Adventurers & Heroes

[Eleven]

There is a difference. What do you play, or your players, gravitate towards? What effect do you think it has on character identity? How do you transition between the two?

I played a Shadowrun game during the summer with a group of people I've never played before. I don't believe the system had an effect; I think it was prominently the goals of the group. We wanted to do cool stuff and get lots of treasure, predominantly so that we could get better at doing cool stuff.

But there wasn't a larger goal.

Back when I played 1st edition D&D with my father (as a very young kid and long after 2nd & maybe 3rd had come out), we had a campaign that lasted the entire series of time we played - we were heroes who started off fighting a bunch of goblins and followed their schemes until chasing the greatest of evil.

Maybe it was because we were much younger and much less cynical - that could be a big part of it. I wonder, though, if the tying together of events was handled differently and changed our outlook. It even seems to have changed the morality of the game. When we pretended to be heroes, it seemed to make me a better person while playing, and adventuring was just (?) a lot of fun.

What are your opinions?

[Toofey]

I think that's why it's good to play heroes.

[Jay R]

How do you define the difference between the two? My characters are always larger than life, and ready to fight the bad guys. But the paladins have defending people as a primary goal, the thieves have stealing cool things as a primary goal.

[Dr.Epic]

Adventurer: I don't define them as someone who tries to save the world, but someone who is just looking for quests and payment.

[Shadowknight12]

Hero.

I don't care about playing a supercool badass who gets all the phat lewt and the hottest chicks.

I want to play the ordinary bystander who takes a step forward when something goes wrong and says "No."

[Fallbot]

Adventurers.

In our current campaign we're a group of broken, dysfunctional people thrown together by fate, whose self-serving blundering occasionally happens to help other people. I do see it as the start of a Hero's Journey, at least for my character, who is starting to grow as a person and take responsibility for what happens around him, but there's still a long way to go before we're more than rich, murderous hobos.

Oddly, I was talking to another player about that game and realized that he believes we're unequivocally the capital H Heroes, while playing an unstable warlock willing to burn a woman alive for trying to prevent a prison break, so I guess it's all a matter of perspective.