You read the Darksword trilogy too, huh?Unless it's a word of spellcasters and the fighter is the one guy born in the last 1000 years without magic. Then he's the weird one who is going to doom the world to a boring, magicless future.
Okay, but you were a hero by 4th level and a superhero by 8th. At least according to Gygax and his title chart.
A flawed hero is better than one who is perceived as an outstanding moral example or role model. You can relate to them better than you could with a hero who appears to have no flaws.
I only asked because you previously said your PCs aren't protagonists...
In D&D terms a hero is someone who helps/saves others, often through threat of bodily harm or death. Or almost every D&D game I've ever been in. In D&D, you can even accept payment for it and be a hero!
Doesn't really change my point though. Why insist on heroism at all?
They're obviously focused on in play, but I don't consider them protagonists because games are not stories, at least not necessarily and not in a non-emergent way. We're not telling a story together primarily, but instead we're exploring a world together.
Yeah, that's a narrative the game pushes, but it didn't used to and it doesn't have to, and there are plenty of D&D-adjacent games (Dungeon Crawl Classics is a good example) that still don't.
I've been playing games that way, and not narrative games, since 1e when I started playing. We took jobs or sometimes helped for free. We killed rampaging monsters, saving farms and villages. We rescued princesses from dragons and evil dukes. And on and on. We ended up heroes(in D&D terms), because that's just how the vast majority of games go.
Fair enough, but that doesn't go against anything I said. I never said that playing the hero wasn't popular.
