(Although maybe “Hypothesis” or “Rumination” is a better term. I don’t know that I can produce an idea on RPGs that comes close to being a “Theory”)
I was watching the new Voltron with my son yesterday (it’s great for the record). I started noticing the little character arcs of the cast. Some of the familiar “zero to hero” “weight of the world” “heart vs duty” stories played out in the episodes. It got me in mind of how comfortable certain narrative arcs are. Not stereotyped, just easy for me as an audience member to enjoy, recognize, and root for. I pumped my fist when the hero-kid picked up a sword and stood between his robot and the bad guys. “You’re not getting this lion!” he cried defiantly, and I was like “Hell yeah!”
Defiant hero teenager is pretty much playing right into the tropes of the genre. Watching the show though put me in mind of another mecha show which is basically its antithesis: Neon Genesis Evangelion.
People hate the first series/movie of that show (and with good reason). Shinji, our “hero”, is an unlikable twerp. Instead of being cool and defiant he’s a bumbling, incompetent little wimp. His character murders the escapist power fantasy. He kind of makes you sick, honestly. The whole series does.
They knew what they were doing, though. The series creators clearly new the genre tropes of Mecha anime, with exactly as much intimacy as the creators of Voltron. In both cases the comfort exhibited by the show’s writing reveals a deep understanding of the clockwork of the genre. The two series diverged radically in their aims: Voltron is a love letter to mecha/sentai shows, but NGE is a poisoned one.
There’s a scene in the movie where Asuka, the cute, tough female pilot (and one of Shinji’s “love interests”) gets into a fight with a wave of huge monsters. The scene starts like you’d expect: she’s kicking ass and tearing them apart. Then suddenly, everything changes. Her energy runs low and the bad guys lob a spear through her mech.
She’s defeated. Overwhelmed and beaten. Then the creatures she’s “killed” all start piecing themselves back together. Then they violently rip her mech to shreds.
It’s a stomach-turning, gripping scene. A scene that flies completely in the face of every trope of its genre. A great, agonizing visual metaphor for futility.
The “crush” character didn’t get in over her head and get rescued by the protagonist. She didn’t get to show off how “tough” she was by winning a hard-fought victory. She failed in a crushing, pointless defeat.
And as I watched the end of that scene for the first time, all of this dawning on my awestruck little mind, I let out a quiet but emphatic “Hell Yeah.”
…….
So we have a room full of writers who produced one show, where all of the heroic arcs and beats play out like clockwork. Then we have a different room of writers that made, like, an anti-clock out of the opposite of those same pieces.
So there’s weight to genre tropes, whether you consciously embrace them or defy them.
But what if you’re not consciously doing either?
There’s where RPGs come in. They’re a hybrid of both games and stories that draw from their own well of genre tropes (some of which are so ancient that they’re essentially dramatic laws).
A game writer has a genre in mind when they make their game. DnD had pulp classics like Howard’s Conan, the high fantasies of Tolkien, the material rationalism of De Camp and so on. Call of Cthulhu had the seminal works of H.P Lovecraft to guide it. Vampire: The Masquerade had Interview with a Vampire, Dracula, and even the Bible.
So there’s a well of tropes for the game when you draw up your campaign and make characters. Even while you play, those tropes inform the game.
RPG characters sometimes do follow the familiar arcs of their genre. But generally they veer off in unexpected directions. You could have a paladin going from zero-to-hero that, just following his arc, steals a forbidden otherworldly power so a big bad can’t get it. Then this malignant power slowly eats at him, driving him mad and warping his body. His actions keep getting grimmer, his judgment more skewed. Now he’s still becoming stronger, but his arc is different now. It’s something unexpected.
We’re familiar with the urgings of the genre to particular forms. But as GMs and Players we find the unexpected disrupting the clean lines of narrative. As people both playing a game and playing a part we’re left to interpret the meaning of events for a character. We find ourselves contemplating their perspective in order to inform their actions.
That chemistry is organic. It’s a unique, at-the-table thing that doesn’t happen in other media. There’s no room full of writer-guardians enforcing genre arcs. Instead there’s a pile of idiot-god dice scattering them to the winds.
The strange and satisfying beauty of character arcs in a roleplaying game is that we decide on them while in the jaws of these mechanics.
“My thief is a werewolf now, let’s see how that goes!”
“I guess we have the sword of kings now. Huh.”
“Wait, did we just make an enemy out of Nyarlathotep?!”
RPGs do something new. They break up the familiar and force us to pick up the pieces and figure out our own damn meaning.
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