When volatile characters get turned bad..

[phindar]

delericho: I don't disagree with anything you're saying, its just that in this case, a radical alignment change is as much or more of a roleplaying challenge than it is a mechanical one. I'd say its in bad form to try to meta your way out of it. (My group came at this debate from the other side, when after we found a Helm of Opposite Alignment started using it to brainwash evil cultists we were fighting.) If I were in this game, and a character was turned to a radically different alignment, I'd be disappointed if the character didn't act very different, or worked rationally with the party.

The second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That's all I'm saying here, people.

Player vs player antagonism is no fun, but character on character antagonism can be a blast. As long as the players don't take it personally, having a radical alignment change (or other, similar drastic shift) can be a lot of fun. There is a tendency for players to over-identify with their characters though, and it can turn ugly. I guess it depends a lot on the dynamic of the group. Some groups I have played with would treat it as a friendly, if spirited competition, others would treat it more like Homer Simpson asking, "Do I dare live out the American Dream and kill my boss?" That's why GMs should use these scenarios carefully. If there is any unspoken hostility in the group, this will bring right to the surface.

 

[Seeten]

Magically FORCING people to embrace your ideals is not a Good act as I see it. Good can convert people by strength of example and by appeals to empathy.

Its much more humane than traps designed to kill, and further, Book of Exalted Deeds has a spell that tortures evil people by forcing them into goodness.

 

[Jubilee]

That's true, but as Hong pointed out, the characters still have a very nasty and terminal disease. Wanting to be cured of that is not bad roleplaying. Thus, the character has every incentive to play nice at least until the Cure Disease is applied.

(The Atonement effect is separate... and Atonement requires a genuinely willing character. So, the CE character could accept the Atonement and pretend to be cured... for a time. There is no need for an immediate betrayal, and especially one so stupid as turning on your friends before being cured and while in the middle of an LG temple.)

I suppose I can threaten not to remove the curse if they don't stop fighting, and I will not remove the curse until they've atoned. Since I'm now surrounded by paladins of the silver flame, I'm sure I can get someone to confirm their alignments have shifted away from evil without trouble.

Plus, if these characters carry on the way that has been described, the campaign is going to be radically changed, and may be destroyed. If that's what the group wants, or is willing to accept, then that's fine. But, if this was meant to be a short detour without lasting ramifications, or the group just don't want to go that way, then maybe they should just 'cheat' and get it over with.

I and my other non-evil allies will quite simply refuse to adventure with anyone who is CE. If this means the psion's player has to change characters, fine by me. She already talks often in an OOC "joking" manner about how her spells could screw with our heads, and my character didn't trust her secretive ways before she turned evil and attacked our leader. I have no desire to play in a campaign that would be at the mercy of an unstable CE evil character.

I think everyone except possibly the GM and the player of the Psion (who is new enough to the campaign that I don't yet have a feel for what she likes with the exception of some shady OOC commentary) agrees that this is not the kind of situation we want to deal with regularly.

(Also, why has the character waited until getting to the LG temple before freaking out? Surely he should have skilled everyone in their sleep/run off in the night/said "I don't want to change back, and you have no right to force me" long before now?)

no one was evil yet when we plane shifted, but the alignment change took effect essentially the next morning (we had to wait for my archivist to memorize the necessary teleport, atonement, and remove curse spells). AFAIK, the psion isn't doing this as a grand plan to go on a killing rampage, but because she was annoyed with the warmage and felt like doing it. I don't think we even considered anyone would refuse to teleport to get the curse removed. Whether the psion thinks she can get out of the atonement, I don't know. However, I think it will be very hard to prevent them both from escalating it now that they've got started. CE people aren't very reasonable.

The quoted text is one example of Chaotic Evil behaviour. It is not the only one. In any case, only a complete fool would attempt to go on a killing rampage while in the company of equally-powerful colleagues who will take steps to stop him and while in a LG temple. That's just dumb.

I'm pretty sure the psion thinks she could take us all, or maybe she didn't realize how violently the warmage would react to her meddling with his body. I'm not really sure his response would have been any different if he had been LN still.. The comoon folk in eberron are supposed to be very low level compared to PCs (although this hasn't always been the case with this GM), so she may not expect anyone else to be able to stand up to her.

/ali

 

[phindar]

It sounds to me like this is already spilled over into player conflict, maybe not the bad poisonous kind, but it sounds like its the players who are in conflict, more than the characters. Games aren't generally at the mercy of unstable CE characters, they're at the mercy of the players. Its a matter of wanting to play with the other players, rather than against them.

This is how I feel too, but its not an alignment, or even a character thing. Its an attitude that the players bring to the table. I'd rather play in an Evil game where it was the characters against the world (for example) rather than a Good game where the players bickered or didn't work together as a team. (Evil characters, I can handle. Evil players, not so much.)

The reason I see these things go off the rails most often is that players want something to happen, and they try to make it happen with their characters. Characters don't have a lot of control over the game world, so this is frustrating, the game starts going in a direction you don't want it to, the other players are working against you (because they are doing the same thing you are, using their characters to get what the player wants), everybody ends up mad, frustrated, and complaining.

(If two players are getting angry with each other at the table, its generally a good time to put the character sheets and dice aside for a few minutes and try to figure out what's really going on. There's no point in having real people getting snippy with one another over an made-up conflict between imaginary characters in a fantasy game.)

Most likely (unless one or more of the group is crazy), the playes don't want to be in conflict with each other, so it seems like these problems should be easier to avoid. The Psion is probably not out to wreck the game, but you and her might have different ideas about what's fun. Two minutes of talking as players can save two hours of character combat.

But its very important to separate player and character motivations. The players are probably anxious to get their alignments reversed, because if they wanted to play CE they would have made CE. The characters have gone maliciously insane and probably want to kill a lot of people. A lot of the time, players get locked into this "This is what my character would do" attitude as a way to justify being a (four letter word of your choice). Ideally, these sort of issues would be settled before the group sat down to game together. You'd know right off the bat if mind control amongst the party members was verboten or not, and you wouldn't have to figure it out three months down the line when the game comes crashing to a halt and half the group hates the other half. (This is I think part of the reason its hard to add new players to a group that has been plaing for awhile, because the group has already sussed out the big issues, usually on an unspoken level, and new players don't know any of the taboos.)

Summing up. Character conflict: cool. Player conflict: uncool. I'm way too tired to dig up the link, but there was a good quote about this sort of thing, to the effect of: We should be able to behave like adults, and dream like children.