Here it is. It's titled “Honour: For the Brave” and goes: “I have no family; I make *honour* my family. I have no home; I make *bravery* my home. I have no desire; I make *dignity* my desire. I have no friends; I make *humility* my friend. I have no enemy; I make *dishonour* my enemy. This is my vow of honor -- for the brave. I am brave.“ Something like that. It's not the words that matter, it's the honour.
Actually can we just steal Disco Elysium’s copotypes for an alignment system?
Like legit I think a mystery game with lower stakes like that sounds kinda fun
There’s a bunch of games you can use. I haven’t looked into it but there’s one called Brindlewood Bay where apparently you start a session without an answer to the mystery, and instead players roll up a clue at appropriate points, and at the end they have to make it fit together. Found [big footprints], [candle] and a [torn black cloth]? Must have been the tall priest!
I admit, I kinda feel like if I want to play a mystery story character, I kinda want to play a mystery, not Lost with the writers making something up as they go along! (yes, "the writers" is us in this circumstance, but that does not reduce the feeling, it just makes it more acute!)
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
My Hungry alignment character was a chef who wanted to hunt monsters to cook them into new dishes
The DM wasn't really too interested in doing much with the Cooking skill though, which was the only downside, and in his defense the DMG rule for tool checks is basically a big fat shrug.
If you like my purposefully bad ideas, you should see my other, worse ideas!
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
edited July 2022
I think my favorite approach to "alignment" within a TTRPG is the optional allegiance system in d20 Modern:
Allegiances
The allegiances system is optional.
A character may have up to three allegiances, listed in order from most important to least important. These allegiances are indications of what the character values in life, and may encompass people, organizations, or ideals. A character may have no allegiances (being either a free spirit or a lone wolf) or may change allegiances as they go through life. Also, just because the character fits into a certain category of people doesn't mean the character has to have that category as an allegiance.
If the character acts in a way that is detrimental to his or her allegiance, the GM may choose to strip the character of that allegiance (and all its benefits) and assign an allegiance more suitable to those actions.
Pledging Allegiance
A hero's allegiance can take the form of loyalty to a person, to an organization, to a belief system, to a nation, or to an ethical or moral philosophy. In general, a character can discard an allegiance at any time, but may only gain a new allegiance after attaining a new level.
Having an allegiance implies having sufficient intelligence and wisdom to make a moral or ethical choice. As a result, a character must have Intelligence and Wisdom scores of 3 or higher in order to select allegiances.
Allegiances include, but are not limited to, the following examples.
-- Person or Group: This includes a leader or superior, a family, a group of linked individuals (such as a band of adventurers or a cell of secret agents), or a discrete unit within a larger organization (such as members of the character's squad or platoon, or individuals whose safety the character is responsible for).
-- Organization: This may be a company or corporation, a gathering of like-minded individuals, a fraternal brotherhood, a secret society, a branch of the armed forces, a local, state, or national government, a university, an employer, or an otherwise established authority.
-- Nation: This may or may not be the nation that the hero currently resides in. It may be where the individual was born, or where the hero resides after emigrating to a new home.
-- Belief System: This is usually a particular faith or religion, but can also be a specific philosophy or school of thought. Belief systems could also include political beliefs or philosophical outlooks.
-- Ethical Philosophy: This describes how one feels about order, as represented by law and chaos. An individual with a lawful outlook tends to tell the truth, keep their word, respect authority, and honor tradition, and they expects others to do likewise. An individual with a chaotic outlook tends to follow their instincts and whims, favor new ideas and experiences, and behave in a subjective and open manner in dealings with others.
-- Moral Philosophy: This describes one's attitude toward others, as represented by good and evil. An individual with a good allegiance tends to protect innocent life. This belief implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of other creatures. An evil allegiance shows a willingness to hurt, oppress, and kill others, and to debase or destroy innocent life.
Allegiances and Influence
An allegiance can create an empathic bond with others of the same allegiance. With the GM's permission, the character gains a +2 circumstance bonus on Charisma-based skill checks when dealing with someone of the same allegiance—as long as the character has had some interaction with the other character to discover the connections and bring the bonus into play.
Zonugal on
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I would probably go for running Scooby Doo in Bubblegumshoe
It's the teen focused version of Gumshoe, aimed more in a Veronica Mars direction, but I think it overall heads in the right direction for that style of mystery
Take law/chaos and split it into social and personal facets. That's your new alignment grid.
