
Dekalinder |

If someone comes to me telling "i wanna be THE HERO!!!!!" i tell him
"this is a cooperative game between X persone, each of them contibuiting to build a common story where everyone can be the hero of his dreams. So, you will be A hero, like the other, but there are still other people as much important as you here"
If they insinst, i show them the door. If they keep insinsting, i shove them through the door. He better pray someone opened it in the meantime.
At my table, no primadonna are allowed.

lemeres |

Magus can actually heal-- they get Infernal Healing & Greater.
Bard is pretty much the most blatant way, but frankly I find the notion of pitching a class as "The Hero Class" silly. The hero's class is whatever the person who acts like the hero wrote down on his character sheet.
Of course, I was just using the term as an example of the 'jack of all trades'...without the usual vaguely derogatory perceptions that makes people think..... well......"bard" (with a sneering tone, like "b-AAAARD?!")
If we are using the TVtropes entry, then my discussion more pertains to the 'jack of all stats' bullet point on the tvtropes page.

Melkiador |

Magus can actually heal-- they get Infernal Healing & Greater.
Bard is pretty much the most blatant way, but frankly I find the notion of pitching a class as "The Hero Class" silly. The hero's class is whatever the person who acts like the hero wrote down on his character sheet.
That's just arguing the definition. "The Hero" trope is a widely recognized thing. It's obvious that almost any character could be a "hero" of one definition or the other. No one is really arguing against that. But being a hero isn't the same as being "The Hero".
Although I will concede the OP doesn't seem to be using the trope. He just had his own definition of "Hero" that he didn't have sources to back up.

thejeff |
If someone comes to me telling "i wanna be THE HERO!!!!!" i tell him "this is a cooperative game between X persone, each of them contibuiting to build a common story where everyone can be the hero of his dreams. So, you will be A hero, like the other, but there are still other people as much important as you here"
If they insinst, i show them the door. If they keep insinsting, i shove them through the door. He better pray someone opened it in the meantime.
At my table, no primadonna are allowed.
What if the other players want to play the sidekicks? The supporting cast can be more interesting than the Hero.

kestral287 |
kestral287 wrote:Magus can actually heal-- they get Infernal Healing & Greater.
Bard is pretty much the most blatant way, but frankly I find the notion of pitching a class as "The Hero Class" silly. The hero's class is whatever the person who acts like the hero wrote down on his character sheet.
That's just arguing the definition. "The Hero" trope is a widely recognized thing. It's obvious that almost any character could be a "hero" of one definition or the other. No one is really arguing against that. But being a hero isn't the same as being "The Hero".
Although I will concede the OP doesn't seem to be using the trope. He just had his own definition of "Hero" that he didn't have sources to back up.
*Shrug* I pitched a long post explaining how my image of the archetypical hero is a Sorcerer or Wizard.
Jack of all stats is relative to your party. If you have old-Rogue, Fighter, Monk, Bard, the Bard can probably outsmart The Smart Guy, fight as well as The Big Guy, doubles down as the Chick, and outshines his Lancer easily. Relative to the world he's a jack of all stats, but to his party he's not-- and to me at least, relative to the party is the key factor.
So, with the people surrounding her, Nanoha from my big post qualifies as the closest we have to a jack of all stats. She dabbles in different types of magic enough to fight at all ranges and she isn't the best source of raw firepower in her group-- but there's no calling her anything but a full caster.
Tied back in: she's in a party of full arcane casters. She just happens to be carrying the spell set that gives her the most options, so she's the hero.

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The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
The problem with that analysis is that there's one inescapable difference between the TV Trope Hero and any player character.
He does not depend on dice rolls to judge how the story was going to play out. You can't get more of an apples to oranges comparison than this.

kestral287 |
kestral287 wrote:The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
The problem with that analysis is that there's one inescapable difference between the TV Trope Hero and any player character.
He does not depend on dice rolls to judge how the story was going to play out. You can't get more of an apples to oranges comparison than this.
There are a lot of problems with the analysis, but frankly 90% of the hero is behavior. Roleplaying the hero will do far more to make him what he is than anything else. The closest I'd do to suggesting builds is to say that the Nemesis feat is awesome.

