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Horatio@Bridge
2020-07-13, 11:59 AM
I am working on developing a new role playing game, and I got to the part about making up monsters. One of the types of monsters I'm making are kaiju, which in this setting are mindless creatures of rage and destruction manifested from humanity's collective unconscious. As I was writing them up, I got to thinking about J.R.R. Tolkien's work of criticism on Beowulf, called "The Monsters and the Critics."

In this essay, Tolkien talked about the literary place of the monsters. To cut a long story short, he argued that the monsters represent death, and the story is about how a person faces the inevitability of death and the destruction of all their works. Very Ozymandias, if you're familiar with the poem.

At the same time, there's been a really big rethink of monsters in fantasy series, including in Tolkien's own work as well as in Beowulf. Wizards, of course, just announced the end of evil races. I think there's a lot of merit to that, and a lot to learn about how we ostracize people by painting them as "monstrous," or use racialized features (as Tolkien as been accused of doing) to indicate evil in the monster. And you can tell great stories about people who have been cast out as monsters - the rethinking of Sycorax and Caliban in last year's run of the Lucifer comic was absolutely brilliant.

I do wonder, though, if the idea of monsters as death, as something we have to continually struggle against, even if it's doomed, is still something which resonates today. Life in the Dark Ages, especially in Germany and England, was incredibly precarious. Death in modern society is much less immediate and threatening, though the coronavirus might be changing that. So maybe the idea of "doom" conveyed by the monsters of Beowulf and Norse mythology just isn't relevant anymore. What do you think? Is the idea of a monster as death personified still worth including in our stories, even if just to role play out how we can face down our own mortality? Can it be separated from its racist past? If so, how do you tell that story?

For myself, I've been trying to find the balance of these evolving views as I'm designing my own monsters. Making death clearly inhuman is one way I try to avoid the problems of racism. I also clearly link the monsters to humanity's collective unconscious and to the terrible wages of violence that hurts even the victor. If you want more details, you can see the rest of my solution at my developer blog (see my signature).

While facing down a ravenous dragon creature remains a pretty cool gaming experience, and I hope that I put it in a way that works, I'm still unsure if should have monsters that can't be reasoned with or befriended. Is that inherently problematic, and promoting violence and hierarchy?

Kaptin Keen
2020-07-13, 12:12 PM
The idea of monsters as death manifest: No. I'm simply not inward thinking enough - at least not in RPG's - for that to resonate with me at all.

Abolishing evil races: That's just dumb. But so is the idea that, say, orcs are evil because they're orcs. But mind flayers really are evil, because they are mind flayers. There's just no way around that. You cannot have brains of sentients as your primary food source, and mind control slavery as the foundation of your society - and also be all-round ok, nice guys.

RPG's have a tendency to tag different as evil. Which is a monumental blunder. But there is also real, actual evil - monsters that just don't work as good (dragons, to me, are just unimaginably pointless as good), and monsters so inherently abhorent as to render the idea that they're not evil moot; mind flayers, vampires, demons and devils, and so on.

But hey - do away with the idea of 'alignment', and you're already golden. Everyone is defined by their actions: Bam! Problem solved.

Edit: Oh, I meant to include - there's no reason you couldn't reason with, or befriend, an evil creature. Evil men have shaped human history since the dawn of time, and none of them have been isolated, lonely, friendless. Not that isolated, friendless evil men haven't existed, but they've ... had less impact than ... you know, conquering horse lords or what have you.

MoiMagnus
2020-07-13, 12:36 PM
There are plenty of games (video games and pen & pencil RPG campaigns) where the heroes encounter countless "human bandits/thief/assassins" that are nothing but punching-bags disguised as enemies.

There is a difference between creating a whole culture or a whole intelligent race of irredeemable peoples, and having an endless supply purely evil creatures (humans, or incarnations of pure evil, or whatever you want) for the sake of your power-fantasy.

