Geriatric Grumbling

[Drifter Bob]

So, bringing it back to DnD, I have been trying to figure out the DnD alignment of the principal characters in Deadwood, and I can't do it. None of them stick to any DnD alignment, but all of them show internally consistent behavior.

Thats funny, my girlfriend and I were discussing this very issue the other day after watching the season finale of Deadwood. I actually was making the attempt, though I admit it's not a perfect fit. Here's what I came up with:

Swearengen the pimp / tavern owner seems to be chaotic neutral, perhaps on the border of chaotic evil. He will kill anyone who crosses him or who he deems a significant threat to his wellbeing without hesitation, but he puts a crippled woman to work, performs a mercy killing out of pity, and seems to forgive affronts. He is the ultimate pragmatist, with a definite chaotic neutral's contempt for the trappings of civilization. Yet he seems to have some genuine interest in the wellbeing of the community (witness his pushing Bullock to be sheriff)

Seth Bullock the hardware store owner is lawful neutral or lawful good. You could see him wrestle with a moral issue in the last episode after he beat up Ada's grifter father. Pragmatism dictated that he have Swearengen kill the guy before he could make trouble (via threatened blackmail), but his conscience wouldn't allow this expedient, (you could almost hear the DM in the sky warning him) and he decided to circumvent that from happening at the last minute.

The guy who owns the casino, I forget his name, is neutral evil or lawful evil. Very sinister

The mayor / hotel owner (farnham?) is chaotic evil. A scheming worm looking out for no 1. (love the portrayal, btw.)

The doctor is chaotic good or neutral good (more fun casting with Brad Douroff!).

Both of the prostitutes, Swearengens No 1 gal and the retired madam from the casino are both obviously chaotic good.

Mr Wu -- lawful neutral

Ada, lawful good

This would be one of the goals of a more mature DnD. Consistent character development beyond the limited spectrum of good/evil/neutral/chaos/law.

Yeah, I fully agree, you could start with basic DnD alignments, but extrapolate to another level, something on the order of a few personality archetypes. They have something like htis in the Dying Earth rpg.

DB

 

[Olorin]

Sometimes diaglo is best ignored.

I usually immediately skip any post diaglo makes, since he says the same thing _every single time_.

Ok, maybe not the exact same thing. But variations on it.

 

[Pierce_Inverarity]

Here's what I came up with:

Swearengen the pimp / tavern owner seems to be chaotic neutral, perhaps on the border of chaotic evil.

Swearengen for me is possibly the most interesting character since Tony Soprano. He's definitely not good, and I think the chaotic part is probably correct. Except, he was the one who suggested a town government and led the whole shebang, which seems like a lawful act to me (granted, it was in his best interest) He has no problem killing and covering up the act by feeding the corpses to wu's pigs, and while he hates authority, he seems to be embracing the possibility of the economic prospects of that authority. I lean towards neutral or neutral evil, but as you said for all his murderous behavior, he's exhibited true mercy and a form of compassion of the type I usually consider CG.

Seth Bullock the hardware store owner is lawful neutral or lawful good.

I agree with lawful good, but a very troubled LG. In fact, LG doesn't do him justice. He recognizes that he kind of likes violence and killing, but hates the part of him that does. Even so, he lets himself be carried away by the act twice, once with the indian and with Almas father. It has changed the way I'll view LG forever. What about the fact that he's having an affair with Alma while he's away from his wife (from a sham marriage). Doesn't sound lawful to me. Another tough one.

The guy who owns the casino, I forget his name, is neutral evil or lawful evil. Very sinister

Cy Tolliver, Agreed. NE. Though, he does seem to have a lot of real honest affection and tenderness of a sort towards his head Madame. Another complex character.

The mayor / hotel owner (farnham?) is chaotic evil. A scheming worm looking out for no 1. (love the portrayal, btw.)

E.B Farnham. Agreed on both counts! My new model for the ultimate CE schemer.

The doctor is chaotic good or neutral good
Both of the prostitutes....are both obviously chaotic good.
Mr Wu -- lawful neutral
Ada, lawful good

I think you mean Alma. To me, she's someone who was Neutral, but who has now changed to good. She's been forced by circumstances to change her view because she's become a foster mother. I say NG, because of the affair with Bullock.

I agree with the prostitues, but Wu, a drug dealer and local corpse disposer, seems more LE to me.

They have something like htis in the Dying Earth rpg.

