Why do heroes have to be super?

[Anderlith]

So I have found on this site a surprising number of people who think that their heroes in the games they play must be super powerful or superskilled or way better than the peons of the world just because they are "heroes". I've never seen this in the behavior of anyone I've gamed with or anyone I or they know. So I ask the question why, why do you need to have lots of abilities & power & skill to feel like a hero? Can't you be a hero against the odds instead? (the more likely thing to happen). Is it really all that rewarding to roflstomp the competition, fully understanding that you were better to begin with? I'm not saying that my playstyle is better or anything. I'm just trying to wrap my head around others find this particular playstyle favorable.

[Pigkappa]

Can't you be a hero against the odds instead? (the more likely thing to happen).

You can, but the chance of failure is really high.

Many RPGs out there (including D&D for sure) are about extremely hard quests. Quests that common people can't face. Kill the mighty dragon who can kill a regular person in one second. Go teach the bunch of Gangrels who left a bloodless corpse on the street what their place is. You can't do these things without super-powers.

[Seerow]

The problem isn't so much that you need to be super with tons of skills and powers to be a hero. It's that in D&D, being super powerful and changing the world around you has always been a part of the high level schtick. There are games out there that balance to a lower power level as the top end, that get by just fine. As an example, Shadowrun has the PCs playing as guys who are a cut above the average in their field of expertise, but not super heroes by any stretch of the imagination. Or if you prefer the D&D system, if you want characters at the top end to be cool but not over the top, that's what E6 is for.

[Tiki Snakes]

Personally, having skills powers and abilities is always much more about having options than anything, giving me a legitimate range of new and exciting ways to interact with the world.

Can't say I've any overwhelming need to feel the hero in any given situation though. It's an appropriate role in some games, and not in others.

[Coidzor]

Because an average person isn't a hero except in a song from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog sung by Captain Hammer. They're an average, normal person.

A villain whose plots can be defeated by an ordinary man or small group of completely ordinary people does not have their stuff together and is kind of a joke.

[Hiro Protagonest]

So I have found on this site a surprising number of people who think that their heroes in the games they play must be super powerful or superskilled or way better than the peons of the world just because they are "heroes". I've never seen this in the behavior of anyone I've gamed with or anyone I or they know. So I ask the question why, why do you need to have lots of abilities & power & skill to feel like a hero? Can't you be a hero against the odds instead? (the more likely thing to happen). Is it really all that rewarding to roflstomp the competition, fully understanding that you were better to begin with? I'm not saying that my playstyle is better or anything. I'm just trying to wrap my head around others find this particular playstyle favorable.

Have you ever read or watched any stories about such heroes? None come to me.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Have you ever read or watched any stories about such heroes? None come to me.

Actually most of the stories I have read/watch are about underdogs.

For example Dragonball Z, at first Goku could barely face Radditz which was the weakest of the Sayans, he had to sacrifice himself and work with Piccoro to kill him.

Against Frieza he had to go Super Sayan to match him (I do concede he all but curbstomped him once there)

Cell: None of the heroes could beat him till Gohan entered his rage

Buu: They had to use the fusion dance to get a chance to beat him.


So even when the heroes are powerful in most cases the evil is greater than them...

[Anderlith]

I never said an ordinary person, but a competent person sure. A policemen or a soldier doesn't have superhuman capabilities yet there are countless records of soldiers & such doing heroic things, look at the exploits of one John L Barkley or Teddy Roosevelt, I've always viewed heroes as the ones that "could get the job done" not necessarily the ones with the biggest toys, i.e. +x weapons of x, & more broken spell combos than you can shake a stick at.

[GolemsVoice]

Power is relative. The better question is perhaps if the character fits the powerlevel of the game/story he's in. The eponymous hunter in White Wolf's Hunter won't mow down werewolves by the dozens, and that's ok, because that's not what Hunter is about. But the things the game actually IS about, I want my character to be good at them. Trying the impossible and failing is no problem. But regularly failing what in the game is considered a standart challenge gets boring and frustrating.

A bad example would be being forced to play a common soldier in a game where everyone else is a power-armored superhuman. (Unless the group as a whole asks for this, of course)

And one more thing: I, personally, play games to be someone extraordinary. Doesn't mean I have to be the world's greatest hero, simply being someone I'm not in real-life, like a cop or a soldier, can be great. If I want to struggle with mundane things, I wouldn't need to play RPGs at all.

(Now, mind you, in the end, it's about what the group likes best. If you and your gaming group would disagree with me, and you're having fun, that's fine, but I likely wouldn't join any of your games)

[Dusk Eclipse]

To be honest I think because most RPG games are an escapist fantasy, if I want to be a hero I want to be the best hero I can be. Sure you can play at lower levels of power where you have to struggle to come by; but for many (at least apparently) that isn't the norm.

