I’ve heard it said that Chaotic Good is the most difficult alignment to roleplay. “You always have to do the right thing.”
You know the alignment grid, right? Here, I’ll show you the old school one:
Sure, Chaotic Good may be the most difficult to roleplay, but that just means that it’s the easiest to DM. Show the characters a helpless maiden fearing for a relative’s life at the hands of a corrupt constable and watch the feathers fly! Or, of course, just put everybody in a dungeon (or, for a twist, a tower) and ignore alignment entirely.
Let’s say that you don’t want to ignore it entirely, though… When it comes to DMing, I’ve found that groups of the four in the upper left are the easiest to manage. You have a party with Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Lawful Neutral, and Neutral Neutral, you’re going to be doing okay and, so long as the Paladin doesn’t get sticky fingers while in town, you never really have to worry about inter-party bickering when it comes to metaphysics… maybe the Neutral Neutral guy will discuss sustainability and/or balance with the Paladin but, so long as the players are able to stay on this side of the line of “Lawful Stupid”, the party is managable and the DM need only set up the occasional twist. Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral, after all, railroad themselves and the other party members will likely go along because of their own neuroses.
If you introduce the other five, however, you are going to have to do some serious player wrangling unless you’re going to have them crawl a dungeon. Chaotic and/or Evil characters are not only chaotic and/or evil, they are *UNPREDICTABLE* (excepting, of course, Chaotic Good). Not even taking the whole “chaotic stupid” option into account, you have to deal with the fact that they are going to have agendas that are, very likely, not yours.
So, assuming Chaotic and/or Evil characters in the party… what are your tricks to wrangle everybody?
If I were going to get back in to RPG’s, I would leave several concepts from D&D behind completely. Alignment would be the very first to go. Good storytelling from the DM should lead to ethical dilemmas on all the characters.
I would also dispense with character classes, opting instead for skill-specific advancement in particular kinds of tasks. One acquires “experience” points, but pretty much only by killing monsters and bad guys — “experience” should be based on what one actually does. That’s both realistic and reasonably easy to track, especially with the assistance of a computer.
After all, why shouldn’t magic-users wield swords? Gandalf did in LOTR which is still the gold standard for stories set in fantasy worlds. I’d have magic users go on a replenishing mana system instead of having to tediously memorize spells for hours a day. Why should a moral dilemma cause a level 13 lawful good paladin to suddenly become a level 1 lawful neutral or neutral good fighter, when the law demands her to perform an immoral act? Besides, a story about a corrupted paladin sounds interesting.
I like attribute scores scaled on a 1-100 scale instead of 3-18; it seems much more intuitive. Yeah, this is getting pretty far afield from what Dungeons and Dragons was all about. In my copious free time, I may just have to design this game and try it out with some friends.
Warhammer Fantasy is the system you’d want. Almost everything is kept in and rolled against percentiles. There’s something else besides alignment (I can’t remember what, it’s been 12 years)
Plus it runs on a career system – you start in some kind of entry level job and use experience to round out the skills for it, then you can transition to another job maybe higher in the tree or branching along or even starting over in a new one, but you retain all your old skills. So a knight can become a priest can become a thief can become a pit-fighter if you so desire (and want to spend the game time and XP).
It was always my favorite fantasy system by far.
Yeah, that would work too. Though Plinko described the second edition. Fantasy Flight Games recently released the third edition, and I have no idea what that’s like.
I have the 3e and it uses a dice pool mechanic. The dice have their own symbols and the action cards tell you what you can do with those symbols. I heard hear a rumor that they have (or were) comnig out with a d100 version as well, but I have not looked into that.
My favorite thing about most any system were it’s random outcome tables (Warhammer and Palladium were awesome for those), I’d hate to lose them!
“My favorite thing about most any system were it’s random outcome tables (Warhammer and Palladium were awesome for those), I’d hate to lose them!”
Warhammer 2e did have one of the best charts ever. The death chart. ‘Head is lopped off and flies 2d6 feet in random direction.’ Classic!
I like D&D’s alignment system if only because it is a magnificent generalization.
You’ve seen the joke, I’m sure, that the two axes are *REALLY* “plays by the rules” and “acts like a (jerk)”… and you’ll find that those are the only axes you need for categorizing most of the stuff you come into contact with.
You just described GURPS, except with the attribute scales still on a 3-18 bell curve.
Which actually works *very* well for normal human scales. As the GURPS guys found out when they wonked out the rules for superhumans, it doesn’t scale at all well.
