# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 19 - Destiny tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] Destiny is a funny thing. No, I don't mean the stripper, though she does have quite the sense of humor. I would spend more time with her if it were cheaper. No, I mean the narrative concept that tends to lead toward the Chosen One storyline. Typically, the Chosen One is a protagonist who is destined for greatness of the most illuminatory sort. They are to defeat the dragon, to depose the evil king, to stand against the onslaught of the gods in the protection of mankind. We've seen the Chosen One story play out 10,000 times across narratives from both childhood fairy tales to the latest blockbuster. Everyone wants the hero's journey, and the hero's journey involves the Chosen One, the hero, the Once and Future King. The problem for me comes when you look at the agency that the character has within their experience and realize that the classic hero's journey, the clarion call of destiny, really only allows the character two choices. And those choices aren't real. They're illusory. First, the hero must deny the call. There's no chance that they can take it, because if they do, then the first part of the story, which motivates them to actually accomplish their destiny, doesn't happen. Narratively, they have no choice but to deny it. After all, if they accepted the call, then they would just go against whatever evil they stand to destroy unprepared. Later, they choose to respond to the call. But again, if they didn't, then the rest of the story wouldn't happen, and frankly, it might be more interesting. Regardless, the choice is illusory when taken as part of the greater understanding of the story as a story. It's not a surprise. It can't deliver any punch simply because it's taken. The power of the story comes from the other elements along the way. It's a meal whose flavor is brought purely by the sides and not the entrée. What if we change the underlying elements of what is in play, however? What if instead of a call to heroism, the Chosen One is destined to villainy? What kind of a story plays out at that point? The obvious one is to lean into it being a tragedy. A character of high moral position finds themselves tempted or subverted by ever darker choices. Can we invert the turning points of the hero's journey and play them out as the villain's journey? They would need to hear the call to villainy relatively early and resist it, struggle against taking the darker path, and then eventually have to accept it and embrace it in order for the story to be done. Is that an interesting story? It might be, simply due to the subversion. But it does inherently limit the character's agency, just in the same ways that the Hero's Journey does. At both of those pinch points, no other choice can occur, and we know that, having seen the story 10,000 times. How about a third twist? What if the destiny being placed before them is mediocrity? A character who will only be remembered by the prophecy that they'll be forgotten. What kind of a story would that lead to? Just as the call to villainy is almost always a tragedy, the call to mediocrity is inherently a comedy. You have a character who can aspire to both the heights and the depths and throw himself entirely into the pursuit of both or either and ends up failing. What other response can we have but to laugh? If you play it off as a character who accepts that they are the everyday background character, as the heroic arc would suggest, there's a certain hollowness. Sure, it speaks to the reality of our existence, that the vast majority of us won't have any particular calling or positive impact on the world when we're gone, and that we should probably focus on the small pleasures that we can secure for ourselves. That's certainly a story worth telling, but it's a bit Hallmark. If you play it off as a character whose tragedy is that they aspire to more and are continuously denied it by the powers that be of the universe, that also has the potential to speak to the everyday experience of the common man. But it's tragicomic, in the same way that a lot of Charlie Chaplin's work ultimately was. The story ends up in the same place as the heroic version, but it's the defeat of the protagonist's dreams on the breaking wheel of reality that we are left with. That might actually be the better story, but only because it's more emotionally evocative. It's more poignant. Frankly, I'm just not that fond of destiny narratives. The fact that they suck the air out of meaningful choices by the character, even within the context of a pre-established narrative, is frustrating to me. The feeling that the story can only go one way at any given pinch point is a source of great security to a broad audience. They enjoy the feeling of inevitability. That's just not for me. I want characters whose choices feel meaningful, not just in my tabletop RPGs, but in my literature. I want them to possess the ability to utter the Luciferian No, to deny the fates, the gods, and the world for their own reasons, whether to ascend the heights heroically or (more in line with my personal preferences) descend to the depths to be the best villain that they can be. I want it to come not because they have a destiny to do so, but because they have made choices to do so. Destiny feels like a cheap way to create a feeling of inevitability and the warm blanket of security that should, instead, be instilled by knowledge of the characters.