What's the difference? The level of abstraction.
Nobody is complaining about the pieces of chess being sacrificed heartlessly, and the fact that players only consider peace after absurdly high amount a casualties. Because we're at a level of abstraction where nobody is even pretending that the pieces have a personality. They don't have a family. They don't have an age. They barely have a physical description.

That's why the place of evil in RPGs is an hard subject to handle. The level of abstraction is oscillating between a tactical combat almost at the level of a boardgame and almost-realistic social interactions, with the exploration pillar somewhere at the middle of the two.

Composer99
2020-07-13, 01:46 PM
While facing down a ravenous dragon creature remains a pretty cool gaming experience, and I hope that I put it in a way that works, I'm still unsure if should have monsters that can't be reasoned with or befriended. Is that inherently problematic, and promoting violence and hierarchy?

As a general principle, I think it's fine if it's theoretically possible that most monsters can be reasoned with or befriended, with some reason why this specific monster acting as an antagonist towards the PCs can't be (or willfully won't be). It's fine if, broadly speaking, humanoids aren't evil while this specific group of humanoids are antagonists (brigands, slavers, enemies in a war, raiders, guards of an evil magician or faction, that sort of thing).

That may not be the case for some monsters - if, say, they are an expression of a sort of utterly alien intelligence (such as most aberrations - aboleths, beholders, mind flayers, that sort of thing), or if they are cosmically evil (fiends). Such creatures, with possible individual exceptions, might be amenable to reason or persuasion or distraction, but will always be antagonistic, and in some cases unable to conceive of cooperation, altruism, etc. as you or I know it.

There are also mindless creatures such as oozes. Such creatures can't be befriended or reasoned with, but they aren't malevolent as such; say rather that they are... er, single-mindedly focused (as it were) on certain imperatives (eat! eat! eat!), and if PCs are clever they can find ways to distract or divert such creatures without having to fight or destroy them.

Even then, it's your setting. If you want mind flayers to not be brain-eaters and to have the same range of possible moralities as humans and similar sentient beings, go ahead by all means.

Silly Name
2020-07-13, 01:49 PM
The issue modern fantasy faces is the depiction of "evil monsters" as thinking, free-willed being. Tolkien himself lamented the "corner" he had written himself into with orcs and their established origin: if orcs are corrupted Men/Elves, then they should still have all the capacity for both Good and Evil of those two people, because even if their forms are corrupted they still have a soul, they cannot be unthinking beasts subject to Morgoth/Sauron's will.

The moment you have an "always Evil" species that also appears to possess advanced mental faculties and free will, you run into problems, which D&D is trying to address. If orcs are a player race (and therefore free willed), they cannot be restrained in their moral inclinations as if they were Demons, who are Chaotic Evil incarnate. To address what Kaptin Keen said, what makes Mind Flayers evil in D&D isn't their way of nourishment, but the slavery and mind control and the fact they relish in the act of devouring other sentient beings - but you don't think a lion is evil for eating a zebra.

Honestly, the biggest blunder modern D&D has to face and admit is the fundamental worldbuilding mistake of making most non-Human races to be just "Humans with Hats": you either make them truly alien, or you give them the proper attention and realise how ridicolous it is for a culture to remain monolithic across the ages and continents. Elves and Dwarves and Halflings are presented, fundamentally, as specific cultures that could easily be human cultures apart from the fallacy of thinking that "living in caves/in forests/as nomads" is enough to create a distinct culture. What are the differences between a dwarven kingdom and an human kingdom? Only that the human kingdom is allowed to be culturally diverse, while dwarves are saddled with stereotypes.


