Heroism

[Callan S.]

The people I know who are into DnD figures that a "hero" is someone who is better than the average. He will get through impossible odds even for him. He will get through, barely, but the common man wouldn't have stand any chance.

It's a genre. It's not a misconception of "heroism" IMO.

I'm going to change my vote and go with this! So the basic formula is that he's better than the majority and faces odds which, relative to him are tough, while relative to other people, are impossible.

[Ian.Plumb]

Hi,

Okay, so I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I always hear crap about TROS combat being 'gritty' as opposed to 'heroic.' What I reckon this means is that in TROS death is a constant and brutal possibility, where in a 'heroic' game the characters are godlike in comparison to their enemies, and can get wailed upon with little-to-no risk of actually dying.

IMO, the labels "Heroic" and "Gritty" refer to the mechanics of the game and have nothing to do with the gaming environment or the events that take place within it.

Heroic, Cinematic, Hollywoodesque all refer to gaming systems designed to model the events we see in movies or literature. Whether the results produced are realistic or not is of secondary importance.

Gritty, Realistic, Historic all refer to gaming systems that can model the real world. Whether Aragorn can mow down twenty Orcs is less important than when it happens it is an outstanding event that leaves everyone at the gaming table amazed.

Where do the labels apply for TRoS? TRoS handles both. If the referee wants realism in the gaming environment then SAs will be infrequently awarded and the NPCs will have SAs at similar levels to the PCs. Without disparity in the applicable SA bonuses TRoS produces realistic results. If the referee wants to turn up the Hollywood factor then SA payments will be frequent, the NPCs won't have SAs, and the wide disparity in dice pool will ensure that the PCs actions are both heroic and Heroic.

Cheers,

[Drifter Bob]

This question of what is heroism is really a two parter, IMHO.  On the one hand, what does that term really mean, and on the other hand, what do gamers mean when they use the term, and what is behind their way of thinking about it.

To keep it clear, I'm going to answer this in two posts, one for each concept.

First, The idea that heroism means 'feeling fear and doing what you know is right anyway' is a kind of watered down, modern, civilized, Christian version of the concept, applicable to firemen, soldiers, cops who are just doing their albiet very difficult and often harrowing jobs.  I say this as a former soldier and a fromer EMT myself.  I risked my life and have even saved a couple lives, but I don't consider that heroism.  Nor do I believe that for example, parents are necessarily heroes.  We can all of us be bad or very very good and inspired and endure great thigns, but that don't make us heroes.   Contrary to the modern Christian version of it, Heroism really doesn't have anything to do with morality either.

Heroism in the "good old days", (generally, before the late medieval period, by which time most truly heroic legends had been laid down) meant rising above the strictures and fears of the average man, even, say, the average Viking or Celtic warrior, and doing great things, being "great" all the time.  

All of us, even in ancient tribal socities of Homeric Greece or Migration era Germany or La Tene era Celtic Europe, have to make compromises in our lives to live.  We have to obey the rules of society, we may even knuckle under to injustice, to personal fears, we simply have to face the fact that caution and compromise is a neccesary part of life.  

What the hero does, what Gilgamesh and Odysseus and Cu Cullihain and Beowulf do, is to remind us what potential we have in us if we could only throw off the pettiness of day to day life, and "rise above" as black flag used to say, and really live up to our full potential.  And that doesn't just
mean courage, but also strength, and cunning, and wisdom, and sheer elan.  They remind us how far we can really take ourselves, and generally, they reminded a particular group of people who shared a given mythology, how great they could be.

That to me, is what heroism really is.  That is the quality, the heroic quality
that all these folks really have in common.

JR

[Drifter Bob]

The fact that most gamers use the term heroism to just mean invincible characters like comic book heroes, is just another way the sick and weak side of the RPG culture has distorted yet another beautiful thing, such as true heroism.

This is going to probably really irritate people, but I think it has to be said.

The reaction by that reviewer toward TROS, and his and others invocation of 'heroic' systems, is complete rubbish on a number of different levels.  From a 'gamist' perspective, if I understand the term correctly, the guy is way off base because, as many have pointed out, the system has sufficient mechanics to allow for more or less invulnerable characters, by using the SAs.  

