In my last post I examined my personal beliefs about heroism, and what it means to be a hero. This post is about the complementary subject - villainy.
Firstly, I will say that I believe that there is a fundamental difference between villainy and evil. To me, evil is the belief that one can impose ones thoughts and feelings on others, and that one has the right to do so. Evil has no regard for the feelings of others, because to the evil being, other people are not important. On the other hand, villainy is simply the conscious choice to act out of selfishness. It accepts that the feelings of others exist and are important to them, and then does something potentially hurtful anyway. Not usually because the villain believes he has the right to do it, but because he has a need to do it, because some external force is bearing upon him.
Taking a quick look at some iconic villains, then:
Lex Luthor. Lex is, to my mind, actually evil. He may not be casually cruel, but he certainly feels that he has the right to do anything he pleases. His own cunning allows him to temper his activities in such a way that it is not obvious to the world at large, but his core drive has no sympathy for the plight of other people.
Darth Vader: Okay, not a villain in the superhero sense, but a totally iconic villain nonetheless. The important thing to note about Vader is that he changes. I'm going to ignore The Phantom Menace, because he's too young to actually make reasoned choices, but in Attack of the Clones, Anakin Skywalker is clearly a hero. However, in Revenge of the Sith he rapidly shifts to villainy as a result of his fears of the future, and leaps to evil later on in the same film when Palpatine manages to convince him that taking iron control of his future is the right thing to do. While I think that it was done too quickly, it was actually an interesting visualisation of the fall from grace.
Catwoman. Not sure why I'm pulling DC villains out for this, other than that my exposure to DC was a lot higher than to Marvel when I was younger, because, frankly Batman is COOL. Anyway, Catwoman is a villain. She's a crook, a thief, not out to rule the world, just out for what she can get. She doesn't try to impose herself on other people except to get things she wants.
And, just for completionism, a look at my own villain from City of Heroes (well, City of Villains) - Psychonova. He's evil. I'm really not sure that I can go into all of the reasons why, but he is. He was meant to be, and continues to be, a truly despicable person, without any care or regard for the thoughts of feelings of others. Out for what he wants, and willing to do anything to get it. He's pretty much textbook evil, as far as I'm concerned.
The themes prevalent in those who are truly evil become obvious - some event or knowledge convinces the evil person that they have the one true vision of the way the world should be. Conversely, a villain is usually driven to their actions by some outside force or impulse. While it is possible for a villain to descend into evil, it is quite rare for someone who is evil to then ascend back. But it does happen. Darth Vader is a good case-in-point of this, with his redemption at the hands of his son. One thing that I'm not sure I've ever actually witnessed, though, is an evil person changing to become merely a villain. They will usually jump straight back to good or heroic. The change of heart that makes someone recognise the rights and values of others tends to blot out any prospect of villainy.
I can't take the time to discuss the myriad means by which a villain can descend to that level - might as well try to count the stars in the sky, because there are at least that many answers.
When it comes to roleplaying, then, it is always a good idea for the GM to know if the "bad guy" is villainous or evil, because the flavour of their activity will be coloured by it. A lot of modern comic books take the time to delve into the psyche of the antagonist, to explore what makes them the person that they are, and that is a good thing, since it allows us to explore the human phase-space of experience and events in a safe environment, but the thing that I personally enjoy is a well represented evil character. The Joker. Lex Luthor. Galactus. Megatron. Sometimes I like to hate the bad guy. It's why I made Psychonova as evil as he is - I get a lot of joy out of trouncing someone who is unequivocally evil, and offering that chance to my fellow RPers is part of the joy I take in running plots and GMing.
In conclusion: While similar, villainy and evilness are by no means the same thing. Evil may be a sub-set of villainy, but there are some clear distinctions and knowing the boundaries of each is worthwhile for anyone preparing to play a villain or an evil character. And, while it is a perfectly valid thing in this day and age of social awareness to ascribe motivations and reasoned actions to characters, to give them the chance at the sympathy vote from players, a GM should not be afraid to introduce a "bad guy" who is just plain EVIL. Being able to pound on someone because doing so is simply the right thing to do, without having to second-guess your actions, is one of the great pleasures in roleplaying, and it never hurts to let the players do it.
Monday 2 November 2009
Weekly Games: M&M
Sorry I've been away for so long, dear readers - new job combined with lots of holiday very rapidly has left me in a position where I've pretty much always found something more important to do thant write in this blog.
Plus, my memory being what it is, I'm undoubtedly going to forget a load of stuff that's been going on in my weekly games. I also have a post that I'm writing about a game I took part in a couple of months ago, now.
