Should PCs Be Exceptional?

Micah Sweet said:

It's a shame that PC exceptionalism only has those two poles and nothing in between.

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It's a shame the idea of exceptional fantasy PCs automatically brings cries of "if you want superheroes, play a superhero game!", yes.

Lord Shark said:

It's a shame the idea of exceptional fantasy PCs automatically brings cries of "if you want superheroes, play a superhero game!", yes.

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Well ... depends on what "exceptional" means (again).

MGibster said:

I want to roleplay something different from my normal experience. That's why I like to play average Joes.

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Sarcasm aside, I want to, in effect, take something not all that far removed "mechanically" from my normal experience (at least when it starts out), play it in a completely different setting and milieu with different parameters, and see what happens.

The personality etc., however, is likely to be something different from my own: I get to be people I can't be in real life.

TaranTheWanderer said:

If I run a game, most NPCs in a village have 8-10 in every stat except for the stat(s) that is related to their main profession. They’d have anywhere between a 13 and 16 in that stat (depending on their status and reputation).

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Why would their generic stats be as low as 8-10 when the bell-curve average is 10.5?

A character with 9s in five stats would need an 18 in the sixth stat just to reach the bell-curve average. As 18s are in theory supposed to be pretty rare, this makes no sense.

I mean, 9-10-10-11-11-12 is a bland enough array for typical villagers and yet still matches the bell-curve.

payn said:

I don’t know all of these references but I see Conan as mundanely exceptional. His backstory covers him becoming so, but he bleeds and makes dumb decisions like any one else. He’s awesome because he perseveres because of luck, wits, and grit even in the face of the fantastical.

It’s the exceptional as in the PC can bend steel or fly or Bullets bounce off them which would annihilate a normal person that I do not prefer.

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This I would tend to agree with, albeit it varies a bit depending on the campaign/game. But I generally want highly competent "mundanes", not super-beings. This site's has a pretty strong D&D bias, and D&D turns people superhuman at high levels. A high-level D&D character can kill a dragon with a bit of sharpened steel, and I think that warps many people's thoughts on the topic. But my preference is for Leverage-level competence. For example, when faced with four beefy goons, Eliot Spencer calmly explains to them exactly how he's going to kick their butts, and when they attack anyway he proceeds to do it in exactly the way he said.
What he does not do is punch holes in tanks.

Celebrim said:

Even Luke isn't a complete N00b. Biggs, who has been to the Imperial Academy and thus been formally trained, and who is competent enough to throw into Red Squadron, testifies "Luke is the best pilot in the outer rim." While there might be some bias talking, there is good reason to believe that Luke is himself starting with a dice pool already well above what is available to a typical starting Star Wars RPG character. Best pilot in the outer rim implies Luke has something like 9d6 or 10d6 in Starfighter Operation to begin the game and is only an inexperienced N00b in the sense that he's very much a specialist with perhaps no more than 4d6 in any non-piloting pool.

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According to the original D6 RPG, Luke at the Battle of Yavin had 7D in Starship Piloting, 6D in Starship Gunnery, and 8D in Airspeeder Operations and Repulsorlift Operations. By comparison, Han Solo has 10D in Starship Piloting and 9D in Starship Gunnery. A starting human could, at best, have 6D (4D in the underlying stat and getting +2D from skill dice).

Theory of Games said:

Yeah but IME the PCs with higher stats end up protecting your lil underdog. Higher stats > lower stats

... or victory. And there's a better shot at victory with better stats. Statistically-speaking

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I've run the numbers for our games, and with a fair bit of data to go on I found that starting stat average has a rounding-error effect on projected career length (measured by adventures, I could do it by sessions but never have). I'm no statistician but I think the difference falls well within the "not statistically significant" boundary; which means that your starting stats have basically no effect on the odds of your being a one-hit wonder.

What makes a much bigger difference is reaching your third adventure. Get there, and your projected career length skyrockets.

For the vast majority of my games where this question is relevant, exceptional feels too strong of a word for where I want them to start. However, I do want them to be interesting, competent, capable. They're not uniquely special, I just want them to be Level 1, not Level 0.

payn said:

Well, there is certainly another level to the discussion. Does the player want to take the journey to being exceptional, or do they just want to start after it’s been achieved? I’m of the former mind but do expect to arrive at some point.

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Pretty much same here.

My question is, if you start at the end of the journey to exceptional, where do you go from there?

Or is it a "this character goes to 11" situation?

Scribe said:

Which is a core component of Sword and Sorcery. Its not about world shaking events, thats not the power level of the characters.

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Absolutely. That's one of the mistakes of the most recent Conan movie (well, that and everyone screaming up into the sky, holding something), making it be about saving the world.

Lord Shark said:

And even superheroes fail as well. Doesn't mean they're not exceptional. Is Spider-Man less super because he failed to save Gwen Stacy and has been repeatedly beaten bloody by villains?

I have no interest in running a game for peasants who barely know which end of the sword to hold and who cringe in terror at the sight of hostile housecats. Give me heroes, thanks.

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It's not about superheroes on one end of the spectrum and incompetents on the other. Rather, to my mind, it's about the PCs' place in the world. Spider-Man is generally considered a "street-level" superhero. He's powerful, but not so powerful that he doesn't have to exert effort to overcome his challenges. It's like, the Silver Surfer showing up to defend a bodega probably isn't going to be as exciting as Spider-Man doing so.

As an aside, if you go back and read some of the Spider-Man Epic collections, those early comics are some of the consistently best of the era. Compared to The Avengers, where you were just as likely to encounter a horribly racist red menace caricature as a villain that's still around today

Lanefan said:

Pretty much same here.

My question is, if you start at the end of the journey to exceptional, where do you go from there?

Or is it a "this character goes to 11" situation?

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I think advancement is overvalued, especially outside of D&D and its ilk. Most characters in fiction do not get "better" all the time. They start out competent and "improve" by learning more about whatever dangerous and weird circumstances they encounter. There are characters focused on learning, like young superheroes, but usually they don't actually get "more powerful" just better and doing whatever it is they do.

For D&D and the like, I would rather have characters start at 5th and go to 9th over the course of the campaign (or 14th to 20th, or whatever range band you are interested in) than start at 1st. Especially in modern D&D, those first few level are so fast and artificial it is barely worth it anyway.