This is further confused by alignment restrictions in game — Paladins must be Lawful Good. Druids must be True Neutral. Clerics should mimic their god’s alignment (or not). Rangers must be Good.

What does this all mean? How do we incorporate into our game?

House Rule 1: Steal from 4E

One of the good things about the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is that it has an alignment choice of “unaligned”. House rule number one is to allow unaligned characters into the game. PCs are permitted to lack a worldview.

PCs can now be good, evil, lawful, chaotic, lawful good, lawful evil, chaotic good or chaotic evil. Or unaligned.

Neutral has also disappeared from our alignment list. We will have to revisit this later, before deciding whether or not neutrality has a place in our game.

Most characters in the game world — and likely most of the PCs — ought to be unaligned. After all, who sits around wondering if their actions are Lawful or Chaotic, Good or Evil?

Theologians and philosophers, that’s who. When was the last time you saw a theologian or philosopher battling a gelatinous cube in a dungeon?

House Rule 2: Define your terms

The Player’s Handbook goes through each alignment and gives it a strict definition.

For instance, Lawful Neutral:

Those of this alignment view regulation as all-important, taking a middle road betwixt evil and good. This is because the ultimate harmony of the world -and the whole of the universe – is considered by lawful neutral creatures to have its sole hope rest upon law and order. Evil or good are immaterial beside the determined purpose of bringing all to
predictability and regulation.

With something similarly heavy for each alignment, it is difficult to see how two PCs of differing alignments could ever coexist throughout an entire adventuring campaign. Additionally, one cannot simply be Lawful. One must also choose “good”, “evil”, or decide that such a choice is “immaterial” and purposely take a “middle road” between them.

Exhausting.

The good/evil and law/chaos axes, however, are difficult to define and fraught with philosophical wonderings. This is dangerous stuff for the DM who just wants to get on with it. Yet it must be done.

Law vs Chaos

The first edition of AD&D defines Chaotic Neutral as follows:

Above respect for life and good, or disregard for life and promotion of evil, the chaotic neutral places randomness and disorder. Good and evil are complimentary balance arms. Neither are preferred, nor must either prevail, for ultimate chaos would then suffer.

Lawful seeks out order, regulation and predictability; chaos seeks randomness and disorder. “Randomness” appears repeatedly throughout all the chaotic alignments, which has lead more than one gamer to play chaotic characters as crazy (which is not an alignment at all).

“Law and order”, on the other hand, is the recurring phrase throughout the lawful alignments.

This, as you might have guessed, seems most unsatisfactory. Must a lawful character always obey the law? Clearly the answer is no — a Lawful Good character, for example, would face quite the dilemma with an evil law. But what of a Lawful Neutral character? What of a law that formented disorder? Must all laws be good? What happens when a law of the church conflicts with a law of the state?

So what do Law and Chaos mean?

One of my favourite definitions comes courtesy of Jeff Rients:

Ragnarok just started. Aligned on one side are the Kirby versions of Thor, Odin, etc. On the other side are Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath. Where does your PC stand?

A) I fight alongside Thor!
B) I fight alongside Cthulhu!
C) Where do I stand? Are you crazy? I get the hell out of there and find a place to hide!

If you answered A your character is Lawful. If you answered B then your character is Chaotic. If you chose C then you’re Neutral.

We like this definition.

Lawful characters approve of the system in which things work. They do not necessarily believe in order (as in “law & order”), but they believe in the way things are ordered. Sky above. Earth below. And so on.

Chaotic characters disapprove of the system of things, and seek to usurp it — or would seek to usurp it, if they had an opportunity, and could be bothered.

Essentially, it takes a law-and-order VS anti-establishment point of view, but elevates it to a cosmic level. We love this, at the Big Bad Blog.

For many, their position vis-a-vis the cosmic law/chaos debate will likely also reflect their day-to-day interactions with more earthly authorities, but nothing stops a chaotic character from being an upstanding and involved citizen of the metropolis. A lawful character can be a lone anarchist looking to bring down the government. These situations are unlikely, not impossible.

Good vs Evil

With Law and Chaos sorted, we now enter the even more difficult minefield of “good” and “evil”. From the Player’s Handbook:

Neutral Evil: The neutral evil creature views law and chaos as unnecessary considerations, for pure evil is all-in-all. Either might be used, but both are disdained as foolish clutter useless in eventually bringing maximum
evilness to the world.

Neutral Good: Unlike those directly opposite them (neutral evil) in alignment, creatures of neutral good believe that there must be some regulation in combination with freedoms if the best is to be brought to the world – the most beneficial conditions for living things in general and intelligent creatures in particular.