[Dust]

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[Frozen_Feet]

It's because in a lot of games, especially D&D, player characters are assumed to be heroes before the fact, and are by default given things a hero "should" possess. Hero is something you are.

This in contrast to a playstyle where the players are nothing unless they make themselves to be something; they aren't given anything either unless they themselves see trouble to have it. If they want to be heroes, they have to be heroes with the stuff they have. Hero is something you become.

I like the second style more, even when playing with superpowered characters.

Also note: the idea that a hero can't be an "average person" is a very different prospect under these playstyles. In the first, of course some joe can't be a hero, since they lack the things they need to be one! And on the flipside, a hero can't be some joe since they'ree heroes.

In the second, there is nothing inherent separating some joe from a hero. It all lies in their actions. These actions might make or prove them "unaverage", but it's only observable after the fact.

[some guy]

It's because in a lot of games, especially D&D, player characters are assumed to be heroes before the fact, and are by default given things a hero "should" possess. Hero is something you are.

This in contrast to a playstyle where the players are nothing unless they make themselves to be something; they aren't given anything either unless they themselves see trouble to have it. If they want to be heroes, they have to be heroes with the stuff they have. Hero is something you become.

I like the second style more, even when playing with superpowered characters.

Also note: the idea that a hero can't be an "average person" is a very different prospect under these playstyles. In the first, of course some joe can't be a hero, since they lack the things they need to be one! And on the flipside, a hero can't be some joe since they'ree heroes.

In the second, there is nothing inherent separating some joe from a hero. It all lies in their actions. These actions might make or prove them "unaverage", but it's only observable after the fact.

It's basically this. Or as Zak S. has written recently, the Han vs. Luke issue. I feel more for starting small and unimportant, taking arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them and all that. Barely surviving, but through wits, luck and determination succeed.
But I can imagine there is also something to found in being already awesome and rad. Being something fantastic and different, trying to experience that. The sooner you are rad, the more the radness-meter fills.

EDIT: You know, I usually run games in which the pc's are not extraordinary. I once played in a game in which the DM felt the pc's had to be heroes (I like to call the pc's 'adventurers', not 'heroes'). There really was not a very clear difference between how he ran his game and how I run my games.

[Deepbluediver]

Many people find playing an uber-powerful god like being fun; its like asking why some one prefers chocolate ice cream. Think of how many videogames have cheat codes to this effect. There was even an entire PC game (called Black & White) where the premise was that you ARE god to your tiny-but-growing civilization.

Now, I don't think that there are quite as many super-powered epic characters out there as these forums sometimes make it appear. A lot of people just like theorycrafting maxed-out toons for the fun of it, or finding ways to "break" because you can. Not every players considers the DM to be an enemy, but a few people probably think that if can break the game they've "beaten" WotC.


Personally, I haven't played as much D&D as other posters, but nearly everything that I have done has been low to mid level campaigns or one-shots, and no one in our group ever complained it wasn't fun.

[Coidzor]

I never said an ordinary person, but a competent person sure. A policemen or a soldier doesn't have superhuman capabilities yet there are countless records of soldiers & such doing heroic things, look at the exploits of one John L Barkley or Teddy Roosevelt, I've always viewed heroes as the ones that "could get the job done" not necessarily the ones with the biggest toys, i.e. +x weapons of x, & more broken spell combos than you can shake a stick at.

So I ask the question why, why do you need to have lots of abilities & power & skill to feel like a hero? Can't you be a hero against the odds instead? (the more likely thing to happen). Is it really all that rewarding to roflstomp the competition, fully understanding that you were better to begin with? I'm not saying that my playstyle is better or anything. I'm just trying to wrap my head around others find this particular playstyle favorable.

By saying that anyone who wants to play a character with power and skill and abilities is just playing to roflstomp the competition, you are giving the impression that your intent is to talk about characters who lack power & skill & abilities and are thusly ordinary. As in, the most likely thing there is in the game world.

So, if you say you don't mean it that way, then it behooves you to clarify what exactly you're positing on both sides or else we can't really discuss it with you.

Because I'm pretty sure that Teddy Roosevelt's larger than life living style isn't what you were implying in your OP. As, while he did roflstomp his childhood illness, that was only after he put in a lot of hard work, but by the same token, nor was he just marginally competent as an adventurer. Being as he became famous for his adventuring habits. And someone who can become famous as an adventurer and make a habit out of it rather than it being a one-off fluke is going to be exceptional amongst whatever class/type of person it came from.

And now we have no idea what the heck you're trying to contrast this with.

[Totally Guy]

Check out Mouse Guard. It's a game in which the characters suffer for their goals and principles. They become heroes because they do it anyway. It can get pretty bleak and I love it.

