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Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 04:04 AM
First of all, pardon the tautology, I couldn't resist.

But to the topic at hand. Is it just me, or do most (not all, since I don't know that many) non-generic systems/games put you in the shoes of an average person? Not the average person in the world, mind you, not the commoner or a civilian or someone unaware of the larger picture, but an average or even below average X - adventurer, specialist, shadowrunner, supernatural creature, etc?

As in, the games assume that the starting character is, by definition, starting out, and has a long way to go, and is basically at the lower end of the food chain not only mechanically (which makes sense, players usually want to progress and grow stronger), but also narratively, i.e. the world is actually has quite a lot of somewhat normal (i.e. not one in a billion) people who are outright better than you, and what's even worse - the world is even fuller with people who are on your level, despite you being from a somewhat special group by premise?

I can't seem to recall any game aside from Exalted where you started out as someone already elite to the point that there were maybe fifty, maybe a hundred people or less, as cool as you even at chargen. It can work, too - your enemies would have to be either numerous and influential enough that their sheer numbers can compensate, or inhuman and different enough that you can't be compared to them in any capacity but mechanical stats.

I've been discussing this with a friend, and he also said that he couldn't remember any tabletop RPG where you played as someone potentially irrepleaceable and absolutely above the 99.999999% of the rest.

Any thoughts on why that works like this? What games avoid this in some way?

Edit: This is less about power levels (though it is in some form about power levels, I guess) and more about your PC being really irreplaceable due to the mechanical and presumed-setting factors. Even a god doesn't matter when you can just have another god ready to take their place, but a perfectly realistic, if very good at their job, human, could be someone absolutely necessary as they are, because there simply aren't many/any other people of their expertise in the particular subject you're likely to face.

Zombimode
2020-05-23, 05:15 AM
Doesn't this deppend solely on the chosen starting point for the adventure/campaign?

Usually the DM can pick any point in the progression as a starting point. But in order to be able to choose any point the progression needs to start at Novice level.

There are of course special cases of games that don't provide a progression in the classical sense. Take Star Trek Adventures for instance: the characters progress in Believes and Values etc. but not in abilities. But since your skills already are at peak professional Starfleet Officer level it would be a moot point.

Spore
2020-05-23, 05:24 AM
The World of Darkness systems place you in a certain category that stand out from the common folk (mages are mortal but with magic, vampires are superhuman but have fatal flaws, werewolves are extremely powerful but might loose control to the beast etc.). In D&D and similar systems you are a very average adventurer. What differentiates you from the commoner is honestly your potential, starting power and wealth (you are not batman-rich but you have enough to start your career).

First any RPG I know is about acquisition of power (notable exception would be Call of Cthulhu which is just a survival game). Secondly any sufficiently high level game i played devolved into a politics simulator. Both things are pretty boring to me. I dont want to start the game already powerful enough to stomp out a skyscraper. And if I wanted a politics simulator I would boot up Tropico or City Skylines or even Civ 5.

Lvl 2 Expert
2020-05-23, 05:32 AM
I've been discussing this with a friend, and he also said that he couldn't remember any tabletop RPG where you played as someone potentially irrepleaceable and absolutely above the 99.999999% of the rest.

To place that sentence and number into context; with today's world population that would make you someone who is absolutely clearly semi-objectively better than every single person in the world except maybe a 100 others. So you take out those 100 in a surprise attack and you've prevented anyone from ever threatening you in a way that makes sense for an RPG and win the game forever?

What would the point of this game be? What is the plot hook? With the exception of some versions of Superman and maybe a few documentaries about presidents and popes I don't think I know any media that have "the protagonist is the most powerful person in the world" as a starting point.

Khedrac
2020-05-23, 05:35 AM
I would say that most game systems place you as just starting out as an exceptional character.

Most do recognise you as exceptional, otherwise why are you adventuring (or being chose for missions).
Equally, most start characters as just starting to allow for later development.

There are notable exceptions, but because we can usually name specific games, they tend to confirm the "most" part of the above statements.

Games where you really are supposed to be just average:

Call of Cthulhu - you just got unlucky enough to discover the eldritch horror.
Paranoia - you are just a average security clone.
World of Darkness - you are an average non-human preying on the world of humans.
Games where you start out begin play as experienced:

Traveller - you just retired from your career!
I am sure others can list more, but the vast majority of games are as starting "heroes".

Of course, DMs can and do set up individual campaigns differently

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 05:41 AM
Doesn't this deppend solely on the chosen starting point for the adventure/campaign?

Usually the DM can pick any point in the progression as a starting point. But in order to be able to choose any point the progression needs to start at Novice level.

There are of course special cases of games that don't provide a progression in the classical sense. Take Star Trek Adventures for instance: the characters progress in Believes and Values etc. but not in abilities. But since your skills already are at peak professional Starfleet Officer level it would be a moot point.

Somehow, I have very rarely seen people start a game anywhere higher than 1st level or the equivalent. In D&D-like systems, there were a few cases where we started at level 3 just to skip the tedium of not having any fun abilities, but that's it. In non-D&D systems, all I ever see or hear about is either standard chargen or even custom rules that specifically lower the starting point (i.e. "street level" in Shadowrun, starting as a mortal/ghoul in Vampire, etc). While the stipulation that you can start a game at a higher level does indeed exist, I don't see it being used very often. Then again, it's anecdotal, so maybe I'm in the wrong here?


The World of Darkness systems place you in a certain category that stand out from the common folk (mages are mortal but with magic, vampires are superhuman but have fatal flaws, werewolves are extremely powerful but might loose control to the beast etc.). In D&D and similar systems you are a very average adventurer. What differentiates you from the commoner is honestly your potential, starting power and wealth (you are not batman-rich but you have enough to start your career).


WoD is actually a major contributor to this thread existing, since the starting characters are either usually barely better than humans if you take their weaknesses into account (VtM vampires have probably the worst combination of flaws I've seen attributed to a vampire), or above human but still rather much below average for the splat. I remember that it took quite a while to get to the point where I felt that I actually played, in a certain character's words, "a real effing vampire", and by that point I had about a hundred EXP invested into various disciplines.

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 05:55 AM
To place that sentence and number into context; with today's world population that would make you someone who is absolutely clearly semi-objectively better than every single person in the world except maybe a 100 others. So you take out those 100 in a surprise attack and you've prevented anyone from ever threatening you in a way that makes sense for an RPG and win the game forever?

What would the point of this game be? What is the plot hook? With the exception of some versions of Superman and maybe a few documentaries about presidents and popes I don't think I know any media that have "the protagonist is the most powerful person in the world" as a starting point.

If we're keeping it somewhat grounded, then something like Metal Gear, I suspect, or maybe some spy game, or a detective-action game where you play as a really elite member of some organization dedicated to a globally-important mission. Deus Ex comes to mind, too. There are other people on your level, but they're rare and legendary in their own right, and while normal mooks are dime a dozen, there aren't ten thousand level 5 adventurers or 1000 karma shadowrunners roaming around, and you're not, as it may be, expendable?


I would say that most game systems place you as just starting out as an exceptional character.

Most do recognise you as exceptional, otherwise why are you adventuring (or being chose for missions).
Equally, most start characters as just starting to allow for later development.

There are notable exceptions, but because we can usually name specific games, they tend to confirm the "most" part of the above statements.

Games where you really are supposed to be just average:

Call of Cthulhu - you just got unlucky enough to discover the eldritch horror.
Paranoia - you are just a average security clone.
World of Darkness - you are an average non-human preying on the world of humans.
Games where you start out begin play as experienced:

Traveller - you just retired from your career!
I am sure others can list more, but the vast majority of games are as starting "heroes".

Of course, DMs can and do set up individual campaigns differently

I'm not sure about that, since I remember D&D settings to be full of high-level heroes, and even fuller of mid-level adventurers going around. Sure, you can grow to become exceptional, but unless you get to levels unusual for the setting (which in some of them is basically "epic"), you're just another one of those, even if you did save the world once or twice in the process.

Quertus
2020-05-23, 07:21 AM
Yeah, this is a big problem. I am mostly interested in telling proactive stories about changing the world, and most systems have this bulk of "people way higher level than you" in the way of that goal. In D&D, I'd want to start out as a 20th level Lich king, minimum, if not a god; in WoD, I'd want hundreds of not thousands of XP for a "starting" top dog character with seeming world-changing potential.

The only system that comes to mind that *kinda* sidesteps this problem is the old Marvel facerip system: character creation was completely random, so you could start out as anyone from an Aunt May equivalent, to someone with actual world-changing powers. Still nowhere near top dog, mind you, but able to create life, or grant super powers, or make money out of thin air, or otherwise actually have a proactive impact on the setting, and do so in ways that hundreds or millions of other higher level characters couldn't do better.

Random Sanity
2020-05-23, 07:48 AM
I've seen a couple systems where you can start at high power levels relative to the setting, but both were niche products.

First one that comes to mind is the Deathwatch branch of the WH40K RPG: you're an elite among elites, and a squad of starting PCs deploying to the right location can potentially turn a planetary conflict upside-down. Hope you like space marines and grimdark.

The other is Cartoon Action Hour, which is designed to replicate a cheesy Saturday-morning cartoon from the 80's; there are options for the PCs to start off anywhere from street-level to earthshaking depending on the type of series you're running. Wacky shenanigans encouraged.

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 07:50 AM
Yeah, this is a big problem. I am mostly interested in telling proactive stories about changing the world, and most systems have this bulk of "people way higher level than you" in the way of that goal. In D&D, I'd want to start out as a 20th level Lich king, minimum, if not a god; in WoD, I'd want hundreds of not thousands of XP for a "starting" top dog character with seeming world-changing potential.

The only system that comes to mind that *kinda* sidesteps this problem is the old Marvel facerip system: character creation was completely random, so you could start out as anyone from an Aunt May equivalent, to someone with actual world-changing powers. Still nowhere near top dog, mind you, but able to create life, or grant super powers, or make money out of thin air, or otherwise actually have a proactive impact on the setting, and do so in ways that hundreds or millions of other higher level characters couldn't do better.

I honestly cannot comprehend whether you're sarcastic or serious. I don't exactly mean that you rarely get world-changing powers, they aren't really a necessity in this equation. It's more about the scale and the fact that while your PC is supposedly a hero, they're not the hero, and even your party isn't really posed as the party, instead being semi-random, while trained and capable, people who stumble across something plot-related. Or even not plot-related in a looser game where an overarching plot doesn't necessarily exist. That's why I list Metal Gear and Deus Ex as examples - while their protagonists are far from godlike, they possess an array of rather unique merits and backstories that make them uniquely suited for the task at hand, and it's pretty clear that there isn't another Adam Jensen, JC Denton, Snake or Raiden around the corner who could do the same thing just as well.

Drascin
2020-05-23, 08:13 AM
First of all, pardon the tautology, I couldn't resist.

But to the topic at hand. Is it just me, or do most (not all, since I don't know that many) non-generic systems/games put you in the shoes of an average person? Not the average person in the world, mind you, not the commoner or a civilian or someone unaware of the larger picture, but an average or even below average X - adventurer, specialist, shadowrunner, supernatural creature, etc?

...no? There's a whole spectrum, from "you're a complete nooblet" to "you're one of the most unique people on the planet".

And I mean, even in some where you're technically "new", it's new in the sense of "you're new, but you're new at being a superpowered demigod of which there are a hundred in the entire world, who can stop bullets with his mind and cut buildings in half", so. Like. Being new at being a Highlander still makes you a goddamn Highlander!

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 08:14 AM
I've seen a couple systems where you can start at high power levels relative to the setting, but both were niche products.

First one that comes to mind is the Deathwatch branch of the WH40K RPG: you're an elite among elites, and a squad of starting PCs deploying to the right location can potentially turn a planetary conflict upside-down. Hope you like space marines and grimdark.

The other is Cartoon Action Hour, which is designed to replicate a cheesy Saturday-morning cartoon from the 80's; there are options for the PCs to start off anywhere from street-level to earthshaking depending on the type of series you're running. Wacky shenanigans encouraged.

That's not exactly what I mean, but close enough, I guess? I've updated the OP a bit to try and clarify what I'm talking about.

It's less about raw power and more about your PC being really, really unique in the game world. if you're a master at X, then anyone even close to you should probably be rare, etc, etc. But most games have chargen and enemy mechanics that imply that A) you're not really that unique B) there are tons of people who are better than you, and nothing, not even common sense, forbids the GM from making someone who's still better than you by the time you surpass the common enemies, because if you did it, then basically anyone can do it.


...no? There's a whole spectrum, from "you're a complete nooblet" to "you're one of the most unique people on the planet".

And I mean, even in some where you're technically "new", it's new in the sense of "you're new, but you're new at being a superpowered demigod of which there are a hundred in the entire world, who can stop bullets with his mind and cut buildings in half", so. Like. Being new at being a Highlander still makes you a goddamn Highlander!

I did mention Exalted as an exception, because there are like 50 Solars in the world, Solars are the default player option, and anyone who's not a Solar is directly below them on the totem pole of coolness in their area(s) of expertise. Exalted actually fits my criteria for this thread, although it is a bit too high-powered for some things I have in mind, but the general design principles are exactly what I'm talking about.

Random Sanity
2020-05-23, 08:34 AM
So less about power, and more about plot impact? Cartoon Action Hour still fits - regardless of the power rating you use for chargen, the game runs on a "star power" mechanic rather than character levels, with a 1-4 rating depending on how big a deal/hard to replace the character is to the story. PCs are usually a 3 out of 4, with most named NPCs being 2 and only the BBEG getting a 4. Again, this comes with the "playing a cartoon" caveat.

Still, it is pretty surprising how few systems really cater to the "you are the protagonist" thing, mechanically speaking, despite that being the supposed premise of tabletop roleplaying in general.

Alcore
2020-05-23, 09:16 AM
This right here;


Edit: This is less about power levels (though it is in some form about power levels, I guess) and more about your PC being really irreplaceable due to the mechanical and presumed-setting factors. Ect...

Invalidates the vast majority of examples i have. Even Mutants and Masterminds (which can run on comic book logic, DM permitting) can easily replace a superman with another one that while not the same can still do the job.


The offshoot of Mongoose Traveller (called Mindjammer) kinda does this. In the mindjammer universe the characters are effectively immortal, some more than others, with multiple skills near the max, a ship that can fly itself (often a PC in its own right) and more wealth and tools than they likely need. In comparison to the tramp traders in the main who might have a skill near the max, is fighting off old age, the ship is imitating the Millennium Falcon and bankruptcy is a few feet behind them.


The only game that makes you feel truly irreplaceable, to the common man, is Dungeons and Dragons. An average human has straight tens. The average PC has a sixteen (assuming they don't balk at such a low score) with higher than ten in just about all others. Top ten percent already. By level ten its the top one percent. By level twenty you're likely killing the only other level twenties you know.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-23, 09:28 AM
Somehow, I have very rarely seen people start a game anywhere higher than 1st level or the equivalent. In D&D-like systems, there were a few cases where we started at level 3 just to skip the tedium of not having any fun abilities, but that's it.

On this point, I tend to start out say-quest parties above first level all the time, be it 3.s or Rolemaster (the most recent party of the latter started at level 5). Granted, in geneal for weekly games we start at level 1, but that's often because we're running throiugh a module or AP, but even then I have at least one once occasion started a party at level 10 or 11 for a specific adventure I was going to run.

I have also on the odd occasion run a game where one or more PCs were The Chosen One, but from level 1.

However, in none of those cases where the the PCs "th best there is around;" the one partty that reached (and one potential current party that might make it to) Epic pretty much BECAME that (and indeed, off-screen, the former were attributed to have basically gone in and Ruined The Chosen One plot - because we'd fundementally abandoned that party a decade or so prior and I wanted to give it some closure).

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 09:36 AM
The only game that makes you feel truly irreplaceable, to the common man, is Dungeons and Dragons. An average human has straight tens. The average PC has a sixteen (assuming they don't balk at such a low score) with higher than ten in just about all others. Top ten percent already. By level ten its the top one percent. By level twenty you're likely killing the only other level twenties you know.

You'd think so, but the chargen mechanics actually make the implied setting full of superhumans who run around killing monsters and eventually get to level 20 because after a while, the only survival factor is one of your party surviving, stowing the bodies in a Bag of Holding and hauling you off to pay for your resurrection. The only thing that limits this is the DM saying that PCs are rare and no NPCs are actually using PC chargen.

Kaptin Keen
2020-05-23, 09:45 AM
If your starting point is to be among the ... what was that, 0,0000001%? Then what is the point of the game, and where is the potential for growth?

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 09:52 AM
If your starting point is to be among the ... what was that, 0,0000001%? Then what is the point of the game, and where is the potential for growth?

The potential for growth is there. Exalted does that, and I'm pretty sure you could whip up a game about super agents which are already as good as humans can get at something during chargen, but become even better during gameplay.

The point could be a lot of things. My friend suggested a mix between X-Files, Metal Gear and F.E.A.R. - you're elite military/government specialists who investigate the weird stuff, like "are there actually vampires?" or some global conspiracy or whatever.

prabe
2020-05-23, 10:08 AM
There are systems/settings where your character is, if not irreplaceable, at least part of (at least in principle) a vanishingly small group, even at the start. Someone mentioned White Wolf above, and that's a pretty good example. Many Supers settings are in a similar vein, though that can vary with setting (and system--I haven't played either game in its current incarnation, but it's my impression that typical starting characters in Mutants and Masterminds are, for instance, harder to hurt with non-super attacks than typical starting characters in Champions). Someone else mentioned Call of Cthulhu, and while that does have a survival aspect to it, and replacing your character is ... something you should be prepared to do at all times, it's pretty explicit in the setting and system that the vast majority of people don't see and/or understand the Mythos. Unseen Armies is similar, though you can start as an Avatar of one archetype or another, and your group's goals may not be entirely prosocial.

Morty
2020-05-23, 10:08 AM
In Wrath & Glory, the new WH40K RPG, you can begin play at "Tier 4", which translates to Inquisitors, Primaris Space Marines and people badass/important enough to rub shoulders with them. I don't know if it's enough for you, since your standards seem pretty high. I don't think it'd be terribly difficult to use a generic system to make PCs who are powerful and important, either. Especially superhero-focused ones.

MoiMagnus
2020-05-23, 10:45 AM
1) Because that's a trope. "Zero to Hero".
2) Technical systems usually have the complexity of playing a character correlated to their power in a universe. And you want the character to start simple and gain more and more technical depth as the players progressively grow accustomed to them.
3) Because the average DM is bad at correctly handling high scales. It is much easier to maintain believable the life of the "average adventurer" than having to build some believable political factions and power struggle. And "weak" PCs also mean the scope of their actions is manageable and will much rarely get out of what the DM want to track for the campaign.
4) Character growth is much more obvious when you start low.

Though, when I'm DMing or playing homebrew/improvised RPGs I personally prefer having each PC start with "worldwide recognition" on one specific field (or the capacity to have one if they wanted to). Not "the best", but most expert of the field have probably heard of them. [Note: "worldwide" is to adapt to your the setting. If you're not in modern time, that's probably more "kingdom wide"].

Alcore
2020-05-23, 10:51 AM
You'd think so, but the chargen mechanics actually make the implied setting full of superhumans who run around killing monsters and eventually get to level 20 because after a while, the only survival factor is one of your party surviving, stowing the bodies in a Bag of Holding and hauling you off to pay for your resurrection. The only thing that limits this is the DM saying that PCs are rare and no NPCs are actually using PC chargen.

*shrug* never said it was perfect.


Your question is kinda setting specific than system specific. (At least before the edit).

Telok
2020-05-23, 11:57 AM
Pendragon may count. You start off as a reasonably capable knight in Authurian legend. The chaps at the round table are better than you, but you start out at shoulder rubbing distance to them. Absolutely better than the peasantry.

Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7e does it, depending on how the DM wants to populate the setting. You cam start laying the beat down on dragons, daemons, and liches from day one if you're not completely stupid (stupid is a straight up D&D style i-hit-u-hit fight).

Any of the superhero games does as long as you aren't going for a below average 'street level' variant. You can always run a high end game in those too, most supers games tend to at least try to get their power scaling right.

