By The Intrepid in Folktales — 21 May 2025

Power with Purpose in Role-Playing Games

Reframing the RPG Power Fantasy as Community Aspiration

I. Introduction

In The Dungeon Is a Detonator, we explored how the dungeon, long treated as a self-contained challenge, is in fact a rupture—a keystone event that destabilizes the world around it. It is not merely a location, but a catalyst: political, spiritual, ecological, and cultural. When players clear a dungeon, they don’t restore the world—they change it.

But if we understand the dungeon as a detonator, we must also ask: What rises from the ruins? What is built in the aftermath? What vision of power fills the vacuum left behind?

In many traditional tabletop RPGs, the answer is often framed in terms of personal power. Characters grow stronger, acquire magical items, defeat enemies, and accumulate influence. This is the core of the classic power fantasy: the journey from zero to hero, from fragile adventurer to god-slaying legend. It’s a structure beloved for good reason—empowering, exhilarating, and mythic.

And yet, in a world wrestling with real questions about authority, justice, interdependence, and sustainability, we might ask whether the traditional power fantasy is enough. Or whether it might be transformed—not rejected, but reframed—into something with broader resonance.

This essay proposes a shift in perspective: from power as individual dominance to power as community aspiration. From the hero who saves the village, to the hero who stays and helps rebuild it. From the party that clears the dungeon, to the party that tends the soil left behind.

II. The Traditional Power Fantasy in RPGs

The traditional RPG structure is steeped in power fantasy by design. Characters begin weak and vulnerable, then steadily gain:

Abilities: spells, attacks, and class features
Items: powerful gear, relics, and gold
Narrative clout: status, land, influence
Victory: defeated foes, solved mysteries, checked boxes

This arc is deeply satisfying. It resonates with Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, with mythic storytelling, and with our own desire to matter in a world that often feels indifferent. It can:

Provide agency to players who may feel disempowered elsewhere
Offer a safe space for escapism, experimentation, and catharsis
Allow exploration of archetypes: the rogue with a past, the reluctant warrior, the chosen one

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the traditional model. In fact, many of its virtues—hope, transformation, perseverance—are essential. But it carries shadows too:

Hyper-individualism: where the party is a set of lone operatives rather than a true community
Extraction logic: where “clearing” a dungeon means looting everything and leaving
Detachment: where consequences for the world are minimal, unexamined, or simply reset
Colonial undertones: where the players bring “order” to “wild” places without interrogating what was there

These critiques don’t demand we abandon the structure—they invite us to evolve it. What if the story of gaining power was not about becoming superior, but about becoming responsible? What if the journey wasn’t from weakling to warlord, but from outsider to steward?

The rest of this essay explores how to design games, characters, and stories that channel the thrill of growth into the joy of shared flourishing.

III. Reframing Power as Community Aspiration

If the traditional power fantasy asks, “What can I do with power?”, the aspirational model shifts the question to “What can we build, protect, or heal together?” This isn't about removing power from the equation—it's about redefining its vector. Power is no longer an end in itself, but a tool for uplift, connection, and transformation.

Power as Relational, Not Hierarchical

In most RPGs, power accumulates upward: stronger characters defeat bigger foes, collect rarer items, and bend the world more to their will. But what if power was measured by how it spreads, how it enables others to act, and how it seeds long-term flourishing?

A warlock doesn't just pursue forbidden knowledge—they broker safety pacts for their village.
A bard’s music doesn’t just charm enemies—it repairs cultural memory, reigniting community resilience.
A paladin's divine mandate isn't personal glory—it’s infrastructure: roads, clinics, reconciliation rites.

This reframing shifts characters from avatars of dominance to agents of care. Their power is responsive, not just reactive.

What Is Community Aspiration?

Community aspiration in RPGs can take many forms, but it tends to center on these values:

Interdependence: Recognizing that no one survives alone—not in the wild, not in a city, not in a fractured kingdom.
Responsibility: Power that’s earned must be wielded with attention to consequence.
Imagination Beyond Scarcity: Envisioning worlds where survival isn’t the end goal—thriving is.
Uplift and Mutual Aid: The party’s success is measured not just by their victories, but by who rises with them.

This isn’t about moralizing or preaching. It’s about opening the imaginative space to stories where winning doesn’t require leaving others behind.

Narrative Opportunities in Aspiration

When power becomes a communal pursuit, entirely new story structures emerge:

Defense, not Domination: Instead of conquering a keep, players might defend a multi-faith city from fracturing under pressure.
Restoration, not Ruin: Rather than looting a dungeon, players unearth lost technologies to rebuild ecosystems.
Liberation, not Leadership: The “chosen one” trope is dismantled, replaced by coalitions, councils, and co-created futures.

