Additional Podcastery

Once again I descended into the Lair of the Ginger Giant to cast some pods.

First we have the 6th Antagonist Relations Actual Play Podcast: Because They're Suckers where the party, with a new Were-frog companion, descended into the dungeon below the Mirror Reflecting.

Second, we have a long and rambling actual, old-school Antagonist Relations Podcast, Roll a CON Save, where we talked about some of the shortcomings of 5e D&D and how we address them, games we want to run and I did some more convincing of Ben of the glory that will be Death Grind D&D before the three beers and late night caught up to me and we ran out of steam. We're going to try and be more focused on these in the future, and cover topics instead of (who am I kidding, in addition to) rambling on and on, so if you have a topic you'd like us to cover, reach out and let us know.

Thought of the Day... #2 - Is it worth being a bit of a "Jerk" about Alignment?

This meme is a total lie, P. Bubs is totally not Lawful Good by any stretch of the imagination... 

Listening to a recent Play on Target podcast on Character Behavior and Alignment while in the car and trying to move between a dozen reports at work and started thinking again about Alignment.

I have a pretty tortured history with Alignment and Morality in D&D and other Fantasy Heartbreakers, which is told partially through my previous (and often snarky, fair warning) posts on Alignment, as well as two of my character's from the Ginger Giant's games, the often equally hated (by other PCs, at least) Sid and Uwain.

What I'm thinking about now, is how much I should push players to play Alignment/Morality. In my Shattered World game, I made the decision to leave Alignment off, figuring that the Icons and NPCs would be able to enforce any moral issues I decide to make an issue of.

Now, I'm gearing up to start running Out of the Abyss with my Sunday group, and I'm wondering how much I should enforce their alignment. Do I just have them choose a few Ideals from the D&D 5e Backgrounds? Do I try and write up something like the Dungeon World Alignments, which seems like time I could spend on doing other prep for Out of the Abyss (which is incredibly prep heavy for a DM already) or for my two other ongoing games or for my upcoming Dread one shot. Or I could try and steal the Noble, Fear and Rage Passions from Unknown Armies? Do I just admit that of my playing group it seems like I'm the only one who feels like Alignment is an important part of the game and let my players choose various Good or Neutral alignments as they wish without trying to enforce "alignment" morality and keeping my mouth shut when "good" characters decide to be cruel or dishonest because they think they can get away with it?

One thought I have is to reward players who play close to the alignment they put on their sheet by giving them a mechanical boost against Madness, which will be a huge part of Out of the Abyss, but I also need to read the Madness section of the 5e DMG again and decide how by the book I want to go with Madness or how much I want to change for ease of play and/or avoid the Malkavian problem of people playing insanity as "wacky". But then, if we don't define alignments well, it becomes more of a case of "are you playing that alignment the way Zack imagines it?"

In any case, the podcast has it in my mind again, that I really do wish I could have each PC commit to a moral code they would hold to, more like Vampire morality paths than D&D's alignments, but I know that is utterly unfeasible to try and pry that out of most players.

Further complicating things, in Al-Qadim Church, I'm playing an Evil priestess of a Chaotic Evil goddess, Ragarra, and I find myself thinking that I need to work with Thomas to come up with a good well-written code of ethics to abide by. Last session there was a moment where one of the other players went with a very "traditional" D&D Heroic Good impulse to risk his PC and the party save a fairly helpless NPC and my PC argued against it and almost ordered him not to, as if the NPC was weak enough to die, then that was that and he should be left to die in the river or re-captured and murdered by gnolls. Now, my problem is when I play non-good characters, I tend to think a lot more about what code of ethics/behavior they actually hold to, which I haven't really done yet with Thema.

Anyway, this has gotten way long for what was supposed to be a quick "Thought of the Day" but y'all can consider it as an open thread to discuss Alignment with me.

Honest Descriptions of PCs Alignments in D&D

Reading Thomas' post about having a GM declare his PC was Chaotic Neutral has me thinking about D&D Alignments again...

Here is a nonsense Alignment Meme, because ALL Alignment Memes are nonsense.