For the purposes of this post, though, I'm not going to focus on the events of the game session that happened, but rather on the implications of it.
I've previously described the party that is undertaking this game, at least in general terms, but what hasn't been covered in detail is my intent for the campaign. The most interesting thing to note from this perspective is that only a couple of the characters - Liberty Belle and Procyon - strictly fall within the specific genre I'm going for. The game is probably best described to comic geeks as "Bronze Age", but I'm not massively up on my terminology, so I might have that a little wrong. What I'm aiming for is slightly over-the-top villainy (the bad guys are bad, monologue lots, and have dastardly plans for taking over the world!), coupled with a more realistic appreciation of the lives of the heroes, and the things that matter to them. Ultimately, the direction I'm trying to guide things is that the interactions between the PCs, their lives and the things that matter to them are the important things. What the villains are up to is entirely secondary to that (though in a given session it might not seem that way).
Anyway, Liberty Belle and Procyon are Silver Age-esque "heroes are heroic!" characters, but with sufficient character flaws and complications to give them some traction. The rest of the party - and by no means do I consider this to be a bad thing - are more gritty and realistic.
This led to an interesting question raised in our last session. To briefly explain the situation - the heroes are currently on "Anti-Earth" - sort of the dark mirror to their own world, where the good guys are bad, and the bad guys are good - or dead.
The party quite swiftly fell into two camps regarding their responsibilities to the world in which they found themselves: Group A want to liberate the people, free the oppressed and generally be all-round good-guys. Group B want to do what they came here to do and get home.
Personally, I'm in Group B, but as the GM, and given that I want the players to make this sort of decision for themselves, I don't have any say in it. Nor do I want to influence the decision, because this is exactly the sort of theme I'm trying to explore in this campaign. Yes, hello players, you're all guinea pigs in the GM's social experiment.
A little bit of background for anyone not familiar with the Freedom City M&M setting. Anti-Earth is, as previously stated, the dark mirror to the universe of Freedom. For anyone familiar with City of Heroes, you won't go far wrong if you imagine Praetorian Earth as represented in the game so far (and definitely ignoring the dystopia that it will be revealed as in Going Rogue). The world is ruled by a cruel group of villainous super-powered beings called the Tyranny Syndicate, and the entire world is riddled with corruption, graft, cruelty, and all the vices of the modern world, expanded into the mainstream. It is not this way because some event made it different from the world of Freedom - it is like that because that's the way the world is.
Now, the standard superhero trope of "fight your doppelgangers" has already popped up in reduced form, and the heroes have already met Anti-Earth's sole, lonely hero, Mind Master (who, on their own world, is the villainous Mastermind). They are here to perform a rescue, arrived unplanned, with reduced resources... and the upstanding true-blue heroes among them are determined to "save the world", while the more down-to-Earth (I want to say pessimistic, but that's not really true) members of the group want to just do the rescue and make their way home.
This, then, raises the true point of this post: In a superheroic setting, are there any circumstances in which it is "reasonable" for a hero to be less than completely heroic?
This calls to the fundamental nature of a "hero", I suppose. To me, a hero is someone who, for whatever reason, helps to improve the lives of others without regard for personal gain or safety, and without regard for whom they are helping. I make that distinction quite purposefully, because it's possible for someone to help a specific person without regard for personal gain or safety, and not be heroic at all.
Now, in comics, the true, dyed in the wool heroes are larger than life personalities, clad in spandex, going around rescuing cats from trees, helping old ladies with their shopping and foiling bank robberies. The interesting stuff all tends to happen when a) their personal life gets involved or b) a particularly dastardly villain proves more than they can handle. But this particular situation is neither of those. It's a question of whether they truly are heroes, and what does being a hero mean to them.
Of course, I'm not so megalomaniacal that I believe that my definition of a hero is the true one, but I've not really seen anything that makes me want to change it. Nor am I going to enforce my beliefs onto my players - they have their characters, and they can play them however they want to, as far as I'm concerned.
For this situation, I'm only interested in the spectrum of heroism, rather than the full range of human responses. So, given that a hero's natural reaction to "bad things" is going to be "fix bad things", the range of possible actions is limited. As I see it, though, in the situation as presented, we have the two ends of the spectrum already - one the one hand there's "help those we came to help, and then get home", and on the other is "help everyone".
In a world not your own, where you are strangers, possibly feared, certainly hated by the powers that be, where does each hero stand? And why?
