Daredevil

by JD Wiker

[Webmaster's Note: JD does give away some of a very obvious plot. Consider this a spoiler warning, even though they're so obvious it's hard to call them spoilers.]

Daredevil was my favorite Marvel superhero for many, many years after I first "discovered" comics (in the sense that they could be kept for longer than a month or two), and I've still got the entire Miller/Janson run squirreled away in my parents' basement. So I was looking forward to Daredevil, the movie—knowing full well that it wasn't likely to satisfy me.

The problem I saw with Daredevil—and which played itself out on the screen—was that the Man Without Fear is basically a low-power Spider-Man knockoff. Sure, Matt Murdock has special abilities that set him apart from humanity, but he still swings on a line, does acrobatics, and beats up thugs. Even his supervillains are just other people in costumes who have a schtick or two; Spider-Man's villains are a few notches further up the power scale. Daredevil had Man-Bull, Stilt-Man, the Gladiator, and even the Owl for recurring villains; his toughest challenge was Bullseye. Spidey had the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Electro, the Scorpion, and the Vulture. (Okay, the Vulture was really more at Daredevil's level.) Spider-Man also originally had the Kingpin, until Frank Miller stole him for old Horn-head. For Daredevil to do well at the box office, it had to out-do the Spider-Man movie. Either it had to have even better stunts-which, given the character's limitations, wasn't likely-or it had to have a really killer plot and sizzling dialogue.

Sadly, the plot was fairly lackluster, and the best bits of dialogue came directly from Daredevil comics of yore. I won't spoil the movie for you, but if you followed all the appearances of Bullseye and Elektra, you'll spot the scene right away.

All of this got me thinking, though. Assuming you're not setting out to do the superhero genre where the characters and their powers are all larger than life, you're going to need a gripping plot. And if you're shooting for a superhero campaign, you're going to need a campaign model that, like a movie franchise, keeps the audience coming back again and again.

With Daredevil, I just don't see a sequel coming any time soon.

The Superhero Campaign Model

Translating the themes of the superhero genre into a superhero campaign model would seem to require merely creating some new FX powers to cover all the traditional "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive" stuff that heroes do. Unfortunately, the translation is only half the process. To truly do justice to the genre, the GM has to establish a world in which not only can ordinary people gain great powers, but those who have such powers feel compelled to use them-for public good or personal gain.

I'm guessing that most people reading this have a good idea of what a superhero setting looks like: people in colorful costumes beating the stuffing out of each other with amazing, often superhuman, abilities. So we can skip defining the setting and jump right into the role of the heroes.

The Role of the Heroes

What possesses people to use their extraordinary powers in extraordinary ways? Psychologically, it's just an extension of doing what you're good at in order to make money or have fun (or both). It's no different from a genius pursuing physics research or an athlete trying to go pro. But that doesn't really tackle the desire to behave heroically. After all, the physicist doesn't put together a tactical team to defuse hostage situations, and the athlete doesn't run around the streets at night in his uniform beating up muggers.

That kind of mentality might have been enough for early comic book heroes, but four decades of Marvel Comics, and seven of DC Comics, has demonstrated to us that we need heroes to have solid motivations for risking their lives. We'll even accept less than heroic motivations, so long as the protagonist of a comic story beats the stuffing out of the antagonist at some point. Heck, most of us would even root for the bad guy, if the bad guy takes out another bad guy with the kind of style and panache we admire.

But what does it take—beyond gaining superpowers—to turn average kid Matt Murdock into Daredevil, the Man Without Fear? The powers are neat, but the character has to be driven to pursue justice; it can't just be a hobby, or the character seems less heroic. Certainly, "seeing" his father killed for refusing to throw a fight is one motivator, but let's face it, you'd have to have some real grief issues not to have let that go after ten or fifteen years.

This is one of the places where Daredevil falls short of the mark. We see that Matt Murdock, a lawyer, has an obsession with justice: He hates to see the guilty go free—and he can tell when people are lying on the witness stand, because his hypersenses can pick up the telltale physiological signs of deception, like a lie detector. Sure, he can't prove it without revealing his abilities (and thus his secret identity), so that's a good reason why he goes after these people himself, as Daredevil.

