's not a problem, just something to take into account considering your personal development as an artist. Does soap opera speak to you as a person? If it does, I expect that you'll write a game about it some day. How many roleplayers like, say Dickens? One percent? How many like Batman? 70%? This is a matter of statistical likeness, nothing more.

You could as well ask "why are we designing games about issues that interest us?". A great majority of roleplayers are geeks, Titania's children from Mars, people who are accustomed to the ethos of morality, individuality, excellence. It's natural that this particular brand of fiction affects their roleplaying as well. If bridge playing matrons would have first developed roleplaying games, we'd be all playing Prides & Prejudices now.

So I guess that my answer to your questions is that we should go beyond superheroes when we bloody like to. If you want to a) be original, b) write about a particular non-supers issue or c) market to new customers, you will reinvent and remove the superpowers. Until then I see no particular reason to do it just because they're common.

[Jonathan Walton]

If bridge playing matrons would have first developed roleplaying games, we'd be all playing Prides & Prejudices now.

Now THAT's a line I've GOT to remember :)

If you'll notice, though, I acknowledged this point in my opening post.  I very much agree with you on the "why."  People seem to be agreeing that the "how" is: just do it, a much less complicated answer than what I was expecting, honestly.

[Eero Tuovinen]

If you'll notice, though, I acknowledged this point in my opening post.  I very much agree with you on the "why."  People seem to be agreeing that the "how" is: just do it, a much less complicated answer than what I was expecting, honestly.

Ah, that's probably because it's the same as asking "what should my game be about?". It's no good trying to design away from something, like it'd be if I went and made a game that doesn't use super powers. Such a game wouldn't necessarily be anything, as it's only defined by a lack of something.

It's much better to design towards something. That's why the answer is "just do it": the exact same principles we always use when designing apply. I have my goal (say, Prides & Prejudices, the game of marriages and petty social games), I have my tools, I have my vision. There's nothing to it, super powers do not make the matter different in any way.

For the record, of the last five games I've designed (or rather, started), one has characters in a superior social position, but all others are about quite different trappings than being better than somebody.