Where have all the heroes gone?

[Jonathan W Gamble]

Start a new thread (with a title that says what you're looking for) and all the right people will see it.

Cheers, Whiz.

 

[Mark CMG]

When I first started playing we usually player heroes who did things for the sake of good we rarely choose to kill things to get their stuff. Sometimes it happened but most our loot and goodies came as rewards for a job well done.

And I rarely saw this lets make a character to screw everyone else over or a DM who would allow it.

I can understand that there are times when you don't want to play in a heroic game but to always want to play bad guys or indifferent guys to me just gets boring.

This echoes my own experience and sentiments. It's also been the underlying intent of the groups who play in the games I have always run (or they don't last long).

 

[Harmon]

The play methods here make me very happy to have the group that I have. There is no back stabbing, player to player, we try to help each other. While some of the characters might resemble The Operative from Serenity, the vast majority are kind and good people.

While I only have one LG character I gravitate towards NG and CG, one of our Players sticks to TN so she can do questionable things, a couple of LN characters, but for the most part we like to have the G in our alignment.

Grunj spoke of a good character would stumble up to a temple of a good healing god’s temple, and not be healed before the request of a donation. This would never fly in our campaigns. Of course there is seldom a time when our campaigns don’t involve helping a good group of characters, or good aligned deity (do not take the present campaign as an absolute position on this- we are trying to save an evil giant to save a city, that giant is pretty much guaranteed to die). It’s preferred by the Players that we help the alliance of good so that we can deny evil to flourish.

Something else that comes to mind- Players generally play what they are deep inside, so if you are back stabbing then I would think you are, in your personality a back stabbing bastadage.

Where was it? Someone mentioned that- ahh, Kristivas, mentioned something about the tragic character theme. I prescribed to this so much in my past that I had no idea that I was doing it until it was pointed out by the GM. Presently 4 out of 5 of my current characters have families still living, healthy, well adjusted (for the most part), but I only did this because every character I played had something that sent them into the adventuring life. Its an easy path to follow.

Thank you for the thread, it has made me feel really good about the group I play with. I want to thank them, so I will post this and send out an email.

Hope you find your inner hero some time, it’s a great amount of fun.

 

[Kristivas]

Something else that comes to mind- Players generally play what they are deep inside, so if you are back stabbing then I would think you are, in your personality a back stabbing bastadage.

I wouldn't totally agree. Perhaps it is true for some people, but I've seen a lot of examples where a role was just a role.

I'm going to assume you mean personality-wise. I've played the bad guy. The cocky bad guy, the party-annihilator (a title given to me after I ganked the whole party), the guy who stole everything, and on occasion.. the 'super vile' bad guy who did things that would give Eric's grandma a stroke.

This is probably less than 3% of the kind of characters I have/would play, and I can assure you that asside from being a bit of an , I'm none of those things in real life (and I know you didn't say I was, I'm just saying..).

People do it to let off steam, but I doubt it's some deep-seeded evil or bastadageness. The same reason playing Unreal for a few hours is fun. You run around one-shotting 13 year olds and listening to them whine over a headset from wherever they are in the world about how you're 'cheating'.

Granted, I agree with the majority of you. The game table is the wrong place to let off that kinda steam and piss off your friends/the DM. There are plenty of 13 year olds out there! (to beat on Unreal)

 

[Harmon]

I wouldn't totally agree. Perhaps it is true for some people, but I've seen a lot of examples where a role was just a role.

I'm going to assume you mean personality-wise. I've played the bad guy. The cocky bad guy, the party-annihilator (a title given to me after I ganked the whole party), the guy who stole everything, and on occasion.. the 'super vile' bad guy who did things that would give Eric's grandma a stroke.

This is probably less than 3% of the kind of characters I have/would play, and I can assure you that asside from being a bit of an , I'm none of those things in real life (and I know you didn't say I was, I'm just saying..).