Now, I almost geared up a new post about Alignments and not being a dick to other players, but instead here's something more lighthearted. Now, D&D is famous/infamous for its nine alignments (except for 4th when it was "simplified" to five which I've marked with * for no reason)

• Lawful Good*
• Neutral Good* (as Good? I guess Good from 4e could cover Neutral and Chaotic Good)
• Chaotic Good
• Lawful Neutral
• True Neutral* (as unaligned)
• Chaotic Neutral
• Lawful Evil
• Neutral Evil* (As Evil)
• Chaotic Evil*

But when I have players actually playing D&D I rarely see these alignments, so here is my proposed list of "Honest" Alignments that reflect actual play in my very snarky and not terribly serious opinion. **(Though serious enough that I did not make Alignment an official part of my current 5e D&D game)

The list of Honest Alignments in no-particular order (or some secret order, who knows?).

1. Lawful Jerk - aka "Let's not break any laws."
2. "If the party's fine with it..." aka "If I can just get to the next level on my iPhone game" aka level 5 Facebook browser.
3. Ruthless Good aka "If I think they're Evil, there's nothing that's too horrible that can be done to them."
4. Thieving Murder Hobo aka "I search the body!"
5. Stabbity-stab-stab.
6. "Who needs diplomacy when you have Acid Arrow?" aka ADD aka Random Asshole aka Chaotic Neutral
7. "Ignore all the notes I'm passing the DM" aka "If I roll high enough, the PC fighter won't know I'm stealing from them." aka Eventually murdered by the rest of the Party.
8. Annoying Personality Trait- aka D&D 5e background quirks and flaws
9. Deranged Lunatic aka "What's wrong if I eat babies?" aka Sid

Additional "Honest" Alignments (more in traditional Alignment order) h/t the Ginger Giant for these and for tolerating my editing of these.

• Moral Absolutist - For when you want to be a bossy dick wrapped in a meta cloak of doing the right thing, accept no substitute.
• The Good Guy (or Girl) aka "I want to be like Aragorn" aka "I sort of do the right thing but I don't need to get on a soap box about it"
• Killing is my Business & Business is GOOD aka the Barbarian - For players who get bored and like to stir things up but also want to pretend to be good.
• "I'm out for myself, but I'm not going to stab you in the back to do it"
• "Yes, but how does this affect ME!?" aka the Scout, aka "I'm just going to do my own thing here and if the rest of the party doesn't go along...¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
• "Well, at least I'm not Evil!" aka "I do what I want"
• "Might Makes Right" aka "Mostly I can game the rules, so I'm good with rules but I'm really not Good.:
• "I do what I WANT!" aka "I want to play an evil PC"
• "Insanity for the sake of Insanity" aka "Why don't you want me to heal you?" aka "It's not my blood"

The Murder Hobo's Dilemma… "Are we in the Dungeon yet?" - Dungeon World

(Full disclosure, I'm sure this is more an issue for me, with my wanting more realism in characters and plot than realism in rules.

I've know played in three sessions of Dungeon World and I've been enjoying them but last night I realized that there was something that kept me (yes, I managed to let the group decide I was their leader, must to my chagrin) from leading the group full force ahead into adventure. The premise of the game is a modern day Twin Cities metro, but with magic and dungeons, where Adventuring Companies (emphasis on the company) send adventurers into dungeons but otherwise it's straight forward fantasy version of the present. The GM was explicit that the normal humanoid fantasy races, goblin, orc, kobold, weren't inherently evil, and that is leading to some quandaries. I had gone in expecting a fairly lighthearted game, and tenor of play-wise, it's been fairly lighthearted but the plot has been drifting much grittier.

In the first two session, the party, with the conceit that we were the local "neighborhood watch" went into a dungeon near a graveyard and fought a mixture of goblins and an elf (or two, I don't rightly recall if there was more than one) who were in what the GM described as a teenage party pad (wrecked furniture, oil barrel fire, empty keg) and while the elf was a member of a previous adventuring party to disappear into the dungeon, the goblins were definitely high school kids, ya know, wearing letter jackets and such. Now, there was a lower level of that dungeon with a definitely evil undead creature of some kind, so I think we partly rationalized things as "oh yeah, the evil undead thing was controlling them, so we're not total murder hobos for slaughtering those unarmed teenagers".

Alignment Woes - Neutral, Unaligned and Mechanical Difficulty

What is this guy?  He's a Rilmani.  Why don't you know about him? Because Rilmani are dumb.

Go read Thomas' thoughts about Alignment in 5th Edition over at The Tower of Infinite Evil first before you read this post because originally this was just going to be a comment on that post before it got really long.