[UA] Morality (and banality)

[Gregory Paul Stolze]

At 06:58 PM 12/05/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>More generally, and ranting for a moment, I think that the rpg community - 
>and the sf/fantasy community, come to think of it - have a tendency to focus 
>on a model of heroism that isn’t that useful (that of the ‘immediate hero,’ 
>who leaps boldly to the rescue), and then whinge that the rest of the world 
>- and mainstream literature - has forgotten what ‘true heroism’ is.

Well, this ties in to the nature of true evil, doesn't it?  I can't
remember her name, but some writer proposed the idea that real evil is
rarely very interesting.  It's commonplace, it's boring, it's banal.  That
is, in fact, the impression I got reading "Ordinary Men."  These guys
weren't out to liquidate the Jews because of profoundly held beliefs.  They
did it because they didn't want to let down their fellow soldiers (at
least, at first that was their primary motivation).

Because real evil is so hard to portray in gaming -- because it's amorphous
and numbing and long term and ten thousand tiny compromomises over the
course of years -- real heroism is hard to portray too.  

Hm, suddenly I'm flashing back to one of the finer moments in Tweet's
original Al Amarja game.  The setup was that this old man named
Feeblemeister had sicced his giant rats on one of the hookers working out
of Sad Mary's.  One of the PCs was investigating the giant rats.  When a
bouncer from Sad Mary's found where Feeblemeister was staying, he was sent
out to teach the guy a lesson, and the PCs tagged along.

Now, in a typical RPG, this would have been a big combat between the PCs,
the bouncer, and the giant rats, right?  Instead, they found Feeblemeister
-- unprotected -- and the bouncer started whaling on him.  Feeblemeister
didn't resist, and pretty soon the bouncer had knocked him down and was
kicking him.

So the guy playing the PC -- in a sharp, commanding voice -- said "That's
enough!"  And the bouncer stopped.

Later, the bouncer confessed how uncomfortable he was with that particular
task.  "If he'd fought back, sure, that would have been great.  But just
lying there, not resisting... I din't know what to do."  He was relieved
that someone had told him it was okay to stop.

-G.

Who wishes the protagonist in "Titanic" had been an ordinary middle-aged
man who calmly kept his head in a crisis and sacrificed his own life to
save his unglamorous, middle-aged wife.

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