I am Lazarus back from the Dead... come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all... or if you're of a less literary bent, Colville is alive! Gordon's alive! Hey the machine still works fantastic! Welcome back everybody. I was gone for a little while I took about a week off I was sick as you know and recovering and also there was a day last weekend when I was going to make a video But [uh], when I went out to get something to eat in the afternoon I ran into I didn't literally that would've been a short story. A bad one though I I encountered--had a random encounter!--on the way To get lunch a couple Sundays ago and a tiny little doggy-wog ran across the street It was a big street and so when I saw this unleashed dog Running around I stopped I grabbed the dog as soon as I opened the door It was like "Hello" and jumped into my car And I was like "You belong to somebody obviously" I went to the pet store I spent a lot of money on that stupid dog this dog I didn't know how long was this dog how long how who had been away from his humans I didn't know so I got him some food and some water which meant I had to get a food bowl and water bowl and I got a leash and a Harness And I just said hey tiny dog let's go for a walk and see if maybe you know where you live and the dog was Super Enthusiastic about going for a walk, and I thought this is totally gonna work, but really I think its owners Don't usually take it for a walk so it was just happy to be out and running around About 24 hours later because it had a chip I was able to return it to its humans The chip wasn't registered so we had to go through the vet who had sold the chip to the owners So that is a lesson by the way if you buy a pet and somebody tells you it's been chipped Make sure that you call the company that owns the chip, that put the chip in there, and register the chip Otherwise it has been chipped But it's not going to be super useful in helping you return the dog to its human. The story ends well I was able to find the owner and the dog went back to its human, but I think it cost us a video That's just the way things go I think we can assume from here on out that if I miss a video It's probably because I rescued a dog. Alright enough of this gay banter "Enough of this gay banter" Yeah, super happy to be back and have the machine working. This video is about alignment And it's one of the most contentious topics in the history of D&D I have probably had more arguments about Alignment in the thirty years I've been playing the game than anything else in Dungeons and Dragons. These days, maybe because D&D is more popular than it used to be I get in a lot fewer arguments about alignment. Maybe I've gotten better at explaining it. I'm not sure Maybe it's just less contentious of a topic because we've all matured a little bit as a gaming culture Wouldn't it be pretty to think so. But hopefully to save you from getting in the arguments I've gotten in, that's the subject of this episode. I want to start by saying alignment is something unique to Dungeons & Dragons. There has never been a character in history or in fiction that has an alignment. I can't just beat up the Ice King for nothing, that's against my alignment! Okay, one. If alignment is problematic it's because of the way it puts certain expectations on the players and Often the difference between the players' expectations of what alignment mean and the DM's expectation of what alignment means. For instance let me tell you a story; I was running D&D for some friends of mine and one of them, my friend Frieda, had not really played before and was making a character for the first time and saw the drow in the players handbook and thought they were super cool and wanted to be one of them. Now the drow are super cool, and there's nothing wrong with being one of them I was playing a drow character in my friend Jim's game. When I told my friends in Jim's game that I was going to be a Drow their only reaction was, "You realize you get disadvantage in daylight, right?" They had no problem with me playing a lawful evil character Because they could trust that it wasn't going to be a big deal And we weren't going to come into conflict unless there was some character specific reason for us to do so. Like if there was some part of my backstory or something or some unique goal of mine It might bring us into conflict but that would be later down the road, that would be when we were higher level and it would be neat and dramatic and we all understood that I was mature enough that if it meant I had to split off [from] the rest of the party to pursue that goal or they all had to try to kill me or something that would just be a neat dramatic moment and it wouldn't cause any kind of friction between the players. When they said "You realize you get disadvantage in daylight?" I said "Hey, it's called Dungeons and Dragons not Daylight and Dragons" So in one group me playing a drow was no big deal and I sort of assumed the same thing would be true for my friend Frieda who wanted to play the drow in this new party Now one of the players in that game, Matt, wanted to play a Tiefling paladin and I thought that was super cool and so I explained to Frieda that her playing an evil character from the Underdark--which in my setting is another dimension-- might bring her into conflict with Matt's paladin and she did not want to be in conflict with Matt's paladin to which my response was Well, then why do you want to play an evil character? See, this is an example of a conflict and the conflict isn't really built into Dungeons & Dragons so much as it is between the players' expectations and my expectations as a DM. I expect that if you write down Lawful Evil on your character sheet that that is going to in some way