[Hiro Protagonest]

By saying that anyone who wants to play a haracter with power and skill and abilities is just playing to roflstomp the competition, you are showing a hostile attitude towards it.

Ayup. Go read Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Heroes of Olympus. Percy, the Grace siblings, the Di Angelo siblings, Leo Valdez, and the entire damn Zhang family all have extreme superpowers, Hazel Lavesque and Piper McLean have moderate superpowers, and Annabeth Chase and Clarisse (have no idea what her last name is) are badass normals.
Percy is also is an excellent rider and swordfighter, plus he bore the Curse of Achilles for almost a year before wading through the Little Tiber, and both Graces can match him in combat before he bore the Curse and after it washed away in the river.
Not sure about Nico Di Angelo, but his half-sister Hazel was impressed by his sword skill after being amused by the scrawny pale boy saying his black sword was "Stygian iron" all serious-like.
Hazel also thought Percy was a god when whe first saw him carrying the old lady that happened to be Juno (remake of Jason the Argonaut carrying Hera across a river).

They face monsters, immortals, and the media (long story) on a regular basis, and don't curbstomp everything (actually, I can't remember them ever curbstomping anything, although I think they use the Inverse Ninja Law when facing a monster army as long as they have a number of people on their side in the double digits). And did I mention they're just regular people who happen to be children of gods?

[Ziegander]

So I have found on this site a surprising number of people who think that their heroes in the games they play must be super powerful or superskilled or way better than the peons of the world just because they are "heroes". I've never seen this in the behavior of anyone I've gamed with or anyone I or they know. So I ask the question why, why do you need to have lots of abilities & power & skill to feel like a hero? Can't you be a hero against the odds instead? (the more likely thing to happen). Is it really all that rewarding to roflstomp the competition, fully understanding that you were better to begin with? I'm not saying that my playstyle is better or anything. I'm just trying to wrap my head around others find this particular playstyle favorable.

Oh, there's nothing wrong with being non-super and still heroic. "Real life" heroes typically triumph despite the odds once, maybe twice, in their lives. That doesn't make them any less heroic. Heroes in a role-playing game are typically meant to triumph despite the odds multiple times a day, multiple days per week. The sheer mathematics typically demand that a hero in an RPG be super in order to survive.

[king.com]

I never said an ordinary person, but a competent person sure. A policemen or a soldier doesn't have superhuman capabilities yet there are countless records of soldiers & such doing heroic things, look at the exploits of one John L Barkley or Teddy Roosevelt, I've always viewed heroes as the ones that "could get the job done" not necessarily the ones with the biggest toys, i.e. +x weapons of x, & more broken spell combos than you can shake a stick at.

One of the reasons Dark Heresy is my favourite roleplaying game. Your just ordinary people, with that barest hint of potential, where everything and everyone in the universe is more powerful and dangerous than you and its your job to stop them.

[navar100]

It is not a sin for player characters to be "powerful". If you absolutely just can't stand that, get out of the DM chair.

[king.com]

It is not a sin for player characters to be "powerful". If you absolutely just can't stand that, get out of the DM chair.

Thats an extremely odd and out of place comment when someone was asking for logical explanations.

[Drasius]

Define Super? If your character (to use D&D standards) has better than 10/10/10/10/10/10, then you are by definition playing a character with above average stats, which some could call super, or at least, certainly not an everyday joe bloggs.

If your all 10 character faces housecats, then it's fair play, if the 20/14/18/12/10/10 half somethingorother barbarian faces off against housecats, then that's Super. If the same characters face off against a dragon of level appropriate status, the "Normal" character is a tasty snack whereas the "Super" character will probably have a new set of armour and some scars.

One of the main reasons why you get "Super" characters is that not everyone plays in low magic campaigns all the time, hence increaseing threat levels require Super heroes. Add this to the fact that when Joe Average goes adventuring, he is normally the guy who the Super loots for anything useful after he has failed and become a corpse.

[FatJose]

Get this out of the way.
Definition of HERO
1 a : a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability b : an illustrious warrior c : a man admired for his achievements and noble qualities d : one who shows great courage
2 a : the principal male character in a literary or dramatic work b : the central figure in an event, period, or movement

There you go. You're a hero by default because your party is the focus of the game's story. Clearly, it doesn't matter "what" you are. It covers anybody. Literature supports this. Especially if you're looking beyond cheesy children's fantasy novels.

The idea that D&D has super-powered heroes has more to do with the enemies and common folk being super underpowered. RL humans would stomp human commoners to death. I've never seen an actual man killed by a house cat but its commonly known in D&D circles just how garbage D&D villagers are. All of the evil races you face early in your careers are supposedly horrid threats to the good people but their stats put them at a huge disadvantage. (Why the commoners don't take care of the goblins or kobolds is anyone's guess. They're at least at equal footing.)

