Reflection: What I Fight For

One thing about games like VtM and D&D are that, at their core, they’re power fantasies. You gain the power to affect change in the world, and you use that power. Sometimes, you get the chaos gremlins who loot, steal, and murder-hobo their way through a world. Other times, you get creatures like me and my friends. We’re no less chaos gremlins, but we have a very strict, if nuanced code of ethics. In our Monday game, where we’re playing in Wildmount, the world of Critical Role (pretty popular D&D stream if you haven’t heard of it /s), our party are most definitely not the good guys. We say it pretty often, actually. In fact, we’ve made deals with evil gods, mouthed off to good ones (okay, that’s mostly me), and have a tendency to lean into the area of morally gray. 

The reason behind this is that all of us play characters (and, I can face this, are the kind of people) who value efficiency. More often than not, in a world where a threat more powerful than the gods is coming along and threatening them with non-existence, evil gods are willing to swallow their pride in the interest of self preservation. Good gods… less so. Thus, we’ve found you can always trust an evil person to follow through on their promises if breaking them means they’ll end up dead or worse. 

You can trust evil to be what it is. 

Now, remember that nuanced moral code we have? Yeah, it’s pretty rigid: You do what is in your nature to survive, we can understand that, just be honest with us. You try to fuck us over, manipulate us, or break your word to us, we will come after you with a rage powered by the white hot intensity of a thousand suns. 

Evil Lich hires us to get her phylactary so she can finally die, only to be revealed as the new Lich Queen goddess? She’s our mom now and we love her. We brought a necromancer who was a boss battle in alive because he dared hurt our Lich Mom. You do not hurt Lich Mom. 

Witch Queen Tasha rolls in, tells us she needs our help, plays us for weeks before its revealed that she was wasting our time in the Faewild in order to let the next Calamity happen and keep us sidelined to be the heroes to restore the world afterwards while letting the people we care about die… I took the necromancer’s notes on temporal magic, learned time travel as an artificer, brought the fury of the gods down on her, and now she’s tarred, feathered, has a beard because our bard/rogue/warlock Charles thought it would be funny, and is currently in a very long, very uncomfortable time out on the moon. 

We may be chaotic, but our morals are pretty straight forward. 

“Well, none of this has anything to do with the chapter we just read!” You may be saying to yourselves right now… WRONG! 

You need to understand what a power fantasy really is. Especially in our modern world where many people think of a power fantasy as being Homelander from The Boys or Superman from… pick a comic/movie/tv show of his. People see it as that unstoppable force that can do whatever they want and either indulges in it or restricts themselves from fully allowing themselves to have it. They often think that the power fantasy, especially the male power fantasy, is the ability to act without consequences. I challenge that definition, as this story did become something of my own power fantasy (at least in this chapter). 

I couldn’t find it at the time of writing this, but there was a meme floating around for a while, I think it was in regards to Fallout 4, where someone was asking, “In a game where you can do anything, are unstoppable, and can basically be anyone but yourself, why do you choose to be good?” The response to that question hit me hard and has never really left me: “Because my power fantasy is being able to actually help people.”

Yesterday there was another murder by ICE agents in Minnesota. These little boys in their dress up outfits playing soldier against civilians are the ones with the unhealthy power fantasy. They are living out the video game the Columbine shooters made, where they modded DOOM to look like their school and none of the “enemies” could shoot back. They’re the example of Homelander. They use force to get people to either fear them, obey them, or accept them. And we never will. Force cannot earn respect. 

This is one of the reasons why Grey’s weapon of choice is his words. His influence. His mind. He seeks a perfect world, something he can never have. He seeks perfection in himself, something that cannot exist. More important than either of those desires is his constant striving for that perfection. Perfection can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and it is never achievable, but just because it isn’t achievable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it. Can Grey remove all the corrupt politicians in his world? Can he punish all the sexual predators in his world? Can he even make a measurable difference in the world with the ones he can take out of commission?

Honestly, probably not. 

But just like that person who (allegedly) bit off that ICE agent’s finger, those facts won’t stop him. Because intent matters more than anything. Power is a network. Individually, we have nothing, together we have everything, and if we focus that power with intent…

We can build a world where people get what they deserve.