Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 7742703" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Sure, I agree with that. But honestly, I don't think the addition of the word Chaotic or Lawful really muddies things all that much. My 8 year old self was able to suss it out pretty easily, and I wasn't some kind of prodigy. No, I don't think I made a mistake. I made a general statement about what 5E does in contrast with some past editions of the game, notably 3E and derivatives based on the Diplomacy discussion. What I didn't do was say that it was first, which seems to be the issue you have with my comment. I am not claiming it was first. I just said that it does something I like. If that happened in 4E first, that's fine. But irrelevant to my point. If you were going to convert a 4E character who was unaligned to 5E, what alignment would you make him? I get the distinction you're making about Neutral being devoted to the balance like a Druid, or about it being not devoted to any ethos like a simple animal, but I look at Unaligned as covering the same category. I suppose Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral maybe muddied things a bit, but again, I was able to grasp it at 8, so it's hard for me to really think of this as too complex. Yeah, I hated the way skills were so heavily codified in 3E and its versions, and that's a big part of what I've been talking about in my posts. I like the way 5E functions in this regard. I realize it's a bit vague, but to me that makes it flexible for multiple approaches. So for me, in the case of an NPC making a compelling argument for some course of action on the part of the PCs, I prefer to focus on player actions to add information for them to make a decision rather than have an NPC action make or strongly influence their decision. Mostly, but it's situational. On the part of the NPC, the DM can make what he thinks is a compelling argument by the NPC, or he can make a weak argument. Although it certainly is possible for him to make one or the other depending on a roll. So if he rolls a Persuasion check, and the result is high, he can make a strong argument, and if the result is low, he can make a weak argument. But for me, the PCs can use their skill checks to help them gather information. "Is he lying?" make an insight check, and the like. I don't think I'm saying that the mechanics support player agency, so much as I'm saying that I prefer that the mechanics in question don't limit that agency. I prefer for players to make decisions about what their characters say, think, or do in all but the most extreme circumstances.</blockquote>

Verification