Yup. My party ended up torturing and killing the mayor of a town and essentially took it over, starting a crime ring whose reputation snowballs out of control over multiple games to the point where we fight some of the greatest heroes in the land instead of going through with the campaign. Our dm actually created some new characters and leveled them higher than ours so we might be stopped. We werent.
“That’s not alignment works” is a bad argument there from the DM. If the characters realize that their actions have changed them to “Evil” alignment, they can try to change it back again by doing “Good” aligned things. Their characters’ goals are now redemption for their past deeds, like by rescuing orphaned lava snakes!
Geoffrey Peterson Especially since that’s literally how they got here in the first place. They made evil choices so they are evil. But now he’s saying that if they make good choices they won’t be good? What kind of shit is that?
I always thought alignment was more of an internal thing; more so your actions would be based on your alignment; not your alignment based on your actions. I mean, you do choose your starting alignment, correct? And if you do evil deeds while thinking they are good deeds, how does your allignment change when your motivation was to be "good" all along? Unless allignment is external... In which case, yes good actions would in fact make you more alligned with good. Either way, the GM is stuck.
Well intentioned bad guys are the best bad guys. I like to imagine you guys are famous to some underground group of villains as some sort of evil mercenary band despite you trying to be good the entire time
"That's not how alignment works" Yes it is. Alignment is just how the characters act in situations. Someone who was chaotic evil, has had his world view swayed and is now working to unravel all of his evil plans eventually becomes neutral or good once his good/neutral actions exceed his evil actions and his evil actions have been/would be willingly undone by him.
Old thread but I believe the gm's that's not how alignment works was in reference to not attempting to shift it artificially you're supposed to allow the character your playing develop naturally even if it ends with you being evil that's the choices you made using the meta knowledge of oh no my alignment shifted I must shift it back artificially changes your character
@@alexdraco9926 Yeah it might be. I just sense that puffin's character didn't want to be evil. I was saying that a character's intentions are what control alignment. His character wasn't evil because his evil actions were unintentional. I, as a DM would allow someone to switch alignment if they wanted to and after they show that their character has changed they could count themselves that alignment mechanically.
@@agustdgames3120 I mean...look at the GMs face there. Pretty sure the gag is that neither one really knows how alignments "work" Which to be fair, given the largely subjective and debatable nature of alignments, and the vague system for alignments in D&D ~ Pretty much every table will have a different answer for how they are supposed to work
That ending gives me an idea: A charming evil group that are really nice, but insane/stupid enough to do evil anyway. "Sure, I have a basement full of zombies that once got loose and attacked the nearby village, but I'm trying to conquer death here. I need to keep my test subjects around for further experiments. And those gelatinous cubes and goblins? Look, I needed employees, and goblins work for next to nothing. They farm the cubes as a food source."
The base of the game is always set around a great menace. No one ever said it had to be evil in nature!
4 роки тому
reminds me of several quests in the videogame Runescape 2, where you, a hero, get tricked into doing some bad things. in one example, you are told to make some special runes and put them on a door to magically reinforce it to prevent a big monster from escaping... BUT...you actually end up HELPING it escape! and just barely avoid being eaten with the help of a friendly NPC who teleports you away after some difficulty.. at one point your character actually says, "now would be a good time!"
10/10 that is how all my games devolve. Somewhere down the line of defeating the ultimate evil bad all my characters either become a Walter White or the face of the new ultimate evil.
I usually gm, but I can think of 2 games where something like that happened without it being an evil campaign from the start. In one the party sided with a lich to conquer the local kingdoms. The other was a Call of Cthulhu campaign where the players summoned a great old one to deal with a way less dangerous villain.
I was the Keeper (GM) and the players summoned Azathoth. They managed to unsummon him before he destroyed the planet or anything but he killed about half the party, the villain, and loads of civilians.
I remember this is one time in a campaign At the beginning: I am Lawful Good, i shall do no wrong. *3 sessions later* Strolls past random pedestrian: Can I stab him?
I had a Neutral Good Paladin. I solved every problem with Javelins... And the one time i didn't throw a javelin at something, we later found it the figure was the person we then had to track down and kill.
I'm always in campaigns with a lot of moral ambiguity. In one of my current campaigns I'm a pacifist monk that I've built so that they literally can't initiate attacks and only does damage by counter-attacking in self-defense. He solves his problems with negotiation instead. In that same campaign one of our party members is a soul-draining vampire called a youma that is a chaotic evil sociopath pretending to be a god. In a Star Wars campaign I'm playing our crew was Imperial special forces but amoung our party members we have: 'A developing droid hive-mind trying to take over the galaxy', 'A sith Inquisitor that trained under, married, and had children with an ancient sith lord by her late teens', 'a genocidal maniac that burned Endor to the ground, gets turned on by graphic violence, and lobs grenades as a greeting', and my character is just a stoic Mandalorian Sharpshooter watching this all happen. *I swear our groups should have a rating system like the movies. We'd be rated R for sure.*
Be me dming. My friend from 4chan rolls up a chaotic neutral dwarf cleric. Guy is constantly drunk on his holy water. In his drunken rage he would attack people and steal their clothes. If this isn't chaotic stupid, I dunno what is.
Once, my party was running curse of strahd, and came across a small town. Through an exceptionally strange course of events and choices, we ending up in the following situation: all but two of the party was outside of the mayor’s house slaughtering the town guard. Meanwhile, our two druids turned into spiders and snuck into the mayor’s house. One druid killed the mayor’s son and all of his cats, while our other druid stole the mayor’s wife’s wedding dress and while wearing it killed the mayor, his wife, and his dogs. Then after all the town leadership was dead we just took over the entire town. This was the same campaign during which one of the party had a familiar which the entire party referred to as Rambo Sprite
“So...we did some...bad things. On accident though!” “Oh yeah you’re now 100% evil.” “Wait what? Wait what if we do some good things to balance it out? We can go back to being good!” “What you can’t just change your alignment just like that!”
