February 24, 2011

One of the most difficult things to do when designing a throwback, old school Dungeons and Dragons game is to figure out the house rules for alignment. Alignment is simultaneously of little and huge importance in the game. Most particularly, the little boxes that it puts the PCs in is simultaneously an ingenious way of settling into character and the most limiting, unrealistic part of the game.

This is further confused by alignment restrictions in game — Paladins must be Lawful Good. Druids must be True Neutral. Clerics should mimic their god’s alignment (or not). Rangers must be Good.

What does this all mean? How do we incorporate into our game?

House Rule 1: Steal from 4E

One of the good things about the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is that it has an alignment choice of “unaligned”. House rule number one is to allow unaligned characters into the game. PCs are permitted to lack a worldview.

PCs can now be good, evil, lawful, chaotic, lawful good, lawful evil, chaotic good or chaotic evil. Or unaligned.

Neutral has also disappeared from our alignment list. We will have to revisit this later, before deciding whether or not neutrality has a place in our game.

Most characters in the game world — and likely most of the PCs — ought to be unaligned. After all, who sits around wondering if their actions are Lawful or Chaotic, Good or Evil?

Theologians and philosophers, that’s who. When was the last time you saw a theologian or philosopher battling a gelatinous cube in a dungeon?

House Rule 2: Define your terms

The Player’s Handbook goes through each alignment and gives it a strict definition.

For instance, Lawful Neutral:

Those of this alignment view regulation as all-important, taking a middle road betwixt evil and good. This is because the ultimate harmony of the world -and the whole of the universe – is considered by lawful neutral creatures to have its sole hope rest upon law and order. Evil or good are immaterial beside the determined purpose of bringing all to
predictability and regulation.

With something similarly heavy for each alignment, it is difficult to see how two PCs of differing alignments could ever coexist throughout an entire adventuring campaign. Additionally, one cannot simply be Lawful. One must also choose “good”, “evil”, or decide that such a choice is “immaterial” and purposely take a “middle road” between them.

Exhausting.

The good/evil and law/chaos axes, however, are difficult to define and fraught with philosophical wonderings. This is dangerous stuff for the DM who just wants to get on with it. Yet it must be done.

Law vs Chaos

The first edition of AD&D defines Chaotic Neutral as follows:

Above respect for life and good, or disregard for life and promotion of evil, the chaotic neutral places randomness and disorder. Good and evil are complimentary balance arms. Neither are preferred, nor must either prevail, for ultimate chaos would then suffer.

Lawful seeks out order, regulation and predictability; chaos seeks randomness and disorder. “Randomness” appears repeatedly throughout all the chaotic alignments, which has lead more than one gamer to play chaotic characters as crazy (which is not an alignment at all).

“Law and order”, on the other hand, is the recurring phrase throughout the lawful alignments.

This, as you might have guessed, seems most unsatisfactory. Must a lawful character always obey the law? Clearly the answer is no — a Lawful Good character, for example, would face quite the dilemma with an evil law. But what of a Lawful Neutral character? What of a law that formented disorder? Must all laws be good? What happens when a law of the church conflicts with a law of the state?

So what do Law and Chaos mean?

One of my favourite definitions comes courtesy of Jeff Rients:

Ragnarok just started. Aligned on one side are the Kirby versions of Thor, Odin, etc. On the other side are Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath. Where does your PC stand?

A) I fight alongside Thor!
B) I fight alongside Cthulhu!
C) Where do I stand? Are you crazy? I get the hell out of there and find a place to hide!

If you answered A your character is Lawful. If you answered B then your character is Chaotic. If you chose C then you’re Neutral.

We like this definition.

Lawful characters approve of the system in which things work. They do not necessarily believe in order (as in “law & order”), but they believe in the way things are ordered. Sky above. Earth below. And so on.

Chaotic characters disapprove of the system of things, and seek to usurp it — or would seek to usurp it, if they had an opportunity, and could be bothered.

Essentially, it takes a law-and-order VS anti-establishment point of view, but elevates it to a cosmic level. We love this, at the Big Bad Blog.

