D&D Alignment: Evil or Good?
TheMayor
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Registered User regular
My friend and I are dusting off our Dungeons & Dragons stuff, it has sat too long unused as we had forsaken it for the likes of the White Wolf D10 adventures for a little while.
As we get ready to build characters this evening a lively discussion has sprung up around the water cooler. What should our alignments be? Typically we would try to all agree on something so that our group dynamic is stable, but we have a newbie DM so we want to make things easy for him. Of course we asked him, what shall we be: A band of swarthy villains, or a gaggle of happy care bears?
His response was unhelpful: I don't care, neither does my campaign.
This brings me to my dilemma, if we make evil characters will they fit with any of the pre-made campaigns that one can purchase at the local hobby shop? I haven't checked and my nearest hobby shop is far, while you are so close. Do the pre-made campaigns assume you are all good or at least neutral?
We don't want to spend a lot of time creating these characters just to uncreate them. Alignment matters deeply to a few of us because one guy wants to be a paladin, and I personally want to be a demonologist because I bought the Dark Road book and it looks pretty challenging.
Advice? Thoughts? Anything we should consider? Is this not as important as I think it is? hehe
As we get ready to build characters this evening a lively discussion has sprung up around the water cooler. What should our alignments be? Typically we would try to all agree on something so that our group dynamic is stable, but we have a newbie DM so we want to make things easy for him. Of course we asked him, what shall we be: A band of swarthy villains, or a gaggle of happy care bears?
His response was unhelpful: I don't care, neither does my campaign.
This brings me to my dilemma, if we make evil characters will they fit with any of the pre-made campaigns that one can purchase at the local hobby shop? I haven't checked and my nearest hobby shop is far, while you are so close. Do the pre-made campaigns assume you are all good or at least neutral?
We don't want to spend a lot of time creating these characters just to uncreate them. Alignment matters deeply to a few of us because one guy wants to be a paladin, and I personally want to be a demonologist because I bought the Dark Road book and it looks pretty challenging.
Advice? Thoughts? Anything we should consider? Is this not as important as I think it is? hehe
TheMayor on
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Ooch.
You might have been able to pull off a mixed party if it wasn't for the association clause. As it is, if he's playing a paladin, you're locked out of being openly evil, and covertly evil as well if he ever Detects you.
It depends if you're stupid evil or not. Most will accomodate those who are selfish evil but not stupid evil. Most characters can find a reason to stop world-wrecking evil forces, even if it's just that they'd rather be the one to wreck the world.
That's kinda rude to do to a newbie DM (Bringing in 3rd party stuff.) If this is really his first time running a game and the first time you guys have played for quite awhile I'd consider strongly sticking to PHB stuff as a courtesy. At the very least with WOTC stuff the broken stuff is easy to find by glancing at their forums.
So you want to worship a deity directly opposed to the only ethical tenet you have? Nerull is far more of the CN necromancer type than Wee Jas. Fuck, at times Wee Jas forbid the creation of undead by her followers depending on what you consider canon. You can still worship Nerull without being evil and that makes way more sense than Wee Jas.
Anywho I was just reading the Gods handbook that said Wee Jas is the god of choice.
I agree with your statement about keeping it simple though, especially since this is our DMs first campaign. I think I'll go with a generic Players Handbook Necromancer now. Its not as if I need to get all specialized or whip out expansion books at level 0 anyway.
I'm just easily excited by the flashy pictures and fancy new spells they contain.
Be nice and save the monkeywrenching for when he's more experienced and can handle it.
Class information available here, FYI.
Also note they get rebuke undead, and a natural high cha, so they can both be hoarding undeads, get an alternative class feature on the paladin mount and instead rebuke a skeletal nightmare to be riding that flying flaming skeleton horse.
This one:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20070209a
would work especially well since it compensates for less healing abilities.
EDIT: Mah forget about that, first spirit is completely useless. There are other variants though.
However, your DM's response of "it doesn't matter" is probably from inexperience. It does matter, especially when you're new to running. Be kind, roll good or neutral and let your friend roll his pally. When your DM has more experience, then ask him to try an evil game. This way everyone has a good time
Of course, rolling a demonologist and not going evil (right away, at least) could bring some good RP to the table, especially if the pally player is amenable to RPing and doesn't just grief you the whole time (I've had bad experiences with paladins in most of my groups, so I'm biased at times. Nothing against your friends, mind you.)
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
Listen to this man.
A new DM deserves the players giving him a good first shake. I've been a jerk at the table with a chaotic character before, and because the DM didn't have enough experience to handle how I was interacting with the NPC's, it really ruined the experience for her and slowed the campaign down a lot. I try not to do this anymore. Everyone's there to have fun, so just go along with it and see how it goes.
Remember that most "regular people" are true neutrals, just trying to live their lives according to their chosen profession. Unless you're playing a class with alignment restrictions (like Paladin, Monk, or Druid), keep this in mind. These restrictions are there for a good reason: Monks and Paladins have to be disciplined and will be aligned with Law, a Druid has to have some knowledge of "balance" as a concept of the natural world and thus be aligned with Neutrality, and Barbarians need to be aligned with Chaotic forces to tap into their rage.
Well, some people don't get the concept of "Paladin". It's not an easy class to RP for most of us who are gamers and focus on the concept of "winning". I try to think of Paladins as not focusing on winning, but seeing victory as the inevitable outcome of aligning oneself with Good and Law, and acting in accordance with their code without exception. DM's have a hand in this too, because many of them never bother to actually write up a Paladin's Code for their player, who ends up making it up as he goes along, which isn't what a Paladin does at all.
A paladin could indeed be allies with a summoner/demonologist. They could be veterans of the same war, lifelong friends, brothers... something that denotes a strong bond between them that the Paladin, by his nature, would not want to break... even though he sees his companion as being somewhat deluded. Instead of just being a dick about it and constantly chiding his friend, a Paladin leads by example. He's a religious warrior, and knows that you don't succeed by merely telling others what to do... one must instead show them that the true victory comes through faithfulness to a patron deity of good and law, and a moral code.
It's more or less a fantasy cliche now (Caramon and Raistlin of the Dragonlance novels, f'rinstance. Caramon thinks his brother is weak and constantly tries to save him and show him the strength of good deeds because the familial bond is so important to him. To be aligned with good requires compassion... and Caramon actually pities Raistlin for having malicious tendencies... and in the end when Raistlin is about to destroy all life to become a god, Caramon finally convinces him of his error.).
If you just insist on playing an evil character, try to establish the relationship with the other players ahead of time so you can go through the adventure and help build the story without the DM having to constantly re-tool the campaign, which he won't be experienced at. If the good/evil dichotomy in the party is an RP thing that doesn't interfere with the campaign, it could still be fun for everybody.
Sorry about going on a tangent about Paladins... it's a pet peeve of mine that they often get played as jerks when they probably shouldn't be.
That's actually a great point.
A great deal of the problem with my group comes from years of hard-line L5R roleplaying. I mean, Shogun-style Daimyo's who could just piss all over you and not care. It was all honor and ettiquette, maintaining (and saving) face, etc.
After this, seeing a Paladin, with a code, charged to fight Evil, they become stereotypes of Griefadins and one even went so far as "OMG You stole that?! Return it or I'll FUCKING KILL YOU!!!" (Yeah, they roll like that.). He refused to let up and when he went on the offense he was dropped to LN. This spurred an overly-long discussion about the Good part of Lawful Good. Something that deserves it's own thread
So, The Mayor, what was the outcome? What did you guys go with?
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
"Oh, I see you've committed a misdemeanor. Prepare to die."
Dude's cruising for lawful evil with that kind of conduct.