Completely useless tripe. “Maximum evilness”? “The most beneficial conditions”?

Other good and evil alignments seem to equate good or evil on the value that a person gives to “life”, “beauty” and “freedom”. Presumably the life and freedom of others (not oneself). Beauty … well there’s another philosophical trap there — the DM already has enough of those on his plate, thank you very much.

But this gives us something to work with, and we state our good/evil paradigm as follows:

Good characters are those who fight for others. They hold a respect for the rights of others (what these rights are might be defined by some other ethos), and actively look to fight for these rights. At the extreme end of the spectrum, a good character is willing to make personal sacrifices to fight for the rights of others.

Evil characters could not care the least for others. They are not necessarily completely self-interested — they could be worshippers of a god, or devoted to some philosophy or higher purpose — but the evil character would not hesitate to torture, kill, imprison or otherwise brutalize complete innocents, if they can see that they personally benefit (or their chosen cause benefits) from this activity. At the extreme end of the spectrum, an evil character actually enjoys one (or more) of these activities and would go out of their way to participate in it.

Again, most people would be unaligned on the good/evil scale. Most of us are not active actors for other people’s rights, but we still respect them. This is an imperfect definition, to be sure, but while we are all fairly certain of how a good character should be played, our evil characters tend to be caricatures, if we are just trying to maximize our evilness.

Once again, good characters are capable of killing innocents, so long as doing so is a sacrifice for the greater good. Evil characters do not (necessarily) need to step on everybody they can — but they will do so if it happens to be convenient.

Beyond good and evil

One thing that gets lost in the lawful/chaotic/good/evil discussion is that there exist ethos beyond the alignment system.

Lawful Good, for example, seems to have been co-opted by the Paladin class who must exemplify by-the-book Lawful Goodness. And in doing so, destroy the entire alignment for everybody else.

Of course, nothing stops a character — or a class — from having an ethos beyond that of their alignment. Clerics ought to take their ethos from the god they worship. Paladins have their whole Paladin code, and so on. Druids have their philosophy of balance.

Whither neutral?

So what happens to neutrality?

True Neutral: The “true” neutral looks upon all other alignments as facets of the system of things. Thus, each aspect – evil and good, chaos and law – of things must be retained in balance to maintain the status quo; for things as they are cannot be improved upon except temporarily, and even then but superficially. Nature will prevail and keep things as they were meant to be, provided the “wheel” surrounding the hub of nature does not become unbalanced due to the work of unnatural forces – such as human and other intelligent creatures interfering with what is meant to be.

True neutrality has always seemed a little out of whack to me. Using the Player’s Handbook‘s own definitions, how is True Neutral seeking …

… balance between Law and Chaos, where Chaos is “randomness” and Law “law and order”? It sounds like the True Neutral — waiting for Nature to prevail, and standing against the interference of intelligent creatures — ought to be (passively) chaotic.

… balance between Good and Evil, where good respects freedom and life, and evil seeks the end to freedom and life? (Presumably the goal of those who are maximizing evilness).

True Neutral sounds a lot like Chaotic Good to us – not the textbook version of it, where each alignment has its own peculiar definition, but taking the concepts of “Chaotic” and “Good” as expressed, and combining them. Experience has taught us that there are two types of True Neutral characters — those that are a pain in the ass, trying to play Switzerland in an individual, and those that are playing what we consider to be a de-facto Chaotic Good.

We do not like True Neutral.

Using our revised definitions, True Neutral would represent a “balance” between trying to uphold the current cosmological order of things, and usurp it. And a balance between fighting for and repressing the freedoms of others.

None of this makes sense. We still dislike True Neutral.

The Druids can have something like True Neutral, as a class ethos, but for your Big Bad Blogger, True Neutral kind of stinks.

House Rule 3: Redefining alignment restrictions

The Cleric/Priest

In D&D, Clerics are traditionally unrestricted in terms of alignment. Not so in my games.

A Cleric or Priest character is heavily invested in the current cosmological order. All clerics or priests must therefore be Lawful, Lawful Good, or Lawful Evil. Exceptions can be made for this rule, if the cleric/priest worships the Cthulu in the example above, or a god that otherwise wishes to usurp the order of things. In these cases, the cleric can be Chaotic.

A cleric or priest must be Lawful or Chaotic.

Additionally, a cleric’s alignment may be restricted (on a good/evil basis) based on the god he or she follows. All clerics or priests will be additionally restricted by their god’s ethos.