In this context, the fantasy becomes not about being the best, but about becoming indispensable to something greater than yourself.

IV. Game Mechanics for Community Aspiration

If the core fantasy is changing, the mechanics must evolve alongside it. Traditional mechanics often reward individual advancement—experience points, leveling systems, and treasure acquisition. But when the focus shifts to collective flourishing, mechanics must start asking different questions: Who benefits from this power? What systems does it uphold or transform?

Below are several mechanical structures and ideas—many of which can be layered onto existing systems—that support aspirational, community-centered play.

1. Reputation and Influence Systems

Replace or augment XP with Reputation Tracks that measure how various communities perceive the party. Instead of leveling up because of kills, players grow in prestige for:

Negotiating peace between rival factions
Restoring sacred land to its caretakers
Redistributing stolen resources
Dismantling exploitative structures

Mechanically, reputation can grant narrative leverage: safe passage, support in times of need, or even structural changes like new laws or public rituals in their honor.

2. Faction and Relationship Clocks

Adapted from Blades in the Dark, faction clocks allow GMs to track the impact of the players’ actions across multiple interest groups. Importantly, these clocks don’t just track conflict—they track trust, solidarity, and mutual aid.

Players might gain the favor of a workers’ syndicate, only to strain their relationship with an allied guild. Their choices become relational, not just tactical.

3. Community Building Mechanics

Inspired by games like Beyond the Wall, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, and even Pathfinder’s Kingmaker, community-building mechanics allow players to literally shape the world:

Build housing, workshops, or spiritual sites
Train new leaders or share knowledge
Solve public health crises or food shortages
Create festivals, trade routes, or mutual aid systems

Power, in this model, is infrastructural. The fantasy becomes one of creation—not just reaction.

Design economies that encourage equitable resource use, not hoarding. Mechanical incentives might include:

Shared inventories or “community vaults”
Rituals or events that require the party to donate items or labor
Magic items that grow stronger the more people they aid (e.g., a cloak that heals more HP the more communities it has defended)

Scarcity becomes a test of solidarity, not a contest of accumulation.

Include encounter types that go beyond combat, requiring players to solve systemic problems:

A famine caused not by nature, but by unjust taxation
A rebellion on the brink of co-optation by a foreign power
An ancient curse that can be lifted—but only by repairing intergenerational harm

Reward players not for solving these instantly, but for committing to long-term solutions.

6. Shared Advancement

Mechanics can support communal progression—a village, faction, or network that levels up alongside (or even instead of) the players. Examples:

A “Hope Meter” that increases as acts of care ripple outward
NPC allies gaining new traits, professions, or titles
A liberated district developing unique resistances, magics, or defenses

This reinforces the idea that the party’s success is not self-contained—it’s generative.

In the aspirational model, mechanics aren’t just balance sheets or levers of power. They become expressions of values. Every rule is a ritual. Every resource, a relationship. Every mechanic, an invitation to imagine a world where power means care, continuity, and change.

V. Narrative and Thematic Elements

While mechanics set the rules of engagement, it’s the narrative that breathes life into a campaign. The stories we choose to tell—and how we tell them—shape the emotional, ethical, and imaginative core of a game. When reframing power as community aspiration, we begin to tell stories not of domination, but of connection, consequence, and care.

Here are several narrative principles and thematic pillars that reinforce this model:

1. Interconnectedness Over Exceptionalism

The traditional hero narrative elevates the exceptional individual. The aspirational story centers interdependence—how characters are shaped by their communities and, in turn, shape them back.

Practical Techniques:

Show how small acts ripple: a single well defended may become a symbol of hope.
Weave personal arcs into community arcs: when a PC faces a personal trial, the community rallies—or fractures.
Create dilemmas that require cooperation, not unilateral heroism.

2. Communities as Characters

Make communities feel alive—not just as backdrops, but as living, growing, and sometimes suffering entities.

Tools:

Give them needs, fears, and ambitions.
Let them respond meaningfully to player actions—not just “gratitude” or “panic,” but changes in culture, leadership, ritual.
Use relationship maps, festivals, rumors, and traditions to texture them.

When players invest in a community’s story, not just its survival, they become more than guests—they become participants in its legacy.

