Lessons from Dungeons and Dragons about storytelling (2013)
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This is the main reason I don't like superhero films. There is no sense of danger or vulnerability. It's just people in fancy jumpsuits doing acrobats around explosions till they win the day. I prefer main characters dying / at severe risk of dying. Give me tragedy. Show me vulnerable people who grow and become stronger.
It's actually a very common pattern. Might even be Shonen manga 101.
I liked very much the Marvel movies that were fun (Guardians of the Galaxy for instance) and did not rewatch the sad and heavy ones.
It is of course a matter of personal taste. My wife terrorized me a few times into going with her to movies where I either had to take notes to follow the narrative, wonder about the mental sanity of the script writer and the director, wonder whether the movie froze when people were looking at each other for 5 minutes without saying anything, or simply trying to find a comfortable position to sleep.
Some of these movies left a trace, though, but maybe not a very good one (usually Almodóvar movies)
To be clear, I don't like it either if others consider their taste to be 'superior', but simply stating what you prefer is not - I think - implying anything.
I feel like there's a trap people fall into where they tie some of their self-worth to their entertainment choices. If you don't like the music (say) that I do, then that seems like no big deal to me.
More generally, there is the opposite situation to being a 'superfan' where people delight in putting stuff down. Ultimately if you don't like (say) Marvel movies, then just don't watch them, of course. However it's reasonable to be critical of any entertainment or art form if you can articulate why and how they could be better.
Just my two cents.
When looking for some new styles, I found it interesting to see some of them on youtube "recap" channels. This opened me to some new styles (to a point at least).
Same for music. I listen to more or less everything except a few styles which I do not like. Take rap for instance - most of the current rap music is unbearable to me and I can qualify why I feel that way (either from a music perspective, the lyrics or the overall message). This said, I like very much some of them, usually a bit older ones, or from people who has a message to send. It just takes an awful amount of time to track them down.
My gripe is that Marvel's dominance seems to have massively reduced the variety of movies in the cinema. I'm not talking arthouse, I mean blockbusters.
About half of all big-budget movies seem to be about a guy (usually) with special powers. I know derivative sequels were a thing before Marvel, but it would be nice to have a little more variety.
* A ordinary person has to cope with an extraordinary situation, or
* An extraordinary person has to cope with an ordinary situation.
While we didn't feel it was a great fit for some stories, it definitely applied to a few of the greats.
The power fantasy comes as a reward for those early phases of the game where characters build their careers up in those editions.
e.g. trying to do https://bullypulpitgames.com/games/grey-ranks/ in any edition of D&D won't work well.
Haven't decided on a system for the next campaign, maybe Spire, Night's Black Agents (or other Gumshoe system), or one of the many excellent PbtA games.
(If your character can't make a difference, it really isn't much fun.)
The strangest thing I see in today's young roleplayers is how they stick to a single system -- D&D 5e -- obsessively. Different systems are good at different aspects of storytelling, and the occasional attempts at universally-applicable rules (GURPS, I'm looking at you) tend to be mediocre at everything. A really good GM can overcome this, but you shouldn't need to depend on having a really good GM in order to have a successful game.
On the other hand, every lesson learned from this article is applicable across games and genres and media types.
I assume they work for younger viewers but I really can't understand how any adult who respects their own time can enjoy these. There is never anything on stake, there's no danger, there's never a chance for the bad guys to ever win. You know even if some superheroes die, they will either come back or another way to win the day will emerge. So what's the point?
Martin Scorsese expressed a very similar thought(1) for which he had to answer later on. He then explained exactly this: nothing is at risk.
I think that's why shows like The Boys do so well, because besides the bloody visuals they offer the chance that some characters might just not make it, anyone can meet their end at any point.
You can't kill US superheroes because then how will you continue monetizing them? In that regard you can really appreciate the approach they have in the UK where they just end a franchise when they feel they told its story even if it became very popular.
I am just sitting here for an entire decade waiting for great, engaging movies to make a comeback.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...
So in the ensemble movies (like Avengers) you get teams where some of the members are in no danger at all - the Gods - while the others are very much in danger! Except of course, the viewer knows that none of the good guys are really at risk of serious injury.
