My discomfort with Thinker player archetypes--villains have plots, not heroes

[sktarq]

I think for me there are a couple different kinds of planning problems being bandied about.

There is tactical planning that slows the game...this usually shows up in combat and has the player planning on the spot for how to deal with what is in front of them...often talking to each each other OOC and producing effects as though there was IC communication w/o actual IC communication. Also it incorporates serious time distortion. In a six/seven/ten second round (depending on game) the PLAYER may spend several minutes talking, mulling, and planning. Repeated over the party this can easily drag a couple round (less than a minute game time) skirmish into a multi-hour drag.

There are the planners who pre-plan whole sections of how they will tackle the plot or big event. Usually pre-planning. This would presumably occur IC as well during downtime at near real speed. Some may well even eat up significant in game time in order to collect info to help this. I personally have little issue with this. No incoming info is going to be perfect. . . a good imperative plan that the players worked hard on should be rewarded. But few DM/ST's etc are usually trained to think about dealing with planning like this. Their own world is reactive to the players and pre-set from the adventure packet or notes...ex) no matter what time of day the players show up the witch will be making dinner or the monster will be in. Planning can help a lot but often planning players rely on things like this. It is a lot of extra work to try and deal with this tbh and requires a different type of thinking very often. Oh your planned target has friends over to his tower for dinner the particular night the PC's attack? Sure why not. History is full of such real somewhat weird events. Archduke Ferdinand's driver getting lost in just the right way for example. An actual good plan could handle that a brittle one can't. Also planning should have opportunity cost. A serial killer or raiding monster may well raid again while the PC's are not attacking it and the PC's/players can be powerfully effected by scenes of such things.

Then there are those who plan to bypass the adventure as the creator saw it. Which honestly, just happens. The players figure out that the best solution comes from talking to the right person? I have to ask...why is that a problem? you gave them a challenge and they solved it with the tools available in the world which is ya know, their part in the game. Building your challenges with this in mind can be more challenging and can get into railroading if you are not careful. But can also give you interesting opportunities. (the PC's needing to go into favor-debt to some other PC to get their plan filled which can be called in as a different hook). Also is using cats paws the PC would need to remember that the NPC's are meant to represent full humans with complex lives in a complex society and they may not react the way the players want just because they want it. and honestly I think most DM's are not good at dealing with this sort of thing....the player says something that kinda makes sense so the GM agrees..and then does so again...pretty soon the player has reasonabled his way through the issue...when people etc are often not "reasonable" that way particularly societies as whole who have their own issues and conflicts. Now dealing with those can actually be fun if done well and is a different tack but often the GM's just roll over for this kinda stuff....agan this is whole different kind of work than goes into a lot of normal DM planning...

[patchyman]

There are the planners who pre-plan whole sections of how they will tackle the plot or big event. Usually pre-planning. This would presumably occur IC as well during downtime at near real speed. Some may well even eat up significant in game time in order to collect info to help this. I personally have little issue with this. No incoming info is going to be perfect. . .

I agree with a lot of what you said but I would add that the DM is a player too, and his fun matters as much as the players.

It simply isnÂ’t very much fun for the DM to sit in the room and do nothing (except answer the occasional question) while the players debate and discuss the merits and flaws of different plans (and often get locked into debating minutiae). In many groups, you have limited game time so an hour or two spent planning can really cut into game time. If the players do the planning outside of the game (while sending the DM the occasional e-mail), I think most DMs would be happy the players are taking an interest in the game.

Edit: of course all this is orthogonal to legitimate concerns of not wanting to DM villainous or extremely anti-heroic PCs.

[Xervous]

I agree with a lot of what you said but I would add that the DM is a player too, and his fun matters as much as the players.

It simply isnÂ’t very much fun for the DM to sit in the room and do nothing (except answer the occasional question) while the players debate and discuss the merits and flaws of different plans (and often get locked into debating minutiae). In many groups, you have limited game time so an hour or two spent planning can really cut into game time. If the players do the planning outside of the game (while sending the DM the occasional e-mail), I think most DMs would be happy the players are taking an interest in the game.

