Fighting For Good Causes

Hey Earthlings!

Not long ago, I wrote the Cypher System Bestiary. One entry under the Modern genre is "billionaires" (level 5, attacks and Speed defense as level 3; effectively infinite resources).

The creature entry reminds us that it’s humane to remember that every billionaire is also a person. A few choose to direct their incredible fortune primarily towards humanitarian ends. Others buy sports teams and leagues, rare collectibles, and extravagantly expensive yachts. Many display childish behavior and get away with it. And more than a few got their wealth by founding businesses credibly accused of human rights violations and environmental devastation.

The upshot is that you can put a billionaire—along with a vampire, a weird west gunslinger, and a killer robot—in your next Cypher System game if you want.

Which is great, because tabletop role-playing games are fictional escapes. You don't need me to tell you that. Just look at the murder hobos most D&D adventuring parties include. Also generally fine, fun, and funny—assuming they’re not ruining the fun for other players—within the confines of the stories ttRPGs so brilliantly create.

It’s not fine when someone in real life decides they will deal with a situation like an adventurer battles monsters lurking in a dungeon. In reality, I don’t feel it’s laudable.

To crystallize that feeling far more eloquently than I, please welcome Batgirl, in her role as a guest blogger, to finish out this post.

Batgirl’s Take

There’s an appeal to the righteous outlaw trope, from Robin Hood to Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde to John Wick. But we all understand that there’s a distinction between the fantasy of law-breaking, particularly in fiction, and the reality of the brutality of murder.

Nobody idolizes John Wilkes Booth, Gavrilo Princip, Lee Harvey Oswald, or the 9/11 pilots, even though they believed themselves to be fighting for good causes. We remember them, rightly, as people who committed premeditated assassinations, who caused enormous suffering to the families and communities of the people they killed.

No matter how much we may or may not sympathize with the killers' adopted causes, we know they're not heroes. The real heroes and justice fighters are the people who work for the common good: Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr, Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, and Ceyda Sungur (Turkey's Lady in Red).

These are the people we really admire, the people who make a better world.

[Image from NBC News, showing Turkey's "Lady In Red" standing up to riot police right before they pepper spray her]

[Article originally published in my Patreon.]