State of the Blog and Games Part Two, the Seconding.

So almost six months ago, just after finishing the holiday season, I wrote a state of the blog post. Since then I’ve only written four posts. Two as “Thoughts of the Day” (though they are more substantial than I remembered), one that was a follow up to my first State of the Blog post (or at least the Battlerager part) and one on the tandem games that Thomas and I ran over the New Years. Then, since January 15th… silence and absence have ruled the blog. Now, I’m going to walk out onto (an admittedly broad and sturdy) limb and say that 99% of the three people who read this blog know me in real life, but maybe there is a loyal stray reader who happened upon this blog by chance and has followed my meandering writings, for that semi-plausible reader, here is my excuse: I got married.

State of the Blog and Games / Battlerager Blues

I can't recommend the DesignsByMiranda Etsy shop enough; I got several XMAS gifts for friends from it and they were shipped promptly and high quality and now I'm wishing I'd gotten more for myself.

I did a great job keeping this blog up to date, from this last August (2015) up through November, averaging a little over 9 posts a month. Then the dreaded Holiday season descended from the (mostly) snowless skies and games were postponed and rescheduled due to illness and the holiday business and I didn't keep up my blog posts.

Here's the state of my games in the order that it occurs to me this afternoon.

• My Shattered World 5e-ish campaign continues apace, just let the PCs hit 5th level and plan on accelerating the plot now. Managed to make use of this swank Dyson hand themed dungeon, but not this other one... (yet). Eventually I'll get back and update my campaign log.
• Back in early November I began running Out of The Abyss. We're 2ish sessions in, in that we did a character creation session plus short "test" dungeon for the players to get a feel for their PCs, then did about an hour and a half of play in a second session before it was cut short due to illness and finally a short-ish session on 12/20 to finish up Chapter One. So most of the PCs have escaped into the Underdark (one player was only at the character creation session so far, so her PC will be somewhere in the Underdark) with weapons, armor and rope they captured from the Drow, but without food or water. Expect at least one blog post on OOTA (which is how I've decided to abbreviate Out of the Abyss) next week when I sit down and share all the game aids I've found to use and share a few of my own that I've made.
• Our Antagonist Relations Actual Play: A Red & Pleasant Land Podcast should be returning the first week of January, as the players face off against that Pudding. Maybe someday the Ginger Giant and I will do an Antagonist Relations podcast that isn't an actual play again, but right now time constraints on the Thursday evening's we're free and the joy of the actual play makes that hard as we end up spending most of the two hours playing and then don't get to just sitting around shooting the shit.
• Thomas' 2nd Edition Al-Qadim Church continues to be quite enjoyable to play and I really ought to write a full post on it. Someday soon I'll have a chance to get my thoughts down right after playing, but running OOTA on 1st and 3rd Sundays has made that a little tougher.
• Speaking of Thomas, since he is back in the (semi) frozen wastes of MN, we decided that instead of our traditional New Year's D&D we'd each run a session of D&D, using the same maps and tying our two sessions together, because we are overly ambitious. So on New Year's Day, Thomas will run a group of Dwarves through the dungeon of Dortherdoreft and then on January 3rd, I'll run a group of Drow though the very same dungeon. We'll be re-using some of the same elements and we're hoping to write up the adventures once we've run them. 
• Also due to the aforementioned over-ambition, I'm toying with a bunch of new ideas to put up on the blog for 2016, but I probably will keep that all to myself since I should be continuing all the things I've started like GM Commentaries, Campaign Summary Updates, Gussying Up 5e Monsters and such before I do wacky things like creating custom 5e campaign settings with new (sub)races, class builds and what-not. Though since Thomas has started putting up more stuff for 5th edition Planescape conversions, I know that I'll have at least a few things in that vein coming soon

Since I needed to come up with a 5th level Dwarf PC for the first session of Dortherdoreft I took a closer look at the Battlerager Path as introduced in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (SCAG) hoping it would combine my love of Dwarves and Barbarians but instead it was... disappointing... to say the least, but instead of continuing to pepper Thomas with my problems with the build, I'm going to cover them here and then propose some fixes. Warning, I'm really harsh on the build as presented in the books, because in my opinion, it's awful. Way more awful than the Ranger or other by the book 5th edition classes/sub-classes that have gotten a lot of crap. And it hurts me, because Dwarf+Barbarian should be AWESOME and instead it is so sub-optimal that it isn't even worth playing as a joke. And I should know because I made a bunch of jokey less than optimal 5th edition PCs recently...

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.