Edit: of course all this is orthogonal to legitimate concerns of not wanting to DM villainous or extremely anti-heroic PCs.

On the contrary it’s plenty fun for players to get into planning. It’s only dull when the planning itself is dull or stagnant. Back and forth player discussions are very similar to RP (it might even be RP!)

You get high player activity and involvement with a lot of shared spotlight time. These players care enough about the game and/or setting that they’re thinking rather than begging to be led by the nose. Sometimes there’s too much planning, so the GM adds explosions. Sometimes the players want another bloody mosh pit but it’s now time for stopping and thinking. Players being able to entertain each other through RP and planning is another feature, not a bug. Use it if it meets your goals, mine being ‘deliver an environment that entertains‘. That big history of the local land? The mysterious metal ships dominating a once peaceful shipping lane? The bard and the squirrel prophet debating how to best cultivate plants? The whole party drafting an outline for what specialists they should hire for their boat? I don’t need to present every option for the players to choose to engage with it, and this isn’t a CRPG that strikes down any input that isn’t predefined.

[LordCdrMilitant]

I love planning action and acting aggressively and offensively.

The general paradigm of perpetual reaction to blunt the enemy's repeated offensives until somehow you find your way to the big boss and kill them gets frustrating and tiring for me.


Also, just because you have a plan, doesn't mean it will go off without a hitch. Usually I have my players compose a plan of action, and then present some kind of challenge that messes up the plan of action and forces them to adapt the plan in the moment.

[Devils_Advocate]

Good guys can change things. And they often do. It's just they have either a) more modest goals than world domination or b) goals that are orthogonal to big flashy stuff. IMX, heroes have goals and plans that are basically downtime things. Have a family, work towards the good. Own a tavern.

Evil tends to go for the sweeping changes to society--Good knows that that's a deception all in its own. Good comes from the individual. Good men have more often fallen to evil by trying to change everything else (ie For the Greater Good) than by direct seduction by evil. So Good focuses on those close at hand. At least how I see it.

Also, since the world in films is not generally a crapsack (thankfully, grimdark is not interesting to me at all), heroes are generally fighting to preserve the light from the forces of darkness, rather than trying to bring the light. The world is generally good, so there's more scope for evil to have large-scale plots. That's the nature of a bounded spectrum. Just like it's easier to drop your grade if it's high and raise it if it's low than vice versa.

A civilization that isn't a utopia is built on systems of control that benefit those with greater power at the expense of those with lesser power. The king enjoys a much higher standard of living than a peasant and does much less work, for the king sits at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of non-optional transfers of resources. Every major head of state is at least moderately villainous, by your both your stated standards and others. And rulers who do put their own lives and/or their own power at risk tend to be outlasted by those who make other sacrifices.

Good characters don't just idly tolerate the oppression of the powerless. They can be cautious about how they attempt to pursue change, but even Lawful Good characters seek to stop systemic unfairness; they just prefer to try to change the system from within, rather than to try to replace it. And to the extent that large-scale villains usually are attempting to fix problems, problem-reduction doubles as villainy-prevention via decrease in potential causes for villainy.

You can have an entire utopian world threatened with conquest by a mustache-twirling villain who wants to bring everything under his personal rule just because he's egotistical, but that's a somewhat contrived scenario. Large-scale evil isn't absent from a realistic world until it suddenly springs up. The greatest evils, in terms of sheer scale, are those permitted or even encouraged by those in power. The greatest evils are normal and expected because they've persisted for generations. The greatest evils are accepted, but shouldn't be.