Does someone believe in rigid or flexible societies? Does someone lean towards a personal code, or do they evaluate on the moment? Those are more useful I think. Maybe selfish/altruistic as a third axis instead of good/evil.
Anyway, back on the actual topic, which is Wreckage, my game what I have made.
They were supposed to merely parley with King-Queen Bitch-Lord in order to gain knowledge of the whereabouts of a key required to free a ever burning entity to get revenge on the Lipless Men, but my impression of an evil drag queen was too good, and now they are working for them instead. They’ve totally forgotten what they were planning and are instead going to blow up a dam because their new boss wants to create a private bathhouse. This will start an open war with the Metal Heads who need that water as a coolant system for their mother/god.
The new King Arthur vidya gaem has an alignment graph of Christian vs Old Faith on one axis and Righteous vs Tyrant on the other. This is pretty sufficient for that game. The religion one is self explanatory; the other is a variation of paragon vs renegade.
Of course my first character is an Old Faith Tyrant.
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Indie Winterdie KräheRudi Hurzlmeier (German, b. 1952)Registered Userregular
Gang this story has changed me, if you've got the time... hoo boy
I came across this channel because of an unhinged cereal mascot-themed game with Brennan Lee Mulligan RPing a terrifying Tony the Tiger. But I've really only had that one on in the background; this one, I've got investment in from a fondness for GBB, and the references/Easter eggs are primo. The interactions are hilarious.
I only got a few minutes in. It really sounded like they were punching down on some person with Asperger's, or just someone who is socially awkward. I didn't sympathize with the story teller, let's just say that.
It sounds like someone who is not a great DM (classic new DM mistakes of over prepping lore and railroading) but it also sounds like a table of shitty players (let’s start a restaurant in the city and ignore the call to adventure).
Mostly it just sounds like a group of people that are unable/unwilling to sit down and discuss things in advance (like have a session zero and set DM and player expectations in advance, if someone is DMing and you aren’t enjoying it don’t just say “this campaign is shit” at the table, talk through the issues you are having openly and honestly).
It sounds like someone who is not a great DM (classic new DM mistakes of over prepping lore and railroading) but it also sounds like a table of shitty players (let’s start a restaurant in the city and ignore the call to adventure).
Mostly it just sounds like a group of people that are unable/unwilling to sit down and discuss things in advance (like have a session zero and set DM and player expectations in advance, if someone is DMing and you aren’t enjoying it don’t just say “this campaign is shit” at the table, talk through the issues you are having openly and honestly).
Overall, everything about that just sucked.
The "Let's start a restaurant" thing was infuriating, yeah.
Like, what are you even doing there? Go back to Munchkin.
EDIT:
In other news, I just late pledged for Pirate Borg, a scurvy-ridden high seas adaptation of Mork Borg. They sent me a slightly incomplete pdf of the rules already, and it's fun. I detect a bit of power creep; the classes are mostly a lot stronger than the Mork Borg classes, as they all get extra stuff on level-up... which is fine, it's just not quite the circling-the-gutter feel of the original game.
EDIT 2: Pirate Borg lets you start as undead, a merfolk, a fish mutant, or a sentient animal (chicken, jaguar, monkey, crocodile, rat, or parrot). For some of them you can even roll again for a class (like a skeleton swashbuckler or mermaid buccaneer).
Dracomicron on
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
The new King Arthur vidya gaem has an alignment graph of Christian vs Old Faith on one axis and Righteous vs Tyrant on the other. This is pretty sufficient for that game. The religion one is self explanatory; the other is a variation of paragon vs renegade.
Of course my first character is an Old Faith Tyrant.
Oh weird, that older King Arthur Total War-esque game from back in 2009 did the same thing
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
edited July 2022
I think replacing (at least) one of the axes of the alignment grid with setting/story specific ideas is a pretty good one
Especially if you're working under the general assumption that all of your players are largely aligned on like, major ideas (adventurers are traditionally good, thieves are traditionally chaotic, that sort of thing)
Like I could make a nice little alignment grid for my Blades game that does axes of Profit/Reputation and Humane/Bloodthirsty and neatly drop every one of my PCs onto it - in traditional D&D terms they're all probably some form of chaotic good to chaotic neutral, but they'd be all over the place with a more specific chart and that gives nice strings to tug at for a GM
Looking through the Planebreaker book some more, a few of the locations detailed that I really like so far are:
Etherguard
A gargantuan creature with a city on it's back. It mostly wanders through the ethereal plane, but it can travel to the Prime Material plane and others. The city on it's back is almost completely abandoned, since almost nobody wants to live in a place that shakes with every step (or worse, if the creature tries to "shake off" people like a dog, or if it transports itself to somewhere like the plane of fire to scour them off).
