The 'I Want' PC

Readers who do not live in the dank earth beneath rocks with only woodlice and earthworms for company will no doubt have heard of something called K-Pop Demon Hunters. If you haven't heard of it: now you have, and the title is essentially everything you need to know. It's about K-Pop Demon Hunters - trust me, you now don't have to watch it.

The silver lining in the cloud that is having K-Pop Demon Hunters-obsessed children is that the songs are actually pretty catchy and well-executed, even if the lyrics are cringe-inducing doggerel ('Heels, nails, blade, mascara/Fit check for my napalm era/Need to beat my face, make it cute and savage/Mirror, mirror on my phone, who's the baddest?', indeed). And the soundtrack does have one bona fide banger of an 'I Want' Song: the uplifting, Let-It-Go-beating, every-local-grab-a-granny-nightclub-in-the-country-will-be-playing-this-for-years anthem, Golden. 

If you're wondering what an 'I Want' song is, it's the phrase used to describe the songs that basically all musicals have these days, in which the main character (typically a Disney princess) gives vent to her special snowflake feelings and proclaims the desire to escape social expectation/veer from the path laid out before her/find her true self/break free from an overbearing parent/etc. Prominent examples would include:

This species of song, and its role in the films in which it appears, is easily lampooned, but it is important to remember that everybody is young once, and it would be concerning to inhabit a world in which young people are not moved by the theme of 'I Want' songs. This is a necessary part of adolescence: feeling as though one is misunderstood, as though one has a special calling in life, and as though one is destined to do amazing things. What a sad indictment of the culture it would be if such songs did not exist.

For a long time, RPG culture has tilted in the direction of what I will call the 'I Want' PC, no doubt because this speaks to the adolescent craving to be special and because adolescents (and permament adolescents, let's face it) are the core audience for table top RPGs. I can well remember understanding, even as a 13-year-old, that my own instincts and feeling were being manipulated by the game designers in the extensive chargen options they laid before me so as to create my own, uniquely interesting and special, tiefling/werewolf/turtle-man fighter-mage with glaive proficiency and the curse of the bard's tongue. I recognised that this was manipulative even as I revelled in it; a very great deal of the fun that my friends and I got out of, say, Shadowrun or Werewolf: The Apocalypse or Cyberpunk 2020 was the process of simply making up characters.

A good 'I Want' PC should have the following characteristics:

1 - He or she should be wrestling with inner demons - and he or she must be driven by this sense of turmoil in the direction of adventure, preferably reluctantly. The K-Pop Demon Hunters iteration of this is that the main character, Rumi, is herself half-demon and gradually transforming into one; I have only caught snippets of the things because I find the experience of watching the film to be almost physically painful, but I understand this somehow gets resolved. See also: Elsa from Frozen, who can't control her ice magic powers; Ariel from The Little Mermaid, who wants to be human; Luke Skywalker, who wants to get out of Tatooine, etc. 

2 - He or she should be a misfit and set apart from society, preferably having been bullied or ostracised for some reason. Think Elphaba from Wicked with her green skin, Belle from Beauty & The Beast and her obsession with books, Harry Potter and his upbringing with the Dursleys, and so on. 

3 - He or she should have a special gift or blessing that makes for genuine superiority over the hoi polloi. It is no good wrestling with inner demons and being a misfit if one is not a misunderstood genius of some kind to compensate. Hence Harry Potter is actually the chosen one, Elsa is actually a demigod-like ice sorceress, Luke Skywalker is actually a Jedi and can use the Force, Moana is actually a blessed navigator, and so on.

