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:

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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.

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.

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

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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?

Jonathan Walton wrote: 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?"

Jonathan Walton wrote:

Eero Tuovinen wrote: 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?"

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...

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.

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

Christopher Weeks wrote: 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.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: But you see, that's exactly the point of the literature argument.

Christopher Weeks wrote: 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?

Simon wrote: 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.

Neel wrote: 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".

Zak wrote: 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.

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)

Jonathan Walton wrote:
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.

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

Jonathan Walton wrote:
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.

Ironically I AM working on a game called Regency Park which IS about and based on the social world in Jane Austen's novels.

I dunno, it interested me.

Trevis

I have on my back burner a Sorcerer minisup about, well, modern artists. So you *think* that you are larger than life and that the rules of society don't apply to you, but they do, because you're a schmoe. Just a schmoe who can paint.

yrs--
--Ben

I read part of this thread yesterday, and it percolated for a while and brought something back.

The first review of Multiverser ever published was by some gamer on UseNet. As I recall, he took exception to the I-game concept of the game. His stance was that he wasn't arrogant enough to believe himself capable of surviving in an alien world, let alone becoming a hero. He would rather create a hero who was better than himself, and imagine that he was that here.

I don't know how prevalent that notion is. I didn't have it then; I'd been on a lot of wilderness adventures with the Scouts and had been trained in many useful skills for that sort of context. Yet I think that there is this appeal, at least to many gamers, of being someone whom we perceive as better, or more powerful, or more important, than whom we perceive ourselves to be.

In Multiverser, I see players who put a lot of effort into their characters becoming better. They find people to teach them to fight, study advanced technologies, read ancient tomes about magic, and otherwise strive to build up characters who can be heroes. I also see players who in playing themselves move through worlds with very little concern for their own character abilities. They'll learn a bit here, pick up some gadget there, take an interest in a particular field for a while, but in the main they're happy with being who they are. You can say that all versers have a kewl power, because they're all immortal; but the characters don't know this at first, and sometimes take a long time to figure it out, and even then it doesn't always make much difference.

I think if we were playing Prides & Prejudices, we would have players who wanted to be the rich character, the charismatic character, the politically connected character--who wanted to have a character whose impact on the world exceeded his own, so he could imagine being that someone better.

This then may be the heart of the problem. If you play characters who have no more ability to impact the world than you, either you're headed for one of those bleak games where loss is inevitable (Call of Cthulu, early Gamma World) or at best you're going to be involved in rather boring routine events that don't go anywhere. (I actually do not mean "boring" in derogation; such "boring" events can be the very focus of a simulationist exploration of a cultural setting--they just don't have any of the dynamic of something happening that drives most play.) However, as soon as the character has the ability to impact the world, whether due to ability or situation or any other factor, he must choose how to impact the world, and at that point he becomes either a hero or a villain, using his power for good or for evil, to the degree that he is so empowered.

So how do you make characters who can't change anything but are still interesting to play?

--M. J. Young

M. J. Young wrote: So how do you make characters who can't change anything but are still interesting to play?

Jonathan, I think that what you're saying is "You don't need to change the larger situation of the world, because the story is focussed on you, so the things you can change are automatically the meat of the story". Am I close?

This would get into the interesting question of what the Stakes of the story are (in, I believe, Trollbabe terms), and how you get everyone on the same page about what the stakes are. It is (as M.J. Young just pointed out in the Inertia thread) a question that doesn't touch on individual play, but matters a great deal in how folks play together as a group.

About which I could spout more, but will defer :-)