Druids

Druids have no alignment restrictions.

They are, however, restricted by an ethos which resembles “True Neutral” above. They believe that those things that influence human activity, be they greed, compassion, the rule of law, or the directives of the divine, are themselves forces of nature which balance.

Paladins

Paladins are no longer restricted to being Lawful Good. They must, however, continue to be Lawful.

Additionally, Paladins (as part of religious military orders) face other restrictions in terms of ethos, as per traditional Paladins.

Rangers, Assassins and Monks

The Ranger’s restriction (good alignments only) remains. This is rationalised from the origins of the class in Tolkien’s books.

The Monk’s Lawful restriction also remains — this is in keeping with the notes on Paladins and Clerics above. It is an interesting thought to have Chaotic Monks, but these would have to be NPCs, or to be a well-thought-out part of a game.

The Assassin class has never sat well with us, as it seems more like a thief with a particular profession. However, a free-willed assassin ought to be evil in our books.

Why have alignment at all?

Before calling that a wrap, we feel that we should comment on why we would include alignment at all in our game.

It is certainly a good question — most current systems do not include alignments, and when we played D&D as a youngster, alignment was house-ruled out, or otherwise disregarded.

But in building a game with an “old school” feel, it seems wrong to rob it of one of the key aspects of the game. Spells such as Detect Evil and Protection from Evil do not mean much without the alignment system. It simply comes down to the feeling that a character in a throwback game ought to have an alignment on their character sheet.

Once that decision was made, the trouble of making alignment palatable to your blogger reared its head. The above is the best solution we have at present.

We do wonder how others choose to tackle alignment. Please leave a comment and let us know.

Image from Mighty God King. Previously appeared on the Big Bad Blog in All About Alignment.

The game recognizes that the people I play with have busy lives. The days of playing in weekly games is far behind us — there are fencing tournaments, partners, work trips, babies at home, late nights at work, blogging to do and vacations to consider.

And that’s just me.

I look at the free time available to me now, and that available to my friends, and wonder how it was that I once played in three regular (and frequent) games, all populated with people who played both regularly and frequently.

Still, my friends are itching to play, so I am slowly writing.

The initial game concepts were built around player flexibility.

Most games have implied player controls. Once the party leaves on an adventure, things are pretty much set until that adventure ends. The players cannot leave the game session early, nor can they arrive late for the next game session (assuming that the adventure is lasting into the next session) without disrupting game play. They certainly cannot come to the next game session and say “I’m tired of playing a Fighter. I’ll be a Bard today.”

This game is attempting to eliminate these presumptive controls, and so needed an adaptive mechanism that allows the players the ability to turn up late or leave early. To change characters from session to session, if they so desire. They need to be able to experience whatever facet of the game most engrosses them.

And in game? The desire is to reflect that player freedom with character freedom. Again, most games have implied character controls — adventures, railroads, plot arcs, and the like. The GM creates a small slice of the world, knowing that the characters cannot escape it.

Unlike player controls, the means by which to escape character controls is well known: the sandbox. A world full of danger and adventure around every corner. A world in which the characters — the player thrust into the game — determine their own road.

Unfortunately, I am finding that these concepts — or, at least, my implementation of these concepts — butt heads.

To allow player flexibility, I created the Guild of the Tarot — a mysterious and powerful adventuring guild — that grants the flexibility to the larger party (including all the characters every player will eventually play) in return for the PCs’ services as an adventuring party in perpetuity (more or less). This flies directly in opposition to the sandbox, as it implies a DM-driven series of adventures.

Thoughts I have that water down this unfortunate character control unfortunately also water down the freedoms that the concept introduces for the players. The more the game is a sandbox, the more the players need to be forced to keep playing the same character, arrive on time and attend every session. The more thoroughly the player freedom mechanism is implemented, the more the sandbox shrinks, and I am forced to give the game direction and story that I do not intend to put there.

Every time I think I’m OK with the latter, I turn back to writing the game and find that I am wrong. But the game is predicated on the loosing of player controls.

A dilemma. And larger than I thought it might be.

I need the mechanism. I’m not a wave-your-hand GM; a reason for weird-ass shit like PCs disappearing and reappearing must exist (even if the players are unaware of it).

This has given me some ideas regarding how the character controls might be loosened, by giving the PCs larger-sized quests, though I am not sure how to fit those concepts into my current framework.

Alternatively, the guild could want something else and allow the players more freedom. But then important questions such as what does it want? rear their heads. Those need answers, and those answers would most certainly shape the game in some manner.

