Curly's World

No matter if you play an early roguelike or advanced incarnation of The Witcher

You always start as sb young/stupid/unskilled/untrained etc

and with time and practice you "learn" to overcome those higher on power ladder

While the basic idea is interesting and playable

my thought is, it has become obsolete

We already know, from life, traditional hierarchies not always work like this. Youngsters are ometimes smarter than parents, females than males, blacks than whites etc

Yet rpg genre seems to utilise the late XIX century conservatism; lone white muscled hero forging his way through the hostile world of f*** females, killable dwarfs, swallowable foods etc. Like we wwre neolithic early humans

It's weird; despite almost total gamification and virtualisation of humankind, rpg game never puts you in a middle of things as it is in real world, where you face the already known troubles, you always start as an innocent kid learning to use basic survival techniques

Its interesting from the debate point of view, but at the same unnerving

Why rpg "heroes" always start from the bottom

Does gaming industry sort of trains future corpo workers, teaching them to "start from the beginnings"?

I think this leveling goes all the way back to original D&D. The difference however is that in early D&D role playing, the players do start as every man who are young/stupid/unskilled/untrained. However, this breaks down especially badly in modern computer rpg games where the player starts out as a hero, especially if the game is a sequel. By Mass Effect 3, Shepard has killed and destroyed many big enemies, yet due to the game mechanics needs to start out the sequel with low-tier weapons and with skills locked. Same goes for Geralt or any exceptional hero in an RPG game.

There are many tabletop RPGs that try to get away from this legacy from D&D, either trying to shake off leveling all together or starting the game with the idea that the player character is competent and elite from the beginning: they cannot die by falling an ordinary set of stairs or be killed by a simple rat. However, not too many computer games seem to have dropped this or many other things from D&D.

For computer games, an excuse can be made for tutorial purposes: even though the player character might not be a noob, the player themselves is new to the game and its mechanics.

Campbell's Hero's Journey doesn't necessitate that the journey must be from "zero to hero".