Back on topic, I'm working on my own RPG too, heavily influenced by Antiquity and Mediterranean Myths. Players will end up fighting hydras and gorgons just as often as they fight other heroes, and they will be characters with their own reasons to fight. Often, they'll have to face the idea that the ethos of the world pits noble warrior against noble warrior, neither of them identifiable as "Evil" - the Iliad clearly depicts Hector in a positive light, even if he is the main defender of Troy and should therefore be the "enemy" for the Greek audience. But Hector never had the option to not defend his home, and so he's a tragic figure, and his death is tragic. The ethos of that world didn't require "enemy" to mean "villain", and in fact their narratives show prefer honourable, respectable foes over profoundly evil adversaries with no redeeming virtues - just like they favoured heroes that still had flaws and made mistakes and had to deal with their imperfections or be doomed by them. Because those things make for great stories, and tragedy is extremely cathartic.

But for "monsters", in the modern sense? The hydras and the basilisks and the minotaurs? They are incarnations of chaos, of a world that's dangerous and unknown, maybe representing humanity's darkest instincts and deepest fears, something to be faced, vanquished and exorcised. They'll be awe-inspiring and spectacular, some will be benevolent or at the least neutral, like pegasi and the Golden Ram. I heartily share your idea of using the former categories of those creatures to represent concepts like Death - though not necessarily just that. Other fears of humanity and dangerous elements of an untamed world can be represented too. I strongly believe RPGs are a great narrative tool and can be used to learn more about ourselves no matter what role we play, perhaps influenced by my views on theater and the role of actors.

Herakles was so widely revered because his role as a monster-slayer was, fundamentally, the role of the bringer of peace and civilisation. He made the world safe for humanity, by excising the most violent, chaotic, dangerous parts of the wild world. This is the kind of thing I would like my game to reenact.

The first thing I'd do, though, is to make a clear distinction between "monster" (the ferocious, animalistic dragon, representing Death itself) and what is simply "non-human" (nymphs and dryads and centaurs - clearly different from humans and possibly dangerous, but also capable of speech and thought). I'll probably try to name the section of my handbook that deals with all those non-human beings as something like "Compendium of Creatures", something that clearly tries to establish that not everything in there is to be slain mindlessly, but rather that it collects everything that is non-human - including the benevolent and the divine as much as it does the bestial and the malevolent.

I'm probably rambling and sounding like an elitist idiot that fancies himself an auteur. Sorry for that.

TL;DR: I'd really try to clearly define "monster" as a name for specific beings (again, incarnations of chaos and wilderness, representations of evil and primal fears, things that are more beast than man), and drop it as a generic noun for anything that's unlike the players.

Clistenes
2020-07-13, 02:11 PM
I tend to think of monsters as natural predators of humans, like intelligent tigers or sharks. You can't coexist with tigers. Yeah, they are cool. Yeah, they aren't evil... so what? They eat us, so their alignment is irrelevant. We want them far away from us...

Manticores, Wyverns, Worgs, Hydras...etc., If they eat people, we want them dead, period. They are like tigers or crocodiles, we wouldn't care if they are "neutral" creatures that follow their natural preying instincts or "evil" ones who delight in hurting others; we would kill them all the same.

As for intelligent, humanoid species like Medusas or Hags or Ogres... if they prey on humans, we would want them dead too. If they are usually able to control themselves and deal with humans fairly, the rare human-eating murderer being a rare outlier, we could give them the benefit of the doubt, but if enough of them attack and devour or enslave humans, people, even good people would go into "kill them before they kill us" mode.

Orcs and Goblinoids and Kobolds are more complicated, since they are more like people. They are humanoids, they have societies... there isn't a reason some groups couldn't socially and biologically evolve into becoming less mindlessly aggressive and more able to coexist... There should be individuals and tribes able to coexist with Humans, Elves, Dwarves and the like out there... But if the Orcs close to your settlement usually attack and kill humans, people won't give them the benefit of the doubt when meeting them, they will draw their blades... and that is neither racism nor specieism, that is just not wanting to be killed...

Some time ago there was a thread discussing a setting in which Lizardmen had been displaced from their territory by some monsters and Elves allowed them to enter their country and gave them a portion of their city to live in, but barred them from entering the rest of the city, keeping them segregated. Most people called it racist as asked for the elves to be severely punished, but I was like "dude, Lizardmen are primitive hunter gatherers who eat humanoids like Humans and Elves... you don't want them stalking your garden and eating your pets and children! Elves have been unbelievably nice!".