Drascin
2020-05-23, 12:13 PM
That's not exactly what I mean, but close enough, I guess? I've updated the OP a bit to try and clarify what I'm talking about.

It's less about raw power and more about your PC being really, really unique in the game world. if you're a master at X, then anyone even close to you should probably be rare, etc, etc. But most games have chargen and enemy mechanics that imply that A) you're not really that unique B) there are tons of people who are better than you, and nothing, not even common sense, forbids the GM from making someone who's still better than you by the time you surpass the common enemies, because if you did it, then basically anyone can do it.



I did mention Exalted as an exception, because there are like 50 Solars in the world, Solars are the default player option, and anyone who's not a Solar is directly below them on the totem pole of coolness in their area(s) of expertise. Exalted actually fits my criteria for this thread, although it is a bit too high-powered for some things I have in mind, but the general design principles are exactly what I'm talking about.

Okay, I kinda want to be clear here before we start with examples: there's a massive difference between "the chargen rules allow the GM to make people better than you and the adversaries included in the game are the people who can actually be adversaries to you" and "your character is just a dude". Pretty much every game that is more pulp-y (say, Spirit of the Century, or Legends of the Wulin, or anything in that general stripe) is of the general opinion that yes, there might be people who are your equal or superior, but from moment zero you are among an extremely rare club of people with their own society apart from that of the rest of the world and one of a small few who can do X, X being whatever the campaign is about, and your characters are by definition a cut above everyone else. But of course the GM rules will point out how to build antagonists that can face you. You start at like Hercule Poirot and the fact that Sherlock, Moriarty or Miss Marple exist and are smarter than you and you WILL run into them because that's the way the universe works doesn't make you any less Poirot.

I mean, hell, one of your examples is what, X-files and MGS? Mulder and Scully are about as special as dirt, and the entire point of the first MGS is that Snake is not some super gifted genetic wunderkind (that's Liquid), he's just a cloned dude who was trained from birth to be very good at soldiering. This is, like, basic FATE character material.

Anyway, for examples. Power levels absent, most Supers games tend to assume your specific kind of powers are probably rare if not unique. Most wuxia style games basically have a very clear separation between the kung fu practitioners, which includes the PCs and are important, and literally everyone else, who can't punch worth a damn and are window dressing. In general, these kinds of action movie style games are big into this.

But even if you absolutely, positively need the game itself to tell you nobody else can be like you, you also have options. First thing that comes to mind is Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine. Mostly because of the combination of fully purpose-built narrative sheet and highly whimsical/philosophical setting. To give you an example, one of the premade showcase characters you can play in the provided base scenario is the Sun. No, I don't mean like a sun powered hero. I mean the anthropomorphic personification of the actual Sun in the sky. Her name is Jade Irinka. You don't get more unique and special than that! :smalltongue: In general, if you need to be absolutely unique, you will need to build it with one of the games that give you open ended options.

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 01:16 PM
*snip*


*snip*


*snip*


*snip*

As I've said, it's not exactly about power level or even importance. Thinking about it really hard, I'd say that it's something like...

How plausible in-setting it would be to roll up a second character who is very similar in general aptitudes and skills, to replace the first one? Like, say, you have an astronaut - how many of those can you afford to lose to various circumstances, narratively, before there's nobody to actually fly Apollo 11? Can you just plausibly excuse the new guy being around the same level of competence and skill? If the answer is "rather easy", then it's a fail by the criteria set here. For instance, it's pretty hard to just replace a dead Solar in Exalted, because there are only 50 in existence, which means that all of them who exist can have enough range in skills that no two of them are alike enough - there very well might not be a second Dawn Solar who focuses on army-slaying, or something.

That's why I mention videogames like MGS and Deus Ex - the point isn't that their protags have special powers, but rather that there is plausibly no one available to replace them quickly or at all in the event of their failure/demise. The US doesn't have another super agent in MGS 1 to send in if Snake messes up, Sarif doesn't have another heavily augmented ex-SWAT professional cop to send on an investigation, etc. Whereas games usually have easy replacements available (and are presumed to work that way), unless the GM outright blocks that from working.

D&D, VtM and Shadowrun fail this test pretty quickly, and with how large WH40k is, I would assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that even things like Deathwatch and Wrath and Glory can have replacements pretty easily. Pendragon might be right with that, since even the extended knighthood is probably less than 150-200 people. Call of Cthulhu also might work, although Lovecraftian horror isn't really what I'm after here (though it's more about general principles).


1) Because that's a trope. "Zero to Hero".
2) Technical systems usually have the complexity of playing a character correlated to their power in a universe. And you want the character to start simple and gain more and more technical depth as the players progressively grow accustomed to them.
3) Because the average DM is bad at correctly handling high scales. It is much easier to maintain believable the life of the "average adventurer" than having to build some believable political factions and power struggle. And "weak" PCs also mean the scope of their actions is manageable and will much rarely get out of what the DM want to track for the campaign.
4) Character growth is much more obvious when you start low.

Though, when I'm DMing or playing homebrew/improvised RPGs I personally prefer having each PC start with "worldwide recognition" on one specific field (or the capacity to have one if they wanted to). Not "the best", but most expert of the field have probably heard of them. [Note: "worldwide" is to adapt to your the setting. If you're not in modern time, that's probably more "kingdom wide"].

Well, that makes sense in general. It also frees up the genre to play no-name nobodies, I guess, although I think it could be done in reverse - if you want, you can play no-name mercenaries or adventurers, but by default you're well-recognized and rather unique.

Zarrgon
2020-05-23, 02:12 PM
Is it not totally up to the players of a game what "shoes" they wear? Very few games have a rule that says you must start playing the game at the lowest level. And very few games have rule stating that your character must start as an average nobody.

In any game, if you want to start playing as a 20th level god emperor, king of kings, seventh son of a seventh son, chosen one to rule the world.......you can.

Kaptin Keen
2020-05-23, 03:20 PM
The potential for growth is there. Exalted does that, and I'm pretty sure you could whip up a game about super agents which are already as good as humans can get at something during chargen, but become even better during gameplay.

The point could be a lot of things. My friend suggested a mix between X-Files, Metal Gear and F.E.A.R. - you're elite military/government specialists who investigate the weird stuff, like "are there actually vampires?" or some global conspiracy or whatever.

I'd claim that what you want is best achieved by something like D&D E6. Play a character in a world where most everyone else is a 5hp commoner, basically no one has class levels, and you have the potential to eventually cast fireballs, or have let's say 70 hp to the 5 of your expected enemy, and great cleave.

The advantage of E6 is that you don't run out of ways to expand.

If you start right at the top of the super power pyramid, you're making things difficult for yourself. I know there are people who pull that off, and I by no means want to diss the power fantasy - but it's not something I can do.

Tanarii
2020-05-23, 04:02 PM
Yes, most games have assumed progression from somewhere below elite to something in the elite. Very few have no power progression built in. Even in exalted, to give the newly elite Solars a run for their money they had to have the world dominated by slightly less elite Terrestials, to provide them with some kind of threat. And it still has Gods and Abyssals and Sidereals for 'higher level' threats.

The thing to remember is RPGs aren't about telling stories. And players generally like seeing some kind of progression or gaining power.

Jay R
2020-05-23, 04:33 PM
First, because that’s how many stories are written. Harry Potter starts as an eleven-year-old kid who doesn’t understand magic. Luke is a farmboy who knows nothing about the Force. Frodo is a member of an obscure, mostly powerless bucolic race.

Second, because that’s where suspense comes from. The heroes need to be less powerful than the villains they face. Harry and Hermione spend most of book 7 hiding because Voldemort is so much more powerful, and they are seeking a way to get past his greatest defensive power. The rebellion are sending small one-man fighters in a desperate attempt to defeat the Empire’s biggest weapon. A Fellowship of nine people are sneaking through the wilderness, running from orcs, Nazgul, the Balrog, and others, trying to finish their mission without being noticed by the ultra-powerful Sauron.

Third, quite often the supremely powerful people are sitting behind a desk, sending other people out. They don’t have to adventure any more. Dumbledore is running a school. Most of the Jedi Council are not going out on missions; their primary work is in the capital. Theoden is mostly leading his army.

Even when the hero is supremely powerful, the authors have to send them up against even more supremely powerful villains. He’s a Kryptonian? OK, in the next movie he will face three Kryptonians.

If the heroes are “potentially irrepleaceable and absolutely above the 99.999999% of the rest”, then 99.999999% of all encounters are meaningless. For goblins to have any value as villains, they have to be at least as powerful as the heroes. When the heroes defeat them and face bugbears, the bugbears have to be at least as powerful. And so on.

Finally, if you want to play a game in which your character is more powerful than virtually all people, no problem – such games exist. Play a superhero game – Champions, or Mutants and Masterminds, or some such.

But it won’t get you what you want. If you’re more powerful than everybody except super-villains, then all you will face will be super-villains.

Quertus
2020-05-23, 04:46 PM
I honestly cannot comprehend whether you're sarcastic or serious.

A little of both :smallwink: I wasn't sure where you were going.

So, it's a matter of replaceability? And you want games where the PCs are irreplaceable?

Then… any system, if that irreplaceably is through story reasons ("I'm the god-Emperor!") or other, you know, theoretically irreplaceable / nontransferable conditions.

System wise? Random character creation in facerip certainly makes it unlikely that your next character will have any chance of filling a similar role.

From a lore PoV? Exalted? Playing a high-end Lawful outsider in D&D (strictly limited numbers)? Homebrew Paradox (like Rifts, but good) where you probably won't be in a world compatible with your old character concept at the time? Something set in a post-apocalyptic or space station setting, with only a very finite number of people in the entire "world", maybe?

Drascin
2020-05-23, 05:13 PM
As I've said, it's not exactly about power level or even importance. Thinking about it really hard, I'd say that it's something like...

How plausible in-setting it would be to roll up a second character who is very similar in general aptitudes and skills, to replace the first one? Like, say, you have an astronaut - how many of those can you afford to lose to various circumstances, narratively, before there's nobody to actually fly Apollo 11? Can you just plausibly excuse the new guy being around the same level of competence and skill? If the answer is "rather easy", then it's a fail by the criteria set here. For instance, it's pretty hard to just replace a dead Solar in Exalted, because there are only 50 in existence, which means that all of them who exist can have enough range in skills that no two of them are alike enough - there very well might not be a second Dawn Solar who focuses on army-slaying, or something.

That's why I mention videogames like MGS and Deus Ex - the point isn't that their protags have special powers, but rather that there is plausibly no one available to replace them quickly or at all in the event of their failure/demise. The US doesn't have another super agent in MGS 1 to send in if Snake messes up, Sarif doesn't have another heavily augmented ex-SWAT professional cop to send on an investigation, etc. Whereas games usually have easy replacements available (and are presumed to work that way), unless the GM outright blocks that from working.

D&D, VtM and Shadowrun fail this test pretty quickly, and with how large WH40k is, I would assume (correct me if I'm wrong) that even things like Deathwatch and Wrath and Glory can have replacements pretty easily. Pendragon might be right with that, since even the extended knighthood is probably less than 150-200 people. Call of Cthulhu also might work, although Lovecraftian horror isn't really what I'm after here (though it's more about general principles).


Exalted is basically the easiest one to roll an extremely similar dude in, actually! You died, your spark went to another guy, you can probably reuse 80-90%% of your character sheet right there if you feel so inclined and you don't even need to make an effort to think up a justification in the slightest :smalltongue:

And the thing is that in MGS, you could in fact extremely easily make another character to replace Snake without the slightest narrative hiccup. If we imagine MGS as a tabletop game, it would be significantly easier to justify a replacement character for Snake than explaining, say, why there is another Githzerai Sorcerer to replace your just deceased Githzerai Sorcerer in an average D&D campaign (given the proclivities of the zerai in general). Heck, 2 has a replacement character, with roughly the same mechanical skills! And the implication of more existing! The trick is that he's the guy in place, and there's a clock ticking, so any replacement would be too late.

Which is consistent with how many RPGs work! Very often PCs in games are irreplaceable less through "there is literally no one else in the universe who might be able to do what I'm doing" and more through a combination of uncommon grit and courage (you're Indiana Jones) and being the people who ARE there to actually face the problem (you're the one who knows the Nazis are heading straight for the temple). Sure, there's a very good chance you could find someone to do what Indy does in his movies. But Indy is the man on the spot, so if he doesn't do it, who is going to be there to solve the problem before everything goes pear shaped?

Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that "easy to replace" is... a very moving target, that often depends a lot more on the tone of a game than the ruleset and even far more on the specific campaign than the tone, and that this whole feeling that "well, if a PC can become a wizard by [simple mechanical action X], everyone in the world can do it, so there must be millions of wizards around" is kind of... fallacious, in a way?

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 10:47 PM
*snip*

Like I said, it's less about absolute power, and more about relative power multiplied by it being common or not. You can easily have a game with lots of progression and lots of enemies who are better and bigger than you - it's just that those enemies would probably have to be something either non-sentient or lacking PC potential. Something like D&D, in which there is nobody functionally above level 5 than you - but there are still dragons, chimeras, hydras and other stuff, but perhaps there is but a single NPC archmage and he's really tied up in other stuff. So the implication that the PCs are special needs to be reflected in the implied setting or the general setting for that to work. Not like, say, Faerun, where the captain of the city guard is probably a double-digit level Fighter.


Exalted is basically the easiest one to roll an extremely similar dude in, actually! You died, your spark went to another guy, you can probably reuse 80-90%% of your character sheet right there if you feel so inclined and you don't even need to make an effort to think up a justification in the slightest :smalltongue:

And the thing is that in MGS, you could in fact extremely easily make another character to replace Snake without the slightest narrative hiccup. If we imagine MGS as a tabletop game, it would be significantly easier to justify a replacement character for Snake than explaining, say, why there is another Githzerai Sorcerer to replace your just deceased Githzerai Sorcerer in an average D&D campaign (given the proclivities of the zerai in general). Heck, 2 has a replacement character, with roughly the same mechanical skills! And the implication of more existing! The trick is that he's the guy in place, and there's a clock ticking, so any replacement would be too late.


Well, both Snake and Raiden are actually pretty unique for their setting. Solid Snake is a clone of Big Boss, who has been trained to a level of an elite military agent, and has enough experience that actually having a specialist on his level would be unlikely - the games imply that people on that level are, well, Raiden and Frank Jaeger, perhaps, as well as Big Boss. Mooks you meet are presumably elite soldiers but can't really hold a candle to Snake, Meryl is good but also not nearly as good, and Foxhound are all similarly good specialists, but in their own ways - which is the feel I'm actually interested in and which is related to this thread.

Raiden is a child soldier who has an uncanny talent for murder since young age, has been put through a lot and just had his memories locked away by the Patriots - but he's still an insanely talented and experienced individual, not just another soldier who went through something available to most of them (VR training) and that would get him good enough to be compared to Snake.

That's basically the feel I kind of set this thread on - I think that a game about something like Foxhound, a small black ops squad of elites unmatched in their particular expertise among normal humans (but not necessarily in the world itself, which can have monsters and heavy materiel and so on), would really fit the criteria.

Shadowrun actually is pretty close, but the world makes it unfeasible, because the corps always have their a lot of their elite troops who they would spare no expense upon, and who are, by default chargen, simply better than you. It also kinda breaks verisimilitude if you, for some reason, exceed them majorly, because by the logic of the setting, you don't actually have access to anything that they wouldn't have available, unless we're talking something very niche and forbidden like blood magic. Imagine MGS2, but every time you trigger the alarm, you get multiple copies of Vamp, Fortune or Solidus hunting you.

KineticDiplomat
2020-05-23, 11:00 PM
I tend to agree that this is a wide ranged based on thematic and mechanical aspects to a system, both in initial set and in opportunity.

With very few exceptions (twilight 2000 is the only one I can think of, and even then you’re at least a soldier - maybe DH or WFRP if you go random chargen), almost all RPGs begin with you being “un-average.” Even in the classic D&D sense, a level one player class represents a special skill set and training - you aren’t a turnip farmer or angry peasant. Not everyone walks around going “oh right, yeah, milked the cow today, also practiced summoning demons or calling on a diety to smite my foes and mend flesh. Same old same old.”

Several games go further to make the point - Shadowrun explicitly says that not only do you have whatever skills let you get in to shadow running, the average PC has survived the brutal winnowing process that claims something like 90% of runners in the first year. So in terms of capability, you’re already the hotness.

Others just focus on the narrative starting once you’re competent enough to do more than kill rats. Blade of the Iron Throne just outright says “yes, you start as Conan or Doc Holliday or whoever because that’s the interesting part of the story.”

Even supposed “zero to hero” games like Blades in The Dark mark you as a cut above of the rest relative to your starting circumstances.

From there, it’s a matter of growth thematics. In lower fantasy style games, growth does not mean becoming night unto a god, so you might become a better action hero who none the less never exceeds the capacity that might just be possible from flesh and blood with a light suspension of disbelief. And generally this is easy to make work, world wise. Because fifteen randos are still dangerous to Bruce Willis.

Higher power fantasy like D&D has a much harder problem. Because you do become increasingly god-like, fifteen randos are about six seconds of both, but supposedly the world has enough challengers to keep throwing appropriate challenges at you a the way to being a demigod.

Ignimortis
2020-05-23, 11:11 PM
I tend to agree that this is a wide ranged based on thematic and mechanical aspects to a system, both in initial set and in opportunity.

With very few exceptions (twilight 2000 is the only one I can think of, and even then you’re at least a soldier - maybe DH or WFRP if you go random chargen), almost all RPGs begin with you being “un-average.” Even in the classic D&D sense, a level one player class represents a special skill set and training - you aren’t a turnip farmer or angry peasant. Not everyone walks around going “oh right, yeah, milked the cow today, also practiced summoning demons or calling on a diety to smite my foes and mend flesh. Same old same old.”

Several games go further to make the point - Shadowrun explicitly says that not only do you have whatever skills let you get in to shadow running, the average PC has survived the brutal winnowing process that claims something like 90% of runners in the first year. So in terms of capability, you’re already the hotness.

Others just focus on the narrative starting once you’re competent enough to do more than kill rats. Blade of the Iron Throne just outright says “yes, you start as Conan or Doc Holliday or whoever because that’s the interesting part of the story.”

Even supposed “zero to hero” games like Blades in The Dark mark you as a cut above of the rest relative to your starting circumstances.

From there, it’s a matter of growth thematics. In lower fantasy style games, growth does not mean becoming night unto a god, so you might become a better action hero who none the less never exceeds the capacity that might just be possible from flesh and blood with a light suspension of disbelief. And generally this is easy to make work, world wise. Because fifteen randos are still dangerous to Bruce Willis.

Higher power fantasy like D&D has a much harder problem. Because you do become increasingly god-like, fifteen randos are about six seconds of both, but supposedly the world has enough challengers to keep throwing appropriate challenges at you a the way to being a demigod.

I've mentioned that "average" doesn't mean "average normal person", but an average X, be it an adventurer, a specialist, a shadowrunner, supernatural creature, etc. As in, you're certainly not normal, but the game implies that the pool of people you belong to is large enough to have a lot of people like you, and among those people, you're average. If we take Shadowrun and cyberpunk for example (4e is probably an exception, since it does let you start as a super-elite higher than most elites in the book), then...

You're not Case in Neuromancer, you're his alright no-name partner from a few runs back. You're not Adam Jensen in Deus Ex, you're one of those elite mooks who don't die from a single headshot, but are still present in multiple instances. You're not Major in GitS, you're one of the criminals who are well-prepared and well-armed, like that guy with a camouflage hoodie and a gun firing anti-armor bullets which wreck cars. You're certainly not Raiden in MGR (even without the "throw thousands of tons" part), you're one of those tougher cyborgs with mauls or greatswords which take some effort but are ultimately also mooks.

You're somewhat special, but not exactly protagonist-level. You're probably not the person someone would come to with a mission like those people above get, until you progress further than the game wants you to.

It's the same for D&D, WoD, and most other games I've seen - yes, you're special, but there are many special people, and your "specialness" is pretty low. It makes sense for D&D, really, but in genres where you play a somewhat more niche character than a "fantasy adventurer", it feels...weird. Like, is there really a point to having a "vampire at level 1" in VtM? Someone who cannot reasonably imitate any of the iconic vamps and would probably get dusted by Blade or some more brawny versions of Van Helsing?