Not all 'I Want' characters have all three of these characteristics but an 'I Want' PC really should. And it is fairly straightforward to make up some tables to supply them. Here is a 1d8 one, but you could easily expand it to 1d30, 1d100, etc. with more detailed rows:

1d8	Inner demons	Misfit because…	Special gift
1	Actually has an inner demon	Is especially ugly or in some other way repellent	Can manipulate one of the elements
2	Wants to be physically different in some way	Has very distinctively coloured skin or some other unusual physical feature or mutation	Can always tell when somebody is lying
3	Has an uncontrollable, destructive power	Is an orphan and has been raised in unusual circumstances	Can teleport short distances
4	Was prophesied to have a vitally important life mission	Has been raised by neglectful or cruel parents or guardians	Can go invisible for short periods
5	Has a ‘dark side’ that comes out in some specified set of circumstances	Has a disability that is maligned by a misunderstanding society, such as mutism or deafness	Can fly for short periods
6	Goes through periods of debilitating depression, weakness, lethargy, etc.	Is of a different species or is a different type of entity to those in mainstream society	Has X-ray vision
7	Has an uncontrollable appetite or unrestrainable addiction	Has a strange social impairment such as an inability to lie, or smile	Is telekinetic
8	Has an arch enemy	Is the victim of strange rumours	Can breathe underwater

The Roundabout Animal Fantasy World

This is a picture of 'the most dangerous roundabout' in the North East of England, not far from where I work. The persistent local rumour is that the roundabout was installed the wrong way around when it was built, in the 1960s, so that the ramps from the central motorway that take traffic up to it (it is built on a concrete flyover) are too long, and those which take traffic down from it to the motorway are too short. Certainly, exiting it northbound can be a hair-raising experience and I see pretty frequent minor collisions when walking in the vicinity - usually when a timid driver has become intimidated and hit the brakes and then been rear-ended by a somebody tailgating from behind.

The vagaries of road traffic in Newcastle upon Tyne being as they may, though, my interest in this roundabout is somewhat esoteric: I like to imagine it as a location for animal fantasy gaming.

I have had a fascination with roundabouts for a long time, partly because they are a peculiar illustration of British design genius (the first having been biult here, in the early 20th century), but mostly because of the way they tend to implant a small island of greenery into the middle of what is often a lake of concrete and tarmac populated by loud, tooting and vrooming vehicles. They are little blobs of tranquility in amongst a lot of noise and bother. And it is easy to imagine them as little universes of their own, untouched by the outside world - populated by creatures unknown, furtive, mysterious, strange.

The roundabout near where I work mostly contains rabbits. In summer, they're often out there of a morning drinking the dew off the grass and frolicking cutely in the golden sun. There are presumably also rats and mice in abundance - not to mention spiders, beetles, ants. With a little stretch of the imagination one could envisage owls and bats in the trees, perhaps a fox. This makes it relatively easy to see it as a potential Duncton Wood or Redwall-type world if given a little poetic license with regard to scale - the roundabout I am describing is perhaps 25 metres in diameter, whereas if it felt more like 100 metres then you would be cooking with gas for a 'mice with swords' or 'moles who war over sacred menhirs' or 'rabbits who set up a totalitarian dictatorship' campaign setting.

But another idea, I think more compelling, would be one in which the roundabout itself serves as a kind of gateway to another realm - a realm of Nature, or Aelfrice, or faerie; something like a Mythago Wood of the big bad city. While the roundabout may only look, from the outside, as though it is 25m across, when one has stepped into the trees one suddenly finds oneself able to travel in deeper, and deeper, and deeper, as though the greenery never ends. There, the noise of the traffic rapidly recedes, and one is then brought into another reality - a world of natural magic, of fox-men and owl gods and crow kings and mole-women, of masked outlaws and lost wanderers from ancient days, of ghosts and spirits and dark creeping nameless things thirsty for blood or men's souls.

There are two ways of taking this latter option. The first conceit could be that the PCs are animals (rabbits, mice, whatever) who have made their way to the roundabout and wandered through the gateway, and have then found themselves transformed into intelligent, humanoid versions of themselves. Perhaps this is just what happens when passing beyond the threshold, and perhaps they return to normal when passing back through it. Perhaps there is a miniature society of creatures who do this.