3. Moral Complexity Without Nihilism

Aspirational storytelling doesn’t mean utopianism. It thrives in the tension between ideals and flawed reality. In these worlds:

Good intentions can have unintended consequences.
Trust can be fragile and must be earned.
Institutions may be compromised, but not irredeemable.

What distinguishes aspirational RPG storytelling is the belief that change is possible, even if it’s hard, slow, or partial. Hope is not naivety—it’s resistance.

4. The Cost of Power, the Weight of Impact

Characters may gain power, but in this model, power always comes with a question: What will you do with it? And more poignantly: What happens if you walk away?

Let the world feel their absence.

A community abandoned in its moment of need might fall to despair or radicalize.
A policy implemented without follow-up might become oppressive in its own way.
A healed land may become the next target of conquest—unless protected.

Power is not a trophy. It’s a mandate of care.

5. Themes of Justice, Repair, and Belonging

Aspirational narratives are fertile ground for exploring deeper themes:

Social justice: Who has power? Who’s denied it? What systems uphold inequality?
Restorative justice: What does redemption look like for former enemies or oppressors?
Ecological care: What does it mean to heal a land, not just cleanse it?
Cultural survival: How can stories, rituals, and languages be protected and revived?

These themes don’t need to be didactic—they can be atmospheric, emergent, even subtle. What matters is creating space for them to unfold.

6. Hope as Endurance, Not Reward

The traditional power fantasy often rewards hope after victory. In the aspirational model, hope is part of the work itself. It’s what keeps people showing up, building again after fire, forgiving without forgetting.

Design NPCs who hope despite the odds. Let their dreams become the players’ torchlight. Let the party's own resilience inspire other

The stories we tell around the table are not just escapes—they are blueprints for the worlds we wish we lived in, or fear we might. By telling stories of communal aspiration, we remind ourselves that power doesn't have to corrupt—it can connect, repair, and transform.

VI. Examples in Existing RPGs

The idea of power as collective aspiration isn’t entirely new—it’s been emerging in RPG design for years, particularly in indie spaces and story-forward systems. Some games build these themes directly into their mechanics and narrative scaffolding. Others allow them to emerge through play. Either way, they serve as models for what is possible.

Blades in the Dark

Power through systems, relationships, and legacy

Blades centers on criminal crews trying to carve out space in a haunted, industrial city. Power is gained through relationships—with factions, communities, rival gangs—and tracked via clocks and turf maps. It’s not just about surviving; it’s about shaping the city’s ecosystem over time.

Community is both asset and battlefield.
Choices ripple across factions.
The crew's identity is inherently collective.

Blades doesn’t preach collectivism, but it makes it a smart, mechanically rich path to lasting power.

Apocalypse World

Community as both stake and center

At the heart of Apocalypse World is a ruined world struggling toward survival. Every playbook is embedded in a social ecology—whether you run a water farm, mediate a gang’s rage, or bring people together through music.

The world is always watching, always reacting.
Survival is inherently collective.
You’re not the lone hero—you’re the linchpin.

The tension between scarcity and aspiration fuels every arc.

Urban Shadows

Power as negotiated trust

Urban Shadows takes place in a supernatural city teeming with factions, favors, and obligations. Its debt mechanics turn every interaction into a question of who owes whom, and why.

Power is social and layered in obligation.
Trust is currency—but so is betrayal.
The city is not a backdrop, but a co-participant in every story.

Aspiration here means balancing conflicting needs, protecting marginalized communities, and trying not to lose your soul in the process.

Lancer

Mechs as tools of liberation

While Lancer is ostensibly a tactical mech game, its lore and structure emphasize political and ethical conflict. Player characters aren’t just pilots—they’re agents of change, caught in a universe of colonialism, empire, rebellion, and revolution.

Missions often impact entire worlds or settlements.
Mechs are used not only for combat, but for reconstruction, exploration, diplomacy.
The setting challenges players to ask what kind of future their violence is building.

It’s war gaming reframed as ideological architecture.

Valthorne: City of Living Law

Justice as collective memory, power as civic responsibility

Valthorne is a living city—its laws, infrastructure, and decisions shaped directly by the players’ actions and the collective consciousness of its people. Every mechanic reinforces community aspiration:

The Flow Track monitors harmony and strain across different districts, emphasizing the city's mood and wellbeing as a system to be navigated, not controlled.
Murmuration Squares record choices and conversations in the city’s memory, allowing community consensus and legacy to evolve.
Griefstone Vigils create space for mourning, reconciliation, and honoring the weight of change.

In Valthorne, power is exercised through stewardship, not supremacy. Players are not conquerors—they are civic collaborators, improvising justice in real time.