Dimers
2020-05-24, 01:36 AM
13th Age has a mechanic that can, depending on player choice, make their character absolutely irreplaceable, impossible to replicate. You're literally unique. Whether that uniqueness matters for plot, well, that's up for negotiation between player and GM, but IIRC the book does encourage GMs to make the One Unique Thing shine.

GURPS is highly variable; there's no standard at all for whether you're average compared to other adventurers/superheroes/whatever. Unfortunately it kinda fails the replaceability test, because if one character can spend points for a given power, so can another.

I don't recall Feng Shui well but it might fit the bill. I think it depends mostly on the GM's worldbuilding. There's not a lot of guidance given for how many other beings in the world know what the PCs know.

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~

I'm particularly annoyed at White Wolf for filling their books with this crap. There's this special hidden world of superhumans and wonder-workers, and you're one of them -- you should feel like you have some real impact on the world! But no, you're the bottom of the 'special hidden world' heap, every other mage/vampire/werewolf/whatever is more powerful and important than you, and in most cases you can't even make reliable use of the thing which theoretically makes you special. In both mechanics and flavor, the books tell you that you have no real influence.

Ignimortis
2020-05-24, 02:01 AM
13th Age has a mechanic that can, depending on player choice, make their character absolutely irreplaceable, impossible to replicate. You're literally unique. Whether that uniqueness matters for plot, well, that's up for negotiation between player and GM, but IIRC the book does encourage GMs to make the One Unique Thing shine.

GURPS is highly variable; there's no standard at all for whether you're average compared to other adventurers/superheroes/whatever. Unfortunately it kinda fails the replaceability test, because if one character can spend points for a given power, so can another.

I don't recall Feng Shui well but it might fit the bill. I think it depends mostly on the GM's worldbuilding. There's not a lot of guidance given for how many other beings in the world know what the PCs know.

Generics which have no set setting are by definition making heroes replaceable, because there's no implied setting - GURPS can give you 100 build points or 400, and that changes the implied setting and tone of the game dramatically. It's like supers games with distinct power levels, where there's no real "default" presented as the most common way to do things. That's completely on the GM, moreso than any games with defined power levels and mechanics around them, and the implied settings thereof.


I'm particularly annoyed at White Wolf for filling their books with this crap. There's this special hidden world of superhumans and wonder-workers, and you're one of them -- you should feel like you have some real impact on the world! But no, you're the bottom of the 'special hidden world' heap, every other mage/vampire/werewolf/whatever is more powerful and important than you, and in most cases you can't even make reliable use of the thing which theoretically makes you special. In both mechanics and flavor, the books tell you that you have no real influence.

Pretty much what I was pointing out, yes. You're a super, but only just, and everyone with a name is probably better than you, until you exceed what the game considers to be normal for PCs. It's pretty fun when you actually get there, but first you gotta live through a year or two of playing a guy with 5 dots in disciplines total and pretty human-like stats.

That's the thing with "you can just start higher up". Sure, it can be solved if everyone agrees to that, but people playing the first time usually don't do that. The first time is usually played pretty much RAW and thus the implied setting matters in these situations.

Alcore
2020-05-24, 05:00 AM
How plausible in-setting it would be to roll up a second character who is very similar in general aptitudes and skills, to replace the first one?hard. Vary hard for most systems.


3.5 assumes straight 10s with NPC arrays for those stronger people and i once rolled 18,16,16,14,14,12 and i have rarely seen anyone beat that. See, you say "roll up" but unless its a PC you don't roll; a DM fills in the blanks for the NPCs. Plenty of systems make you a cut above the rest, sometimes several cuts. I have yet to see a system that requires a DM to roll up the NPCs.


I'm not sure what you are looking for but our help isn't helping. Relative power, how easy to replace. Dungeons and Dragons has it. Most systems has it. I don't know if the gulf between common and uncommon isn't big enough for you or your DM is overpopulating the world with uncommon.



You're somewhat special, but not exactly protagonist-level.a DM can make a beer bellied, one eyed dim witted sailor a protagonist. Irrelevant.

Tanarii
2020-05-24, 08:01 AM
It sounds like what's you're looking for a is a system where you make The Protagonist.

Ignimortis
2020-05-24, 10:12 AM
It sounds like what's you're looking for a is a system where you make The Protagonist.

Well, in a way, yes. Maybe if I put it another way...

Most TTRPGs presume you play as an average X (not an average person), be it an adventurer, a specialist, a shadowrunner, supernatural creature, etc. As in, you're certainly not normal, but the game implies that the pool of people you belong to is large enough to have a lot of people like you, and among those people, you're average (or even below average). The default setting and the implied setting usually have that, and I do not argue that a GM cannot change their setting to stop that and make PCs special by default, but that doesn't change the main point, which, I think, has been proven at least somewhat in this thread.

What I'm looking for (not exactly looking for to play, although who knows, but to prove a point of sorts) is a system/setting combo where you can't really be an average X - it's a group small and elite enough that your character is, by default, one of the few humans/whatever playable races who ever get this good. Something like...a superior black ops team. Royal Knights of Kingdom Z (distinct from regular knights who probably number in the hundreds). (In)famous (space?) pirates or enforcers. Something where the game establishes, by default, that you're not a nobody just setting out, not a relative novice, and that there are definitely not hundreds or more people in this field who are at the same level. A few tens, perhaps - that sort of thing works poorly without similar named and established rivals, but not a lot.

I've gotten a few responses that do seem promising and I'll have to look at how those games handle worldbuilding around those conditions.

MoiMagnus
2020-05-24, 10:42 AM
What I'm looking for (not exactly looking for to play, although who knows, but to prove a point of sorts) is a system/setting combo where you can't really be an average X - it's a group small and elite enough that your character is, by default, one of the few humans/whatever playable races who ever get this good. Something like...a superior black ops team. Royal Knights of Kingdom Z (distinct from regular knights who probably number in the hundreds). (In)famous (space?) pirates or enforcers. Something where the game establishes, by default, that you're not a nobody just setting out, not a relative novice.

Paranoia High Programmer. That's a "spin-off" of the Paranoia RPG. (And unfortunately quite bad compared to Paranoia, IMO. It's main problem is that to be interesting, you need peoples that already know well enough the Paranoia universe. But even then, the DM has a lot of work to do to maintain an interesting game.)

Quick sum up of the Paranoia universe: in a distant future, humanity's survivors live in the complex Alpha, an underground metropolis under an AI dictatorship from "Our Friend the Computer". The computer is fully parnoiac against the presence of any traitors, any mutant, and any "communist" that lurk in the shadow, and the society is a high tech society of constant betrayal and bureaucratic nightmare. The game is usually played on a parodic tone, where most high-ranking officials and enemies are incompetent and most of the society is fully absurd (The manual heavily encourages the DM to have full autocratic power on the rule of the universe, keeping most of the rules secrets and directly rewarding player behaviour that lead to more interesting games even if that mean ignoring the rules of physics or probability. Yes, that mean a lot of RPG horror stories because not all DMs will make a good use of this power.). But it can also be played as a game of serious blackmail and manipulation in a dystopian universe.

In High Programmer, you play the top of the bureaucratic pyramid, as you are the few that rose to the top, obtaining the right of modifying the code of the Computer (hence essentially enacting laws as it pleases you, as long as no other High Programmer opposes you). You are part of a council of High Programmer that meet to deal with the never ending apocalyptic threat that endanger the Complex Alpha, which is always on the verge of self-destruction or destruction by external factors. (Though your personal gain is still your primary goal, you collaborate with other High Programmer only because the destruction of the Complex Alpha is bad for everyone).

On of the problems of this RPG is that it fails to implement "show, don't tell", as you are managing an economic empire, corrupting lower ranking officials, managing multiple secret societies, sending troups and troubleshooters here and there, but all the gameplay is the group of PCs being around a table for negotiation and giving orders to NPCs, with reports of what is happening. For the most part, it is almost a diplomacy resource management boardgame, except that it doesn't have by default the depth of a good boardgame.

Theoboldi
2020-05-24, 10:59 AM
I guess of the games that I've played, Godbound may fit your definition? That system revolves around playing people who can come from any background, but are unique in that they have been granted god-like power that they are free to use however they wish.

The standard setting does have many other beings of similar power, but most of them have specific constraints or have aquired that power through evil means, and the players are generally the only people able (or willing) to fight them. Even beyond that, the standard setting is a mostly very unhappy place, so you're encouraged to use your own powers to make it better.

Even more explicitly, the game has rules for letting the players make quick, vast changes to the game world, which they are actually required to do to level up. So you're not just the only ones who can save and improve the world, you also get to decide how you improve the world and make it stick as part of the mechanics.

Psyren
2020-05-24, 09:21 PM
I can't speak to other systems' takes on this, but in D&D at least, just having a PC class makes you pretty exceptional. This is both implied by demographical data (e.g. the DMG population tables) and explicitly stated for systems like Eberron.

This doesn't mean that you'll live up to that potential - you might quit adventuring or die long before then - but you do stand out from average inhabitants of your setting in some way, at least in terms of runway.

AntiAuthority
2020-05-25, 07:28 AM
Well, the reason why is probably because it appeals to the fantasy of the Everyman rising up to do great things. That anyone, no matter how unremarkable the circumstances of their background, can rise up and make something out of themselves if they work hard enough and are given the chance to prove themselves. Any faceless person like you or me can matter in the grand scheme of things, even if we're virtually indistinguishable from the waves of faceless masses because we lack overtly supernatural abilities, magic powers, fantastic fighting skills, divine blessings, special destiny or some such that automatically elevates us above 99% of the rest of the population.

The second part is that people might find it hard to relate to the "Chosen One" character that is super special. Most people consuming media or playing TRPGs to emulate that media aren't being told by the universe, "Hey, you have a super special destiny and only you can accomplish it. Nobody else can even hope to accomplish what you're capable of... So get on it!" and has the rest of the world acknowledge that you're on a level beyond them because of how you were born/chosen/mutated/whatever that sets you apart from the faceless masses... I can understand why some people might not be able to put themselves into this person's shoes.

Anyway, I'd say it's a form of wish fulfillment for those who want to start from nothing and a way to relate to your characters as people instead of the Chosen One.




To place that sentence and number into context; with today's world population that would make you someone who is absolutely clearly semi-objectively better than every single person in the world except maybe a 100 others. So you take out those 100 in a surprise attack and you've prevented anyone from ever threatening you in a way that makes sense for an RPG and win the game forever?

What would the point of this game be? What is the plot hook? With the exception of some versions of Superman and maybe a few documentaries about presidents and popes I don't think I know any media that have "the protagonist is the most powerful person in the world" as a starting point.

Actually, there's various tropes (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvincibleHero)related to this concept (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExperiencedProtagonist), so there's definitely a market for the protagonist being completely unique because they're the protagonist (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UniqueProtagonistAsset) in-universe.

Though it tends to vary from the hook, as it can be about the super competent protagonist being the only person capable of solving the issues (the Spartan 2s in Halo being worth an army of soldiers by themselves and turning the tide against the Covenant, Samus Aran having the unique weaponry and abilities to save the galaxy, Dante being one of the few able to stand up to the demonic forces because he's a half-devil while regular humans and soldiers are capable of being killed by the weakest demons, etc.) that the majority of the rest of the characters are incapable of handling by themselves, which shows that it takes someone a cut above the usual rank and file to dispatch the enemy... Or it could just be the fun in watching an OP character walk over their enemies (the entirety of the Overlord, Hellsing and One Punch Man anime series, Dante in DMC4)... Or just some that want to see what a protagonist will do with all that power, will they use it to protect others, inflict harm onto others, or something else entirely? That said, there's probably another reason to it that I'm unaware of, but those are the first two that spring to my mind.

Theoboldi
2020-05-25, 08:21 AM
So, as an addition to my previous post about Godbound, the author of that system is currently working on a generic fantasy game called Worlds without Number that includes a toned down version of the same mechanics for changing the world.

Even without your PC being some kind of chosen one with great powers, having a clear impact on and place within the campaign world can give that feeling of being unique. It's easy to replace Bork the Barbarian if his main claim to fame is just being a powerful member of the party that defeated the evil lich king. It's much harder to replace Bork if he founded the Blood Axe clan, is the one who abolished slavery in the high kingdom, and became the ambassador between humans and orcs. Just to give an example. Another character can rise to similar heights if Bork dies, but they will have to carve out their own place and cannot be a simple replacement.

Satinavian
2020-05-25, 08:46 AM
That's why I mention videogames like MGS and Deus Ex - the point isn't that their protags have special powers, but rather that there is plausibly no one available to replace them quickly or at all in the event of their failure/demise. The US doesn't have another super agent in MGS 1 to send in if Snake messes up, Sarif doesn't have another heavily augmented ex-SWAT professional cop to send on an investigation, etc. Whereas games usually have easy replacements available (and are presumed to work that way), unless the GM outright blocks that from working.
Well that is usually not something that is part of the system, it is something that is part of the module/campaign.

It is actually quite common to have PCs being irreplacable in that sense. Even without accounting for the multitude of plot-devices making a PC a Chosen One.

Ignimortis
2020-05-25, 09:04 AM
Paranoia High Programmer. *snip*

That does fit the point of the thread, pretty much. It sounds like the game does run into a common trap of "nothing much fun to do at the top", which is present in many systems that don't really expect you to actually be at the top and have high-level rules tacked on.


I guess of the games that I've played, Godbound may fit your definition? That system revolves around playing people who can come from any background, but are unique in that they have been granted god-like power that they are free to use however they wish.

The standard setting does have many other beings of similar power, but most of them have specific constraints or have aquired that power through evil means, and the players are generally the only people able (or willing) to fight them. Even beyond that, the standard setting is a mostly very unhappy place, so you're encouraged to use your own powers to make it better.

Even more explicitly, the game has rules for letting the players make quick, vast changes to the game world, which they are actually required to do to level up. So you're not just the only ones who can save and improve the world, you also get to decide how you improve the world and make it stick as part of the mechanics.

Oh yeah, I keep hearing about Godbound, although I also keep hearing the word OSR mentioned in conjunction (which is rather off-putting to me). Guess I'll have to grab it for a read myself after all.


I can't speak to other systems' takes on this, but in D&D at least, just having a PC class makes you pretty exceptional. This is both implied by demographical data (e.g. the DMG population tables) and explicitly stated for systems like Eberron.

This doesn't mean that you'll live up to that potential - you might quit adventuring or die long before then - but you do stand out from average inhabitants of your setting in some way, at least in terms of runway.

Like I said (multiple times, I believe!), the exceptional-ness in this case doesn't mean "perfectly common among everyone in the world", but rather "exceptional even among those in similar professions". So D&D adventurers are uncommon, but among those adventurers, who still number in the thousands, you start off as below average.


Well, the reason why is probably because it appeals to the fantasy of the Everyman rising up to do great things. That anyone, no matter how unremarkable the circumstances of their background, can rise up and make something out of themselves if they work hard enough and are given the chance to prove themselves. Any faceless person like you or me can matter in the grand scheme of things, even if we're virtually indistinguishable from the waves of faceless masses because we lack overtly supernatural abilities, magic powers, fantastic fighting skills, divine blessings, special destiny or some such that automatically elevates us above 99% of the rest of the population.

The second part is that people might find it hard to relate to the "Chosen One" character that is super special. Most people consuming media or playing TRPGs to emulate that media aren't being told by the universe, "Hey, you have a super special destiny and only you can accomplish it. Nobody else can even hope to accomplish what you're capable of... So get on it!" and has the rest of the world acknowledge that you're on a level beyond them because of how you were born/chosen/mutated/whatever that sets you apart from the faceless masses... I can understand why some people might not be able to put themselves into this person's shoes.

Anyway, I'd say it's a form of wish fulfillment for those who want to start from nothing and a way to relate to your characters as people instead of the Chosen One.

Yep, and I would say that those things actually work with D&D. What surprises me is more that a lot of systems use that approach, even when the genre suggests that you're playing someone far removed from the average person - you still start off "better than commoners/civilians/most humans, but way worse than any iconic character of the genre was even when their story began", same as D&D, except it doesn't feel as right.



Actually, there's various tropes (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvincibleHero)related to this concept (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExperiencedProtagonist), so there's definitely a market for the protagonist being completely unique because they're the protagonist (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UniqueProtagonistAsset) in-universe.


Precisely. If there was a DMC TTRPG, wouldn't you want to play a half-demon like Dante or at least a quarter-demon like Nero? Sure, you'd probably be weaker than them at their peak, but starting out like Dante in DMC 3 might actually be expected - no DT, but still some crazy anime skills and above peak swordsmanship. It's just that the demons will be numerous, and they don't even hold to human standards anyway. Meanwhile, human hunters in DMC have their appeal, but they aren't the draw here, they're niche.


So, as an addition to my previous post about Godbound, the author of that system is currently working on a generic fantasy game called Worlds without Number that includes a toned down version of the same mechanics for changing the world.

Even without your PC being some kind of chosen one with great powers, having a clear impact on and place within the campaign world can give that feeling of being unique. It's easy to replace Bork the Barbarian if his main claim to fame is just being a powerful member of the party that defeated the evil lich king. It's much harder to replace Bork if he founded the Blood Axe clan, is the one who abolished slavery in the high kingdom, and became the ambassador between humans and orcs. Just to give an example. Another character can rise to similar heights if Bork dies, but they will have to carve out their own place and cannot be a simple replacement.

Also a system I've heard a lot about and never checked out for some reason. I'll have to add it to the list, I like the example you provided if that actually is mechanically supported and not just "well, that's stuff that happened but doesn't affect anything".


Well that is usually not something that is part of the system, it is something that is part of the module/campaign.

It is actually quite common to have PCs being irreplacable in that sense. Even without accounting for the multitude of plot-devices making a PC a Chosen One.

It's kinda a part of both. A game about MGS/DX would have to be a game where the premise itself says that you're one of those rare guys on a mission which really couldn't be trusted to anyone else.

Theoboldi
2020-05-25, 09:33 AM
Oh yeah, I keep hearing about Godbound, although I also keep hearing the word OSR mentioned in conjunction (which is rather off-putting to me). Guess I'll have to grab it for a read myself after all.

Also a system I've heard a lot about and never checked out for some reason. I'll have to add it to the list, I like the example you provided if that actually is mechanically supported and not just "well, that's stuff that happened but doesn't affect anything".


I will say, Godbound is definitely OSR in the sense that it is based on 1st edition D&D mechanics and is compatible with most OSR material, but in practise it plays very differently. For one, there's no classes, and you are obviously quite a lot more powerful than average OSR characters, so a lot of stuff related to equipment and wealth gets abstracted. Worlds without Number (which is a fantasy version of the author's sci-fi system, Stars without Number) hews more closely to OSR principles, but is also very much its own thing with lots more character customization and many departures from the usual OSR formula.

That aside, the rules for enacting changes are actually quite interesting in that they are not too heavily tied into the rest of the system. In Worlds without Number, they are even optional! So you can easily bolt those rules onto most other systems and have that work just fine.

Now, the rules only cover the players making those changes and some guidelines for the consequences of them. Making these things matter in the game world does always ultimately come down to the GM. There's no rule that says once your players raised an army, every third adventure or so must revolve around that. However, the rules are quite clear that if your players spend their resources on making something happen, and adventure in pursuit of it, then they will get that thing and it will be a part of the campaign world from then on. Of course, no system can help with making the PCs feel special if the GM is just gonna ignore their achievements and not actually do anything with them.

Mr Blobby
2020-05-25, 12:39 PM
The World of Darkness systems place you in a certain category that stand out from the common folk (mages are mortal but with magic, vampires are superhuman but have fatal flaws, werewolves are extremely powerful but might loose control to the beast etc.)...

Though it's perfectly possible for your ST to get you to make 'mundie' characters and then said ST plays a series of quick solo prologues where each of the PC's get their 'special' status [Awakening, Embraced, First Change etc] and literally start on the ground floor. Though for some critters (such as vampires) chances are said character would have been 'above average' on something [which was what temped the sire in the first place].