The second conceit could be that the PCs are urban explorers, occultists, paranormal researchers, or whatever, who know of the gateway and go back and forth through it. Retaining the animal fantasy motif, perhaps beyond the gateway itself there are many 'raised' or 'fae' animals who inhabit an entire world. Perhaps some of these beings are hostile, perhaps some are welcoming, perhaps some are in between - perhaps most are not what they seem. Perhaps they bestow gifts or possess goods that are of use in our world - or impose curses on interlopers. 

Either way, the sense of the roundabout as small, visible and isolated and yet the same time a threshold to something vast and unknowable is compelling. Roundabouts, as they are, stand as small pockets of mystery within the urban landscape - the trick is to turn them into more than mere pockets: into worlds. 

Monster Manual Deadly 60

Do Americans know about Deadly 60? This is a kids' wildlife programme that has been aired on the BBC since 2009; the conceit is that the presenter, Steve Backshall, travels to a different location each episode in search of a few of 'the Deadly 60', meaning the sixty 'deadliest' animals on the planet. 

How 'deadly' is defined is never made explicit - sometimes it seems to mean 'deadly to humans' (king cobra, crocodile, black widow, and so on) and sometimes it seems to mean 'deadly to its prey' (chameleon, gannet, dolphin). Each creature on the list is given a Top Trumps style set of stats for things like speed, weapons, armour, etc., but these seem to just be assigned for fun and Steve has by now encountered far, far more than sixty animals. Really, it is just a wheeze for an entertaining programme about wildlife - and it works surprisingly well for an adult audience as well as for kids. There is a mixture of real-life animal-bothering (excuses are often made for Steve to get into situations in which he ends up getting nipped by a wolf, having his hand crushed by an anaconda, fending off crocodiles with sticks, etc.), fact files and experiments (is a peregrine falcon faster than a car?) and sheer japes and shenanigans - it's a very good, entertaining programme made by an evidently nice and enthusiastic team of people who get on well. I recommend it, if you are able to watch it and have children who are into wildlife.

But the reason I ask is that it brings me back to the idea, the subject of many posts passim, about exploring the world and interacting with it for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of extrinsic objectives such as treasure or XP. I do not mean to suggest that one should or could base a campaign around the 'Krynn Deadly 60' or 'Athas Deadly 60' (though that might indeed be fun...), but rather that there is something pure and refreshing about the concept of a campaign in which the PCs direct their energies towards finding weird and rare creatures to interact with rather than kill and take their stuff. 

'Interactions' cover a wide range of scenarios, though. Some thoughts:

• We are familiar with the concepts of snake charming, lion taming and the like. It is difficult perhaps to envisage how to make a long-term, open-ended campaign about a troupe of dragon tamers or cyclops hypnotisers or gargantua charmers who rove the wilderness in search of subjects...but not impossible.
• The PCs are in the employ of a wealthy eccentric/scholarly institute/guild/menagerie, etc., and go off in search of exotic creatures to bring back alive.
• The PCs are wannabe Steve Backshalls (or Herculeses) who simply want to test their strength against dangerous, powerful or strange monsters - wrestling hydras, boxing minotaurs, riding tarrasques and so on - without killing them.
• The PCs are themselves scholars who go out in order to study and learn about the capabilities and behaviour of monsters for the sake of the advancement of knowledge, presumably working for some kind of institute of higher education.
• The PCs are 'beast masters' who gain abilities, enhanced spiritual awareness, good juju, or whatever, from communing with monstrous beings

And so on.

The trick here is, as ever, to come up with ways to advance levels without deploying XP for gold, or at least in such a way as to emulate what is good about XP for gold through another form of token. One of the underrated virtues of XP for gold is that, in encouraging the PCs to amass wealth, it opens avenues to different modes of gameplay through the spending of their fortunes on, for example, commercial ventures, fortresses, specialist hirelings, and so on. Any replacement XP method should ideally have this potential, but it is difficult to see how this can be facilitated within the confines of a campaign focusing on PC-to-monster interactions.