Alignment:Optional

If you have gamed for any length of time, you have probably had to explain the concept of a role playing to a new gamer. Sometimes that is difficult when the only table-top games they were familiar with were probably things like Monopoly, or Risk. When I was fist introduced to the RPG concept, I caught on fairly quickly. I was already a sci-fi nerd and had been making up my own characters and mentally injecting them into my favorite comic books, novels, and TV shows for years. But there was one concept that gave me pause: alignments. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concept; I disputed the very idea of alignments as being contradictory to the general concept of role playing.

My first gaming experience was with Traveler, which had no alignment system. So, when I rolled my first AD&D character, I asked more than one question about alignments. It seemed contradictory to tell a player to assume a roll, and then tell that player how he must play that role. Locking him into a given behavior pattern, before he had time to develop a concept of how that character should act, and thereby forcing him onto a path he may not otherwise have taken.

I understand the need for structure in a game; that is what the rules are for, but alignments (with the exceptions the cleric and paladin classes) actually play a very small role once the game begins. There may be a magic item that will only work for a particular alignment, and there are some alignment restrictions on certain spells, but the game could go on just fine without them.

The rules governing what alignments can associate with others really serve no useful purpose. What they do is taint any campaign from the start, by effectively telling the players what characters they can create in order not to conflict with the alignments of other characters in the group. So you wind up with players that are playing their second choices for characters and perhaps becoming disillusioned with the game from the beginning.

Clerics and paladins derive their abilities from a patron deity. If you know the code and doctrines of that deity, then you know the code cleric and paladin characters must abide by. That makes alignment sort of a moot point. Both classes are essentially warrior-priests. They fight to defend their church and the interests of their deities while trying to spread their faiths. Alignments really aren’t needed.

A friend of mine and I were talking about this issue, and came to the conclusion that the paladin class was superfluous. Simply remove the edged weapon restriction from the cleric class, play a cleric character with a more militaristic attitude, and you effectively have a paladin for the purpose of role-playing. What differentiates paladins from other classes is religious zeal, not the type of dice used to determine hit points, or the charts used in combat, The dedicated paladin class (which I am actually very fond of, and have played extensively) is governed by his alignment to the point that he can become disruptive to a group. So entrenched in their particular concept of right and wrong and what is, and is not lawful (in light of the lawful good alignment), they tend to insist the rest of the group adhere to the same standard. This can lead to squabbling among players, and stall the game while the DM tries to play peacemaker. This really can’t be blamed on the player handling the paladin, because he is interpreting what it says about the lawful good alignment in the game rules.

Eliminate alignment from the equation and the player has some room to play the paladin as being more reasonable and practical. I know some hard core purists out there will balk at the idea of eliminating alignments, and that’s fine. It’s your game. But, if you have players who know what they’re doing, you might want to consider making alignments optional.

Just Imagine

Imagination is a word that you would think would go hand-in hand with table-top RPGs. I mean the idea behind such games is to imagine adventures within the parameters of given set of rules. Like a good novel, an RPG gaming session should paint a mental picture of a fictional setting and allow the players and game master to walk a mile or two in the shoes of a fictional character that is larger than life, fantastically heroic or despicably villainous. RPG settings and rules were not designed to hinder imagination. They were designed to help develop it.

Unfortunately, some (perhaps even most) RPG players focus on the rules, detailed campaign settings, and the dice and never bother to imagine the action the settings, rules, and die-rolling are supposed to represent. They roll initiative, attacks, and saving throws and never develop a mental image of the drama that the GM (if he is doing it right) is trying to describe. The GM and the players should be collaborating on telling a good story. The drama and fun come from the unpredictability of people with different talents, interests, and personalities as they compliment or conflict with one another. Throw in the unpredictability of the dice bouncing across the table, and you have a fun, challenging session that can be strung together with other such sessions to make a campaign that can be a source of entertainment and camaraderie that can last for years. Some call this “fluff,” but what it really is imagination and creativity.

For example, in one of our sessions from a long-running campaign, a paladin of mine slew a green dragon. That one sentence tells you what happened. But, if that were the way my DM and I had described the encounter at the time, we would have forgotten about it. I would have the experience points, and some treasure that was found afterward, but that was all. But we didn’t stop at stating what happened, we described how it happened in glorious ‘fluffy’ detail.