It's like Skyrim! "Oh, so you killed the dragon atacking the city? Well bully for you." "Did... DID YOU JUST KILL A CHICKEN? *GUARDS! KILL THIS MONSTER!* "
@@dydlus *Nicks guard while fending off vampires.* *You have committed crimes against Skyrim and her people. What say you?" *Nicks follower in any combat.* "Careful!"
In the session I just played in our half-orc fighter has split personality disorder and the evil one tricked us into unleashing eternal night upon the world. Now the two personalities are two separate beings and the good one is helping us try to defeat the bad guys, including her other personality.
If you are interested in split personalitie disorder, here is a very interesting interview. I learned so much about it there ua-cam.com/video/A0kLjsY4JlU/v-deo.html
In my current campaign we murdered an innocent man for no reason, let a god of evil steal the god of magic's magic orb for a bit (which we in no way aided in the retrieval of), almost burned down a whole forest, planned to use the last surviving residents of a town as a momentary distraction for a dragon we were going to fight, accidentally buried an entire continent, and are wanted in one of the major empire for the murder of a prince that we didn't actually do but there's no convincing them of that now. Also I personally sent a guy directly to hell. I mean granted, he was a bandit, but he didn't really pose any threat and I shifted him to the Abyss purely out of my character being annoyed about other things. And then after that the last survivor tried to run away and I killed him as he fled. We are good people.
Tuan Le My guess is he used the magic item so many times that the continent was buried in replicas of the item. Still, I would like to know what happened.
Yeah this is part of why I say "You can be a bad guy while also not being evil. You can be a good guy without being good." Alignment is Action+Intent not Consequence. If your non-evil actions with otherwise non-evil intent produce bad outcomes, then that has no bearing on your alignment.
DM: You've done so many Evil things that your alignment has changed to evil Players: Well, if we do good things again that means our alignment will change back, right? DM: tHaTs NoT hOw AkUgNmEnT wOrKs-
I've always liked the stance that alignments are in response to what a character does more then anything else. Like oh you burned a child alive for the info on how to get into the castle? ok, well you're neutral evil now. It's what you are.
@@scotthuizinga Remember way back in the old days when, if you broke your alignment, a magical wolf (or something) would come along and pretty much kill you? It was a way of forcing players to stick to their alignment.
@@wayway7017 That was part of the game, way back in the 80s. I can't recall what they were called but if you broke alignment they showed up to punish you n the game.
Alignment is a guideline, if even. It is something you throw down on your sheet because you're technically supposed to. No good DM makes you stick to it.
I once had the opposite, we where in a city where the undead killed everyone but the mayor, our fighter killed him for no reason and it turns out he was the one who killed the city and raised them as undead.
The problem I have with the whole situation is that the DM is obfuscating the effects of players actions; like "Oh, there's a little girl who's fallen on the ground, do you help her? Ohp, looks like she was evil, you helped evil, so you're evil." I get the idea of good intentions leading to bad actions, but when the most basic moral choices and intentions lead to a character being considered evil it just feels unnecessarily cynical, which is something I absolutely hate in a DM.
One of my friends wanted to insert a module into my campaign (I said yes, he had actually never DM'd before and I wanted to give him the chance) and it actually involves the party fighting his own character as part of the boss fight. I thought it was a really impressive way to put himself out of action while he DMs and also just a cool concept overall!
2:23 This is why when my group of friends and I play D&D, we don't care about alignment. We have one simple rule for that: "Do what your character would do." Just because someone is almost entirely evil, doesn't mean they have to -...say.... *speaks in higher pitched voice* kill a cute wittle kitty they find in a drak alley way! - or something like that. :p Plus, if you've got a party with total opposite "alignments," odds are, one of them wouldn't exactly stick around in the party for very long. :p
Come to think of it, most of my players were evil. Becoming cannibals, burning an entire town alive, backstabbing the mayor and helping an orc beat up a kid are all not-good-person things.
I once successfully tamed a magical Agathion Tiger over four times my character's size by feeding it giant lizards. Then I realized I'd have to keep feeding it. Predatorial pets aren't as cool when you realize you've gotta roll a 90 or higher on random encounters just to find something big enough to satisfy it.
In my current campaign, two of my teammates (former city guard, and a multi-classed nightmare) killed a pregnant ettin, crit rolled on a cesarean, and raised an ettin daughter. Now, the new guy (half-orc half-dwarf barbarian) and the other two have managed to capture a fully grown hydra (with help from the party obvy), raise it's intelligence to 19 and convince it to stay in a giant fishbowl. Concurrently, my character (pyromaniac sorcerer) has made a deal with a grey slaad to kill a death slaad in order to be given a subservient green slaad.
I once had a group of well established heroes that was defeated by our bad guys and banished to a prison camp in hell for 100 years. I managed to save my group by becoming the most ruthless monster there and earned the respect and fear of the damned as their leader... When we got out we figured: "OK, so our guys are a little scarred now... David over there was a prison bitch to demons for 100 years and has some pent up rage, and he is probably the nicest one of us at this point...". When we escaped there was a massive celebration to herald the 'return of the heroes'... that night we got drunk and cannibalized a few of our fans... it all went downhill from there...
3:34 Oh, THAT? Oh, we got a GREAT DEAL on this place; you wouldn't BELIEVE how many people had turned this place down before! Hey! You wanna come in and see the basement? It's HUUUUUUGE! You could store, like a city's worth of FOOD in there!