inform your decision-making And so I tried to explain like an Evil character can't be trusted to do the right thing They might, for instance, murder people for no good reason. In fact I guess the word murder kind of means for no good reason. And she said to me, explicitly, I don't want to murder people for no reason, it's just that my base instinct as a gamer is, why am I talking to this person when I could stab them kill them and take their stuff? Which I'm not I'm not sure what the difference between that and murdering people for no reason is. I guess [uh] the reason is she got bored Which I think we can agree is the same as no reason. Now, she started to really worry about the problem between her character and Matt's character but I wasn't worried about that because I had read the Dragonlance books when I was growing up and If you haven't read the Dragonlance books I don't know if they're still popular, but they were super popular in the 1980s. They were a huge gateway drug for a whole generation of nerds and D&D players. It's kind of unlike normal fantasy in that it really is about getting the party together and they all have obvious classes and they cast the spells from the player's handbook --these are Licensed D&D books by the way-- in the Dragonlance books one of the characters is Raistlin and he is an Evil mage His brother is a good character his brother is also in the party, and there's a paladin in the party though They all put up with this evil wizard in the party because he's very powerful and he overwhelmingly uses his power to aid the party, but he has a goal he wants to become an Archmage and when the opportunity comes to kill the previous Archmage Fistandantilus --which is maybe the coolest name for a Wizard ever-- Raistlin starts to do genuinely Evil stuff He betrays the party he goes after his own goals, and there was some sense that they're gonna have to try to stop him So that was the example we all had growing up and that informed our play style as adults and so it wasn't a really big deal if there was a Evil character in the good party because if it turns out that somewhere down the road you come into conflict resolving that conflict even though it might cost you your character is going to be super dramatic and sometimes that's the goal. But some players do not like drama. We'll talk about that later this episode and Freida was one of them, Freida didn't want to come into conflict with Matt, and I tried to explain look there's lots of reasons why these good characters might adventure with you you might have been thrown together by circumstance it might be a case of the enemy of my enemy and you're both working together to stop some evil creature that you all hate. It might be that your character is using the party because their goals kind of coincide with yours and so for the time being you're gonna ride it out and you're gonna play along with them I just didn't think it was that big a deal, but she did think it was a big deal. She was worried I think that the rest of the party would somehow ostracize her for being evil, but I don't think that was true I think that as long as she didn't try to kill anyone else in the party as long as she didn't try to randomly murder people then you were going to be fine. So as it turned out we played for about six hours and not once in that entire session did the subject of the characters' alignment even come up. But I spent probably more than six hours outside the game before that talking to her about it So that's what I mean when I say alignment can be problematic It doesn't have to be problematic But it can be problematic because people want to do things like randomly murder people but not be perceived as evil. D&D is a world where your actions carry weight. It is not a video game where you can figure out the script for the NPC's, and exploit it, and so then kill people with no repercussions. In fact it's sort of the DM's job to make sure there are repercussions for your actions. The goal is to present the world as though It's a real place and When you murder people when you steal from them when you lie to them in the real world there are repercussions as there should be in D&D. And that I think is where we come into conflict because there are players who come maybe from the video game tradition and they want to be free to do whatever with no repercussion, and I don't really think that D&D is well-suited for that. Y'know like go play Descent like a board game simulation of D&D if that's what you're into. We should expect our characters' behaviour to have repercussions and alignment is really just a description of that behavior. How did we end up with alignment? Where did it come from? [ah] One of the things I enjoy learning about and Talking about in my channel is the history of D&D so we're gonna get a little bit of the history of alignment Alignment's been with us from the very first edition of the game the three little booklets that Gary Gygax published back in 1974 and back then it was literally just a--I think it was one sentence. It read, "Before the game it is not only necessary to select a role" (by which they meant a class) "but also a stance." That was what they called it They said alignment was a stance. A stance on what they didn't say, and there were only three back in 1974: Law, Neutrality, and Chaos. And then there was a list of who was which and most of the monsters were Chaos and most of these civilized races (humans, elves, and dwarves) were Lawful. It's popular in this day and age to cite Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion series Elric Hawkmoon Gorem as being one of the origins of alignment And that certainly is, A) a very popular series if you've never read any of the Eternal Champion stuff I highly recommend