Ramiah, the Star Blade
A demiplane contained inside the artifact it takes it's name from: Ramiah, the Star Blade. The soul of every creature the dagger kills is brought here, to this limited plane of metal with a beautiful night sky overhead filled with stars, nebulae, etc. The souls are basically in a sort of purgatory, unless they allow a large dark star on the horizon (The Empty Star) to consume them. Eventually many of the souls were given metal bodies (made from the very metal of the plane itself) by a living wizard that stumbled into the plane, and before she finally died of old age she automated the process so any soul that arrives would be given the choice to receive a body and continue existing. The embodied formed their own city in a ravine (so they won't have to see the Empty Star and feel it's pull) and they create art, music, dance, games, and are generally happy and content.
Unithon, the Geometrical
A plane of basic geometric shapes like spheres, cubes, pyramids, etc. If you hit a stone cube with a pickaxe, little cubes would break off from it and the cube you hit would stay a cube and just shrink down with each piece that broke off. The plane itself sits on top of a giant metal cube with a thick layer of soil shapes on top, then a layer of stone shapes, and then the cube itself below that. The people are colorful, leathery cubes that use telekinesis to float around and hold tools and whatnot. Light is provided by a glowing cube in the sky, and there are two pyramid "moons" (one red, one green). It's a real fuckin weird place
So Minecraft is gonna sue them for cube plane, right? 😄
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Most of the problems I hear about with alignment really seem to boil down to the weird peccadilloes of players and GMs - like the control-freak GM who uses your character's code to micromanage everything your character does because the GM is a weirdo control freak - or people who have legitimately really fucked-up ideas about what is good or bad in ways that would be problems outside of the game as well. "What, you're telling me torturing the bad guy isn't good? Lol whatever lib." The problem with that guy has nothing to do with his character's alignment!
Aside from proactive metaphysical neutrality, which seems to be a kind of cosmically-ordained centrism, most of the actual things being described by alignment - a person's inclination to ethical behavior, the degree to which someone tends to go-along-to-get-along versus standing outside of social orders and hierarchies - can be pretty useful to know about and name! Especially in games that are very very often about groups of peripatetic outsiders from diverse backgrounds who find themselves wandering to lots of different places and butting up against different codes of conduct, or being put in situations that test their own differences as a group.
The problem is that lots of D&D or dungeon fantasy games simply aren't being played at a level to support that. The guy who shows up with joke character Farty the Gnome, or the guy whose main idea of characterization is building out 20 levels of obsessively-picked feats and weapon synergies, either aren't equipped or aren't interested in doing those things, telling those stories, or having those conversations, and the wider culture of D&D tends to bend in that direction. But that's an issue with the wider culture and not with, you know, the fact that it says "lawful good" on page 167.
Eh, when you’ve got Gygax himself referencing John “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians” Chivington as Lawful Good I’m more than happy just to launch the entire notion of alignment directly into the sun.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Eh, when you’ve got Gygax himself referencing John “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians” Chivington as Lawful Good I’m more than happy just to launch the entire notion of alignment directly into the sun.
What that (and many other things) says to me is that Gary Gygax was an asshole and a moron, rather than that everything he touched is haunted by evil ghosts. I first encountered alignment in David "Zeb" Cook's deeply reasonable take in the original AD&D 2nd edition books, and over the years it ended up being a useful storytelling tool sometimes, an irrelevancy other times, but the spirit of Gary did not reach out from the pages to chill my bones.
The original "ethics" alignments (lawful, neutral, chaotic) were more likely inspired by Moorcock, which didn't really ascribe morality to them (though the Chaos lords were pretty evil, the Law gods weren't much better, and said more about power corrupting than anything else).
