# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 16 - Overcome tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] Guess what, guys? **We shall overcome!** The man will never keep us down! We are and forever will triumph! While we are at the bottom now, soon we shall be on top! *Viva la revolución! Non illegitimum carborundum!* We are the tiny rebels who have absolutely no successes to our name because we've allowed the culture to get to this point. We've only now decided to theoretically act in a violent manner to overthrow the authority which is currently enshrined, has all the cards, all the resources, and all the weapons. We will now stand up and retake the civilization in the name of good thoughts! Have you noticed that 75% of the new games, which aren't rip-offs of **D&D**, seem to have a common theme? I want to be clear here. I definitely am talking about indie RPGs as well as a lot of D&D-adjacent ones. Let's pick on things that I like for other reasons and look at the collection of [[Blades in the Dark|Forged in the Dark]] games. - https://bladesinthedark.com/forged-dark Do I *like* Forged in the Dark mechanically? Absolutely love it. Do I love some of the setup concepts? Absolutely, no question. Do I own more than a few of the games on this list? Oh yes, you better believe it.[^1] Am I sick nigh unto death of the whole *rebel with a cause* motif?  *(From **[Empire of Dust](https://youtu.be/vtspIqqZNCY)**. You should watch it.)* This is where I invite the mob to my door with torches and pitchforks because I'm going to point out that this is *not* just a trait of the culture war politically inclined social left, which largely dominates the indie RPG spaces. You see it all the time in the socially conservative (vastly smaller) pseudo-authoritarian right spaces which talk about RPGs. It doesn't just manifest in the overt obsession with imagining yourself being of the tiny rebel faction, which is definitionally intended to throw over whatever political power currently exists as the entire point of the game, but in the particular obsession with the zero-to-hero hero's journey, level one to level infinity, *"this is the only real story"* archetype of the classic traditional RPG character arc. Basically, I'm just tired as hell of the whole fucking thing. But this isn't new. I was tired of it about a year after the cyberpunk genre became big, which goes back quite a ways. I was definitely tired of it about five years after the **[[Cyberpunk (RPG)|Cyberpunk RPG]]** became big, because as a lover of the genre, I was a huge fan of the game. But by and large, it and the **Cyberpunk**-adjacent games had one story to tell: you are the downtrodden, victimized members of society oppressed by your social elite and thus forced to predate on your fellow citizens in order to show the powers that be who really has the upper hand. Does that sound familiar? I understand the appeal of the hero's journey. I really do. I understand that it's critical to comprehending much of Western literature and specifically the American understanding of individualist potentiation—the ability to imagine yourself partaking of this elemental storytelling structure is simultaneously empowering and universal enough that you can talk about it with anyone and everyone you know, and they will immediately empathize with what you're talking about. The problem is that it's been talked about so much and leveraged so much by people who do so excessively and bluntly that it's no longer compelling in the way that it is packaged and presented. It has become *de rigueur* rather than a selling point and a reason to be excited about any given thing. It's been pushed so aggressively that it's crowded out a lot of other ideas which are as important, if not more so, than asking yourself: how would I struggle to overcome if I were disadvantaged and given an opportunity? The obsession with the rebel narrative is just that exact same thing, equally done to death. It is the farthest thing from fresh. But worse, it is washed in a specific politics, in a way which is both tin-eared and vaguely insulting to anyone who doesn't agree on every single tenet and point. The rebel narrative can be interesting if the rebels are challenged with the idea that they might be wrong or that they might not be qualified to actually implement or even conceive of solutions. If the rebel group has internal dissent about what should be done and how it should happen. If the powers that be that they struggle against themselves are achieving things which the rebels haven't thought about or assumed to be the function of the world as a natural process rather than something that requires power to implement. But that's not what any of these games are about. There's no question of divided loyalties, because the powers that be are always mustache-twirling evil. There's no question of whether the rebels are capable of replacing the powers that be, because things will simply continue on as they are, no matter what. Power vacuums don't exist. Everything worth doing is already being done by somebody else. No one really knows how the powers that be actually attained the power that allows them to be the powers that be. No one considers that the powers that be can't continue as the powers that be without at least some degree of consent of those "under their boot heels," and there's not even a whiff of awareness of how historical rebellions, uprisings, and social agitators generally have turned out. This wouldn't be a problem if it were just a few games here and there, because there are always a few games here and there. However, in some parts of the hobby, it feels as though 66% of the time you're going to get a game that starts with the same assumptions as the two games that came out