And, of course, I’m open to bright ideas, should they exist.

Image: Steve Zieser.

However, it is, for the moment, all we are playing.

Over the past four months, your blogger has had his first opportunity to play in the Fourth Edition as a PC, rather than a DM. Truth be told, this is the first real 4E experience for us. As a DM, we used the 4E mechanics for conflict resolution, but the game itself was imagined independent of the system.

For this new game, however, the DM has only ever played 4E – no other roleplaying experience was present. The adventure we have been playing was published by Wizards of the Coast. There are few to no house rules.

It is fourth edition in, pretty much, its purest form.

Which means that it is my duty as a blogger to give you my take on how the game feels from this side of the screen.

It can feel old school

In the introductory portion of the game, I was surprised by how light the mechanics felt. With a first-time DM and a relatively inexperienced group of players (aside from myself) feeling out the first few steps of a new game, I was expecting that all the annoying attributes of a combat-oriented mechanic bearing down on my play.

That did not happen at all.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. It is still a role playing game, and the introductory bits in which the players are meeting each other and feeling each other (and the NPCs) out is instinctively role-heavy. It’s hard for a mechanic to get in the way.

And as inexperienced as the group might be, they are pretty fantastic. The problems occur when the mechanics get heavy and the group’s inexperience shows as they have difficulty navigating the world of dice, bonuses, penalties, and so on. I probably should have expected this part of the game to go well.

But I was nervous. It went well, anyways. The group become a party, and some cohesion is slowly forming.

The introductory sessions felt like an old fashioned D&D game.

It can really bog down

In most games, there’s a point in the combat sequence where the fight is over, but the combat is ongoing. There is no longer any suspense about who is going to win. There is no longer any strategy that needs to be executed in order to win. It becomes a dice game.

Move around the table, rolling a d20, until (as a group) you have rolled 15 or better five times.

Boring, at least to me. Once upon a time it would not have been. I’m pretty sure I sat in my room alone rolling dice for an entire evening several times during my childhood. But I got over it, and it’s certainly not how I would choose to spend an afternoon with friends today.

It’s a dead period, with no roleplaying going on, little interaction between the players (we’re all intently looking at the board), and no movement in the story.

Roll.

Roll.

Roll.

Whether it’s the nature of 4E, the relative inexperience around the game table, or I had just forgot this part of the roleplaying game, I don’t know. But it bores the hell out of me.

On top of that is the never-ending dungeon which is a stack of fights, one on top of another. Thanks to the good designers of Wizards of the Coast, our group has now spent two entire sessions exploring this particular dungeon – by which I mean fighting zombies, goblins and zombie goblins (by which I mean rolling dice) – with nary a moment designed to flex those gaming muscles in which we play our roles.

I have come to enjoy the combat in fourth edition. It is interesting in and of itself (until it bogs down at the end), and I wish the bad guys would just do the decent thing and die (or surrender). But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

While I am willing to write this off as just being a poorly written adventure in this respect, it is hard to look at the structure of the game – the mix of encounter and daily powers, number of healing surges, and so on – and not imagine that the game designers did not anticipate this very situation.

It’s a super hero game

So the fourth edition has strengths and weaknesses, as any game does. But the strangest thing about it is that it is not a fantasy roleplaying game, but a super hero game.

This is not an original Big Bad Blog thought, but I have no idea where I read that previously or who should be credited with this observation.

The game works best when thought of as a superhero game in a fantasy context. It does not lend itself to a gritty style of fantasy. It is not your Tolkienesque high fantasy. As with any RPG, you could conceivably stuff it into one of those boxes, but it wasn’t made for it. It is decidedly not the Dungeons and Dragons I grew up with, where the PCs are a small band of adventurers doing the best they can in a fantastic and dangerous world.

No. We have super powers, every one of us. Even at first level, we have super powers. My character background does not read like any background I have written or read for and D&D game before – it reads more like a superhero origin story.

Here’s an Eladrin. He gets in a bit of trouble. Then a radioactive spider bit him, and now he’s suddenly Spidereladrin.

Not really – my character is much closer to Nightcrawler than he is to Spiderman, but he is a superhero (not an adventurer), as are the other members of his party. His history does read more like an origin story than a background, and his decisions are inherently coloured by the fact that he is otherworldly and special, rather than just a guy with a sword.

Again, this is neither good nor bad, but it is definitely different.

It is easy to see how old school D&D folk like me get very bent out of shape over this edition of the game. When I think of D&D – when I go out to play D&D – I get a certain set of expectations in my mind. These expectations are wide-ranging, but they certainly don’t involve a Marvel Superheroes story set against a Tolkien backdrop.