it, and certainly Law and Chaos feature heavily in Especially the Elric series. He serves Arioch one of the Lords of Chaos "Blood and souls for my Lord Arioch!" and in fact He visits like the ultimate plane of Law Which is like this y'know gray waste because there is no energy left there. And within the context of the Elric books and the rest of the Eternal Champion series good and evil do not really feature much. It is mostly about which side you're on Law VS. Chaos, and these were primordial forces. There are gods of Law and gods of Chaos and they rule the multiverse. But there is an earlier antecedent. I think the place Gary actually got the notions of Law and Chaos was this book right here It's Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson And you can see this is a slim little volume it's about 191 Pages You could read it in a day and a half. Three Hearts and Three Lions is a great book It's a lot of fun to read I recommend it if you can find it at a used book store find it online maybe get it on your Kindle It is the origin of a lot of the tropes in D&D it's basically where we get the paladin from there's obviously an earlier antecedent in the Knights of Charlemagne It's an interesting book it was originally published in 1961 from a 1953 novella that Anderson wrote. It has a lot in common with the pre-Tolkien-esque Fantasy that you used to get before the Lord of the Rings and before the Hobbit when it used to be that people assumed there had to be some connection to the real world like Conan for instance takes place in Earth's prehistory You know the Wizard of Oz John Carter of Mars these are all about characters from the real world who end up being transported to some other dimension or other time. So there always had to be some kind of way to contextualize the fantasy in terms of our real world either it takes place in our Past or our future or somebody from our present is transported or teleported into this other world, but Tolkien said "No, man, you can just write what you want." The story is about a world war II soldier who gets shot and he wakes up in the middle ages and he's caught up in the matter of France the story of Charlemagne as distinct from the Matter of Britain the story of Arthur. And here in the world of Three Hearts and Three Lions in the middle ages the story is presented as a conflict between civilization--the Holy Roman Empire--and Wilderness--elves and the fairies--and that conflict is core to the notion of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons So originally in the game there were only these three alignments and not only were there only three alignments. There was also something they don't have anymore, I don't think, which was alignment language not only did you speak common and if you were an elf you spoke elven you could be expected to speak your alignment language, which was super weird none of us really understood what that meant there was no explanation as to what that might be. It was described in terms of gestures and body language I think it was an incredibly strange thing and as a result I don't think anybody used it. But once we had the internet people could just ask Gary Gygax Hey, what were you talking about with alignment language? And he gave a very interesting answer. He revealed in a Q&A that he considered alignment to be like your character's Religion and the example he used was you could have been born or grown up anywhere in Western Europe in a several hundred year timespan anywhere from you know like the Sixth century to the 15th century and be expected to not only speak your local language French or German or whatever but you would also speak, if you were Roman Catholic, Latin, or maybe you could read Latin if you're an educated person and Likewise if you were a Jew in that same period You would speak whatever language was your local language that you had been born into But you could also be expected to speak or read Hebrew, especially if you were an educated person And that's very interesting to me because it shows that Gary never really thought about alignment as being a personality. I don't think actually Personality has ever really entered into alignment He didn't even think of it as a philosophy which I think is how we think of alignment now? He thought of it more like your religious tradition you were from this or that place in Greyhawk But you belonged to a church and that church had a language and that was expressed in terms of Law, Neutrality, or Chaos. I have personally never had a problem with alignment. I like alignment. I use alignment in my game I encourage my players to use it my game is called the Age of Chaos because I think all good campaigns need a central tension and Mine is the tension between Law and Chaos literally civilization versus wilderness and my campaign takes place in an era Where wilderness is winning and civilization is dying. I like that tension between humans and elves where humans represent civilization They make roads and buildings and elves represent nature and what happens when you let everything lay fallow Which is basically a recapitulation of the central tension in Three Hearts and Three Lions. Now if you read the alignment descriptions in the players handbook. They're actually very simple It's I think literally one sentence, for instance the description of Lawful Good the player's handbook Just said you can be depended upon to do the right thing as expected by society. That's it That's the whole description of lawful good There's no more explanation really as to what alignment does or what it's for and maybe that's one of the reasons We don't get in huge arguments about it. The way we used to back in the 80s and the 90s. They have wisely in 5th edition kind of you know panned the camera