I'm sure directors try to avoid or work around this, but fundamentally if the big bad guy can knock out the strongest god (eg Thanos vs Hulk) then if they so much as strike one of the normals, they should really be dead.
Finally, it's very funny to me that Scorsese got criticised for expressing an opinion on movies. I mean, I've watched a lot of these crappy superheor movies, and they are enjoyable enough at times, but it's not great cinema ...
I think though that it's a huge compromise and sometimes as far as giving up your artistic integrity when you make a superhero blockbuster. You're making entertainment for kids, you're being pinned by focus groups, ad men and franchising demands, not to mention the strict age requirements, and as of late, olbigatory cultural stances. How can you even make a movie like that?
Don't even get me started on the ensemble movies. Those are atrocious. Good luck jamming 40 lead heroes in your movie and having anything substantial happen to their characters. Not that having them together makes any sense. Even if you own both Iron Man and Guardians of the Galaxy, thay don't mix! They have a completely different vibe!
It would be a fun experiment to create a Marvel Movie Script Generator and see if you can get something resembling (or even better?) than their usual shtick.
Of course, money is to blame. When your movie is a corporate product designed to earn for shareholders, you get pictures like MCU and the Transformers movies. These movies are doing their job. Too bad for us for being interested in an engaging, original experience. Thank goodness off beat studios exist that produce some actually interesting movies.
Official RPG campaign did it a lot, because of course they wanted to sell the X supplements to the Y players too.
When one member of the party can stop time, call down meteors or kill with a word then just being able to swing a sword really well seems less impressive.
That alone is an interesting take, but it gets better when dealing with the actual heroes. It's a great parody of Marvel and plenty of cultural queues. They explore a reality where the superheroes are marketable products and everything they do is for the optics. In reality, they are horrible, horrible people with a God complex that often do horrifying things.
It's the best superhero story I enjoyed in a long, long time.
I haven’t seen the boys so I can’t comment on it specifically but I would ask, is it really “realistic” or is it just cynical?
It's a different take. In a world where some people have absolute power, would they get absolutely corrupted?
The answer (from The Boys) is not so clear cut.
Spider-Man isn’t a series that says what would happen if a dude got spider powers and fought crime. It’s a story about a specific person, built around specific themes. Stories aren’t simulations.
Some people think that if a deconstruction work has characters die, because normally some people would die if they fight all the time, that it must be a realistic portrayal of what would happen. That’s false! It’s still a story and glossing over the boys it certainly doesn’t seem very different. It’s not a story about what would happen if superheroes were real and had too much power. It’s a story about some specific assholes mostly who have superpowers.
The real answer is that if people gained super powers, they would not start being superheroes to begin with.
Conerecing The Boys, it's not about humanity as much as it's about American stuff. It's being very very specific with its criticism. Homelander is not just a psychopath, he's a product, literally, of American culture (represented by conglomerate Vaught).
Also, while The Boys has criticism and some characters might not survive, it's also very tongue in cheek and tries to entertain rather than lecture. Personally I have fun watching it. If nothing else, it manages to surprise me, which is not something I could say about superhero movies in the last ten years.
No, the absolute power/absolute corruption in The Boys is not in the superheros.
The cynicism is portrayed, and expounded upon, by several of the show's characters.
It's not cynicism for cynicism's sake, or just to be edgy. The dystopian feel that the series imparts isn't corny or overdone. I imagine this is how a world with superheroes would act/react.
Season 4 was when things started going downhill with the "writing" team, and that plot armor is one of the major reasons. But it most definitely wasn't a lie before that or in the books.
Some of the zombie shows have killed off nearly all of their starting cast (some... haven't).
Iron Man? Dead. Black Widow? Dead, returned for a prequel. Captain America? Dead, Captain Britain showed up for a cameo. Vision? Dead, returned in a magic dream for a span, still probably dead? Hawkeye? Retired, body battered beyond further use. Scarlet witch? Probably dead.
Only Loki is really playing into to the trope of "Dead, but not really, over and over again."