From the point of view of a general outlook on games, what kind of baby do you have to be to feel all weepy abut the destruction of an imaginary character?  People play hundreds of RPG's of all different types, but they can't entertain the idea of playing a character who might die even once because they are too squeamish?  Come on!  These are literally people who can't even PRETEND to be heroes.

This ties into a deeper issue, and that is the general high level of acceptance for, the in fact fetish for, mediocrity and mental mush in the RPG community.  There is a mindset I have encountered many times, which militantly embraces the familiar, stale, mastubatory world of bad rpg-dom, and is violently hostile toward any improvement of or tinkering with the medium.

Needless to say, this is not a big problem with most people posting to the Forge, where the experimental side of the genre is more prevalent than most places, but I'm certain you all know what I'm talking about because I think it's a large chunk, if not a majority mentality within the larger RPG community.

There are several distinct characteristics evident:

1) An unwillingness to experiment or modify rules, and a fetishization of canonical interpretation of THE OFFICIAL RULES.  Any number of simple house modifcations could have been made to every thing that reviewer, for example, said about TROS.  Did he have some valid complaints?  sure, but why not just make a couple of minor changes, make armor more efficient or magic skill a little more expensive to acquire, or raise damage resistance a point or two.  Easy to get the game exactly how you want it.  But these people want their hand held.  This is a very common mentality with hard core D&D fans.

2) Demands to play cheezy wish-fullfillment characters.   I knew of one guy who was a big RPG enthusiast, but refused to play any RPG unless he could be the same magical-Silver-Dragon-disguised-as-a-human every single time he played.  No matter what game.  Since I've gotten back into RPG's I've found this attitude alarmingly prevalent.

3) Unwillingness to try new things.  This is a big reason why D&D & whitewolf are still the most popular game systems and why the excellent independent RPG's such as those found here in the forge have such a relatively tiny share of the market.  They are hostile toward any incursion into the familiar if smelly turf of "their world", just they way they resent it when their mom comes in and cleans up their messy room.  They like the dirty socks on the floor.  And thats one of the reasons they hate and fear the very concept of Realism, for example.

4) want their hands held all the time.  Again, another factor in the negative review of TROS.  These are the GM's who have to have pre-written adventure modules to play, the chracters who WANT to be railroaded into a plot line

5) Rationalize medioctrity.  I once met an MIT student, who was brilliant, and he used to rationalize how all these star trek episodes were actually realistic.  He had brilliant explanations for why all the cheezy special effects and plot ideas (like every Alien was a human with different ears or differnt skin color) They will move a mountain rather than step over a sacred molehille.

I could go on and on.  But I think this creepy mentality, that many people cling to because it's "their thing".  This is a big part of why the market isn't bigger, not just game mechanics, although it also influences game mechanics.

anyway, I'm starting to foam at the mouth, so I'll quit for now...

JR

[Ingenious]

Right F***ING on Bob!
My first understanding of true heroism came from reading books on WW2, Pearl Harbor.. etc. The story of the one black man standing on the deck of a ship, under fire, shooting a machine gun at every damned plane that flew by.. knowing that he was going to die and yet he stayed there and fought.. to me that is heroism in its purest form.

And to respond to your very negative(but fully deserved) opinion of D&D and its fanatics. I have only been in the world of table-top RPG's for probably less than a year.. I started out with DND 1st edition..and liked it. But there were too many 'lead by the nose' campaigns, dungeon crawls..etc.  Just explore every room, hallway, etc.. kill the bad guys and save the good ones. Plot had little to do with it, but there was a plot of some sort at least. Looking back on the whole thing, I find it comical. Absolutely comical it was to play that system.. However, there was alot of investment in a character...because of the system and the possibility of one having massive hit points increased the longevity to a point where you could play the same character for YEARS. But what was the point of it all? There was nothing spectacular about it, nothing to set one character apart from the next IMO..except going off the rulebook in how it says the characters should be different.

One of the things that initially drew me to TROS was the complete and total customization of characters, they had personalities.. flaws, certain things they excel at. And this was for every single player to be able to have. Not to mention the unprecendented combat system.

