Ah, heroism. The bold confrontation of evil and menace by the brave and occasionally somewhat foolhardy hero for the benefit of someone in desperate need of their help. The RPG hobby was born out of the forge of heroism, and the most popular game within the hobby has always used it as the banner-level promise. "Play Dungeons & Dragons," the cover proclaims in ways overt and subtle, "and you will be a hero!"
We can think of this heroism something like an emotional goal for our game. Though the exact cocktail of emotional highs we get from pretending to be a hero in our games is probably pretty complex, it's likely close to what Ekman would've called "satisfaction." It also involves a lot of elements of social approval: in the fantasy world, your avatar can be loved and honored and respected for their deeds, and, by empathy, you can feel that feeling, too. Certainly that's a big draw for people not used to getting the accolades of their peers (ie: a lot of socially awkward high school folks), but it's also a draw for other people, for a variety of reasons. The ultimate thrust is that being a hero is fun in and of itself. Solving the problems of imaginary people feels awesome.
Of course, if we are to play as the hero, we're going to need someone in need of our help. D&D is set up so that the characters we make are eminently capable of helping the NPC's in the world. For the most part, our NPC's are farmers and townsfolk and other "civilians," while our characters are elite, heroic, and sometimes even specially chosen by destiny or blessed with some ability that makes them distinctly NOT part of the normal daily operation of the world.
In the context of game design, these NPC's serve to help motivate the player. When you sign up to pretend to be a hero (as D&D advertises itself), doing the right thing feels good, so the player is naturally inclined to help out the people of the world that lies before them. It's what they're here to do -- to save those who need saving, and feel good because of that. So we need people who need saving, for our own fun. We need to put peasants in peril. We need a world that needs heroes.
There can be a problem in this. In presenting our NPC's as victims that need saving, we need to walk a fine line between encouraging the player to do the thing they want to do and be a big damn hero, and presenting our NPC's as characters who exist only to be helped. What's wrong with an NPC who exists only to be saved by the PC's? Well...
[video=youtube;X6p5AZp7r_Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q&feature=player_detailpage[/video]
That Doesn't Apply At All!
I see your point. There's more than a few issues talked about this video that are relevant for our own games, but not everything. For one, our home games aren't exactly mass market media. Every table is an audience of about 4-8 people, typically adults or teenagers, so the cultural limits of Mark's Monday MapTools game is pretty limited. Mark clearly doesn't have the same influence or reach of Nintendo, so it's not like some little girl in some distant city is going to grow up playing Mark's campaign and allow it to shape her self-image.
It's also true that, because of the nature of D&D as a game where you make your own characters, there's a greater diversity in protagonists and victims in the game. While I'm fairly confident males still dominate, I'd wager there's been more female protagonists in 40 years of D&D than there have been in the same amount of time in videogames, if only because character gender is something you opt into -- anyone can play a male or a female character. There is no default character gender option, the game demands that you make a choice. Victim types, too, are more diverse, and often grander. It's not always the princess that needs saving, it's often the whole kingdom, or the whole world, or even no one in particular (it's just about the heroes and the dangers outside of town). A princess getting kidnapped by a dragon is pretty small potatoes compared to what that dragon could do to her entire kingdom, without going through the hassle of a kidnapping.
Some of the D&D writing, especially pre-3e, can be amazingly sexist, or at least ignorant, and there's certainly other issues with the presentation of women in the game (holy sexual objectification, Batman!). The damsel in distress, though, doesn't have a large presence. We're well ahead of Mario and Link, at least.
A Problem With Appendix N
Of course, the same cannot be said for the source material we claim to want to emulate with D&D. Old pulp novels? Ancient Greek myths? Medieval fairy tales? Check, checkitty check-check. D&D is deeply steeped in the raw distilled testoster-juices of stereotypical adolescent male power fantasies, and is pretty proud of it. These stories unabashedly used and re-used the damsel in distress without the slightest batting of an eyebrow. So what's wrong with us playing games inspired by our often-brilliant, occasionally-questionable source material? Shouldn't we be able to play as Perseus rescuing Adromeda? Is there anything inherently wrong with the princess and the dragon?
Well, not always. A trope is ultimately a narrative tool. It isn't inherently good or bad (though it can be over-used and stereotypical). What's good or bad is in how you use them.
Using Princess Peach's kidnapping as an excuse plot in (almost) every single Mario game doesn't use the trope well. It's a thoughtless use of the narrative tool to frame some compelling run-and-jump action gameplay. That gameplay is the point -- the plot is just there to frame it. None of the characters participate in that storyline consciously. As has been noted by keen observers of the obvious over the years, Mario and Peach and Bowser never really think about this ritual they go through. The three aren't multi-dimensional characters, they're not people, they're just anthropomorphized vehicles for game mechanics. Mario isn't a person, he's just a run-and-jump avatar. Bowser isn't a villain, he's just a big moving wall of failure. Peach isn't a princess, she's just a goal point in a pink dress.