Yeah, this is a big problem. I am mostly interested in telling proactive stories about changing the world, and most systems have this bulk of "people way higher level than you" in the way of that goal. In D&D, I'd want to start out as a 20th level Lich king, minimum, if not a god; in WoD, I'd want hundreds of not thousands of XP for a "starting" top dog character with seeming world-changing potential...

One problem with this is; learning curve. Unless the player knows the game system and the GM inside-out a character which has grown organically will be 'better made' than one which was built in one sitting.

However, your concern - which I think I'm reading as a basic 'want to be the organ-grinder, not the monkey' and avoid what I call for Vampire the Masquerade the 'deus ex elder' situation - can be dealt with easily by having the PC's start out in smaller sandpit.

Provide the PC's with a small pond - say for VtM a smallish satellite city of a metropolis - where they'll grow in. As it's small, their adversaries will be correspondingly smaller and their abilities to change the environment will be greater. Then, when they're 'big enough', introduce them to the larger pond...

Though there's also the issue of trust and power. If I'm a GM, immediately giving all my players 'world-changing' powers means I've basically promoted them to 'Deputy-GM' in regards to plots, worldbuilding and so on. This means I'll have less power to tell the story. That is, unless I sneakily shove in a power level [I]above them to counteract...


...The second part is that people might find it hard to relate to the "Chosen One" character that is super special. Most people consuming media or playing TRPGs to emulate that media aren't being told by the universe, "Hey, you have a super special destiny and only you can accomplish it. Nobody else can even hope to accomplish what you're capable of... So get on it!" and has the rest of the world acknowledge that you're on a level beyond them because of how you were born/chosen/mutated/whatever that sets you apart from the faceless masses... I can understand why some people might not be able to put themselves into this person's shoes...

Some players/GMs are also really wary of this trope. As a GM, I'm worried if a player submitted a 'super-special' concept for it's often a sign they're a Mary/Marty Snowflake [though not always!]. And Chosen One stories often - in my opinion - are really poorly written.

Max_Killjoy
2020-05-25, 12:55 PM
HERO system (Champion, etc) doesn't assume anything, but the suggested starting points are usually very competent and capable for the setting and campaign being constructed -- there's very little reason to assume that the PCs are "just starting out" unless the group has specifically decided on that setup. There's a reason "street level", "just starting out", and "teen" superheroes have lower starting point totals suggested than for the standard superhero PCs.

Quertus
2020-05-25, 01:39 PM
So, earlier, I commented on how PCs could be "irreplaceable" in any system, if they had the right history / status.

Now people are saying that there are systems which explicitly address that… but that a bad GM could still ignore it.

Which leads me to wonder, other than taking it out of the GM's hands¹, giving such things clear, player-facing mechanical benefits, what would "irreplaceably mechanics" even look like?

¹ of the style of "my knight moves for 2&1”, "my Llanowar Elves tap for 1 Green mana", no, we're not playing mother may I.

Lorsa
2020-05-25, 01:53 PM
I once ran a solo campaign in nWoD, where the character was a former professional assassin who had lost her memory (so I could run the good old story where you wake up somewhere and don't remember who you are or how you got there). Since WoD is a faux real world, in sheer combat prowess the character was definitely in the top 75 in the entire world (which makes it in the top 99,999999% I believe).

Yet, there was plenty of suspense. Because, as you know, five of the top 90% combat humans can still take out one in the top 99.999999%.

It was a quite fun campaign actually, as the player first thought it was WoD rules but a world without supernaturals. So when the first supernatural stuff appeared he was quite surprised (and it's not often you can surprise jaded long-time roleplayers).

Eventually, the character was working for a "supernatural" department of the FBI. So yes, the foes did end up being more than human. But still, in terms of starting point based on all other humans, the character was definitely high up there.

The fun thing is that the player managed to surprise me in return. There was one time where a case brought the character face-to-face with a demon, and I fully expected it to end in a fight. Instead, the player was worried about his character's love interest, who was also present, and instead decided to talk the demon into working for the FBI unit, hunting down other supernaturals. The player made a good case, and it made great sense for the demon. So all of a sudden the unit had a demon working for them. That, I did not expect.

Psyren
2020-05-25, 02:12 PM
Like I said (multiple times, I believe!), the exceptional-ness in this case doesn't mean "perfectly common among everyone in the world", but rather "exceptional even among those in similar professions". So D&D adventurers are uncommon, but among those adventurers, who still number in the thousands, you start off as below average.

I guess my question then is - why are you comparing "just starting off" adventurers to established ones? You're correct that the former group is going to be generally weaker/less capable, but it seems to be a pretty banal observation.

AntiAuthority
2020-05-25, 04:46 PM
Yep, and I would say that those things actually work with D&D. What surprises me is more that a lot of systems use that approach, even when the genre suggests that you're playing someone far removed from the average person - you still start off "better than commoners/civilians/most humans, but way worse than any iconic character of the genre was even when their story began", same as D&D, except it doesn't feel as right.

I'm not really that big on the history of TRPGs, but with the none D&D ones... Do you think it might be they're doing this because D&D was one of the first/biggest RPGs, so they copied that aspect too? It's not unusual to copy things from more successful products because you either like those things or you believe they'll help your product's success.



Precisely. If there was a DMC TTRPG, wouldn't you want to play a half-demon like Dante or at least a quarter-demon like Nero? Sure, you'd probably be weaker than them at their peak, but starting out like Dante in DMC 3 might actually be expected - no DT, but still some crazy anime skills and above peak swordsmanship. It's just that the demons will be numerous, and they don't even hold to human standards anyway. Meanwhile, human hunters in DMC have their appeal, but they aren't the draw here, they're niche.


No doubt a half-demon or quarter-demon to pull off crazy sunts. Maybe a human hunter every now and again if I wanted to give myself a challenge.





Some players/GMs are also really wary of this trope. As a GM, I'm worried if a player submitted a 'super-special' concept for it's often a sign they're a Mary/Marty Snowflake [though not always!]. And Chosen One stories often - in my opinion - are really poorly written.

Sturgeon's Law in a nutshell.

Theoboldi
2020-05-25, 05:01 PM
Something else I think nobody has brought up yet is the prevalence of metaplot in many systems and settings. At the most extreme ends of it you have published adventures where the NPCs are the ones who actually are the main characters, but even D&D 5e's campaigns and adventurer's league modules so far are careful not to heavily disturb the status quo of any one setting so that further adventures can still happen there.

Further than that, most published adventures are deliberately generic enough that any kind of PC can join in on them, often with only very loose restrictions. Adding these two together can easily create the feeling that your PC is nothing special, even if they are performing great heroics.

Lord Raziere
2020-05-25, 05:28 PM
See, this is why I define specialness not by what other people think of my character, or whether they have lots of power or prestige...

but by whether they have an interesting concept that I would like to roleplay, regardless of the surrounding world.

I don't do chosen ones. I don't do elite of elites, or what have you. I do anomalies. strange things that award you no prestige, no wealth, nothing....but does give unusual mindsets and powers that make for an interesting to roleplay on its own merits, not for any reward. I have devoted my mind to making sure I can come up with the most interesting concepts while technically remaining within the bounds of the game's rules and setting. those little edge cases that crop up, even if they are no more powerful than any other PC.

I have gotten these PCs into games and have had fun with them. I define their specialness and make them so within the bounds that I am given. such a thing is a matter of creativity, no matter the setting. the setting does not define specialness entirely. It does so only partially, and you have your say in that.

Mr Blobby
2020-05-25, 05:31 PM
My objection to Chosen One stories is perhaps more due to the fact they're obvious deux ex machina which can 'solve' any and all plot issues. You don't need to explain logically why the Big Bad is trying to kill the PC - 'for they're the chosen one' and so on.

Now, 'Chosen One' stories can be done well. I'll cite two. One, Harry Potter. I particularly liked when it was finally revealed that Potter became it because Voldemort basically chose him to be [Neville Longbottom also fitting the criteria of the prophecy]. Two: Morrowind. When the PC reaches the 'Cave of the Incarnate' and meets the various ghosts/spirits who tell them that they can be the Nerevarine - if the PC wants to be, that is.

Another aspect not mentioned is perhaps simply bad GMing. If you're playing a bunch of L10 whatevers the characters are perhaps pretty skilled and important when compared to the vast majority of NPCs. Yet... if the GM keeps on throwing L20 [non-combat] NPCs at them, sure the players will start feeling weak. Even more so if the GM is not that good at plot flexibility and keeps on using said NPCs to 'get the PC's back on the rails'.

Tanarii
2020-05-25, 05:39 PM
Further than that, most published adventures are deliberately generic enough that any kind of PC can join in on them, often with only very loose restrictions. Adding these two together can easily create the feeling that your PC is nothing special, even if they are performing great heroics.
Performing great heroics / feats is what makes a character special. Not being unique or a chosen one or some other special-to-start.

*grognard grognard* :smallamused:

Rater202
2020-05-25, 06:05 PM
I would argue that simply being a PC means that you're special in some way.

Let's take Chronicles of darkness for example, core rules: You're not a mage. You're not a powerful psychic tapping the energy of the Underworld via a symbiotic connection to something that used to be a Ghost but is now closer to an anthropomorphic embodiment of a specific kind of death, you are not a vampire.

You're not even a hunter.

An ordinary average person would not be able to survive an encounter with murderous ghost or maneating ghoul. The core book has rules for advanced martial arts training and God-Damn psychic powers right there, as PC options, that you can take with no special justification beyond "it fits my backstory."

It's assumed that you're the kind of person who can handle an encounter with the supernatural, albeit you're probably in over your head. The game even makes allusions to most people being sheep who ignore and rationalize away the supernatural becuase they can't handle it.

And personally, I like it that way. Roleplaying like this is partly about telling an interesting story and partly about putting yourself in someone else's shoes and pretending to be something you're not.

I'd rather play a heroic warrior bravely facing down monsters, a creepy child who freaks people out becuase they think she's a vampire but she doesn't follow the normal vampire rules and the actual vampires I scared, a tiny techno-organic organism that slowly evolves into a humanlike form as it integrated more technology into itself, a mystic mediating in pursuit of enlightenment, or a transhumanist-biologist than just an average guy with average skills.

I'm an average guy, I think. I'd ****ing die in any of the kinds of story that I like.

Theoboldi
2020-05-25, 06:34 PM
Performing great heroics / feats is what makes a character special. Not being unique or a chosen one or some other special-to-start.

*grognard grognard* :smallamused:

That's not what I said though. In fact, my argument is that in many adventures, the accomplishments of the PCs are not treated as anything grand or important.

Sure, you killed Strahd, but he'll return to haunt his domain in a few years because the powers that be want him to suffer. Sure, your PC can rise up from being a peasant farmer to striking down an avatar of Tiamat, but the goddess herself is still alive and her cult will return someday. You save some people now, but your character for all their accomplishments has left no mark on the world, which will continue to be run by the named NPCs and organizations who actually matter.

Though honestly even starting as a special super capable hero is nothing bad. Having to always start out as nobodies as though it makes higher level heroics and in-universe fame more “earned“ is pretty boring. None of us are actually achieving anything real by roleplaying, and starting out as nobodies when you don't want to is just busywork.

Dimers
2020-05-25, 06:39 PM
'Chosen One' stories can be done well. I'll cite two. One, Harry Potter. ... Two: Morrowind.

No love for Planescape: Torment? The concept is great and the story believably ties the Chosen One character to all sorts of amazing stuff. I mean, I don't think it'd work great for a tabletop game with multiple players, but that's also true for Harry Potter ... for most books, really.

Mr Blobby
2020-05-25, 06:46 PM
...Though honestly even starting as a special super capable hero is nothing bad. Having to always start out as nobodies as though it makes higher level heroics and in-universe fame more “earned“ is pretty boring. None of us are actually achieving anything real by roleplaying, and starting out as nobodies when you don't want to is just busywork.

Some RP'ers like character development when it comes to personality and so on. These are often the ones who if given a 'freeform session' in a town would end up either having a long, rambling chat with another PC in say a bar like a 'bottle episode' in a TV show or go around chatting to NPCs.

One of the best RP'ing experiences I've had was like this - when several PC's and an NPC's [so a GM-PC] spent the evening in a sports pub. Not only did they get to review the [redacted] they'd been through recently, but also get to know each other better and so on.

Anyway, if you're having fun, that's the 'achievement'.


No love for Planescape: Torment?...

Never encountered it. That and I only needed two examples and those were the first in my head.

prabe
2020-05-25, 06:56 PM
That's not what I said though. In fact, my argument is that in many adventures, the accomplishments of the PCs are not treated as anything grand or important.

Sure, you killed Strahd, but he'll return to haunt his domain in a few years because the powers that be want him to suffer. Sure, your PC can rise up from being a peasant farmer to striking down an avatar of Tiamat, but the goddess herself is still alive and her cult will return someday. You save some people now, but your character for all their accomplishments has left no mark on the world, which will continue to be run by the named NPCs and organizations who actually matter.

Though honestly even starting as a special super capable hero is nothing bad. Having to always start out as nobodies as though it makes higher level heroics and in-universe fame more “earned“ is pretty boring. None of us are actually achieving anything real by roleplaying, and starting out as nobodies when you don't want to is just busywork.

Those issues are more on the level of adventure or maybe setting, not system. You can have a D&D world that isn't run by Named NPCs or Big Factions. You can run adventures where the PCs can really change things--not just prevent bad things from happening but actively making good things happen. It's possible for the PCs to be among the characters that matter.

As to starting as something other than nobodies--there are pleasures to playing at the different power levels (tiers, in 5E-speak). Different kinds of stories, at least. You can see that as "busywork," I suppose, and it might be if you'd rather be playing at higher levels. That's not necessarily the case, though, for every player or every table.

Theoboldi
2020-05-25, 07:02 PM
Some RP'ers like character development when it comes to personality and so on. These are often the ones who if given a 'freeform session' in a town would end up either having a long, rambling chat with another PC in say a bar like a 'bottle episode' in a TV show or go around chatting to NPCs.

One of the best RP'ing experiences I've had was like this - when several PC's and an NPC's [so a GM-PC] spent the evening in a sports pub. Not only did they get to review the [redacted] they'd been through recently, but also get to know each other better and so on.

Anyway, if you're having fun, that's the 'achievement'.

Really? I never heard of this thing called character development! Why, please talk down to me some more. I certainly am convinced by that and am not inclined to just disregard what you say.

On a more serious note, you can do character development even when your characters start off strong or established in the world. You can even use a session just having PCs converse with each other or with NPCs, with no problems whatsoever. In fact, I encourage that in my games anyways, whether they are high- or low-powered.


Those issues are more on the level of adventure or maybe setting, not system. You can have a D&D world that isn't run by Named NPCs or Big Factions. You can run adventures where the PCs can really change things--not just prevent bad things from happening but actively making good things happen. It's possible for the PCs to be among the characters that matter.

As to starting as something other than nobodies--there are pleasures to playing at the different power levels (tiers, in 5E-speak). Different kinds of stories, at least. You can see that as "busywork," I suppose, and it might be if you'd rather be playing at higher levels. That's not necessarily the case, though, for every player or every table.

I'd argue it's busywork when you don't want to do it. I do agree with you, though, that any given table should start out at the power level they want and that no way is worse than another. Really I just dislike the notion that including the low level gameplay beforehand makes higher level stories more meaningful.

About your first point, I actually agree fully there. This is a very GM and setting dependent thing. The issue is though, that many adventures are in the sort of style I described, and that can colour the overall behavior of the playerbase if many of them run published adventures.

Bohandas
2020-05-25, 07:20 PM
Games where you really are supposed to be just average:

Call of Cthulhu - you just got unlucky enough to discover the eldritch horror.
Paranoia - you are just a average security clone.
World of Darkness - you are an average non-human preying on the world of humans.

Actually, in Paranoia you start out as clearance red, which is a position of relative power compared to the rest of the denizens of Alpha Complex

prabe
2020-05-25, 07:27 PM
Actually, in Paranoia you start out as clearance red, which is a position of relative power compared to the rest of the denizens of Alpha Complex

It's been a long time since I've read the game, but I think I remember that the general rule is that you failed your way upward from the Infrared unwashed masses to the heights of Red, and you're still being yanked around by those further up the command chain (including the Computer itself). Of course, Paranoia is basically a parody of an RPG, so I'm not sure it works as any sort of example, here.

NigelWalmsley
2020-05-25, 08:03 PM
It's been a long time since I've read the game, but I think I remember that the general rule is that you failed your way upward from the Infrared unwashed masses to the heights of Red, and you're still being yanked around by those further up the command chain (including the Computer itself). Of course, Paranoia is basically a parody of an RPG, so I'm not sure it works as any sort of example, here.

Using Paranoia as a guideline for how RPGs work is kind of like using Spaceballs as a template for a Space Opera.

Tanarii
2020-05-25, 08:14 PM
That's not what I said though.Correct. I was spring-boarding off your reference to heroics to grognard rant about special snowflake characters. You didn't say anything about them.

Theoboldi
2020-05-25, 08:19 PM
Correct. I was spring-boarding off your reference to heroics to grognard rant about special snowflake characters. You didn't say anything about them.

Ah, fair enough. I may have been a bit overly guarded, there. I stand by my points overall, though.

Mr Blobby
2020-05-25, 08:42 PM
Really? I never heard of this thing called character development! Why, please talk down to me some more. I certainly am convinced by that and am not inclined to just disregard what you say....

Well, perhaps if you didn't bemoan the lack of achievement, not making the mark on the world and calling getting the long-term achievements 'busywork' I wouldn't have to 'talk down' to you by pointing out there's more to RP'ing than simple achievement? [which as you rightly point out, isn't even RL achievement].


...On a more serious note, you can do character development even when your characters start off strong or established in the world. You can even use a session just having PCs converse with each other or with NPCs, with no problems whatsoever. In fact, I encourage that in my games anyways, whether they are high- or low-powered...

Yes, but there's a lot less scope for it. A powerful character has already 'made it' in some form(s). It's perfectly workable, but you've skipped a lot of the PC's development - in this case, their 'salad days'. And some RP'ers have the similar view to the ones who own those big camper vans and go on long road trips; that the journey is as important as the destination.

But oddly enough, I do in fact agree with you somewhat - starting out so low you're everybody's bitch is a pain and not that fun. An inexperienced / lacklustre / controlling GM can make this even worse; I'm explicitly reminded of a VtM game I once played [not for long] where NPC elders basically controlled everything, the only achievements your character could make were ones which were so small nobody noticed and would get pissy if you tried to 'take the third option' by say, having the PCs try to achieve something out of The City [and away from the elder's hands/eyes].

But the solution, I feel is to make the low-level game better [which in some cases might mean 'faster advancement'] rather than skipping it entirely. Just like with that VtM game above the solution would have been 'better-played elders' rather than getting the SI to come in and burn them all.

Quertus
2020-05-25, 08:45 PM
See, this is why I define specialness not by what other people think of my character, or whether they have lots of power or prestige...

but by whether they have an interesting concept that I would like to roleplay, regardless of the surrounding world.

I don't do chosen ones. I don't do elite of elites, or what have you. I do anomalies. strange things that award you no prestige, no wealth, nothing....but does give unusual mindsets and powers that make for an interesting to roleplay on its own merits, not for any reward. I have devoted my mind to making sure I can come up with the most interesting concepts while technically remaining within the bounds of the game's rules and setting. those little edge cases that crop up, even if they are no more powerful than any other PC.

I have gotten these PCs into games and have had fun with them. I define their specialness and make them so within the bounds that I am given. such a thing is a matter of creativity, no matter the setting. the setting does not define specialness entirely. It does so only partially, and you have your say in that.

That sounds awesome! Have any good examples that would be especially relevant to helping the OP with "irreplaceably"?


Performing great heroics / feats is what makes a character special. Not being unique or a chosen one or some other special-to-start.

*grognard grognard* :smallamused:

I've been waiting for this response - I almost said this myself when I saw the thread, but I figured someone else would express it better. :smallbiggrin:

Lord Raziere
2020-05-25, 09:03 PM
That sounds awesome! Have any good examples that would be especially relevant to helping the OP with "irreplaceably"?


Depends on what settings he wants me to help with. specialness is largely contextual.

Quertus
2020-05-25, 09:04 PM
Some RP'ers like character development when it comes to personality and so on. These are often the ones who if given a 'freeform session' in a town would end up either having a long, rambling chat with another PC in say a bar like a 'bottle episode' in a TV show or go around chatting to NPCs.

