Battle Plans
I’ll never forget my first alignment debate. It was all my fault.
So no shit there we were, hanging out in the AP physics lab and chucking dice. The lab tables were big enough to contain half a dozen pimply high schoolers. Our imaginations were big enough to contain worlds. Adventure, camaraderie, and untold narrative possibility stretched before us. The Mountain Dew flowed freely, and all was right with the world. That would soon change.
In the game world, our merry band of weirdos had been tasked by the local liege lord to hunt down some traitorous lordlings. Standard starter quest stuff, and plenty of impetus to tromp out into the local wilderness. We hadn’t gone half a league before some exposition accosted us by the wayside.
“A dude who’s totally not Robin Hood leaps out of the bushes. He draws his sword, then plants it in the earth before him. Holding his hands wide, he explains that he wants to talk.”
To our credit, we managed not to murder this NPC on sight. Not-Robin explained that our whole ‘hunt down the traitor lords’ quest line was bogus. We were in the employ of a tyrant, and would do better to align ourselves with the noble freedom fighters of the Wherever Woods.
We looked from one to another, unsure what to do. A clear decision point lay before us, but no one wanted to pull the trigger.
Into this silence I ventured, “We have to choose between obeying the king or siding with the outlaws, right? That’s the whole Law vs. Chaos thing we filled out on these sheets. Everyone check your alignments!”
You can imagine the result. With the opinions that we were “supposed” to have clearly labeled in #2 pencil, everyone dug in. Lawful dudes wanted to obey; chaotic dudes wanted to rebel. The game devolved into hopeless argument, and soon dissolved completely into a morass of, “I can’t do next Tuesday.” Such is the way of things.
But in the interest of avoiding future conflict non-resolution, I thought it might be helpful to float some alternatives to those entrenched opinions of yesteryear. The following represents a first stab at forming a taxonomy of methods for picking between competing battle plans.
- Keep Arguing — This is what we opted for back in high school. It’s the baseline, and represents a vague hope that someone will eventually change their mind.
- Yield — The natural consequence of the Keep Arguing approach. Someone has to snap out of “my character wouldn’t do that” by finding a way that their character would do that.
- Roll Off — If you’re well and truly at loggerheads and just want to move on with life, you can dice off for it. This method has the advantage of reflecting an in-game trope, where arguing adventurers resort to boulder-parchment-shears for difficult decisions.
- Just Go For It — If you’re tired of arguing, you can always try out your plan regardless of the party’s opinion. Imagine the old “sneak in vs charge in” argument at a dungeon entrance. The fighter and the rogue are at an impasse, but the barbarian gets bored and simply hurls himself at the gates.
- PVP — The unfortunate consequence of the Just Go For It method, PVP in this context looks like, “I do the thing,” followed by, “I prevent him from doing it.” It’s player agency vs. player agency in its purest form, and only works well if your group is prepared for it. The decisions of Session Zero apply.
- Vote — Democracy in action! There are multiple choices, and a simple majority wins.
- GM Adjudication — When there are Zax in Tracks and neither wants to blink, it might take a GM’s touch to solve the dilemma. This is often a last resort, and may be suitable to arguments between players rather than characters. For example, “Let’s follow Alice’s backstory for now. I promise Bob will have the chance to avenge his master later.”
- Pick Up Your Dice & Go Home — If your paladin would never go along with the dastardly plot or whatever, there is always the ultimate moral stand. Retire the character and reroll somebody willing to go with the plan.
These are just some ideas to get us started. What I really want to hear in today’s discussion is your approach to intractable problems. So I’m looking for two things: 1) Tell us about a major disagreement that your party had to negotiate; and 2) tell us how you managed to solve it. See you and your gnarly problems down in the comments!
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Dude, bone-boy… just RUN!