"i've know how we can find out" "hey are you the bad guys" "well, its all a matter of perspective isnt it" "you *are* the bad guys, that is totally a bad guy thing to say" (i might have gotten the quotes wrong i know)
We actually had the opposite effect... at the beginning of the campaign: Wait we have an eldrazi, a warlock, a demon, and a kobold. We're the bad guys aren't we? at the middle of the campaign: We're not the bad guys only because stabbing the bad guys is more fun than stabbing the good guys.
I've got a family of characters, starting with Cronos the Great down through Cronos VI. They all worship Bane. Most of them are LE, though there is one that was LN. And since Cronos IV they've also been members of the Flaming Fists. Love that bunch
I was playing a good aligned cleric of Pelor in one of my games, the party was in the Underdark and we came across a settlement of drow, bugbears, slavers, slaves, and other evil people. So, I had a great idea to caste a spell called Insect Swarm, which basically makes creatures inside it want to get outside of it. So everybody in the settlement starts running to the only exit, which is where the party was. Now my plan was to corral all the evil-doers all at once. To do this, I casted another spell, Blade Barrier, in the direction everybody was running. 'Ha! Sure this is a high level spell,' I thought, 'but no one will dare cross these spinning blades of death!' It was then that the GM informed me that because of all the insect buzzing all around, no one will see or hear the blades. '......Oh shit......' The GM then had too much fun describing how all the screams were going quiet and there was a red mist coming out of the swarm of insects. The moral of the story, read the fine print of the spells before you caste them.
This is a good story but it does bring up my problem with the Alignment system. Do the bad guys ever think they’re bad guys? In their heads they’re probably the heroes or doing all this dastardly stuff because it’s for some greater good. If they actually thought it was evil would they keep doing it?
JosephTaylorBass Actually, often times, the villains seem to do what they do for purely selfish reasons - stuff like immortality or power or just because they think it's fun to cause as much death and suffering as possible.
Max Dunham That’s a fair point. Though I’d like to think it’d be more fun to fight a baddie who thinks he’s the good guy and you’re just trying to get in his way
*Dark Overlord:* "Join my cause, and I shall reward you with-" *Party Member:* "NEVER!" *Me:* "Hold on, let him finish..." *Party Member:* "You're not seriousely considering joining him, are you!?" *Me:* "Well, hypothetically... I mean, don't you at least want to know what you're turning down? What's the salary like? What are the benefits? Do we get a good dental plan?" *Party Member:* "Dental!? You'd plunge the world into 10.000 years of darkness over DENTAL!?" *Me:* "Hey, I'm an Elf. I'm likely going to live to be around 700, and if you don't mind, I'd like to be able to eat solid food for most of those years..."
PARTY MEMBER: ........you know what........................................................[sigh] that's fair. Plus [*shrugging and leaning to one side*] retirement from adventuring doesn't usually leave with many open doors and I really, kinda wanna start family sooooooo a pension scheme would really be appreciated.
I think a good campaign would be one where the players are doing like the work of an evil person but like the under handed stuff, but the players don't know it.
I mean that's EXACTLY how alignments work,it changes depending on what you do. If you're evil and do nothing but good things you will go to neutral and eventually become a good character. Good does not mean nice,you can be a complete dickhead but if you do morally good things you will be a good character.
3:05 - In my game (Not DND) there is no alignment. If your criminal then you will do criminal things. If your a law abiding citizen you will follow the law. But most often I find my players will loot and steal from those they don't like and will follow the rules as long as that zone is protected by numbers.
I once did a solid quest for evil character where they loose there body and they could only be summon for a limited time. Instead of going to get back there body they use the effect of getting teleport back to there lair at the end of the summon has a escape plan to cause a maximum of chaos in a city. I cant say what they did because of how insanly evil for YT but I had nightmare that night.
lets just say burning a church and something that rhyme with grape was involved. Also when the first thing they do is killing parents using there child as a weapon. Then calmly eat the still hot breakfeast from that freshly murdered familly as there first 10 min play. I realize my mistake they had fun I had nightmare.
I now want to write a fantasy story where the villains are just a rag-tag bunch of adventurers who tried to fix things but through a combination of character flaws and incompetence destroyed the world.
I want a show to where the “bad guys” are just good men/women that just look evil Like say a lich who is buying plants for his garden and gets attacked by a paladin attacks him and says he’ll stop his evil attacks on these people, while the his speech goes on the lich just leaves him to his ego.
My charachter is a chaotic good elf who is basically an anarchist ended owning an entire county due to inheritence. My father died long ago so my mother remarried... to the (previous) owner of the country. They had a daughter who had a 4 year old son and another one on the way but whose husband had just perished. The count acknowledged me as his son under the condition that my half-sister's line would be the primary heirs to his title. However, a group of religious fanataics (who had been fighting my group for about a year) converted both him and my sister to their religion. To show their devotion, they sacrificed my nephew which really pissed me off so (with a little help from the local dwarves) my group launched something that could be best described as a coup d'état. The count died and my sister reliquished all rights to the title in the name of her unborn child. So now a half-crazy, anarchist elf is in charge of the largest county in our setting. :D
One of my characters is Julia Blood, rightful heir to the throne of Thule, which is pretty much Medieval France if everyone was an elf. Her mother having been forced into flee due to siding with the previous royal family during the revolt that turned the Elven kingdom into a Republic, her uncle and grandfather having died in battle, and her father being executed. They lived in the home of a human merchant named Cicero who got rich selling weapons to the loyalists until he and her mother died when she was sixteen, the servants selling her into slavery. After leading a successful revolt among the slaves, she sailed for the Rajput Empire, my fantasy world's equivalent of India, and offered to make Thule a vassal state if the Silver Emperor gave her the army needed to reclaim the throne. However, on the way to Thule, she received news that the Rajput Empire had been conquered by the Barca Sultanate, my fantasy's worlds equivalent of Carthage and the Ottoman Empire, the warriors under her command deserting her. Alone, she began wandering in search of allies who would place her on the throne, scheming and double crossing to gain the funds needed to raise an army strong enough to put the rebels to the sword.