back and described the Law/Chaos good/evil axes in a more Simplified abstract way. We have the notion in D&D of a fallen paladin, an Oathbreaker, But we don't have the same notion with any other character And that's one of the things that made alignment really weird is that There was this of all the characters you could play there was this one character for whom alignment was super important and not only was it important for him. He made it important for the other characters because paladins could classically "detect evil". Now they call it "divine sense", a paladin could just think about you and know that you were evil. Now in the rules I believe it said that you had to actually be a Source of powerful Evil like an evil artifact or a demon from another dimension? But I don't think anybody played it that way I think we all just assumed that when a paladin used a detect evil He could tell whether or not you were evil and that caused all sorts of problems When I explain alignment to my players when they ask me, what is Law, Chaos, good, and evil I explain it thusly wise and I want to preface this by saying this is my own personal Explanation you are free to use it but you were also free to disagree with it or find it useless. A Lawful character is not just somebody who lives by personal code It's somebody who believes that there should be laws there should be civilization there should be somebody in charge. When there's a problem, they don't want to take matters into their own hands they want to go to the police they want to go to the local constabulary They want to go to the shire reeve whereas somebody who is of a chaotic bent believes that people are best when left to their own devices, like an anarchist basically. They don't like the idea of people above them They don't like the idea of order and structure because they probably believe that that is easily or often or maybe always exploited. So, in my game Law versus Chaos is the difference between the idea that we should have civilization there should be laws they should be written down there should be police enforcing them how whatever form those police take knights for instance and Chaos is the idea that, No, we're better off on our own We don't need that stuff, and we were fine without it. In my campaign good and evil a representative of a more personal philosophy We're talking about ethics a good character is somebody who believes that we're all in this together We should help each other out and an evil character is somebody who begins by thinking no It's every man for himself, so I think these are pretty straightforward definitions I think that the descriptions in the Players Handbook are pretty straightforward. So what are we arguing about when we argue about alignment? Why does it cause so much strife among players? Well apart from my conviction that I think most arguments about alignment come down to arguing about which characters in which fictions Belong to which alignment which I think is nonsense I think a big reason people argue about alignment is because of paladins, because of this divine sense thing So because paladins have the ability to detect evil and they have a sworn code they often cause a lot of arguments I'll give you an example for my friend Brad's campaign this happened many years ago but we were all adults we were all in at least our 20s if not our 30s when this happened my friend Mark made a Character, and he wrote down for his alignment Lawful Evil I think he just thought it was cool to write Lawful Evil down for his alignment. It was neat I think that was the extent of his thinking it was a neat thing to be able to write Lawful Evil on his character sheet. I don't think he had any idea How that might or should impact his character's behavior Or how his character might have been different before he wrote that down as opposed after he wrote that down. One of the problems with alignment is a lot of people perceive it as being I think especially when we're young a lot of people perceive it as being prescriptive it is a way you were supposed to behave if You write down Lawful Good on your character sheet then that means you are supposed to do this that and the other thing, where in fact the idea is you're supposed to play your Character the way you want to and then write down the alignment that describes that, it is descriptive, not prescriptive So Mark made this cool character and he wrote down Lawful Evil on his character sheet for his alignment and meanwhile my friend Jim is playing A paladin and Jim was new to the game and kind of new to the group and he showed up And he was like wow this is gonna be super cool I'm gonna end up in conflict with this evil character, and there's gonna be some great drama that comes out of this That's the way Jim thinks. Jim thinks in terms of what makes good drama Which is also by the way how I think but not everybody thinks that way; Mark hated the fact that Jim was Regularly on the lookout for evil behavior from Mark, and he was regularly kind of challenging Mark's character. Mark didn't understand why he was doing this, Mark just wanted to play his guy and he didn't think in terms of Law or Chaos or good or evil, and you know we were playing as though detect evil worked on normal people and so we had to tell Mark you know look man, Jim can tell that you're evil. What are you doing that's evil? Why did you write that down in your character sheet if it's not going to inform your character's behavior? What is the point of writing down Law or good or Chaos or evil? If it's not going to represent something that your character believes or does? And that is the core issue I think with alignment and why I think it causes strife among players is because they do not understand that we don't argue about