You can really tell that skeletal creatures have empty skulls…
😉
I think my biggest disagreement that had to be negotiated was back when we used to run shadowrun at a new local game store. The owner had asked my friend to run the game and unfortunately we were the only shadowrun table in a store whose owmer was hyping up shadowrun. Well we had a lot of people and we took up two table in back and lookimg back that was a big problem. It was a first session so our group was hited as a distraction for another npc runner groups job. Since we learned shadowrun as everything needs to be a carefully thought out heist we did way more than neccessary research and found out what the job we were dostracting for was. One table wanted to steal the job, get a black mark on our runner records but get a lot more money for doing something overly dangerous. The other table wanted to do it by what we were hired for. It turned into an argument but unfortunately I was the only one at my table who was vocal, the rest of my table agreed with me and told me but that never made it to the other table. This meant simce the store owner was at the other table i got a half hearted threat to ban me from the store after the game. We ended up doing the job as it was given to us but the entire thing left a bad taste in everyones mouth
Im sorry i must have pressed the wrong button and replied to you instead of a general reply >.<
No worries; it happens. 🙂
My son’s Curse of Strahd campaign hit this dilemma: the paladin had Detected Evil on their foes and the party dutifully slew all the evil ones and merely subdued the non-evils. End of encounter, right? Nope.
One NPC points to the dead drow and says “She was a close friend.”
The druid, feeling empathy and with a spare Revivify handy, prepares to bring her back.
The paladin, incredulous, points out that a) the spell brings you back with 1 hit point, b) he could kill the drow (again) with merely a finger-poke, and c) he would be duty-bound to do so since she is still EVIL.
Enter the opinions of the rest of the team and a lengthy discussion of moral relativism, the possibilities of redemption, the mutable nature of motivations over the course of a day, etc. The paladin points out that Good and Evil are fixed concepts in this universe, otherwise he couldn’t sniff it out in the first place. (Children sneaking cookies from the kitchen don’t set off his radar!)
Ultimately the DM set the game back on track by putting these words of wisdom into the NPC’s mouth: “Shouldn’t you just respect the decision (yay or nay) of your friend the caster regarding my friend’s life or death?”
The paladin acquiesced to this point and let the drow escape with one hit point, but only out of respect for his friend the druid. “But know you this, if you lot ever cross our paths again…”
There is no moral relevatism† in D&D, so that should never come up… however teh other points are accurate. They could swear to mend their ways… and as the Paladin I’d make them swear to do so once revived.
And if they refused to swear‡ to change, well, there is still Option 2, he ‘casts’ unrevivify.
† One of the reasons I dislike D&D as much as I do.
‡ Which only Lawful Stupid Evil would do. Or any Evil that knew their friend had a way to bring them back and had realized that not lying and swearing would cause strife int he adventurer’s party.
I can definitely think of a few cases where “just go for it” has been the deciding factor… usually taking the form of someone declaring “my character is going to do X… is anyone going to try to stop him?” And since that usually means an opposed strength check against the barbarian, they usually get their way on that one.
And usually, it’s welcome enough… it’s as good a way as any of breaking a deadlock, and we’re generally pretty good at not taking it personally as players when our _character_ doesn’t get their way.
The usual conflict in my current party is that the barbarian is a bit of a sociopath with a low boredom threshold, and the bard is a relative pacifist who prefers to keep the body count to a minimum. So it’s a bit of a game to try to keep the former convinced that taking prisoners can be profitable… or to keep the latter distracted when scalps are being collected.
one simple answer.
ALL OF THE ABOVE!
;D
Not a big moral decision, but certainly one that would affect the plot. Our party was in a cursed forest, with dracolich tracks leading to where our camp was. We were trying to decide whether to backtrack to some previous paths we hadn’t gone down and risk getting surprised, or head right to where a dracolich was and definitely have to fight, but at least we wouldn’t get surprised. Ended up rolling for it and heading to the campsite.
*sigh* I’m a bit sad that DM adjudication is your last choice. As I’ve said many times here, I’m a fairly controlling DM.
Alignments aren’t hard and fast in any of my games, they always “depend” on a bunch of different factors. “Lawful good” for a human from a strict caste system is going to be totally different than for an elf that is from a loose system of “the elders get together whenever a decision needs to be made” and even further from the gold dragon who for the most part is a law unto himself.