People do it to let off steam, but I doubt it's some deep-seeded evil or bastadageness. The same reason playing Unreal for a few hours is fun. You run around one-shotting 13 year olds and listening to them whine over a headset from wherever they are in the world about how you're 'cheating'.

Granted, I agree with the majority of you. The game table is the wrong place to let off that kinda steam and piss off your friends/the DM. There are plenty of 13 year olds out there! (to beat on Unreal)

In general- I would not play with a group that regularly had back stabbing going on, and any Player that tried to do it more then once I would not allow back (or I would out myself if it was not in my power to out the offender). Now if the campaign is set up the way you speak of (back stabbing all around and regularly) then that is a different story. However (as a GM) if I work on a campaign for days and perhaps weeks only to have the PCs turning on one another with no regard for all the work I had done- it would be the last campaign I GMed for, for that group (it shows a complete lack of respect for all my laboring that the Player would ignore the campaign and just slaughter each other for the heck of it).

If the group is happy and okay with it- then okay, go forth and have at, but for me- it ante fun, it isn’t interesting, and it does show a lot of disrespect for those not in on the “game”.

“Why the hell did you just kill my character?!?! It took my a long dammed time to make it.”

“Cause it was fun!”

For whom? You.

Regarding your feelings that I might see the ‘inner you’ as you back stabbing your friends/fellow players characters, to me it does say something of your personality, however that goes back to the first paragraph (if its what the campaign is about).

Our group tends heavily towards heroes, and towards helping those that cannot help themselves. I don’t think any of them would be back if I played a character that during his watch just slaughtered the whole group, took their stuff, and I know the GM would refuse to GM for the character ever again (I know I would)- that being said, why do the backstabbing- you are never playing the character again.

I rather hope you do not take offense, as I do not know the real you, but to me it means something. :\

 

[Celebrim]

I haven't read the thread enough to know what all has been said, and consider this reply half tongue in cheek, as I don't really know the answer to the question and I'm not even really sure I believe any of my own suspicions. But, what you describe is pervasive. You can see it in gaming, pro wrestling, comic books, video games, music, movies, modern literature, modern painting (I kid you not), and well just about everywhere. I really wish I did know the answer, but I don't. So here is alot of wild stabbing that doesn't help you with your problem but might explain where it comes from.

1) Western society has become machoistic in an effort to absolve itself of the guilt it feels at having been successful and/or its own failure to live up to its high ideas. As a result, its not politically correct to claim that anyone or anything (Western) can be heroic except for victims. Literature that claims otherwise is mocked or belittled. All seemingly heroic figures must be shown to be hypocrites and underlyingly sinister. All true heroes must be victims, anti-Western, have evil origins, or have obvious 'feet of clay'. Players which claim that 'heroes are boring' are simply expressing what they have been taught by society to express.
2) The West and the US in particular has just finished one of the world's most devestating memetic wars - a war of dangerous and subversive ideas. The USSR and the USA squared off with one another, and contrained not to use conventional warfare against each other, instead spent billions and billions of dollars on propaganda designed to undermine the other nations faith in itself, its government, its society, and its beliefs. This is a matter of very public record now that the documents from that 'Cold War' have become part of the public domain. Even though the war is now 'over', the leftover memetic weapons of that war are still active, like the rogue war machines or biologically engineered plagues of sci-fi fantasy or nightmares. While the USA 'won' the war, its not at all clear that it hasn't sustained mortal wounds as a result of the USSR's ideological attack on US culture. The US simply doesn't believe in itself anymore, and hasn't for decades. One of the ways that these mortal wounds express themselves is a lack of faith in heroes, and a preference instead for ideolizing and glorifying the infamous, the scandelous, and the shallow - preferences which were the stated goals of the KGB propaganda machine. Players that express disatisfaction with heroes are simply suffering from a left-over memetic infection from the last war.
Some people suggest that this is also the cause of #1, although my understanding of history is that the trend in #1 dates to before the USSR's inception.
3) In the USA in particular, as a nation founded by rebels and political and religious dissidents, there is a tendancy to romanticize the dissident and the anti-hero at the expense of the hero. Every American's first inclination is to write the story with the heroic rebels fighting against the evil Empire. You'd never expect to find an American story to be about the heroic Empire fighting against the mechanations of the evil rebels. Likewise, its never the guy in the position of authority who teaches the conventional wisdom who is right in an American story, but rather its always the outsider who is bucking the system who is ultimately prove right in American mythology. This is especially true of everything written or shown on the screen in the last 40 years. So a player who expresses a disinterest in the heroic is simply expressing the natural bias of society and can hardly be expected to have any other opinion, given that the vast majority of what he's been exposed to.
4) Most D&D players are adolescents or begin gaming as adolescents or are playful people who refuse to 'grow up', and by expressing a preference for the anti-hero they are expressing the natural rebelous tendancies of that age group. Without the social constraints that discourage encouraging this behavior, economic forces drive content providers to give youths what they want.
5) Most D&D players are not socially gregarious or natural centers of social attention by their (non-nerd) peers. Playing anti-heroes as characters is a way of expressing thier own fantasies about being heroic outcasts