Alignment is just a guide for new players. And they're not even Good and Evil. 'Good' characters are ones that put other people first. 'Evil' characters just put themselves first. Alignment isn't something the GM should force you to change. No matter what you do, your Alignment is how you perceive yourself. If someone believes that everything they do is for the betterment of everyone else, the BBEG can be Chaotic Good. Trying to bring down the current order to establish a better one. They'll have to be in control to begin with, but the goal isn't to control everything.
Indiana Jones "It belongs in a museum!" Bad guy" Wait... are you stealing my culture?" You" Dude is an evil artifact." Baddie" It isn't inharrently evil. It's our heritage." I have just boiled down 2018, yw.
There are always scenario's in witch its acceptable for a DM to change one's alignment. Getting the alignment card in the deck of many things, replacing your hand or eye with the hand or eye vecna. Alignment can and should serve the story.
I just never see it as necessary. Aside from things that switch your alignment around. The Paladin in the party i GM for started off Neutral Good, but very quickly shifted himself to True Neutral. The only time i told a player to switch their alignment was the Gunslinger Dwarf, when he burned down a tavern after cucking a guy (long story), and i told him to switch from Lawful Neutral to Chaotic Neutral. He never really adhered to the law too much. His backstory included him being banished from his homeland for disobeying a law because he didn't believe in it.
Honestly their alignment is well meaning dumb. I kind of side with you. Unless someone is flagrantly doing good/bad stuff for reasons. As a DM myself I will knock cleric/paladin backed powers off if the cleric doesn't do something against alignment but they do purposely do stuff that would intentionally piss their God off.
Kharn, to the greater extent, I do agree with you. Alignment was not ever designed to infringe on a Player's agency with his or her PC... It's the character's core "moral compass" from whence ALL actions come and must also be justified... Good being "socio-centric" and Evil being "ego-centric" in nature... Lawful (obviously) is structured by an ethic, and Chaotic is unstructured for individualism/uniqueness... Finally, Neutrality is either described as ambiguous to the duality of natures in question, or flat out ambivalent (doesn't care). It's not particularly difficult, AND only really needs explanation here, to be sure we can all get on the same perspective page on the matter. A reasonably experienced Player can thoroughly justify ANY action to ANY alignment construct. It's simply a process of explaining from the core value(s) through motivation to intent... Thus you get plans, actions, and outcome (which unpredictably, may or may not end with the intended result). Now, in the circumstance that a Player takes an action that he or she can't legitimately explain from alignment, then the GM should take the agency to penalize.That's NOT to say instantly change the alignment, nor that every resource in the books exactly tells you how to penalize alignments for counter-aligning actions... In fact, they don't. BUT from one infringement to the next, the penalizing actions grow, until there's some point to actually changing the alignment of the Character to better reflect that Player's motivating narrative. Good aligned characters that take up rapidly evolving and un-justified "evil" activities can be stricken with steadily growing emotional traumas, nightmares and night terrors, delusions and flashbacks, etc... Until there's a paradigm shift for the Character to finally "lose faith" in the "good" and decide (however dubious) that it's really just a "dog-eat-dog" style of world and there's no purpose in buying into the "betterment of society"... SO "F*** 'em" and the PC can take on a more "neutral" or even cross fully into "evil" alignment... Becoming self-serving (the definition of ego-centric behavior)... "Redemption arcs" (of course) can be played pretty close to the same way. Granted, thoroughly "evil" (ego-centric) Characters might not exactly endure the SAME kinds of nightmares, delusional behavior, flashbacks, and such that a "good aligned" Character might, BUT there's still something that would interfere with the Character just as much... AND it should be "build-able"... Finally, since some priestly and monkish powers (among other archetypes) ARE based on alignment or attuned to it, they should mechanically suffer (at least) some consequence in this process... If the arc is carried "to fruition" they should (to be fair to Players and PC's) be replaced or reskinned to reflect the new Character Alignment as necessary. I might add, that the whole "ego-centric" and "socio-centric" description of alignment is reflected in the D&D Systemics all the way back to first edition, and that while Gygax never actually used those technical terms, it was likely to preserve some notion of theme than to obfuscate his intentions in the ideals... Consistently, it's been printed that "Evil characters do NOT intentionally actively engage in harming others, neither directly nor indirectly. They're only intent on their own gains." Meaning that ego-centric personalities are usually just careless about consequences. Those are someone else's problem. ;o)
I don't think that unintentionally helping the BBEG makes your party evil; its the party's reaction after they find out the truth that really defines them. Thanks for another hilarious video!
honestly I want to see a campaign where everyone is an accidental villian, they TRY and do good, but end up fucking up and becoming evil... XD! then have an adventure party come after them, and they are all confused XD!
I remember Valve did something similar, they deliberately posted a controversial update on April the first a few years ago. Turns out it wasn't a joke.
Hilarious video! Nothing like strutting around feeling like the "hero" until one day you decide to take stock of your list of "accomplishments" and . . . .oh. . . no. . . .oops.
Woe unto the DM who comes right out and tells their players "Your characters are all evil now"; For unto them is the eternal suffering of players that find ways to destroy the few things that the DM actually cared about in every campaign world thereafter . The only time you should tell the player "Your character was irredeemably Evil" is when that character is secured in the Hell of Blazing Fires, mere moments away from becoming fuel for the crow-shaped nuclear reactor.
