A Question of Alignment

[Jager]

Here is an old, but still functional, horse that I am going to flog. What are people’s opinions of the Chaotic Neutral alignment in D&D? I used to refer to it as the fourth evil alignment because so many people used to use it as an excuse to do evil. "I am not being evil, slaughtering this village. I am just expressing my free will!" My reply as a player usually was, "Fine, then I am not killing you because you are evil. I am killing you because you are too chaotic." It got so bad in some of my college groups; I began running Lawful Evils just so that I could get along with the group. Yes, I tend to play lawfuls. It turns out that LE became my favorite alignment (it allowed me to abandon, or let monsters kill, annoying CN PCs) and let my word actually mean something. Killing one of these PC's myself caused too much strife in the party and merely guaranteed that the next PC the player brought in would try to kill me. In general, I couldn't play good PCs around these psychopaths. Once I saw how crazy/evil they acted, all in the name of their free will, why would I go out anywhere with these people. Why would I risk my character's life saving one of them? Well, the years have passed and some things have changed. I even played a CN cleric in a game. I practiced my free will, never felt the need to kick people smaller than me, and worked fine with a party within the limitations of my alignment (not really good on long term planning, willingness to try anything, no matter how crazy, at least once). Just recently, a CN player in a group I am in decided that he, another "N" PC (a cleric of life and death), and some henchfolk would raze a town and take all its money. It seemed the rest of the party was doing too many good things, and they had to balance the scales. Greed and bloodlust had nothing to do with it. Not a bit. Of course, now they can pay for some of those nifty new magic items they wanted. My reply to that was, "Gee, that's exactly what a band of Ogres would do, if they could." A little of my spleen, as you see. Anyone else?

[The Ranger]

I have so many problems with the alignment system that I have more or less abandonned it. Nobody I know sticks to them in any D&D game I have ever seen...its a little hard to play NG where the general rule is "kill the monster steal its treasure". In fact now that I think of it I have never seen a character roleplayed in a D&D game...well maybe once or twice but not often. Invariably it becomes a slugfest and a "my wands bigger than yours" competition. My own fault too I am afriad; I see D&D and feel my urge to kill Orcs rising.

[Jager]

One thing that helped with the 'Kill the monster, take his stuff' approach was the awarding of mission xps. Something I took from DragonQuest and it was well recieved here. It doesn't matter how you kill, defeat, or bypass the monster as long as the mission is accomplished. Mind you, if your job is to steal the Dragon's hoard, you had better deal with the beasty. This led to more saving the maiden/villagers/whatever and less walking into the next set of ruins we chanced across. Dungeons began making sense (if there are a bunch of undead, someone is making them) and the characters world view was expanded. The next benchmark I am aiming for is to make religion matter. Do you worship Tempus, God of War (and aren't a priest)? Given to the church recently? Gone on any holy missions or battled in his name? Why not? Remember, you are in a world were gods empower priest to perform miracles every day! They are watching and remembering things you do. If you don't care, you should.

[The Ranger]

My players were in the habit of shouting out the names of various evil gods before they went into battle with anything in order to psyche the enemy out. So I started making a percentage roll everything they did it...the players who noticed were too curious to stop. I gave a 1% chance that any diety would hear his name been shouting by an unbeliever and would take appropriate action.

[Matt]

I'm not a big fan of alignment either. I do like the way the put it in 3rd Edition better than 2nd. I played in a 6 year ad&d game that spent a good deal of time role playing, as opposed to dice rolling, and all the characters played their alignments well.

In real life, I don't really think there are to many people who could be classified as good or evil. People make decisions based on the moment. Some of them are good, and some aren't. In d&d, I have found that most players want to be chaotic good with evil tendecies. Which means they want to be the good guys of the story, but be able to do whatever they want. One thing I've taken from White Wolf games is fleshing out the reprecussions from all their actions, both good and bad.

My main complaint with d&d isn't with the alignment of the characters though, but that each species should have an alignment. I have always hated the "hey, there is a giant. It's evil, lets go kill it."