For many, their position vis-a-vis the cosmic law/chaos debate will likely also reflect their day-to-day interactions with more earthly authorities, but nothing stops a chaotic character from being an upstanding and involved citizen of the metropolis. A lawful character can be a lone anarchist looking to bring down the government. These situations are unlikely, not impossible.

Good vs Evil

With Law and Chaos sorted, we now enter the even more difficult minefield of “good” and “evil”. From the Player’s Handbook:

Neutral Evil: The neutral evil creature views law and chaos as unnecessary considerations, for pure evil is all-in-all. Either might be used, but both are disdained as foolish clutter useless in eventually bringing maximum
evilness to the world.

Neutral Good: Unlike those directly opposite them (neutral evil) in alignment, creatures of neutral good believe that there must be some regulation in combination with freedoms if the best is to be brought to the world – the most beneficial conditions for living things in general and intelligent creatures in particular.

Completely useless tripe. “Maximum evilness”? “The most beneficial conditions”?

Other good and evil alignments seem to equate good or evil on the value that a person gives to “life”, “beauty” and “freedom”. Presumably the life and freedom of others (not oneself). Beauty … well there’s another philosophical trap there — the DM already has enough of those on his plate, thank you very much.

But this gives us something to work with, and we state our good/evil paradigm as follows:

Good characters are those who fight for others. They hold a respect for the rights of others (what these rights are might be defined by some other ethos), and actively look to fight for these rights. At the extreme end of the spectrum, a good character is willing to make personal sacrifices to fight for the rights of others.

Evil characters could not care the least for others. They are not necessarily completely self-interested — they could be worshippers of a god, or devoted to some philosophy or higher purpose — but the evil character would not hesitate to torture, kill, imprison or otherwise brutalize complete innocents, if they can see that they personally benefit (or their chosen cause benefits) from this activity. At the extreme end of the spectrum, an evil character actually enjoys one (or more) of these activities and would go out of their way to participate in it.

Again, most people would be unaligned on the good/evil scale. Most of us are not active actors for other people’s rights, but we still respect them. This is an imperfect definition, to be sure, but while we are all fairly certain of how a good character should be played, our evil characters tend to be caricatures, if we are just trying to maximize our evilness.

Once again, good characters are capable of killing innocents, so long as doing so is a sacrifice for the greater good. Evil characters do not (necessarily) need to step on everybody they can — but they will do so if it happens to be convenient.

Beyond good and evil

One thing that gets lost in the lawful/chaotic/good/evil discussion is that there exist ethos beyond the alignment system.

Lawful Good, for example, seems to have been co-opted by the Paladin class who must exemplify by-the-book Lawful Goodness. And in doing so, destroy the entire alignment for everybody else.

Of course, nothing stops a character — or a class — from having an ethos beyond that of their alignment. Clerics ought to take their ethos from the god they worship. Paladins have their whole Paladin code, and so on. Druids have their philosophy of balance.

Whither neutral?

So what happens to neutrality?

True Neutral: The “true” neutral looks upon all other alignments as facets of the system of things. Thus, each aspect – evil and good, chaos and law – of things must be retained in balance to maintain the status quo; for things as they are cannot be improved upon except temporarily, and even then but superficially. Nature will prevail and keep things as they were meant to be, provided the “wheel” surrounding the hub of nature does not become unbalanced due to the work of unnatural forces – such as human and other intelligent creatures interfering with what is meant to be.

True neutrality has always seemed a little out of whack to me. Using the Player’s Handbook‘s own definitions, how is True Neutral seeking …

… balance between Law and Chaos, where Chaos is “randomness” and Law “law and order”? It sounds like the True Neutral — waiting for Nature to prevail, and standing against the interference of intelligent creatures — ought to be (passively) chaotic.

… balance between Good and Evil, where good respects freedom and life, and evil seeks the end to freedom and life? (Presumably the goal of those who are maximizing evilness).

True Neutral sounds a lot like Chaotic Good to us – not the textbook version of it, where each alignment has its own peculiar definition, but taking the concepts of “Chaotic” and “Good” as expressed, and combining them. Experience has taught us that there are two types of True Neutral characters — those that are a pain in the ass, trying to play Switzerland in an individual, and those that are playing what we consider to be a de-facto Chaotic Good.

