It occurs to me that the World o' Darkness games were an effort to engineer rules to encourage Dramatic Hero play that mostly foundered on players' Picaresque Habits and inclinations. (Vampire in particular is built to be a tragedy, leading to some unintended consequences.) Dogs in the Vineyard is a more effective effort to do the same thing, ilarge part because it offers strong guidance to the GM in how to structure scenarios.
Looking at serialized genre fiction I like, the best of it offers an ensemble of characters who are different types of hero from one another, and differences at different scales - a particular episode may have an Iconic Hero story, but it fits into a longer arc that is about a Dramatic Hero inner conflict ...
Actually, probably the purest Dramatic Hero game is Everway. Unlike CoC, which lends itself to the PCs losing themselves in the process of trying to save the world (or something smaller), or even finding Bad Stuff in their family tree, the Platonic Everway example is, quite literally "find disorder, investigate what's wrong, propose and implement a solution".
Actually, with all due respect, I can't think of a game that is less the province of a Dramatic Hero than Call of Cthulhu. There is no internal conflict in the character where the choice of which resolves the situation. In pure CoC, there is no resolution (at least as far as Investigators may be concerned). In fact you could easily argue that it is the Mythos itself (in it's various representations) which are generally the iconic antiheroes of the stories and by remaining true to their essentially unchangeable natures maintain the ethos of the stories. You can't win. You can't beak even. You can't quite the game. You can just caper maddeningly as it all goes to Hell in a handbasket.
Comments 5
It occurs to me that the World o' Darkness games were an effort to engineer rules to encourage Dramatic Hero play that mostly foundered on players' Picaresque Habits and inclinations. (Vampire in particular is built to be a tragedy, leading to some unintended consequences.) Dogs in the Vineyard is a more effective effort to do the same thing, ilarge part because it offers strong guidance to the GM in how to structure scenarios.
Looking at serialized genre fiction I like, the best of it offers an ensemble of characters who are different types of hero from one another, and differences at different scales - a particular episode may have an Iconic Hero story, but it fits into a longer arc that is about a Dramatic Hero inner conflict ...
Reply
Reply
Reply
Actually, with all due respect, I can't think of a game that is less the province of a Dramatic Hero than Call of Cthulhu. There is no internal conflict in the character where the choice of which resolves the situation. In pure CoC, there is no resolution (at least as far as Investigators may be concerned).
In fact you could easily argue that it is the Mythos itself (in it's various representations) which are generally the iconic antiheroes of the stories and by remaining true to their essentially unchangeable natures maintain the ethos of the stories.
You can't win. You can't beak even. You can't quite the game. You can just caper maddeningly as it all goes to Hell in a handbasket.
Reply
Leave a comment