Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Mr. Manchester]

I think alignment is neat. It's been an interesting enough concept that people still debate about what it means to be lawful and chaotic to this day. It's also something that you can sort of ignore in most editions if you really feel like it.

When I run I still use it and since I'm married to Pathfinder 1e forever there are spells and effects that work differently based off of alignment. My rule of thumb, though, is that I don't ask players to even bother writing one down until they get smacked with a chaos hammer or something. By the time that sort of thing comes up someone has played a character long enough where we just kind of know what the character's alignment with. Most of my arguments over it with my party is if they're evil or not.

They're always fucking evil.

 

[AnOminous]

By the time that sort of thing comes up someone has played a character long enough where we just kind of know what the character's alignment with.

When I wanted to be really obnoxious as a PC, my favorite alignment was Lawful Neutral. You may think Chaotic Neutral (sometimes known as Chaotic Retard) would be the most annoying alignment but you'd be wrong. Imagine all the arrogance and assholery of a Paladin preaching at you, but combined with none of the niceness and would drag you out of a burning building at the cost of his life part.

 

[Revelator]

When I wanted to be really obnoxious as a PC, my favorite alignment was Lawful Neutral. You may think Chaotic Neutral (sometimes known as Chaotic Retard) would be the most annoying alignment but you'd be wrong. Imagine all the arrogance and assholery of a Paladin preaching at you, but combined with none of the niceness and would drag you out of a burning building at the cost of his life part.

Yeah, when I do mercenary backstories they tend to be Lawful Neutral...there was the one time I did Lawful Evil in a one-shot. But yeah, I highly recommend not letting the "I'm just playing my character, not being disruptive ;3" jackass do something like that.

You know...like me.

 

[Ah ha']

They've blown so far past humanizing orcs that now we're having to entertain whether or not mindflayers are categorically evil. Some faggot on youtube was making the rounds earlier this year "um-actually"ing about how there are no evil races, and twisting himself in knots to defend his ludicrous position against the mindflayer. Even setting aside that all mindflayers are card-carrying villains and typically slavers, you would never be able to have an ethical society of mindflayers, at least not one capable of reproducing at replacement level. Mindflayers reproduce by implanting a tadpole into the ear of a host. The tadpole then eats the host's brain and attaches itself at the brainstem, forcing a metamorphosis into a mindflayer, afterwhich it still needs a steady diet of sapient brains at a rate of at least 1 per month, and even that is to stave off starvation. Ideally, they'd prefer once every 2 weeks. You'd be extremely taxed playing a lawful good mindflayer having to wander from township to township asking around for deathrow inmates and asking if you can pretty-please eat their brains, all the while praying to your god that you get jumped by a band of irredeemably evil bandits on every trip. Now imagine doing that for every mindflayer in a whole city.

In the book of Exalted Deeds for d&d 3rd/3.5 edition describes one example of a lawful good female Illithid Monk, but from what I recall the pretense of this happening is basically divine intervention.

While it is true there are many examples of evil beings being defeated or redeemed by powerful magic such as Atonement the spell literally only works if the one targeted accepts it, it is not a will save; this has always been the case if Im not mistaken.

The illithids are secretive and paranoid, as a colony they act at the discretion and the whims of the Elder Brains. Which if memory serves are not actually of the same race, the Mind Flayers as laymen call them are an exclusive race even within their own evolution. The result of fallen Illithid societies give rise to greater but still rarer monsters called Neothelids which are considered blasphemous to them.

We can always write the story we want to see and have redemption for even the most vulgar, literal brain sucking aliens. Id describe them as monsters among monsters, but it is such a stretch that it’s not actually fun. Redemption for Devils and Demons? Thats a concept I think is easier to swallow given their metaphysical natures, but Illithids no. But why should we stop there when we can literally redeem the pile of snot in the form of Black Pudding, which shares the same predatory and equal part alien anatomy of the Illithid?

The recent comics of the order of the stick features a good or atleast neutral aligned young beholder, the adopted son of one of the ancient heroes (a halfling). But even that is more believable than a creature which is said to kill the personality of its host body upon achieving ceremorphosis.

This is just me autistically trying to demonstrate with the established canon of the monster how they could be good. We have one example, I guess maybe there is room for 1 good Illithid, but 2? Fuck off

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

When I wanted to be really obnoxious as a PC, my favorite alignment was Lawful Neutral. You may think Chaotic Neutral (sometimes known as Chaotic Retard) would be the most annoying alignment but you'd be wrong. Imagine all the arrogance and assholery of a Paladin preaching at you, but combined with none of the niceness and would drag you out of a burning building at the cost of his life part.

I just make the excuse that my character is a dragon therefore stealing all the things that aren't nailed down as part of his racial component.

He also says that Dragons are just objectively better than every other race because they are born with all inborn knowledge and that human babies and Alvin babies and every other baby it's very vulnerable therefore Dragons are just objectively better.

Then again unless the DM is out we don't miss a week and we haven't missed a week in five years except on the holidays we take Christmas Thanksgiving all that off

 

[EleventySeven]

It's a day that ends in "Y," so I'm down for alignment sperging. I seriously question the type of people who apply this moral relativism to D&D.