Question for you Ben: Have you ever read The Order of The Stick webcomic ? Its based on D&D and has one of the best plots I have ever seen. Keep up the awesome videos. And since you have GMed Mage:The Ascension a lot, could you please tell us some stories ?
That was totally HILARIOUS !!! 😂 The Evil Guy who is so dumb that he doesn't realise that he's evil, until someone lists all the evil things he's done. Brilliant! 😊
The cultist part my party had the exact same thing said to them I said the same thing you did and our barbarian chopped his leg off and said "where is your god now because you better start talking or I start chopping" rolls intimidate with advantage rolls 1 both times and the cultist spits in his face the barbarian says "ok I start chopping" and does so Aw good times
Your monsters are always so adorable. I think it's the faces and rounded shape you give them, but I just want to hug them all. I've never wanted to hug a kraken before, not to mention lava sharks... (though I have wanted to hug a dragon for a while).
NOOOOOOOOOO don't talk about alignment! This can litterly destroy a game. Nothing causes more arguments, limitations, and bull puckery than Alignment. Alignment arguments are PURE EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rogue Exposure Quite possible. Hard to understand for new players; mostly ignored by veteran players. Not sure why we still have it except it's such a part of DnD I don't see it goimg anywhere anytime soon.
"That's not how alignments work" actually, in D&D it is. Unless you are explicitly "Good things for the purpose of deception to cause Evil things," you are still doing Good things and thus your alignment will slowly shift. To be fair, you also would not become Evil even if you helped an Evil person unless what you were doing to help them is either explicitly Evil itself, or you are *knowingly* doing it to cause Evil events to occur. Being deceived into helping a cultist of Nerull is not Evil. Knowing he is a cultist of Nerull and helping in his plans is Evil. Good and Evil in D&D are literally numbers games. After, that is what D&D is: "Math disguised as fun."
What's most ironic is that usually players think they are being very edgy and daring and creative by being... just another group of murder-hobos motivated purely by self-interest.
“Hans? Are we the baddies? I mean, look at our caps! They’ve they’ve got skulls on them!”
Evangelica De Alfaro But they match my magic cape!
"You don't mean you believe the Allies propaganda!"
"But they didn't get to design our uniforms"
Yup. My party ended up torturing and killing the mayor of a town and essentially took it over, starting a crime ring whose reputation snowballs out of control over multiple games to the point where we fight some of the greatest heroes in the land instead of going through with the campaign. Our dm actually created some new characters and leveled them higher than ours so we might be stopped. We werent.
That sounds so fun!!!! I wanna hear more
Lol
@@spritemon98 Yes! Me too xD!
Please, I need to hear more xD!
Please tell us the story!!
“That’s not alignment works” is a bad argument there from the DM. If the characters realize that their actions have changed them to “Evil” alignment, they can try to change it back again by doing “Good” aligned things. Their characters’ goals are now redemption for their past deeds, like by rescuing orphaned lava snakes!
Geoffrey Peterson
Do not speak ill of the DM GOD. Giant rocks will fall from the sky and crush you if you do.
Geoffrey Peterson
Especially since that’s literally how they got here in the first place. They made evil choices so they are evil. But now he’s saying that if they make good choices they won’t be good? What kind of shit is that?
only bad GM's resort to rock falling. don't play with people like that.
I always thought alignment was more of an internal thing; more so your actions would be based on your alignment; not your alignment based on your actions. I mean, you do choose your starting alignment, correct? And if you do evil deeds while thinking they are good deeds, how does your allignment change when your motivation was to be "good" all along? Unless allignment is external... In which case, yes good actions would in fact make you more alligned with good. Either way, the GM is stuck.
Well intentioned bad guys are the best bad guys.
I like to imagine you guys are famous to some underground group of villains as some sort of evil mercenary band despite you trying to be good the entire time
yoko taro approved
Abdega, oh, like the Nazi's?
I wouldn't really call them "bad guys" if they're well-intentioned. More like "Chaotic Stupid" and fit more to be antagonists than protagonists.
theblasblas antangonizing protagonists can be hilarious though!
Teyren Loghain anyone?
I thought the DM was going to say "pure dumbasses"
Yeah, being monumentally stupid has nothing to do with alignment.
I thought he was gonna say 'Chaotic Stupid'
Memes and Hearthstone Same.
Kalash Strelok Chaotic Stupid should be an alignment.
Memes and Hearthstone i was waiting for pure idiot
"That's not how alignment works" Yes it is. Alignment is just how the characters act in situations. Someone who was chaotic evil, has had his world view swayed and is now working to unravel all of his evil plans eventually becomes neutral or good once his good/neutral actions exceed his evil actions and his evil actions have been/would be willingly undone by him.
Old thread but I believe the gm's that's not how alignment works was in reference to not attempting to shift it artificially you're supposed to allow the character your playing develop naturally even if it ends with you being evil that's the choices you made using the meta knowledge of oh no my alignment shifted I must shift it back artificially changes your character
@@alexdraco9926 Yeah it might be. I just sense that puffin's character didn't want to be evil. I was saying that a character's intentions are what control alignment. His character wasn't evil because his evil actions were unintentional. I, as a DM would allow someone to switch alignment if they wanted to and after they show that their character has changed they could count themselves that alignment mechanically.
@@agustdgames3120 I mean...look at the GMs face there. Pretty sure the gag is that neither one really knows how alignments "work"
Which to be fair, given the largely subjective and debatable nature of alignments, and the vague system for alignments in D&D ~ Pretty much every table will have a different answer for how they are supposed to work
That ending gives me an idea:
A charming evil group that are really nice, but insane/stupid enough to do evil anyway.
"Sure, I have a basement full of zombies that once got loose and attacked the nearby village, but I'm trying to conquer death here. I need to keep my test subjects around for further experiments.
