Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4005442" data-attributes="member: 42582">Just focussing on the first sentence of each of your last two paragraphs: (1) What if the town is a town of Hobgoblins who otherwise would invade one of the PoL?; (2) What if one of the characters is (a) a Half-orc or (b) a Dragonborn or (c) a Warlock with a nasty pact (are there Abyssal pacts, or only Diabolic? - anyway, I think a Devil counts as an instace of "demons and such)? Earlier editions of D&D don't really support player authorship in these situations - they get in the way by labelling the Warlock as Evil (and thus already telling us s/he is beyond the pale) or by already telling the players not to ally their PCs with the town-destroying Demon (because Paladins who work with Evil creatures automatically lose their powers, and because many GMs frown on any Good PCs who would do such a thing).Maybe your experience is different. I can only speak from what I have encountered in playing and in reading about other's play experiences - and this is that, in D&D, when a moral question arises the alignment rules, and all the other world elements constructed around it (including the Blood War, to allude back to the thread topic) are there trying to give a predetermined answer. And whenever the answer is predetermined, the players are not authoring.Now I agree that for many players D&D is not the kind of game I am talking about, or at least has not been in the past. Will abolishing alignment (and its consequent plot elements, like the Blood War) introduce more moral complexity? Not necessarily - as I've said twice now, it will mainly facilitate gamist play by no longer nerfing players for their character build choices when unforeseen alignment conflicts emerge during play. But it makes room for more interesting thematically developmental play, by getting rid of those world elements which try to fix the answers to those questions in advance. And maybe, with the barriers removed, more players will find themselves wanting and able to engage in this sort of play.To head off on a slight tangent, I think that there is a reason that D&D has kept its alignment system when so few other games - even mechanically quite derivative fantasy RPGs - have not. It's because classic D&D play involves two aspects: (i) killing and looting (like Conan, and basically amoral and wicked); and at least since 2nd edition AD&D (ii), the frequent assertion that the PCs are heroes (like Arthurian knights, who don't really kill and loot).Alignment was meant to resolve this tension, by justifying as Good the killing and looting of sentient beings. But to do this it had to posit those beings as Evil. And this in turn meant that the game had to offer a ready-made answer to the sorts of moral questions one might expect to arise and hope to resolve during play.As I've argued in the "Metagame role of PoL" thread, I think that the PoL setting is a clever attempt to reconcile (i) and (ii) above without alignment. In this thread I've tried to give some reasons why I think it also better allows for the sort of thematic exploratory play I am trying to describe.There are many other fantasy RPGs that allow for that sort of play, of course (eg The Dying Earth, or HeroQuest, or even RQ or RM played in a certain way). But in my experience they tend to move away from both (i) and (ii) above, heading instead in the direction of (sometimes cynical) social/political play. PoL (if it works as its designers hope, and have plausibly articulated in W&M) won't do this.</blockquote>

Verification