Dekalinder |

What if the other players want to play the sidekicks? The supporting cast can be more interesting than the Hero.
That still doesn't work.
First, someone with that kind of attitude is not going to be healty for the table wheter the other have agreed or not with the basic premise.Second, when i'm mastering, you do stupid shit, and you die. I take extra care into making sure that there is a way out of every situation, and also roll behind the screen so I can cheat out of players getting OHK by random crits. But if you charge down the ogre camp at level 2, i'm gonna squash you like a bug. Being an hero doesn't mean being an idiot. If I hint you that the bad guy is out of your league, you better go find some help or come up with a plan cuz i'm not gonna pull punches if you decide to just charge him. I have learned in my 15 year of gaming that people idea of "being THE hero" with the capital THE is not compatible with this kind of approach.

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Sounds like you are talking about "Idiot Hero". Link
Actually it sounds like he's talking that actor archetype known as "The Line Counter". a classic example being one William Shatner who was the primary cause for the whole rewrite fiasco on "City on the Edge of Forever". His gripe about the script? He found out that Leonard Nimoy had one more speaking line than he did. This is the whole cause behind what would become the infamous Ellison-Roddenberry feud.

Scott Wilhelm |
when i'm mastering, you do stupid s@~#, and you die.
That sounds a little harsh. Are you sure there is any room for heroes in your campaigns? If there isn't, I guess that's okay. Not all RPGing is heroic fantasy, yours doesn't have to be.
But if you charge down the ogre camp at level 2, i'm gonna squash you like a bug.
Isn't that exactly what Han Solo did in the first Star Wars movie? They turned a corner and blundered into more than a dozen Stormtroopers. Han fired his blaster into the air and charged the troopers shouting, and the Stormtroopers all spontaneously thought this crazy man knew what he was doing and broke and ran before him for several minutes before they started chasing after him.
It's pretty believable in real life. In most situations in the real world, if some random person comes running at you as fast as they can shouting, "Run and hide!" the smart thing to do is run and hide. Ask questions later. A camp of ogres might be just smart enough to take that hint and just stupid enough to not see through the ploy.
I'm not saying you shouldn't try to realize your vision, but maybe there is room for others' visions in your world, too. Or is it a small world after all?

Dekalinder |

I'm pretty sure I said "charge down an ogre camp" not "try to bluff your way through an ogre camp with some ingenius thinkg and clever leverage of ogre's most know weakness"
And yes, most of my reasoning is based around the fact that if someone comes to a 5 player game asking to be THE hero, he's exactly the kind of stupid hero arguing that's going to argue about "screen time". And before someone ask, yes, I've got some direct experience on that.

Scott Wilhelm |
I'm pretty sure I said "charge down an ogre camp" not "try to bluff your way through an ogre camp with some ingenius thinkg and clever leverage of ogre's most know weakness"
And yes, most of my reasoning is based around the fact that if someone comes to a 5 player game asking to be THE hero, he's exactly the kind of stupid hero arguing that's going to argue about "screen time". And before someone ask, yes, I've got some direct experience on that.
I just wanted to check in with you on that. After all, Han Solo was bluffing, but he was also charging. I wanted to put it out there that sometimes things look stupid but aren't really.
The party dynamic can be a delicate thing, and I can easily see--and like you, have seen--a single player greedy for glory mess up the experience for everyone else. Actually, I've been at more than a few tables where EVERYBODY was trying to hog the glory for themselves and everybody was ruining it for everybody! Which makes me wonder if I wasn't the one ruining things for the party by saving them from one avoidable disaster after another....
But at the same time, nearly every player I've played with sees his character as the most important and sees the campaign narrative as being about him (or her). Everyone--player and GM alike--sees the world and the narrative in his own way, which is why it's so easy to ruin.
I was in a d20 Modern Game where one of the characters was obsessed with the mysterious benefactor that gave her her 6-guns. One of them was drunken pirate whose ship got sunk in the first day of gaming, and I was a Royal Marine who escaped captivity on board the pirate ship. During the adventure, I had my character write up his exploits with his 2 sidekicks in dispatches to publishers/press back home in London with titles like, "Bertram Sullivan, Royal Marines, and the Pirates of the Far East," and "Bertram Sullivan, Royal Marines, and the Dragons of Singapore!" I don't think my roleplayed glory-seeking impacted the party dynamic negatively. But maybe when I had my wizard cast a Web Spell that also captured some of the party members, I did do more harm than good....
However, it seems that a narrow definition of "hero" has just been offered. The TV-Trope-Hero as offered from the linked website is not necessarily the person the story is about and not necessarily the one who gets all the glory. This offered definition of hero is the one who does the morally correct thing. By that definition, the party could only have one THE HERO if only one party member wanted to be the one who always did the morally correct thing. I've been that thehero from time to time, and it always made it less fun for me. Although once or twice it made a pretty cool story, RPing situation to talk about later.