And those gelatinous cubes and goblins? Look, I needed employees, and goblins work for next to nothing. They farm the cubes as a food source."
Greatest hero ever, Dr. Doom
arousinggrammar.com/2013/09/24/the-motivations-of-doctor-doom/
So, the Addams Family? They're not evil though.
Goblins can be good and gelatinous cubes are great cleaners, I'm not the one that kills baby orcs and when I have a half orc on my team.
The base of the game is always set around a great menace. No one ever said it had to be evil in nature!
reminds me of several quests in the videogame Runescape 2, where you, a hero, get tricked into doing some bad things.
in one example, you are told to make some special runes and put them on a door to magically reinforce it to prevent a big monster from escaping...
BUT...you actually end up HELPING it escape!
and just barely avoid being eaten with the help of a friendly NPC who teleports you away after some difficulty..
at one point your character actually says, "now would be a good time!"
"I feed them *snacky cakes.*"
That is my favorite quote of yours, ever.
He made them when it wasnt his turm
Let's be honest here... doing the right thing is hard. Why return the lost cat when you can raze the village?
Devilbreaker you mean doing the right thing is boring
Devilbreaker wile being evil makes you look cool and you get to controll the world with an iorn fist
In addition, you get to have complete ownership of the cat since nobody could claim it now that they're dead.
Doing evil is even harder. Complete apathy is the way to go, my dude.
what nega said, take the cat for yourself.
10/10 that is how all my games devolve. Somewhere down the line of defeating the ultimate evil bad all my characters either become a Walter White or the face of the new ultimate evil.
Sum Arber what they become murder hobos.
I usually gm, but I can think of 2 games where something like that happened without it being an evil campaign from the start. In one the party sided with a lich to conquer the local kingdoms. The other was a Call of Cthulhu campaign where the players summoned a great old one to deal with a way less dangerous villain.
well you know what they say you eather die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain
The Whisperer In Darkness let me guess. You summoned Nyarlathotep?
I was the Keeper (GM) and the players summoned Azathoth. They managed to unsummon him before he destroyed the planet or anything but he killed about half the party, the villain, and loads of civilians.
I remember this is one time in a campaign
At the beginning: I am Lawful Good, i shall do no wrong.
*3 sessions later*
Strolls past random pedestrian: Can I stab him?
I had a Neutral Good Paladin. I solved every problem with Javelins... And the one time i didn't throw a javelin at something, we later found it the figure was the person we then had to track down and kill.
Kharn The Betrayer *Irony*
I'm always in campaigns with a lot of moral ambiguity. In one of my current campaigns I'm a pacifist monk that I've built so that they literally can't initiate attacks and only does damage by counter-attacking in self-defense. He solves his problems with negotiation instead. In that same campaign one of our party members is a soul-draining vampire called a youma that is a chaotic evil sociopath pretending to be a god. In a Star Wars campaign I'm playing our crew was Imperial special forces but amoung our party members we have: 'A developing droid hive-mind trying to take over the galaxy', 'A sith Inquisitor that trained under, married, and had children with an ancient sith lord by her late teens', 'a genocidal maniac that burned Endor to the ground, gets turned on by graphic violence, and lobs grenades as a greeting', and my character is just a stoic Mandalorian Sharpshooter watching this all happen. *I swear our groups should have a rating system like the movies. We'd be rated R for sure.*
Kyle Pessell Nah, you'd break the system.
That stuff is just crazy
Be me dming. My friend from 4chan rolls up a chaotic neutral dwarf cleric. Guy is constantly drunk on his holy water. In his drunken rage he would attack people and steal their clothes. If this isn't chaotic stupid, I dunno what is.
Once, my party was running curse of strahd, and came across a small town. Through an exceptionally strange course of events and choices, we ending up in the following situation: all but two of the party was outside of the mayor’s house slaughtering the town guard. Meanwhile, our two druids turned into spiders and snuck into the mayor’s house. One druid killed the mayor’s son and all of his cats, while our other druid stole the mayor’s wife’s wedding dress and while wearing it killed the mayor, his wife, and his dogs. Then after all the town leadership was dead we just took over the entire town. This was the same campaign during which one of the party had a familiar which the entire party referred to as Rambo Sprite
😂
Honestly? There are worse fates for Vallaki. Seriously, read a few of the outcomes in the module. Shit's fucked.
"That's not how alignment works."
"How do alignments work?"
...silence...
- every campaign I dm
Alignment works through Philosophy, which is a school of magic available to non-adventurer professions.
Hans, are we the baddies?
Why skulls though?
Maybe they're the skulls of our enemies
We need badges that say "yeah these are skulls but he was a huge dick."
Definitely a missed opportunity
it's still better than a rat's anus
"How do alignment work?"
Oh boy... We don't know. Nobody does.
You need to succeed an INT check of 9001 to uncover the truth of alignment.
“So...we did some...bad things. On accident though!”
“Oh yeah you’re now 100% evil.”
“Wait what? Wait what if we do some good things to balance it out? We can go back to being good!”
“What you can’t just change your alignment just like that!”
It's like Skyrim!
"Oh, so you killed the dragon atacking the city? Well bully for you."
"Did... DID YOU JUST KILL A CHICKEN? *GUARDS! KILL THIS MONSTER!* "
@@dydlus *Nicks guard while fending off vampires.*
*You have committed crimes against Skyrim and her people. What say you?"
*Nicks follower in any combat.*
"Careful!"
My players did the same thing and instead of killing my villain they took his power and then i made them just fight heros i made.
Was their alignment: Compulsive hoarder?
In the session I just played in our half-orc fighter has split personality disorder and the evil one tricked us into unleashing eternal night upon the world. Now the two personalities are two separate beings and the good one is helping us try to defeat the bad guys, including her other personality.