There's also the question of where imitators fall; is Kate Bishop just a reboot of Hawkeye?
So you usually know what you will get, but the villain winning or partially winning is a credible threat.
The "major losses" always felt like they are manifactured in a shallow and meaningless way. You know your heroes aren't going to lose, or die, or get too badly injured. They will always bounce back and the damage will be reversed.
And this is all fine given you accept that superhero movies are primarily entertainment for kids. Which by the way explains why we get the same reboots and origin stories every 10-15 years for a fresh batch of kids.
Of course it's a matter of taste but I just don't see any substance in these movies. Honestly even when I was a kid myself I never really saw the appeal in something like "Batman vs Superman" or "Godzilla vs King Kong". It always seemed pointless to me. As an adult I am just puzzled trying to understand how these movies can hold anyone's attention. But to each their own I guess.
I have no choice but to wholly agree with Scorsese. Unengaging, predictable, day care in a theater.
Humans have enjoyed staring into dancing firelight for millenia. No plot even, and you know exactly what will happen to the flames in the end. What if not being able to just hang out and marvel pleasantly at visual spectacle is bad and the films are actually fine?
Tons exist, lots and lots of movies are made every year.
And that struggle and growth is often best encapsulated in the fight sequences themselves.
Honestly I’m beginning to despise character drama. Superhero movies have tons of drama — the whole storyline typically lives solely to create character growth and personal shifts, and otherwise is largely irrelevant (if the characters don’t learn some lesson, they’ll never succeed). I want it to favor the other way; the story/fights exist, and the characters happen to grow through that experience.
I too want more Jackie Chan: long take highlighting the actions, extremely skilled performer, large budgets spent on retakes until the shot is perfect. But that’s Hong Kong Jackie Chan. Apart from a brief stint in the 70s, Hollywood has never been keen on making interesting movies. They are first and foremost a money making machine. With Disney having consolidated so much of the production market, I fully expect formulaic movies to be released ad nauseam and to be honest as much as it pains me that’s what the general public wants.
Thankfully things get better as soon as you leave the American market.
When I was watching the final episode of Stranger Things, there was a minutes-long sequence flashing between almost all of the characters, showing their struggles. I didn't feel engaged, because I didn't feel like the characters were actually at risk.
Most times heroes in the heroes journey always loses something, a part of them dies off. Or when going back, it's never the same any more. See Lord of the Rings for the best example. Not sure if there's another modern one?
Risk of personal death is tough to pull off convincingly. Risk of death to those they’re trying to protect is much better. And happens pretty frequently.
So you maybe could give it a try again, as they try to reach more depth.
(but those I have seen, were mostly still pathetic)
It's hard to pull off: you kill off the main character in a series, and the show can go on. You kill off the protagonist in a movie and it's the end of the movie, and the entire franchise.
Watchmen followed the graphic novel very closely, so maybe you might enjoy those super heroes.
Then, there is the "drama" cycle. No more jokes, this is serious business. People die, heroes are not so heroic, expect Pyrrhic victories if they win, actors get Oscars.
Personally, I like both, though I have my phases too.
I watched a YouTube video recently (forget which one, or I'd link it) that claimed this is the reason all the Marvel superheroes are so quippy—it's a cheap way to get us to like them when the usual tool of making them relatable through vulnerability isn't available.
That's also easier (so, cheaper). It's easier to write that kind of thing than to write real characters. Less chance of a dud, quicker writing process, lower risk.
Whether they pull it off convincingly or if it's just given lip service is another thing, but ostensibly just because it's a super hero movie doesn't mean it doesn't apply (at least for the first movie for a character).
A good example is one punch man. While everybody around him obsesses about the secret to his power, the main character is mostly concerned about not missing the 50% off mushrooms sale at the supermarket.
There's something about this plot that appeals to people. Perhaps the whole "how i feel inside but keep quiet" introvert personality pitted against "loud incompetents". Dunno. But it works great.
This is dangerous advice:
> Stories can become a way of learning how to face situations we can't control, grapple with loss, and become resilient.
