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D&D Scenarios That Test Alignment
JohnJohnstoneV
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Hey guys
A big short coming with many games is the lack of moral challenges to the player characters alignment. I can think of a few off the top of my head, but I could always do with a few more in my back pocket. With this in mind I've started this thread.
-A group of villains attack the group. Amongst the group of villains is a young child soldier fighting alongside his evil parent.
-A rich bar patron was passed out drunk, and has left his pouch unattended.
-After vanquishing a group of bandits, the players find an expensive magic item which resembles a family heirloom stolen belonging to the bartender weeks earlier.
-An evil sorceress needs to be stopped, but she is pregnant and due at any moment.
Do you guys have any other ideas?
A big short coming with many games is the lack of moral challenges to the player characters alignment. I can think of a few off the top of my head, but I could always do with a few more in my back pocket. With this in mind I've started this thread.
-A group of villains attack the group. Amongst the group of villains is a young child soldier fighting alongside his evil parent.
-A rich bar patron was passed out drunk, and has left his pouch unattended.
-After vanquishing a group of bandits, the players find an expensive magic item which resembles a family heirloom stolen belonging to the bartender weeks earlier.
-An evil sorceress needs to be stopped, but she is pregnant and due at any moment.
Do you guys have any other ideas?
If you game, check out my movie at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A0D8C521295BB4B6
If I can make a success of this movie, I can hopefully move out of my mom's basement.
If I can make a success of this movie, I can hopefully move out of my mom's basement.
JohnJohnstoneV on
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- A necromancer is desecrating a necropolis filled with the honored dead, building an army to defend the living against an orcish horde.
- A woman with horrific memories has been charmed and is now in love with a sorcerer who wants to keep her captive, but the terrible memories are gone and she seem happy for the first time in her life.
- The water source for a desert village is a trapped water elemental genie, who was innocent of any crime and tricked into serving as the source of water for the village. This happened hundreds of year ago and the genie is in constant pain. The players just got an amulet which can free her, but the village and it's rich fields will fail, causing famine not just here but in nearby villages.
Edit: Also it's not always what someone does but why they do it that really tells what their morality is. That's why I generally prefer a motivation system instead of raw alignment, though D&D seems very reliant on black and white morality.
Because more of than not it's bullshit and it's totally arbitrary and adds nothing to the game.
I would have to disagree on that part. What alignment tests do is act as role playing baits, so that the players do not just spend the whole game roll playing. A hard decision will result in the players disagreeing on a solution and having to role play out a solution to it. In my mindset these alignment tests would directly affect gameplay. Even in a door kicking dungeon crawl style game, having to take a child soldier alive so that he can perhaps be rehabilitated directly affects any encounter, as you now have a prisoner to protect.
If I can make a success of this movie, I can hopefully move out of my mom's basement.
Also, the role playing not roll playing thing is retarded and not clever.
Edit: Or I'd kill the pregnant villain and/or child soldier and when you try to argue about changing my alignment for it I'd let the game devolve into a stupid alignment argument and watch it crush everyone's soul the way all alignment discussions do and end the game that way.
In the aftermath, I'd tell you that you're stupid and a liar for telling me we were playing "a door-kicking dungeon crawl" and instead forcing the players to not only try to make decisions that are incredibly difficult and impossible to come to a consensus on in real life, but also trying to take those same impossible to define moral situations and force them to fit into a nine-box grid.
To be honest, I cant think of a better way to put it.
There are other ways.
That reward money? It was the towns taxes for the last 10 years. Now they will never finish that well. You have doomed the town. They will have to move.
Here are some scenarios I have recently encountered in a game I play in with a DM that loves morality choices:
A character who is a good married man and who believes that adultery is completely immoral lands his ship on a island that happens to be inhabited by Amazons. The women ask him to surrender himself for a week to increase the population. In exchange they will give him gold and their boy children that they will be forced to sacrifice if they remain, since no men can live on the island.
Two human characters visit a yuan-ti asking for information. They agree to share a meal with him for information. Once inside, knowing that being inhospitable might lead to their deaths and the deaths of their other party members, they are informed that the stew they are eating contains human meat.
BTW, whatever decision we make, the DM never changes our alignment. Only a series of decisions we make without being railroaded into them that lead in a certain alignment direction causes the DM to say, "Hey, your alignment might be moving in a certain direction. Make sure that's what you want to do."
Zithra Melitch in Star Wars: An Empire's End
Jellica in In the Shadow of Zeus
See, now that is an excellent example of a dubious element to be included in a game. Parties with a face character are always trying to weedle extra cash out of tiny villages, turns out that the reason the village said 100gp is because they are a poor commune of farmers. Sure, maybe they could stretch to 150gp, but next time the players pass through, it's mostly abandoned farms suffering from drought.
Generally, alignment is a pain and you'd do best to ignore it. Have tough choices in game by all means, but steer clear of the boring mire that is trying to work out if it's okay for the LG Paladin to go along with a pragmatic but slightly unseemly course of action that the CN rogue, CG cleric and N Wizard all agree on.
Introducing these elements when the players aren't expecting it isn't a good thing. As others have said.
I think it's perfectly fine to explore moral conundrums and such as long as the players know what they are in for. Personally I think the sorceress think is a bit squick.. Though I mean some Italian Horror movies and Clive Barker have gone there. So if you have that type of crowd.
And child soldiers you have dark fantasy like Berserk and such. I mean as long as the players know what they are in for and up for it.
My own opinion situations like these...are ok to through in as long as the player doesn't have to directly confront them. I think it's a bit too sadistic. I'm sure there is audience for it. If you played the original Dragon Age they did a pretty decent job of having the player see shady stuff but not have the player directly... let me put it this way have to actually really dirty their hands in the sick stuff.