If Your Character Has An Edge, They Also Need a Point

Every one of us, as a gamer, has gone through an edgy phase. Whether it was because we read Frank Miller's work on Batman, or we had an abiding love of the Punisher, or we'd just seen Watchman and loved Rorschach as a character, we tried to bring some of that into our games. There is a reason, after all, that the Marquis de Edge is the first entry on my list The 5 Eye-Rolling Rogues You Meet in Your Gaming Career.

Two edges, but you still need a point.

However, there is a little piece of nuance that I think we often forget when it comes to the discussion of so-called "edgy" or "grim" characters. It's that, much like the media that inspired them, the really successful ones have a point they're trying to make. It's only when that point is absent that the concept falls apart, or starts moving into unintentional parody territory.

So I thought I'd talk about that this week.

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The Iron Age of Comics, And Edgy Characters

If you weren't a big fan of comics in the 1990s, then you might have missed the Edgining, or the Grimming of the medium in the wake of both The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen by Frank Miller and Alan Moore respectively. The former comic took the character of Batman to a new level, as an aging Bruce Wayne comes out of retirement to fight a new breed of criminal with progressively harsher and more demented tactics (most of which got spliced into Batman V. Superman). This culminates in a fight with Superman, Bruce faking his own death, and then training a new generation of Batmen to continue the fight for him. Watchmen was originally going to use a bunch of characters that had been acquired by DC Comics as a deconstruction of the superhero genre, essentially showing the sorts of damaged people and fractured psyches that would exist behind the mask, but DC wouldn't go for it so Moore made his own thinly-veiled versions of those characters as an extra layer of middle finger.

Case in point.

These comics had a massive impact on the medium, going to unique places as they explored the genre of superheroes in ways that hadn't been done before. They acted as the counterpoint to heroic narratives, and showed an underlying bleakness that resonated with readers in a profound way.

What happened next is what always happens next... the tide of imitators began to crash upon the shores.

If you dig through the 90s, you'll find a small ocean of content trying to capture the lightning in a bottle of the foundational titles. Characters like Cable and Deadpool are good examples, but so are the stories of Spawn. Characters who already existed, like the Punisher and Wolverine, were taken to ever bleaker, darker storylines they hadn't been allowed to be a part of before. It seemed like every writer and every artist was chasing that high mark Miller and Moore had laid down, each in their own way.

Some of these tonal imitations were pretty good. The re-invention of Daredevil into a tortured soul trying to balance his more violent desires for vengeance (and giving us the whole Man Without Fear arc) is an example of when this worked. But a lot of titles and stories just devolved into nihilism and brutality, filling pages with empty spectacle that sort of pretended it was trying to be about something, but never really got beyond the belt pouches, bullets, and blood.

What This Has To Do With RPGs

Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, and the explosion of grim, dark, and edgy content that lasted from the late 80s to the early 90s had a pretty notable effect on RPGs as well (not the least of which was the surging popularity of the World of Darkness, which is still with us today). And while there have been plenty of unique settings and games that use grim or edgy content as a vehicle for exploring deeper issues, or to act as a counterpoint to prevailing narratives in storytelling, there are also a lot of games that were just edgy for the sake of being edgy.

Sort of a tabletop version of how Dark Souls gave us deep, impactful worldbuilding, grim storytelling, and an utterly unique challenge and atmosphere, and that spawned an entire genre of imitators, many of whom captured the look but missed the point.

Die, die, die again... but is it a statement on the futility of heroism? Or just punishment?

So what does this have to do with players, and even GMs, who are looking to explore those sharper edges of morality? Those characters and games where adjectives like bleak, grim, or dark apply? Well, it means that you need to have more than just the surface-level aesthetics in order for someone to take what you're doing seriously, and for it to have an impact on the table.

Sometimes that means you're planning an arc for the character, and there's a story you're trying to tell. For instance, if you have a character who's driven primarily by hatred, or vengeance, is this a story about how hollow that victory can be, and the sort of monster it can turn you into despite what you tell yourself? Is it about trying to turn the character off of that path, to give them a bigger cause, to teach them to trust again, and to give them friends and an adopted family to help them heal? Is it about losing your grip on being that better person, and slipping back down into wrath and hatred? Because if you've seen Berserk, that's what happens for our protagonist over the years of serving with the same mercenary company... and let's not forget Guts was found wailing as a baby beneath his mother's hanged body, raised by a brutal "knight" who abused him in every way, and he knew nothing but violence and bloodshed until the Band of the Hawk taught him how to be a person.

That's Mörk Borg level dark, right there.

If you're the Game Master, though, it's equally important to ask what the purpose of the grim/edgy game is. Are you doing a deconstruction of a traditional fantasy tropes, the way Watchmen dissected the superhero? Are you attempting to make a game feel like it has higher stakes by increasing the difficulty and lethality to keep players on their toes, and/or to make things like running in shirtless, sword swinging something that is more likely to get them killed? Are you using the level-based system of power to make comments on hierarchies, personal achievements, or other aspects of a world?

To be clear, you don't have to be going deep and metaphorical with an edgy setting or character concept for it to still be valid. Maybe it just appeals to you in an aesthetic sense, you're more comfortable in that particular archetype, or it's something you haven't really gotten a chance to play. But it is important to do that as an active choice, rather than because you defaulted to it without questioning motives, desires, goals, etc.

And the more edge a character, setting, or campaign has, the easier it's going to be to swallow if there is a point to all of it. Because edge just for edge's own sake can get really tiring really quickly.

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