Haute & Dangerous

Satire as a framework for cultural repair

Though absurdist and high-glam in tone, Haute & Dangerous can be played through an aspirational lens. The players may begin as agents in a fashion-themed apocalypse, but through the Material Collective, they become participants in resistance through creativity.

The campaign can emphasize ethical production, worker autonomy, and cultural storytelling through clothing.
The fashion industry is not just backdrop—it’s the site of a moral and economic struggle.
The players' interventions determine whether the world is ruled by aesthetic tyranny or reclaimed by communities of care.

It proves that even satire—especially satire—can carry an aspirational heart.

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins

Power that echoes across generations

Legacy is perhaps the clearest embodiment of community aspiration. Characters and factions grow, build, fracture, and evolve over centuries. Players alternate between individual PCs and their broader culture or organization.

Power is infrastructural and evolutionary.
Communities literally grow based on your actions.
You can pass down values, projects, and scars to future generations.

It’s not about what you conquer—it’s about what you leave behind.

Traditional Games, Reframed

Even traditional games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder can support aspirational play through thoughtful GMing and player intent.

Introduce mechanics for settlement building, reputation, and political consequences.
Focus campaigns around restoration, reconciliation, or coalition-building.
Frame quests around shared values rather than personal gain.

Examples:

A D&D party that turns a cleared dungeon into a sanctuary for exiles.
A Pathfinder game centered on rebuilding after a magical disaster, with each class contributing to a shared civic project.
A cleric’s divine mission focused not on smiting, but on tending the soul of a dying culture.

The toolkit may not always be built-in—but the intent can still reshape the game.

In every case, these games show that the aspirational model is not hypothetical. It’s already here. It’s just waiting to be named, nurtured, and brought into the light.

VII. Benefits and Challenges of the Aspirational Model

Reframing RPG power fantasies as community aspiration is both an opportunity and a responsibility. It deepens the emotional resonance of play, expands the kinds of stories we can tell, and mirrors the real-world complexities of power and responsibility. But it also introduces new tensions—narrative, mechanical, and social—that designers and facilitators must navigate with care.

Benefits

Aspirational play grounds fantasy in themes that matter: justice, healing, solidarity, interdependence. Players become not just heroes, but collaborators in reimagining what a better world might look like—even if it's imperfect or incomplete.

Stories gain depth by centering care and consequence.
Emotional engagement increases when victories are shared and fragile.
Players connect more fully to the setting—and each other.

2. Narrative Flexibility and Longevity

The aspirational model opens the door to narrative structures beyond the linear rise-to-power arc. Campaigns can focus on:

Long-term stewardship rather than escalation
Community rebuilding and institutional reform
Cultural healing, mutual aid, and resistance networks

This supports slower-burning plots, episodic continuity, and return campaigns grounded in legacy.

3. More Inclusive Playstyles and Player Roles

By decentering conquest and violence, aspirational models make room for:

Non-combat problem-solving and diplomacy
Characters whose power lies in care, memory, or organizing
Players who want to explore empathy and transformation

This invites more diverse player expression and potentially a broader audience to the table.

Challenges

1. Balancing Individual Agency with Collective Goals

One of the most common tensions in aspirational play is preserving individual player agency while emphasizing group cohesion or community impact. If not carefully handled, players may feel:

Like their choices are subsumed by “the needs of the many”
That their character arcs are flattened into utilitarian functions
That moral complexity is replacing fun

Solution: Emphasize contribution without erasure. Make individual choices matter because they influence the collective—not in spite of it.

2. Navigating Conflicting Aspirations Within the Community

Communities are not monoliths. Conflicts between factions, ideologies, and values are inevitable—and narratively rich.

One faction might prioritize safety, another liberation.
A religious group might seek redemption, while a civic faction demands accountability.
Players may find themselves in situations where no side is entirely right.

Opportunity: Use these tensions to explore negotiation, compromise, and coalition-building. Let disagreement fuel growth—not paralysis.

3. Preserving Fun and Flow

A common concern is that aspirational storytelling will become too serious, too slow, or too close to real-life stressors. Not every player wants to roleplay municipal politics or restorative justice circles after a long day at work.

Strategy: Mix tones. Let earnest moments breathe, then cut tension with joy, absurdity, and celebration. Aspirational play should still feel like play—and fun can be subversive, healing, and relational too.

4. Increased Narrative and Mechanical Complexity

Tracking community growth, faction reactions, moral consequences, and evolving infrastructure can create GM overhead and narrative sprawl.