It's odd that you relate your distaste for plotting slightly with Lawful alignment in your OP. Aren't hierarchies, control, and planning trappings of Law, while spontaneity and flexibility are more associated with Chaos? But, upon reflection, I suppose that plotting is more of a thing for those who make the rules, and want others to follow them. Those in a position to influence standards of honor probably prefer that not many others seek power, and that "the virtuous" not be too hesitant to sacrifice themselves "for the good of society".

Players opted in to playing a particular game. It might be D&D or Pathfinder or Shadowrun or whatever - but given it was opted into, there is a reasonable expectation that time at the table will be spend using some aspects of the game system opted into. It isn't wrong to plan but time spent on this is taking up time that could be spent rolling dice and adventuring.

But there is another side of the metagaming coin. If players are roleplaying characters who are supposed to care about the stakes of what's going to happen (if only because they value their own lives), part of that is having those characters try their best to avoid unnecessary risks. A player might even want a combat encounter but feel obligated to try to avoid it because making in-character choices is part of playing a roleplaying game too.

You can't use the social contract to resolve a conflict when that conflict lies within the social contract.

That's true, though I'd say it's important for a GM that plays like that to do it fairly. If the bad guy can attack the party before they're ready, the party should also be able to attack the bad guy before he's ready.

I'm reminded of a scene from Critical Role. The party recently arrived in a city under the control of a pair of major villains, where they were met with a deliberate sign that their arrival there was expected. Having sneaked into the house of one of the villains' underlings, their advance scout secretly listens in on a conversation in which someone is telling someone else that they need to get things in order soon, because "guests" will likely be arriving shortly and they don't want to be unprepared. Cue laughter from players.

As I recall, that arc was also the one where the party developed the strategy of taking out most of the BBEG's underlings and then heading for the BBEG, hoping to gain the advantage of surprise by attacking before eliminating all of the underlings first, as one would be inclined to expect.

(This is also the series that gave us "At dawn, we plan.")

[King of Nowhere]

On the contrary it’s plenty fun for players to get into planning. It’s only dull when the planning itself is dull or stagnant. Back and forth player discussions are very similar to RP (it might even be RP!)

You get high player activity and involvement with a lot of shared spotlight time. These players care enough about the game and/or setting that they’re thinking rather than begging to be led by the nose.

+1 on that. if my players are discussing their moves within my world geopolitics, and how to influence the various factions within, if they talk about the king of the neutral power and how to persuade him to support them instead of the villain like he was a real person, it means they are engaged within my world. there are few satisfactions greater than seeing your players care.

You can have an entire utopian world threatened with conquest by a mustache-twirling villain who wants to bring everything under his personal rule just because he's egotistical, but that's a somewhat contrived scenario. Large-scale evil isn't absent from a realistic world until it suddenly springs up. The greatest evils, in terms of sheer scale, are those permitted or even encouraged by those in power. The greatest evils are normal and expected because they've persisted for generations. The greatest evils are accepted, but shouldn't be.

on the other hand, it's quite hard to build a d&d adventure out of stopping the megacorporation from buying the city park and build a shopping mall on it. you can't exactly attack on sight the employees of the megacorporation that are trying to do their job cutting trees. nor can you kill the manager for it
the main reason to have mustache-twirling villains is to have somebody who's acceptable to attack on sight

[Devils_Advocate]

If the worst thing happening in a world is a park being replaced by a mall, that world is unrealistically utopian already. But that's only unrealistic in the sense of differing from reality, and that applies to all fantasy worlds regardless. It's when a fictional world goes from having a new mall as its worst problem to facing a massive global threat, and then back, with nothing in between, that my ability to take the setting seriously begins to suffer severe damage. In particular, it seems unlikely that fighting a massive global threat created no problems above mall scale that persist even after the global level threat has been overcome.

The main characters engaging in violence isn't a necessary part of every session of Dungeons & Dragons. It is possible to have a brief story arc without combat. But even if the players are discontent to go several hours without any homicide, that doesn't mean that their characters have to feel the same way. "I expose the corrupt mayor using the evidence we uncovered" could itself be a downtime thing. And if the player characters couldn't deal with that mayor before because they were too busy saving the world, but they can now because the world has been successfully saved, it's likely epilogue material.