I always liked the old palladium alignments. A good-selfish-evil axis with variations of each. I'll dig them up and summarize if anybody's interested. I'll have to check out Dying Earth. Can you elaborate a bit?

 

[Drifter Bob]

Swearengen for me is possibly the most interesting character since Tony Soprano. He's definitely not good, and I think the chaotic part is probably correct. Except, he was the one who suggested a town government and led the whole shebang, which seems like a lawful act to me (granted, it was in his best interest) He has no problem killing and covering up the act by feeding the corpses to wu's pigs, and while he hates authority, he seems to be embracing the possibility of the economic prospects of that authority. I lean towards neutral or neutral evil, but as you said for all his murderous behavior, he's exhibited true mercy and a form of compassion of the type I usually consider CG.

I think he's a classic chaotic neutral, if a bit on the bloodthirsty side. As you alluded to initially, his behavior does follow a consistent pattern. Basically, he is a hard core pragmatist. He'll help someone out if it he can do so without disrupting his plans, but he'll kill you in a minute if you cross him.

I think he supports the formation of the city gov a necessary evil, in order for him to really cash in, but you can bet that this guy will always live either on the frontier or on the crazy, neglected corners of civiliztion, because he sees the proceesses with far too jaundiced (realitstic, seemingly) an eye.

I agree with lawful good, but a very troubled LG. In fact, LG doesn't do him justice. He recognizes that he kind of likes violence and killing, but hates the part of him that does. Even so, he lets himself be carried away by the act twice, once with the indian and with Almas father. It has changed the way I'll view LG forever. What about the fact that he's having an affair with Alma while he's away from his wife (from a sham marriage). Doesn't sound lawful to me. Another tough one.

I think you are modernizing or christianizing your concept of Lawful Good, as most DnD players do. Don't you thnk the typical Paladin enjoys slaying orcs and bandits and demons? Getting carried away with violence is something which frankly happens to a lot of people who are fighters. It's something you have to struggle with, in order to overcome the natural fear, many people replace it with a certain battle madness, or a lust for the fight. It is very common even among 'good people'. I know.

What makes him LG is that he reigns this in. He doesn't brawl for the fun of it, and in facts avoids uneccesary conflicts. He ends up taking the hard road with Almas father, purely for moral or ethical reasons.

His 'affair' is reminscinent of the far more egregious case of Lancelot, a mythical figure who is perhaps the archetype of a lawful good person.

This is a LG person. An adult conception of a LG person as opposed to an oversimplified comic book, DnD conception.

Cy Tolliver, Agreed. NE. Though, he does seem to have a lot of real honest affection and tenderness of a sort towards his head Madame. Another complex character.

Agreed, though again, why shouldn't an evil character feel honest affection for someone? Can't an evil individual be nuanced?

E.B Farnham. Agreed on both counts! My new model for the ultimate CE schemer.

Yep, he's a baddie. I love when he talks to himself while he's scheming. His florid language reminds me of the ne'rdowell chracters of the dying earth ...

I think you mean Alma. To me, she's someone who was Neutral, but who has now changed to good. She's been forced by circumstances to change her view because she's become a foster mother. I say NG, because of the affair with Bullock.

Yeah, Alma, I forgot all the names. I agree she transformed herself when she kicked her opium habit.

I agree with the prostitues, but Wu, a drug dealer and local corpse disposer, seems more LE to me.

Again, isn't this westernizing or modernizing or christianizing? To him, there is nothing particularly evil about Opium, any more than the Americans (with some exceptions!) think there is much anything wrong with they Whiskey they sell. the latter is pobably much more widely harmful and disruptive to the community. Same with disposing bodies. He's just pragmatic. Following his own understanding of the world. He is trying to help out the members of his community, and making money however he can. He doens't know why the Americans kill each other, but he can make money by getting rid of the bodies... I don't know enough about the value system of a Chinese peasant in the 19th century to really judge.

I always liked the old palladium alignments. A good-selfish-evil axis with variations of each. I'll dig them up and summarize if anybody's interested.

do so, by all means.

I'll have to check out Dying Earth. Can you elaborate a bit?

Hard to summarise! I reccomend reading some reviews, google some or check out the ones on Amazon. The range of reactions is informative...

DB

 

[Altalazar]

I really think how "mature" it is is based on the adventures and the people you play with, not the system. It is basically a neutral system in that respect. But I voted for more "mature" D&D, over 30, just to indicate that I'd like to see it head in that direction. Maybe it is already there.