[NikitaDarkstar]

As so many others have pointed out already, in a game such as D&D you need to be quite a bit above average to even survive. The trick is to avoid being significantly more powerful than the other players and not be the best at everything. Ever heard the therm Mary-Sue (most probably have by now, but oh well.), it comes from fanfiction but it can be applied to anything that uses characters. A Mary Sue simply is a perfect character. It's the best in fighting, the best in magic, best in social situations, amazingly beautiful and so on. Avoid being that character.

But is there anything wrong with being able to swing a mace hard enough to make a dragon cry? Not really. Is it wrong if you're also immune to anything the dragon can throw at you including enough Damage Reduction to make physical damage negligible at best? Yhea it can lead to boredom and frustration for everyone involved.

[Beleriphon]

The idea that D&D has super-powered heroes has more to do with the enemies and common folk being super underpowered. RL humans would stomp human commoners to death. I've never seen an actual man killed by a house cat but its commonly known in D&D circles just how garbage D&D villagers are. All of the evil races you face early in your careers are supposedly horrid threats to the good people but their stats put them at a huge disadvantage. (Why the commoners don't take care of the goblins or kobolds is anyone's guess. They're at least at equal footing.)

Well, the average human commoner has 4 hit points and AC 10 (in all editions prior to 4th). They have +0 to hit, -4 to hit with anything other than simple weapons. That doesn't stack up well against hordes of goblins or kobolds.

Goblins by default get a +2 to hit with morningstars, +3 with javelins and have AC 15 in 3.X (pretty similar level in previous editions sitting around 5 or 6). Human commoners, who don't have light armour proficiency, would have AC 14 (or 6 or 7 in previous editions). Goblins come in gangs of up to nine, or much larger group with much more dangerous warbands with worgs. This also doesn't take into account the penchant of goblins to work with hobgoblins which can be much more dangerous.

Kobolds are pretty similar, although by and large less dangerous individually.

Essentially the idea with D&D is that human villager could probably fight goblins, as a huge group (like the whole village) but it takes exceptional people to do so in small groups.

[Jerthanis]

Part of it is simply numbers. In a literary work, you can write whatever power disparity you want and be sure of whatever outcome is necessary. In D&D, you actually have to make the roll. If you stack the game such that they have a 50% chance to survive each fight they're in, they're probably not going to survive four fights, let alone the dozens you'll see in the course of a campaign... so numerically speaking, the PCs MUST be more powerful than their opponents almost all the time or they will have an excessive chance of failing completely.

In addition, in many cases, the more power you have, the more options you have as far as leveraging that power. More options means more choices that you can make, and more unexpected solutions people can come up with. People like coming up with plans and making choices, and a lot of the time that's easier when you've got powers that can make meaningful changes on your world.

I like the underpowered heroes too, and really like the idea of ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges and rising up to them to overcome with courage, tenacity and cleverness... but in the context of an RPG the laws of probability are against you and the dynamic of what makes things interesting is concretely different between mediums where the audience is a passive consumer and a medium in which the audience ARE the actors.

It's possible to make underpowered 'normal guy' heroes have the kinds of interesting choices as those with more dynamic and potent powers, and it's possible to make it seem as though they're squeaking along by the skin of their teeth (without having to actually deal with 100 anticlimax TPKs for every 1 satisfying game about unexpected success) but it's SO much more work that way.

[cattoy]

they don't.

{Scrubbed}

My hero is this guy.

[Totally Guy]

Heroes in a role-playing game are typically meant to triumph despite the odds multiple times a day, multiple days per week.

But then it's not really despite the odds, is it?

I had this problem with a game called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. In this game choose characters to fight baddies and every move you make against them the game tells you the odds to hit. Eventually I realised that I was taking virtually no risks and I'd win anyway. I got no further enjoyment from that game.

[Ravens_cry]

Even games about "ordinary" mortals often have some extraordinary extra mechanic to give them a bit of an edge.
Take Hunter: The Reckoning. Despite being fluffed as a mostly vanilla mortal who hunts monsters, you got a few extra knacks, like Conviction, to help make just about every battle against the Monsters not be a nose crushing, gut kicking, groin crumbling, curb stomp battle of messy, inevitable death.

[jseah]

Totally guy:
FFTA? I played that! My first introduction into true char-op (customizable skill sets FTW)
Off topic:

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Marche is useless, but eh, one Turbo MP Double-cast Madeen-Madeen pwns even the final boss in one hit. Or just use a moogle gunner with the outsider weapon for ultima charge with 9 range... plus you can use Concentrate on it for +50% to hit!

OP:
I think perhaps you might want to rephrase that question. You seem to be asking why people want to play "special" characters. Characters that stand out from the rest of the population.

If you didn't mean that, then I can ask it. =P Why do people want to play "special" characters?