Alignment, we should never be arguing about alignment We should be arguing about beliefs and how those beliefs inform action, so for Mark's character He'd written down Lawful Evil, but how did that inform his beliefs? What did he believe that made him lawful or evil? And how did he act as a result and there were no answers to these questions that drove Jim crazy And it also upset Mark because Mark really did not like player conflict. I know a lot of players who don't like player conflict They never want to come into conflict with another player over anything. That's one of the reasons They play D&D is, in a board game or a card game or a miniature war game There's a winner and a loser but not in D&D. In D&D we can all get together and play together and have a good time. As soon as two players come into conflict there's a chance that one of those players is not having a good time Whereas the other player might be thinking wow this is fantastic This is going to make a great story There was a point in this game where we were in the middle of a heinous battle and we all had to retreat and both Mark and Jim stayed behind To hold off the bad guys while the rest of us squishy characters got out and Jim thought wow this is fantastic This is Mark's chance. We're alone. No one will see what he does This is his opportunity to stab me in the back and Jim was really looking forward to that because it meant there would be drama It meant something interesting was going to happen and Mark was like "No, why would I do that?" and the rest of us were like dude because you wrote evil on your character sheet do something evil or change what it says And I think that's what it comes down to: do what your alignment says or change your alignment, and that's it If there is a problem about alignment It's the way it brings players into conflict over their characters behavior which means we should never be arguing about alignment We should be arguing about your character's beliefs, and how those beliefs inform action. Right, I think you as a DM should be asking your players What do you believe, especially when they're getting to the point of making their character where they're thinking, What is my alignment? and they might actually wonder out loud. "What is my alignment?"; a good answer to that is, "I don't know, what does your character believe?" Do you believe it's wrong to hurt people who are helpless? I've often had situations where I've had good characters or lawful characters or Paladins who have the bad guys at their mercy and suddenly this becomes a test of ethics. How do they behave among someone who is a bad guy, but who is now helpless? I think that says a lot about your character and sometimes I will describe the helpless, tied-up Goblin as being meek and pathetic and groveling and that is a great opportunity to kind of play on the players' heartstrings They had seen this goblin a minute ago as a bad guy who was trying to kill them, but now look at him He's pathetic But sometimes I have the bad guys spit and sneer and throw hate fuelled rebukes at the characters and say things deliberately to provoke them Because that's another test It's another opportunity to see how does your character behave when things aren't going well? You know who cares what your alignment is when everything is going fine. Does your character believe it's wrong to lie, does your character believe it's wrong to lie even when no one will know you're lying Does your character believe it's wrong to lie even when lying will get you something incredibly useful or beneficial? You know characters with a code of behavior like Paladins or knights will often say I believe it is wrong to compromise my principles Just because they are temporarily inconvenient. Some characters might say I believe it is wrong to let evil loose upon the world so even though I have this evil character captive and helpless, I'm going to execute this character specifically because letting them go would be bad You know I would be increasing the net evil of the world if I let this character live. I believe these things need to be stopped and no matter the cost. That is a great heroic thing to say and informs a lot of drama "I believe it's wrong to hurt someone just to satisfy vengeance", or for instance I believe it is wrong to break my word. Just because it is convenient to do so I will keep my word I will keep my promises even when there is no downside to breaking them even when no one would know I would break them, "I would know". That's a classic literary trope, one of the things that classically defines the good guys is they keep their promises Even when there is no downside to not doing it even when no one's looking. You know, you'll have the sidekick or somebody say "No-one would know", and the main character says "I would know". Right once we start talking about your characters beliefs and how they inform your actions, now, we're talking about drama, and Dungeons & Dragons I think is fundamentally a game about Heroism and drama. Now these are interesting discussions to have. Not, I'm not going to do this because I'm lawful good That's not an interesting discussion to have. That's the end of interesting discussions. Justifying your behavior based on your alignment is the end of discussion It's the end of wisdom or insight. Better to say I'm not going to do this because "I believe..." or am going to do this because I believe Even though Dungeons & Dragons is a game about heroes it also gives you the opportunity not to be a hero And that's I think we're another source of conflict comes from and I don't mean the good kind of conflict as in drama I mean conflict between players conflict that causes people to stop playing. A lot of players use alignment as an opportunity to do capricious