One of the best RP'ing experiences I've had was like this - when several PC's and an NPC's [so a GM-PC] spent the evening in a sports pub. Not only did they get to review the [redacted] they'd been through recently, but also get to know each other better and so on.


Yes, but there's a lot less scope for it. A powerful character has already 'made it' in some form(s). It's perfectly workable, but you've skipped a lot of the PC's development - in this case, their 'salad days'. And some RP'ers have the similar view to the ones who own those big camper vans and go on long road trips; that the journey is as important as the destination.

But the solution, I feel is to make the low-level game better [which in some cases might mean 'faster advancement'] rather than skipping it entirely. Just like with that VtM game above the solution would have been 'better-played elders' rather than getting the SI to come in and burn them all.

So, I'm all about the "in-character chat", but… why do you feel "40 sessions from level 1-10" makes for a "better" character for that chat than "40 sessions from level 15-25"?

Telok
2020-05-25, 09:08 PM
Using Paranoia as a guideline for how RPGs work is kind of like using Spaceballs as a template for a Space Opera.

Spaceballs is to 2001: Space Odyssey
as Paranoia is to Classic Traveller

Mr Blobby
2020-05-25, 09:41 PM
So, I'm all about the "in-character chat", but… why do you feel "40 sessions from level 1-10" makes for a "better" character for that chat than "40 sessions from level 15-25"?

Short answer: I don't.

Long answer: The earliest levels will be when the PC is the most green. More likely than not, it's also the steepest part of the learning curve on how their 'world' operates. This often means this would be the most rapid change in the PC's thoughts, goals and so on. Even more so, if you're playing a game where the PCs themselves are ageing.

I'm not saying the progress should be equal. As I said above, I'm pretty cool with say the first 5 levels of a D&D-type game being run through fairly quickly. My feeling is that the complaint isn't about low-level gaming, but poor low-level gaming.

Lastly, starting out as a L15 character implies you know the GM and game system fairly well and have already done a decent amount of Blue Booking - kit/spells/backstory/etc beforehand. A L1 character can be made using the 'Quickstart' from the core book, a skim-read of previous and a Blue Book which is nothing more than a list of six items of kit and a 300-word backstory.

Ignimortis
2020-05-25, 11:30 PM
I once ran a solo campaign in nWoD, where the character was a former professional assassin who had lost her memory (so I could run the good old story where you wake up somewhere and don't remember who you are or how you got there). Since WoD is a faux real world, in sheer combat prowess the character was definitely in the top 75 in the entire world (which makes it in the top 99,999999% I believe).


That's pretty much what I'm looking for - a system that would assume that those things are the default chargen (not necessarily amnesiac, of course), and the stories about them are the default, rather than the endgame. That was pretty much the point of my conversation with the aforementioned friend - we realized that neither of us knows a game where you would play something similar to WoD or Shadowrun, but with the default expectation that the PCs are some sort of recognized in-universe badass, not only mechanically, but narratively, in a sense.


I guess my question then is - why are you comparing "just starting off" adventurers to established ones? You're correct that the former group is going to be generally weaker/less capable, but it seems to be a pretty banal observation.

The point is about "why very few systems actually make the characters (by default chargen) anything but people "just starting off". So far the most probable answer would be "it's hard to expect a new player to know enough about the game to make it work properly" as well as "people like humble beginnings being played out".


I'm not really that big on the history of TRPGs, but with the none D&D ones... Do you think it might be they're doing this because D&D was one of the first/biggest RPGs, so they copied that aspect too? It's not unusual to copy things from more successful products because you either like those things or you believe they'll help your product's success.


That very well might be, actually. I've been noticing how older and more well-known RPGs of the 80s and the 90s have tried to distance themselves from D&D, but still used its' tropes and expectations quite often, when not trying to subvert them outright.


Something else I think nobody has brought up yet is the prevalence of metaplot in many systems and settings. At the most extreme ends of it you have published adventures where the NPCs are the ones who actually are the main characters, but even D&D 5e's campaigns and adventurer's league modules so far are careful not to heavily disturb the status quo of any one setting so that further adventures can still happen there.

Further than that, most published adventures are deliberately generic enough that any kind of PC can join in on them, often with only very loose restrictions. Adding these two together can easily create the feeling that your PC is nothing special, even if they are performing great heroics.

Yes, that's also a major factor! And while that works for D&D (very few people I know actually play D&D in established settings, and every GM I know has at least tried their hand at making something their own, so that they and their plays can own it), it works out less with other games, where the mechanics are tightly interwoven with lore and you can't just port them into another dissimilar setting that would use them easily. You might be onto somethin



I don't do chosen ones. I don't do elite of elites, or what have you. I do anomalies. strange things that award you no prestige, no wealth, nothing....but does give unusual mindsets and powers that make for an interesting to roleplay on its own merits, not for any reward. I have devoted my mind to making sure I can come up with the most interesting concepts while technically remaining within the bounds of the game's rules and setting. those little edge cases that crop up, even if they are no more powerful than any other PC.


See, I do that too. I have made my share of unique characters just using what's in the books, who were one-of-a-kind despite not requiring any changes to the mechanics. That's not really the point of the thread, though - I'm just interested in games which have, by default, a premise of you being that kind of person, an actual one-of-a-kind and not just another merc or adventurer, while avoiding the "if everyone's special, nobody is" pitfall.

Lord Raziere
2020-05-26, 12:29 AM
See, I do that too. I have made my share of unique characters just using what's in the books, who were one-of-a-kind despite not requiring any changes to the mechanics. That's not really the point of the thread, though - I'm just interested in games which have, by default, a premise of you being that kind of person, an actual one-of-a-kind and not just another merc or adventurer, while avoiding the "if everyone's special, nobody is" pitfall.

"just another adventurer"?

since when were adventurers some rank and file soldier? thats a weird context for special. if the world's full of adventurers, then how haven't they already adventured everywhere? what use are they? to adventure is not just to kill things violently its to explore where other fear to tread full of unknowns and strangeness. if the adventurers are legion then they must be doing that constantly, and to do that constantly well, the map eventually gets filled y'know? and once that happens, whats the use of adventurers? adventurers never struck me as normal. they are like romanticized cowboys or knights, they do a lot of fighting and creating great stories but inevitably end up creating their own doom when the world becomes too orderly and safe for them to be needed anymore.

and one of a kind what? thats very vague. its easy to create a setting of one of a kinds, they're called superhero settings, they're optimized for it. need to be the last your kind? one dead planet coming right up. don't want to kill all the things in your backstory? okay science experiment gone wrong leading to unrepeatable conditions happened, voila. as for the Syndrome phrase, not even supers have that pitfall as you need normal people to save, so....what is your definition of "everyone is special"?

again this is really contextual. you've somehow defined "adventurer" as something normal, commonplace and not notable. are you sure your not conflating the OOC commonality of DnD games with IC number of DnD adventurers?

Lorsa
2020-05-26, 01:58 AM
That's pretty much what I'm looking for - a system that would assume that those things are the default chargen (not necessarily amnesiac, of course), and the stories about them are the default, rather than the endgame. That was pretty much the point of my conversation with the aforementioned friend - we realized that neither of us knows a game where you would play something similar to WoD or Shadowrun, but with the default expectation that the PCs are some sort of recognized in-universe badass, not only mechanically, but narratively, in a sense.

I haven't quite explored the thought in length, but I guess part of the reason is that it's easier to scale up than to scale down.

Since most systems come with a system for character progression built in, anyone running it could easily apply whatever amount of extra progression on to their starting characters if they want to. Very few systems have character regression, so it'd be harder in "you start badass" system to scale down to "average Joe".

In general, systems typically aim for broadness whenever possible. So if you can choose between "the default is average Joe but there's the possibility for higher power" and "the default is high power", the former might be preferred over the latter.

I guess what we could fault systems for, is having a default to begin with. Maybe the best is to give examples of build-points and how they relate to various power levels, and then let the group choose which they want to go for.

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-26, 06:06 AM
The more mechanically complicated the system is, the less practical it is to start at higher (whether "level" is a discrete measure like in D&D or in a general sense.) While, as DM and inveterate rules-smith, would have few problems starting out with a 20th level character, my teenage niece or my uncle who only plays about four times a year would get overwhelmed much more easily.

So that's definitely one reason.

A second is that by its nature, if you design a system that makes the PCs irreplaceable to the world - you have by definition put a stirct limit on how much material you can get out of that world. There's a relavitely finite number of foes to fight, and unless your PCs want to get down to the nitty-gritty of buracracy, that's about it. You can't exactly sell a lot of rulebooks or expansions for something like that, since you have by definition, limited the possibilities. But maybe you don't care that much about that, as a publisher and just want to get out your vision to the world. But after an adventure in those constraints, you can't exactly set another one there after you've killed all the threats and solved all the problems, can you? (And if you do, haven't you invalidated the last party's actions as much as being set in a communal setting where you're not allowed to kill the Whispering Tyrant?)

So what then? Do you go back to other games, or is now the onus on the DM to continously provide new worlds for every campaign? That's a big ask; and while there are many DMs that might do that, a reliance on that as rules-setting is... Unusual for a good reason, shall we say. Enough that I can't bring to mind any system I'm personally familiar with that didn't have at least one at least "default" setting. GURPS maybe? I've never played it to know enough about it to make that call.

Which brings me to another reason this paradigm is rare - it makes bad players much harder to reign in, because they have a system-granted-leave to be as big an asshat as they like, without consequence (and treating it as an excuse to play out all their power fantasies). Now, if you're playing a game with your mates, odds are, you at least have some level of getting rid of That One Asshat - but for a system that's published, which might be played at a convention or something? That's a consideration. If the clinet size is small, it's less likely to be a problem, but if this hypothetical system had developed instead of D&D? Imagine all the problem threads we'd be getting. Because this is an idea that's really best suited to players that are going to play it sensibly and not, as mentioned, blanket-permission to be Chaotic Stupid; but the promise of that IS more likely to attract people that want to do that.

I think those are among the major reasons why this paradigm is not a common one with published rules.



I will note that it would quite easy in any system to achieve the effect in basically any system either narratively or mechanically; if in D&D, you had an E6 world and then had the PCs at 12th, 15th or 20th or something, that would pretty much have the desired effect or in... I dunno, actually out of the systems I'm personally familiar with, D&D would actually be easiest to do it in (Rolemaster would be pretty much the same as D&D, but Dungeoneer and WFRP are more on a limited curve... I suppose in D6 Star Wars (I used that as a basis for superheros once) you could give the PCs a minimum of, like 8D6 or something in their attributes or something...? It's been ober two decdes since I last played it, so...) So, okay, maybe not that mechanically easily in every system...!

Theoboldi
2020-05-26, 08:43 AM
Well, perhaps if you didn't bemoan the lack of achievement, not making the mark on the world and calling getting the long-term achievements 'busywork' I wouldn't have to 'talk down' to you by pointing out there's more to RP'ing than simple achievement? [which as you rightly point out, isn't even RL achievement].

Okay, you are conflating a lot of different things that I wrote there without considering that they are entirely separate points on entirely different issues. I wasn't just giving out a list of qualities that I want in each and every single one of my games, but rather engaging with specific topics that cropped up in this thread and trying to help figure out the answer to the OP's question.

Also, don't blame me, a complete stranger, for how you decide to behave towards others. That's your decision alone.



But the solution, I feel is to make the low-level game better [which in some cases might mean 'faster advancement'] rather than skipping it entirely. Just like with that VtM game above the solution would have been 'better-played elders' rather than getting the SI to come in and burn them all.
I think you're honestly reading a lot into what I wrote that isn't actually there. I like low-level stories just fine. At the same time, I also like high-level stories. And it's quite alright to just want a single type of experience for a given game. It's also alright to want both in order.

Psyren
2020-05-26, 09:22 AM
Aotrs Commander summed up my views on this, but I'd also add - what's wrong with a system that assumes you start at low level, but gives you all the tools you need to start at any level you want? In many systems, you can crowdsource this work out to the players too - tell the group "okay, everyone build your characters, and we're starting at level 10." Have them do all the work of picking things like spells, skills, feats, gear, and writing their backstories to fit the world you're about to use, then do a quick audit of their handiwork sometime before session 1 for any errors, omissions, or recommendations.

This is not to say that you can't make them feel important/irreplaceable even at level one too if that's what you want. One way to do that might be to make PC classes, or even certain types of PC class (like full casters, or psionic classes, or martial initiators etc.) very rare, and then require the PCs to be those. That's a D&D-centric example but you could probably adapt the principle to other systems too.

ngilop
2020-05-26, 10:48 AM
I have been reading this and I just don't understand this thread at all.

The op keeps using examples of the two 'sides' but those examples are literally the same thing. the OP just is measuring them by different metrics.. ( I think that is a logical fallacy of some sort, but other than No true scotsman i don't remember any names)

The truth is all the examples he gives of the 'mechanically and narratively unique and special" are 100% as interchangeable as the 'just some guy doing things' examples he gives.

I think there is a deeper reason as to why, but I am not expert in that particular field.

Max_Killjoy
2020-05-26, 11:22 AM
For some systems, the lack of clarity about whether the average starting PC is an average person for the setting, or the average above-average person, contributes to other ongoing disputes, perhaps.

That is, arguments over progression, capabilities, scaling, etc, are partially caused by having an undetermined starting point.

SimonMoon6
2020-05-26, 11:32 AM
Personally, I think a lot of superhero games have the potential at least to make the PC be someone who is unique and important and special at the beginning of the game.

For example, with TSR's Marvel Superheroes RPG, characters are made primarily by random chance (as I recall anyway, it's been a long time), so with really good die rolls, you could have a really good character who could be one of the top superheroes around.

And most games give options to allow one to be more powerful than the suggested power level. For example, Mayfair's DC Heroes RPG suggests that players create a character around the power level of a member of the Teen Titans (450 points) but also allows for PCs to be made on any number of points instead. You could easily have a campaign where all the PCs are on Superman's power level, making the PCs be among the most important characters in the setting.

But regardless of the actual mechanics, a lot of this comes down to setting rather than game system mechanics. And setting (like all other fluff) is easily changed by the Game Master to fit their desire.

For example, GURPS lets you play in the world of the Wild Cards novels. In that setting, there are very few truly powerful and influential heroes. A PC could easily be one of the top ten most important characters in the world. Once I ran a game in a setting based on Marvel's New Universe comics in which there were very few superpowered characters and even fewer that were greatly important and influential, so the PCs were incredibly important in the world and capable of changing the entire status quo of the world.


Unfortunately, most Game Masters are inexperienced novices and therefore they may not know how to suitably challenge a character who is actually important to their universe (they might not even want the PCs to change the status quo of the world), and they may not even realize that sometimes good stories (and games) arise not from "can the hero win" but "what will the hero do in order to win" or even "what will someone with unlimited power actually do with that power" sorts of questions... and with multiple PCs, all of whom have great power but differing viewpoints on how to use that power... things can get very interesting. The PCs can challenge each other... and the GM then has far less work to do than normal to create adventures.

But, sigh, most GMs are just happy with PCs going down into the sewers to kill one solitary rat after another. This is fun?

KineticDiplomat
2020-05-26, 11:45 AM
A few recommendations for systems that make you a major player from the start - even if you only use them for ideas.

Burning Empires: Space Opera that works on the premise that your character is SOMEONE. Maybe the governor of a planet, the lord of a semi-feudal fleet, an aspiring bishop, the head of a corporate research program, whatever. It's mandatory that you start with a few defined friends/allies and rivals appropriate to the level of power. It's less a game about individual kinetic capability - being the best sniper, pilot, space-wizard, whatever - and more about being in a position of power that lets you shape the fate of a planet or system over a story arc. Your characters are firmly in the "great man of history" mold, and not "rando saves the world" mold. Worth a look.

Blade of The Iron Throne: Low-fantasy with the presumed starting point that you are protagonist worthy material. Advancement is a tertiary aspect of the system, as you are already an Achilles or Cain Blacknife. The understanding is that from the start an individual perfectly competent soldier by is not going to be much of a challenge for you one on one unless you're a wizened researcher or some such. And for combat focused characters, you generally start somewhere between "really very good at this - you would have a good chance of winning a medieval tournament" to "you might not be unto a legend for the ages (yet), but you're definitely one of the best around today." The power level is very low fantasy though, so if single sword wipes chopping down armies is what you're looking for, not so much. As a GM, I cannot tell you how much easier this makes life.

Song of Swords: I prefer it less to the above, but it does have the rules built in to build in characters ranging from absolutely realistic to the just beyond Homeric hero in a bounded world.

High-End Splats for many of the WH40k RPGs. (Or Rogue Trader.): Starting point is an assumption that you are both highly personally capable and wield significant power and influence. Yes, there are people higher than you on the totem pole, but you're already playing in rareified airs.

Knaight
2020-05-26, 12:14 PM
I'd contest your use of the term average a bit, especially once you start getting into constraining the set arbitrarily until the PCs end up average, but putting that aside: There are absolutely games in which PCs are intentionally unique people in unique situations, a lot of which are explicitly about how people with great power interact with that great power - though how exactly that manifests can vary wildly. Notables:

Mythender. Here I'd say that concept manifests as "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". You play people who technically qualify as mortals if you squint hard enough, who are going out to end some myths by murdering their way through a pantheon. The game plays with trying to retain a connection to humanity now that you're isolated by being a godlike being, while simultaneously trying to wield enough power to murder your way through gods. Notably one of the ways characters can die is accidental apotheosis.

Amber, Nobilis: In these games you play either gods or godlike beings, and you're generally the only god of something. What that something is can vary significantly, but you have a unique interest and perspective regardless (especially in Nobilis), and a character lost is irreplaceable.

Reign: Who exactly you are can vary, but at the very least you are in a position of leadership. You have followers, they're a substantial component in the game, and that power over people is generally a pervasive thing. The bulk of the people you'll end up in major conflict with also have followers, and the sort of stories that fall out of a Reign game definitely tend to show this effect. There are also several explicit rules relating to the impact of extraordinary people on large group conflict, by which the text clearly means you in particular.

Follow: Thematically Follow has some similarity to Reign as described, though you're going to see more in the way of community leaders and fewer battle mages and generals. Mechanically they're basically completely different, with Reign being a pretty traditional game in implementation and Follow being an extremely narrative story game.

Marvel Heroic Roleplay: This is a weird one, mostly because of how licenses work, but by default you pick and play established Marvel characters in a sort of really big troupe play scenario. Part of this is character sheets for a ton of extant characters, including the various world shaking ones.

As for the other idea that most RPGs are about characters just starting out, that seems dubious. Some form of advancement is common, sure, but the specific zero to hero structure is pretty rare outside D&D. Outside of a handful of generic systems most games are also relatively tightly aimed and some are extremely specific. Some of these are definitely specifically about people just entering their fields, youth and inexperience more generally, and other such things - but plenty are also geared towards established professionals with experience under their belts, big damn heroes who are already a big deal, or people who don't really fit any of that because they're just weird.

Democratus
2020-05-26, 02:40 PM
I don't think it's possible to have an RPG where you aren't "an average X".

Reason being: if you scrap your character and make another one - it's another X of the same power. And if you scrap that one (or get killed) then you make another character that's also an X of the same power. And heaven forbid if there are multiple players at the table who are also rolling up X's. And if they die or decide to replace their character, you have even more X's.

This gives you a nigh infinite number of X's at the same power level as you. Making you "an average X".

...

Maybe if you made a game where you could only ever roll up one character and then you burn the game afterward...maybe that would qualify?

Aotrs Commander
2020-05-26, 04:06 PM
The PCs can challenge each other... and the GM then has far less work to do than normal to create adventures.

But, sigh, most GMs are just happy with PCs going down into the sewers to kill one solitary rat after another. This is fun?

Having seen the one time (as a player) what happened when the DM actively really wanted that to happen and it having caused the game to completely self-destruct...

I'll take my rat-hunting over that, if it's all the same to you, thanks. (I mean, I'd prefer a more normal adventure, but between one and t'other...)