So, it's not so much a matter of "are these creatures always Evil?" to me, but rather "are they killing and eating us?".

Quertus
2020-07-13, 05:09 PM
"is the role of monsters in RPGs 'Death'?"

In the modern day? No. That doesn't really resonate, for various reasons.

"Is the role of monsters in RPGs to be some undefeatable force of nature?"

Still *mostly* no. Most RPGs, the concept of "monsters", the notion that the map has "there be monsters", the idea that there are still threats to solve *usually* still exists at the close of the campaign. So, in that regard, sure, they can be. However, I wouldn't railroad my players to *prevent* the successful genocide of one (or even all) monstrous races.

A *single* monster that *can't* be defeated, at least not in a traditional sense, OTOH, can be interesting.

"Is the role of monsters in RPGs… something else symbolic and intellectual?"

Eh, not my cup of tea. If the logic doesn't stand on its own, without looking at deeper symbolic meanings, it's… railroad level irritating.

If the logic *does* hold together at all levels without hand waving, if I can stomach looking at the Monster just at the characters PoV, then cool. And I may actually notice and look at the deeper beauty, too

"Is the role of monsters in RPGs to be a metaphor?"

Yes, monsters can serve as metaphors for all kinds of problems, impediments, shortcomings, threats, etc.

Or, sometimes, a pen can just be a pen.

Yanagi
2020-07-13, 05:12 PM
I am working on developing a new role playing game, and I got to the part about making up monsters. One of the types of monsters I'm making are kaiju, which in this setting are mindless creatures of rage and destruction manifested from humanity's collective unconscious. As I was writing them up, I got to thinking about J.R.R. Tolkien's work of criticism on Beowulf, called "The Monsters and the Critics."

In this essay, Tolkien talked about the literary place of the monsters. To cut a long story short, he argued that the monsters represent death, and the story is about how a person faces the inevitability of death and the destruction of all their works. Very Ozymandias, if you're familiar with the poem.

At the same time, there's been a really big rethink of monsters in fantasy series, including in Tolkien's own work as well as in Beowulf. Wizards, of course, just announced the end of evil races. I think there's a lot of merit to that, and a lot to learn about how we ostracize people by painting them as "monstrous," or use racialized features (as Tolkien as been accused of doing) to indicate evil in the monster. And you can tell great stories about people who have been cast out as monsters - the rethinking of Sycorax and Caliban in last year's run of the Lucifer comic was absolutely brilliant.

Well, okay, this is going to be fast and loose, but...you need to consider that Tolkien was likely speaking in a frame of reference entirely different from fantasy RPGs, in different contexts.

"Monsters" in mythic traditions and literary traditions that derive elements from myth--and Tolkien was a folklorist and a wrote in a format that deliberately echoed specific folklore traditions. Folkloric monsters as Tolkien speaks of them are prodigies, singular strange things that exist outside of the normal flow of nature, humanity, and the divine--and there is an underlying assumption that there is First Cause from which both moral wholesomeness and health flow, the the existence of the monster defies just as evil acts defies it. Monsters come into being as a consequence of breach of The Good: when a sinful or taboo thing happens that is so great a transgression of the moral and humane that it's like there's an infected wound afflicting reality. Monsters bring death, embody death, because death is the wages of disruption of the right order of the world.

This is true of the "monsters" of Middle Earth...most are manifestations of the malicious intent of Morgoth, constructed to have no meaning or identity separate from the one assigned by that malevolent creator. But even beings not directly created by the major malevolent forces reflect the old tradition of "monsters derive from the immoral and the taboo." The barrow wight is a creature who undead arises from its materialism; the spectral warriors the Aragon calls to battle are trapped as spectres because they're oathbreakers. There is a touch more nuance than precursor folkloric monsters--you get to see Smaug have a personality and volition, where Fafnir is a dragon precisely a person was so driven by material greed that they were transformed something stripped of drives and thought that weren't greed--but each is unnatural, wrong in the sense of "this should not exist."