things which I think is different from Evil. I think when there's conflict, it's because a player wrote down I think the reason alignment comes up in arguments is because a player wanted to be free of cultural expectations because they deal with so many cultural Expectations in the real world. Right they have bosses who tell them what to do, they have teachers who tell them what to do, they have parents who tell them what to do, and when they play D&D it's an opportunity to get away from all those things, and do whatever they feel like and be capriciously cruel if they want to which I think actually can be psychologically revealing. So you often have a group of players sitting around the Table and one of them will do something wildly weird and detrimental to the party they'll kill a captive or They will try to steal something from someone who is otherwise Innocent and random and the rest of the party looks at that player and goes what are you doing? And the answer comes back, "I'm just playing my alignment". No what, no you're not, that's ridiculous. You are playing your character You can't play an alignment, you play your character. And your character has beliefs and those beliefs inform action and then based on those beliefs and actions you describe them using your alignment but if those behaviors and actions Changes then your alignment needs to change. For instance in one of the games I run at Turtle Rock studios I have a player, one of my favorite people, Lars who was playing Sigurd going after his brother Andivari, now Andivari was a paladin and Sigurd is a thief and Sigurd was literally willing to do whatever it took to get his brother back and not only that he would often do things that were deliberately cruel because he wanted to exact vengeance Now there was a point where the bad guys had captured Red's character Ellisam and in order to show the other players that they were serious in the process of ransoming him back to the heroes and discouraging the heroes from doing something the bad guys perceived as dumb like trying to fight their way in and rescue Ellisam They cut off one of Ellisam's fingers. Now that was crazy the players had never experienced anything like that many of them had never played D&D before and when they got a ransom note with Ellisam's finger in it. They were like holy moly these guys are evil They thought two things they thought these guys are evil and they also thought these guys are serious and dangerous which is what I wanted them to think. Now losing a finger didn't impact Red's character at all other than given this interesting backstory with the evil Thieves guild But when Lars's character then had the leader of the Thieves guild at his mercy Lars cut the bad guy's finger off for no reason really other than to show hey. I'm serious too. and at this point I'm like Lars. You realize that this is not something good guys do and he had a lot of justifications he goes look he did this evil thing to my friend or when he was torturing another innocent person trying to figure out where his brother is he's like look this guy knows where my brother is and he won't tell me, he always had an explanation for what he was doing But it came down to behaving like somebody in the Godfather I don't know if you've seen that movie, But those are not good people. That's one of the themes of the Godfather is that these guys have a code But they are not good people We should not want to be like them. The characters in the Godfather are presented very romantically and as a result We sympathize with them and we want to see them win, And we forget that these are not good people. Their justification for these evil acts seduces us into thinking that "therefore, it's okay." But I don't think most of us would do any of the things the characters in that movie do Lars was doing a lot of the things the characters in that movie do. His character Sigurd was being vengeful Was being cruel when he didn't need to be. So at one point when he murdered somebody who was not innocent certainly But was helpless I took Lars' character sheet away from him And I wrote "Evil" under his alignment because that's how he had been behaving and that has created a lot of fantastic Role-playing moments because he did later save his brother Andavari, but his brother Andavari is now an NPC And that means he's under my control so I role play Andavari and Andavari is a paladin. We've now had several conversations with me as Andavari and him as Sigurd Arguing about the things he had to do. Andavari is not happy with the things that Sigurd had to do to free him He has said look I would be happier If you had let me die, but stayed a good person. Kept your word. Right? He said you did the same things all the evil guys do you're no different than they are. There's been a lot of great drama that has come out of this relationship between Andavari and Sigurd and the horrible things Sigurd did in order to free Andavari that's a classic story. In the middle of these conversations out of nowhere I'll just look at Lars and say, "Father always said this would happen." But as players we've never had conversations about what Andavari and Sigurd's family was like or what their father was like I just make this stuff up, but it's dramatic and it works on Lars He's often like ah, he'll laugh and say you can't just make that up and I'll be like yes I can I'm the DM So I'm creating this relationship Between these two brothers and the fact that one of them was willing to do anything, was willing to kill people, was willing to torture In order to rescue his brother is a super dramatic thing and the fact that having rescued his brother his brother condemns him for those behaviors is Fantastic drama. So I do think alignment can be problematic like between