Exchange of Realities

Yesterday’s post was on heroes making bad rulers. It’s a topic I know well, through experience with one of my primary characters. It’s also one I’d explore more deeply if I had the chance.

The character I had was an accident, in just about every way; from socialite/spy to military figurehead, and eventually to ruling a country. (This was everything from encouraged to out and out pushed by the rest of the group; I think they got a kick out of it.) And being an accident, she was pretty good at embodying why the transition from hero to leader is so difficult.

Now, she wasn’t complete hero material; when she’d begun, she hadn’t even been particularly heroic. But even in the beginning, concepts like loyalty, a sense of duty, and a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. And even after she acquired some of the more awkward traits, she was still manipulative, a pretty decent delegator, prone to using everything that came to hand to her advantage, and fond of small details. All of those work out pretty well for someone who’s supposed to be in charge.

But there were a couple little problems. For instance, this was a very hands-on character. She’d had to be; most of the problems she ran into were things that a lot of other people just plain didn’t notice, so who else was going to solve them? After a while, she’d gotten used to, if not being directly involved with most of the problems that sprang up, then at least being personally involved with the decision-making process. Now, it’s bad enough when your leader has to be stirring just about every pot on the fire at the same time. But when it’s likely to result in walking straight into trouble, you know there will be difficulties.

Now add to that the fact that most of her victories had come from belief in her own expendability, and the resulting willingness to take greater risks for greater rewards. After all, she felt, we’ve got a perfectly good leader already, and any minute now it’s going to stop being the stuff I’m good at and start being standard war. At that point, I’ll be redundant anyway, so why not make as big an impact as possible first? The problem is, when a strategy based on your impact being more important than your survival meets being someone who is pretty much vital to your country’s morale… let’s just say that it really messes with the modus operandi.

There were minor factors as well, of course. Duty conflicting with duty. Not being permitted to show emotion conflicting with having to deal with some massive-stress incidents (including a near-fate-worse-than-death-experience). Trouble with at least one of the people she was supposed to be able to trust implicitly. The usual. But the end result was a lot of difficulty dealing with the new position.

The one catch to it, I thought, was that there really wasn’t much chance to play with it. My GM’s good at rushing plot and cinematics, but politics aren’t exactly his strong suit, and he tends to get funny about situations in which people are talking rather than doing unless it’s a one on one side chat. I did get chances to work through some of the difficulties, but it always felt like an afterthought—noncanon, almost, for lack of a better term. Hard to really tell if it was coming out right.

Despite that, it was a learning experience, and one I was glad to have.