As I see it, a hero should want to help everyone. But in this circumstance, is it really feasible for their actions to match their desires? I don't actually think so. It's not their world, they have responsibilities to discharge in the universe they belong to, and the sheer scale of the problem on Anti-Earth is specifically tailored to be beyond them. They cannot just leap in and expect to win. And if they try, then they are running the risk of failing their own friends and families back home. But that should never stop the desire to help everyone. To have the potential to be larger than life.
Some may reach this conclusion quickly, for various reasons - perhaps they are smart enough to recognise that to win, they need more time to prepare, to gain every advantage they can. It's not something that can be won with fisticuffs - it needs social engineering on a grand scale, and is vastly beyond the intended scope of the current adventure. Which doesn't mean I would be upset if the players got proactive and decided to do something about it in the future.
In conclusion: A hero is still a hero even when they step away from a fight they can't win. Sometimes they are a hero because they step away from a fight. It is not actions that define a hero, but intent. And the intent should be an unthinking reaction to the welfare of others, and working to improve it. A hero is not a hero because they reasoned that it was the right thing to do, or because they feel responsible for others, or because they are looking to learn something about themselves. A hero is a hero because it is a fundamental part of who they are, which makes them do things to better the lives of others, and they don't think about it. They just do it. Not always the way they want, not always when they want, but they never turn their face away and give in.
Some people will say that a hero is someone who risks themselves to help others, but I don't see that. In the broader context of superheroics, characters like Superman are rarely in danger (Kryptonite notwithstanding), but I wouldn't dispute that he is a hero. One of my own roleplaying characters, Shadowe, in the City of Heroes MMO, is effectively immortal and unkillable, yet I believe that he is a hero, despite not really being in any true danger, no matter what he does. Spider-man is mortal, and became a hero out of guilt, and the awakening knowledge that "with great power comes great responsibility". Peter Parker could have taken that trite little phrase to mean that he has a responsibility to punish the guilty, as a way to assuage his own guilt. But instead he took the more difficult, and vastly more heroic, path to the real responsibility that heroes have - to help others. Because it is not about the dangers that heroes face. It never was, and never should be. It is about the ideals that they hold dear, and the constant striving to make the world a better place. Or, as Shadowe has been known to put it: "Making the world a nicer place, for one person at a time."
Plus, my memory being what it is, I'm undoubtedly going to forget a load of stuff that's been going on in my weekly games. I also have a post that I'm writing about a game I took part in a couple of months ago, now.
For the purposes of this post, though, I'm not going to focus on the events of the game session that happened, but rather on the implications of it.
I've previously described the party that is undertaking this game, at least in general terms, but what hasn't been covered in detail is my intent for the campaign. The most interesting thing to note from this perspective is that only a couple of the characters - Liberty Belle and Procyon - strictly fall within the specific genre I'm going for. The game is probably best described to comic geeks as "Bronze Age", but I'm not massively up on my terminology, so I might have that a little wrong. What I'm aiming for is slightly over-the-top villainy (the bad guys are bad, monologue lots, and have dastardly plans for taking over the world!), coupled with a more realistic appreciation of the lives of the heroes, and the things that matter to them. Ultimately, the direction I'm trying to guide things is that the interactions between the PCs, their lives and the things that matter to them are the important things. What the villains are up to is entirely secondary to that (though in a given session it might not seem that way).
Anyway, Liberty Belle and Procyon are Silver Age-esque "heroes are heroic!" characters, but with sufficient character flaws and complications to give them some traction. The rest of the party - and by no means do I consider this to be a bad thing - are more gritty and realistic.
This led to an interesting question raised in our last session. To briefly explain the situation - the heroes are currently on "Anti-Earth" - sort of the dark mirror to their own world, where the good guys are bad, and the bad guys are good - or dead.
The party quite swiftly fell into two camps regarding their responsibilities to the world in which they found themselves: Group A want to liberate the people, free the oppressed and generally be all-round good-guys. Group B want to do what they came here to do and get home.
Personally, I'm in Group B, but as the GM, and given that I want the players to make this sort of decision for themselves, I don't have any say in it. Nor do I want to influence the decision, because this is exactly the sort of theme I'm trying to explore in this campaign. Yes, hello players, you're all guinea pigs in the GM's social experiment.
A little bit of background for anyone not familiar with the Freedom City M&M setting. Anti-Earth is, as previously stated, the dark mirror to the universe of Freedom. For anyone familiar with City of Heroes, you won't go far wrong if you imagine Praetorian Earth as represented in the game so far (and definitely ignoring the dystopia that it will be revealed as in Going Rogue). The world is ruled by a cruel group of villainous super-powered beings called the Tyranny Syndicate, and the entire world is riddled with corruption, graft, cruelty, and all the vices of the modern world, expanded into the mainstream. It is not this way because some event made it different from the world of Freedom - it is like that because that's the way the world is.