But you can use this trope more thoughtfully. A fairly good example of this is the character development the Ice King goes through in Adventure Time. At first, the character is not much more than Bowser with a few extra princesses, but Adventure Time does more to explore the interesting questions this raises, rather than simply using princess-napping as an excuse for wacky adventuring fun times.
The central problem, then, is when the trope is used and assumed to just be "the way things are." You should feel free to have a dragon kidnap a princess who then must be saved by the (typically male) heroes, but that shouldn't be the end of the narrative. Why did this dragon need this particular princess? What does the villain seek, and hope to gain through her? What power does she offer that the dragon cannot just easily kill her? Why might she not be seeking her own active escape? What are her thoughts on this power that she has that has made her a target? How can she use the heroes to accomplish her own goals (typically, of getting the heck out of there), and what can she do for the heroes that they can't do themselves?
In the deep depths of history, these motives were often baldly and obviously sexual and predatory in nature (when they were thought of at all), but we don't need to follow in those footsteps today. By turning these cardboard cut-out excuses-for-an-adventure into actual characters with motives and desires and hopes and aspirations, you get a better story, and a less stereotypical damsel in distress, all at once. Sure, Jack Vance never gave the thoughts or opinions or abilities of his female characters much consideration, but we don't need to accept that as something that's fine and dandy in our own games. He was a product of his times for better and worse, and we're also a product of ours. As DMs and players, we've never been very interested in wholesale looting of the source material, but rather using it as a wellspring of inspiration. Use these sources of inspiration, but don't be tethered to them. Just because you play a game that borrows from Edgar Rice Burroughs doesn't mean that you need to have an ape kidnapping a token woman just so that the heroes can save her and prove that they're awesome. I mean, what does that ape even do that for? And why doesn't she fight back?
Everyone Is Someone's Princess
We established pretty early on that D&D doesn't have a big damsel-in-distress problem, in general, and in the areas where it might, it's possible to use the trope without necessarily using it in the same way that the original authors might have (ie: without giving it much thought, or with giving it too much thought in a fairly problematic direction).
But D&D's problem with things in distress can run a bit deeper than everyday misogyny, too. Man or woman or child or sleepy hamlet or kingdom or city or world or plane...whenever we fail to develop our designated victims as characters -- as people -- in their own right, it can weaken the whole gameplay experience by treating the NPC's in peril as excuses for gameplay, rather than as interesting characters in their own right.
Ultimately, the idea that there is a designated victim that needs saving is unsatisfying because that's not how the real world works. In the real world, the closest things we have to our D&D adventuring heroes are probably those who bravely face their own death for our good and protection -- soldiers, firefighters, police officers. Yet these people aren't inhumanly special or fated or annointed by the gods, they merely have a special skill set for dealing with things like "people shooting at you" or "being surrounded by fire" that the rest of us generally lack. To put it in comic book terms, they're more like Batman or Iron Man (very skilled, elitely trained, and perhaps a little bit crazy) than like Superman (fundamentally alien) or the X-men (something more than human) or Spider-man (mutated by chance into a greater-than-mortal being). They are heroic because we as a society need them and admire their actions, not because of anything inherently different about them.
Adventurers in D&D could follow the same model: part of an elite force of people specially trained to deal with a world filled with dungeons and dragons, but still fundamentally human. This might rob them of a certain numinous mythic quality, but it can be argued that giving protagonists that quality makes them feel a little less-than-human, anyway. It would also be true in this world that the NPC's are to some degree necessary -- a fireman can't fight fires with one hand and grow crops with the other, so it should be with an adventurer who faces dangerous dungeons and dragons. They can't do it all, so they need the help and the stability of those who stay behind, to make food, to grow crops, to construct houses, to conduct business, to enable the hero to do their job.
It's also true that in the real world, people aren't totally helpless in the face of danger. Time and again, people without training dig deep within themselves in times of crisis and find the strength to face the danger in front of them. Real people become heroic in moments of pressure, such as a kidnapping, and a world in which NPC's are all weak and pliable and needy isn't one where this is true, so it isn't one that feels real. While heroism may demand someone to save, it doesn't demand that this person is passive, and having an active hand in their own salvation should be part of what they want as well.
One of the big issues that can plague heroic gameplay is the idea that the victims are only victims, merely victims, without anything to contribute to the adventure or the narrative other than being tormented by something. This is not only an issue when you re-use the same stock victims, it's also an issue that creates unsatisfying narratives in play. How many times has your group bemoaned the needy NPC's, the town guard who can't kill some goblins, the wizard at the tavern who can never seem to go get his own dang MacGuffin, the shopkeeper who charges them full price despite them saving the world? This isn't just sour grapes, it's a hint that your world and your narrative might be a little shallow, and while that might have been fine for any number of authors in Appendix N, those people are only a starting point, not an endpoint. They are there to launch us into our own adventures, not limit us to theirs.
So lets hear it from you: what are some of the greatest moments you've had in giving your NPC's some agency over their own destinies? Have you treated your NPC's as just plot devices, as victims to save, or were they actual people that the players actually cared about and felt good helping? What have been your big wins here, and what do you wish you've done better? Let me know in the comments!