I think alignment is neat. It's been an interesting enough concept that people still debate about what it means to be lawful and chaotic to this day. It's also something that you can sort of ignore in most editions if you really feel like it.

I run my alignment as a force of nature AND as a subjective thing. Evil exists as a capital E Evil that represents negative energy. Monsters and evil entities are ontologically evil, infused or powered by negative energy. Demons are Evil and evil. Good with a capital g is aligned with positive energy. Angels are Good and good. But mortals can be good or evil despite being animated by Good, they can be evil or good or neutral. And, in theory, undead can be good or evil, although good Undead tends to require very specific conditions like Archliches or divine intervention.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

When I wanted to be really obnoxious as a PC, my favorite alignment was Lawful Neutral. You may think Chaotic Neutral (sometimes known as Chaotic Retard) would be the most annoying alignment but you'd be wrong. Imagine all the arrogance and assholery of a Paladin preaching at you, but combined with none of the niceness and would drag you out of a burning building at the cost of his life part.

Chaotic Retard can be done right but you just have to be okay with being the butt of a joke every now and then. Nobody is pulling off being Deadpool, even Deadpool. But if you're willing to accept your lot in life as a retard than you can play pretty good comic relief, big thing is that the other party members look good in comparison. Same goes if you're being a Lawful Neutral asshole. When a pile of garbage gets dumped on that guy's head everyone has a good laugh and moves on.

To this day my proudest Chaotic Retard moment was when my necromancer decided he wanted a pet monkey. I remember the DM asking if I was planning on taking animal handling or using it for anything useful. The reality was that I had watched a documentary about morons that decided owning a monkey was a good idea and the horrible consequences of that decision. The end result was that my mockery of your standard ignorant arrogant liberal college professor was walking around the city with a completely untrained monkey named 'Baby' because of course it fucking was. It was nothing but a gold sink and since that decision I don't know how many monkeys he's gone though but their inevitable deaths were "never his fault".

My point is, being a retard alignment works if you're willing to accept that you're playing a retard.

 

[Big Green]

They're always fucking evil.

This is my experience with my players as well. It's why I can't wait until soon, when I get to be a player and I can roleplay a generic lawful good hero. I'm planning to be as annoying as possible to the evil douchebags the rest of my friends come up with.

 

[Doktor Grimm]

When I wanted to be really obnoxious as a PC, my favorite alignment was Lawful Neutral. You may think Chaotic Neutral (sometimes known as Chaotic Retard) would be the most annoying alignment but you'd be wrong. Imagine all the arrogance and assholery of a Paladin preaching at you, but combined with none of the niceness and would drag you out of a burning building at the cost of his life part.

This is my experience with my players as well. It's why I can't wait until soon, when I get to be a player and I can roleplay a generic lawful good hero. I'm planning to be as annoying as possible to the evil douchebags the rest of my friends come up with.

One of my favourite PCs to date was created out of spite towards a couple of guys in my uni D&D group, who exclusively played Chaotic Bastard freakshit abominations with dead parents and eighteen-page backstories. I set out to create the ultimate foil -- a character so stuffy and unlikeable that he would prevent the campaign's otherwise inevitable descent into a Theatre Kid's Wet Dream by his mere existence.

The result: a Lawful Neutral human wizard with the Noble background, deemed too insufferable for even his old money parents and cast onto the streets to supervise a money laundering operation that the party was involved with. In practice, this meant acting like a tyrant and hurling racial epithets at the other PCs (to whom he was indispensable, being the only party member with enough money to bribe people). He was pathetically weak and had multiple medical conditions, because his family tree was a circle; to address this issue, I enlisted the help of one of the other players to create an ultra beefy fighter who would act as his bodyguard in battle scenarios, leaving him to stand at a distance and cast Magic Missile when the mood struck him.

The jokes practically wrote themselves. Any pretence of melodrama was quickly extinguished by His Majesty striding up to the villain and asking if they knew who his father was. Strangely, the others seemed to like him -- I think they thought I was doing some sort of pastiche of rich people.

About a dozen sessions deep, after we bluffed our way through a prison break with a few lucky Charisma rolls, our DM bequeathed upon us a disused ship powered by magic, wink wink. When called upon to pilot the ship as the resident caster, he dismissed chauffeuring as "a Tiefling job" and locked himself in the captain's quarters. The rest of the party consisted of the aforementioned fighter, a barbarian, and two rogues. We spent the remainder of the session sailing the high seas at a blistering 1 mile per hour.

Shortly thereafter, the ship was hijacked by a gang of marauding goblins, and my wizard's bodyguard, having drunk himself into a stupor, was unable to save him. Goodnight, sweet prince. I shouldn't have given you 8 CON.