It’s like that scene in Return of the King (the movie version) where Legolas does his crazy elephant-slide thing. Legolas here is not the character from the books brought to life on the big screen, but instead some re-imagined super-powered version of the same.

And that’s what you get when you play 4E.

So whoever originally pointed this out, thank you. I’d probably be a lot more frustrated if you didn’t write about gaming.

Photo by your very own Mr. Topp. Available larger here.

It’s strange, having things that you love to do meet each other. For instance, it is well documented (via this very blog) that I enjoy both photography and Dungeons and Dragons quite a bit.

Instinctively, it is tempting to claim that while Dungeons and Dragons can provide much material to many types of artists — painters, sculptors, sketchers, and the like — there is not much material there for the photographer. Which is to say that toting a camera to a Dungeons and Dragons session nets one photographs of a group of people sitting around a table, rolling dice and eating Cheetos.

Not exactly the sort of material one puts out on their website.

But I forgot about the miniatures.

Truth be told, I have a tendency to do this. I have never been one to use minis much in my games. Whether it is a shortcoming of my own GMing, a consequence of my style as a GM, or just the nature of miniatures, I have always found that they get in the way of gameplay (rather than improving it).

In the 4E game we are currently playing — where I am a player, not the dungeon master — we are using minis extensively. It is interesting how much they improve 4E. Again, I am not sure whether this is a revelation or an indictment of the fourth edition of the game.

And, like toys, miniatures can make for excellent photography. Just before Christmas, we followed our game with a Christmas party, and I brought my camera to the game with that in mind. Little did I expect that my best photos of the night would not be from the party, but from the D&D.

Now I seriously need to invest in a macro lens. Because getting decent shots of minis with my 50mm is difficult.

Although when they come out right (see below), they really come out right.

This is hard, because I am starting with an empty sandbox.

As a result, every day, something needs to be added to the sandbox. A new NPC, a new place, a new adventure theme, a little quirk that will appear in a random room in a dungeon. Anything to make the sandbox grow each day.

It is interesting to see the range of inspirations that are finding their way into the game — I’m pulling in things from everywhere: Gaming blogs (duh), non-gaming blogs, TV shows, movies. Books, magazines, newspaper articles. There is something in almost everything that can be stolen and placed (strategically) in the sandbox.

It’s also a slow project. When I write out a page in my notebook about a Dwarven armourer in the City of Bridges, I do not know how this character will become important — or if they will become important — during the game. I don’t even know if my characters will ever go to the City of Bridges. Hell, at the moment, I’m not even sure where the City of Bridges is. It’s just somewhere.

As a result, we are wondering how long it should take to build a sandbox.

Perhaps that should read: we are wondering how long it should take to build a sandbox when the builder has a baby. I think that my concentration is being sapped by alternate duties.

The players are going into the sandbox soon(ish), though, so I’d best get all the plastic shovels ready.

Image: Steve Zieser

Lazy week (as we like to call it) continues here at the Big Bad Blog. This time, with roleplaying.

A recent discussion with geek friends revealed that one (or more) of our newer gamers did not understand the intricacies of the alignment system. Luckily, it happened to also be Alignment Chart Week at MightyGodKing, and they provide helpful charts.

My favourite is the Big Bang Theory chart, shown above. More useful to the people I play with might be the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine chart, shown below.

Other notable awesome charts: Television and 30 Rock.

But I have never seen anybody explain it so beautifully and succinctly as this (pay particular attention to the last sentence):

It’s pretty clear to me that the rules-heavy nature of 4th edition creates a very complicated game. With every power adding a new rule it is impossible for anyone to understand how all these things will act together. At last count there are 55 player classes, 3,000 feats, 7,400 powers, and 8,800 magic items. That combination of tweet-sized mini-rules is almost collapses in on itself.

I long gave up trying to figure out what abilities and combinations the PCs had or how they worked. Near the end, there wasn’t any bad roll that couldn’t be boosted up by five points using some combination of forgotten feats, situational bonuses, magic items, or triggered actions. People would say things like “deep rumble strike” and then hit an invisible monster for 130 damage. Another would say something “astral wintersgate” and then negate an entire monster’s round of damage. There wasn’t a way in hell I could tell if they had a real power or were just making up nonsense words and then doing whatever they wanted to do.

Mike Shea – What I Learned Running a 1 to 30 D&D Campaign

Until a couple of weeks ago, however, I did not properly appreciate the problem.