 

[Drifter Bob]

I really think how "mature" it is is based on the adventures and the people you play with, not the system. It is basically a neutral system in that respect. But I voted for more "mature" D&D, over 30, just to indicate that I'd like to see it head in that direction. Maybe it is already there.

Well, I think several examples have been cited of how the 3.X rules, both in flavor and in actual mechanics, effect the maturity of the game. If you don't see that or can't grasp it, I guess we have to just agree to disagree.

DB

 

[Drifter Bob]

Hey DB, sorry if I was helping to derail your thread and sorry to anyone else if my previous posts seemed to be insulting to a specific edition or its players. That wasn't really my intention.

I don't think you derailed it at all, I the argument was growing into a familiar direction of old school versus new school, which I wanted to prevent. I actually think you raised some excellent points. For the record, I also agree with you (though for slightly different reasons) that the current melee round is very flawed. Breaking it down into segments makes much more sense than these actions and partial actions, IMO. I think the current system is cryptic and few DM's, let alone players, really get it in every ramificiation.

To get back on track, I'll submit one thing that I think WotC could do to VASTLY improve the next edition/printing of D&D.

Don't include sample DCs in the Skills section of the Player's Handbook. Describe the skill and what the player can do with it, but leave the sample DCs for the DMG, where they belong.

This is really the province of the DM and ought to be addressed in a "Skills" section of the DMG along with advice on how to set and modify DCs not covered by the examples. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've gotten into conflicts with a player while running 3rd ed (yes, I ran several 3e campaigns for about 3 years before hanging up my 3e DM hat) because I set a DC for a task that differed from what the player expected based on the DCs in the PHB. Even if the player is willing to accept that the DM always sets the DC no matter what the book may say, it still sucks for a player to have certain expectations about what their chances are for success only to learn that they are inaccurate after the fact.

If the numbers were in the DMG instead of the PHB, some of those problems could be avoided and it would send a clear message that setting DCs is ALWAYS the DM's perogative.

I think this an excellent point. With the original PhB they seemed to be trying to either pack all the rules into one volume so you could play the whole game out of one book, or maybe they burned themselves out with the collosal first effort and they just got a hell of a lot less ambitious with the DMG. I don't have copies of the 3.5 books yet (I have been using the 3.5 SRD) but the 3.0 DMG was very light, (especially compared to the old ADnD DMG) I think a general approach of thinking what rules should be PhB rules and which ones should be in the DMG or other core books would be a good idea.

DB

 

[Drifter Bob]

That's an interesting and faux-polite way of saying, "I am going to disregard all opinions that differ from mine. Thanks for playing."

I'm honestly expressing my opinion of the results. You on ther other hand seem to be lashing out defensively. Let me ask you a question: Do you use house rules?

As for the 25% - So, a meaningful proportion of the "hard core" audience has a gripe. Big deal. We're probably about 5% of the total audience, and a non-representative sample at that. Not a number on which to base any useful projections, IMO.

First, not a gripe. This is IMO defensiveness again. Like I said before, like it or not (and I'm sure, most DnD players dont like it and would want everything to stay exactly as is) DnD WILL change. A DnD 4E WILL come out. The only question is then, how it will change. Making a suggestion for areas which could use improvements when this change is inevitably made is not a gripe . Labeling it as such is just a facile way to dismiss it.

Also, I never claimed this was a definitive scientific analysis. (WOTC would have to pay me big money to conduct that! ) But I think it is informative.

In any case, with no defensive notions, I stand by my assertion that the rules themselves are maturity neutral. Saying otherwise is like saying a gun has a moral position on its use.

If you sold guns in breakfast cereal boxes, or if they manufactured guns in gang banger colors, or let serial kiillers endorse them, then it would have a moral position on it's use. DnD is sold and marketed to kids, the rules are bent accordingly, both in mechanics and flavor.

Mechanics are inherently neutral. With the possible exception of summonable paladin mounts. Someone was hopped up on Pixie Sticks when that one came down the pike.

How do you answer Oourphs points...?

