And welcome to Day 30 of #RPGaDay!
"Something I Learned About Playing My Character"
You know, I've had no great revelation while I've played my PCs. I have, however, run a ton of campaigns, and if I've learned something from playing tons of NPCs, it's one thing.
Evil is never black and white.
Thirty years of running bad guys means thirty years of looking into the psyche of the villains. My conclusion? Most GMs, storytellers, writers, and even players rely on the classic tropes and stereotypes.
If we focus on cultural, ethnic, and racial stereotypes for the sliver of possible truth that is wildly and negatively exaggerated, we miss out on the other 99.9% of the awesomeness those groups can impact on our lives. The same is true for villains.
Evil comes in so many shades and directions that it's insulting to make every villain in your Modern RPG a classic Bond villain... but with a single twist that everyone forgets about thirty minutes after the big reveal.
To put it into a modern political bent, even Nazis are not cookie cutter villains. Sure, certain types of NPCs should be. You may hate them, it's certainly justified, but lumping every one of these bad guys with the same ideas and plots is actually very shortsighted. If there wasn't some significant variation, we wouldn't have some people as ultimate evil-doers and some as just misunderstood anti-heroes.
"Something I Learned About Playing My Character"
You know, I've had no great revelation while I've played my PCs. I have, however, run a ton of campaigns, and if I've learned something from playing tons of NPCs, it's one thing.
Evil is never black and white.
Thirty years of running bad guys means thirty years of looking into the psyche of the villains. My conclusion? Most GMs, storytellers, writers, and even players rely on the classic tropes and stereotypes.
If we focus on cultural, ethnic, and racial stereotypes for the sliver of possible truth that is wildly and negatively exaggerated, we miss out on the other 99.9% of the awesomeness those groups can impact on our lives. The same is true for villains.
Evil comes in so many shades and directions that it's insulting to make every villain in your Modern RPG a classic Bond villain... but with a single twist that everyone forgets about thirty minutes after the big reveal.
To put it into a modern political bent, even Nazis are not cookie cutter villains. Sure, certain types of NPCs should be. You may hate them, it's certainly justified, but lumping every one of these bad guys with the same ideas and plots is actually very shortsighted. If there wasn't some significant variation, we wouldn't have some people as ultimate evil-doers and some as just misunderstood anti-heroes.
 |
| Because the Swastika cookie cutter I found on a Google search is waaaay too distasteful. |
Sometimes villains turn out to be good guys underneath - Darth Vader for example.
ReplyDeleteRight, James. A select few are simply irredeemable, most love their parents, spouses, kids.
ReplyDeleteEh...I'd debate tha Vader was really a good guy under it all, but you can easily argue that it was his perspective drawn from his particular hardships and pains that drove him. In a similar vein its why Magneto is sych a good villian. Unambiguously does bad shit, but you can understand and maybe even sympathize with his pathos.
ReplyDeleteIt sure makes them more relatable villians than "Bugbear chieftain #4"