Gygax himself was a typical white guy from Wisconsin in a lot of ways, and I can tell you, as a white guy from Wisconsin, what we learned about the horrifying truths about the imperial conquest of the Native Americans was...not really sufficient to understand the truth. And we weren't incentivized to ask questions, either. The men that "settled" the West were hard men doing a hard job. Don't think about it. Also Columbus discovered America and the Aztecs kinda deserved Cortez. Sleep. Don't think about it.
So no, do not lend any credence to Gygax's ideas about alignment. That doesn't mean that all of the ink spilled about it over the years is flawed. The good-law-evil-chaos alignment system is not a replacement for actual character and personality, but it can be a wire frame that might help inexperienced players.
I think it's less useful to have alignment for player characters, but it can be a fun wrinkle to a world with like, literal gods and demons who you have to appease or deal with.
Eh, when you’ve got Gygax himself referencing John “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians” Chivington as Lawful Good I’m more than happy just to launch the entire notion of alignment directly into the sun.
What that (and many other things) says to me is that Gary Gygax was an asshole and a moron, rather than that everything he touched is haunted by evil ghosts. I first encountered alignment in David "Zeb" Cook's deeply reasonable take in the original AD&D 2nd edition books, and over the years it ended up being a useful storytelling tool sometimes, an irrelevancy other times, but the spirit of Gary did not reach out from the pages to chill my bones.
I think alignment is a handy tool for me as a sort of broad shorthand for who my character is as a person when I first create them. Chaotic good? Cool, I'm a generally good person that's willing to bend or break laws if I think they would be harmful to someone or whatever. But as I play my character they'll change as a person due to the things that happen to them and the decisions they make. Then the alignment I initially chose may not be accurate any longer, but people and situations can be messy so deciding on a new definitive alignment is probably not so helpful any longer (or at least more work than I care to do).
Your example of Planescape is another instance where alignment can be a helpful tool for exploring themes like what good and evil, or law and chaos, really is, whether objectively or subjectively. It can be used to tell some really interesting and cool stories, I think!
But yeah, I think your example of people being weird control freaks can make the whole thing worthless. Their desire to fit everything into a neat little box makes the kinds of stories I just mentioned impossible. Instead, everything is as subtle as black and white. They're probably playing games where all goblins are evil and killed on sight, the wild and savage peoples are offensive stereotypes, etc. Gygax and others involved with the creation of D&D had a lot of issues and it shows in a lot of stuff in the game, but I don't think that necessarily means everything they created is tainted or worthless. Maybe that's just my privilege as a cishet white dude showing, where I can afford to ignore certain problematic shit, I dunno.
There's 20 detailed planar locations in here (they get stuff like lore, quests, NPCs, encounter tables, specific locations inside the plane with a map, some combination of the above, etc.) 20 more places with only a few details (only 1-4 paragraphs of lore, maybe some NPCs, maybe ideas for quests), and then 8 microplanes that can be inserted into other planes or between them or whatever (1-4 paragraphs of lore like the previous planes, but with less details and ideas). Here's the names of a few places mentioned in the book:
Pig Skin Farm
Sisyphus Mountain
Worm Rat Lair
Glaund, the Perfect Physicality
Citadel of the Fate Eater
Sanguine
Wreck of the Unimaginable
Savtua, the Swampy Mindscape
Grove of Crows
Erewhon
A lot of these places are real fuckin weird
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
See we always just played that law vs chaos was more community vs individual; and good vs evil was more others vs self. That worked for PC alignment just fine, at least. Nobody was actually evil
Hmm, is Monte Cook maligned? I feel like I remember him being maligned for some reason
He's kind of just widely mocked. During the brief period when he was the lead designer of 5E he had a column where he wrote about game design and had some hits like "trap feats (like Toughness) are good, actually" and a few columns where he "invented" mechanics that existed in 4E. Notably skill challenges IIRC. Numenera is generally regarded as a middling RPG with some cool ideas that someone manages to make spellcasting even more dominant than it is in D&D. And then there's this which I don't really have an opinion on, but it's definitely the kind of thing that will generate thoughts.
But he's not a chud or a shitter. Just kinda mediocre. I know Cypher System is pretty well-regarded.
Erewhon is a dimension of gauzy, translucent filaments stretching away in every direction. Most treatises on the planes of reality fail to mention it. If they do, they discount Erewhon’s existence, putting it down as a fable told to children. How could there be a dimension that exists for some, but not for others?
