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I have recently observed a horseshoe effect (sort of) in how different RPG philosophies arrive at the conclusion of "superhuman PCs are bad; focus on the power of organizing people instead."

Now, I am all for superhuman PCs. I like D&D 4e, Path/Starfinder 2e, Draw Steel, 13th Age 2e, explicitly demigod games like Godbound, and explicitly superhero games like Sentinel Comics and Outgunned: Superheroes. If there is an evil dragon or magician imperiling the land, the PCs personally venture out to neutralize the threat themselves. This is straightforward to resolve mechanically (short of heavy abstractions), and there is a tactical element as well (allied minions get fried by AoE).

But I also stick around various Discord servers, some of which have wildly different views on RPGs. Lately, I have observed two different camps across two different servers, unaware of each other, aver a similar stance under different lenses: "Overtly superhuman PCs are bad, cringe, and should be avoided. Experienced PCs should be heroic in strength, but only subtly so; their real power should instead be their ability to organize people to solve major problems. If an evil dragon or magician is imperil all the land, the solution should be to assemble hundreds or more people to address the threat together."

On one hand, there is an OSR crowd. They arrive at the above stance through rejection of "modern D&D," superhero slop, MCU slop, anime slop, and so on. Here, grittiness and realism is prized. The ideal high-level PC becomes a monarch or a monarch-like figure by starting from scratch, getting rich from dungeon-delving and mercenary work, bloodily carving out a domain, and hiring people to be soldiers and other underlings. The king organizes a formal army against the evil dragon or magician or whatever.

On the other hand...

(Continued in the next post.)

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