Specialness

Thinking about past campaigns, I have no doubt that the individualism of players is something that is barely considered in character generation.  In the days when I ran Andrej and Lukas, I can assure the reader that Robert's approach to the game was very different than David's, with both being very different from that of Maximillian or Butch.  In the Juvenis campaign, Shelby was quite a different player from Pandred, or Drain, or Danielle.  Whatever characters any of these might have been playing, their differences as people and as individuals seeking things from D&D could not be mistaken.

I believe this difference is crucially underrated.  The company markets their game by arguing that you can use feats,

"... to customise your character with extra, unique abilities.  They grant unique powers and abilities aside from your race and class traits, and features."

 

The statement is plainly a lie.  There's nothing "unique" about a feature that I can choose for every character I run, or that the player across the table can also choose for every character he or she runs.  There's nothing unique about assembling the same build over and over, because it works.  There's nothing unique about having the same list to choose from that hundreds of thousands of other game players can also pick over.  It's an old marketing ploy.  It makes a pretense that because you can pick a shirt that advertises Billie Eilish, it's not the same t-shirt that thousands of other people haven't also bought.  It's not personal ... unless you're stupid enough to believe that because you're the only person in this bar to be wearing the shirt, it makes you an "individual."

The lie plays up to something that psychologists call "specialness" — a belief that what makes YOU valuable is found in the way you differentiate yourself from other people through what you accomplish, or what you earn, or your background, or what you choose to believe ... or even what you perceive is your usefulness to your job, your family or your iconography.  It's a philosophy that discards human value based on shared human traits: that we all bleed, or that we all feel pain, or that we all fall in love.  It's a philosophy that promotes "self-reliance" over compassion; and works as a "higher ground" from which individuals can justify their right to attack people who are "beneath" them.

But here is the crux of the philosophy:  it depends upon your ability to acquire your specialness as proof, somehow.  You must find some kind of specialness which you can lord over others, to PROVE that you're "uniquely" deserving of respect, greater sympathy when things go bad for you, or that your voice is somehow louder and more right because you're YOU.  YOU make more money; YOU know more about the Lord of the Rings than other people; YOU buy the right kind of t-shirts; YOU know the best way to build a character in D&D.

But it's all bullshit.  The company has chosen to hitch its wagon to your belief that your value as a player hinges on your ability to build characters ... and this works because a very large part of the D&D-player demographic consists of pathetic, disgruntled white male deplorable incels who are desperate for something that proves their "specialness."  These players aren't interested in "party."  They're not interested in any part of the game that isn't a platform to prove how special they are.  And the company caters to that.  Because there's money in it.

My position is wildly different.  I don't believe at all that anything a player can "choose" can be remotely special, however large the list of character classes or races might be ... for the simple fact that the choice can be made again and again, by anyone.  The only reason why someone else might not make that choice is because they are, defacto, a different person ... which means they're a different person regardless of whether or not there's a choice.  In other words, it's not the choice that makes us special.  It's that we already are.

Which means six different people running the exact same character build around my game table would still and always be six individuals.  The player's illusion of choice is metaphorical pasteboard.

In my generator, I have a result on the table hair condition & health that reads, "Perfect hair; both superabundant in volume and highly lustrous."  As it stands in the company's game, you can choose to have that hair by writing the words down on your character sheet.  And so can I.  So can every character I run.  Because choice is meaningless where it comes to defining your "specialness" or mine.

But to get that hair result in my game system, you must have an 18 charisma, and then you MUST roll a "1" when determining your hair's condition or health.  You can't choose it.  No one can.  If it comes up, you can wear your hair with the reassurance that it's extremely unlikely that anyone else will also have your personal hair, and even more unlikely that it will have the same colour or texture.  Because all of these things are rolled, NOT chosen.

The depth of this consequence is overlooked ... which is criminally irresponsible for the game system we have now.  Too many candidates for "specialness" who entered into the game during the mid-to-late 1980s chafed against and bitched that they couldn't have an 18 strength any damn time they pleased.  They hated rolling because rolling didn't give them a choice to be special ... they had to actually BE special, through rolling, or else not get what they wanted.  It never mattered to these people that if everyone could choose, then the meaning of being "special" would become a joke ... which it is now, regardless of how many times the company puts the word "unique" into a sentence.  No, what mattered for these people was the brand of being special, not actual specialness.

We see it constantly, all around us.  50 different ethnic groups living in the same country all drive the same cars, eat the same McDonald's hamburgers, drink the same Tim Horton's coffee or use the same phone apps on the same phones ... they wake up on industrialised mattresses, listen to the same programmed news and music on their way to the same jobs that observe the same rules that dictate how the same money they'll earn will be taxed and counted in the same way.  Then they use the same money machines to get their money to cross the same streets to go to the same Burger Kings and to buy the same liquor, to go home and pour their drinks in the same glasses that give them the same drunkedness they feel while watching the same sports and reality shows.

And then SOME of them scream and bitch that their "special" culture isn't recognised, or that their "special" entitlement to run the country isn't catered to, or how it's a crime that everyone doesn't 100 per cent kowtow to their "special" privilege to write about, depict, act as or speak for that "special" group of people who also happen to have their same skin tone and ethnic origin.  We live our lives together as human beings, eating and shitting and bleeding and fucking just like the same human beings, but that's NOT ENOUGH.  That doesn't make us special.  And if we're not special, how can we ever, possibly, carve out some tiny pretense that lets us be better than the next person?

The joke is, we don't have to.  We are special.  We don't have to prove it.  We don't need others to believe it.  What we prove and what others believe has no impact on reality.  All my players around my table are different people.  That's a statement of fact, one that's blatantly evident in the way they play.  What we want isn't a set of rules designed to drive people apart by catering to their specialness, but a set of rules that enables everyone to cheer when one of them rolls something so wildly unlikely that it gives us all reason to feel pleased.  One of us got cool hair.  Awesome.