But other sages, wizards, and psions are every bit as certain that Erewhon is real. They know it to be a dimension of the mind, apparently an offshoot or branching of the Astral Plane itself. But if so, it is a place antithetical to divine and demonic beings. Because even to the most powerful entities native to the Outer Planes, Erewhon just doesn’t exist. A portal connecting to Erewhon delivers a mortal directly to a destination in the dimension. To a fiend or celestial, not only does the portal fail to lead anywhere, but in most cases, they can’t even perceive the portal itself.
Caught among the gauzy threads filling the plane are many-faceted crystal accumulations called “nodes” that have mineralized over time. Some nodes are no bigger than houses, while others are miles in diameter. A variety of different creatures have taken up residence on many of the nodes. A large number of them wish to escape the notice of celestial and fiendish beings. Indeed, for those who prefer to be completely cut off from gods, demons, devils, and the like, Erewhon is a relief
The closest I recall to Monte being "bad as a person" was that thing like sliders in a fantasy setting where settings had a % of the apparent people who were actually like capable of agency. That was written into the game and the settings with the lowest % were all exactly that settings you'd expect a person who grew up amidst European ethnocentrism and never questioned it would assign. It is also likely good old fashioned ignorance rather than any kind of hate. It also wasn't his game, he just published it and I believe they admitted they screwed up.
On the other hand Monte is a shit game designer with some fun setting ideas. It very much feels like he comes from that age where you didn't actually playtest stuff. You maybe drew up some plans on a whiteboard, slapped some numbers in that looked like they were "right" and then sent it off to the printers. To be fair, in his prime that was every RPG he just completely missed the boat on the sea change in the industry.
Edit: The game was The Strange, a setting for Cypher published with Bruce Cordell. Also Monte cowrote it from what I've just found.
Hmm, is Monte Cook maligned? I feel like I remember him being maligned for some reason
He's kind of just widely mocked. During the brief period when he was the lead designer of 5E he had a column where he wrote about game design and had some hits like "trap feats (like Toughness) are good, actually" and a few columns where he "invented" mechanics that existed in 4E. Notably skill challenges IIRC. Numenera is generally regarded as a middling RPG with some cool ideas that someone manages to make spellcasting even more dominant than it is in D&D. And then there's this which I don't really have an opinion on, but it's definitely the kind of thing that will generate thoughts.
But he's not a chud or a shitter. Just kinda mediocre. I know Cypher System is pretty well-regarded.
I'd believe the argument that some of the bad feats in 3.5 were intentional "trap feats" if there were more actually good feats, entire feat lines wern't trash, and the fighter and their feat economy were more well designed.
I just don't think the game that has the fighter run out of good feats around level 7(at core) when that is their only class feature is well designed enough to even consider if "trap feats" are good.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Hmm, is Monte Cook maligned? I feel like I remember him being maligned for some reason
He's kind of just widely mocked. During the brief period when he was the lead designer of 5E he had a column where he wrote about game design and had some hits like "trap feats (like Toughness) are good, actually" and a few columns where he "invented" mechanics that existed in 4E. Notably skill challenges IIRC. Numenera is generally regarded as a middling RPG with some cool ideas that someone manages to make spellcasting even more dominant than it is in D&D. And then there's this which I don't really have an opinion on, but it's definitely the kind of thing that will generate thoughts.
But he's not a chud or a shitter. Just kinda mediocre. I know Cypher System is pretty well-regarded.
I'd believe the argument that some of the bad feats in 3.5 were intentional "trap feats" if there were more actually good feats, entire feat lines wern't trash, and the fighter and their feat economy were more well designed.
I just don't think the game that has the fighter run out of good feats around level 7(at core) when that is their only class feature is well designed enough to even consider if "trap feats" are good.
it's not an argument (at least about 3.0; I don't remember to what extent he was involved in 3.5) - Monte Cook freely admitted that he based some of 3rd edition's design philosophy on how the Magic developers had built things like Timmy Cards and trap options that sounded cool on paper but were deliberately suboptimal, to reward system mastery.
He just also is not very ept at game design so lots of the other options sucked or were easily broken/exploited as well.
But in a perfect world where he could execute 100% flawlessly on his plans, he still wanted to make a game where the dude who pored over the rulebook with a calculator would always make a better character than the person of average intelligence who just wanted to make a competent fighter.