This is true of books, but you can put a book down and walk away. D&D has the potential for social and emotion investment that is far more difficult to walk away from.
Your players need to know what kind of game you are running and aware of what bad things are possible. And you need to be open to ret-conning mistakes that ruined the game for someone because of mis-matched expectations in this regard.
An example from my experiences:
I ended up joining late in an online game that had vampires. I was completely unaware they could take over player characters using mind control. As a result, I got blindsided in the middle of a very emotional point in combat. My character's agency was completely removed by a failed saving throw. There was no recourse, no way out.
The rest of the party knew vampires were dangerous, but no one explicitly told me why. The DM forgot I didn't know what everyone else did.
This was more than just a dick move for me because I had some past traumatic events where the same thing happened to me. Most of the DMs I've encountered were hardliners when it came to rules and events. They'd rather kick a player than ret-con anything. Since I was new to the group, I was worried I'd never be invited to play with them again if I dropped out or said anything.
Fortunately in the next session, the DM realized something had happened and privately asked why I wasn't engaged as much as I was. Ret-conned who got mind-controlled to a player who would have fun with it.
It sounds like you wanted pre warning that x could happen in the game which is fair but baring some NSFW stuff it's it assumed that anything can happen in a typical dnd game? You failed a roll. It impacted the story. That is the game.
I feel like I'm missing something. The become resilient part feels like it didnt happen because the DM ret conned the moment. I'm not saying you would have been stronger if not for the ret conning but you would have likely been less impacted by the same event happening in a future dnd game. Even with the ret con you're likely to be less impacted by the same event.
Very common advice for TTRPGs, especially with a group that isn't established with implicit boundaries, is, and has been for w couple of decades, to have a pre-session in which this stuff is discussed openly, with both the GM raising anything they expect to be an issue and players putting forward anything else that is an issue for them, to mitigate this. You can't anticipate everything this way, but “everything goes” is recognized as potentially problematic.
It's a bit more challenging to handle mid-campaign additions non-disruptively, and I expect that even at tables that are otherwise good at this that is somewhat more often a problem, though.
Where does it say that? "The game" is whatever the people at the table agree they want to play.
This is one way to see "rule 0" or sometimes "the most important rule" in other games, that the players are not slaves to the rulebook and that the point of the game is to enjoy the time playing it, not to slavishly follow a set of rules and who cares if some players hate it.
I really don't think there is any excuse to allow something to pass in the game that will make the game a miserable experience for any of the players, and that the rules say so is the weakest excuse I can think of, given that the rules are executed by humans, not machines, and most of the rules are violated or forgotten, or hacked, or simply left unused, anyway.
I didn’t “grapple with the issue”. I had a panic attack and flashbacks. I dreaded the next session for two weeks.
Vampires are unique in having a single failed throw causing a character to permanently lose their agency and be under the direct mental control of a NPC. In this case, I was told to attack the rest of the party.
I had a psychotic break where this exact thing happened to me. I got to watch myself hurt people I cared about. There are very close relationships that were destroyed. Some I will never be able to repair.
Should I have said something? Yes. But I didn’t want to kicked out of the game.
As far as being more resilient, I’m not. If I had known vampires could do that, I would have been fine. Now? If this happens to a character in another game, I will have to leave the game. Retconning wouldn’t help.
I’ll heal in time. Might take a few months, but it may take years before I handle the situation again.
Most of the time, building resilience is the correct way to look at it. Life is filled with challenges and we don't grow if we don't face them.
Trauma (psychological definition) does not work this way. It's like tearing a muscle. Immediately going back to lifting the same weight you did before just causes more damage. You have to work on healing the muscle, but you need to do it carefully.
More resilience is common advice, but agree that its not a panacea for actual trauma. Love that it strikes in interviews for me...
Be well friend!
It’s just one of those things where a little more explanation is needed, but rest assured they’re very right.
It’s one thing to surprise your player(s), it’s another to let one player seduce the wife of another player without any consideration for how they’d feel about it just because someone rolled a nat 20 (actual situation I read about from another player. Also related PSA: a nat 20 does not mean automatic success, let alone that a player gets to do whatever they want).
