I think that the most important thing any storyteller can do is to provide a story that guides and inspires.
There's both the ideological element of that–the idea that portraying models that people should aspire to can make a better world–and a practical element: these are satisfying stories that sell well.
As a game designer who works in tabletop RPGs, I don't work with pre-defined storylines that often. Rather, I work exclusively with rules mechanics, and that makes for an interesting challenge.
*Caspar David Friedrich's* Wanderer above a Cloud of Fog*, a depiction of the Hero archetype.*
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# The Hero's Journey
The Hero's Journey, in its most simple essence, is this: a Hero is forced to confront the tragedy of existence and overcomes it.
It is an important psychological metaphor for growth and self-discovery, but also a practical model for life: doing what one fears and striving to create a better future, embracing chaos without forgetting the purpose of order in life. I think it's incredibly valuable.
Part of the reason for this is that our own conceptions of the universe are flawed. We each have varying levels of ability to objectively assess the world, but no matter how well we assess the world we will find that there is a gap between our perceptions and reality. The knowable part of the world we can accept as Being; the unknowable we cannot worry about or else we waste time and potentially create dangerous errors in our lives (either by failing to accept Being or failing to accept our limits).
The Hero must explore Being to the fullest extent possible, not necessarily by seeking to achieve philosophical perfection (though most Heroes do, which is why a tragedy always focuses on some moral fault). The outcome of this is that they have the opportunity to transform the world for the better: the fairy-tale "happily ever after" ending, but with authenticity born from struggle.
This tenet is reflected in pretty much every world religion, but it is often easy to miss when it comes time to actually telling stories.
# Reflecting the Journey in Games
There are a few obvious ways that this can be done when you have the ability to tell a scripted narrative, but how do you deal with telling a good story when you hand off the story-telling to other people?
Hosting a storytelling class, while compelling, is probably not a viable alternative to figuring out a game design that works, since I'm going to stay focused as a game design guy and not a storytelling guru.
## Struggle
One of the elements of the Hero's Journey is to have a challenge for players to face. This is pretty simple, and I can't think of a mainstream game that doesn't have this as an inherent principle: in almost every roleplaying game there's an explanation of how mechanics function to create challenges for players.
However, not all games are created equally for the purposes of creating a meaningful struggle.
### Personalization
One of the challenges that I often see is that a game creates a limited field for each character to grow and develop.
Mechanically, characters in games should be personalized to fit likely challenges. This includes **both** strengths and weaknesses. This doesn't mean that a designer necessarily needs to add penalties and weaknesses to characters explicitly, but there should be a meaningful range from the best character at the start of the game (or at least, at the normal state of play) to the worst.
I like [Degenesis](http://sixmorevodka.com/degenesis/) (disclaimer: I am a freelancer for SIXMOREVODKA, the creators of Degenesis) as a fairly balanced game for this.
It doesn't force characters to take flaws, but it does provide them with a couple simple scales for character development without requiring a bunch of individualized elements (attributes and skills), and more fluffy elements that matter on a case-by-case basis but are likely to be special for characters (factions, cultures, talents, concepts). The scale runs from a minimum of 1 (representing the number of dice rolled in a pool) to a maximum of 8 or so at character creation, with an absolute cap at 12 dice, with special abilities adding extra successes.
Characters tend to be proficient in more or less 8 areas at the end of character creation, based on rank advancement trees that guide development, but players have a final say in investing points. There are more or less 40 "ranks" that a character might start with across all the possible character options.
### Meaning
One of the other challenges here is to make sure that every character actually has a role to play in the story.
Mechanically, you need to make sure that a character plays a role in the plot, or else they just don't matter to the game at all. This is important because roleplaying is typically a group experience, and a character that doesn't get to act in the game will suffer from meaninglessness. There's also a further issue with making sure that a character belongs to the plot, but this is generally beyond mechanics in and of themselves to resolve.
[Numenera](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/240654/Numenera-Discovery?affiliate_id=275198) (affiliate link) does this really well; characters are defined in a way that is very minimalist, but there's an integral resource mechanic that gives them a choice in what they can do well and encourages them to use those resources to actually excel in that area without creating characters who are just broken.
Another game I like is [Open Legend](https://openlegendrpg.com/) (disclaimer: I played a **very** small role in playtesting and contributing to Open Legend), which gives each character an incredible amount of power and lets it always be "on" as it were, because it has no resource limitations.
The secret here is this: a character needs a place to shine. If you don't give them that, you're going to have problems with it. You can do this by exclusion, making it necessary to choose one person to devote resources to a task and preventing one star character from outstripping everyone else too much, or you can do it by unique talent, boosting a character to the point that they're the one character who does something as well as they do. The latter method is not foolproof, since there can be overlap, but tends not to be an issue if there is a diverse enough range of activities or challenges within the game system to ensure that characters remain relevant.
## Sacrifice
Sacrifice is another key point here. A Hero must be willing to lose something, even if they wind up not having to lose it once the cards are actually in play.
Mechanically, this means both risk and cost need to factor into the game.
### Risk
Risk is a fairly natural element of storytelling, and often comes in the core mechanics of a game (after all, characters have a chance of failing at actions in most systems).
The simple thing here is that if a character messes up, it needs to actually matter. A lot of games don't do this well. Back when I used to play a lot of Warhammer 40:000 roleplaying games, particularly [Only War](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/108564/Only-War-Core-Rulebook?affiliate_id=275198) (affiliate link), I found myself in a lot of situations where characters just didn't actually have risk, and that was a pretty lethal system. Some of that's probably my fault for how I was running the game, but you can also make designs that allow for risk without causing too many problems.