If players start getting into the “you can’t do that, it’s against your alignment”, I usually shut it down immediately. That’s not a decision for the other players to make, but mine as a DM. If the lawful good paladin decides to do a chaotic evil act, as long as they have a reasonable argument WHY that is going to happen, I’ll let it. But they better damn well have a REALLY good argument.
I give my players huge amounts of leeway when we play, but as soon as it starts to affect the game, then that goes out the window. And as soon as someone tries to control another players actions…yeah, that’s not going to happen. So DM adjudication is always what happens when the players start going at it.
In my settings, normal people — PCs included — don’t have Alignments (with the capital A)… that’s reserved for supernatural creatures for which that Alignment is fundamental to what they are. Regular mortals may tend toward good or evil, chaos or law, but they’re almost never Good or Evil, Chaotic or Lawful.
I say “almost never”, because a mortal who has strongly tied themselves to an Aligned power may themselves become the same. The high priest of Asmodeus might be Evil rather than just evil…. and an especially high-level paladin might well be Good instead of merely good. But for a PC to become Aligned would be a huge deal in the story… they’re not entirely mortal any more at that point.
I tend to favour ‘TN’ for my characters, not because of their need to ‘bring balance to the force’ but because they generally can’t be bothered leaning too far one way or the other and creating problems with anyone else.
A lot might say that’s CN or NE but they do prefer people to follow laws when the laws are sensible and not annoy others who aren’t disturbing anyone else.
It’s been said “beware angering the peaceful man’, they follow that tenet.
As for LG, what does the Paladin of a chaotic but non-evil deity do ?
I’ve said it before, I firmly believe James Bond was TN or NG, or maybe CG, he was definitely an assassin but not just for money, he just didn’t stick to the ‘lawful’ part enough to be LG 😉
We never got into too many alignment arguments at the table, most players just wanted to kill things and take their stuff, until we got interested in long stories and seeing what hapened next was too much fun to insist that “my Paladin won’t go along with this, he smites the Sorcerer now that he knows he has an evil streak”, instead it was “he’s keeping a close eye on him in case something completely against my deity’s rules pops up”
hit ‘enter’ too fast 😉 ” …but as long as I keep to the path I can’t expect everyone to stay in step with me”
I rarely play a Paladin corresponding to the ‘priest’ in the last part of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy, but sometimes it works for comic relief in a one-night campaign.
Ah yes, Alignments, the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse (actually the 3rd reason I hate† D&D).
I usually resolve this /in advance/ by suggesting we all make characters within One Alignment Step of some group chosen Alignment.
So, example: If the group decides to roll a NG party alignment, then every has to be within one step of NG, thus allowing TN, LG, or CG.
Personally I like to push for a TN party alignment when I get people to agree to doing this, it locks out the ‘extreme” Alignments of LG, LE, CG, and CE which are the ones that //always// cause the most problems.
† Hate is a strong word… a valid one, but strong. I’ll play systems I hate if it’s with the right group, but I’ll never run systems I hate.
My biggest disagreement in a party was probably the time we were running the PF2e path Fists of the Ruby Phoenix. Official match, an enchantment was cast over all combatants to make everything we did nonlethal at no penalty. Opposing spellcaster casts Disintegrate. Fuck. It hits me and drops me to 0. Fuck again. I roll a nat 1 on the Fortitude save. We look at the text of Disintegrate. “A creature reduced to 0 HP is reduced to fine powder; its gear remains.” So either I’m a living pile of powder or I’m just dead, regardless of the nonlethal enchantment, because it doesn’t say anything about the target needing to be dead to be reduced to fine powder. Cue argument with the DM about spirit of the rules of the tournament and Disintegrate, because my copper dragon went into that bout with a reasonable expectation of not being killed off, and there was at least one referee *right there*.
That really looks like the sort of situation where you should either go 1) “the magical protection against killing actually work and you don’t get turned to dust” or 2) the enemy wizard is disqualified for going around the protection and and is forced to pay for a full resurrection (which is timely enough that you can participate in the rest of the adventure).