Even though there are many orcs, they are monsters in that they exist only as a mockery of elves and lie entirely outside of conventional understanding of "being people" and "having a culture" because they're not even a whole created thing derived from divine inspiration (as the other races of Middle Earth are) but explicitly the end-product of a malevolent being performing some (unexplained, deeply cruel) transformation of ancient elves. They should not exist. That Saruman is utterly depraved is reflected in his fascination with the creation of beings that serve his end--mirroring Sauron and Morgoth.

In RPG settings the emphasis on player choice and the need to create a tool box for any play style means that most fantasy products do not commit to a singular Order that informs both morality and nature/supernature of a how a setting functions, and the business need to create new material and re-brand old material so it can be sold again means that there's an incentive to churn out novel developments and "lore."

The amassed material in quantity is given the vague feeling that there is a coherent world, but in reality most settings are incoherent. That isn't a criticism, it's just not possible to indefinitely keep adding bits and giving people fun choices and have all the bits fit together.

The gods and pantheons when assembled do not tell a story about why the world is as it is. Even the afterlife is multiple choice and not a direct expression of a moral or natural Order. The setting materials describe worlds in ecological and geographic terms that are comfortable for a secular audience and describe people as individuals embedded within social systems and contextualized by them. For every monster that is a prodigy, there are monsters are effectively animals...living, dying, reproducing, having an ecology...monsters that are functional people in that they have generational learned knowledge and tradition--culture--and are effected by environmental and sociological trends such that they are contextualized but also possess individual volition. When this is combined with the conceit of a continuous setting in which there always has to be the prospect of a conflicts, the very concept of what an antagonistic being means is different...because as fantasy settings increase in number and individual settings acquire depth as more material is published, monsters are just beings that you fight against, but next game you might want to be one.

And admittedly this is me talking as an anthropologist by training but...for most of my life fantasy settings have just kind of punted talking about this: create the "always Evil" race but also describe them in terms that make them wholly comprehensible and enculturated beings but also create entire novel series about exceptional heroic individuals, yadda yadda yadda. Meta analysis of coherence does not sell books.

That means that it's end users sussing out their comfort zones on what to pull from the incoherence. And people get really invested in their reading of a self-contradicting canon.


I do wonder, though, if the idea of monsters as death, as something we have to continually struggle against, even if it's doomed, is still something which resonates today. Life in the Dark Ages, especially in Germany and England, was incredibly precarious. Death in modern society is much less immediate and threatening, though the coronavirus might be changing that. So maybe the idea of "doom" conveyed by the monsters of Beowulf and Norse mythology just isn't relevant anymore. What do you think? Is the idea of a monster as death personified still worth including in our stories, even if just to role play out how we can face down our own mortality?

I'd argue that death still feels immediate, it's just that now the most feared version of immediate death involves other people as the agents.

We now see monsters as dialectically individuals--a person gone wrong on the inside, lacking some critical faculty--and symptoms of understandable systems--we've seen how evil emanates from large structures that make people do bad things. At the same time, we view nature as indifferent to morality rather than part of an Order that is moral-and-natural.

The monster that is death is now...a dude. Where once there was Grendel now there is Mike Myers.

NB: I should edit this because the horror character is Michael Myers and the comedian is Mike Meyers, but the mental image of the guy who did Austin Powers as Grendel compels me not to edit.

But in specific case of RPGs you have to look at the structural needs of a game narrative and recognize that the demands of a persistent setting in which players dwell and structure of an "adventure"--with it mobs, mid-bosses and final bosses, plus noncombat challenges and random rewards--is simply different than most stories in which there is a singular, prodigious monster that the hero must slay. And this isn't a problem, it's just the nature of the abstract strategy exercise developed by early designers that has continued through to this day.