It was not until recently that I had played Fourth Edition as a player, and not as the DM. As a DM, I am fairly prone to modifying and ignoring rules — I am particularly fond of speeding up combat, and have a general aversion to grids and combats that take more than five rounds.

So while not necessarily surprised, your blogger was still a little bit astounded when, in one fight scene, an enemy combatant had a curse, three shrouds and a mark on him. Additional conditions that were also, at some point, simultaneously affecting this enemy were that he was slowed, granted combat advantage, and was bloodied.

That is six different effects. Currently the group is using coloured post-it notes to denote such conditions, and the Big Bad at the end of the encounter was a rainbow floating about the map.

All the characters, for the record, are still first level. What’s going to happen when we get to higher levels and begin to find ourselves with an array of powers with ongoing effects? This time it was one bad guy and a half dozen effects (mostly doled out by two players). They were not too difficult to track. When it becomes twenty effects spread across several enemies, how will we keep track of it? When will the post-it notes give out?

All I know is that they will.

It has been suggested previously that it is an expectation to require a laptop for gameplay at high levels — but beyond the Dungeons & Dragons subscription service, what is there to track these things during combat?

We can all come prepared with our standard adjustments, but it is these non-standard conditions that cause a problem. Are there computer programs out there to manage these? Established systems for tracking them?

Our rainbow bad-guy was the subject of many jokes and laughs at the last session. I can only imagine that constant repetition and magnification of the issue will make the jokes seem a lot less funny.

NB: The Big Bad Blog would normally do some research and attempt to give solutions to the problems we encounter, instead of just whining. But we are pretty low on Internet right now, so we are whining instead. Or as we prefer to call it Stating the Problem. Which means that we will, hopefully, have a follow-up post about solutions to this at some point. If we remember.

Perhaps it’s the nature of the beast, but I always seem to really enjoy playing the characters that I create — at least since I reached this “adulthood” stage of life. And because I have this little corner of the Internet, I thought I might write Mr Topp’s Guide to Character Creation.

Treat the steps below with caution. While they are generally the order in which your blogger does things, sometimes steps need to be revisited and reconsidered later. In particular, step two and three are interchangeable, and are repeated (in step four) until they are settled and in sync — although they should never lose sight of the decision made in the first step.

Step One: Find a part of the game that you want to explore

Perhaps this is easy for you.

If you’re a longtime gamer, as I am, you probably remember making characters when you were a kid. You wanted to have the Fireball spell. Or get to have a Mount by virtue of being a Paladin. Or you just got the latest Complete Guide to some class or other, and wanted to try out the Spy kit, or the Gladiator kit.

When I hit my teenage years, however, this stopped being rewarding. A “new” character class (or a twist on an old one) simply did not make characters interesting anymore. As a result, I started to play blank slates — characters that were jack-of-all-trades, or just fit into the party, and counted on random “growth” and interaction with the world in the game to make them come to life.

This was mostly unsuccessful. Over a ten year period, playing a character I liked became something rare and accidental. I decided that I did not like playing PCs, and should only GM.

And then along came the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. I read the novels. I read the rulebook. I re-read the novels. I played in a campaign, ran a short-lived game, and played in numerous one-shots. It is a game I enjoy very much.

But there was a part I did not understand. The power called Logrus Mastery.

When a friend decided that he was running a game based around the Courts of Chaos, that seemed to be my opportunity. I created a character around the idea of Logrus Mastery — he was an exploratory vessel for a part of the game that I did not understand, but wanted to.

And I rediscovered that childhood joy in playing something new. I rediscovered the power of discovery in playing a character. And it was good.

Today, it is the first thing I decide about my character — in terms of the game, what am I looking at? What am I exploring? What part of the game am I trying to experience?

In this new game, I have chosen — quite generally — the incorporation of fey into the game. It has always been there, somewhere, in the background. But in fourth edition it really comes alive. The fey races — Eladrin and Gnomes — have special racial powers built around their fey nature. The Feywild — Fairy-land, if you will — has been expanded as a real and reachable place. And Warlocks can have pacts with fey creatures, from which their powers originate.

All of this explores something not available in the D&D games of my youth, and the central theme to my character concept involves exploring this in the game. A PC steeped in the Feywild gives me a starting point, and grants a heavy focus to the entire character creation process.

Step Two: How does my character get to their starting point?

This step is, essentially, the character’s background and history.

This is a standard part of character creation, but for some reason it tends to be treated as an afterthought. Not here. We are all shaped by our experiences — I, for instance, am not a set of my skills and abilities. Five points of fencing, seven points of blogging, and so on. I am a sum of my experiences — my schooling, my parents, my teachers. Where I have lived, what I have lived through.