But back to the heroism topic.. after my brief tangent.
Heroism does have many forms and perspectives, yadda yadda. We all know that. To one culture, heroism might be strapping a bomb to your chest and exploding it in the middle of a crowd...(bad example I know).
To others it might be a selfless act. It might be taking on a big corperation such as Enron, or a police officer pointing out the level of corruption at his precinct.. Or it might be having to choose between saving your own life, or someone else's.. or 3 other lives, etc. That specific part of Forrest Gump for example..though he did not die.. (through the Grace of God, and more-over the script-writers..)

So we've trampled over the topic of heroism with about 300 M1A1 tanks by now.. so let's rather talk about what is NOT heroic..
What I find to not be heroic, in terms of RPG's.. is DND. If I had a character with 160hp, you're damn right I'd be able to go toe-to-toe with a dragon by myself.. Doing something that you are supposed to be capable of through the downfall(in this case) of a system's game-mechanics..is not heroic. If a mage can flame-broil an entire army of goblins, orcs, etc.. by himself with a few spells..that is not heroic. He's supposed to be capable of that. Was that person ever in danger? Did he even have to break a sweat? Nope.  Let's talk about HP and its craptastic influence on games that I wouldn't pay a dime to play anymore. A character can have hundreds of hit points right? So if I had hundreds of hits points and went solo against a dragon, you would think that was heroic right? Wrong. That dragon only has a fraction of the hit points I would have.. Granted he might hit a little bit harder.. maybe a breath weapon.. but if my saving throws were low enough.. I'd be safe.
Now then, if the dragon had the same number of HP as me.. or more than me.. *MAYBE* it would be SLIGHTLY heroic. But then I'd have to be drunk to a noncoherent state in order to beleive that load of shit.

-Ingenious

[Muggins]

So far a lot of people have been talking about heroism. Let's through another spanner in the works from Jake's first post: "gritty."

A lot of people use this in the context of "realism", meaning that the system allows the play to conform to real life activities. But there is another usage of the word- "dirty". In the spirit of the thread, consider whether "heroism" and "gritty" go together. Can someone still be a hero and shine? Yes. but there is another aspect, wherein heroic deeds can in the end be pointless. The hero sacrifices his life to save the sacred artifact, only for the party to return to find the city already destroyed. Or to find that the local sorceror came in and solved the problem. In some ways, making altruistic actions less rewarding overall is what this version of "gritty" means. At the same time, by combining this sort of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" idea in your regular game can lead to especially poignant situations.

For me, part of the attraction of TRoS is that it has enormous scope for this. Entering into any fight is heroic in some way (though I have had stupid players...), but the outcome of the fight may not lead to any greater reward but survival...

James

[kenjib]

Hi Bob,

If heroism doesn't have to do with conquering your fears and beating the odds, but rather with rising above and showing the illusory nature of complacency and the rules of society to achieve greatness, then why does it follow that D&D's invincible super-heroism is somehow not true heroism?  D&D has characters who are greater than great, completely out of proportion with the average person and having a grotesquely charicatured realization of the human potential.  If anything, this seems to be a hyper-example of your heroism rather than a counter-example.

It may not be the style I like, but I find those two points of yours hard to reconcile.  If people have fun playing that way, I don't see what's so bad about it except for when it conflicts with what someone else in the group wants (and that is not an objective reflection on either style of gaming).  TROS might have more of a live deeply and suck the marrow out of life/live fast die young ethos to it, but that might not be why some people play.  It's just a game after all, not a revolutionary social movement...

[Bill Cook]

To me, heroism entails taking risks and making sacrifices.  If a game provides those opportunities and rewards their pursuit, I would find it to support heroic play.

There is an understanding local to gamer culture that heroic = advantage by kewl.  And if Aragorn did get taken out by the 19th of 56 orcs, it would have made for a shorter story, so there's a counter value somewhere on this end.

I think it's that engaging games have manageable challenges.

When I was learning to play chess, I got into a pickup game with a stranger at a bar who had spent the last few years playing in prison.  From the opening to the middle game, everything was very gioco piano, and then he fed on my material like a swarm of female mosquitos.  After he won, he said, "Y'know, you know how to play.  The way you responded showed that you knew what I was up to.  But you never, you know, went for it."