In the Greek myths, the Lerneaen Hydra is a singular horror incomparable to anything else. In RPGs they come in varieties and can be salted about as needed to increase the difficult of a dungeon crawl. Hercules' decision to muck about with the Hydra's poison eventually kills him; pull that kind of "consequence" or "fate" at a table top and the players would see you as a railroader. It's an apples to bolt cutters comparison.


Can it be separated from its racist past? If so, how do you tell that story?

Well, basically you have to admit that in RPG contexts a "monster" just means "a thing you end up fighting" and that's been the case all along.

If you want the monster to be Death, or Consequences, or The Result of Sin, you just have to put in the narrative work to establish that.

We are where we are because publishers tried to straddle a line in which any particular Evil Thing is a priori Evil but also sold materials that explained them comprehensible within other frameworks. It's the Drizzt problem: once you contextualize the individual in an "evil" race as a product of circumstances, it poses a question about the context of every other individual. If you spend, say, decades publishing articles about how different monsters possess an "ecology" or guidebooks about how beings form societies to specifically teach their kids to be Evil The Right Way, or expound at length of the biographies of fallen angels...those beings don't fit with the assertion that absolute morality is fixed. Even as the RAW of settings (particularly older editions of games) talks about races as "Always Evil" every other part of the ever-growing text treats then as...people who's actions are explainable by deterministic forces such as culture and environment and direct divine intervention. What publishers are doing right now is just...openly concede what's been present all along, that most settings most of the time invoke the aesthetic of absolute morality but actual function with a great dealing of relativism.


For myself, I've been trying to find the balance of these evolving views as I'm designing my own monsters. Making death clearly inhuman is one way I try to avoid the problems of racism. I also clearly link the monsters to humanity's collective unconscious and to the terrible wages of violence that hurts even the victor. If you want more details, you can see the rest of my solution at my developer blog (see my signature).

In my thirty years of playing, fantasy has been transformed by an expansion of the limits of who you could "be" in a fantasy setting. There's bleed from other genres, more "myth and fantasty" materials from other cultures available in English, and authors who grew up on fantasy creating new interpretations that reflect their life experiences and real-life events. This is just inevitable as market forces create and distribute more cultural material more broadly, and as consumer choice is now hooked directly to the entire world. There's less invocation of majescule-E Evil as a state of being, where once the statement is declared there is no further discussion. There's still a bunch of monsters that embody death and human flaws and the consequences of human folly. They're just mostly over in genres like horror and scifi. And they're still prodigies...AI gone bad, cursed objects, serial killers. And in fantasy there are many types of monsters that are, by the flavor text, manifestations of dark and violent impulses that do not possess the full panoply of thought and emotion that free-willed sapient beings do. It's just that they're outsiders, fey, undead, constructs, etc.


While facing down a ravenous dragon creature remains a pretty cool gaming experience, and I hope that I put it in a way that works, I'm still unsure if should have monsters that can't be reasoned with or befriended.

Frankly, I think you're overthinking this in that...it is not an egregious error of design or morality to create a story for an abstract strategy game that focuses on team-based conflict where violence can solves problems. A system or game that include alternative problem-resolution strategies exist and tend to lean heavier into roleplay, but this requires everyone playing to be willing to operate at the same level of in-character rhetorical exchange and drops out the direct cooperation faciliated by complementary powers present in combat systems. Looking at something like Undertale suggests a "strategic rhetoric conflict simulator" is possible in theory but I'd be curious about how to create one that gave players roles with discrete advantages and incentive to combine skills to facilitate victory.

But less meta analytic...even if it is resolved as a design decisions that all monsters are just people, not every person can reasoned with or befriended. If you are writing or running a game the constraint that "every conflict must have a peaceful and amicable resolution" is a structural choice that is valid if that is your intent, and a selling point to your potential players of customers, but ultimately it doesn't make a fictional conflict "more realistic" or "moral."


Is that inherently problematic, and promoting violence and hierarchy?

No, but also non sequitur?

