What's in a Name?
I have been thinking a lot about the hobby and my place in it. As many of you reading this blog have gathered, I have been playing role-playing games since the late 1970s - and I am still in love with those three original little brown books which I find pretty well defines what I like best in the hobby. Well, as is the nature of things, the hobby has changed quite a bit since 1977.
I became instantly excited about the then new idea of adventure gaming in a fantastic medieval setting. Despite struggling to understand all the unfamiliar and seemingly incomplete and contradictory rules as they appeared in those three LBB included in the small white box, the prospect of gaming in fictional worlds akin to Hyborea, Lankhmar, Barsoom and Middle-earth compelled me to carry forth. My friends and I were experienced wargamers and we soon filled in the gaps in our understanding of the ODD rules as written, and in the spirit of the early days, made the game just as we liked it.
At some point well after we had discovered Gencon and nearly worn out the covers of our Advanced Game tomes through frequent use, we began to experience a desire for something new - especially in the form of the elusive "better game". I recall the occasion of our discovering the Call of Cthulhu RPG visiting the Chaosium booth while attending Gencon, and instantly falling in love with the idea of investigative gaming in a horror setting. We all purchased personal copies of the thin CoC box and began our journey in learning to role-play. If memory serves, until that point we had pretty much approached our RPG characters as playing pieces - not as "real" people, but rather more akin to our wargame miniature army men - in other words, a disposable collection of stats.
Call of Cthulhu was not the first new game I had added to my collection, but learning to play it represented a vast change in the way I would approach the hobby. Over the decades other new games would add additional (mostly minor) changes in my approach to playing role-playing games.
My apologies, dear reader, for the long preamble to this post. I now come to the thought of the day. Acting out our power fantasies at the gaming table is not exactly the same as role-playing a hero. Being powerful is not the same thing as being heroic. There are super-heroes and super-villains in comics and literature (maybe in real life too). In its currently popular form, the tabletop roleplaying hobby giant has seemingly moved away from any emphasis on playing the role of "hero" to one of enabling what I will call playing a power fantasy. Whether one sees this as a good thing or a bad thing will depend on personal taste. Good thing or bad thing aside, I think that it is a thing.
For example, I think we may agree that Frodo is a very different character from the dark knight. Their internal struggles make them both compelling characters. The fact that one can easily defeat the other in a fist-fight hardly matters. Being a hero means trying to make a positive difference in the world. Power without purpose is just that - not really heroic.
Returning for a moment to the topic of the game Call of Cthulhu I make the obvious comparison that CoC investigators are ordinary humans with vulnerabilities. The monsters are way more powerful than the characters. The game presumes that players will, through the actions of their characters, try to save the world by frustrating the various plots of evil cultists and alien entities.
Many people enjoy superhero comics and films. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that (it seems important to include this statement today). Superhero games have been a part of the RPG hobby for decades and lots of people enjoy playing them. It's just not my preferred form of entertainment. Under its current direction, the world's most heavily marketed role-playing game feels more like a power fantasy in which no one can agree on a definition of what making a positive difference might mean.
Did I mention things have changed since the late 1970s?
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