[Jager]

Try giving them a mission were they aren't supposed to kill the enemy, like guarding a diplomat who has to go deal with a giant kingdom. Then show them giant culture, family life, and the like. Flesh them out. In one game, the players fought some Frost Giants and freed their goblin slaves. The goblins followed after the party and kept helping out (to the best of their ability). The goblins wanted the protection, and in at least one instance, saved a PC's life. He was caught flat-footed, but the goblin 'hunter' with him wasn't. He attacked (shot an arrow) the critter, giving the PC time to react. Remember, 'evil' creatures have enemies too.

[Guest]

Yeah, I have to say that I prefer running adventures that have a more realistic moral approach. I like the goblin idea. I ran an adventure in the new D&D where the party were begged by a red dragon to venture into a city and get back the skin of his child which was being worn by the Paladin who had killed him. The Dragon couldn't get into the city himself (he'd have got slaughtered) so he asked some good aligned PC's for help. It was a bit of a shock to their system and made for some very interesting situations....."yes mr. paladin, but skining your enemies and turning them into armor can't be good!"

[Jager]

Yes, wearing the skin of another sentient creature as a trophy has got to be one of those questionable things. Hunting down and killing a dragon just so you can wear it as armor sounds down right heinous. I wonder what good aligned dragons think of that kind of action?

[Kirby1024]

I can think of three possible quotes:

1) "My god, is that Karl? He looks so good on that paladin..."

2) [breathes fire on the Paladin] "Ha! Not so protective now, is it?"

3) "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! I'll kill him!" (I think this one's the more realistic one...)

[Guest]

Heh,I like those lines. It was a lot more complicated than that however, I just don't want to bore you with the whole story. I think only line at the time was something like, "errrmmm excuse me Mr. Paladin sir. Could I borrow your armor for just one second please...."

Back to alignment though, I do agree with you Jager, I find myself playing characters who are either neutral or lawful evil, otherwise I find it hard to justify slaughtering off tribes of orcs or whatever that the group encounters. Having GMed for a group that told me they kill off an entire tribe of goblins, I described each one, including goblin kids etc.....the party rethought their plan...(and were plagued by goblin teenagers for the next few years who kept trying to kill them for the deaths oftheir families!..."My name is Sparko Figgans, you killed my father. Prepare to die!"

[Jager]

Picture this:

(A dark, dingy bar that is the sort of haunt cool adventures seek out when not saving the world)

(Enter 5 small figures wearing cloaks with deep dark cowls. The approach the bartender.)

"Hello, Good sir," squeeks one. "We are looking for a certain famous adventurer named Bladesong Quickstrokes."

"Sorry, you will have to be more specific than that," replies the retired killer of dragons-turned bartender.

"Ummm...he had this scantily clad sorceress sidekick," he adds.

"And they had a lot of repressed sexual tension," chimes in another cloaked midget.

"Well, that describes half of the adventurers I know. Anything else about them?"

"Well...they had a grumpy dwarf and a light-hearted elf with them."

"...and the elf always teased the dwarf."

"...who was alway cross and never smiled unless he was killing something," broke in the third figure.

"So, nothing that made this group stand out, then?" continued the bartender.

"Well...the leader used to have six fingers on his left hand until some heroic goblin bit it off."

"Oh! You mean the one who has this whole goblin tribe out to get him cause he slaughtered half their kin?"

(the five figures nod their heads vigourously)

"Right over there. Second table to the left and boys, try not to destroy too much of the furniture."

Hey, at least the group was famous.

[Guest]

heh, I like the name...Bladesong Quickstrokes. Must remember to have his as an npc next time I run something. That would be Giovanni chronicles 3 on Saturday.

Yes I see it now.

The dark room. The evil Giovanni Bladesong Quickstrokes summons the spirit of Cappadocious to him.

Nice.

We had a gnome named Barmsey Lovequest......and just ask The Ranger about Benson, my all time favourite of his characters.

[The Ranger]

Actually Benson wasn't strictly a character. You see we were playing Call of Chuthulu and I had lost three characters to insanity and death in the course of three sessions (the other characters had a lot to do with this).