Spinning every enemy of a group as needing to be killed doesn't really sell that group as heroic. For starters, that sounds suspiciously like the biased perspective of a bunch of murder-happy murderhobos who decide that anyone who stands in their way for any reason needs killin'. Certainly if some folks have killed every one of several enemies they've dealt with, I'd expect them to kill any enemy they make in the future based on their track record. After all, it's what they've done with all of their foes so far.

But let's suppose that some villain is clearly established as someone who nearly everyone agrees needs to be destroyed. That really limits what a character pursuing said villain's destruction tells you about that character. The character could be a benevolent altruist taking on great personal risk in order to protect others, but could also be a hateful mass murderer willing to risk death for the sake of revenge.

We can look at how characters oppose a villain or some other threat, but the more that that threat is so bad that it must be stopped no matter the cost, the more irresponsible it becomes to choose an approach based on anything other than likelihood of success. If you should be wiling to sacrifice your own life to save everyone else's because millions of lives are so much more valuable than one life, then you should be willing to sacrifice someone else's life to save everyone else's for the same reason.

But I think that my main issue can be summarized thus: Altruism isn't a substitute for general benevolence. If a valiant knight faces great peril to slay the great dragon and then goes back to living in comfort at peasants' expense, I have to wonder how much he was concerned with protecting those peasants as anything but a means to an end. If, after a war, a celebrated veteran retires to start a bar and ignores that police officers are allowed to murder people in his country, I have to wonder who he was concerned with protecting through his service. Such valorous individuals may put themselves at risk to confront threats to their own social classes, but they seem untroubled at best by the plight of others in their homelands, never mind humanity at large.

And general kindness does not only concern itself with one's own species! A substantial portion if not the majority of evil perpetrated by humanity on Earth right now involves the treatment of non-humans as means to ends without regard for their well-being.

To borrow from Frank Trollman, playing a genuinely Good character means playing someone who is probably a much better person than you personally are. ("You probably aren't Evil, but seriously: get over yourself.") Perhaps the notion of a hero as someone willing to take on personal risk to defend the status quo appeals because it is easy to imagine oneself in that role. In many cases, that image of oneself may even be accurate! But caring about the welfare of everyone, caring about suffering and oppression of all sorts, demands much more than that. It demands being willing to give up the status quo, to fight even wrongs that enable the lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. Whereas a stalwart defender of the status quo is committed to perpetuating those wrongs.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
―― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[Mechalich]

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If the worst thing happening in a world is a park being replaced by a mall, that world is unrealistically utopian already. But that's only unrealistic in the sense of differing from reality, and that applies to all fantasy worlds regardless. It's when a fictional world goes from having a new mall as its worst problem to facing a massive global threat, and then back, with nothing in between, that my ability to take the setting seriously begins to suffer severe damage. In particular, it seems unlikely that fighting a massive global threat created no problems above mall scale that persist even after the global level threat has been overcome.

The main characters engaging in violence isn't a necessary part of every session of Dungeons & Dragons. It is possible to have a brief story arc without combat. But even if the players are discontent to go several hours without any homicide, that doesn't mean that their characters have to feel the same way. "I expose the corrupt mayor using the evidence we uncovered" could itself be a downtime thing. And if the player characters couldn't deal with that mayor before because they were too busy saving the world, but they can now because the world has been successfully saved, it's likely epilogue material.

Spinning every enemy of a group as needing to be killed doesn't really sell that group as heroic. For starters, that sounds suspiciously like the biased perspective of a bunch of murder-happy murderhobos who decide that anyone who stands in their way for any reason needs killin'. Certainly if some folks have killed every one of several enemies they've dealt with, I'd expect them to kill any enemy they make in the future based on their track record. After all, it's what they've done with all of their foes so far.

