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."