The PC ended up in some kind of alterntive dimension where Chutulu had risen and destroyed the world etc, etc. Before they fled home the characters accidentally snagged a local...my new character, Rodney Urg, a tramp who was one of the few surviving humans on the world.

Rodney was (understandably) madder than a bag of cats on crack. He carried around a large glass jar with six pints of his own urine in it. This jar he called Benson and had many deep conversations with it during his time with the party.

Rodney was my longest lasting Chutulu character, mainly because he was a complete bastard and was meaner than any of the creatures or cultists the players came accross. (I seem to recall him being left to guard three cultists we had taken prisoner and deciding to cut them in two with a saw just to prove that those stage magicians weren't anything special...like I said, nasty.)

[Jager]

I don't know if I have said this before, but you guys are great.

[The Ranger]

I prefer twisted beyond all hope of recovery

[Coriolis]

Jesus I'd forgotten about the sawing the cultists in half! Do you know how much bloody sanity I lost running that damn game? Mind you, I'm back running Kerfuffle since I moved to Cork and its got the feel of that game to it(ask Con.) Just the other day two of the PCs killed each other in a bizarre "man grows unicorn horn/gets shot by other man/first man impales other man and both die" situation. Our female player, in kitchen making coffe at the time, returns with said beverage to find her compadres dead in their room. Mind you, unicorn had earlier summoned the spirit of vegetation in the form of a gorse bush and slept with it. And one of the others took in game rivalry so far (remember I used to insist on troupes for Coc?) he murdered his other character. I think my madness is leaking again.

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Bast protect us all.

[Coriolis]

You're running Giovanni 3 Bagman? How goes it? I doubt I'll ever get to run 4 for you guys. Sorry. But getting us all together these days, and anyway 4 sucked. Well, I actually liked some of the stuff in it but if you've been playing the same characters for three books and are well into them and their history and then not being let play them in the final section is just crap.

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Bast protect us all.

[Avenger]

I would sooner allow LE characters than I would CN. Lawful Evil people are selfish, greedy, immoral, bigoted, small-minded sorts who grab all they can for themselves with no abandon for others. They'll screw over anyone they can, but fear legal repricussions, so they never do anything too bad unless they can get away with it.

Or in other words, a lot like the better portion of the cross-section of humanity I have the misfortune to deal with.

Conversely, I tell my players this; we have a word for CN characters. Insane. Unless you plan on shitting in your hand and gleefully hurling it as passersby, you don't get to play CN. Nobody can clutch onto sanity following nothing but whatever childish whim hits them at the time. Playing someone with a CN alignment is like playing someone with no ego or superego. You live like that for a day, I'll let you play CN.

And since the old stereotype-breaking got brought up, I thought I'd add my two cents. The following examples come from the last game I ran. It was an utter joy.

1)A wounded Gnoll they met on the trail between cities begged for healing, claiming that soldiers had wounded it and left it for dead. When the Cleric of Tymora tossed a coin to decide whether she should heal the Gnoll and then did, he thanked her profusely, told her that he was on his way to visit his wife and son, that he was foolish to travel human roads, gave her a small token of his high regard and smiled a doglike smile as he went about his merry way.

2)Also on the trail, they came to a caravan of jolly Gnomes pulling a large covered cart, escorted by Gnomes riding dogback. When the PC's stopped the Gnomes and conversed with them for a moment, they found them to be merchants. "What kind of wares do you have?", said the party who was low on supplies. They pulled back the blankets that covered the exposed sides of the wagon.

Slaves. Orcs, Humans, Dwarves.

3)When entering the swamp that surrounded the castle they had come to explore, they found a series of human and demihuman heads floating about the water, some impaled on pikes. The perp? A large troll. While the group prepared their spells, no one dared to attack with fire (because of the methane gas), the troll called out in a gruff voice; "Wait!" "Sir" Thomas had come to clean up the ruins with some other soldiers around 50 years ago. Thomas met his end, but his fellows pooled their resources and got him a Reincarnation spell (Resurrection doesn't happen in my game). Unfortunately, he got put into a Troll's body, and has remained since. "But why all the heads?" "Ma'am, when people attack me for being what I am, I feel inclined to defend myself. Their clothes and money I have no use for, but their bodies I can put to good use as a warning to others. If they turn and run, I don't have to kill them." In the end, he actually escorted them to the castle in trade for some food. Even after 50 years as a troll, he had quite a taste for jerky and biscuits. Besides, if this civilized group clears out the castle, maybe people will stop coming around.