Heroes go for it.

[Drifter Bob]

Hi Bob,

If heroism doesn't have to do with conquering your fears and beating the odds, but rather with rising above and showing the illusory nature of complacency and the rules of society to achieve greatness, then why does it follow that D&D's invincible super-heroism is somehow not true heroism?  

If you can't tell the difference between the mediocre pablum of the typical D&D game, or for that matter the comic books and TV show cliche's which inspire them, and say, the epic of Gilgamesh or Beowulf, then you will never understand heroism.  I admit it can be a bit difficult to define the difference in a mathematical way, but I think it is obvious to most people.  

There are also a few things you can point out.  There is no false humility, there is no sappy P.C. moralism, there is no routine stale beating up on boringly predictable opponents, no equivalent of hacking through armies of orcs.  Heroes face challenges which though grown beyond all experience, were fundamentally real to the audiences of the original fables.  They may be capricious and wierd, but they are never mundane.

It may not be the style I like, but I find those two points of yours hard to reconcile.  If people have fun playing that way, I don't see what's so bad about it except for when it conflicts with what someone else in the group wants (and that is not an objective reflection on either style of gaming).  TROS might have more of a live deeply and suck the marrow out of life/live fast die young ethos to it, but that might not be why some people play.

Well, by one way of looking at it, nothing is bad about it any more than nothing is bad about millions of Americans eating fast food, reading the national enquirer, and watching championship wrestling all day on TV.  If thats how they want to spend their time, then fine.  On the other hand, if the Big Mac fan wants to write a review of Gallatoires restaurant, and tell everybody that the food sucks because nothing is deep fired, then I have every right to point out the bankruptcy of his eating habits.  If the Enquirer fan writes a scathing critique of The Dying Earth based on the fact that it doesn't have any pictures and the words are too long, I have every right to point out that what he reads is, from my perspective, pablum.  If the Championship wrestling fan complains bitterly about Yojibmbo because he can barely read and hates subtitles, I can point out how stupid he is.  Etc.

It's just a game after all, not a revolutionary social movement...

I don't know where you get the revolution part.  Like I said, if people want to spend their lives in tepid mediocrity, that is their business, but I'm not under any restriction that says I can't call a spade a spade.

JR

[kenjib]

If you can't tell the difference between the mediocre pablum of the typical D&D game, or for that matter the comic books and TV show cliche's which inspire them, and say, the epic of Gilgamesh or Beowulf, then you will never understand heroism.  I admit it can be a bit difficult to define the difference in a mathematical way, but I think it is obvious to most people.

There are also a few things you can point out.  There is no false humility, there is no sappy P.C. moralism, there is no routine stale beating up on boringly predictable opponents, no equivalent of hacking through armies of orcs.  Heroes face challenges which though grown beyond all experience, were fundamentally real to the audiences of the original fables.  They may be capricious and wierd, but they are never mundane.

I see where you are coming from better now.  Thanks for clarifying.  You've got a good point, and I think it's a very compelling and rpg-inspiring view on heroism, but why do definitions of heroism that are 1000 and 4000 years old respectively pre-empt the modern interpretation?  Comic book superheroism is now the order of the day, and quite valid.  Having a much larger circulation, I'd wager that it's a much more prominent definition of heroism than older ideals (Frank Miller's turning things on their head notwithstanding, since a scattered/branching timeline is a form of immortality in itself).  Personally I too prefer the older ideals, but that's neither here nor there, really.

If I had to define heroism, it would be a bit simpler.  It's someone who does grand things and that you agree with.  Someone who does grand things that you don't agree with is an anti-hero or a villain.  False humility and P.C. moralism do not disqualify someone from heroism, as long as their deeds still match up.  I think that hacking through an army of enemies, wading in their gore in the lust of battle, does potentially sound pretty heroic though, and D&D is a good game for enabling that kind of scenario.  TROS less so.