The adventuring party had just fought its way through dozens of dragon cultists only to find ourselves faced with a dragon with several of members of our band unconscious or dead and the others critically short on hit points. We were in no shape to fight a dragon. To top it all off, of the characters that were still on their feet, only my paladin made his saving throw against dragon fear. He stood there, his bloody two-handed sword in hand, facing a pissed off mass of scales, claws and teeth.

The situation was grim. My DM described the scene. (This was years ago, so the exact words escape me) “The dragon circles angrily above. Half of your friends lie wounded or dead on the ground. The others are paralyzed with fear. Rungalor (the strongest and most dangerous member of our group) pisses himself in terror. They can only stare at the circling wyrm as if hypnotized by the scaled death that awaits them.”

Thoroughly engrossed in the unfolding narrative, I tried to keep the spirit of the moment going. "Andared (my paladin) leaps to the attack, yelling a plea for Tyr ( his patron deity) to aid him.”

Andared had discovered a pair of boots of leaping and springing earlier in the adventure but, at that moment, I had forgotten that. So, when I said that he “leaps to the attack,” I underestimated the enormity of my leaping assault. I won the initiative roll, and bounced my most trusted twenty-sided die across clipboard that lay on the carpet where we were playing. It landed on a twenty!

As a house rule, we used a critical hit table that my DM had composed himself. It had twelve possible outcomes. The DM rolled a d-twelve and it landed on a twelve which, on that table, was an automatic kill. Here, he could have said simply "you killed it". The adventure would have been over, experience points and treasure would have been divided, and the night would have ended on less that memorable note. But, thus was my tried and true DM.

“Your leap propels you many man-heights into the air. You feel the hand of Tyr (remember, Andared evoked Tyr’s aid earlier) guiding your sword arm as your blade descends unerringly towards the wyrm’s neck! Your sword slices through the neck, spraying you with gore and silencing the beast’s anguished cries of rage and agony. You land lightly; leaving the two twitching parts of the dragon behind you, it’s blood thickly coating the floor.”

Honestly, as imaginative and eloquent as the DM is, I doubt he was that poetic in his descriptions ad-libbed on the fly that night, but he did do a damn good of painting a fantastic mental image of the action. Instead of remembering a few die-rolls and some marks on my character sheet, I have an epic battle to remember and recount time and time again. Taking the time to get beyond the physical trappings of the game, we created a great moment in our gaming history (and our friendship).

I suppose it’s natural to get distracted by the artwork in the books, the intricate rules, the fantastically detailed settings, and (my favorites) the shinny, multi-colored dice. But I think the fun is in the imagination and mutual story telling that all of those things facilitate and support. It’s about imagination, not dice.

Fourth edition is for the weak

OK, so we're up to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Truly, the 4th addition has almost nothing in common with the game I've been playing for two decades. Like most other things these days, it has been watered down until it is a pale shadow of what came before.

Looking at the 4th addition rules, there seems to be no way for a character to die. Oh, a character can be reduced to zero hit points, fall unconscious, and miss out on some experience points, but then the character can just come back to life at the end of an adventure! This rule is quite clearly to appease players who are whining, gutless wonders who have never heard the word "no" when it was addressed to them.

Yes characters can be resurrected in my beloved first addition game, but there are real, permanent consequences for the resurrected character, and my DM makes resurrection hard to come by (and then there is that system shock saving throw). In my gaming archives, I have the sheets for many characters that met thier doom in the course of the game. I really liked some of them. But they died, and circumstances prevented me from having them resurrected. I accepted that they were dead, and went on without whining to the DM, or bitching about the rules being unfair. My gaming buddies and I still tell the stories of how these characters died and laugh. They served their purpose, they provided us some fun and some good memories.

I ask you: what is the point of using dice and keeping track of hit points, if character death is meaningless? When you can come back to life and lose not so much as a point of constitution, then why not just get out the character's sheet, write down whatever treasure and magic items you want the character to have and be done with it? Without true risk for the character, the reward is meaningless because it has not been earned.

Are the latest crop of D&D players so spoiled, unimaginative and egotistically fragile that they can't stand to loose, or even suffer a minor setback in the course of the game? Are they really that pathetic? If so then they should stick to video games when you can just push a button and start over. Table top RPGs are meant to have an element of drama. Without true risk, that drama just isn't there. Without the drama, you may has well play Monopoly, because you're missing the point of RPGs.