Personally I’d probably go for the first option
We went with the “rewind the turn and have the NPC use a different spell” option
I saw this comic in a Discord server with somebody specifically name-dropping a campaign of theirs that this takes place in. So that’s fun.
Wait, what? You mean you were talking to one of my players?
I suppose some parties might have a designated Party Leader that gets to arbitrate these sorts of decisions. That would require buy-in from the other players though.
my version of roll-off:
for Chaotic Characters I have a set of D6 modified to D2 by painting the pips.
so now there are red 1s and green 2s on one ex-d6 and green 1s and red 2s on the other.
Chaotic doesn’t mean I‘d have disobeyed because „I‘m chaotic – duh!“
it would have me rolling the „I‘m chaotic d6s“ and
2xgreen = obey
2xred = disobey
mixed = don’t care or
when a tie breaker is required – higher number decides.
I’ve been lucky in my games so far that any player character conflict has not also been actual player conflict; I try to check in above table to make sure that people are enjoying creating the drama, and not actually feeling bad about stuff.
My games also tend to view alignment as more “descriptive” than “prescriptive” when we use it, which helps.
But the number one thing I always think of whenever I’m having this kind of issue is something I read in a conversation about paladins—when you’re torn between the lawful thing and the right thing, always remember: a little less lawful, a little more good.
I think that’s a concept that can be applied to a lot of situations, even for non-paladins! A lawful character believes in a code, but not necessarily the legal one, and that code is usually a tool, not an end in itself. Likewise, a chaotic character believes that rigid codes can’t accommodate the realities if life, but they’re still not equally likely to jump off a bridge as they are to cross it, or to stab an orphan child instead of giving them food.
People are messy and complicated and hypocritical all the time, so going against your supposed alignment can create fun conflict, too, both internal and external.
As a DM, the way I solve the issue of my players having planning issues is to lean back and smile ominously as they argue among themselves. Enjoying the free entertainment. If I want to freak them out, I will roll a couple of dice every now and then, or ask them to roll some for me. Wisdom Saving Throws are especially fun, as they are very paranoid about scrying. If things drag on for too long, I will either cut in and ask them (Sometimes using an NPC, sometimes as myself) “This have gone on for quite a while, what are you doing” or simply move the plot along for them. Such as by having someone set something on fire.
As a player, it varies. Generally through arguing over the options, yielding if I don´t have strong enough feelings about the subject. In the case that it is something I feel strongly enough about, I will, depending on the situation, do it on my own (Or with my other supporters in the party) or ask for a vote on it. Of course, this depends on the situation and danger of it. If my idea is something that requires the aid of the rest of the party, I will generally respect the majority consensus about it. Even if I am going to go full “I told you so” when things inevitably goes wrong.
I’m afraid I haven’t had any party issues as I haven’t played, but to my way of thinking, couldn’t the party look at what evidence there was to support either side, depending on your characters’ aptitude and inclination for that sort of thing?
Did the peasantry and/or city-dwellers seem happy, satisfied or not unusually discomforted by their position in life?
Was the Court’s austerity reflective of a sober-minded leader who invests in the kingdom’s future or a religious monomaniac that seeks to crush all freedom and creativity?
Did the party paladin use ‘sense evil’ on the King after a successful charisma check to offer it as a service on the basis that “Even the best people have doubts; Wouldn’t it be a grand thing to know that you’re a good person? To have that goodness confirmed by divine mandate?”
So… I take the standpoint that Conflict Is Inevitable. I establish this in session 0, and I also establish the bounds. I view adventurers as the sort that may very well tell their friend to stand up or shut up. But it’s important to make sure everyone understands it’s alright if they disagree from time to time, and that there’s a lot of ways to work it out.
In session 0, I also remind them that at least at times, the plot just DOES have rails and sometimes you’re GOING to take the train to plotsville because the only other viable alternative is for me to make a whole new session if people zig when I thought they’d zag.
But a lot of time, I like to use RP to handle these things. And sometimes, as pointed out in your illustrious examples and the comic itself, SOMETIMES someone commits Bored Now and we’re off.