Covered that right? That is the most common issue with dnd that I've seen. Some people want to include nsfw stuff, to varying degrees, and others dont.
For instance, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for a table to go “we don’t want romance in this campaign.” I’m not saying that’s a game I want to play, I for one enjoy a good love story and I’m always rooting for my character to fall in love, but if that’s the story the group wants to tell…well, they don’t have to! It’s all about communicating that at the top and everybody agreeing, or identifying something during the game and having an open discussion. Odds are unless you’re truly with a group of random people that you’ll find a game that works for everyone.
Not every person with PTSD knows what will trigger them. If a game goes long enough, someone will not recognize they have stepped on a trigger they have been warned about.
If everyone assumes good faith and treats accidents as accidents, there isn't really a need for anything dramatic.
The DM's responsibility is to foster an environment where this can happen.
In addition, it is the DM’s responsibility to know who is at their table. Every single DM I have ever played with has sent out a questionnaire that makes people flesh out their character a bit, as well as communicate anything they feel is necessary. I have never started a table without doing it as well.
While it does behoove a player to tell their DM if they have PTSD or something, the DM also is expected to make basic overtures requesting that kind of information. Especially if there any new players at the table. Ultimately the energy and comfort level at the table is set by them.
Of course you can’t always predict everything, and not every player always knows what is going to upset them or bother them at a table. But that is why constant communication and respect is important. If your table can’t do that then it is not a table you want to play at.
At the end of the day, D&D is about telling a story together and respecting consent. Also, shoot/loot/scoot lol
As an aside... I usually house rule that Mind Control and Time Travel _do not exist_ because it removes player agency, so removing those options from the story seems like a Good Idea.
[0] https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/consent-in-gami...
This is an issue that can crop up often in games. For future reference you might want to check out safety tools like the X card:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SB0jsx34bWHZWbnNIVVuMjhD...
Although to be honest, I've never played with something like that and I tend to think of such tools as unnecessary, provided that there is good communication between playes (including the GM).
Although in the past I have one a few occasions, maximised "bleed", for the purpose of emotionally engaging my players. I believe this is probably a no-no nowadays.
This is something that comes up again and again in marketing and persuasion, although I still do not fully understand the psychology behind it.
It is often more effective to tell the intimate story of an individual suffering with X, compared to providing accurate data on the impact of X. Replace X with disease, climate change, and so on.
If you have the choice between presenting quantitative data or telling an emotional story, the emotional story appeals more effectively with a majority of people. There are only a few cases where people try to be strictly rational and are only convinced by data and statistics.
I suspect it’s because intimacy speaks to fear, whereas data speaks to reason.
And in terms of our historic evolution as living beings, fear came long before reason - so it’s more deeply rooted in our psyche.
That said, this is just my hunch. I hope some biologists / neuroscientists here can shed more light on this.
We can't possibly comprehend the multiple permutations of that "something else" playing out x100, multiplied by all the people who are close to them. It's simply incalculable.
This is of course an unpleasant thought. What if my kid got cancer? Or any other of the horrible things that one reads about happening to kids? The reaction to this these thoughts can go one of many ways, with the two extremes being an emphatic "we need to stop this from ever happening again, even if we need to change our way of life" and —on the other side— a "this is never going to happen to me, it only happens to people who deserve it somehow".
So we (at least most of us) are capable of telling when someone's suffering comes from the outside, from something that could hit us too. After all most societies developed at least some way to collectively fight fires or deal with other catastrophes often by institutionalizing and financing the people who do it. This is deeply what being a society is a about: aknowledging that some things that happen are better to be dealt with collectively than individually, either because of their scale, or because of their stochastic nature (it only hits few, but it hits them hard).
I think however when it comes to storytelling it is key to do both: Tell the individual story, and show that stories like these are not rare (this takes away the "it will never happen to me"-defense). The indivdiual fate influences society and society influences the individual fate.
The Heroine with 1001 Faces, by Maria Tatar
Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging, by Sharon Blackie
DnD does nothing novel with storytelling; in fact, it just borrows ideas and tropes from fiction and history.