 

[anti SJW]

Hello TableTopThread

200 pages later I have once again come to ask for fun ideas for a rather tricky situation I landed a player in that unfortunately just happened to occur to one of the PCs. The goody-2-shoes cleric has touched a shield possessed by an unknown, but rather powerful demonic entity (Maybe slightly below pit-fiend level if this were a devilish rather than a demonic power).
When handling it, she took advantage to make a wisdom save and - I kid you not - rolled two critical failures. I interpreted this as a mind wide open so the demonic entity has successfully found a new host which it is now stealthily co-inhabiting and slowly taking possession of. The rest of the party (in character) is not particularly aware of this, nor is the cleric (in character).

During the next long rest I intend to have her have a nightmare in which she chokes the life out of some evil devil, only to wake up to the party pulling her off her beloved stepchild whom she was strangling in her sleep.

Incidentally, vis a vis the stepchild: She is a leftover from a previous campaign in which the party rescued a young drow, raised to be the host of a kind of avatar of Lolth and it's a NPC they're rather fond of. They never really figured out what was wrong with her, or why she keeps attracting (and being attracted to) all kinds of evil influences, but she is essentially missing a part of her soul/life force, an empty vessel, a potential walking-talking phylactery to store another creature's life force and this emptiness is attractive to all kinds of outside influences. I mention this because I feel there is potential for some interaction there as well.

Any other fun ideas, either short or long term? It's rare to get an organic opportunity for possession, but when it presents itself in this obvious a manner, I feel it is worth taking.

Maybe have the demon start to put ideas to justify the cleric going against the tenants of the good god she is a cleric of.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

The reality was that I had watched a documentary about morons that decided owning a monkey was a good idea and the horrible consequences of that decision.

You are always welcome at my table.

 

[BlazikenLover]

Are people really mad at the bit about the peasant railgun in the 2024 DMG? Because that seemed very sensible (even if I do think it is stupid it needs to be spelled out, but some players/DMs are fairly exceptional) clarification to do.

 

[Ghostse]

Are people really mad at the bit about the peasant railgun in the 2024 DMG? Because that seemed very sensible (even if I do think it is stupid it needs to be spelled out, but some players/DMs are fairly exceptional) clarification to do.

At this point they could include a coupon for free ice cream and it would piss people off.

.... likely because the ice cream would be some non-dairy Vegan soyslop made by a company that donates to lawyers for illegals convicted of violent crimes to try to get them released and ensure they and their families stay in the US.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Are people really mad at the bit about the peasant railgun in the 2024 DMG? Because that seemed very sensible (even if I do think it is stupid it needs to be spelled out, but some players/DMs are fairly exceptional) clarification to do.

It's not so much the clarification as it's the tone. You don't get sassy with your audience when you're already chronically short on goodwill.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

It's not so much the clarification as it's the tone. You don't get sassy with your audience when you're already chronically short on goodwill.

Wizards hate people making online thought exercises about the game almost as much as they hate white men playing the game.

 

[White Slaad]

Are people really mad at the bit about the peasant railgun in the 2024 DMG? Because that seemed very sensible (even if I do think it is stupid it needs to be spelled out, but some players/DMs are fairly exceptional) clarification to do.

No, because modern DMs don't read the DMG.

 

[Adamska]

Are people really mad at the bit about the peasant railgun in the 2024 DMG? Because that seemed very sensible (even if I do think it is stupid it needs to be spelled out, but some players/DMs are fairly exceptional) clarification to do.

It's more because it's many years too late for something like that to matter, smells strongly of them just looking at ancient meta to pretend they know shit, and it was done in a cuntish tone. It also reeks heavily of "we need to pretend this edition improves or fixes something that was resolved by simple DM fiat 15+ years ago"

 

[AnOminous]

The result: a Lawful Neutral human wizard with the Noble background, deemed too insufferable for even his old money parents and cast onto the streets to supervise a money laundering operation that the party was involved with. In practice, this meant acting like a tyrant and hurling racial epithets at the other PCs (to whom he was indispensable, being the only party member with enough money to bribe people). He was pathetically weak and had multiple medical conditions, because his family tree was a circle; to address this issue, I enlisted the help of one of the other players to create an ultra beefy fighter who would act as his bodyguard in battle scenarios, leaving him to stand at a distance and cast Magic Missile when the mood struck him.

I had almost exactly this character. And I played him with a nasally, whiny voice, and he would always try to pull rank against everyone, despite being a pathetic coward, who would cast his Magic Missile and then run away, then lecture everyone about how he would have handled everything better. He was definitely a comic relief character, because bad things happened to him all the time and everyone laughed.

It's nearly identical because he even literally did the "do you know who my dad is" and mocking dwarves with racist slurs thing. And needed to have a personal tard wrangler to keep him from getting killed.

 

[Fag Albert]

Nobody is pulling off being Deadpool, even Deadpool.

I've had to say this exact phrase to a few people.. Where they just seem to miss the fact that the character is built to be a pest & a punching bag that all the other superheroes usually want to beat the shit out of whenever he shows up. There's this weird disonnect where they can't seem to grasp difference between finding a character charming from a third person perspective compared to characters in a story interacting with them and thus seem shocked when the paladin wants to jam his holy avenger up Jingle the Jester's ass.

 

[Spirit of Fire]

Need more Slivers in tabletop games.