Jim and Mark But I also think it can create a lot of fantastic drama like between Lars and I. One classic alignment related problem is the player who wants to be able to do whatever he wants and so writes down chaotic neutral as his alignment. The player who writes down chaotic neutral for their alignment often does it because they think it means they can do whatever They want, but what do they want to do? Do they want to be able to be cruel and capricious on a whim? That's not chaotic neutral that's Chaotic Evil. Neutral people don't behave randomly They just don't believe in that basic dichotomy between good/evil or Law or Chaos or they believe it exists but they don't have anything to do with it. If you are a character who wants to be free to steal or wants to be Able to inflict pain on a whim That is not neutral that's evil and when you frame it like that all of a sudden players are like well I don't want to be evil because there is this in the real world We do have this sociological expectation that evil is bad and good is... Good. So when you point out look that's what you're talking about is not being neutral It's being evil players will often stop and go oh, well. I don't want to be evil. Okay forget it So that's the lesson don't let your players Argue about alignment rather ask them questions about what they believe and how those beliefs inform their actions and you'll discover That's a much more interesting discussion to have, "What do you believe?" Of course Evil characters often don't think they're evil. Right, evil characters often don't see themselves as evil But they are often capricious; they murder; they torture. There's Milton's great quote from Paradise Lost "Shame for a good Scotsman to admit it, but... I'm not up on Milton." "Statement Lucifer made when he fell into the pit... 'It is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.'" No not that one. "Evil, be thou my good." That's Satan's way of saying I just see the world the opposite way that you do, your notion of good is just your perspective I, the Devil, perceive my actions as good. I'm not sure that's super defensible in the Modern age I think we have a more nuanced notion of good and evil. If you ever read Paradise Lost maybe you've seen Doctor Who? "Use your powers for Evil!"
"Evil?" "Your evil is my good." Same idea. If you haven't seen those Tom Baker Doctor Who's you are really missing out on some great television some Brilliant writing Brilliant characterization, I strongly recommend the triptych of Face of Evil followed by Robots of Death and then the Talons of Winged Shyang That's like six hours of TV right there. It's fantastic. So that's the alignment episode we talked about different kinds of alignments We talked about the history of alignment. We've talked about how I interpret alignment It's up to you to determine how strong and prominent are these forces in your universe? Are Law and Chaos forces that are caught in eternal struggle the way they are in the Michael Moorcock eternal champion books? Maybe they're not. I think most games are more about good and evil and as a result that contextualize Law versus Chaos in terms of The temporal realm in terms of the notion of there being a ruler should we have rulers should we have laws but I like the idea that Law and Chaos are primordial forces. It goes a long way to explaining things like demons and elementals for Instance which are real things in Dungeons & Dragons. That's part of the context of this discussion is that unlike the real world, Good and Evil and Law and Chaos are game mechanics in D&D there are spells that affect them there are magic items that only good or evil people can use and I will often Take a lot of those items And I'll just substitute good and evil for Law and Chaos and the takeaway from this, the lesson is, that we should never be Arguing about our characters' alignment. We should be arguing about what your character believes, and how that informs their actions. OK, so that's what you believe, now what are you going to do? Because that's where drama comes from and that's what D&D is about and rolling dice and killing orcs and pizza and Mountain Dew. I look forward to lots of comments from you guys talking about the Arguments that you've had at your table and When you hang out with your friends about the alignment system in D&D. I suspect if you're new to the game you're not aware of The way alignment has been the source of contention and so you might find some of these comments really interesting. We had a lot of great comments to my previous episode we had a Lot of comments about my previous episode about the catastrophic failure episode. One of the best comments was someone who suggested that what I really should have done was I should have just followed the dwarf's story and Instead of changing the camera's point of view to the two prisoners I should have just followed the dwarf in his attempt to get arrested and get thrown in jail so he could break everybody out and of course the person who suggested that is entirely correct. If I had done that, it would have solved all the problems that I made an entire video about but of course Hindsight's 50/50. There was no way for me to know in that moment that that was the right thing to do But that's a tool you have at your disposal as the dungeon master is the ability to shift The camera away from what this player is doing to what that player is doing or even to what the NPCs are doing. I often will, like you're watching a movie, I will cut and I will show the players What the bad guys are doing or thinking is kind of a cutscene. Sometimes I enjoy beginning entire campaigns in the middle of the action you know like a James Bond opening where I'll start with a cinematic Describing what the