At this point, I consider the anti-hero (or his counterparts the 'victim hero' out to avenge/prove himself and the 'outcast hero' who society doesn't trust) to be more trite than the heroic in just about every form of art, but I lack the skills/persistance to do anything about it but complain.

Make of this what you will, but I've basically found that RPG groups can be divided into two types. Those that effectively through social pressure ban or players who play good aligned PC's, and those that effectively ban through social pressure those that play evil aligned PC's.

I think that the folks compiling the lists of heroic archetypes just above this post are a good start to solving your particular problem though, since in this particular case simply showing the friend that there are interesting, complex personalities and backstories available to people who lean more 'white' than 'gray' or 'black' is probably enough to solve the problem. Then again, you may find that ultimately you'll end up losing this friend to 'the dark side' if he finds a group more accomodating of his preferred play style.

On the flip side, I've started to see some 'push back' in the 'arts' (for example comic books) as I think more and more people are starting to see that this whole anti-hero thing has run its course, especially since for all the claims of complexity, 'anti-hero's vs. villians' tends to come down to 'us vs. them' with rather interchangable labels. Good is all too often simply the side you are allied with if the heroes are perfectly willing to use the tools of the villian against them. Perhaps its a deeper appreciation for the LotR and its meaning, perhaps its just mere boredom, whatever, but its starting to be 'cool' again to have heroes. So maybe the next generation we'll see a counter-counter-culture where it's hip to be square. Beats me.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Curiously, Lawful Good is probably the most common alignment for my characters but fewer than half of them (and none of the longest running ones) have been paladins. Next on my list is probably Lawful Neutral.

I have, however, seen well-played characters in other games (that don't feature alignment) that would have been Evil if assigned an alignment. There just seems to be something about writing that word on the character sheet that messes with their players. (Much like writing 'Lawful Good' affects people. Honestly, how often do you see a character who isn't a Paladin who holds the LG alignment? And yet it should be the most common alignment amongst Dwarves, and not exactly uncommon elsewhere.)

 

[haakon1]

I haven't read the thread enough to know what all has been said, and consider this reply half tongue in cheek, as I don't really know the answer to the question and I'm not even really sure I believe any of my own suspicions. But, what you describe is pervasive. You can see it in gaming, pro wrestling, comic books, video games, music, movies, modern literature, modern painting (I kid you not), and well just about everywhere. I really wish I did know the answer, but I don't. So here is alot of wild stabbing that doesn't help you with your problem but might explain where it comes from.

1) Western society has become machoistic in an effort to absolve itself of the guilt it feels at having been successful and/or its own failure to live up to its high ideas. As a result, its not politically correct to claim that anyone or anything (Western) can be heroic except for victims. Literature that claims otherwise is mocked or belittled. All seemingly heroic figures must be shown to be hypocrites and underlyingly sinister. All true heroes must be victims, anti-Western, have evil origins, or have obvious 'feet of clay'. Players which claim that 'heroes are boring' are simply expressing what they have been taught by society to express.

