RPGADay 2026: Day 5
Prompt of The Day: Burden
A Heavy Burden
This is not about the eternally-ignored encumbrance rules. This is about leadership, an equally-ignored burden.
You can always tell that a party of adventurers is doomed to fail. Their default leader, usually the party’s sole Fighter, is useless at being a leader.
I am specifically looking at the “default” tabletop here. Just as every incarnation of this game seems only to be about hardcore mass murder and nothing else, so too do the rules always seem to focus on individual player characters’ honing their prowess in battle and never focus on little details such as pursuing tactics, or having a strategy.
Still less is there any kind of focus on leading the group, taking responsibility for having subordinates, and taking pains to ensure that no party member gets left behind. These basic things are ignored in practically every single roleplaying game I have ever encountered.
There are numerous aspects to being a leader. These are a few.
Focus
Of all the members of the party, the leader must have focus. Possibly the strongest focus of the entire team. The leader must know what is going on, what the team is doing, what they think they are doing, what the opponents are doing, and what environmental changes are occurring. They have their own role to play in the unfolding scene, but more that that they have to ensure that the player characters know their role.
Communication
The party leader must be able to communicate with the rest of the team. Likewise, the team must be able to communicate freely with the party leader.
As Robert Anton Wilson once pointed out, “True communication is only possible between equals,” so there must be no concealment between the leader and their crew in a stressful scene.
Empathy
In order to communicate effectively, the leader must understand their team; their goals and aspirations, their weaknesses and flaws, what it would take to motivate them to act, what it would take to get them to stop before they commit a rash act.
Just as much as the leader must have empathy for others, and even towards people outside of the team, they must understand and accept themselves. They cannot understand people if they hate themselves.
Authority
The leader must be known as such. The rest of the team depend on the leader to make decisions, and to give each team member instructions on what to do. They can, in turn, expect respect from their subordinates, and to give it back to them in full. They know their jobs. You have got to know yours.
Discipline
This one is the most painful lesson to learn, either end of the pointy stick. When a leader delegates a task to a subordinate, that subordinate has got to carry out that task, no matter what. Team members’ lives, and the whole mission, could be put in jeopardy if they should fail to complete some tactic or to exercise their skill or talent properly.
Responsibility
Sometimes, there is failure. Hopefully, no lives are lost, and no other form of damage such as social humiliation. But where there is some sort of failure, the leader must know how to accept responsibility for that failure. The subordinate who failed may have been unable to complete their assigned task, or they may not have understood the ramifications of failure. In either case, the buck stops at the leader.
I mean, sure, an individual who screwed up may take a real hit - the leader might ask for the screwup not to come with them on their next little soiree into the dark, or they might have to forfeit something like maybe a huge chunk of their accumulated blood money to pay restitution to an injured third party; but ultimately, they must accept the blame for the screwup in the first place, just as much as if they themselves had committed the goof.
Goal-Setting
The leader must be able to see the bigger picture. It isn’t about defeating one room full of bad guys, or coming away with loot from clearing a whole dungeon. There has got to be something more to this. Like maybe, not stopping individual bandit raids by taking out one band of thugs at a time, but by taking out the leadership, or finding out what is keeping them out there raiding travellers (such as, oh I dunno, overtaxed villagers and a charismatic leader distracting them from getting legal redress and turning them into armed cult followers worshipping him instead).
Winning each battle is a matter of tactics. Stopping the enemy at the root, even using diplomacy instead of the sword, is strategy.
Daily Character: Bernadette Q
Real Name: Not known
Setting: Hunter: The Reckoning, Confessions Of A Wayward
Notes: Bernadette Q (she adopted this name after her imbuing) is a Wayward. Waywards are supposed to be the most violent of all imbued hunters, having been turned into crazed mass murderers at the point of imbuing. Unlike the regular imbued, who must turn on their Second Sight and Aegis protection, Waywards’ Second Sight is permanently on, meaning they can never stop seeing the horrors of the world, and they can never go back to normality.
Waywards are creatures of Vision (the third Hunter Virtue, the others being Mercy and Zeal), and Vision Virtue imbued are supposed ot be Big Pocture people, always looking at things at a strategic level. Bernadette Q is very much a Wayward - very much a Big Picture thinker, able to spot what none of the other hunters can see, or even imagine.
Her constant Second Sight grants her the astonishing ability to see things like relationships between individual Beings. Who’s using whom; who’s an ally of whom; who hates or loves, or fears or is infuriated by, whom. Even mundane things like identifying a Shady perp as being a bagman for their leader, whom she despises but can’t help but obey due to some sort of addiction to something only the Shady leader can supply (such as blood or some sort of Essence). There’s never just a monster in her field of sight to take down. The monster is part of some twisted local ecology, and she can work out what damage its demise can cause to the balance of power in the area; who would suffer from this creature’s death.
And then she can tell the other imbued how to take it down. Or stuff the creature’s lair with enough explosives that the flash would be visible from the surface of the Moon.
Daily Prompt List
1 Discipline
2 Stature
3 Poise
4 Charm
5 Burden
6 Reach
7 Mercy
8 Resolve
9 Privilege
10 Secret
11 Tact
12 Loss
13 Strain
14 Regard
15 Endurance
16 Composure
17 Intensity
18 Directness
19 Desire
20 Promise
21 Charity
22 Grit
23 Fortune
24 Distance
25 Familiarity
26 Regret
27 Hunger
28 Devotion
29 Labour
30 Pride
31 Edge