Once you have fleshed out your character, these choices are limited. But when your only limitation is the overriding character concept (see step one), you have a lot of freedom to define who your character is before the sum of their experiences has been limited by what is written on a character sheet.

Like most long-time roleplayers, I have seen (and written) all sorts of character backgrounds, from short novels to single paragraphs. What works best for me is to have a very lightly mapped out history, with more detail as it gets closer to the game.

For instance, in this game, there is a sentence or two about my character’s family. A paragraph about his life up until recently, and then about a page on the events that lead him to where he is at the start of the game. Excepting some early-in-life character-shaping event, this seems to work well.

Step Three: How does my character interact with their environment?

Once we have the basic drive of the character — and probably a good idea of what they’re going to look like once skills have been assigned and powers chosen — my next consideration is how they interact with their environment.

Are they bold? Quiet? Arrogant? Confident? Proud? Humble?

How will they react to those monsters, characters and dilemmas they are likely to face in the game?

Most importantly, can I, as the player, find something inside myself that can be drawn upon to behave in the appropriate fashion? It seems to me that I have moments in which I behave — or would like to behave — in a manner that would fit any of the characteristics I would place here. Chances are you do too, but be aware of them right now. If you decide to be a proud character, but normally deflect praise yourself, be aware of this when creating the character.

It is the differences, personality-wise, between you and the character that make them an interesting person to play and explore. The alternative is to play yourself with superpowers — there is nothing wrong with that approach, but make it a decision and not an inevitability.

Step Four: Stir

Here we take our steps two and three, and revisit them. Adjust them until they fit together.

The character’s past ought to either inform the manner in which they interact with their environment, or be consistent with it. In other words, there should be an event (or events) which lead towards their behaviour, or the character’s story needs to be consistent with that form of interaction all along.

For instance, if you want to fulfill your commuting fantasy about pushing your fellow jerk commuters down the stairs, your character will probably be short-tempered and violent. They might have a past that involves being imprisoned, living on the street and fighting for cash (consistency), or have suffered a recent trauma (event). They likely should not have had a happy childhood with good relationships and had top grades in school.

People do “just snap”, but there ought to be a trigger. Do not count on encountering a proper trigger in the course of the game, unless you have already agreed such a thing with the GM, and decided what it would be.

Step Five: Put your character into the game’s framework

Only now do we turn to rulebooks and character sheets. Create your character based on what you have already decided.

While there will likely be a few painful choices — two things that both fit the character as written, where only one can be chosen: where to spend the last few points, what skill gets the last slot — most decisions will be made by your character concept (Step One), with the peripherals informed by your character history (Step Two). Your circus-raised Sorcerer, for example, is more likely to know acrobatics than history.

Step Four: Development

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

All of the above is designed to give you an interesting person to drop into the midst of a game that somebody else is designing. What happens from there is anybody’s guess.

In the majority of games, the events in-game are supposed to be the defining moments of a character’s life. Unless you’re playing retired superheroes who are called to action one last time, this is likely to be the case in the game that you are playing.

And there’s something about experiencing life-defining moments. They change you.

And so they will change your character as the game progresses.

Think of the four Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. Merry and Pippin go through profound changes over the course of the story. Sam and Frodo, on the other hand, are more stalwart and bent to the purposes they have been assigned at the beginning of the story. But they are also much changed by the adventure. Their future selves are quite different to the Hobbits who were plucked from the Shire by adventure.

There is little point in trying to plan it out. Certainly, your character can have goals, but how reaching (or failing to reach, or being sidetracked) will change them is difficult to guess. The events with the most impact to the character do not have to be those most important to the story: A friend in danger can turn a reticent hero into the one leading the charge. Wielding a flaming sword could change the character’s own self-image, and alter their approach to dangerous situations.

Whatever happens, let it happen. Your character might continue to be interesting long into the future.

Top photo by Steve Barry.
Bottom photo by Lydia.

Secondly, it argues that character death is akin to punishment for the player, as it pulls them out of the game.

Around the same time, I read an article at D&D With Porn Stars which — in its coda — looked at character death and character creation through the lens of how the game is approached.

These two articles mixed and merged in my head, and are now forcing themselves back up onto the pages of the Big Bad Blog.

What is death in roleplaying?

In a roleplaying game, death is not the same as it is in real life. Depending on the game you play, it does not even necessarily mean that the character is gone — it could simply be like a hockey penalty. But if death is not death, what is it?