(There were other factors, but that was the major one. Hell, this was despite MY best efforts to keep it together; I sacrificed the only CE charcter I've ever played1 for a LE one (in an Evil party) to explictly try and be a unifiying, not devisive force (bear in mind the group semi-regularly plays Evil parties and this was the only one to have this happen to, so alignment wasn't the problem.)



1And he was so much fun; his crowning achievement (in a setting that was in a tundra/arcitc reason) that we should overthrow all the governments by changing the world's economy to be based on snow. I fondly remember the reaction of the other players to that suggestion...

Note that I did my best not to do crap to the other players, and when I was sort of forced into it by having it done by me (and the resultant OoC explosion from one of the players), I immediately spoke to the DM after session and changed character.

Though I am still mildly peeved that I had to do that it was my character on the recieving end; the other player's (vastly over-powered, since th DM didn't care about LA) succubus stole my magic weapon/thingy (that she knew he was attached to) and she had a blow-up when I said my character got all upset about it; granted, I think I used the words "you have never seen such hate," but, y'know... Roleplaying? Especially as said player seemed to hold us as being a proper roleplayer to our... Hack-and-slashers, shall we politely say. But I resolved the ooc issue, swapped over my character for next session and didn't make any more deal about it. (I think I waved it off at the time as it being "far too easy to get lost in playing a CE character.") The DM, incidently, was a bit miffed, since her really liked my CE guy, but what can you do. Sometimes, you have to literally take one for the team, and sometimes, even that's not enough.

Tanarii
2020-05-26, 05:28 PM
I have been reading this and I just don't understand this thread at all.

The op keeps using examples of the two 'sides' but those examples are literally the same thing. the OP just is measuring them by different metrics.. ( I think that is a logical fallacy of some sort, but other than No true scotsman i don't remember any names)

The truth is all the examples he gives of the 'mechanically and narratively unique and special" are 100% as interchangeable as the 'just some guy doing things' examples he gives.
Yeah I can't understand it either. I tried, and kept hitting a brick wall.

I mean, I can understand "not everyone wants to start at level 1" and "not everyone wants to do the hero's journey (or whatever that crap is called)" but the OP seems to reject the idea of starting at higher levels are not being sufficient. Because apparently it's not about power, it's just about being so special and unique you're the only one powerful enough for the job. :smallconfused: But apparently that's wrong too. :smalleek:

Theoboldi
2020-05-26, 05:53 PM
As somebody who is arrogant enough to assume he understands it, I do believe what OP is looking for is a game where the PCs feel properly like the specific protagonists. Not just to the extent that they are the adventurers who happen to be saving this town, or that they are the cyberpunks who happen to be doing this job, but that the overall events of the game only can come about via them.

I suspect the bit about power only matters in so far as that many RPGs, even the ones where you play powerful beings, start you out as a weak, inexperienced version of those, with plenty of stronger examples around. As such, you still often have that feeling of being a mere pawn and minion in them.

It's not strictly about power though, I think. Even a grim and low-powered story like the X-Files (which I think was brought up as an example, but I am too lazy to check) has the main characters feel very irreplacable because they are driving the plot through their own curiosity and decisions, informed by their particular personalities and skills. They feel more unique as a result of it.

Compare that to D&D, where often you are hired to do a specific thing. You are acting on the behalf of someone else, or reacting to a particular evil in progress that threatens everyone, and not you in particular.

(Do mind I say this as someone who likes D&D, and knows it can be played very differently. I'm just going by rough anecdotal experience and averages here. Ultimately, this is more of a question of setting andan playstyle than system.)

(There are also other aspects to this, of course, like the usual adherence to the status quo in many settings and modules that I pointed out earlier. But I'd still be here typing tomorrow if I tried to figure all of them out in one post.)

Ignimortis
2020-05-26, 09:56 PM
I don't think it's possible to have an RPG where you aren't "an average X".

Reason being: if you scrap your character and make another one - it's another X of the same power. And if you scrap that one (or get killed) then you make another character that's also an X of the same power. And heaven forbid if there are multiple players at the table who are also rolling up X's. And if they die or decide to replace their character, you have even more X's.

This gives you a nigh infinite number of X's at the same power level as you. Making you "an average X".

...

Maybe if you made a game where you could only ever roll up one character and then you burn the game afterward...maybe that would qualify?

It's more about the baked-in/implied setting than the raw ability to make a thousand characters. As in, does the world actually suggest that there are very few PCs not only in proportion to the general populace, but as an absolute number?

For example, the Exalted example upthread - yes, you can make a new character, because Exaltations don't actually die out, but there are still only 50 or less Solars in Creation at any moment of time, and that's treated as something substantial by the baked-in setting, so there is no possibility (outside of some really weird plot shenanigans) to have an army of a thousand Solars. The only common Exalts who are capable of being mass-produced, the Dragonblooded, are substantially weaker and generally rank a few tiers below Solars...and Solars are designed as default characters/protagonists, so you're not DBs fighting Solars as bosses, you're the Solar fighting DB death squads. As such, you're positioned as someone narratively important not just because you're in the right place at the right time.


I have been reading this and I just don't understand this thread at all.
*snip*


Yeah I can't understand it either. I tried, and kept hitting a brick wall.
*snip*


As somebody who is arrogant enough to assume he understands it, I do believe what OP is looking for is a game where the PCs feel properly like the specific protagonists. Not just to the extent that they are the adventurers who happen to be saving this town, or that they are the cyberpunks who happen to be doing this job, but that the overall events of the game only can come about via them.

I suspect the bit about power only matters in so far as that many RPGs, even the ones where you play powerful beings, start you out as a weak, inexperienced version of those, with plenty of stronger examples around. As such, you still often have that feeling of being a mere pawn and minion in them.

It's not strictly about power though, I think. Even a grim and low-powered story like the X-Files (which I think was brought up as an example, but I am too lazy to check) has the main characters feel very irreplaceable because they are driving the plot through their own curiosity and decisions, informed by their particular personalities and skills. They feel more unique as a result of it.

Compare that to D&D, where often you are hired to do a specific thing. You are acting on the behalf of someone else, or reacting to a particular evil in progress that threatens everyone, and not you in particular.

(Do mind I say this as someone who likes D&D, and knows it can be played very differently. I'm just going by rough anecdotal experience and averages here. Ultimately, this is more of a question of setting and playstyle than system.)

(There are also other aspects to this, of course, like the usual adherence to the status quo in many settings and modules that I pointed out earlier. But I'd still be here typing tomorrow if I tried to figure all of them out in one post.)

Theoboldi has it right in basically everything! It's less about absolute power, more about relative power, and even more about narrative importance of exactly who you are to the plot. The reason I also bring up systems and not only settings is that:

A lot of systems that aren't D&D have their hardwired settings which come with certain assumptions, usually placing you exactly in the "average/below average" category of whoever you're supposed to be playing in the game. However, I (when starting this thread) didn't really know a lot of systems that would come with different assumptions.
Most of the systems I know tend to be designed around that particular "you're still a rookie" playstyle, and end up floundering when you're actually high enough to be notable, because at this point there's usually nothing left to tackle.


I.e. my main three sources of knowledge are D&D, WoD and Shadowrun (I'm sure most of you have noticed that). D&D and Shadowrun, by default, work on the basis of:
You're doing a standard adventuring/shadowrunning job, something happens and you get dragged into plot events, but there is no reason that another party with a wildly different background, couldn't be here instead of you, and it is implied that the world actually has quite a few parties like yours, you just happened to be here first. Sometimes nothing even happens and you don't get dragged into anything, you just do your job and get your coin/nuyen.

Note that D&D has the luxury of having plenty of possible settings that avoid most of what I just listed, and your DM can certainly make your party the only ones around, or at least the only ones that make it over 5th level. Shadowrun doesn't do that, even if you start as Prime Runners or something. You'd have to homebrew something completely different to make that work. Otherwise, there are still corp elites whose entire purpose is to be better than you.

To clarify - I don't mind having enemies stronger than you. It's just that they, in a game I'm trying to describe, should probably mostly be something that the PC cannot aspire to be - i.e. monsters instead of "basically a PC with more resources to draw on", exceptions being some sort of competing same-power institutions with similarly limited manpower so that they cannot afford to throw mooks at you - anyone numerous enough to be replaced quickly can't really do much to you most of the time, and anyone skilled enough to rival you would also be in such low numbers that losing them is almost unacceptable unless the payoff would be really worth it (great opportunity for personal rivalries and "indirect competition" type of missions, though).

WoD does things a bit differently - you start as a member of a very special group: vampire, werewolf, mage, etc. Even a new vampire can probably take on something that would be quite possibly deadly to a mortal, and a werewolf is a killing machine by default. However, the world is also full (not literally, but it still feels like it) of other people like you - except they're experienced and more powerful, and generally get to lord you around because of how the setting works. Combine it with lackluster powers of the lower ranks (that's where the power level bit comes in), and you still feel like a nobody, because mortals are still a significant threat for quite a while (multiple opponents really mess you up) and all the other vamps/weres/magi are looking down at you and sending you off on errands.

And the endgame only works for werewolves - they have their share of supernatural monsters that aren't comparable to PCs and get to break all sorts of rules. What do you do when you're a vampire who has influence in their town and all their Disciplines at 5 to back it up? Nothing much, sit around and play politics, because you can't affect the world on any larger scale personally, unless you do play politics for a few centuries.

Zombimode
2020-05-27, 03:57 AM
The point is about "why very few systems actually make the characters (by default chargen) anything but people "just starting off". So far the most probable answer would be "it's hard to expect a new player to know enough about the game to make it work properly" as well as "people like humble beginnings being played out".

Then you may have missed my point, that being: in order to provide a wide range of possible starting points, spanning from novice to epic, the system has to provide that information and that obviously includes the novice stuff.

I have to admit, I have a really hard time understanding your point. To me your "problem" is ridiculousy easy to solve: if you want the PCs to start at a high level of competency, just do so! Don't start at level 1, at Novice, with 100 Character Points etc. Choose a higher starting point.
If you want the characters to have some kind of "special" role (Regardless of ability! Those two points are not related) just design a campaign with that premise.

ngilop
2020-05-27, 10:13 AM
Yeah... so...

That is what I am not understanding.

You keep saying things apply to this but not to that and the truth is those same things apply to both equally.

Just because you say "X" and repeat it continuously doesn't make it a truth or right.

Everything you are saying D&D can't and something else can is completely wrong.

I mean: one cannot just say " I don't do X with Y, therefor Y cannot do X" Because it doesn't work like that in reality. Countless other have done X with Y very successfully.

I do not get how you think the fact that others PC can be created and do the same thing invalidates the narrative important of the current set of PCs. Because as Democratus stated in his post, to actually create what you want. You would have to create an RPG that only ever has 1 GM and 1 set of players with just that initial set of characters and then the RPG would need to be removed from existence afterwards. ANYTHING less means somebody else can GM the RPG and other players can make characters and therefore they are no longer uniquely unique. You just have 'characters who can do stuff and other characters created using this system can do the same thing" And you examples keep making me more and more confused. Because your own examples have consistently invalided your points that you are trying to assert.

But, I am also willing to concede that none of what you have been saying is what you actually mean. That what you want to communicate to the audience you are just not able to put into words.

Quertus
2020-05-27, 01:10 PM
I still think that "replaceability" vs "irreplaceably" is the easiest way to conceptualize this concept.

For (IMO) a great example *of both sides*, look at The All-Guardsman Party (which I'd encourage you to do anyway).

In the beginning ("Darwinian Selection", parts 1&2, IIRC), the PCs are highly replaceable, being guardsmen fighting off a Tyranid invasion. As characters die, they are replaced with copies with the serial numbers filed on. Nubby dies, he's replaced by "Nubby 2"; Cutter 16 dies, hrs replaced by cutter 17, etc, each player seemingly cycling through the 5 or so character ideas that they like, while they watch them die in droves to the implacable Tyranid advance.

Then, the tenor switches. Instead of playing "wall of guardsmen", the players switch to playing one of the *very few* survivors of that massacre. Characters are still… kinda replaceable (there's more survivors than just the 5 or so PCs we follow), but there's only one Nubby Nubs, only one Sergeant Greg Sergeant, and each of these alternate PCs has a different played-through history, a different personality and outlook and skill set.

It's a great example of "you don't survive because you're special; you're special because you survived" - although, given the underlying Fate Points mechanics, the "you survive because you're special" is likely true for the remainder of the story.

-----

What makes this thread odd is, usually, if a PC dies, you want the player to be able to make a new PC easily. Usually, replaceability is considered a virtue.

The biggest problem IME if when you look at important quests, and find yourself asking, "why are *we* there ones doing this, in a world with Elminster / Yoda / Quertus / etc?". Eventually, there comes a point where one grows tired of all the contrived stories necessary for that to work, or the individual contrivance is so great that it necessitates rejection.

Take, for example, one of my personal horror stories: the GM had the gods themselves come down to charge our 1st level characters with defeating an already-successful Drow invasion! When asked why *we* had been chosen, the gods responded that the Drow were likely to underestimate us. :smallannoyed:

So, either you have to relegate the cool stories to the cool characters while you play the fod telling the mundane stories in their shadow (and what fun is that?), or you need the PCs to be the ones who are actually cool, or you need a lot of uncool contrivance.

Thus, it seems to me, the premise of this thread is, "which systems choose 'cool PCs' as the default, where *the PCs* (EDIT: the ones you'd end up with at the end of default, "1st level" / "starting character" character creation) are actually the ones you'd choose for the most important 'save the world' mission in the world, if you were in charge?".

Ignimortis
2020-05-27, 09:27 PM
Then you may have missed my point, that being: in order to provide a wide range of possible starting points, spanning from novice to epic, the system has to provide that information and that obviously includes the novice stuff.

I have to admit, I have a really hard time understanding your point. To me your "problem" is ridiculousy easy to solve: if you want the PCs to start at a high level of competency, just do so! Don't start at level 1, at Novice, with 100 Character Points etc. Choose a higher starting point.
If you want the characters to have some kind of "special" role (Regardless of ability! Those two points are not related) just design a campaign with that premise.

The thing is, I can design a D&D campaign based around that. I could probably pick up a generic system and work with that, too. But that's not the point of this thread. A lot of systems come with baked-in settings which are rather interconnected with the rules,and I was wondering what other system+setting combos work in this way (putting the players in the "important to the world" spot) by default, besides Exalted.


Yeah... so...

That is what I am not understanding.

You keep saying things apply to this but not to that and the truth is those same things apply to both equally.

Just because you say "X" and repeat it continuously doesn't make it a truth or right.

Everything you are saying D&D can't and something else can is completely wrong.

I mean: one cannot just say " I don't do X with Y, therefor Y cannot do X" Because it doesn't work like that in reality. Countless other have done X with Y very successfully.

I do not get how you think the fact that others PC can be created and do the same thing invalidates the narrative important of the current set of PCs. Because as Democratus stated in his post, to actually create what you want. You would have to create an RPG that only ever has 1 GM and 1 set of players with just that initial set of characters and then the RPG would need to be removed from existence afterwards. ANYTHING less means somebody else can GM the RPG and other players can make characters and therefore they are no longer uniquely unique. You just have 'characters who can do stuff and other characters created using this system can do the same thing" And you examples keep making me more and more confused. Because your own examples have consistently invalided your points that you are trying to assert.

But, I am also willing to concede that none of what you have been saying is what you actually mean. That what you want to communicate to the audience you are just not able to put into words.

It's not about that. I replied to Democratus about this, and the point isn't in your mechanical inability to make those characters, but in there not being a lot of those characters, narratively, by default - i.e. you don't start as a farmer's son with a sword and rusty mail grandpa brought from the last major war, or a punk who has a gun and is slightly better at using it than other punks around them.

I already said that D&D can do that - if you make your own setting centered around that and use the mechanics properly to reflect that. But the published settings for D&D still work with the premise of "adventurers are plentiful enough for any random party to just stumble across the plot".



What makes this thread odd is, usually, if a PC dies, you want the player to be able to make a new PC easily. Usually, replaceability is considered a virtue.

The biggest problem IME if when you look at important quests, and find yourself asking, "why are *we* there ones doing this, in a world with Elminster / Yoda / Quertus / etc?". Eventually, there comes a point where one grows tired of all the contrived stories necessary for that to work, or the individual contrivance is so great that it necessitates rejection.

Take, for example, one of my personal horror stories: the GM had the gods themselves come down to charge our 1st level characters with defeating an already-successful Drow invasion! When asked why *we* had been chosen, the gods responded that the Drow were likely to underestimate us. :smallannoyed:

So, either you have to relegate the cool stories to the cool characters while you play the fod telling the mundane stories in their shadow (and what fun is that?), or you need the PCs to be the ones who are actually cool, or you need a lot of uncool contrivance.

Thus, it seems to me, the premise of this thread is, "which systems choose 'cool PCs' as the default, where *the PCs* (EDIT: the ones you'd end up with at the end of default, "1st level" / "starting character" character creation) are actually the ones you'd choose for the most important 'save the world' mission in the world, if you were in charge?".

Pretty much that. A system/setting (as I've noted before, a lot of systems come with their own baked-in settings) where the default character creation turns out highly potent and rare (for their world) people who are actually expected to do things like save-the-world class missions. I'd like for the expected/presumed premise to be something more than "well, we stumbled upon this world-changing plot and we have a vaguely appropriate skillset for this, so guess it's up to us, despite us being pretty much nobodies from the next town over and there being quite a few more powerful people who could handle it better, but somehow they aren't taking phone calls at the moment".

You're the cool PCs who get a cool mission. It might develop into something that still feels way outta your league, but you're already some of the best this world has to offer, so there's nobody significantly cooler-than-thou you could point at and ask "hey, why aren't they doing this?"

Drascin
2020-05-28, 01:20 PM
Pretty much that. A system/setting (as I've noted before, a lot of systems come with their own baked-in settings) where the default character creation turns out highly potent and rare (for their world) people who are actually expected to do things like save-the-world class missions. I'd like for the expected/presumed premise to be something more than "well, we stumbled upon this world-changing plot and we have a vaguely appropriate skillset for this, so guess it's up to us, despite us being pretty much nobodies from the next town over and there being quite a few more powerful people who could handle it better, but somehow they aren't taking phone calls at the moment".

You're the cool PCs who get a cool mission. It might develop into something that still feels way outta your league, but you're already some of the best this world has to offer, so there's nobody significantly cooler-than-thou you could point at and ask "hey, why aren't they doing this?"

That's most pulp style games, to be honest.

For example, most FATE-based stuff is very much in this vein - Spirit of the Century has you start as a member of a globe-spanning gentleman adventurer club that basically only includes the absolute best and brightest (basically, Indiana Jones is the bar for so much as entry, here). In Atomic Robo you start as a new recruit Action Scientist for Tesladyne, Robo's cadre of elite superscience problem solvers which expects you to be able to think a solution to a vampire invasion as part of your job interview to qualify for a position and supersede or disprove at least two established fundamental laws of science in your first four years in the company. And so on.

So yeah, look into games that talk about "pulp", you'll find some of this quite easily.

Psyren
2020-05-28, 01:43 PM
But the published settings for D&D still work with the premise of "adventurers are plentiful enough for any random party to just stumble across the plot".

First, there are agents in most D&D settings with a vested interest in the "plot" being discoverable - ranging from dedicated guilds/organizations to the gods themselves, depending on the stakes of said plot. There are whole groups whose job it is to ensure that adventurers are aimed at problems suited to their skills, so it shouldn't be a surprise when that regularly happens.

Second, adventurers might seem plentiful from a PC standpoint (i.e. it's plausible that I, as a player, can always roll up another one) - but in terms of the setting they can still be quite rare. Even remote regions in most settings can have populations in the hundreds of thousands. Even if merely 500 of those individuals have the potential to be adventurers - more PCs than a table (never mind an individual 3.5 or PF player) will probably go through in their entire lives - that's still less than 1% of the population of just that region, not even the setting as a whole. Take a look at the population figures for regions in Faerun or Golarion or Eberron if you don't believe me.


You're the cool PCs who get a cool mission. It might develop into something that still feels way outta your league, but you're already some of the best this world has to offer, so there's nobody significantly cooler-than-thou you could point at and ask "hey, why aren't they doing this?"

Various settings do explain this though. About the only one where this is really a problem is Forgotten Realms, and even there it can be explained why Elminster or Laeral or the Simbul are leaving X up to your ragtag band if it's such a danger, it just takes a little imagination.