As a point of clarity, they and the other adventuring groups were there because of a contest. If the contest ends, no more adventurers.

4)The elves in the area had, for the last 88 years, been committing a genocidal pogrom against the Gnollish peoples. Rounding them up into camps, exterminating them wholesale, lining them up firing-squad-style, experimenting on them with potions and magics, all in an effort to wipe them off the face of the earth. Cute and happy forest dwellers.

Who happen to make Mengula look tame by comparison.

5)The two NPC's in the campaign were Sidney, an Elf, and Claire, a half-Gnome.

Sidney (his real name was 'Lucid Azure') was part of the Elven community and even came from high birth. But going against the flow, he saw what his people around him were doing and it sickened him. He ran away from home and came to live in the human city. He has atrocious hygiene, liberty spikes, and a goatee. He plays punk rock on his lute, and makes his money by playing on streetcorners and taking change until he's been paid enough to leave. His girlfriend,

Claire, appears and claims to be a half-Gnome. She is, in fact, a Tiefling who is spending some time on the Prime against her fathers' wishes. A guttery young woman, she is ferociously loyal to Sid, and makes money for the pair by picking the pockets of spectators who have croweded around Sid to throw the produce du jour for the day.

6)When inside the castle, they came to a series of jail cells. Two adjoining cells contained a young Paladin named Gremio and an Orc named Grossuk. During their interrment in the subterranean prison, the two had become very good friends. Both were LG.

Anyway, I'm sure nobody bothered to read all that, but what the hell, eh? That was maybe half of the oddities of my last game. I love to defy convention, show people the exception to the rule. Of course, there were plenty of evil baddies to beat up on, and just like in life, the most probably outcome was usually the actual. Not every Orc was LG, not every Elf was a genocidal maniac, not every Gnoll was genial and polite. But I like to show players that they can never take anything for granted in Avenger's game.

--@venger

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Don't try to run, you son of a bitch. You'll just die tired.

[The Ranger]

Very interesting read Avenger. In the last game of GURPS fantsy I played the Elves were a bunch of nutters who would use up one world and pass on to the next through dimensional portals. I always associated them with the aliens from "Independance Day": "...like a swarm of locusts, moving from planet to planet..."

Elves make cool bad guys I think. Besides, the characters can make such great neck decorations with the ears

[Coriolis]

You leave my nutters alone Ranger. They did nothing to you!!!

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Bast protect us all.

[Guest]

Not to him maybe....they certainly did a lot to me.....

I like the ideas Avenger. They are the kind of things that I do as well. As you say though, they are exceptions and not the norm...still anything that makes the players think before they go on the rampage. I hate that Star Wars/Star Trek morality shit that gets put around....I blame the Americans!

[Stheno]

Anything which makes the players think before they go on a rampage ?????

[Coriolis]

In total agreement with Bagman on the enforced morality of certain games/shows. Always been shoulder to shoulder with him on that one. And as for the nutter elves, that was your own fault, you wrote your character's back history. Not me, or Donal. Always saw Caspian as a vaguely Jon Snow sorta guy, if a bit more twisted by fate. Anyway, according to Donal and I, Dominic has just crushed the last of the Elves into so much goo, apart from that Admiral guy you liked. More later on that.

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Bast protect us all.

[Kane Knight]

Quote:

Originally posted by The Ranger:
Elves make cool bad guys I think. Besides, the characters can make such great neck decorations with the ears

Bwahahahaha...Yessssss

[Kane Knight]

Quote:

Originally posted by Stheno:
Anything which makes the players think before they go on a rampage ?????

BAh. Thinking is over rated. I mean, how fun can a game be if you have to think before you kill the monsters?