Too many variables can lead to decision fatigue.
Slow progress may frustrate players used to immediate rewards.

Solution: Use simple tools—clocks, relationship maps, milestone trackers—to surface change in ways that feel tangible but manageable.

5. Ethical Sensitivity and Responsibility

Aspirational play often invites exploration of real-world themes: inequality, colonization, trauma, cultural survival. This can be powerful—but it can also go wrong without tools for care and consent.

Best Practices:

Use session zero to discuss tone, themes, and boundaries.
Offer opt-in tools for emotional safety (e.g., Lines and Veils, X-Card, Open Door).
Reflect as a group on what stories you’re telling and why.

Handled well, these stories don’t just entertain—they model different ways of being in relationship with others, with power, and with the world.

Ultimately, the aspirational model doesn’t erase the thrill of growth. It reframes it. Power becomes not just what you get, but what you give. And the legacy of a character isn’t measured in kills or kingdoms—but in what they built, preserved, or repaired for those who come after.

Design Principle: Community Without Compromise

Community-centered play should never mean silencing player agency. It means expanding it—rooting each decision in a living world that responds.

Players should feel that:

Their choices reshape the emotional and material landscape.
Their failures leave scars, and their triumphs leave legacies.
They are not cogs in a machine—they’re architects of something collective.

Agency is not sacrificed in aspirational play. It’s amplified through relationship, responsibility, and resonance.

VIII. Conclusion

We began with a question: What rises in the wake of the dungeon? What comes after the blast zone of the traditional adventure—the slain tyrant, the looted vault, the cleared map hex?

The aspirational model offers one answer: we build. We mend. We choose futures together.

Reframing the RPG power fantasy doesn’t mean rejecting strength, heroism, or daring exploits. It means redirecting the arc of power—from dominance toward dignity, from glory toward care, from personal legacy toward communal transformation. It asks us not just what we fight for, but what we’re trying to grow in the world we’re helping shape.

At their best, RPGs aren’t just about slaying monsters. They’re about imagining better worlds, trying on new selves, and exploring what we believe is possible. When we center community aspiration, we don’t lose the thrill of adventure—we gain a reason for it to matter. A village spared. A culture revitalized. A haunted keep made into a sanctuary. A broken world learning to heal not through conquest, but through collaboration.

This is a harder fantasy. It’s more fragile. It can’t be solved with a single fireball or final boss. But it’s also truer to how real change happens—and to the kind of stories that stay with us long after the dice stop rolling.

So to designers: build systems that reward care. Track the ripples of healing and legacy. Let players level up their influence, not just their stats.

To GMs: put communities at the center of your world. Let their dreams shape your maps. Give your players not just dungeons to break, but lives to uplift.

To players: wield your power like sunlight, not like a sword. You are the miracle the world didn’t expect—but desperately needs.

Because the most powerful character at the table isn’t the one who deals the most damage.

It’s the one who leaves something behind worth protecting.

The aspirational model invites players to dream better worlds—but dreaming together carries responsibilities.

When stories center justice, healing, and community, they often brush up against real-world wounds. That’s not a flaw—it’s part of what gives them power. But it also means we need tools and awareness to navigate with care.

Before diving into complex themes, take time to check in:

What topics feel rich for play? What feels off-limits today?
Use safety tools (Lines & Veils, Script Change, Open Door) to shape a shared creative space.
Consent isn’t just about avoiding harm—it’s about opening doors to deeper play, together.

Representation and Reflection

Who gets to be the center of the story? Who gets to change the world?
Avoid turning communities into backdrops or metaphors for player catharsis.
Celebrate diverse voices, and be willing to step back when a story isn’t yours to lead.

Aspiration ≠ Idealism

Aspirational RPGs don’t require utopias. They thrive in friction:

The healer who burns out.
The leader who doubts.
The village that fractures and reforms, stronger.

The goal isn’t perfection—it’s progress, however messy.

Power as Praxis

Ask: What does this game teach us about how power works? Even fictional systems reflect values. Does your system:

Reward extraction or stewardship?
Celebrate domination or mutual aid?
Encourage spectacle or solidarity?

Ethical play means noticing—and sometimes rewriting—the rules we inherit.

Design for Transformation, Not Control

Let characters fail, and let the community survive anyway.
Let villains be redeemed—or systems, not people, be the true antagonist.
Let players grieve what they couldn’t save, and celebrate what they could.

This is the slow work of imagination. And it’s worth protecting.