Well, by one way of looking at it, nothing is bad about it any more than nothing is bad about millions of Americans eating fast food, reading the national enquirer, and watching championship wrestling all day on TV.  If thats how they want to spend their time, then fine.  On the other hand, if the Big Mac fan wants to write a review of Gallatoires restaurant, and tell everybody that the food sucks because nothing is deep fired, then I have every right to point out the bankruptcy of his eating habits.  If the Enquirer fan writes a scathing critique of The Dying Earth based on the fact that it doesn't have any pictures and the words are too long, I have every right to point out that what he reads is, from my perspective, pablum.  If the Championship wrestling fan complains bitterly about Yojibmbo because he can barely read and hates subtitles, I can point out how stupid he is.  Etc.

I don't know where you get the revolution part.  Like I said, if people want to spend their lives in tepid mediocrity, that is their business, but I'm not under any restriction that says I can't call a spade a spade.

JR

How does playing D&D casually equate with spending one's life in tepid mediocrity?  I'll also call a spade a spade and say that this is just a game.  It's not a lifestyle.  A person's choice of game does not send them into a precipice of squalid grey spiritual-middle-management land.  It's just a game.  Even so, why is it beneficial for heroism to be somehow divorced from pop culture/the unwashed masses, where the vibrant center of life and culture actually is, and shuttled off into an obscure, cobweb infested corner of literary scholasticism?

I believe that heroes are as people define them.  Like pornography - people know it when they see it.  If I find that my view of heroism is superior to but at odds with millions of Americans, is this saying more about me or about millions of Americans?  I'd actually say both at the same time.

As far as your food analogy goes, I subscribe to Cook's Illustrated and enjoy making nice dinners at home.  I like to experiment and improvise off-the-cuff so I prefer cooking to baking (although I still can't wait to try the baklava in the issue that just came - I'm a baklava addict).  I'm reading an excellent book now, Cookwise, that will really help me to understand the chemical interactions of ingredients in cooking and baking.  I also like eating at nice restaurants here in Seattle.  On the other hand I think that, to be honest, McDonalds food tastes pretty good.  I know to avoid it thanks to Fast Food Nation as well as general common sense, but honestly yes, it does taste good and lots of people (I'd wager most) agree with me.  In fact, it was engineered to taste good in a laboratory, down to the very last strange and unnatural additive in the grease to infuse a soup of flavors into the fries.  It was designed to be addictively good, which is actually part of the problem with it (that and the pricing issue).  If someone doesn't like Gallatoires, I too think it's good to know what their tastes are (McDonalds, for example) to establish context, but I'm not going to deride their opinion and call them epicureally bankrupt.  A review has absolutely no meaning without the context of an audience.  What does this food stuff really have to do with rpgs?  Well, really I'm not quite sure but I do find that when trying to discuss things analogies generally tend to make things less clear than more clear and spin discussions off onto strange tangents like this one, if you see what I'm driving at.

[Bastoche]

Arguing about taste wheter for food or role playing games is a lost argument. You can't argue about tastes. It's about tastes and opinion. One who believes his tastes to be supperior than someone else's is both a snob and wrong.

[Bob Richter]

Ask the man on the street -- is a fireman a hero? a soldier?

These men are not superhuman. They do not cleave through armies of orcs. They sacrifice themselves for their neighbors and their countrymen. This makes them heroes, not an overwhelming number of hitpoints.

Roleplayers and comic-book enthusiasts are a rare and odd breed. If you want to establish a baseline for what our society calls "heroism" ask someone else.

[kenjib]

That's a good point Bob Richter.  Do you think the man on the street would deny that Superman is also a hero?

[Bastoche]

And what teels you that this soldier or firefighter, although human, is not above average?

The notion of what a "hero" is is not glued in concreet. It's subjective. And in the context of role-playing games, it's a matter of opinions. You like heros that are nobodies on sheet and makes great actions. Fine. Some like heroes that are "better than the norm" on sheet and others like their heroes to be super-human. It doesn't make these characters any less heroic because you say so.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Jake, I lay the historical responsibility for the gamer-versions of "heroic" (which I agree are nonsensical) with the Hero System, published in the late 1980s. This, and its associated game Champions 4th edition, represent a rather serious shift from the versions of Champions published up until then, including a pretty elaborate categorization of superhero comics which used the words "heroic" in the now-common gamer sense.

Best,
Ron