Why We Call Them Heroes

One of the seemingly minor changes in the latest draft of the rules, is the inclusion of the term "heroes." Today I want to talk a little bit about that.

If we look at 4th Edition D&D, this term was used to describe characters in the first "tier" of the level progression; even a level 1 character was referred to as a hero. The assumption (whether mechanical or narrative) that characters could/would/should be ineffectual or incompetent simply wasn't there. Everyone had a job to do, and your mechanics made you capable of doing it -- so your backstory had to be something that fit that level of capability. In earlier editions of D&D (which I haven't played, but have read about) Fighters, even at first level, were titled "veterans" because the assumption was that they (like other classes) would be experienced at what they do.

Another thing that was made expressly clear in 4e, was that player-characters (heroes) should not be evil or chaotic; 4th Edition simplified the "nine alignments" down to five, and (at least in the first PHB) said that PCs should only fall under three of those: unaligned, good, or lawful-good. The purpose of this was to encourage teamwork; the focus on roles and party balance meant that cooperative play was essential, and character backgrounds needed to reinforce that mechanical paradigm.

Now, as an aside, from my playing days in 3.5, one of the big takeaways that I got from looking into alignment a bit more, was that evil characters still understand and appreciate loyalty. Once you're a part of a team, there should be cohesion -- even if some of its members are "dirty" or "scummy" -- and everyone should be working towards the same goal: the big picture.

We can see all of these influences in The Next Project; it's not even really mechanically possible for PCs to attack one another. Simple things like class dice give a framework for how your team should be composed, and that everyone has a part to play, together.

Now, some of the classes in TNP have a darker, more evil bent to them -- Assassin, Blackguard, Necromancer, etc. Things such as the Shadow power source, however, should tell us about what drives or inspires these darker characters -- not be an indicator of their unreliability.


But here's what I think is possibly the most important point:

The characters we create are a heightened, stylized ideal -- a fictional conceit that we admire, from whatever media we consume. They're the brawny protagonist in an action movie, they're the cold anti-hero in a western, they're the swaggering scoundrel in a space opera. They are fantastic, and so they exist in a fantasy world. There is always something about them that we look up to (and that we hope our fellow party members and players might look up to, as well) because they are always, in some small way, a reflection of ourselves and our imagination.

We root for them to succeed, we watch them grow and change, and we fill in their past as they move forward through their adventures. We carry them over -- across editions, campaigns, settings, parties, playgroups -- and each time we do, our characters (all of them) become more and more refined. They become more real, they become more human.



So, why do we call them heroes?

Because they're our heroes.