before it. That's healthy for neither the hobby nor for the people who are making the same thing over and over again. The hero's journey requires that the protagonist has a superior force to struggle against in order for them to have a struggle to improve. The obsession with level as a metaphor provided by classical tabletop RPG design, as embodied by **D&D**, and, in fairness, a lot of classic literature drives a lot of their storytelling into the same trough. There must be an evil empire, because the protagonist needs someone stronger than themselves to fight against. The evil empire must have a bunch of faceless mooks, because they need to die to drop gold and XP. There needs to be a big bad because there needs to be someone for the hero to triumph over, to represent their ascension to the point of heroism they set out to accomplish. There is a lot of, *"and then this happens,"* because it's necessitated by the thing that happens immediately before it.[^2] To say that it's lazy understates the case. To say that it's been done to death, understates the case. I suppose that the worst thing I can say about it is that it is just so damn *common*. I'm using "common" as a pejorative here, let me be clear. What, then, are the alternatives? Clearly, if we are to overcome, we must overcome that greatest opponent of the protagonist, the mighty empire, whether it be corporate or imperial. Correct? Absolutely not. There is the adage that there exist seven kinds of story in the world, and that all stories can be seen to fall into one of these patterns. > **[The Seven Basic Plots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots)**[^3] > > - Overcoming the Monster > - Rags to Riches > - The Quest > - Voyage and Return > - Comedy > - Tragedy > - Rebirth Is this really a full and complete list of *all* the kinds of stories in the world? No. There are definitely stories that don't fall into one of these unless you stretch and twist and make each point expand to the point where it is no longer reasonably constrained. Once you define things to be wide enough, everything fits in it, but it's no longer meaningful for making distinctions. What this does is give us a checklist to think about what other kinds of things we can do. After all, the traditional underdog rebel story is really just *Overcoming the Monster* all day, every day. The traditional RPG structure throws in some *Rags to Riches* and *The Quest* amongst those options. So it's not *as* constrained, but it's still focused on a tiny, narrow section of the potential stories you can experience with your characters. Think about some game experiences which don't focus fundamentally on only one of these elements. Pick games that don't obsess themselves with just a single one of these things, unless you absolutely just want to do that when you play that game. Likewise, don't be the kind of person that only plays one game in their life. There are too many of those out there now, and there are too many people out there who are trying to play out their victim fantasy in their fantasy fantasy. Stop it. You can be better than that. If you find yourself falling into the trap of doing the same thing over and over again with slightly different trappings, don't do it. Do something different. Allow yourself to grow. Allow yourself to experience things that are not necessarily in your wheelhouse, that you might even be uncomfortable with. Question the assumptions of the rebel narrative. Deliberately subvert them. What happens if your character is on the side of the colonialist forces? What happens if the colonialists *are* really right, and their influence will make life better for everyone? What if your character and story isn't involved with questions of slaying the monster or even going on a quest, but instead focuses on travel and return and the exploration? What if it isn't a rags-to-riches story at all, but in fact a tragedy about characters who start with things to lose and make a critical decision which sets them on a path of descent rather than continuous ascent?[^4] What if you do something different? Can you then be said to truly have overcome? Give it a try. Play to find out. [^1]: It's not even like I can exempt my favorite things from this criticism. **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Sundered Isles]]**, which is an amazing expansion and discussion of a vast multitude of things, has as its core assumption that you are going to be a rebellious figure in the Isles themselves. There's no concept that you might be on the side of a national power and believe that they are actually doing something positive. Rebellion is your only choice. In a game that is very focused on freedom and the ability to choose, it is the one thing for which it is never assumed that a choice would even be thinkable. [^2]: If not for the first time, I really feel compelled to link to Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking about storytelling and why *"and then this happens"* is so erosive of good storytelling. It's wrong, it's bad, and you need to stop doing it.  [^3]: This is one of those rare moments where the Wikipedia page is really quite good and deserves a solid consideration, especially if you are thinking about the kinds of stories that you can put forward in an RPG. [^4]: Honestly, I'm not even sure where to put in games like **[[Nobilis]]**, in which you literally start the game as a god, and the question is not so much, what can you accomplish, but it's rather, what are you going to have to trade off in order to achieve what you want? There are elements of the quest. There are elements of Voyage and Return. There are elements even of Tragedy, Comedy, and Rebirth. But it's not ever just *one* of those things, and it's *never* Rags to Riches.