DB

 

[Deadguy]

On the question of where to put sample DCs: I would most vehemently disagree that they deserve only to be in the DMG! As a player I need some idea of how the numbers on the character sheet relate to actual game play. Without knowing what a skill score means in comparison to what is required to achieve objectives, I have no idea just how good my character is, only a relative level of skill in comparison to other PCs. In 'real life' to develop my skill, I have undertaken many tasks, likely practised in a variety of cirsumstances, and talked with other skilled people. I have thus had the chance to see what my level of skill means in a range of situations. And that's what the sample DCs represent - a baseline that the player and DM can share so they can adjudge the effectiveness of characters.

Of course the DM sets the final DC. But I do feel that either:

1. he should start with the examples given and work outwards from that the DC for the specific circumstance being rolled for; or
2. say in advance that the rules as written for a skill don't fit his view at all, and provide an alternate baseline.

Otherwise we end up with those ludicrous situations where there are massive disconnects between what the player thinks his character can do, and what the DM thinks the character can do. I've seen that crop up in games, and PCs end up attempting ridiculous tasks, that if the player had the same knowledge as the character they would never attempt in a month of Sundays! Or you have PCs that hesitate to perform tasks which the DM knows is easy for them because he's given the wrong impressions entirely - and entirely accidentally too.

Note that I am not saying that there can't be factors unknown to the characters - but that the characters (and thus the player) need some idea of what they think the difficulty is. I am afraid I have seen too many DMs that use this rules 'secrecy' as an excuse to manipulate the game unfairly.

 

[Drifter Bob]

On the question of where to put sample DCs: I would most vehemently disagree that they deserve only to be in the DMG! As a player I need some idea of how the numbers on the character sheet relate to actual game play. Without knowing what a skill score means in comparison to what is required to achieve objectives, I have no idea just how good my character is, only a relative level of skill in comparison to other PCs.

I think that could be easily handled by having the PhB just list a range of skill bonus from "+1 = poor" to "+10 = great" or whatever. You don't necessarily have examples of how your To Hit bonuses are going to stack up to monsters in the PhB, do you?

In 'real life' to develop my skill, I have undertaken many tasks, likely practised in a variety of cirsumstances, and talked with other skilled people. I have thus had the chance to see what my level of skill means in a range of situations. And that's what the sample DCs represent - a baseline that the player and DM can share so they can adjudge the effectiveness of characters.

I can see what you are saying here, but again, I think giving this information to the players sets false expectations, and leads to this adversarial relation with the DM, as you describe below:

Of course the DM sets the final DC. But I do feel that either:

1. he should start with the examples given and work outwards from that the DC for the specific circumstance being rolled for; or
2. say in advance that the rules as written for a skill don't fit his view at all, and provide an alternate baseline.

DM's should always notify players of rules modifications in advance, but I think it is a stretch to assume that not agreeing with what the PhB says a DC means in every iteration is a rules modification.

I've seen that crop up in games, and PCs end up attempting ridiculous tasks, that if the player had the same knowledge as the character they would never attempt in a month of Sundays! Or you have PCs that hesitate to perform tasks which the DM knows is easy for them because he's given the wrong impressions entirely - and entirely accidentally too.

That's silly! Why couldn't the player just ask the DM how if something is within the threshold of his or her ability? Surely a person would have some sense of whether or not they could lift a certain rock or jump over a gorge or climb a wall, just by looking at it. Again, this sounds like a disturbingly adverserial game, if a DM would just let you try and abysmally fail to do something which your character thought in good faith thought he or she could do, then your DM is a jerk.

I am afraid I have seen too many DMs that use this rules 'secrecy' as an excuse to manipulate the game unfairly.

With all due respect, (and I think you are being sincere) this is implying that the rules can save a party from a killer DM, which is just as silly as the idea that the rules can save the DM from a bad party.

If you have a DM who is trying to manipualte the game 'unfairly', as if in competition with the party, then you have a bad DM. On the other hand, it is a basic fact of DM'ing that you can't play by the rules 100% of the time behind the screen. As someone else pointed out in another thread here on EN world, most DM's fudge regulalry in the benefit of the players to keep them from being brought down by that rogue critical hit or from failing that vital skill check to save the whole party or whatever. Assuming that the DM is out to get you is going to lead to a bad game. If your DM really IS out to get you, then you really should't be playing DnD. Play a wargame.

Finally, while rules cannot save a game from bad players, I think that the rules maturity issue however DOES lead to more adversarial players on both the DM and player side, which is really depressing and lame and another negative consequence of the 'culture' of the current rules, which I hope will be changed in later incarnations of the game.

DB