In general roleplaying is all about safe and structured exploration of things that the players know are not safe (or possible) and part of that is exploration of things that the performance without stakes of things they would explicitly not do or support. You might encounter someone who brings their real-life attitude and personality disorders, mask-off, to the tabletop, but the idea that a game could instantiate those ideas into a neutral party is, well, an overestimation.

There's a criticism to be made of how games tend to be so honed down to battle mechanics that other kinds of conflict are hard to simulate, but it's really an it's argument about how consumers should want more and be more exploratory...aesthetics not ethics. But at the level of RPG design, there's actually no way to stop the mechanics and setting fluff from being used to create narrative explicitly celebrating violence and hierarchy. An RPG session is a collaborative storytelling venture where tone and direction are determined only in the moment, between the participants, and while the DM has the most narrative control ultimately there's no hard limit on what can be considered or said.

Horatio@Bridge
2020-07-13, 09:01 PM
Back on topic, I'm working on my own RPG too, heavily influenced by Antiquity and Mediterranean Myths. Players will end up fighting hydras and gorgons just as often as they fight other heroes, and they will be characters with their own reasons to fight. Often, they'll have to face the idea that the ethos of the world pits noble warrior against noble warrior, neither of them identifiable as "Evil" - the Iliad clearly depicts Hector in a positive light, even if he is the main defender of Troy and should therefore be the "enemy" for the Greek audience. But Hector never had the option to not defend his home, and so he's a tragic figure, and his death is tragic. The ethos of that world didn't require "enemy" to mean "villain", and in fact their narratives show prefer honourable, respectable foes over profoundly evil adversaries with no redeeming virtues - just like they favoured heroes that still had flaws and made mistakes and had to deal with their imperfections or be doomed by them. Because those things make for great stories, and tragedy is extremely cathartic.

That sounds really cool! What system is this for? Do you have a place where you are posting your work?


------------

I'm hearing a lot in reply here about the role of monsters in RPGs being different than that of monsters in myth or literature, and that point is well taken. There is a lot of it that is a game, and the point made about the "monsters" basically being chess pieces to facilitate opposition and tactical thinking makes a fair amount of sense. From that perspective, having a group of roughly sketched antagonists that are mostly hit points and abilities is more than enough for the purposes of the game. The biggest thing would be to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes when so doing.

I do think there's a bit more going on in an RPG than just tactical simulation. Making decisions from the point of view of your character is one of the biggest imaginative leaps we make. There's a big opportunity to explore the themes of myth and literature, whether we are conscious of it or not.

Silly Name
2020-07-14, 06:39 AM
That sounds really cool! What system is this for? Do you have a place where you are posting your work?

Thanks! Right now it's a Google Doc in my native tongue (Italian), which I've just opened to feedback from some friends. The system is... sorta similar to PbtA, sorta my own, with a large Pendragon influence on certain mechanics meant to stimulate and help with interpretation (my very ambitious pitch when explaining this project was "Pendragon, but for Classical Mythology").



I do think there's a bit more going on in an RPG than just tactical simulation. Making decisions from the point of view of your character is one of the biggest imaginative leaps we make. There's a big opportunity to explore the themes of myth and literature, whether we are conscious of it or not.

I would like to specify I think there's space and audience for both, and often the audience is shared. Last night I played Ten Candles, and it was an unique experience which dealt with trying to get into a character that was almost randomly generated, in a world where death is certain and you're prodded towards doing things for the sake of the story. It was quite incredible to see how things changed as the candles went out, and the atmosphere was unlike any other game I've played.

But I still enjoy D&D and some high-fantasy, light-hearted fun. I still like playing and running games were a bunch of heroes go against an evil necromancer and it's all about the story being fun and cool, and the characters being powerful and awesome. I still like to sometimes sprinkle in a bit of moral dilemmas and difficult situations, and then it's followed by some silliness or a joke from me or the other players. But I know there's a time and place for both ends of the "Narrative - Gamist" spectrum, and the various spaces in-between.