Statless Wonders

Derail my game now, bitch.

Hello again internet. Today I want to talk about a topic that's a bit contentious among roleplayers, and for once, I can kind of see where both sides are coming from. So, before we start, I'm going to throw out a few famous characters from RPG's, and see if you can find a common thread among them. Caine from Vampire: The Masquerade. The Lady of Pain from Planescape. The Harlequin from Shadowrun. Now, that's a pretty disparate group, but they're all linked by one thing. In all the editions of their RPG's and in all their appearances, they're unkillable. Not unkillable like the gods of DnD or the Tarrasque, where they're just given absurdly high stats essentially to taunt anyone who would try, but in some, ridiculously small circumstance with utterly, stupidly overwhelming odds, they could be taken down. No. These characters are not really characters so much as plot devices, meant to usher the story along, and they're what I call the Statless (I'm actually not sure if the Harlequin ever did get statted. It's been a long time since I've looked at Shadowrun but last I checked, he has a handwaved reason to survive a briefcase nuke, so I'm going to guess no). What that means is that these characters aren't given statistics. It's just kind of assumed that if you're stupid enough to challenge them, they're going to wreck you, because you don't have a hope in hell. Now, for obvious reasons, because players don't like being told what to do, these characters are one of the oldest points of arguments among roleplayers vs rollplayers.  Some think that it gives the story consistency, because there legitimately should be threats too big for one person to handle, but others argue that it takes agency away from the player. So I'm here to talk about this, maybe provide the for and against arguments and show how I've use characters like this in games.

Why these characters make sense
Now, even when I do use a Statless Wonder, I tend to use them very sparingly, and almost never directly adversarial toward the players, because, obviously there's no game there. An invincible enemy is a boring enemy, and if someone is directly opposing the player, even if they've made that enemy themselves by being idiots, I will always give them some way to get out of it. Now, one of the reasons I do use characters like this, is to preserve the setting. For example, the entire point of the Lady of Pain in Planescape is that she is powerful enough to keep the Gods themselves from setting foot in Sigil, the city between planes. Think about how powerful a being has to be to do that. If a player character can just take her down, they are, by implication, more powerful than any god that has ever lived in ANY DnD setting, and they've basically 'won' the game, as absolutely nothing can challenge them.

Characters like this, that preserve the setting, I think have a good reason to be invulnerable because it just wouldn't make sense story-wise if they weren't. If Caine, the first vampire could just be taken down by any random chump who put enough points in say, Thaumaturgy, then why haven't one of the other thousands of terrifying and nasty vampires out there done it already? A lot of these characters are only really challenged by players who want to disrupt the game and the story, and I like to keep those types nipped in the bud before they shank a plot-important NPC and wreck my storyline. It sounds railroadey, but there's a certain level of control that you need to maintain or else why be the storyteller? I'm a fan of player freedom as much as the next person, but someone who wants to personally be the one to take out an Antediluvian itself is trying to mess with you. They're trying to derail your game and make it all about them, probably just for bragging rights.

Now, here's the thing. I'm not inherently against the idea of changing the setting. If some person genuinely has a decades long campaign to use every possible advantage to find Caine and find out his weaknesses and diablerize him, becoming the new lord of all vampires on earth, I'm not inherently against him succeeding. The thing is, there's no story after that. Congratulations, you're Caine. You can splinter skyscrapers into powder with your pinky finger. You can blot the sun out with your godlike obtenebration and embrace all humans and animals at once and eat them. An invincible enemy is boring, but by the same token, so is an invincible player character. If someone legitimately amassed enough power to destroy the Lady of Pain, they have surpassed literally every being in any cosmology of Dungeons and Dragons, and it can be said that genuinely nothing can stand against them that they can't kill just by thinking about it for a moment. How do you challenge a character like that? How can you make a story, which depends on conflict in some way, about a character like that? I'm not against a character taking down a supposedly 'invincible' piece of the setting, but once they've done that, they're retired, because there's no point playing them any more.

Why people who want to kill them are right.
The place where a lot of players have a point about how annoying these characters are, and the place where the GM fails to use them right, I find, is when the GM uses them to 'bully' the players. I've mentioned this before, but there are GM's out there who don't like players getting 'too powerful' for fear of breaking the game, as if games aren't playtested or anything and can be broken that easily. There are GM's who fall in love with their little pet characters and can't bear to see the players take their toys away from them.

I cannot say this enough. I hate this attitude. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

The game is about the players. Period. If you wanted a story focusing on your character, either write a book or be a player character and not the GM. RPG's are a collaborative experience, and there HAS  to be some level of give and take. It's a contract. Players give up control, allow their characters to interact with the story, and accept that their characters may not make it to the end. GM's give up the spotlight. It's the sacrifice that you have to make to be a good GM. If you get to define the story and just make it focus on your pet invincible NPC, you're just playing with yourself.  

I've seen GM's make invincible supervillain Mary Sues, loosely based on themselves. Probably the worst I've seen was run by this raging waste of space (not the author, the idiot who ran the game)
and that was about the saddest thing I've ever read. There's a difference between making a villain badass and making him a Mary Sue (and yes, that term can apply to villains as well). By making Statless Wonders outright oppositional to the PC's, the game becomes unfair, and ceases to be a game.

How I've used the Statless Wonder.
I've used this type of character very, very sparingly. I run Vampire: The Masquerade more than any other game (can you tell?) and even when I make methuselahs or ancients (or in one Sabbat game that sadly never took off, even Antediluvians) statted out so players can defeat them (see my previous post on Learos) if they so choose. The thing is, as I've repeated, the only time I've use an invincible character is when they are ABSOLUTELY critical to the integrity of the setting. I've had players decide they didn't like NPC's as much as I do, and decide to kill them, and even if some of those are my favorites, I've let them die. I've done that for two reasons. Firstly, I like a good story as much as anyone else, and sometimes I find that when a story is completely derailed, it makes for some good drama as both the PC's and NPC's scramble to fix things. Secondly, I am a firm supporter of killing your darlings. As I've mentioned above, I understand my role as a GM, and it's not as the star of the story. Player characters are the stars and they should feel like it.

One little compromise I've used that I actually find as a nice compromise is the idea of the 'Avatar', and not the airbending kind. Essentially, say someone wants to see if they can beat up great Cthulhu or some other stupidly suicidal course of action, and you don't just want to tell them to shut up and eat their salad. How I handle that is by using a statted version of Cthulhu, but then if they beat him, just say it was an avatar, a tiny fraction of Cthulhu's power. Another version of that is the resurrective immortal, the most famous example of that being the Tarrasque in DnD, which has stats, but just flat out, cannot be permanently be killed. Doing something like this gives the player a sense of accomplishment, especially if you establish that the entity notices and even if they aren't killed, may be slightly taken aback by a mere mortal wrecking even a small part of them, while not actually wrecking the setting or the campaign too much. The only other time I've used this type of character is when a player isn't supposed to beat them physically, but outsmart them, almost a puzzle that can hideously kill you. That's neither here nor there, but I'd say that if you used something like that, you make it very clear to the players that a straight up fight is a very, very bad idea.

- Kephn