Now, the standard superhero trope of "fight your doppelgangers" has already popped up in reduced form, and the heroes have already met Anti-Earth's sole, lonely hero, Mind Master (who, on their own world, is the villainous Mastermind). They are here to perform a rescue, arrived unplanned, with reduced resources... and the upstanding true-blue heroes among them are determined to "save the world", while the more down-to-Earth (I want to say pessimistic, but that's not really true) members of the group want to just do the rescue and make their way home.
This, then, raises the true point of this post: In a superheroic setting, are there any circumstances in which it is "reasonable" for a hero to be less than completely heroic?
This calls to the fundamental nature of a "hero", I suppose. To me, a hero is someone who, for whatever reason, helps to improve the lives of others without regard for personal gain or safety, and without regard for whom they are helping. I make that distinction quite purposefully, because it's possible for someone to help a specific person without regard for personal gain or safety, and not be heroic at all.
Now, in comics, the true, dyed in the wool heroes are larger than life personalities, clad in spandex, going around rescuing cats from trees, helping old ladies with their shopping and foiling bank robberies. The interesting stuff all tends to happen when a) their personal life gets involved or b) a particularly dastardly villain proves more than they can handle. But this particular situation is neither of those. It's a question of whether they truly are heroes, and what does being a hero mean to them.
Of course, I'm not so megalomaniacal that I believe that my definition of a hero is the true one, but I've not really seen anything that makes me want to change it. Nor am I going to enforce my beliefs onto my players - they have their characters, and they can play them however they want to, as far as I'm concerned.
For this situation, I'm only interested in the spectrum of heroism, rather than the full range of human responses. So, given that a hero's natural reaction to "bad things" is going to be "fix bad things", the range of possible actions is limited. As I see it, though, in the situation as presented, we have the two ends of the spectrum already - one the one hand there's "help those we came to help, and then get home", and on the other is "help everyone".
In a world not your own, where you are strangers, possibly feared, certainly hated by the powers that be, where does each hero stand? And why?
As I see it, a hero should want to help everyone. But in this circumstance, is it really feasible for their actions to match their desires? I don't actually think so. It's not their world, they have responsibilities to discharge in the universe they belong to, and the sheer scale of the problem on Anti-Earth is specifically tailored to be beyond them. They cannot just leap in and expect to win. And if they try, then they are running the risk of failing their own friends and families back home. But that should never stop the desire to help everyone. To have the potential to be larger than life.
Some may reach this conclusion quickly, for various reasons - perhaps they are smart enough to recognise that to win, they need more time to prepare, to gain every advantage they can. It's not something that can be won with fisticuffs - it needs social engineering on a grand scale, and is vastly beyond the intended scope of the current adventure. Which doesn't mean I would be upset if the players got proactive and decided to do something about it in the future.
In conclusion: A hero is still a hero even when they step away from a fight they can't win. Sometimes they are a hero because they step away from a fight. It is not actions that define a hero, but intent. And the intent should be an unthinking reaction to the welfare of others, and working to improve it. A hero is not a hero because they reasoned that it was the right thing to do, or because they feel responsible for others, or because they are looking to learn something about themselves. A hero is a hero because it is a fundamental part of who they are, which makes them do things to better the lives of others, and they don't think about it. They just do it. Not always the way they want, not always when they want, but they never turn their face away and give in.
Some people will say that a hero is someone who risks themselves to help others, but I don't see that. In the broader context of superheroics, characters like Superman are rarely in danger (Kryptonite notwithstanding), but I wouldn't dispute that he is a hero. One of my own roleplaying characters, Shadowe, in the City of Heroes MMO, is effectively immortal and unkillable, yet I believe that he is a hero, despite not really being in any true danger, no matter what he does. Spider-man is mortal, and became a hero out of guilt, and the awakening knowledge that "with great power comes great responsibility". Peter Parker could have taken that trite little phrase to mean that he has a responsibility to punish the guilty, as a way to assuage his own guilt. But instead he took the more difficult, and vastly more heroic, path to the real responsibility that heroes have - to help others. Because it is not about the dangers that heroes face. It never was, and never should be. It is about the ideals that they hold dear, and the constant striving to make the world a better place. Or, as Shadowe has been known to put it: "Making the world a nicer place, for one person at a time."
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