I think it's more than a US question. Every country but the US, the British Empire, and arguably Russia that fought in WWII -- which is pretty much every country but Latin America, Africa (arguably they did fight as colonies, but with more involvement from some than others), and the Middle East -- "lost". From China, Poland, and France on the winning side to Germany, Japan, and Italy on the losing side, and across smaller countries from Belgium to Thailand, the experience was a national humiliation -- being conquered, occupied, and having to deal with the psychic burden of collaboration or active participation in Nazism or its Japanese and Italian counterparts.

So pretty much everybody but Americans, British, Australians, and Russians reflexively think "war is bad", "war is always wrong", and "there's no such thing as a winnable war, it's a lie we don't believe anymore" (the last is the Sting quote -- he's British, but he wishes he wasn't, as being Western and rich is embarassing). That's metasized more generally into "heroism is bad", "nationalism is bad", and now even "my countries existance is bad" -- note the rise of the EU as a way to abolish any blame for Germany's Nazi past or France's collaboration. Add to that the end of Empire for Britain, France, Belgium, and the rest of Europe, and it re-inforces the idea. All their 19th century heroes were racist villains, their WWI heroes were foolish pawns of the system, their WWII "heroes" are best not talked about in most countries, and post WWII the story is mostly "can't we ignore all problems and just concentrate on the Eurovision song contest and how to retire early?"

I think this accounts for the "axis of weasel" attitude in European-influenced Western "high culture", as reflected in "serious" art, movies, literature, etc. from both sides of the Atlantic.

In western "low culture", I think America does predominate, and the primary anti-heroic impulse comes from the 1970s. It's the reaction to Nixon's betrayal of the trust of the American people, both in losing in Vietnam and in trying to steal the election (which he would have won anyhow) at home in the Watergate scandal. The result was that most Americans -- especially people turning of age in the 1960s through 1970s -- grew up in an age of pervasive cynicism about government, the military, military heroism, and "goodness" in general. The good side of that is the collapse of the old rules that kept down blacks, women, gays, etc. with a new attitude of freedom, but the bad side is general breakdown of respect for the good parts of older values. On the right, it was embodied in me-first capitalism and "there is no society" (a Thatcher quote) politics of attacking the concept of government and trying to shrink it. On the left, it was embodied in "special interest" politics -- my group wants this.

Culturally, a bit of counter movement to the counterculture began with Star Wars. It's the first "heroic" movie where people who were fighting were good made since maybe 1968's "The Green Berets". It's the antithesis of movies like "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now". As Bart Simpson said, "There are no good wars except Star Wars, World War II, and the American Revolution."

I think D&D's first (and honestly only) cultural revelance in the late 1970s and early 1980s is related to that upwelling of yearning for heroism and derring-do coming out of Lucas and Spielberg tapping into what people had been starved of.

I'd bet people are starving for heroes again. In particular, two fairly recent "lack of hero" cultural bits really struck a nerve with me:

1) The latest Superman movie. Superman has a illegitimate kid with Lois Lane, and he wants to carry on an affair with her even though she's married to another man? This is not my 1950s Superman -- I thought he was better than us in more ways than being bullet proof. This anti-heroic Superman failed spectacularly at the box office, as I understand it.

2) Enterprise, the latest Star Trek series that took Star Trek off the air for the first time since 1987. It started out heroic enough, but it went down in it's second season, a plot about striking back at 9/11 terrorism thinly veiled. It turned into Git'mo in space in some episodes, but where it really jumped the shark morally, I think, was an episode where Archer pirate attacked a neutral starship and stole their engines, leaving them marooned in space, because he had to complete the mission. Spock or Kirk or even Picard would have said no to that, fate of humanity on the line or not. I could hear the Kirk line in my head: "If we sink to the same barbarism as our enemy, there is no point in defending humanity, for we're already gone."