We do not like True Neutral.

Using our revised definitions, True Neutral would represent a “balance” between trying to uphold the current cosmological order of things, and usurp it. And a balance between fighting for and repressing the freedoms of others.

None of this makes sense. We still dislike True Neutral.

The Druids can have something like True Neutral, as a class ethos, but for your Big Bad Blogger, True Neutral kind of stinks.

House Rule 3: Redefining alignment restrictions

The Cleric/Priest

In D&D, Clerics are traditionally unrestricted in terms of alignment. Not so in my games.

A Cleric or Priest character is heavily invested in the current cosmological order. All clerics or priests must therefore be Lawful, Lawful Good, or Lawful Evil. Exceptions can be made for this rule, if the cleric/priest worships the Cthulu in the example above, or a god that otherwise wishes to usurp the order of things. In these cases, the cleric can be Chaotic.

A cleric or priest must be Lawful or Chaotic.

Additionally, a cleric’s alignment may be restricted (on a good/evil basis) based on the god he or she follows. All clerics or priests will be additionally restricted by their god’s ethos.

Druids

Druids have no alignment restrictions.

They are, however, restricted by an ethos which resembles “True Neutral” above. They believe that those things that influence human activity, be they greed, compassion, the rule of law, or the directives of the divine, are themselves forces of nature which balance.

Paladins

Paladins are no longer restricted to being Lawful Good. They must, however, continue to be Lawful.

Additionally, Paladins (as part of religious military orders) face other restrictions in terms of ethos, as per traditional Paladins.

Rangers, Assassins and Monks

The Ranger’s restriction (good alignments only) remains. This is rationalised from the origins of the class in Tolkien’s books.

The Monk’s Lawful restriction also remains — this is in keeping with the notes on Paladins and Clerics above. It is an interesting thought to have Chaotic Monks, but these would have to be NPCs, or to be a well-thought-out part of a game.

The Assassin class has never sat well with us, as it seems more like a thief with a particular profession. However, a free-willed assassin ought to be evil in our books.

Why have alignment at all?

Before calling that a wrap, we feel that we should comment on why we would include alignment at all in our game.

It is certainly a good question — most current systems do not include alignments, and when we played D&D as a youngster, alignment was house-ruled out, or otherwise disregarded.

But in building a game with an “old school” feel, it seems wrong to rob it of one of the key aspects of the game. Spells such as Detect Evil and Protection from Evil do not mean much without the alignment system. It simply comes down to the feeling that a character in a throwback game ought to have an alignment on their character sheet.

Once that decision was made, the trouble of making alignment palatable to your blogger reared its head. The above is the best solution we have at present.

We do wonder how others choose to tackle alignment. Please leave a comment and let us know.

Image from Mighty God King. Previously appeared on the Big Bad Blog in All About Alignment.

February 16, 2011

Regular readers of the Big Bad Blog might recall that I am in the midst of creating an old school sandbox game. The central concept of the game is simple: flexibility.

The game recognizes that the people I play with have busy lives. The days of playing in weekly games is far behind us — there are fencing tournaments, partners, work trips, babies at home, late nights at work, blogging to do and vacations to consider.

And that’s just me.

I look at the free time available to me now, and that available to my friends, and wonder how it was that I once played in three regular (and frequent) games, all populated with people who played both regularly and frequently.

Still, my friends are itching to play, so I am slowly writing.

The initial game concepts were built around player flexibility.

Most games have implied player controls. Once the party leaves on an adventure, things are pretty much set until that adventure ends. The players cannot leave the game session early, nor can they arrive late for the next game session (assuming that the adventure is lasting into the next session) without disrupting game play. They certainly cannot come to the next game session and say “I’m tired of playing a Fighter. I’ll be a Bard today.”

This game is attempting to eliminate these presumptive controls, and so needed an adaptive mechanism that allows the players the ability to turn up late or leave early. To change characters from session to session, if they so desire. They need to be able to experience whatever facet of the game most engrosses them.

