As the head of my own massive RPG empire, I felt it was my duty to pick up some books and go a-reading. After all, Joseph Goodman at
Goodman Games thought it was a good idea to read through every book on Gygax’s
Appendix N list, which makes sense considering he’s spent the last little while shaping the gaming industry Gygax (, Arneson, et al) initiated. I’ve taken to the list myself, I’ve gotten through some of Elric, Conan, and a good pile of other Robert E. Howard and HPL stories to boot; and I’ve a good pile of Appendix N pulp books from my local book shop to last me through another 10-month Canadian winter and then some.
In a quick break between Sword and Sorcery, however, I picked up a book on management (re: my plane-spanning Empire), and found a gem that’s really gotten me thinking. The section was on motivation, the assumptions about people we have about work:
The Psychological Assumption: … A person is a complex, unfolding, maturing organism who passes through physiological and psychological stages of development. We evolve an ego ideal towards which we strive. The most powerful motivating force in us, over and above such basic drives as hunger, sexuality, aggression, is the need to bring ourselves closer to our ideal. The greater the gap between our perception of ourselves in reality and our ego idea, the more angry we are with ourselves and the more guilt we feel. Work is part of our identity, our ego ideal, and opportunities must be provided for us to work towards our ego ideal in work if we are to be motivated.
In short (too late): we have an ideal, we spend our lives trying to be that person, and the greater the difference between us and that person, the more we hate ourselves. To be happy, we need the oppotunity to get closer to that ideal.
Obviously this was written with role playing games in mind!
Look at what we players do: we make up characters. For years I’ve thought of character generation as a sort of
Myers-Briggs test for the player AT THAT MOMENT: what do they feel like doing? What are they hoping to be? WHO do they wish they were? What is their life like that, with their personality, they insisted on being a bard/monk/gnome/cleric?
What’s interesting is that the Alignment of Lawful Good is easily the most harped-about alignment in RPGs. Sorry, “Lawful Stupid”. And yet, for the last 30+ years Paladins have come to be one of the most popular characters to play. I’m constantly seeing Paladin PCs in games that I run, and to be frank, back in the day they were a big pain in the butt: less treasure than everyone else, fewer items, followers, and the alignment restrictions not just for them but those with whom they worked, it really was a lot of extra work for seemingly no payoff; and yet, droves of people kept playing them. In no iteration of the rules have they really been left out. There is some kind of satisfaction inherent in playing a Paladin. There has to be, to keep at it when the villains, the other alignments, and even other players hate you!
Paladins aren’t the only popular characters, obviously, and power certainly comes into it for some in designing their heroes. Competence and reliability, more than anything else, is the sign of a well-made character sheet, and high enough stats. The cunning rogue, the kindly cleric, and of course the brilliant mind of the party mage.
More than the cliche types, after a while a good player can really get into their character: imagine how they’d handle various situations, who they might be as a person, give them a personality. Like an actor who takes on a beloved role, who becomes that character on film, a Player can “become” their Character, even for a little while each week.
Maybe we can take that Ego Ideal and replace it with who we wish we could be more like. Maybe we can even let that character help us develop: more confident, more athletic, more detail-oriented than we have been. And not just one: so many different characters can be made, could we learn something from the barbarian one week, the wizard the next? Could the cleric help us learn to live for other people than ourselves? Could the paladin teach us, disheveled, manky us, what it means to have ideals and ethical principles, and live them instead of just paying lipservice?
For the truly imaginative, role playing games are an opportunity to meet heroes, to become more like actual heroic versions of ourselves than we might otherwise have access to in the world of “reality” television and its superficial, tacky role-models.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s the real reason so many people who have found roleplaying games, love them so much.