Democratus
2020-05-28, 02:54 PM
Various settings do explain this though. About the only one where this is really a problem is Forgotten Realms, and even there it can be explained why Elminster or Laeral or the Simbul are leaving X up to your ragtag band if it's such a danger, it just takes a little imagination.

This can be a problem in many games with powerful NPCs.

In one Pendragon game, our band of knights was asked by Merlin to do a task he could easily accomplish with some magic. When we pointed this out to the wizard he threatened to turn us into toads. :smallbiggrin:

Tvtyrant
2020-05-28, 03:20 PM
The thing is, I can design a D&D campaign based around that. I could probably pick up a generic system and work with that, too. But that's not the point of this thread. A lot of systems come with baked-in settings which are rather interconnected with the rules,and I was wondering what other system+setting combos work in this way (putting the players in the "important to the world" spot) by default, besides Exalted.



It's not about that. I replied to Democratus about this, and the point isn't in your mechanical inability to make those characters, but in there not being a lot of those characters, narratively, by default - i.e. you don't start as a farmer's son with a sword and rusty mail grandpa brought from the last major war, or a punk who has a gun and is slightly better at using it than other punks around them.

I already said that D&D can do that - if you make your own setting centered around that and use the mechanics properly to reflect that. But the published settings for D&D still work with the premise of "adventurers are plentiful enough for any random party to just stumble across the plot".



Pretty much that. A system/setting (as I've noted before, a lot of systems come with their own baked-in settings) where the default character creation turns out highly potent and rare (for their world) people who are actually expected to do things like save-the-world class missions. I'd like for the expected/presumed premise to be something more than "well, we stumbled upon this world-changing plot and we have a vaguely appropriate skillset for this, so guess it's up to us, despite us being pretty much nobodies from the next town over and there being quite a few more powerful people who could handle it better, but somehow they aren't taking phone calls at the moment".

You're the cool PCs who get a cool mission. It might develop into something that still feels way outta your league, but you're already some of the best this world has to offer, so there's nobody significantly cooler-than-thou you could point at and ask "hey, why aren't they doing this?"
I think the actual issue is distinct from what you are seeing. In a generic module/campaign it has to be vague enough to fit in whatever the players decide to play. Timothy Cooltron wants to play a Bard who learned to play a banjo from a peddler, while Rex Roy wants to play a demi-god descended from an alien space deity. How do you stick them in the same party? By making the job feel like whoever decided to play stumbled across it, and having their character origins unrelated to the story at hand.

So the problem as I see it is what you want requires everyone to play a super-competent fated hero, while the generic setting can stick both them and Scruffy the Halfling half-mop Rogue janitor together and move on. I've played games where one person was Antonio Bandera's character from Shrek, another was a sentient insect pile that ate bats, and the others were humans who wanted to get involved in the city budget and planning. None of those would fit into the highly specific story you want the game to tell, so the game is designed to leave room for you to make your own setting while the default settings allow a wide net for different player interests.

Psyren
2020-05-28, 03:44 PM
This can be a problem in many games with powerful NPCs.

In one Pendragon game, our band of knights was asked by Merlin to do a task he could easily accomplish with some magic. When we pointed this out to the wizard he threatened to turn us into toads. :smallbiggrin:

Oh sure, but the post from Ignimortis I was responding to specifically mentioned D&D. I'm not saying this disconnect can't pop up elsewhere, just that I know that it is solveable in D&D.

Ignimortis
2020-05-29, 11:05 PM
I think the actual issue is distinct from what you are seeing. In a generic module/campaign it has to be vague enough to fit in whatever the players decide to play. Timothy Cooltron wants to play a Bard who learned to play a banjo from a peddler, while Rex Roy wants to play a demi-god descended from an alien space deity. How do you stick them in the same party? By making the job feel like whoever decided to play stumbled across it, and having their character origins unrelated to the story at hand.

So the problem as I see it is what you want requires everyone to play a super-competent fated hero, while the generic setting can stick both them and Scruffy the Halfling half-mop Rogue janitor together and move on. I've played games where one person was Antonio Bandera's character from Shrek, another was a sentient insect pile that ate bats, and the others were humans who wanted to get involved in the city budget and planning. None of those would fit into the highly specific story you want the game to tell, so the game is designed to leave room for you to make your own setting while the default settings allow a wide net for different player interests.

That's how it works for generic systems (and semi-generics, as I'd probably call D&D), but since there are narrower games with a single focus, I was wondering if there are any that fit the description upthread.


First, there are agents in most D&D settings with a vested interest in the "plot" being discoverable - ranging from dedicated guilds/organizations to the gods themselves, depending on the stakes of said plot. There are whole groups whose job it is to ensure that adventurers are aimed at problems suited to their skills, so it shouldn't be a surprise when that regularly happens.

Second, adventurers might seem plentiful from a PC standpoint (i.e. it's plausible that I, as a player, can always roll up another one) - but in terms of the setting they can still be quite rare. Even remote regions in most settings can have populations in the hundreds of thousands. Even if merely 500 of those individuals have the potential to be adventurers - more PCs than a table (never mind an individual 3.5 or PF player) will probably go through in their entire lives - that's still less than 1% of the population of just that region, not even the setting as a whole. Take a look at the population figures for regions in Faerun or Golarion or Eberron if you don't believe me.

Various settings do explain this though. About the only one where this is really a problem is Forgotten Realms, and even there it can be explained why Elminster or Laeral or the Simbul are leaving X up to your ragtag band if it's such a danger, it just takes a little imagination.

It's not necessarily about D&D (D&D was mentioned in reply to one post, and the quoted bit is a reply to another, so they don't have to be about the same thing), so the Pendragon example from Democratus stands. Still, I've been in my share of D&D games that just seemed so weird - a level 13 wizard giving you, a level 2 party, a quest to clear out something? He could've been there and back in 5 minutes, leaving only charred bodies behind, with no expense to himself. Probably would've handled the subsequent plot better, too.


That's most pulp style games, to be honest.

For example, most FATE-based stuff is very much in this vein - Spirit of the Century has you start as a member of a globe-spanning gentleman adventurer club that basically only includes the absolute best and brightest (basically, Indiana Jones is the bar for so much as entry, here). In Atomic Robo you start as a new recruit Action Scientist for Tesladyne, Robo's cadre of elite superscience problem solvers which expects you to be able to think a solution to a vampire invasion as part of your job interview to qualify for a position and supersede or disprove at least two established fundamental laws of science in your first four years in the company. And so on.

So yeah, look into games that talk about "pulp", you'll find some of this quite easily.

Interesting. I've always thought of "pulp" as something that's quite grounded and puts mundane people in situations that are also pretty grounded. Maybe I'm conflating "hardboiled" with "pulp", though. I'll have to check that out.

Lord Raziere
2020-05-29, 11:22 PM
Interesting. I've always thought of "pulp" as something that's quite grounded and puts mundane people in situations that are also pretty grounded. Maybe I'm conflating "hardboiled" with "pulp", though. I'll have to check that out.

You are conflating them. Pulp is 1920's-1930's Proto-Superhero stuff like The Man of Bronze himself: Doc Savage and The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

hardboiled detective stuff? thats more 40's-60's, the closest you get to that before then is basically mystery novels full of people that are thinly veiled Sherlock Holmes copies or Hercule Poirot.

prabe
2020-05-30, 12:07 AM
hardboiled detective stuff? thats more 40's-60's, the closest you get to that before then is basically mystery novels full of people that are thinly veiled Sherlock Holmes copies or Hercule Poirot.

Erm, you're not broadly wrong about the difference between pulp and hard-boiled, but The Maltese Falcon (the book, by Dashiell Hammett) was published in 1929, and it's pretty hard-boiled stuff (though the boundaries between hard-boiled and noir are porous) and not a thinly-veiled pastiche of either Doyle or Christie. Raymond Chandler was later, and that might be more what you're thinking of.

Lord Raziere
2020-05-30, 12:39 AM
Erm, you're not broadly wrong about the difference between pulp and hard-boiled, but The Maltese Falcon (the book, by Dashiell Hammett) was published in 1929, and it's pretty hard-boiled stuff (though the boundaries between hard-boiled and noir are porous) and not a thinly-veiled pastiche of either Doyle or Christie. Raymond Chandler was later, and that might be more what you're thinking of.

Well I was just leaving out the fact that hardboiled/noir was also in the 30's and the Maltese Falcon codified them because I didn't think it was worth bringing it up. regardless both great detectives in their mystery novels and hardboiled detectives in their darker and edgier versions of them are separate genres from pulp. pulp has languages from a lost race long vanished, servants of feathered serpents chortling and yelling about delivering death, girders lifting a giant steel skeleton, a son with gold eyes and bronze skin raised to be the supreme adventurer by a rich man whose fortune waned as his influence spread to the point of this:


Hardly had Doc learned to walk, when his father started him taking the routine
of exercises to which he still adhered. Two hours each day, Doc
exercised intensively all his muscles, senses, and his brain.

As a result of these exercises, Doc possessed a strength superhuman.
There was no magic about it, though. Doc had simply built up muscle
intensively all his life.

Doc’s mental training had started with medicine and surgery. It had
branched out to include all arts and sciences. Just as Doc could easily
overpower the gorilla-like Monk in spite of his great strength, so did
Doc know more about chemistry. And that applied to Renny, the engineer;
Long Tom, the electrical wizard; Johnny, the geologist and the
archaeologist; and Ham, the lawyer.

Doc had been well trained for his work.

I am not making this up. this is an actual passage from The Man of Bronze, published in 1933. See for yourself, its public domain (https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140713)

Pulp is not grounded. apparently we've all been missing Clark Savage Sr.'s program to become the pinnacle of human achievement in only two hours a day. :smalltongue:

Tanarii
2020-05-30, 03:27 AM
You are conflating them. Pulp is 1920's-1930's Proto-Superhero stuff like The Man of Bronze himself: Doc Savage and The Shadow, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

hardboiled detective stuff? thats more 40's-60's, the closest you get to that before then is basically mystery novels full of people that are thinly veiled Sherlock Holmes copies or Hercule Poirot.
A lot of people get them mixed up because of pulp noir.

Lord Raziere
2020-05-30, 05:10 AM
A lot of people get them mixed up because of pulp noir.

Yeah. I can see that, the problem is, the two genres are so old that a lot of what they do is obscured by the fact that they originated so much of what we consider normal today. superheroes wouldn't exist without pulp, Conan was also a pulp character and he is a big influence on the fantasy genre, Tarzan and Zorro are from this era to, probably a lot of the B-movie science fiction is influenced by pulp, like anything that goes for thrills, sensationalizing and exaggeration over sense in american media is probably influenced by pulp style in some way shape or form, and a LOT of media does that, it would not surprise me if Hollywood's blockbuster movies are just what pulp is in movie form.

though really pulp is just a successor to penny dreadfuls and dime novels of the 19th century which were also going for thrills, sensationalizing and exaggeration.

while noir has been parodied to death but also has consistently been able to find its place in newer more modern settings with cyberpunk and the complex social issues we face today, with it being a good genre to examine the issues of our world through because it gives you a setting thats down to earth, a believable protagonist and a way to help solve those issues without being super or an action hero- without being special at all. its just that exaggeration and parody goes hand in hand, and time has a way of making the past a foreign country and people have a tendency to make exaggerated romanticism out of foreign countries. like if noir/hardboiled isn't the inspiration your drawing upon for a mystery, its normal mystery novels that you probably are, its either one or the other and one or the others influence can be felt whenever a plot involves a crime that needs solving.

there has never been sense to the genre of fantasy, we have always been building on top of a foundation of thrilling quick larger than life nonsense with action scenes and chase scenes with questions like "wait but how does any of this work-" being answered never. and thus there has never truly been sense to why or how one character is special compared to anyone else.
take my Doc Savage example: he is supposed to be the pinnacle of human achievement, able to be both super-strong and know all things in every science and even know laws better than his own lawyer!....on two hours a day training. when the obvious nerd question everyone would be asking, if Doc Savage was a hero widely consumed as say, Superman or Batman today would be "wait why doesn't he just share those methods with everyone else and like help people do everything better instead of going around punching dudes?" Doc Savage could in theory make everyone else on Earth just as a great as him, but he doesn't. for some reason. the reason is that Doc Savage is not a science fiction novel where we explore the implications of someone discovering the perfect training method to make someone a master of all things humans can do and thus spread that to everyone to see how that would change society.

his specialness is just an excuse, brought about by lots of money, being taught by someone who was also an adventurer before him and somehow being born with skin of bronze and eyes of gold and acquiring five people to be his sidekicks somewhere along the way. just like being a chosen one is an excuse because being chosen by fate to be the one to save the world is completely arbitrary. personally, I don't really need such excuses. the best hero in my opinion is someone who chooses themselves without some other force or person decreeing they should be a hero or that they are special enough to do something, whether they have superpowers or not is incidental. and they make themselves special by going to actively doing something about it, fighting whatever gets in their way until they come out on top, and the world is just lucky that they succeed, and luckier that the person decided to try at all. but then I'm a fan of the anime shonen hero nonsense so I might be biased towards stubbornly punching the world in the face to get my specialness up from being some strange weirdo outcast with a strange power (but not necessarily zero to hero, strange weirdo outcasts can be pretty powerful and I like them that way)

prabe
2020-05-30, 10:08 AM
Well I was just leaving out the fact that hardboiled/noir was also in the 30's and the Maltese Falcon codified them because I didn't think it was worth bringing it up. regardless both great detectives in their mystery novels and hardboiled detectives in their darker and edgier versions of them are separate genres from pulp. pulp has languages from a lost race long vanished, servants of feathered serpents chortling and yelling about delivering death, girders lifting a giant steel skeleton, a son with gold eyes and bronze skin raised to be the supreme adventurer by a rich man whose fortune waned as his influence spread to the point of this:

Pulp is not grounded. apparently we've all been missing Clark Savage Sr.'s program to become the pinnacle of human achievement in only two hours a day. :smalltongue:

That's reasonable; pulp is definitely not grounded in what we now would recognize as reality. I've encountered some Haggard, but I'm far more versed in mysteries than pulp fantasies, so your time-frame for hard-boiled seemed a little off. It's not as though I was arguing with my Baker Street Irregular wife about Holmes being a pale imitation of Dupin or anything. :wink:

Max_Killjoy
2020-05-30, 11:46 AM
That's reasonable; pulp is definitely not grounded in what we now would recognize as reality. I've encountered some Haggard, but I'm far more versed in mysteries than pulp fantasies, so your time-frame for hard-boiled seemed a little off. It's not as though I was arguing with my Baker Street Irregular wife about Holmes being a pale imitation of Dupin or anything. :wink:

And I'm not sure "pulp" can really be taken as a narrow coherent genre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine#Genres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_noir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir
https://www.pulpmags.org/contexts/essays/what-is-pulp-anyway.html

prabe
2020-05-30, 11:48 AM
And I'm not sure "pulp" can really be taken as a narrow coherent genre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine#Genres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_noir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir
https://www.pulpmags.org/contexts/essays/what-is-pulp-anyway.html

I dunno. I refuse to call it "pulp" if it's not printed on cheap paper. :wink:

Yora
2020-05-31, 04:26 AM
A game that comes to mind where all PCs are special and no NPCs are like them is Apocalypse World. In many campaigns, there is even only one PC of any class.

Anonymouswizard
2020-05-31, 06:02 AM
And I'm not sure "pulp" can really be taken as a narrow coherent genre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine#Genres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_noir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir
https://www.pulpmags.org/contexts/essays/what-is-pulp-anyway.html

I tend to think of pulp as a style more then a genre. You can have a pulp fantasy, but also in theory a pulp romance or a pulp tragedy. To me it's more about fast following prose and a focus on action.


Anyway, a side note, I've only skinned the thread, but it feels to me that there's a focus on the protagonists as the character's with The Power To Save The World, not the ones who drive the story. Strictly speaking it doesn't matter if the protagonist is the most powerful bee fluffer ever or a rookie who's first bee fluffing was last Thursday on a rainy afternoon, what matters is that our bee fluffer has the motivation, drive, and skills to affect the way the plot is moving to a disproportionate degree. To me games which are successful at this are those which make pursuing PC goals central rather than stopping villain goals. The specialness of the PCs doesn't matter protagonist wise because they're the ones directing the plot.

Of course, this doesn't mean you can't have PCs with vastb levels of power. But whereas a low level PC might have 'meet a giant' or 'avenge my best friend Robert Bobson' as a goal a high level PC might have 'create the demiplane of blackjack and hookers' or 'rain hellfire upon every bank in the world' as their goals.

Quertus
2020-05-31, 03:43 PM
Anyway, a side note, I've only skinned the thread, but it feels to me that there's a focus on the protagonists as the character's with The Power To Save The World, not the ones who drive the story. Strictly speaking it doesn't matter if the protagonist is the most powerful bee fluffer ever or a rookie who's first bee fluffing was last Thursday on a rainy afternoon, what matters is that our bee fluffer has the motivation, drive, and skills to affect the way the plot is moving to a disproportionate degree. To me games which are successful at this are those which make pursuing PC goals central rather than stopping villain goals. The specialness of the PCs doesn't matter protagonist wise because they're the ones directing the plot.

Of course, this doesn't mean you can't have PCs with vastb levels of power. But whereas a low level PC might have 'meet a giant' or 'avenge my best friend Robert Bobson' as a goal a high level PC might have 'create the demiplane of blackjack and hookers' or 'rain hellfire upon every bank in the world' as their goals.

So… suppose you've got a party of 12 dwarves, 1 fat Hobbit, and one Angel/Wizard. If they all want to go slay a Dragon, that's easy. Maybe one decides to woo an elven NPC they meet, while another roleplays being a dedicated homebody, with the "slay the dragon" quest as a backdrop for their roleplay? Sure, no problem - there might be some disproportionate screen time, but, as a GM, this doesn't sound too daunting. The Wizard's player wants to split the party, and foolishly try to solo the "Necromancer" quest that the other players rejected, while the hobbit wants to constantly be in stealth mode, "scouting ahead/behind/sideways"? That could involve some juggling, but… maybe?

Now if, rather than reacting to the content that's already there, and using it to further any goals or desires that they may have, instead, they bring goals and plot elements to the table that they insist be incorporated into the campaign? How do you build a coherent game with 14 - or, if they're like my characters, more like 42 - active goals being pursued, like slaying the Dragon, finding and watching over a sleeping princess in the woods, forging a returning hammer for your adopted son, advising the Mother of Dragons on how to slay your own people, forging a returning axe for a drunkard to use to avenge the genocide of your people, sing to and give bribes to the new witch overlord in hopes of currying her favor (or at least forestalling her house-dropping wrath), and 36 other player-originated, campaign-warping plots? How do you make that enjoyable for the players, who haven't bought into - and can't necessity even meaningfully interact with - the other 39 plots?

Sure, you could agree to handle them sequentially, but when half the party dies to the epic confrontation at the end of the first plot, the players are likely to call shenanigans, and you'll be back to GMing a half a dozen or so simultaneous, separate "rightful heir" plotlines, with the elf prince, the dwarf princess, and the two human prince(ss? It's so hard to tell) joining the Angle/Wizard "prince" from the last game, alongside 4(!) useless hobbits all begging for pity artifacts.

I'd say that they're all pretty special and irreplaceable, but, even though you banned Prince Charming, the player of Prince "merely boring" could switch to playing his younger brother, Prince "merely fair" in the event of an untimely death.

Psyren
2020-05-31, 05:46 PM
It's not necessarily about D&D (D&D was mentioned in reply to one post, and the quoted bit is a reply to another, so they don't have to be about the same thing), so the Pendragon example from Democratus stands. Still, I've been in my share of D&D games that just seemed so weird - a level 13 wizard giving you, a level 2 party, a quest to clear out something? He could've been there and back in 5 minutes, leaving only charred bodies behind, with no expense to himself. Probably would've handled the subsequent plot better, too.

1) Occamm's Razor, it's simple delegation - he had better things to do.

2) Even with teleport, you still need to know where you're going, it can be limited/interfered with even without magic, etc.