Burt Likko:
I hate alignment. I’ve played a few D&D characters and I always take “unaligned” (4th edition has a slightly different alignment system) as my alignment because I find the alignment concept ridiculous. The Law – Chaos divide I could conceivably get behind, but Good vs. Evil? Who decides that? I find the concept of a universe where good and evil are objectively measurable quantities both risible and disturbing.
As for the rest of those item, once you’ve changed all that you don’t have D&D any more. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. GURPS works like that, or if you want something that isn’t mind-bendingly complicated you could try Savage Worlds (neither have base-100 attributes, but that seemed like the least-important of your proposed reforms). There are probably plenty of other systems that work this way that I’m not conversant with. Actually, I wonder how the Dragon Age RPG works?
The dragon age RPG has a kind of weird dynamic. There is a major event. There is a Big Bad. It is your job to stop the Big Bad.
When you start the game, you’re just a talented schmoe who absolutely could not even break through the Big Bad’s defenses, let alone hope to face it… so you spend 40ish hours finding allies, finding tools, and building the skills to get to the final fight.
Along the way, there are many little events and little bads to deal with… and how you deal with them is your “alignment”. There is a guy who has a hostage and you know the guy has a key you need.
Do you negotiate? Do you trick the guy? Do you kill the hostage?
The important thing that you need to get past the Big Bad is the key.
And you find yourself in another situation in a city that you can’t escape from without the right paperwork. Do you do favors until you have papers? Do you forge papers? Do you kill the functionary in your way?
Again, the goal is the same in each case. You will never *NOT* need the key. Your path will never *NOT* go through that city. Alignment is little more than picking which pony wears the garland when the cart gets to town.
Well that’s certainly in keeping with the computer game.
Alignment works differently in a 99% railroaded story.
I think what you’re saying is only true if you assume people have to play all the way in the corner of the graph – they shouldn’t. Even in a fairly bright-moral-line imaginary world like high fantasy, most characters have motivations and logic and they make compromises to get by.
If you see evil/good as a sort of continuum of selfish/altruism and lawful/chaotic the same way as preference for the group/self as the source of moral authority I think the ways to handle it are more straightforward. We all have friends or colleagues that fit at different spots along these lines and yet we get through the day, not to mention we know plenty of stories where those with different ideologies work together when their motivations line up this one time, right?
Well, without delving *TOO* deeply into theology, I can’t help but wonder if the ability to have daily conversations with the deity of your choice (getting spells, etc) wouldn’t clarify a lot of blurry areas for, at least, clerics who could then pass wisdom along to the rest of the poor schlubs.
Out of all the players I ever had, bar none, the ones who roleplayed the worst as a body were the clerics.
There were really bad Paladins (who rapidly became non-Paladins). But the Clerics never seemed to really get over the fact that when they pray to their deity every day, they can actually have conversations with him/her/it.
The last time I played D&D (with Jaybird, it so happens), I was a late arrival and found that the party didn’t have a cleric. I hate playing a cleric, but the party needed one so I rolled one up. I then proceeded to role-play my character as if he hated being a cleric himself, including eye-rolling and sarcastically suggesting to my party members that they duck next time whenever I dished out healing.
And heck, I think he might have been Chaotic Neutral.
Heh. We had a werewolf paladin. He got to be the ship’s cook, and mimed puppet shows using bread. Most Fun Paladin Ever.
I have found that in most groups alignment is ignored or used as a very base guideline and people play their character however they like. Too many play there character’s ‘alignment’ as some version of their own moral code with a couple of personallity areas brought more to the forefront.
As for what you want from a roleplaying game, I have played and read about ones that do bits and peices of what you would like, Burt Likko. Gurps is generic enough to do the skills but not the d100s. The only d100 systems I have read about are the Warhammer 40K RPGs Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Death Watch. Yet each of those have classes. Still, I think that one allows more flexability.
Star Frontiers had a d100 skill system, if I recall correctly…
Yes! You are right, that was d100. I use to play that in Jr. High…..
Rolemaster and Palladium also used d100 (or “percentage-based”) skill systems.
I love Rolemaster, if only for the gruesome results you could get on the critical tables. “Haha, Impact critical, severity E, roll 85! I punch you so hard that I disintegrate your skeleton!”
Chaotic good is only predictable if you assume shared ideas of the good, or if you are playing with people you know really well. Hey, maybe that’s where the DUMPSTER!!!! problem comes from?