Revan much?
If you are interested in split personalitie disorder, here is a very interesting interview. I learned so much about it there ua-cam.com/video/A0kLjsY4JlU/v-deo.html
Oh wow that's not how DID works at all and is actually a rather dangerous stereotype
In my current campaign we murdered an innocent man for no reason, let a god of evil steal the god of magic's magic orb for a bit (which we in no way aided in the retrieval of), almost burned down a whole forest, planned to use the last surviving residents of a town as a momentary distraction for a dragon we were going to fight, accidentally buried an entire continent, and are wanted in one of the major empire for the murder of a prince that we didn't actually do but there's no convincing them of that now.
Also I personally sent a guy directly to hell. I mean granted, he was a bandit, but he didn't really pose any threat and I shifted him to the Abyss purely out of my character being annoyed about other things. And then after that the last survivor tried to run away and I killed him as he fled.
We are good people.
how you buried an entire continent? i need to know!
well there was this self-replicating magic item...
Android 19 Go on . . .
Android 19 you buried a continent in clones of yourself?
Tuan Le My guess is he used the magic item so many times that the continent was buried in replicas of the item. Still, I would like to know what happened.
I don't get it. Why didn't you just set everyone and everything on fire? It usually solves every problem I come across.
Change your name to Salamanders then
Did you catch his call of cthulu video with the light everything on fire guy?
ua-cam.com/video/xgxhNwPEJUA/v-deo.html
They tried that. turns out everything was already on fire.
Ignus BUUUUURNSSSSSSSS.... people...
And what about when a fire elemental is sent to kill you?
"I feed them snacky cakes!"
Love that line.
Yeah this is part of why I say "You can be a bad guy while also not being evil. You can be a good guy without being good." Alignment is Action+Intent not Consequence. If your non-evil actions with otherwise non-evil intent produce bad outcomes, then that has no bearing on your alignment.
DM: You've done so many Evil things that your alignment has changed to evil
Players: Well, if we do good things again that means our alignment will change back, right?
DM: tHaTs NoT hOw AkUgNmEnT wOrKs-
How DO alignments work?
*Panic*
Uhhh *Frantically flipping through the books* UHHH *Watches UA-cam videos on the subject*
UHHHH?!? *Mass Hysteria ensues*
I've always liked the stance that alignments are in response to what a character does more then anything else. Like oh you burned a child alive for the info on how to get into the castle? ok, well you're neutral evil now. It's what you are.
@@scotthuizinga Remember way back in the old days when, if you broke your alignment, a magical wolf (or something) would come along and pretty much kill you? It was a way of forcing players to stick to their alignment.
@@LibraGamesUnlimited thats a very shitty way to do it
@@wayway7017 That was part of the game, way back in the 80s. I can't recall what they were called but if you broke alignment they showed up to punish you n the game.
Alignment is a guideline, if even. It is something you throw down on your sheet because you're technically supposed to. No good DM makes you stick to it.
I once had the opposite, we where in a city where the undead killed everyone but the mayor, our fighter killed him for no reason and it turns out he was the one who killed the city and raised them as undead.
The problem I have with the whole situation is that the DM is obfuscating the effects of players actions; like "Oh, there's a little girl who's fallen on the ground, do you help her? Ohp, looks like she was evil, you helped evil, so you're evil." I get the idea of good intentions leading to bad actions, but when the most basic moral choices and intentions lead to a character being considered evil it just feels unnecessarily cynical, which is something I absolutely hate in a DM.
2:05 I can't blame you, Garathor was a pretty swell guy.
One of my friends wanted to insert a module into my campaign (I said yes, he had actually never DM'd before and I wanted to give him the chance) and it actually involves the party fighting his own character as part of the boss fight. I thought it was a really impressive way to put himself out of action while he DMs and also just a cool concept overall!
My wife always writes “neutral good” on her sheet but then she always plays “chaotic evil”
2:23 This is why when my group of friends and I play D&D, we don't care about alignment. We have one simple rule for that: "Do what your character would do." Just because someone is almost entirely evil, doesn't mean they have to -...say.... *speaks in higher pitched voice* kill a cute wittle kitty they find in a drak alley way! - or something like that. :p Plus, if you've got a party with total opposite "alignments," odds are, one of them wouldn't exactly stick around in the party for very long. :p
Well, that wouldn't work if I was the DM. My story is very railroaded
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
Matheus Tran by accident
It's more like _"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself roll enough nat 1s to become more harmful than helpful."_
Come to think of it, most of my players were evil. Becoming cannibals, burning an entire town alive, backstabbing the mayor and helping an orc beat up a kid are all not-good-person things.
I had a thing like the Lava Sharks where our Swashbuckler saw a wolf den and thought "i'ma get me a pet wolf pup"
.......That sounds like a great plan. I endorse this plan. I am excited about this plan. You go first.
Now now, I have an intelligence of six, I think I know what I'm doing.
My party did the same, only with bears... :D
I once successfully tamed a magical Agathion Tiger over four times my character's size by feeding it giant lizards.
Then I realized I'd have to keep feeding it.
Predatorial pets aren't as cool when you realize you've gotta roll a 90 or higher on random encounters just to find something big enough to satisfy it.
In my current campaign, two of my teammates (former city guard, and a multi-classed nightmare) killed a pregnant ettin, crit rolled on a cesarean, and raised an ettin daughter. Now, the new guy (half-orc half-dwarf barbarian) and the other two have managed to capture a fully grown hydra (with help from the party obvy), raise it's intelligence to 19 and convince it to stay in a giant fishbowl. Concurrently, my character (pyromaniac sorcerer) has made a deal with a grey slaad to kill a death slaad in order to be given a subservient green slaad.
