Reddit roleplaying games2/21/2023 They are the important people whose whim shapes history. What does this have to do with roleplaying games, you may ask? The PCs are those Great Men. It doesn’t help that those few are almost always male and white, Ghandi notwithstanding. The Great Man Theory ignores the contributions of countless people and social circumstances in order to examine a select few. Gandhi became the face of an independence movement that had been building for decades, at least. Napoleon came to power in a time of great chaos caused by the French Revolution and all the events that led to it. The problem with the Great Man Theory is that it’s incredibly narrow and simplistic. They focus heavily on who led what battle and who was elected president on what date. High school history texts tend to use this method, even if it isn’t explicit. Napoleon caused the rise and fall of post-Revolutionary France, Gandhi was the man who made India independent, etc. The idea is that certain important people, for good or ill, caused events to turn out the way they did. Put simply, this is a way of looking at history that emphasizes influential individuals. If we really care about roleplaying games, we have to acknowledge their flaws in order to improve. However, there are a number of more systemic issues that are harder to explain away, and those are what we’re looking at today. Sometimes these problems can be chalked up to a single disruptive player or bad GM. We’ve all had a game or two where things just felt wrong. Unfortunately, they have a dark side as well. They let us become active parts of our favorite stories instead of passive observers. They provide hours and hours of entertainment with our friends. Roleplaying games take us on marvelous adventures.
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