Posts
HONOUR
Here it is. It's titled “Honour: For the Brave” and goes: “I have no family; I make *honour* my family. I have no home; I make *bravery* my home. I have no desire; I make *dignity* my desire. I have no friends; I make *humility* my friend. I have no enemy; I make *dishonour* my enemy. This is my vow of honor -- for the brave. I am brave.“ Something like that. It's not the words that matter, it's the honour.
Actually can we just steal Disco Elysium’s copotypes for an alignment system?
I admit, I kinda feel like if I want to play a mystery story character, I kinda want to play a mystery, not Lost with the writers making something up as they go along! (yes, "the writers" is us in this circumstance, but that does not reduce the feeling, it just makes it more acute!)
The DM wasn't really too interested in doing much with the Cooking skill though, which was the only downside, and in his defense the DMG rule for tool checks is basically a big fat shrug.
I’m not gonna pretend the new chart makes any sense, so yeah, fill your boots!
@Drascin
Not defending it, it was just an example game. There are many that could run Scooby Doo!
But hey, to reflect the new alignments we’ve had to rearrange the planes some. Enjoy your new adventure locales D&Ders!
It's the teen focused version of Gumshoe, aimed more in a Veronica Mars direction, but I think it overall heads in the right direction for that style of mystery
What's Ligis?
Does someone believe in rigid or flexible societies? Does someone lean towards a personal code, or do they evaluate on the moment? Those are more useful I think. Maybe selfish/altruistic as a third axis instead of good/evil.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
They were supposed to merely parley with King-Queen Bitch-Lord in order to gain knowledge of the whereabouts of a key required to free a ever burning entity to get revenge on the Lipless Men, but my impression of an evil drag queen was too good, and now they are working for them instead. They’ve totally forgotten what they were planning and are instead going to blow up a dam because their new boss wants to create a private bathhouse. This will start an open war with the Metal Heads who need that water as a coolant system for their mother/god.
Of course my first character is an Old Faith Tyrant.
I came across this channel because of an unhinged cereal mascot-themed game with Brennan Lee Mulligan RPing a terrifying Tony the Tiger. But I've really only had that one on in the background; this one, I've got investment in from a fondness for GBB, and the references/Easter eggs are primo. The interactions are hilarious.
I only got a few minutes in. It really sounded like they were punching down on some person with Asperger's, or just someone who is socially awkward. I didn't sympathize with the story teller, let's just say that.
It sounds like someone who is not a great DM (classic new DM mistakes of over prepping lore and railroading) but it also sounds like a table of shitty players (let’s start a restaurant in the city and ignore the call to adventure).
Mostly it just sounds like a group of people that are unable/unwilling to sit down and discuss things in advance (like have a session zero and set DM and player expectations in advance, if someone is DMing and you aren’t enjoying it don’t just say “this campaign is shit” at the table, talk through the issues you are having openly and honestly).
Overall, everything about that just sucked.
The "Let's start a restaurant" thing was infuriating, yeah.
Like, what are you even doing there? Go back to Munchkin.
EDIT:
In other news, I just late pledged for Pirate Borg, a scurvy-ridden high seas adaptation of Mork Borg. They sent me a slightly incomplete pdf of the rules already, and it's fun. I detect a bit of power creep; the classes are mostly a lot stronger than the Mork Borg classes, as they all get extra stuff on level-up... which is fine, it's just not quite the circling-the-gutter feel of the original game.
EDIT 2: Pirate Borg lets you start as undead, a merfolk, a fish mutant, or a sentient animal (chicken, jaguar, monkey, crocodile, rat, or parrot). For some of them you can even roll again for a class (like a skeleton swashbuckler or mermaid buccaneer).
Oh weird, that older King Arthur Total War-esque game from back in 2009 did the same thing
Especially if you're working under the general assumption that all of your players are largely aligned on like, major ideas (adventurers are traditionally good, thieves are traditionally chaotic, that sort of thing)
Like I could make a nice little alignment grid for my Blades game that does axes of Profit/Reputation and Humane/Bloodthirsty and neatly drop every one of my PCs onto it - in traditional D&D terms they're all probably some form of chaotic good to chaotic neutral, but they'd be all over the place with a more specific chart and that gives nice strings to tug at for a GM
A gargantuan creature with a city on it's back. It mostly wanders through the ethereal plane, but it can travel to the Prime Material plane and others. The city on it's back is almost completely abandoned, since almost nobody wants to live in a place that shakes with every step (or worse, if the creature tries to "shake off" people like a dog, or if it transports itself to somewhere like the plane of fire to scour them off).