And in game? The desire is to reflect that player freedom with character freedom. Again, most games have implied character controls — adventures, railroads, plot arcs, and the like. The GM creates a small slice of the world, knowing that the characters cannot escape it.

Unlike player controls, the means by which to escape character controls is well known: the sandbox. A world full of danger and adventure around every corner. A world in which the characters — the player thrust into the game — determine their own road.

Unfortunately, I am finding that these concepts — or, at least, my implementation of these concepts — butt heads.

To allow player flexibility, I created the Guild of the Tarot — a mysterious and powerful adventuring guild — that grants the flexibility to the larger party (including all the characters every player will eventually play) in return for the PCs’ services as an adventuring party in perpetuity (more or less). This flies directly in opposition to the sandbox, as it implies a DM-driven series of adventures.

Thoughts I have that water down this unfortunate character control unfortunately also water down the freedoms that the concept introduces for the players. The more the game is a sandbox, the more the players need to be forced to keep playing the same character, arrive on time and attend every session. The more thoroughly the player freedom mechanism is implemented, the more the sandbox shrinks, and I am forced to give the game direction and story that I do not intend to put there.

Every time I think I’m OK with the latter, I turn back to writing the game and find that I am wrong. But the game is predicated on the loosing of player controls.

A dilemma. And larger than I thought it might be.

I need the mechanism. I’m not a wave-your-hand GM; a reason for weird-ass shit like PCs disappearing and reappearing must exist (even if the players are unaware of it).

This has given me some ideas regarding how the character controls might be loosened, by giving the PCs larger-sized quests, though I am not sure how to fit those concepts into my current framework.

Alternatively, the guild could want something else and allow the players more freedom. But then important questions such as what does it want? rear their heads. Those need answers, and those answers would most certainly shape the game in some manner.

And, of course, I’m open to bright ideas, should they exist.

Image: Steve Zieser.

February 9, 2011

We realize that you might be tired by now by the fact that the roleplaying section of the Big Bad Blog seems to do nothing but talk about the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

However, it is, for the moment, all we are playing.

Over the past four months, your blogger has had his first opportunity to play in the Fourth Edition as a PC, rather than a DM. Truth be told, this is the first real 4E experience for us. As a DM, we used the 4E mechanics for conflict resolution, but the game itself was imagined independent of the system.

For this new game, however, the DM has only ever played 4E – no other roleplaying experience was present. The adventure we have been playing was published by Wizards of the Coast. There are few to no house rules.

It is fourth edition in, pretty much, its purest form.

Which means that it is my duty as a blogger to give you my take on how the game feels from this side of the screen.

It can feel old school

In the introductory portion of the game, I was surprised by how light the mechanics felt. With a first-time DM and a relatively inexperienced group of players (aside from myself) feeling out the first few steps of a new game, I was expecting that all the annoying attributes of a combat-oriented mechanic bearing down on my play.

That did not happen at all.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. It is still a role playing game, and the introductory bits in which the players are meeting each other and feeling each other (and the NPCs) out is instinctively role-heavy. It’s hard for a mechanic to get in the way.

And as inexperienced as the group might be, they are pretty fantastic. The problems occur when the mechanics get heavy and the group’s inexperience shows as they have difficulty navigating the world of dice, bonuses, penalties, and so on. I probably should have expected this part of the game to go well.

But I was nervous. It went well, anyways. The group become a party, and some cohesion is slowly forming.

The introductory sessions felt like an old fashioned D&D game.

It can really bog down

In most games, there’s a point in the combat sequence where the fight is over, but the combat is ongoing. There is no longer any suspense about who is going to win. There is no longer any strategy that needs to be executed in order to win. It becomes a dice game.

Move around the table, rolling a d20, until (as a group) you have rolled 15 or better five times.

Boring, at least to me. Once upon a time it would not have been. I’m pretty sure I sat in my room alone rolling dice for an entire evening several times during my childhood. But I got over it, and it’s certainly not how I would choose to spend an afternoon with friends today.

It’s a dead period, with no roleplaying going on, little interaction between the players (we’re all intently looking at the board), and no movement in the story.

Roll.

Roll.

Roll.