But let's suppose that some villain is clearly established as someone who nearly everyone agrees needs to be destroyed. That really limits what a character pursuing said villain's destruction tells you about that character. The character could be a benevolent altruist taking on great personal risk in order to protect others, but could also be a hateful mass murderer willing to risk death for the sake of revenge.

We can look at how characters oppose a villain or some other threat, but the more that that threat is so bad that it must be stopped no matter the cost, the more irresponsible it becomes to choose an approach based on anything other than likelihood of success. If you should be wiling to sacrifice your own life to save everyone else's because millions of lives are so much more valuable than one life, then you should be willing to sacrifice someone else's life to save everyone else's for the same reason.

But I think that my main issue can be summarized thus: Altruism isn't a substitute for general benevolence. If a valiant knight faces great peril to slay the great dragon and then goes back to living in comfort at peasants' expense, I have to wonder how much he was concerned with protecting those peasants as anything but a means to an end. If, after a war, a celebrated veteran retires to start a bar and ignores that police officers are allowed to murder people in his country, I have to wonder who he was concerned with protecting through his service. Such valorous individuals may put themselves at risk to confront threats to their own social classes, but they seem untroubled at best by the plight of others in their homelands, never mind humanity at large.

And general kindness does not only concern itself with one's own species! A substantial portion if not the majority of evil perpetrated by humanity on Earth right now involves the treatment of non-humans as means to ends without regard for their well-being.

To borrow from Frank Trollman, playing a genuinely Good character means playing someone who is probably a much better person than you personally are. ("You probably aren't Evil, but seriously: get over yourself.") Perhaps the notion of a hero as someone willing to take on personal risk to defend the status quo appeals because it is easy to imagine oneself in that role. In many cases, that image of oneself may even be accurate! But caring about the welfare of everyone, caring about suffering and oppression of all sorts, demands much more than that. It demands being willing to give up the status quo, to fight even wrongs that enable the lifestyle to which one has become accustomed. Whereas a stalwart defender of the status quo is committed to perpetuating those wrongs.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
―― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Um...okay, maybe relax a little regarding the structure and function of escapist speculative fiction.

I mean, yes, fantasy, as a genre, tends to be highly invested in protecting the extant status quo or at least offering a more ethically appealing version of the same system without making any systemic change by installing a 'good king' or something similar. It is deliberately simplified, and this is a huge part of its appeal. Many TTRPs (and cRPGs) are simplified even further, and present serious threats to society as a series of violent encounters to be defeated (tactical RPGs like Fire Emblem do this in a shockingly literal fashion). If you object to this element of genre structure then play something else, criticizing a genre for behaving how it is designed to operate because you object to aspects of that design is totally orthogonal to a discussion of how internal elements of said design should be structured and manipulated within the context of the genre. Interrupting a discussion about fantasy simply to say 'fantasy is dumb' isn't helpful.

There are tabletop RPGs that are intended to highlight aspects of cultural, environmental, and public policy struggles, usually in a modern context. Mage: the Ascension is such a game. However, the mechanical framework used by such games generally fails to engage with this in a functional manner (the oWoD still had more actual rules about how to run combat than anything else), in part because modeling social interaction mechanically is incredibly difficult and no RPG has developed a good system for complex social interactions yet. That's why is you run a MtA game where the goal of the characters is something like 'Save the Amazon Rainforest' it still ends up being about blowing up Pentex factories and slaughtering mutagenic abominations rather than engaging in complex multiple stakeholder political discussions simply because RPGs are good at running the former and terrible at running the latter.

Most people who write fantasy are not particularly sanguine about the often rather crapsack nature of the pre-industrial worlds they've chosen to represent (though some people, like Joe Abercrombie, take it beyond the grimdark event horizon), but even if the world isn't all that great of a place for most of its residents it is usually trivially easy to conjure up some sort of horrific threat that would make it measurable worse if not stopped. And that's pretty much how melodrama has always worked, going back to the Greeks.