Ramiah, the Star Blade
A demiplane contained inside the artifact it takes it's name from: Ramiah, the Star Blade. The soul of every creature the dagger kills is brought here, to this limited plane of metal with a beautiful night sky overhead filled with stars, nebulae, etc. The souls are basically in a sort of purgatory, unless they allow a large dark star on the horizon (The Empty Star) to consume them. Eventually many of the souls were given metal bodies (made from the very metal of the plane itself) by a living wizard that stumbled into the plane, and before she finally died of old age she automated the process so any soul that arrives would be given the choice to receive a body and continue existing. The embodied formed their own city in a ravine (so they won't have to see the Empty Star and feel it's pull) and they create art, music, dance, games, and are generally happy and content.
Unithon, the Geometrical
A plane of basic geometric shapes like spheres, cubes, pyramids, etc. If you hit a stone cube with a pickaxe, little cubes would break off from it and the cube you hit would stay a cube and just shrink down with each piece that broke off. The plane itself sits on top of a giant metal cube with a thick layer of soil shapes on top, then a layer of stone shapes, and then the cube itself below that. The people are colorful, leathery cubes that use telekinesis to float around and hold tools and whatnot. Light is provided by a glowing cube in the sky, and there are two pyramid "moons" (one red, one green). It's a real fuckin weird place
Aside from proactive metaphysical neutrality, which seems to be a kind of cosmically-ordained centrism, most of the actual things being described by alignment - a person's inclination to ethical behavior, the degree to which someone tends to go-along-to-get-along versus standing outside of social orders and hierarchies - can be pretty useful to know about and name! Especially in games that are very very often about groups of peripatetic outsiders from diverse backgrounds who find themselves wandering to lots of different places and butting up against different codes of conduct, or being put in situations that test their own differences as a group.
The problem is that lots of D&D or dungeon fantasy games simply aren't being played at a level to support that. The guy who shows up with joke character Farty the Gnome, or the guy whose main idea of characterization is building out 20 levels of obsessively-picked feats and weapon synergies, either aren't equipped or aren't interested in doing those things, telling those stories, or having those conversations, and the wider culture of D&D tends to bend in that direction. But that's an issue with the wider culture and not with, you know, the fact that it says "lawful good" on page 167.
What that (and many other things) says to me is that Gary Gygax was an asshole and a moron, rather than that everything he touched is haunted by evil ghosts. I first encountered alignment in David "Zeb" Cook's deeply reasonable take in the original AD&D 2nd edition books, and over the years it ended up being a useful storytelling tool sometimes, an irrelevancy other times, but the spirit of Gary did not reach out from the pages to chill my bones.
Gygax himself was a typical white guy from Wisconsin in a lot of ways, and I can tell you, as a white guy from Wisconsin, what we learned about the horrifying truths about the imperial conquest of the Native Americans was...not really sufficient to understand the truth. And we weren't incentivized to ask questions, either. The men that "settled" the West were hard men doing a hard job. Don't think about it. Also Columbus discovered America and the Aztecs kinda deserved Cortez. Sleep. Don't think about it.
So no, do not lend any credence to Gygax's ideas about alignment. That doesn't mean that all of the ink spilled about it over the years is flawed. The good-law-evil-chaos alignment system is not a replacement for actual character and personality, but it can be a wire frame that might help inexperienced players.
I think alignment is a handy tool for me as a sort of broad shorthand for who my character is as a person when I first create them. Chaotic good? Cool, I'm a generally good person that's willing to bend or break laws if I think they would be harmful to someone or whatever. But as I play my character they'll change as a person due to the things that happen to them and the decisions they make. Then the alignment I initially chose may not be accurate any longer, but people and situations can be messy so deciding on a new definitive alignment is probably not so helpful any longer (or at least more work than I care to do).
Your example of Planescape is another instance where alignment can be a helpful tool for exploring themes like what good and evil, or law and chaos, really is, whether objectively or subjectively. It can be used to tell some really interesting and cool stories, I think!