3) Even if he could handle this problem quickly, he may see a threat down the line that he needs a party higher than 2nd level to help him deal with - so hoarding all the quests for himself so they gain no XP is actively hurting his chances in the future.

Zarrgon
2020-05-31, 09:11 PM
Various settings do explain this though. About the only one where this is really a problem is Forgotten Realms, and even there it can be explained why Elminster or Laeral or the Simbul are leaving X up to your ragtag band if it's such a danger, it just takes a little imagination.

The imagination here is the split between the Player Unrealistic Optimized Character Exploit Game Setting and a (Near)Real Fictional Alternate Virtual Reality World Setting.

The game setting only cares about the rules and exploits. This is where a player will say "my charcter can make one scroll and hour so they sit down for 16 hours and make 16 scrolls then sleep 8 hours and do that same thing the next day." Technically this is "ok" as it follows the game rules, but it is playing the dull, boring mechanical game with zero role playing.

And this is the setting were people will say " every 'cool' powerful character automatically save the day and the whole world is perfect with nothing for any PC to do ever". As soon as there is even one giant rat in a cellar, 100 demi god characters all alter reality to fix it(and kill the giant rat).

The world setting is as "close" to a real world simulation as is possible for a fictional world. So all characters in this world act just like "real" people. In short they utterly ignore the mechanical rules and role play. This is where a player will say "lets sit and talk with the baron" and then they role play out the long,long, long "real" conversation between their character and the baron.

And in this setting people will say the characters are "real fictional" people and have lives. So they have things to do, all the time, Other then only go on "cool Adventures". A "real fictional" character might read a book, or maybe play with their kids, maybe do some farm work or even just take a nap. So this world always has openings for adventures to do things.

Oddly, for whatever reason, many people though seem to only like the "oh no there is a problem and ONLY the PC's in the whole world can solve the problem. " It does make the PC's very "special" if they are the only characters that can do anything in the world.

Ignimortis
2020-06-01, 10:13 PM
1) Occamm's Razor, it's simple delegation - he had better things to do.

2) Even with teleport, you still need to know where you're going, it can be limited/interfered with even without magic, etc.

3) Even if he could handle this problem quickly, he may see a threat down the line that he needs a party higher than 2nd level to help him deal with - so hoarding all the quests for himself so they gain no XP is actively hurting his chances in the future.

Those are abstract reasons for why it might work that way, but honestly, most of the time there's only the first one to rely on.

~~~~~~~~~
In any event, it seems that most of the time my best choice for a system+setting defined in the OP would be taking a generic flexible system for superheroes (probably lower-powered ones) and adapting it to some extent, then writing the setting myself.

Bigmouth
2020-06-03, 08:25 AM
This thread hurts my head in so many ways. The examples being given probably had a lot to do with this.

So here are some games that seem to fit. Granted most of them are probably older than most people on these forums

Ars Magica: The wizards are incredibly limited in number, definitely world altering, they are not replaceable. So much so that you only use one of them on any given adventure.
James Bond 007 There definitely aren't a lot of 00s. You can totally wade through armies when needed. You ARE the people that are called on to save the world. Bonus: It is a really fun game.
Apocalypse World You aren't A gunlugger. You are THE Gunlugger. THE Driver. THE Brainer. It's not a class, it is you and only you. Characters are powerful. Nobody asks them to save the world, they decide if they want to save the world.
Pulp games like Daredevils or the much more modern and playable Spirit of the Century. Pulp heroes are typically much more rare than other versions of superheroes. So instead of being heroes in New York City, you are globetrotting. You can easily run pulp in some more generic systems, but built in setting seems important to your algorithm.
Atomic Robo a slightly different spin on the pulp thing. Probably the best FATE setting book and best version of FATE.
Castle Falkenstein Characters are heroic leveled and unique. Not very crunchy..but don't know if that's required.

ngilop
2020-06-05, 10:11 AM
This thread hurts my head in so many ways. The examples being given probably had a lot to do with this.

So here are some games that seem to fit. Granted most of them are probably older than most people on these forums

Ars Magica: The wizards are incredibly limited in number, definitely world altering, they are not replaceable. So much so that you only use one of them on any given adventure.
James Bond 007 There definitely aren't a lot of 00s. You can totally wade through armies when needed. You ARE the people that are called on to save the world. Bonus: It is a really fun game.
Apocalypse World You aren't A gunlugger. You are THE Gunlugger. THE Driver. THE Brainer. It's not a class, it is you and only you. Characters are powerful. Nobody asks them to save the world, they decide if they want to save the world.
Pulp games like Daredevils or the much more modern and playable Spirit of the Century. Pulp heroes are typically much more rare than other versions of superheroes. So instead of being heroes in New York City, you are globetrotting. You can easily run pulp in some more generic systems, but built in setting seems important to your algorithm.
Atomic Robo a slightly different spin on the pulp thing. Probably the best FATE setting book and best version of FATE.
Castle Falkenstein Characters are heroic leveled and unique. Not very crunchy..but don't know if that's required.

You are not the only one brother.

I took me reading this over about 60 times to finally understand what the OP actually wants.

Unfortunately, I fully believe that what the OP wants is impossible. Because as soon as he makes a system with a way to have character creation, those same characters are no longer unique and another set of players can make characters that can accomplish the same goals, let alone the fact that a player can make completely identical characters with different names. Thereby rendering those original characters no longer unique.

But, if the OP can somehow create a system where everything is completely unable to be replicated then hats off to him and congratulations. Because he did what I thought was un-doable.

Ignimortis
2020-06-05, 11:09 PM
You are not the only one brother.

I took me reading this over about 60 times to finally understand what the OP actually wants.

Unfortunately, I fully believe that what the OP wants is impossible. Because as soon as he makes a system with a way to have character creation, those same characters are no longer unique and another set of players can make characters that can accomplish the same goals, let alone the fact that a player can make completely identical characters with different names. Thereby rendering those original characters no longer unique.

But, if the OP can somehow create a system where everything is completely unable to be replicated then hats off to him and congratulations. Because he did what I thought was un-doable.

You are mistaking the mechanical ability of a system to create a character with plausibility of there being such a character. It's not a binary switch of "can be replaced/cannot be replaced", but more of a sliding scale. If there are a hundred thousand PC-worthy characters in the setting, and it's plausible that you meet someone very similar to your PC around the corner/next town over, then it's not what I was looking for. If there are just a hundred spread around the world, then you have a narrative space to make another one, but much less reason to ask "why are we handling this, again?" - because it's pretty obvious that there is actually nobody else capable enough to do it. I already said that D&D could do it with the right setting designed for it, for instance, but the default settings (Greyhawk/Faerun) don't really do that.

However, Bigmouth posted things that seem to fit - special agents (by romanticized definition) cannot be mass-produced even in hundreds, much less thousands, so it's implausible you'll see more than one or two other than your party, and it's also plausible they aren't and even wouldn't be working on the same mission you are. Pulp heroes should also fit that. The whole point is that the game setting isn't full of people who could potentially be PCs - PCs are rare and important. That doesn't mean that you cannot make another one, but more that the GM cannot make a hundred more and preserve plausibility/verisimilitude at the same time, unless it's explicitly a plot hook like "the bad guys have set up a cloning facility that produces copies of their best agents/well-known heroes, but they're unstable and dangerous, and it needs to be shut down".

Onos
2020-06-06, 02:44 AM
This is mad. OP, if you want that specific fantasy of "these are the only heroes", make that clear to your players in session 0. If they die/otherwise fail the quest then that's it, game over, good effort lads but the world burns. Of course, when you restart that campaign because it's the one you're most invested in and is by far your best work and the players really loved it till they made one mistake, you'll completely invalidate the whole premise anyway. Unless you just recycle the stuff they didn't see, in which case you've only mostly invalidated it. And then all your campaigns will begin to look eerily similar, the PCs will get bored and they'll find/make their own quest.

I find much the same issue with the published d&d settings in that the default assumption is loads of characters could feasibly replace the PCs (often for good reason as has been covered already). I either tweak it (you guys are the first to hit level 10 in over a millennium, Merlin had a heart attack/soul exploded in an arcane experiment) or just run a fully homebrew campaign. The common set up for RPGs is common for a variety of reasons, and the further you move away from that the more work you'll have to put in.

RPGs aren't games themselves. They are systems for the GM to design a game with. Saying that "all games have replaceable PCs" means that you have run all your games like that. If you really must have some sort of mechanical enforcement of uniqueness I'd suggest something like making your PCs have "special souls" or some noise: they don't obey ordinary death mechanics, and will reappear as a new individual (fully grown, maybe a level lower) somewhat near their brethren. Then you could even have your PCs be the only ones who have ever saved your plane, throughout history. But again, that's work outside of simply buying and running a system.

Tanarii
2020-06-06, 07:46 AM
This is mad. OP, if you want that specific fantasy of "these are the only heroes", make that clear to your players in session 0. If they die/otherwise fail the quest then that's it, game over, good effort lads but the world burns. Of course, when you restart that campaign because it's the one you're most invested in and is by far your best work and the players really loved it till they made one mistake, you'll completely invalidate the whole premise anyway. Unless you just recycle the stuff they didn't see, in which case you've only mostly invalidated it. And then all your campaigns will begin to look eerily similar, the PCs will get bored and they'll find/make their own quest.
Lots of home games that's true once you pass a certain amount of character advancement, the campaign is over if the heroes die. Lots of people are not comfortable bringing in new characters that haven't advanced organically. And many games don't handle gracefully bringing in a brand new character and picking up where the old advanced character got axed, because power curves can be very steep.

Of course, this bring up that the OP is assuming a single group of players with a single group of PCs. That's definitely the most common way to play TRPGs, but the biggest kid on the block was designed, and still is designed, for open table pickup play. So there really are that many adventurers in 'the world'. :smallamused:

ngilop
2020-06-08, 10:13 AM
bunch of cool stuff:
I never even thought about that aspect of it. Consider me mind blown.

I guess the OP can just never allow a new player to join his games and that would solve any issue with that player creating a new character that invalidates the whole 'the characters are unique and only they can do X wherein X is whatever the specific goal of the game is.

Segev
2020-06-09, 01:12 AM
In Exalted (which I believe has been brought up, but I’ve been slow going through this thread) if you’re playing the default Solar Exalted, there are 149 others “like you,” maximum, and up to 299 with your level of Potential. 700, if you count all Celestial Exalted.


Though the discussion of the “specialness” of adventurers as a class reminded me of a notion I’d contemplated for worldbuilding in a D&D setting, but would work for any that has “easy” resurrection:

What if adventurers were a special category of beings, which crop up in the various sentient races from time to time seemingly at random? What sets them apart from “non-adventurers” is a divine blessing that literally makes divine blessings (specifically, healing and raising magics) work on them.

This answers why your farm lad is invited on the hideously dangerous quest: he can be healed magically, and even brought back to life! His twin brother who stays on the farm can’t.

It also answers why the assassination plot threatens the king and the kingdom’s stability, rather than the king just having the royal priest on hand with 10,000 gp worth of diamond should the king ever die or go missing and divination reveal his demise.

Vahnavoi
2020-06-09, 02:35 AM
@Segev: that's reinventing the wheel. The D&D rules have always assumed that the PCs are special in that way, there are just multiple explaining factors for it instead of one.

Democratus
2020-06-09, 08:54 AM
Though the discussion of the “specialness” of adventurers as a class reminded me of a notion I’d contemplated for worldbuilding in a D&D setting, but would work for any that has “easy” resurrection:

What if adventurers were a special category of beings, which crop up in the various sentient races from time to time seemingly at random? What sets them apart from “non-adventurers” is a divine blessing that literally makes divine blessings (specifically, healing and raising magics) work on them.

This answers why your farm lad is invited on the hideously dangerous quest: he can be healed magically, and even brought back to life! His twin brother who stays on the farm can’t.

It also answers why the assassination plot threatens the king and the kingdom’s stability, rather than the king just having the royal priest on hand with 10,000 gp worth of diamond should the king ever die or go missing and divination reveal his demise.

This is super cool. I really like interesting in-world explanations that help reinforce existing tropes.

I may steal for my next campaign! :smallcool:

Alcore
2020-06-09, 01:37 PM
Yeah I can't understand it either. I tried, and kept hitting a brick wall.

I mean, I can understand "not everyone wants to start at level 1" and "not everyone wants to do the hero's journey (or whatever that crap is called)" but the OP seems to reject the idea of starting at higher levels are not being sufficient. Because apparently it's not about power, it's just about being so special and unique you're the only one powerful enough for the job. :smallconfused: But apparently that's wrong too. :smalleek:

I think what he wants is a system and setting that contains a PC so unique and irreplaceable that their absence means the bud guy must win. There is no other outcome.

It's kinda like Lord of the Rings (which is invalid if you bothered with the book version) and Frodo. Frodo was the only one able to handle the ring without going insane. Without Frodo Suron will win. Without Frodo one character with become Darth 'X' when they yield the ring. Without Frodo the setting doesn't work.

I think that is what he wants.


He wants a setting and system that will support a singular Mary Sue and both will fall apart if the Mary Sue is not present. I have nothing to offer once i realized this.

Theoboldi
2020-06-09, 04:58 PM
Or maybe he just wants a system more focused on telling stories suited to and formed by only the particular characters the players are playing.

Like Fate, for instance. Or anything PbtA. Or even a D&D campaign that is player-driven. Or yes, any given setting where the PCs are members of a unique group of people.

I mean, I just see no reason to needlessly insult OP when talking about what games like these are out there, how campaigns in that style can be encouraged, and the pros and cons of these systems and campaigns, are all interesting conversations that can be of value to those reading this thread.

Alcore
2020-06-09, 05:23 PM
I like to think that the specific post you are replying to does not offer insult. Needless or otherwise. A Mary Sue can make a great story when used well and i just don't think i can offer any help anymore... i fear what he wants is just not there.

Ignimortis
2020-06-10, 02:17 AM
I already said that Exalted actually fits my criteria, so there is definitely something like that there. There aren't gonna be thousands of Solars, and thus every Solar is, to an extent, irreplaceable. Sure, there might come another like them a few years or dozens of years later, but right now, in the playable timescape, there are maybe ten people with your skillset and power in the world (since there are five castes, and IIRC, there are only 50 Solars in Creation). Oh, twenty if you count Abyssal analogues.

I was wondering if there are games out there with something like this setup in mind, and some people certainly delivered quite a few answers. So I'm not sure why people keep hyperbolizing my point to "the PC is completely unique on a system level and you cannot make another like them ever". Have I said that myself at some point? If so, I apologize for not putting things clearer. It was always about settings and systems that work within those settings, because for many games, the two are so closely intertwined that you can't really separate them (D&D being one of the soft exceptions - not being completely generic, but also supporting a wide enough range of things that you could make your own setting anyway).

Lord Raziere
2020-06-10, 03:20 AM
Has anyone mentioned Nobilis? you get chosen to be a reality-warping demigod-like being called a Nobilis and do crazy stuff with your Estate. its the kind of game where you can warp anything within your sometimes very abstract domain and determine the fates of entire realities and worlds.

Many Fate settings assume the pcs are special and the only ones who are powerful enough to do anything about the situation. like Gods and Monsters, can't get much more special than being one of the gods who create the world.

other than that, the stuff I use to make special characters get pretty generic, such as superheroes or generic anime systems or fate in general or strands of fate, because making a setting for this kind thing would get real specific, because you basically need to build the entire setting around the hypothetical PCs. if they are so special like that, then the world needs to be built around people like them, which is what Exalted does.

like remember how specialness is all about context? yeah, anything can be special as long as you figure out the environment of having a lot of absence of that thing. if the setting is a desert, water becomes more special and people who can conjure water are the most special people within that setting. which is why you often need a generic system for specialness, because you know how the average PC party is a ragtag bunch of misfits with no real connecting traits other than being good at violence? yeah that won't work with that desert setting where water conjurers are the special people, because not everyone wants to play the water conjurers and the setting and system is only built around those people. however if you have a generic system you get five people who want to be special anomalies of some kind then define how their characters are special, the GM can then make a world around those five special characters where it makes sense for all five to be special. Exalted was just smart enough to figure out a flexible enough kind of special to make its premise work.

like these special PC settings are rare, because its easier to make a setting where the people in power are someone else and they are bad or evil and your a bunch of random people with some powers but are unknown and such, because you just started out, because then the status quo is something that doesn't need to be built around the PCs and they are free to instead disrupt that status quo through their own efforts while the GM can reuse that setting for PCs over and over again no matter who is playing. but if you have like five special PCs and one of the players has a real life thing come up and you need a replacement....well its kind of hard to explain why that this new PC replacement is here and so special if you never heard of or mentioned them before (because even if they're not unique, they're still probably a celebrity/famous/legend/king/whatever and thus would theoretically be known by other people who are also special, because you need to keep tabs on other special people thus make sure have the knowledge to make you yourself remain special, as any social status is one you inevitably have to maintain in some manner). so again, generic system is better for that, because the setting isn't set in stone and can be modified more freely than a published one to be built around that new special character.

like there might be other settings out there than can count, but most of the time people just go to a generic system that can flexibly accommodate many kinds of specialness if they are breaking away from the DnD mold in the specialness direction. Onyx Path/White Wolf stuff is more breaking the DnD mold in the auteur artist direction.

Segev
2020-06-10, 10:00 AM
I already said that Exalted actually fits my criteria, so there is definitely something like that there. There aren't gonna be thousands of Solars, and thus every Solar is, to an extent, irreplaceable. Sure, there might come another like them a few years or dozens of years later, but right now, in the playable timescape, there are maybe ten people with your skillset and power in the world (since there are five castes, and IIRC, there are only 50 Solars in Creation). Oh, twenty if you count Abyssal analogues.

I was wondering if there are games out there with something like this setup in mind, and some people certainly delivered quite a few answers. So I'm not sure why people keep hyperbolizing my point to "the PC is completely unique on a system level and you cannot make another like them ever". Have I said that myself at some point? If so, I apologize for not putting things clearer. It was always about settings and systems that work within those settings, because for many games, the two are so closely intertwined that you can't really separate them (D&D being one of the soft exceptions - not being completely generic, but also supporting a wide enough range of things that you could make your own setting anyway).

There were originally 300 Solars in the First Age. 300 Lunars, and 100 Sidereals.

In the Age of Sorrows (when games are generally expected to be set), there are 150 Solars, 100 Abyssals, and 50 Infernals.

Hence, a maximum of 700 people anywhere near as cool as you have potential to be, if you're one of the Celestial Exalted.

ExLibrisMortis
2020-06-10, 06:40 PM
I think that the "exceptional" and "irreplacable" discussed so far more or less come down to "you can only build characters that are in this limited pool of exceptionals" (possibly divided into sub-pools--the pool being defined mechanically and in-universe). In D&D, you can create exceptional and irreplacable characters, but they use the same mechanics as non-exceptional characters (at least for most editions), and you can also be average with those same mechanics. By contrast, in Exalted, you can only make characters that are Exalts, and that's a narrow group of people by definition.

I guess a lot of designers decided that it's better to have character mechanics that are somewhat more broadly applicable, both in the sense that they apply to more than just PCs in-universe (so there are potentially NPCs doing the same things PCs do, mechanically), and that they apply in more possible universes (so the use of a setting featuring such a "pools of exceptionals" is not strictly required or assumed in the lore).


You could pretty simply adapt D&D 3.5 into such a system (and lots of other systems, too). Just say that the world is homebrew E6, nobody (no exceptions, not monsters, not deities, not a friggin' draeden) can have more than 6 HD, and play characters from the one specifically introduced (homebrewed) group of people that can have/start with 10 HD. But no, the system doesn't force you to do this; it's more generic than that, and if you want to narrow it down, it takes manual adjustment.

Segev
2020-06-14, 01:13 AM
By contrast, in Exalted, you can only make characters that are Exalts, and that's a narrow group of people by definition.

To be fair, you can also make Fair Folk, Dragon Kings, Mountain Folk, God/Fae/Demon/Ghost-blooded, Ghosts, heroic mortals, and possibly even gods or elementals or demons. But they will be weaker than most Exalts, especially if you go for half-mortals, mortals, or ghosts. So yeah, you're expected to play something on the higher end of the power scale, something "more special" than not. (Being mortal or a ghost sucks in Exalted.)