You’re thinking, “It’s just a fucking dumpster,” your Chaotic Good players are thinking “OMG SOMEONE COULD BE IN PERIL WOT IF I DON”T SAVE THEM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”
The Dumpster is something that hits all groups… they get preoccupied with something that the DM said as an offhand remark and it gets absorbed and is now some weird totem for them… and that happens with good players in a good mood playing a good game with a good GM. Even Lawful good.
Well, we’re back to your problems of narrative economy. If the DM mentioned it, it MUST be important!
I always liked the Batman alignment guide. http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b217/strangething/batman-alignment-chart.jpg
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This debate kind of sounds like someone arguing why anyone would ever declare a variable as an integer when a double-precision real number allowed for so much more subtlety. Well…yes, the integer has less available range, but that’s kind of the idea. D&D is portraying a four-color universe, the kind where you have actual objectively-defined Evil and Good.
And, more to the point, magic spells and artifacts that can have specific effects on one or the other. I mean, what are you going to do, cast “Protection from Keynesian Economic Theory, 10-foot radius”? (Sounds like something you might see in ‘Dungeons and Discourse’, though.) Having a bit set for “good” or “evil” allows the game to have mechanics that can affect specific groups without having to predefine those groups.
Why, that’s exactly what I’m arguing! And you’re right, I must be sure to incorporate a “Protection from Keynesian Economic Theory” magic ring in dungeon module AR-1, The Shruggers’ Atlas.
Thinking about an Ayn Rand RPG makes my head hurt.
If you pick up any treasure, you’re banned from the game as a looter. The only way to win is to go away and start your own game.
3rd (or was it 3.5?) came out with a brilliant book called Book of Vile Darkness that was one of the most interesting discussions of evil I’ve seen made with the intention of a recreational reading audience that was not written from a Christian Theological perspective (you should definitely pay attention to the “for mature audiences only” warning, though).
If you want the game to get into ideas beyond “what glows when you cast ‘detect evil'”, this is a pretty interesting book.
From stuff like “what if OBL cast ‘detect evil’ on you?” thought experiments to discussions of what is uneqivocally evil (possession, for example), this book allows for people to really get into what would make a villain Lawful Evil (or Chaotic Evil) and *REALLY* screw with the player’s heads.
The lack of subtlety, if there is a lack of subtlety, is the result of a choice made by the players and DM.
(And, of course, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that)
The BoVD is a great book about ‘Evil’ and how to make your NPCs that much more evil and nasty. Sadly, I had a campaign die off, because the guys were too nasty, sigh.
Schindler’s List Nazis are not Sound of Music Nazis.
I now want to drop everything else and make a Scale of Movie Nazi Evil.
Lessee… Shindler’s List Nazis, Great Escape Nazis, Guns of Navarone Nazis, Sound of Music Nazis, Raiders of the Lost Ark Nazis, Surf Nazis Must Die Nazis…
Also, on OBL casting Detect Evil. That reminds me a little of the crazy paladin in the Goblins comic. Basically almost everything is evil or has the seeds of evil to him. Makes for an insteresting thought when people on different sides think they are ‘right and just’.
There is the objective question of “is OBL connected to the positive material plane for his magick?” which is answerable.
Is that the only measurement that counts?
I imagine that if Allah is a god and if OBL counts as a cleric, we could look at such issues as: Do you have to be the same alignment as the god you worship? (I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’) and at such issues as “could a lawful evil cleric worship a lawful good god?” (And I don’t know the answer to this one)
Would a lawful good god give spells to a lawful evil cleric follower?
Or maybe Allah is Lawful Neutral which would allow for both Lawful Good followers (it’s a religion of peace!) and Lawful Evil followers (no booze, buds, or boobs!).
But now we’re in the weeds.
You know, a Lawful Neutral god worshipped by a Lawful Evil Cleric would make a pretty sweet side-quest story for a group with a Lawful Good Cleric who worships the same god, now that I think about it.
I like this idea. I can even imagine the byplay between the three. “Oh, you two are so obsessed over this Good vs. Bad side conversation. ORDER! Call to ORDER!”
The problem is that I think that every deity I’ve ever seen worshipped was worshipped by a PC of the same alignment.
Lawful Good folks just don’t worship Neutral Good gods. That’s what Lawful Good gods are for.
Well, there *are* deities that have multiple follower alignments.
NPCs!
read teh webcomic Shades of Grey. tis awesome.
> “Protection from Keynesian Economic Theory, 10-foot radius”?
Holy crap that’s the funniest thing I’ve read all week.
Okay.
Alignment alternatives essay percolating. I think I have something for Thursday night.
(Oh, and I’ll be back in a bit to throw down with the rest of y’all)