While reading some of the earlier posts made by Cabana, one of the things I noticed was that one of the influences picked was Fight Club, and be it, the movie or the book there are certain themes mentioned within it, one of them, at least the one that stuck with me the most, was the idea that "You are not a beautiful snowflake, you're the same compost as everyone else."
Would adding this idea to an RPG be a bad idea?
I mean, what would happen if in the RPG we came right out and told the player that their character was not a hero. Not at all. Not even a little bit. They are the same as everyone else. Sure, their upbringing might be unique, they might have some abilities that some other people don't possess, but when it comes right down to it, there are others like them, heck, there are others who are better than them.
Most of my experience comes in the form of Dungeons and Dragons which basically straight up tells you at the beginning of the book that you are special. That you can be anything you want to be. And they're correct, by the end of the game, if you've made it to level 20, you're essentially a god. Nothing really can touch you, besides elder dragons and other gods (and about half of the actual gods pale in comparison to a party of level 20 characters). What's worse is that if you want, you can play an EPIC campaign where levels continue all the way up to 30. So you're even more powerful than gods by the end of it.
While this works for D&D, I'm not sure if I really want it in our RPG.
I think that the characters should, through hard work and sacrifice, be able to become something great, but I don't think that they should ever be able to transcend to godhood. Characters should be human, they should be flawed, they should be weak, and at times they should rise above their limitations and do something amazing, but at their core they should be human.
The world outside the safety (or perceived safety) of the villages should always be frightening to them, it should always be perilous. There should always be great adventurers and heroes of old that the characters look up to. The world should be awe-inspiring and somewhat terrifying, they should never feel like they're completely in control, or that no matter what the odds, they can handle it. There should be times when they need to run away, and if they don't, if they opt to stand their ground, they should suffer for it, potentially die for it.
Because that is what sometimes happens to people, they die.
This is another issue I have with D&D, there's really no fear of death. If your character dies, the party just pools together 6000 gold and calls up the local Cleric, and BAM! there's the player again, missing a little XP maybe, but overall not worse for wear. When they get to a high enough level, they don't need to pay the money, the party Cleric can just do it himself. And at later levels, the character itself simply cannot die. Almost every classes level 20 capstone ability is the "get out of death free" card ability.
I think death should be very real in our game.
If you take too much damage, you die.
If you do something stupid, you die.
If you have a string of bad luck and the dice aren't with you, you die.
Simple as that.
Maybe that's harsh, but I think that to get a good gritty sort of feel, characters need to die, and players need to fear their characters dying. They should be actively trying to preserve their characters, they should be thinking of ways to deal with an encounter that doesn't involve charging in guns blazing and hoping for the best. Maybe that's just me, but I've been playing a lot of 3.5 recently and I kind of miss the days of 2nd edition, where if you screwed up, and even if you didn't, your character was toast. We played the Tomb of Elemental Evil module and I lost well over a half dozen characters to it, and it was a blast. Same deal with Call of Cthulhu, we had a running joke that if everyone didn't end up dead or insane by the end of a mystery, the GM sucked, or we were extremely lucky.
With the campaign we've been running for two years with 3.5, we've only lost 2 characters. Both of which, the players asked me to kill. No character has been lost due to combat, traps, or anything else. I don't think I like that much. Part of what makes roleplaying exciting to me is the looming threat of death and destruction. If that's not there ... I don't know, it doesn't excite me.
But back on point, I think that characters should die, I think that DMs should encourage it even. I think that characters should be human, and if they level, they should have a cap well below that of say, the "great heroes" of the land (like Lancelot or King Arthur level) and the "great villains". I think that they should be able to be heroes but never to feel like they're a part of the elite, the movers and the shakers, the people who outrank kings.
Another thing I've noticed is that in D&D, they always refer to the party as "heroes". I don't think we should do that in our material. The party is not automatically heroes, or even heroic. That is a title that must be earned, through hard work and sacrifice. I guess really that's what all this is about, that the players and their characters must earn their heroism, not be given it from the outset.
Sorry, that was more ranty than I would have liked, but I do think that I included some good points. Maybe I'll go through and edit it and trim down the unnecessary bits.
/Shawn/
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