I did a bad thing on the bus this morning.\u00c2\u00a0 I tried to apply D&D alignments to some characters from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.\u00c2\u00a0 Characters in that series are all shades of gray.\u00c2\u00a0 Even the most evil bastards seem perfectly reasonable when you see things from their point of view.\u00c2\u00a0 You just can’t fit those characters into one of nine alignment slots.<\/p>\n
So instead I tried to fit alignment around those characters.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’m going to keep this short.\u00c2\u00a0 The character I was looking at today is Stannis Baratheon.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s clearly defined as Lawful Neutral.\u00c2\u00a0 But he’s slipping towards evil.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, no matter how far he slips he’ll never be Lawful Evil like the Lannisters.<\/p>\n
So why not indicate the slippery slope of evil as part of his alignment?\u00c2\u00a0 In this case we’d call Stannis LN -> LE.\u00c2\u00a0 Interesting characters are dynamic.\u00c2\u00a0 They change over the course of the game.\u00c2\u00a0 Why not indicate that change rather than settling for an inaccurate alignment?<\/p>\n
For once I’m not going to examine each new alignment type.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not worth it and they should be self explanatory.\u00c2\u00a0 This idea seems pretty elegant at first glance.\u00c2\u00a0 The only ugliness, at least in D&D mechanics, is whether Stannis would count as evil or neutral for magical effects.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe it’s both.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe it depends on the effect.\u00c2\u00a0 I leave it up to the GM.<\/p>\n
Indicating alignment shifts as part of alignment works great with my previous post on alignment too.\u00c2\u00a0 An apathetic character who takes up a cause could go from nn (passive neutral) to nG (passive neutral, actively good).<\/p>\n
I’m not sure if I’ll inflict this on my players in a real game.\u00c2\u00a0 Neither of the groups I play with has much use for alignment to begin with.\u00c2\u00a0 I still like keeping it around as a thought exercise though.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe someone else can use it and comment on how it works?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I did a bad thing on the bus this morning.\u00c2\u00a0 I tried to apply D&D alignments to some characters from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.\u00c2\u00a0 Characters in that series are all shades of gray.\u00c2\u00a0 Even the most evil bastards seem perfectly reasonable when you see things from their point of view.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-theory","tag-alignment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}