Anyhow . . . enough cultural blah-blah from the long hung up his diploma poli sci/history nerd. I do agree that currently the anti-hero seems to be everywhere, but I don't agree that everyone necessarily likes it. Time for scruffy, rebellious squeeky-clean heroes to rise up!

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

I saw a disturbing trend with this in my gaming group. EVERYONE'S character had his village burned down by Orcs. EVERYONE'S character had their girlfriend/sibling/whatever kidnapped by the BBEG. EVERYONE'S character was torn inside and mulled like Drizzt.

Imagine a character who was born to parents who died of natural causes. No brothers or sisters to be kidnapped. His village still stands, not being razed by Orcs. No overly dramatic happenings in life. No real love interest (yet). No 'cool facial scars'. Decides to go adventuring and help these people he met, who do have such problems. He helps them, but he's not internally agonizing over thier plights. No brooding. He's just trying to be a good guy, do the right thing, and help out people. If he gets paid, all the better! No over-developed sense of vengeance; he's got more to live for than to kill someone for some horrible wrongdoing.

People might call that bland, but it's what you make it. You can be just as interesting as the guy who's Mother was stolen by Zal'gon'mok, Overlord of the Abyss, to be bred with and spawn a demonic army. It's less about the background drama, and more about what you do with the character after the game started imo.

Something to think about here (in support of what you just wrote), and this is my opinion: Interesting characters are not characters with a bizarre and improbable or dramatic backstory. Yeah, your ranger's family was killed by orcs and you hunted them in the mountians and then were lost in a blizzard and healed by a monk who taught you the virtues of forgiveness, etc, blah blah blah. Great. That would make an interesting story if written well. But it doesn't make your character interesting now.

What makes your character interesting now is what he does and the choices he makes in difficult situations. Does your paladin insist on continuing on his mission to recover the relics of his god or make the diversion to stop a band of orcs that somehow slipped past the patrols. There are solid reasons to pick either one, but which choice you make is interesting. You've recovered a powerful magic item. Do you travel to the capital city and lay it at the feet of the king as a tribute to his governance? Do you refuse to sell it to the highest bidder because he is a wicked man and would use it to triumph over a good man in a duel? Or do you wash your hands of it all and say that what happens next is none of your concern? Let's say that an evil entity gives you a the ability to channel its evil into a death touch power. Your companions are fighting a losing battle and a villain is in front of you. Do you use the power, knowing that it is evil? Did you research it beforehand and discover that every use of the power puts the entity that much closer to breaking free of its prison? Do you deliberately try to set the entity free because you anticipate that its release will weaken other evils more than it harms innocents? Or do you not believe in guilt and innocence and only reason that its release will prevent more pain than it causes? When you are confronted with the realization that the villain you just spent nearly every spell you had in order was going to meet his master in the graveyard at midnight, do you say "we can't take him; we'll track him down another day" or do you say "I've five charges in my wand of magic missiles and three scrolls; this chance may not come again; let's roll!"

Interesting characters are created by those choices. It is the courage and honor and virtue (or sometimes their failings in those virtues) in actual gameplay that make characters interesting. Without that, a character with an interesting backstory is just a dull character with an interesting backstory.

 

[Kristivas]

I rather hope you do not take offense, as I do not know the real you, but to me it means something. :\

Not at all.

Nearly all of my (or my other friends/players) evil-doing in campaigns usually fell under one of three circumstances.
1. It was expected before the beginning of the game (evil campaign, anything-goes campaign, one-shot, ect).
2. The game was going downhill, so we decided to end it quickly with a blowout.
3. Being 'evil' was a story idea and the player had worked something out with the DM.

I can honestly say that at the start of every serious campaign, I'd never went into it with the want or need to ruin the game. I would much rather play the game out to the end than see it end early due to backstabbing, bickering, PVPing, or other general nonsense.

I'm looking forward to finding a game of DnD in the next year or two. It's difficult where I live. When and if I can, my next character may just be a paladin.