But why become a lawyer in the first place? As we know from the movie and the comics, Matt's father, a boxer, didn't want Matt to follow in his footsteps, and insisted that Matt study hard to become something "better," like a doctor or a lawyer. Still not good enough a reason, so here we diverge into mythic storytelling: Matt Murdock is obsessed with justice, which seems to be mixed up in his mind with vengeance. (In the movie, he recognizes at one point that he's dangerously close to becoming a villain himself: "I'm not the bad guy," he tells a frightened child, though he seems to be speaking more to himself.)

Daredevil's quest for justice makes him rather a Nemesis figure: a manifestation of divine retribution, drawn loosely from Greek mythology. He serves a higher power (in this case, justice), trying to make the world a better place by punishing the wicked. This is the mythic theme of Daredevil, but the movie overlooks it, sadly, opting instead for a kind of twisted love story with Elektra (ironically, a figure drawn even more directly from Greek myth).

Campaign Traits

So, to really capture that superhero feel, the motivations of the heroes have to be just as "larger than life" as the heroes themselves. Stopping crime is one thing; having an archenemy who you are destined to destroy, or be destroyed by, is quite another. The first plays well to one-shot games or "mini" campaigns; the second works much better to keep the players coming back, session after session (or movie after movie).

Let's proceed from the assumption that the campaign should feel like an epic.

Key Conceits

If you had to develop three key conceits upon which to base superheroic campaigns, these would probably do the trick.

Superpowers exist. For whatever reason, a very small percentage of the world's population has powers and abilities "far beyond those of mortal men." They may be the product of nuclear or chemical accidents, genetic mutation (or engineering), technological achievement, divine gifts, infernal gifts, a world-changing event ... the list goes on and on. But for whatever reason, otherwise ordinary people get access to these abilities.

Good people and bad people alike get superpowers. Not everyone who gets superpowers is a good guy. Some otherwise law-abiding people turn to crime when granted these powers, but usually those who become "supervillains" began as villains, anyway. The fact that superpowers exist doesn't mean that the method of their distribution is in any way fair or benevolent. Nor does it mean that those who gain them will be emotionally or psychologically stable enough to handle having them.

Vigilantes exist. Some people who gain powers (and even some who don't) feel compelled by a sense of responsibility, a need for justice, or a desire for revenge to help police the "super population"—even when the official police would prefer they didn't. These vigilantes, the so-called "superheroes," try to use their abilities to serve the greater good, in whatever fashion works for them, from battling supervillains to bringing kittens down from trees. Some superheroes may be little better than villains themselves, but they ostensibly work on the side of the law, or at least justice.

Mythic Adventures

Where all of this ultimately comes together is in the campaign's adventures. The adventures have to create a story arc that takes the heroes from their initial "learning curve" days to their final, climactic confrontation with the enemies they've been striving against for so long. Unlike Daredevil, the movie, the hero shouldn't take down the major villain at the end of the last reel. Defeating Bullseye should be enough.

Even learning the identity of the major villain should be sufficient. The first confrontation with the Kingpin should come at the end of a later adventure (or sequel), and even then, the resolution needn't necessarily be in the hero's favor. (Recent issues of Brian Michael Bendis's Ultimate Spider-Man had Spidey expose Wilson Fisk as the Kingpin—but not defeat him in combat. In fact, the first time they tangled, Spider-Man got his ass handed to him by the Kingpin.) This sets up an enduring enmity that builds upon the basic premise: that one day, the superhero and the supervillain will face off, and only one will walk away alive.

For that sort of thing to happen, the stakes and the enmity have to escalate, bit by believable bit, until the hero is prepared to sacrifice his life or his freedom just to take the villain down, once and for all. Many roleplayers would be all too happy to kill a vexing NPC in the game, but wouldn't be willing to stop playing their character as the price for doing so. But when the player doesn't care that his character could die or go to prison, so long as the villain is no longer able to menace society, then it's time for the final showdown.

Getting to that point, though, is the real art of gamemastering a superhero campaign, and I heartily recommend boning up on Greek mythology and the works of Joseph Campbell, in addition to superhero comics in general.

Hopefully, if there's to be a Daredevil 2, the screenwriters will do the same.

Your Turn

What did you think of Daredevil and JD's observations? Let us know in the Opinions section of our discussion boards.