Atarlost |
The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
That's a bunch of description, but completely lacks definition. If I say "I want to play the hero," I'm not talking about a guy who wears blue or red and is the primary love interest of the group's token female character. I don't think anyone is. The actual heroic archetypes are less superficial.

kestral287 |
kestral287 wrote:That's a bunch of description, but completely lacks definition. If I say "I want to play the hero," I'm not talking about a guy who wears blue or red and is the primary love interest of the group's token female character. I don't think anyone is. The actual heroic archetypes are less superficial.The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
*Shrug* It's a trope. It is what it is. And as I've written in this thread-- treating anything like "This is what The Hero is" as a math problem, where you have a checklist to walk down, is stupid. It's a nuanced and individualized thing. There is no definition.

Dekalinder |

kestral287 wrote:That's a bunch of description, but completely lacks definition. If I say "I want to play the hero," I'm not talking about a guy who wears blue or red and is the primary love interest of the group's token female character. I don't think anyone is. The actual heroic archetypes are less superficial.The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
I think you lack understanding on the definition of tropes. In any case,, The Hero is commonly accepted as one specific archetype of hero, with his primary definition not being about what he can do, but how important he is for the story as a whole. He is the centerpiece that makes the story go forward. In that page you find out listed many ways in witch such importance can be emphasized by the autor. A generic character respecting this trope does not have to adhere to all of them.

Atarlost |
Atarlost wrote:I think you lack understanding on the definition of tropes. In any case,, The Hero is commonly accepted as one specific archetype of hero, with his primary definition not being about what he can do, but how important he is for the story as a whole. He is the centerpiece that makes the story go forward. In that page you find out listed many ways in witch such importance can be emphasized by the autor. A generic character respecting this trope does not have to adhere to all of them.kestral287 wrote:That's a bunch of description, but completely lacks definition. If I say "I want to play the hero," I'm not talking about a guy who wears blue or red and is the primary love interest of the group's token female character. I don't think anyone is. The actual heroic archetypes are less superficial.The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
Those traits have nothing to do with archetypes at all. Nothing on that page ever actually describes an archetype. The page is completely sodding useless.

Froth Maw |

The OP is just saying that if someone wants to be "THE hero" it's easiest to just tell them to be superman, because that's probably what they had in mind anyway. It's not terrible advice for achieving what the player wants, but I really don't like playing with superman types.
"THE hero" to me is right up there with the guy that falls for the first female NPC he sees and the caster who wants to be a god on the list of most annoying characters. They usually wind up never wanting to do anything even slightly morally gray, trying to intimidate the more morally questionable characters into behaving themselves, and then getting beheaded by the party psycho.

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kestral287 wrote:That's a bunch of description, but completely lacks definition. If I say "I want to play the hero," I'm not talking about a guy who wears blue or red and is the primary love interest of the group's token female character. I don't think anyone is. The actual heroic archetypes are less superficial.The OP specifically went on to define his version of hero "as the trope". That would be this.
His analysis of what that trope means and TVTropes' analysis of what that trope means are two wildly different things, mind. Hence my giganto-post.
This isn't a game where one player is the star, and the rest of the players are his cheering section. Unless that's what they want.