Again, this depends on the death in question. Some deaths might be sacrifice, suicide (at least in the kamikaze sense), or storytelling. But most deaths will be consequence.

What Gnome Stew misses is that in many — dare I say most? — roleplaying games, death merely represents defeat. In games like Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not even permanent. It needs to be kept in mind that death is not the only — and often, is not even the best — consequence for failure.

Game style and death

The D&D With Porn Stars article makes clear that playing styles can strongly influence the impact of death on the players, and the way death is used.

Hack and Slash games must have death as a consequence. If you are playing kill the monster and take the treasure, the monster gets a chance to kill you. That’s just how it goes. As a GM, fudging die rolls takes the fun out of the game — which is essentially a small scale tactical battle game with odd weaponry. When the point of the game is to win the fights, the players need to actually win the fights.

Winning cannot occur if there is no opportunity for loss.

Character-driven games are often better when a consequence other than death is chosen.

If you play a roleplaying game which is about building a character, understanding the character and playing that character’s role to a T … well, this is where death becomes as much penalty as consequence — not only do you say to the character “this is the consequence of your actions”, you also force the player to go back to square one and start over.

This is not necessarily cool, or warranted.

In these situations, there is often a better consequence to throw at the players, as they are emotionally invested in the well-being of their characters.

World-driven games ought to have death as part of the landscape. If you are playing in a sandbox game in which the players (through their characters) explore the world you have built, with strange peoples and places, danger hidden around every corner, et cetera … death should be part of the landscape. Such a world ought to be littered with the bones of old heroes — and your players should be in constant danger of being such heroes.

Storytelling games should also feel free to use death — though it does not seem as necessary as it does in the Hack and Slash and Wolrd-driven games.

I was amused by the Gnome Stew article — it mentioned that there was never any doubt that Frodo would live (in Lord of the Rings) or Luke Skywalker (in Star Wars). But, of course, the entire company does not survive the whole distance in Lord of the Rings — Boromir dies, much as Thorin does in The Hobbit. And Obi Wan dies in Star Wars, as do some lovable Ewoks. Most stories involve death and loss at some point — if the story calls for (or looks like it will be improved by) PC death, then PC death should be possible. Perhaps even desirable.

Other types of consequence

As a GM, it is always important to remember that consequence comes in different forms. In the epic Dungeons and Dragons game I ran during University there were two large consequence scenes which went beautifully.

The first was a death scene — an injured party member went wandering around town alone, although the Big Bad was certainly in the area. A battle ensued and the character died. The interesting part is that it was not the player who played the character who was most distraught, but one of the other players whose character had lost a travelling companion. It is not necessarily the player who loses the character who “experiences” the greatest consequences.

The second was a session in which the PCs were trying to drive an enemy army from a city that they had captured. While the players were “successful”, their tactics were not — the city burned, and many NPCs died. At the time, I thought this consequence — the tactics and approach seemed a little laissez-faire to me, with the foregone “we’re PCs, so it’ll work” attitude — was a light slap on the wrist, as it did not impact the PC’s directly. However, it stuck rather heavily with one of the players.

The lesson here is that the negative consequences do not have to fall directly on the player’s character for the consequence to strike home. Nor does that consequence need necessarily to be death. In fact, with more experienced players, a more complex and indirect consequence can be better — waiting around for a Raise Dead spell can be a bit ho-hum.

Take the kid’s gloves off

Gnome Stew puts forth the argument that because character death is a penalty that can emotionally impact players, it is not fun and should not be part of your game.

This ignores what people actually enjoy. Sad movies, scary movies, games in which there are winners and losers, games in which there are penalties (hockey, for example), and driving too fast are just a few of these.

Penalties are okay if they are built in to the game. Any time a player has their character do something risky, they should be doing so with the understanding that it might remove their character from the game if it does not go well. That’s what the game is — PC’s, in almost every game I have ever played, are huge risk-takers. Nothing wagered, nothing won.

And players who are emotionally invested enjoy the games because of the emotional investment. Character death — their own, another player’s, or even an important NPC’s — can actually play as a trigger for exactly what they are trying to get out of the game.

Arguments which state that consequences should be avoided in roleplaying games, particularly when they claim that this is for the player’s own good, miss out on a great deal of the fun in roleplaying — it arbitrarily decides that great moments (and set-ups for great moments) in roleplaying games are de facto not fun.

Here at the Big Bad Blog we disagree. Consequences are a necessity if a game is to be fun. Otherwise you might as well just sit there with a bored expression rolling dice until all the bad guys are gone.