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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6688729" data-attributes="member: 4937">Rich’s presentation of alignment in ‘examples of play’ is so much more nuanced, coherent and thoughtful than anything TSR or WotC has ever done.   I’ve been very impressed with the clarity of his thought and above all with the empathy and compassion with which he approaches characters of each alignment.  I don’t know if this empathy is a natural attribute of Rich or something cultivated by long experience as a DM, but it’s really impressive to me either way.  I’ve long held that as a DM, you need to be able to eloquently defend each alignment’s precepts, because otherwise it’s not reasonable to believe that real people would believe them and your characters will therefore be flat and one dimensional.   Certainly this will be true of the characters of the alignments you can’t empathize with, but it will also I think undermine your ability to portray the alignments you most empathize with because you’ll be unreflective and just assume that point of view is obvious.  (This is something also discussed eloquently in Green Ronin’s ‘The Book of the Righteous’ on the topic of evil, when the writer points out how terribly unlikely and unreasonable it would be for and large number of real people to serve evil gods as they are usually presented in other fantasy works.)In my mind, as I read OotS, I read it as if it was a transcription of actual play, and that there were actual players animating the choices of all the characters.   I do that first because it is believable as a transcription of actual play in every level, and because it’s interesting to think about how the choices of the characters are both on one level believable reification of the characters and at the same time serving the purposes of the story.  Combined with the seriousness with which each character’s beliefs are displayed, this causes me to imagine the players as being extremely skilled and masterful RPers.  In particular, the imaginary players of Roy and Belkar for me are the sort of players I would aspire to be.   They are absolutely fantastic in every way, playing alignments that are extremely tricky to get right, not the least of which is the vast majority of examples of play of characters of that alignment that people have seen get them all wrong.   I mean sure, it’s easy to imagine Elan’s player as the sort of typical CG/CN goofball player that is trying to draw spotlight to himself and blow steam by being nutty and stupid and Durkar’s player is a sort of stodgy gamist type with a neckbeard that has a lot of experience but isn’t entirely into all the thespianism, but Roy and Belkar are just amazing.In particular, what gets me about Belkar’s player compared to almost every CE character I’ve ever seen in a game is the player understands that if he’s going to play an evil character it’s not the rest of the groups responsibility to comprise to allow him to fit in, but that as the anti-hero/anti-villain outlier in the group its his responsibility to make it believable that the character is allowed to remain in the group.   And so Belkar almost invariably finds a funny excuse for ‘standing down’ when confronted in a way that strongly makes Belkar come across as a scary creep, but still excuses the party for hanging out with this creep.   And Belkar’s player is so patient.   He knows he’s in a multi-year campaign, so he’s not expecting 15 minutes into it to pull off a stunning betrayal are brutal crime to prove his bone fide CE’ness.  He knows he’s got lots of time to establish character, and it indicates he’s playing the character out of a genuine interest to explore the character and not because his own id/ego/whatever is compelling him to act out evil acts because of the desirability or fun his player perceives in acting out those acts.   As a DM I find that immensely refreshing compared to, “Look. Look.  I’m torturing and raping people.  Hur Hur.  No, really, I am!!  I really am.  Isn’t it cool!”But the relationship between Belkar and Roy is just a thing of beauty.  These are two characters at the opposite ends of the alignment spectrum.  They’ve got nothing in common really.  They are just using each other.  They detest what the other stands for.   In most groups, by the second session they’d be trying to kill each other, and the players would make the character’s belief conflict personal (probably because often as not each player was actually playing himself) and you’d end up with table conflict.   But instead while the characters are at each other’s throats, it’s easy to imagine that the players themselves have this incredible rapport.   Belkar’s player knows that as the chaotic PC, his character is much more free to change his mind and his beliefs compared to Roy, and so is willing to take Roy’s queues and then find a reason to back down to end the conflict before it reaches the level of roll for initiative.  Roy’s player on the other hand is played as this very intellectual character whose both strength and weakness is a gift for long term planning.  Roy’s justification for associating with Belkar is essentially that it’s better serves the interests of good and law in the long term (or at least the mid-term) for him to do so.   Not only will not associating with Belkar make the quest less likely to succeed - at least until his presumed inevitable betrayal that Roy believes he can prepare for and see coming - but that if Belkar is ejected from the group he’s only going to end up working for Team Evil and be an even worse force for evil.   So when Roy needs to compromise, Roy’s player invents a long term reason for doing so that is benevolent and orderly.   And don’t get me wrong, as LG he’s got the freedom to be merciful and be in character, but instead of playing this as being paragon Lawful Good, Roy’s player is playing this as a slight but perhaps tragic character flaw either consciously or because the player himself has that flaw.  And you can really see that coming out in the current Durkon plot line, because it’s exactly this willingness to discard his straight forward ethical beliefs in the name of long term planning that has gotten him into serious trouble with Durkon’s vampiric state.  Roy essentially has and always had a flaw of mild arrogance, an assumption that he’s smart enough to figure it out for himself and he doesn’t have to rely on a moral/ethical code but that he’s capable of interpreting it.   That’s actually mildly chaotic, and Roy was called on it when he died and was judged, but Roy’s player pulls it off as not an ethical conflict but as being a personality and justifies it as being lawful and good to the best of Roy’s ability.   And this is great on so many levels, because it shows that no one need be 100% consistent, that personality and alignment aren’t the same thing, that you can be lawful good without being lawful stupid, but at the same time maybe sometimes you should just follow the rules and not assume you know better than whoever made the rules.   (I mean, witness Roy lecturing the Gods recently, and at the same time not realizing they can’t even hear him.)  Roy is about to be in a huge moral crisis, because Belkar’s chaotic evil – hit your enemies as hard as you can before they can hit you – was probably the right thing to do hear and Roy pragmatism (neutral) and reliance on his own judgment (chaotic) badly is leading him astray.   I wouldn’t be surprised to find Roy thrown into the same level of depression and crisis Belkar was thrown into when he realized his officiousness was actually working against his own self-interest.  And all of this just shows just how amazing and how much story can be added and how much fun it can be to play a Lawful character.  It’s not a drag to play lawful.   It doesn’t mean that you are somehow gimped as a player or as a character.   I mean consider O-Chul who is probably the most ‘badass’ character in the whole story, and is honestly the best most fully realized Paladin in the history of D&D media.  I mean D&D has been around like 40 years now and we are finally just recently getting a good public characterization of a Paladin, instead of an endless parade of Lawful Stupid, Lawful Cruel, and hypocrites that inevitably turn into villains that have marked how the Paladin has been handled in prior media.  Did it really take nearly 40 years to find someone who could at least empathize with the LG perspective rather than scorn it?   No wonder the growth of RPGs as art has been so slow.</blockquote>

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