Exchange of Realities

It’s funny how often characters are expected to go from hero to ruler. Heck, early versions of Dungeons and Dragons took it for granted that the successful adventurers, after a while, would go from working solo to having anything from a keep to a country.

I have difficulties with this. While I don’t have firsthand experience with hero to ruler, I’ve gotten to play with it a bit in a couple of my games, and not only is it not what it’s cracked up to be, but in many cases it’s not emphasized just how different the two jobs are and how difficult it can be to go from one to the other. Heroing and ruling are two different things, and I believe they should be kept more separate than they currently are.

Why, you ask? Let me start with a couple of questions.

What do we see as a hero? Someone who gets things done, alone if necessary. Who is willing to put his cause over his own life. The hero is the one who leads from the front, who empathizes with everyone, who is willing—no, expected—to choose the path of most risk rather than the path of most sacrifice. When he fails, it is a fact about how hard the task is, and we commend him for trying at all. We expect honesty, almost to the point of bluntness, and call foul at any sign of deception.

What must a good ruler be? Someone who keeps things together. Yes, she’s expected to die for her country, but only as a last resort, because her country needs her to help it through. She cannot risk herself if there is a choice, and cannot in good conscience risk a lot for a very slim chance of victory, because she’s not the only person she is risking; neither can she afford to consider every single person’s feelings, as there are times when a few must be disappointed for the good of the many. When she fails, perhaps it wasn’t that the job was hard, but that she has some sort of secret agenda that the failure promotes. And while it isn’t respected in her, she can’t always be completely honest; sometimes, misdirection is a country’s only chance at survival—or the ruler’s only chance at survival, if people without a hero’s scruples think they could do her job better than she could.

As you can see, there are a lot of mutual contradictions in there. And that’s to be expected. You can’t have your rulers gallivanting around getting captured or threatened or who-knows-what; keep it up too long and you’ll be out a ruler, and if the succession hasn’t been carefully figured out everything’s going downhill from there. Likewise, you can’t have your heroes sitting on the throne telling people who are powerful en masse and don’t believe in direct confrontation exactly what they think of them. It usually results in little things, sure, but when those little things are knives between the ribs, laughing them off is just going to make you die faster.

For a hero to become a ruler, there has to be a change. A new sort of hero’s journey, if you will. The impulsiveness, the risk-taking; that has to be cast aside. The all-or-nothing attitude—gone. A ruler has to be able to compromise, and to know when not to; to be able to set aside vision for practicality. She is not expendable, and she must know it. A hero may live for himself—or rather, for his vision and his probable adrenaline-junkie-ness, his sheer ideals and his view of how the world works, his definition of love and his understanding of what the world needs. A ruler may not; again, her decisions affect far more than her, so True Love or wanting to just be normal again get tossed aside in favor of another night trying to get the funds to line up or a prince with no personality but a solid offer of allegiance dangled as a carrot behind him. It’s a hard process, leaving those things behind. But that’s what makes it interesting.

So if you want someone to be both hero and later good ruler, think about it a moment. Consider making her notably flawed at one or the other, skills or temperament that serve her well in one capacity hamstringing her in another. Or consider having her actually have to change, to learn the differences between one role and another, maybe even to fail.

Or just don’t make the future-ruler character a hero, or the hero a ruler. You’d be amazed at the interplay that can come from being the heroic confidante to the poor soul who is stuck with the big job.