But yeah, I think your example of people being weird control freaks can make the whole thing worthless. Their desire to fit everything into a neat little box makes the kinds of stories I just mentioned impossible. Instead, everything is as subtle as black and white. They're probably playing games where all goblins are evil and killed on sight, the wild and savage peoples are offensive stereotypes, etc. Gygax and others involved with the creation of D&D had a lot of issues and it shows in a lot of stuff in the game, but I don't think that necessarily means everything they created is tainted or worthless. Maybe that's just my privilege as a cishet white dude showing, where I can afford to ignore certain problematic shit, I dunno.
There's 20 detailed planar locations in here (they get stuff like lore, quests, NPCs, encounter tables, specific locations inside the plane with a map, some combination of the above, etc.) 20 more places with only a few details (only 1-4 paragraphs of lore, maybe some NPCs, maybe ideas for quests), and then 8 microplanes that can be inserted into other planes or between them or whatever (1-4 paragraphs of lore like the previous planes, but with less details and ideas). Here's the names of a few places mentioned in the book:
Pig Skin Farm
Sisyphus Mountain
Worm Rat Lair
Glaund, the Perfect Physicality
Citadel of the Fate Eater
Sanguine
Wreck of the Unimaginable
Savtua, the Swampy Mindscape
Grove of Crows
Erewhon
A lot of these places are real fuckin weird
He's kind of just widely mocked. During the brief period when he was the lead designer of 5E he had a column where he wrote about game design and had some hits like "trap feats (like Toughness) are good, actually" and a few columns where he "invented" mechanics that existed in 4E. Notably skill challenges IIRC. Numenera is generally regarded as a middling RPG with some cool ideas that someone manages to make spellcasting even more dominant than it is in D&D. And then there's this which I don't really have an opinion on, but it's definitely the kind of thing that will generate thoughts.
But he's not a chud or a shitter. Just kinda mediocre. I know Cypher System is pretty well-regarded.
I think so? I can't recall specifics, it could be just that people didn't like his stuff? Or maybe he's an asshole? I forget.
But other sages, wizards, and psions are every bit as certain that Erewhon is real. They know it to be a dimension of the mind, apparently an offshoot or branching of the Astral Plane itself. But if so, it is a place antithetical to divine and demonic beings. Because even to the most powerful entities native to the Outer Planes, Erewhon just doesn’t exist. A portal connecting to Erewhon delivers a mortal directly to a destination in the dimension. To a fiend or celestial, not only does the portal fail to lead anywhere, but in most cases, they can’t even perceive the portal itself.
Caught among the gauzy threads filling the plane are many-faceted crystal accumulations called “nodes” that have mineralized over time. Some nodes are no bigger than houses, while others are miles in diameter. A variety of different creatures have taken up residence on many of the nodes. A large number of them wish to escape the notice of celestial and fiendish beings. Indeed, for those who prefer to be completely cut off from gods, demons, devils, and the like, Erewhon is a relief
On the other hand Monte is a shit game designer with some fun setting ideas. It very much feels like he comes from that age where you didn't actually playtest stuff. You maybe drew up some plans on a whiteboard, slapped some numbers in that looked like they were "right" and then sent it off to the printers. To be fair, in his prime that was every RPG he just completely missed the boat on the sea change in the industry.
Edit: The game was The Strange, a setting for Cypher published with Bruce Cordell. Also Monte cowrote it from what I've just found.
I'd believe the argument that some of the bad feats in 3.5 were intentional "trap feats" if there were more actually good feats, entire feat lines wern't trash, and the fighter and their feat economy were more well designed.
I just don't think the game that has the fighter run out of good feats around level 7(at core) when that is their only class feature is well designed enough to even consider if "trap feats" are good.
it's not an argument (at least about 3.0; I don't remember to what extent he was involved in 3.5) - Monte Cook freely admitted that he based some of 3rd edition's design philosophy on how the Magic developers had built things like Timmy Cards and trap options that sounded cool on paper but were deliberately suboptimal, to reward system mastery.
He just also is not very ept at game design so lots of the other options sucked or were easily broken/exploited as well.
But in a perfect world where he could execute 100% flawlessly on his plans, he still wanted to make a game where the dude who pored over the rulebook with a calculator would always make a better character than the person of average intelligence who just wanted to make a competent fighter.