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.

True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates - Notes and Loot

Here for your edification are the notes I ran my planned Extra Life session, The True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates off of...

• Notes/Adventure Outline
• Loot Given out in game 
• I printed these so that when I gave treasure to the PCs they could only see the front and had to decide if they wanted to risk opening it to see the potential consequences.
• PC Love Letters/Magic Items
• The live-tweet stream for the game.
• The map I based the dungeon on, Dyson's Crypt of the Child Kings

Thanks again to everyone who donated to my Extra Life page and all of the players, as well as James and the Ginger Giant for organizing the event.

Running True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates - Extra Life

Watch along as I provide twitter updates on running my "True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates" session for our D&D Extra Life event, I'm only running this 1 three hour session, but I'll be playing in three more for a total of 12 straight hours of D&D before I get up to attend Sun-AD&D Al Qadim Church.

Play starts at: Noon CST Saturday 11/7
For ages bold or insane adventurers have sought the True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates, clearing out or perishing in its many impostors, starving on mountain tops where it was falsely rumored to be... They went seeking the secret of the Stairway to the Stars, to use for good or ill and for the many treasures, artifacts and mysteries that surely must be buried with a being as powerful as the dread and infamous Sid. Now you've been hearing it whispered by sages and lunatics that the Lich Whipple constructed his lair above the True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates, and you would consider them mad to think so, except for the map you hold in your hands. Dare you descend below the Lich's lair to discover the secrets of the True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates? Will you be the first to plumb its dark depths in ages or will you find those who have come before waiting?

This session is for 4-5 PCs and is an improvised Death Trap Dungeon, in the style of White Plume Mountain and Tomb of Horrors.

Tweets about TrueTombofIsidore

More Stuff!

• Here's my long-winded rant I plan on delivering about why I'm running a Death Trap Dungeon and why it will be fun.
• For the map, I'm using the excellent Crypt of the Child Kings map from Dyson
• This article on Deathtrap Dungeon World Principles really informs how I'm running as I run most D&D through the lens of Dungeon World
• True to form, I wrote up some Love Letters for all the players who got me their sheets (4 of 5) and also made some artisanal, bespoke custom magic items for them, which you can peep here. (Includes the Sacred Finger Bone of Uwain the Betrayed)
• The Ginger Giant provides a preview of all the other sessions on his blog
• Here's our Extra Life team Twitter @KnownWorldUnite

Thank you again to all of my players and blog readers who have donated!

Uwain the Betrayed: Speechification

Why, yes, I'm the kind of crazy SOB who'd write up a speech for his D&D character to deliver... I've been waiting for months to have Uwain give this speech, and finally, tomorrow, I shall have that chance...  The game left off last time with my former PC, the now NPC, Sid (referenced below as "That Abomination", sending abominations to kill the PCs, this would be the speech Uwain would give immediately after the fight.

Serious Business, Character Business

The Monarch: " (sighing) Jollyrancher82, never get henchmen.''

Jollyrancher82: "You know, that's not my real name.''

The Monarch: "Well, how was I supposed to know? I used my real name.''

Jollyrancher82: "I just thought, you know... "The Monarch," I thought you were into cosplay...''

The Monarch: "Real name! And I am into costumed business, not costumed play."

 The above quote has very little to do with this post, but it does encapsulate how serious I am about Character Business.  Not business in the sense of Neckties and Profit-Margins, but business in the theatrical sense, that is:

9. An incidental action performed by an actor on the stage to fill a pause between lines or to provide interesting detail.
 14. (Performing Arts / Theatre) Also called stage business Theatre an incidental action, such as lighting a pipe, performed by an actor for dramatic effect (http://thefreedictionary.com/business)

Character Business is one of the things that can make or break a game for me.  PCs with good character business can rescue a dreary plot and if done well can make a good game great.

Uwain the Betrayed - Introduction and Goals

So I'm gearing up to re-join Citizen Ben's monthly 4E D&D campaign after taking a short sanity regaining break.  Previously I had been playing Isidore (Sid) Philokales, a crazy Ardent (psychic healer for those not fluent in the more obscure 4E classes) who was devoted to the worship of a stellar entity that he believed would come and cleanse the world in a burning apocalypse.  For various reasons, mostly because he was insane and none of the rest of the party shared his apocalyptic goals, it became clear to me that it was time to turn Sid over to Ben to use an NPC.  After some thought, I decided that I wanted to play a character who could become the moral center of the game (some discussion of the game and its lack of a moral center can be found in my The Face vs The Captain vs Individual Impulsiveness - Party Leaders in RPGs post) and Uwain, a Paladin of the Raven Queen, a former Cindersoul Genasi raised as a Revenant, was born...

The Face vs The Captain vs Individual Impulsiveness - Party Leaders in RPGs

I've been thinking about Party Leaders in RPGs a lot lately.  Beyond just what I mentioned in my last GM Commentary, this is something that I've been pondering since the summer. To my mind, there are two broad types of party leaders in RPGs, though they easily overlap in individual characters, which are:

• The Face - The Face is the social leader of the group.  This is the character who serves most often as group spokesman to NPCs, usually due to the social skills of the PC, the social skills of the player and  often due to in-game character status as well (ie. being a Noble in the system setting).  The Face may not set battle tactics or make any plans outside of social situations, but by virtue of being the character doing important social interactions with NPCs, the Face of a party often leads simply by being the party spokesperson.
• The Captain - The Captain is the plotter, planner and tactical leader of the group.  Unlike the Face, the leader is not a outside facing social spokesperson for the group, instead the leader is the character who comes up with the battle plans or the infiltration schemes or does the plotting of the group's next moves.

The Face and Captain can often overlap in the same character, but they can also be separate characters, depending on the make up of the party.  The Face is probably the easier to play, since at the simplest it can be decided just by the players looking around and saying "You've got the highest Charisma/best social skills/speak Troll" you talk for us.  But, in my mind the Captain is the more important or influential of the two, since any deals, diplomacy or social shenanigans that the Face makes are easily ignored by the other characters once that social situation has ended, or even during. (That brings to mind a D&D game I ran where after the other characters had just finished averting combat and talking the tribe of lizardmen out of attacking them, the party's wizard decided to just hit the lizardman chief with Acid Arrow and then chaos ensued).  The Captain, on the other hand, if he's actually the group's tactical leader, if he commands the respect of the other characters and the players, can help set the group's course, and therein lies the rub... To play the leader of your RPG group, it's not enough to convince the characters that your character should lead, you have to convince the players as well...