Game Mastery

This is a D&D specific post, as it deals with the topic of alignment.

Last night our game ended and it was time to discuss what to run next. The new guy asked what we thinking of evil characters and accidentally triggered a well rehearsed and lengthy rant from yours truly. The topic comes up fairly often. My thoughts on the matter are well refined from rehashing them over and over. Since this blog is a central repository for RPG issues that keep resurfacing, I figured this topic was post worthy.

First off, let’s talk evil. One of my favorite topics. Evil (and chaotic for that matter) often gets misplayed. I’m talking about the sort of evil that wonders off from the rest of the group to go barbecue an orphanage for shits and giggles. Sometimes it’s one character seeing how much carnage he can get away with. Sometimes it’s a whole party taking part in a verbal depravity contest. Characters like that aren’t evil, they’re monstrous. They’re beyond the brink of sanity. You can’t roleplay something like that, you can only perform a freakshow of disgusting acts.

And that’s all well and good if that’s what your group is doing. I’m sure we did that back in middle school too, even if my subconscious doesn’t want me to remember it. Some people just need to get that sort of thing out of their system before they can try being evil in a not so juvenile way. Personally, I’d rather play Grand Theft Auto.

The point I’m trying to make so far is that there’s a difference between evil and monstrous. Many players think back to their early evil campaigns which were nothing but monstrous and think that that’s what playing evil is. It’s not.

Evil characters are self motivated. They do what benefits themselves at the expense of others. They probably don’t even consider themselves evil. No really. The classic example of evil is Hitler, and I doubt that even he saw himself in an evil light. People don’t acknowledge their own evil. They don’t embrace it. They justify it. But they also hide it.

It is almost never in an evil character’s best interest to let the world know he’s evil. Okay, supervillains maybe, but they’re different. Let’s say you’ve got an evil halfling in the adventuring party. The evil halfling wants to ensalve humanity. Since he’s evil, the halfling is self motivated and will put himself and his cause above others. He sees a nunnery. The monstrous evil version of the halfling would light nuns on fire for his own amusement. The monstrous evil version would also be arrested by the town guards, then quartered and tossed in a pauper’s grave. Whereas the truly evil halfling would recognize the flammable nunnery as nothing more than a distraction and leave it alone. Burning nuns does nothing towards his goal of enslaving humanity. In fact it’s probably detrimental. Even if he isn’t caught, the town guard will be on the lookout for a little guy who smells like lighter fluid. This attention is totally unnecessary. To avoid attention, it is often in an evil character’s best interest to appear to be lawful good.

I’ve seen similar problems come from characters of the chaotic disposition. Let me rephrase that. I’ve seen similar problems come from players who don’t understand their character’s chaotic disposition. They act randomly. Sometimes lighting nuns aflame, sometimes giving orphans treasure, all in the name of chaos.

I’ve come to believe that this misunderstanding is actually a problem with the alignment terminology. Chaotic sounds, well, chaotic. I can understand why a player who picks this alignment might be a little confused about its meaning. Lawful gives the wrong impression too.

For as long as I’ve had these opinions I’ve been trying to come up with alternative alignment terminology. Nothing seems to work quite right. And on top of that, D&D relies on so many alignment based effects that any little changes I make to the names could unbalance things. ‘Detect self-centered’ seems like a poor replacement for a paladin’s detect evil.

Furthermore, I’ve found that the nine alignments available represent a poor selection of possible characters. I even go so far as to use alignment as a litmus test for figuring out how interesting a character will be – if he don’t fit in one of the nine slots, he’s probably interesting.

As such I’ve chosen to expand the alignment system we’re all used to. I think I’ve done so in a manner that is elegant and sensible, but I haven’t tried it with any PCs yet.

The basic idea is that you can be active or passive in an alignment. A paladin is actively lawful and will try to arrest law breakers. An every day citizen leads a lawful life, but is passive about it. It’s not their problem if someone robs the bank. A passive good character wants people around to be happy. An actively good character does something about it.

This system also allows for the two kinds of neutrality. Some neutral characters just don’t care. Others actively strive for balance in the world. The first group is passive, the latter active.

To represent activity and passivity, I use capital and lowercase letters. Paladins are LG. Citizens lg.

This translates well to evil too. Someone in it for themselves is merely evil. The Big Bad Enemy who is trying to take over the world is Evil with a capital E.

Between Lawful, lawful, Neutral, neutral, Good, good and Chaotic, chaotic, Neutral, neutral, Evil, and evil, we’ve taken the alignment system with 9 possible slots and made it possible to accommodate 36 types of characters, without adding any new terminology. This post is long enough without enumerating all 36 types (especially when you consider the differences between the four true neutrals: NN (balances all), nn (apathetic), Nn (balances law/chaos), and nN (balances good/evil)), but I hope this is something people find useful in their games.

Back to the original topic, I explained my active/passive alignment system to the new guy and told him that I’m happy to have an evil character, but capital E is off limits.