Whether it’s the nature of 4E, the relative inexperience around the game table, or I had just forgot this part of the roleplaying game, I don’t know. But it bores the hell out of me.

On top of that is the never-ending dungeon which is a stack of fights, one on top of another. Thanks to the good designers of Wizards of the Coast, our group has now spent two entire sessions exploring this particular dungeon – by which I mean fighting zombies, goblins and zombie goblins (by which I mean rolling dice) – with nary a moment designed to flex those gaming muscles in which we play our roles.

I have come to enjoy the combat in fourth edition. It is interesting in and of itself (until it bogs down at the end), and I wish the bad guys would just do the decent thing and die (or surrender). But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

While I am willing to write this off as just being a poorly written adventure in this respect, it is hard to look at the structure of the game – the mix of encounter and daily powers, number of healing surges, and so on – and not imagine that the game designers did not anticipate this very situation.

It’s a super hero game

So the fourth edition has strengths and weaknesses, as any game does. But the strangest thing about it is that it is not a fantasy roleplaying game, but a super hero game.

This is not an original Big Bad Blog thought, but I have no idea where I read that previously or who should be credited with this observation.

The game works best when thought of as a superhero game in a fantasy context. It does not lend itself to a gritty style of fantasy. It is not your Tolkienesque high fantasy. As with any RPG, you could conceivably stuff it into one of those boxes, but it wasn’t made for it. It is decidedly not the Dungeons and Dragons I grew up with, where the PCs are a small band of adventurers doing the best they can in a fantastic and dangerous world.

No. We have super powers, every one of us. Even at first level, we have super powers. My character background does not read like any background I have written or read for and D&D game before – it reads more like a superhero origin story.

Here’s an Eladrin. He gets in a bit of trouble. Then a radioactive spider bit him, and now he’s suddenly Spidereladrin.

Not really – my character is much closer to Nightcrawler than he is to Spiderman, but he is a superhero (not an adventurer), as are the other members of his party. His history does read more like an origin story than a background, and his decisions are inherently coloured by the fact that he is otherworldly and special, rather than just a guy with a sword.

Again, this is neither good nor bad, but it is definitely different.

It is easy to see how old school D&D folk like me get very bent out of shape over this edition of the game. When I think of D&D – when I go out to play D&D – I get a certain set of expectations in my mind. These expectations are wide-ranging, but they certainly don’t involve a Marvel Superheroes story set against a Tolkien backdrop.

It’s like that scene in Return of the King (the movie version) where Legolas does his crazy elephant-slide thing. Legolas here is not the character from the books brought to life on the big screen, but instead some re-imagined super-powered version of the same.

And that’s what you get when you play 4E.

So whoever originally pointed this out, thank you. I’d probably be a lot more frustrated if you didn’t write about gaming.

Photo by your very own Mr. Topp. Available larger here.

January 18, 2011

It’s strange, having things that you love to do meet each other. For instance, it is well documented (via this very blog) that I enjoy both photography and Dungeons and Dragons quite a bit.

Instinctively, it is tempting to claim that while Dungeons and Dragons can provide much material to many types of artists — painters, sculptors, sketchers, and the like — there is not much material there for the photographer. Which is to say that toting a camera to a Dungeons and Dragons session nets one photographs of a group of people sitting around a table, rolling dice and eating Cheetos.

Not exactly the sort of material one puts out on their website.

But I forgot about the miniatures.

Truth be told, I have a tendency to do this. I have never been one to use minis much in my games. Whether it is a shortcoming of my own GMing, a consequence of my style as a GM, or just the nature of miniatures, I have always found that they get in the way of gameplay (rather than improving it).

In the 4E game we are currently playing — where I am a player, not the dungeon master — we are using minis extensively. It is interesting how much they improve 4E. Again, I am not sure whether this is a revelation or an indictment of the fourth edition of the game.

And, like toys, miniatures can make for excellent photography. Just before Christmas, we followed our game with a Christmas party, and I brought my camera to the game with that in mind. Little did I expect that my best photos of the night would not be from the party, but from the D&D.

Now I seriously need to invest in a macro lens. Because getting decent shots of minis with my 50mm is difficult.

Although when they come out right (see below), they really come out right.