Should PCs Be Exceptional?

[Micah Sweet]

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.

As a player, that's pretty much all I want. As a GM, I want to present a setting that allows that experience for my players.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Not usually in the context of young superheroes.

I don't know about that. A lot of Marvel heroes improve over the years. The FF, Spider-Man, Iron Man, even Thor moves on to stronger opponents over time.

 

[payn]

I'd argue at least Aragorn is, and as to the Shadow--well, Batman isn't theoretically inherently exceptional. He was forged by his life.

So, was the shadow...

Anyways if you want to nitpick the examples I can give tons of better ones. Indiana Jones, James Holden and crew, DS9, B5, GoT, etc.. You can argue folks have "fates or destinies" which seem no different to you than being bullet proof or can fly while nearly nobody else in the setting can, but the distinction matters to me.

For the record, I dont have an issue with supers, its just not my default mode for most genres.

 

[Autumnal]

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.

Agreed. If I had the energy, which I don’t, I’d do a Storyteller’s Vault thing on permanent advancement happening only with character age. Typical xp would get you short-term advantages that fade as the crisis of the moment settles. The second half of the project would be a lot of advice on long-term chronicles, where time skips from like a year to decades and centuries are a routine part of play, providing those opportunities for aging.

 

[Lanefan]

Rand al'Thor and Luke Skywalker are just about the worst zero to hero examples one could come up with. They are good at just about everything they try, have special magic juju, come from great lineages even if they do not know them and are pretty much the embodiment of chosen by destiny tropes.

A far better zero to hero* example might be Arya Stark's progression through GoT.

* - well, maybe not capital-H "Hero" n the Good-aligned sense, perhaps more just "pretty damn competent at what she does".

 

[Campbell]

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.

This all day. My favorite traditional games are ones like Chronicles of Darkness and Achtung Cthulhu! where you pretty much start out topped out the stuff you are specialized in and maybe get slighter better at this thing or that thing, but what you can do is pretty much what you can do from the start. That way we can focus more on who you are changing.

 

[Lanefan]

The fact D&D hit points, especially in older versions of the game, are the biggest part of your defensive capability almost ensures this; even if using Con modifiers to hit points, its only going to have a very limited impact on your hit points over the first couple levels.

Except the characters in the data came in at a wide variety of levels; they didn't all start at raw 1st.

Also, the results are fairly similar across low- and high-hit point classes (with some outliers in rarely-played classes due to insufficient data). Were hit points the main determinant, I'd expect mage-types and maybe Thieves to have a noticeably lower chance of survival than Fighters, but the results don't back that up.

 

[Distracted DM]

Of course, my problem is that D&D when I started playing it was more sword & sorcery and less high fantasy, and I still prefer to play my D&D-like games that way, so the whole "D&D is high fantasy" thing has never sit right with me.

I prefer Sword & Sorcery as well due to media inspirations; but I've accepted that DnD has left that behind and I just make myself miserable trying to force it. Someone else mentioned that S&S is more about a smaller more personal scope than power, which I agree with wholeheartedly- though higher power often leads to a bigger scope. It's tough to run a believable small-scope campaign with DnD because the PCs outstrip other NPCs quickly with a few exceptions... so you need something like a place like Ptolus where there are (I imagine) multiple guilds of archmages and the PCs going against one of them isn't going to destroy everything.

There ARE 5e S&S house-rules I've seen- most notably by @xoth.publishing , one big thing iirc is reducing the types of spells available to casters.

If I wanted to live my best Sword & Sorcery life, I'd run something like Dungeon Crawl Classics (though now that may be tainted), but my the vast majority of my players are really into 5e/A5E and I like my players enough to keep going with it.

 

[Celebrim]

I'd argue at least Aragorn is, and as to the Shadow--well, Batman isn't theoretically inherently exceptional. He was forged by his life.

Batman's biggest superpower is he was born wealthy, and not just comfortable but preeminently wealthy. That and he apparently has an 18 in every stat. It's not at all clear that you get smarter or stronger just because you want to be smarter or stronger. Maybe a little, but you already had to start out pretty special to get exceptional.

The truth is, there are almost no everyman heroes and certainly not in heroic fiction (and definitely not in superheroic fiction which is all about super men).

Frodo Baggins by Gandalf's account was "the best Hobbit in the Shire". Merry and Pippin were hobbit princelings. Sam arguably gets there, but even he is I think intended to represent the most noble qualities of the English peasant stock right from the start and not merely an average member thereof.

Even Elizabeth Bennett does not count.

True everyman protagonists might be Arthur Dent in "Hitchhikers". Ishmael in "Moby Dick". Oliver Twist. And I'm running blank already.

 

[Autumnal]

I periodically do a rant about how arranging stories in order of internal chronology leads to greatly distorting impressions, and it’s seldom truer than with swords & sorcery. The first time readers met Conan, he was an experienced king. The second time readers read a novel’s worth of Elric, he destroyed the entire world. It is not a small genre.

Edited to add: game systems that both allow for some significant advancement and can handle non-linear presentations like Howard, Leiber, and Moorcock? Now there’s a design challenge.