Instead, players should understand that their characters are part of a bigger world, that there are larger factors influencing their situation. Player agency is important, and sometimes there are legitimate moments in which the course of history is determined by a single person’s choice. The goal isn’t to make the PCs slaves to what’s going on around them. The game Kingdom uses certain PCs as Touchstones, someone who represents the views of common people. If your players know what regular people are going through, what they think of the current situation, it will put a better context on their adventure. Be careful with this because it runs the risk of distracting the story with unimportant details, but it can be very valuable. Not the village mayor or goblin chief, but the carpenter trying to patch up the holes in his stockade before the next raid. Are the villagers unable to protect themselves from goblins because they have no iron to make weapons? Were all their young people of fighting age conscripted to the King’s army? Perhaps the goblins are attacking in retaliation for their hunting grounds being turned into farmlands.įor the advanced GM, another valuable method is to flesh out minor NPCs. If the PCs are invested in a setting, they will understand the complicated factors that give rise to their adventures. If the fantasy kingdom/space empire/land of talking mice is more than just a collection of encounters, it will provide some context. The first step in solving this problem is simply to have a well developed setting. Outside of heroic fiction, those individuals are rare to nonexistent. Not only is this disingenuous, but it contributes to a savior complex – the idea that when there are problems, the only solution is to wait for some exceptional person to solve them. Everything is about them because they have the character sheets. You see this more in roleplaying games than in other stories because nearly everything is told from the PC’s perspective. Otherwise why spend so many hours playing them? The problem arises when the game focuses exclusively on their actions, as if nothing else matters. The PCs are supposed to be the main characters of their story. To a certain extent, this is how it should be. There’s little to no examination of how the villagers feel – or how the goblins feel, for that matter. Even if all the PCs are doing is saving a village from goblin attacks, the focus is on them. This is more obvious in large scale games, where the PCs lead armies or steer the course of nations, but it’s visible at small scale too. They are the important people whose whim shapes history. What does this have to do with roleplaying games, you may ask? The PCs are those Great Men. It doesn’t help that those few are almost always male and white, Ghandi notwithstanding. The Great Man Theory ignores the contributions of countless people and social circumstances in order to examine a select few. Gandhi became the face of an independence movement that had been building for decades, at least. Napoleon came to power in a time of great chaos caused by the French Revolution and all the events that led to it. The problem with the Great Man Theory is that it’s incredibly narrow and simplistic. They focus heavily on who led what battle and who was elected president on what date. High school history texts tend to use this method, even if it isn’t explicit. Napoleon caused the rise and fall of post-Revolutionary France, Gandhi was the man who made India independent, etc. The idea is that certain important people, for good or ill, caused events to turn out the way they did. Put simply, this is a way of looking at history that emphasizes influential individuals. If we really care about roleplaying games, we have to acknowledge their flaws in order to improve. However, there are a number of more systemic issues that are harder to explain away, and those are what we’re looking at today. Sometimes these problems can be chalked up to a single disruptive player or bad GM. We’ve all had a game or two where things just felt wrong. Unfortunately, they have a dark side as well. They let us become active parts of our favorite stories instead of passive observers. They provide hours and hours of entertainment with our friends. Roleplaying games take us on marvelous adventures.
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