I have recently observed a horseshoe effect (sort of) in how different RPG philosophies arrive at the conclusion of "superhuman PCs are bad; focus on the power of organizing people instead."Now, I am all for superhuman PCs. I like D&D 4e, Path/Starfinder 2e, Draw Steel, 13th Age 2e, explicitly demigod games like Godbound, and explicitly superhero games like Sentinel Comics and Outgunned: Superheroes. If there is an evil dragon or magician imperiling the land, the PCs personally venture out to neutralize the threat themselves. This is straightforward to resolve mechanically (short of heavy abstractions), and there is a tactical element as well (allied minions get fried by AoE).But I also stick around various Discord servers, some of which have wildly different views on RPGs. Lately, I have observed two different camps across two different servers, unaware of each other, aver a similar stance under different lenses: "Overtly superhuman PCs are bad, cringe, and should be avoided. Experienced PCs should be heroic in strength, but only subtly so; their real power should instead be their ability to organize people to solve major problems. If an evil dragon or magician is imperil all the land, the solution should be to assemble hundreds or more people to address the threat together."On one hand, there is an OSR crowd. They arrive at the above stance through rejection of "modern D&D," superhero slop, MCU slop, anime slop, and so on. Here, grittiness and realism is prized. The ideal high-level PC becomes a monarch or a monarch-like figure by starting from scratch, getting rich from dungeon-delving and mercenary work, bloodily carving out a domain, and hiring people to be soldiers and other underlings. The king organizes a formal army against the evil dragon or magician or whatever.On the other hand...(Continued in the next post.)
On the other hand, there is a more narrative-game-oriented crowd, for which Stonetop has overwhelmingly been the spotlight game for the past several months. Here, grittiness and realism is also prized, but the rationale is couched very differently: superhuman demigods simply are not how life and community work, and they are not the kind of lesson we should be teaching. The ideal experienced PC also becomes a major leader, but it is presented less as feudal or institutional power, and more as influence rooted in a proven track record of altruistically helping the community. The wise watch leader gathers the clan's best warriors, trains together with them on how to fight a dragon or magician, and marches out. That sort of thing.What do you personally think on the "superhuman PCs are bad; focus on the power of organizing people instead" subject?
skub
A bunch of faggots invaded the hobby to raise their flag over it and make everything about their political hangups, why would you give a shit what they think?
Superhuman PCs are obviously good, of course.
Edna you are the best poster left on this shitty board And that's fucking terrifying
>>98759107>>98759135Hey Touhou, contributing some past thoughts on this subject.
>>98759135Honestly never knew this was a thing. Though as a weirdo with a discord account to a freeform rp server, I guess I can share my own perspective on that. When you play in a roleplaying game where the power ceiling is as low or high as people want it, and everyone starts high, the novelty of “raw power” kind of dies down and personality and charisma become more important. And I don’t mean “I can describe how my vampire sex god can make women soak their panties by waking into the room”. I’m talking about someone who can actually write a guy who is willing to sit down, listen, make convincing arguments, and overall schmooze better. And those kind of personalities tend to be given the unofficial jobs of wrangling the gods and-or smoothing things out with the normies since they have the social capacity for it. Which often ends up with even the guys with the highest self-proclaimed power levels deferring to them when the npcs are somehow in phased regarding their bluffs on how they can blow up the planet.After seeing it happen three times and having my comparatively normal character be appointed the one in charge of the boring paperwork, aka be the in-game leader of the merry band of galactic travelers, I wouldn’t say “superhuman PCs bad.” I’d say superhuman PCs ultimately are just less impressive before the guy who can roleplay his way out of a paper bag.
>>98759107That's just an aging demographic bringing more and more of how people work into the games.Enjoy the lull, when their kids get to middle school we'll be drowning in capeshit again.
>>98761697>RPG tastes work like tastes in alcohol I see. Not sure how to feel about that.
>>98761551Quality post. Or pic of quality post, at least. >>98759107Lone superheroes are boring. There comes a point where the stacking numbers become meaningless and it makes the whole RPG endeavour seem pointless. Sort of Fr Manhatten vibes. The only enjoyable high level play is where NPCs are important (perhaps even more important) and connections are vital. There is also no better reward than diegetic social power. When people do as you say, look to you for leadership, that feels good. Throwing a billion damage can't compare.
>>98762102Well said
>>98759107can you convine the two and have a god emperor endgame?t-d non dnd player.-
>>98762102Poorly said, and false.>>98761551Poor quality post.
>>98759107Superheroes are power fantasy, and a power fantasy is something what is hard to make tasteful. I really like superheroes, but when I think about a possible campaign, I'd make some multigenerational drama with a lot of real lofe history and politics as a reference.
Who told you it should be tasteful?
>>98759107>>98759135>What do you personally think on the "superhuman PCs are bad; focus on the power of organizing people instead" subject?I think you're missing part of the descriptive context on both ends, having started as a narrative storyfag in 2004 getting out of the 3.5 ghetto then drifting over to OSR a decade later. Both of the groupings are, more than rejecting superpowers, are rejecting the cruft, book keeping and gameplay focus of Wizards of the Coast style gameplay, both in terms of how it tries to do narrative but poorly and how it tries to do dungeons & dragons but poorly, yet somehow taking longer to do it in either case. Much storygaming is very oriented around being superpowered, there are dozens of games literally about that that were instrumental in PBTA leading to BitD and the current milieu. Dungeon World was entirely about super powered dnd just making it less fiddly for players and lessbookwork for the gm. Similarly OSR has as end goals a variety of superpowered capacity, the group organizing is just what some of the classes focus on rather than being the whole of it. High level wizards, clerics, druids, etc. are all super powered. Heck, high level Fighting Men are end literally classified as super heroes. Again, it isn't quite about not having super powers but with osr its more about how those powers develop over time rather than being front loaded.There are girt and TRV MTL memes about how mudcore things should be, but those are more memes than anything else.