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One PC being The Hero doesn't mean that the rest of the group is the cheering section.
Captain America seems like a pretty good example. He's the leader of the Avengers, the one with the firmest moral principles, the guy who tries to get everyone to work together and calls out the orders. However, the other Avengers get lots of screen time, both action scenes and character development, to the point that someone on the first page asked who the hero in the movie was. Answer: they are all heroes, but Cap is The Hero archetype.
There's a couple things you can do to make this work.
1) Plan OOC, orders IC. Your character may be the party leader, but that doesn't mean you get to tell the other players what to do - if other players tell you what kind of orders they'd like your character to give their character, it keeps everyone at the table on even footing even if one character is in charge.
2) Delegate well and broadly. Your teammates are highly skilled - if you set an objective they should be able to figure out how to achieve that objective. Micromanaging is disrespectful.
3) Be ready to support your teammates. There's a couple spots in Age of Ultron where Cap and Thor perform maneuvers using their shield and hammer - with Thor swinging the hammer as Cap braces the shield. There's another scene where Cap acts as a distraction. The Hero cares less about getting the glory than about getting it done, and sometimes that means that he's making the assist. This is why I think the bard is a pretty good fit for the role - the class may have a lot of support abilities but they're largely about inspiring and coordinating others (aka Leadership) and the class can be competent in melee (not usually as strong as a martial, but Cap isn't exactly the heavy hitter that Thor or the Hulk are).
4) Don't steal their thunder. As an extension of the above point, if you know that another PC has a particular skill, don't try to beat them at that skill. And while you can help with their personal objectives don't make it about you. Again from Age of Ultron, there's a scene where everyone is trying to lift Mjolnir and Cap moves it slightly, then stands back. Given that in the comics Cap is one of the few people who can actually wield the hammer, I wonder if he could have picked it up, but chose not to knowing that it was important to Thor. (This may not be what the moviemakers intended but it's still a good illustration of the mindset of The Hero as a team player.)

Qaianna |

If someone were to ask me how to be 'The Hero' in a game, I'd rather ask them just how they define heroism. There's a good chance you might get a Superman wannabe, yes. This might take some explaining, and using the Avengers as an example of a party might be a good idea. Remember, never forget your friends. And if the would-be player doesn't want to see the party as friends, then tabletop RPG might not be the right fit.
Another example, another mythos. Twilight Sparkle was, while not overtly hostile, generally had no time or interest in other people around her. Then a (simplified, the source material isn't targeted for too much complexity) journey later to see how that works, and she's a hero. I'm sure there's a parody somewhere featuring her blowing off the would-be friends and dooming the world.
As far as class? I wouldn't call either Captain America or Twilight Sparkle a bard. But yes, they do pretty much glue their bands together. And they can still be the peak expert at one field, but still know that they can't go it alone.
I think that last part there is the most important. The hero knows he or she is NOT alone out there. Well, a good one will. The others end up mocked in bad reviews on writing boards.

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As far as class? I wouldn't call either Captain America or Twilight Sparkle a bard.
The shield champion brawler is pretty obviously designed with Cap's fighting style in mind, though unfortunately it isn't compatible with Exemplar, which best represents his leadership ability. I think others have suggested variants of paladin or fighter.
Twilight's almost certainly a wizard or arcanist, with a pseudodragon familiar.
Bard's a good class for The Hero but any class can fill the role.

Atarlost |
Atarlost wrote:Those traits have nothing to do with archetypes at all. Nothing on that page ever actually describes an archetype. The page is completely sodding useless.What do you think an archetype is?
Archae Type. The original type. The established form a character fits into. Are you a tragic hero in the style of Jason or Oedipus or are you an epic hero in the style of Beuwolf? Or maybe you're one of those usually religious figures that follows the monomyth. I don't recommend the last for gaming, though.