The game that I like for doing this really well is [Spire](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/235679/Spire?affiliate_id=275198) (affiliate link), since it has a Fallout mechanic that is used frequently for both small and large consequences for actions. An important element of this is that the consequences are very narrative; one of the strongest elements of the Warhammer 40:000 roleplaying games is how severe injuries are very meaningful and distinctive, and Spire takes a similar idea and applies it to the little things as well.
This isn't to say that a system that uses hit points or has few distinct risks is bad (I use them in a bunch of my games), but having the consequences for actions be on a "doomsday clock" instead of immediately meaningful is dangerous.
### Cost
Cost is the notion that a character must give up one thing for another.
Obviously resource mechanics function in this manner, but there's also a question of how to best handle this.
I'm not going to go into specific games here, but I'm going to broadly outline three ways this can be done:
The first is that you have short-term resource limits. Numenera is an example of a game that has a stark resource cost for actions, and it does this really well.
Another is that you have long-term resources that require a lot of effort to refresh. Vampire: The Masquerade relies on this, having characters need to go on side-quests to find a source of blood to power their abilities or recover from harm.
Finally, you have a cost in potential, where you have to sacrifice one opportunity for another. D&D does this a little with its class system, since barring multiclassing (which locks you out of capstone abilities), there is no way to access every ability in the game.
## Growth
Growth is another powerful element of the Hero's Journey, and it can be mechanically represented in systems that encourage characters to develop.
One often overlooked part of growing is the acceptance of responsibility. The maturation into potential is well-handled in most games, but one of the things that makes characters in games shallow is that they do not have responsibility for their world.
### Responsibility
The Cortex system does this as well as anything else, though there's some of this in the Resistance toolbox that powers Spire.
The general rule here is that characters should have at least an option to align themselves with a cause or movement; Eclipse Phase does this through a reputation network system (though it's not necessarily a core part of the mechanics and is often overlooked in play), and Degenesis does this really well through its factions and the backgrounds that characters get that reflect their role in them.
It's worth noting that even lip service here at least allows people to pursue an archetypal ideal Hero; Shadowrun has a lot of flaws that relate to responsibility, and while they're not necessarily mandatory they can lead to very interesting characters.
Typically responsibility must be found outside the character in a side character or faction. One notable exception to this is the blood mechanic in Vampire: The Masquerade is an example of a sort of internal responsibility, since a vampire character will require blood to function but needs to be careful about how they acquire it or risk a loss of humanity or potential problems from exposure.
### Potential
Potential is simply growth, and it's one of the core gameplay loops of most games.
The biggest caution here is that it needs to be important: I have never played a game in which I have looked forward to my next advancement so much as in Open Legend and the Warhammer 40:000 roleplaying games.
Both of these games have powerful, distinctive abilities that characters gain access to as they level up. I played primarily first edition Dark Heresy as a player, which has very distinct ranks: characters may purchase abilities from the rank that they have currently achieved, and that includes abilities that are very rare or entirely unique.
Later games in the same family like Only War did away with the rank systems and by extension somewhat cheapened the advancement process, and a lot of the anticipation was limited.
By comparison, characters in Open Legend often focus on one or two special abilities, and leveling up allowed them to access more powerful versions of those abilities (as well as generally branch out). Picking what would come at the next advancement level was meaningful because the powers scaled meaningfully upward.
## Reward
The final reward for the Hero is something that is rarely reflected in games. The reason for this is simple: more play is generally better.
However, games that don't have a sophisticated way to reflect the logical ending of the Hero's Journey fail to show the rewards that come with challenging the tragedy of the universe and making the right decisions to succeed.
Another problem comes when there is no meaningfully negative ending: if the only outcomes are to eventually grow in power until a character becomes a deity or have the character die without consequence as a result of game mechanics, that's going to be an issue.
### Salvation
Salvation is the reward of a Hero who follows their path and creates a new version of paradise in the world by confronting the challenge that would doom them and those they care about.
There aren't many games that I'm familiar with that go for this mode of ending, but they do exist. [The Good Year](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110152/The-Quiet-Year?affiliate_id=275198) (affiliate link) is an example of a more storytelling-focused game that does this.
The truth of the matter is that this is mechanically very difficult to represent, and when I see it represented it often feels cheap: a board-game mechanic brought into storytelling. However, I think that there would be a few good places that could be explored here:
- Legacy: Characters are removed from play, but change the universe (e.g. providing a bonus to other characters/future characters)
- Ascension: Characters transform into a different state, perhaps requiring a different ruleset (e.g. going from adventuring to leading a kingdom)
Obviously, this can be handled by individual narrative conceits.
### Damnation
Damnation is a tragic ending for a Hero who sacrifices morality or takes the wrong action.
The Star Wars roleplaying games do this when they have characters fall to the dark side of the force and become NPCs.
Similar mechanics exist in games like Eclipse Phase, Call of Cthulhu, and associated games, but it's important to distinguish between normal failure and damnation, however, because the latter can happen only when there is some deliberate flaw. Something like spore infestation in Degenesis, which is typically the consequence of action taken by players in exchange for a mechanical reward, is a very good example.
However, something like insanity in Call of Cthulhu may better reflect the Sacrifice stage of the Hero's Journey, in which the Hero must pay a price for overcoming the known world and turning unknown chaos to knowable order.
Vampire: the Masquerade plays with this in its humanity mechanic: characters who fall too low begin to lose control of their actions. This is a decent way of handling this.
# Wrapping Up
As a game designer, I aspire to make meaningful games, and my method for doing so is to assess how I can bring games closer to the archetypal conception of the Hero: this is a reflection of our own reality and our own need to grow and develop, so it creates memorable and appealing stories.
I don't know that the perfect "heroic" game currently exists, but a lot of mechanics that could lead to such a game certainly do.
hiveblocks