characters are doing and they have to infer or imply How did we get into this situation, just like you do at the beginning of the classic James Bond movies you kind of have to Wonder what kind of adventure was he on that This is the conclusion to it? You have a lot of tools at your disposal as a DM to control the flow of the narrative. Changing the point of view of the camera is just one of them. I had a lot of players players That's a that was a freudian slip players instead of viewers Maybe that's what I should just call people who watch this are you guys are my players? No, I think that's dangerous you would then expect me to run D&D for you, and I don't know that it's possible I have almost 10,000 subscribers and there's not really a way for me to run D&D for 10,000 people. I had a lot of viewers ask where I get my maps from and the answer is I steal them with the exception of the map of my campaign that I made in Hexographer actually I think I used a combination of Hexographer and campaign cartographer. There is it's not a really a plug-in it's an art pack for campaign cartographer that lets you make hex maps I like hex maps because they have a lot of information in them, and they are a style But it makes it so that I who am not an artist can make a relatively good looking map. A lot of the maps I use that you'll see me reference in these videos of Cities and towns and keeps come from the Harn series by Columbia games, this was a game series I'm not sure they still make anything for it, but they're all available as PDFs you can buy online I'll put a link to the doobly-doo to their page on RPG now, but the Harn RPG I think was called Harn Master was its own game had his own rules And it was very authentically medieval like your character could die of cholera for instance And they did these amazing maps the world of Harn looked beautiful The cartography was beautiful the art was fantastic. So I often go to RPG now and I plunder it I bring the images into photoshop Just because I want to tweak the names. Names say a lot about your campaign I think and the names in Harn Master are unique My game is not set in Harn, well maybe it should be! We're going to talk about building campaign settings and whether you should use a Prepackaged campaign setting or whether you should roll your own I rolled my own and I largely regret it isn't that interesting that I would say that, that makes you want to watch that video doesn't it. I think in balance the benefits of Buying a campaign setting outweigh the fun of making your own but obviously that's just my perspective Somebody asked a question about one of my earlier videos when I described myself as a player in a party caught in a Closing walls trap and how did my friends and I get out of it? I never described how we got out of it our solution was I had a spell book I had recovered from a bad guy NPC I was a spell caster And in that spell book was a spell of gaseous form. Right, so I could turn into a mist But I wasn't high enough level to cast that spell I didn't know that spell so I had to cast it from my spell book like a scroll and I had to make a roll to see if I could do it because I wasn't high enough level and it might backfire and fire My brain or something. I made my roll I succeeded in casting I was able to turn into a mist and escape through a crack and then open the door from the outside I don't know if that sounds epic now describing it, but it was super epic that night We spent hours trying to figure out how we could get out of this place We played D&D last week and my friend Phil introduced his new character Graves and the players are in the process of laying siege to Broken Spire Keep which I think has some interesting lessons in it that we'll talk about in our next episode and then after that I think we'll do the "building villains" episode. Actually I think creating bad guys is a misleading way of putting it I think better to say we're going to talk about how to hook your players on who the bad guy is. Wait, oh, here's a better way to say it, how to introduce bad guys in a cool way That's what the video is gonna be about. It's gonna be about Introducing bad guys and probably we'll talk about what makes bad guys interesting. That's it for the alignment episode. I hope you folks found it useful or engaging or entertaining. We are rapidly approaching 10,000 subscribers--that's insane to me-- There are a lot of people online, on Twitter following me, at MattColville.com who tell me that they are running D&D because of this video series And that blows my mind. Nothing makes me happier. As usual we have no ads I do not have a Patreon. If you like the channel if you want to support it I strongly encourage you to come by my Amazon page in the doobly-doo. I am an independent Fantasy author. I have two books out They are fantasy novels I think if you like fantasy if you like Dungeons & Dragons you'd probably like them. A lot of people have bought them and many Of those people said they liked them. The more books I sell the more videos I want to make the more videos I want to make the more books I sell so we have a great ecology going here. Each book is four bucks Which I think is not bad, of which I see three bucks. Which is a pretty good deal. So when you buy a book you're throwing me three bucks. You buy both books you're throwing me six bucks And you're also encouraging me to write more books So that's a great little system I've got going where I make videos and sell books and the books make me want to write more books and make more videos which Sell more books. This is crazy. Thanks to everybody who comments on the videos I read all the comments. Next episode Phil introduces his character Graves and the party assaults Black Spire Keep. Until then: Peace, out.