I once had a group of well established heroes that was defeated by our bad guys and banished to a prison camp in hell for 100 years.
I managed to save my group by becoming the most ruthless monster there and earned the respect and fear of the damned as their leader... When we got out we figured:
"OK, so our guys are a little scarred now... David over there was a prison bitch to demons for 100 years and has some pent up rage, and he is probably the nicest one of us at this point...".
When we escaped there was a massive celebration to herald the 'return of the heroes'... that night we got drunk and cannibalized a few of our fans... it all went downhill from there...
“...what the F- is wrong with you people?” Is still one of my favorite Puffin quotes. I always get a chuckle out of that
3:34 Oh, THAT? Oh, we got a GREAT DEAL on this place; you wouldn't BELIEVE how many people had turned this place down before! Hey! You wanna come in and see the basement? It's HUUUUUUGE! You could store, like a city's worth of FOOD in there!
"The skeletons are fake, I think"
"i've know how we can find out"
"hey are you the bad guys"
"well, its all a matter of perspective isnt it"
"you *are* the bad guys, that is totally a bad guy thing to say"
(i might have gotten the quotes wrong i know)
Maybe you have the wrong perspective
We actually had the opposite effect...
at the beginning of the campaign: Wait we have an eldrazi, a warlock, a demon, and a kobold. We're the bad guys aren't we?
at the middle of the campaign: We're not the bad guys only because stabbing the bad guys is more fun than stabbing the good guys.
I've got a family of characters, starting with Cronos the Great down through Cronos VI. They all worship Bane. Most of them are LE, though there is one that was LN. And since Cronos IV they've also been members of the Flaming Fists. Love that bunch
Crushed a bunch of trolls under a cave in. Along with the villagers we were supposed to save. The look on the DMs face was priceless though.
I still love the "How do alignments work?" line cause it hits so close to home. XD
You either die a hero or live long enough see yourself become the villain.
or live long enough to become irrelevant.
that's the one few people realize.
that statement could be reversed and still have the same meaning.
Not quite, but it's certainly an interesting thing to ponder about, think dictators and such.
You either die a villain(and make a new, cooler character) or live long enough to see the DM finally make you a hero.
I was playing a good aligned cleric of Pelor in one of my games, the party was in the Underdark and we came across a settlement of drow, bugbears, slavers, slaves, and other evil people. So, I had a great idea to caste a spell called Insect Swarm, which basically makes creatures inside it want to get outside of it.
So everybody in the settlement starts running to the only exit, which is where the party was. Now my plan was to corral all the evil-doers all at once. To do this, I casted another spell, Blade Barrier, in the direction everybody was running.
'Ha! Sure this is a high level spell,' I thought, 'but no one will dare cross these spinning blades of death!'
It was then that the GM informed me that because of all the insect buzzing all around, no one will see or hear the blades.
'......Oh shit......'
The GM then had too much fun describing how all the screams were going quiet and there was a red mist coming out of the swarm of insects. The moral of the story, read the fine print of the spells before you caste them.
"Now they're our pets. I feed them snacky cakes!" Best explanation for having lava sharks ever
That is exactly how alignments work. What you strive for is what you are.
If you can't achieve it you're dumbarses at worst.
You weren't evil. You were just dumb asses. Fantastic video I was laughing the entire time.
This is a good story but it does bring up my problem with the Alignment system. Do the bad guys ever think they’re bad guys? In their heads they’re probably the heroes or doing all this dastardly stuff because it’s for some greater good. If they actually thought it was evil would they keep doing it?
JosephTaylorBass
Actually, often times, the villains seem to do what they do for purely selfish reasons - stuff like immortality or power or just because they think it's fun to cause as much death and suffering as possible.
Griffith did nothing wrong ;)
Max Dunham That’s a fair point. Though I’d like to think it’d be more fun to fight a baddie who thinks he’s the good guy and you’re just trying to get in his way
unless your Acererak, he knows he is bad
Man, You guys must have all really loved infinity war.
*Dark Overlord:* "Join my cause, and I shall reward you with-"
*Party Member:* "NEVER!"
*Me:* "Hold on, let him finish..."
*Party Member:* "You're not seriousely considering joining him, are you!?"
*Me:* "Well, hypothetically... I mean, don't you at least want to know what you're turning down? What's the salary like? What are the benefits? Do we get a good dental plan?"
*Party Member:* "Dental!? You'd plunge the world into 10.000 years of darkness over DENTAL!?"
*Me:* "Hey, I'm an Elf. I'm likely going to live to be around 700, and if you don't mind, I'd like to be able to eat solid food for most of those years..."
PARTY MEMBER: ........you know what........................................................[sigh] that's fair. Plus [*shrugging and leaning to one side*] retirement from adventuring doesn't usually leave with many open doors and I really, kinda wanna start family sooooooo a pension scheme would really be appreciated.
I think a good campaign would be one where the players are doing like the work of an evil person but like the under handed stuff, but the players don't know it.
Hastur King you mean every PC I have inevitably played?
TAR HOGAr?! GERATHOR?!?!?
That is one of the oldest campaign plots in the book.
Royal 97 Tropes are still fun. If they weren't, people would have stopped using dragons years ago.
the DM Lair I know. But he made it out like he invented the wheel.
I mean that's EXACTLY how alignments work,it changes depending on what you do. If you're evil and do nothing but good things you will go to neutral and eventually become a good character. Good does not mean nice,you can be a complete dickhead but if you do morally good things you will be a good character.
3:05 - In my game (Not DND) there is no alignment. If your criminal then you will do criminal things. If your a law abiding citizen you will follow the law. But most often I find my players will loot and steal from those they don't like and will follow the rules as long as that zone is protected by numbers.
Numbers?
we feed them snacky cakes!
I once did a solid quest for evil character where they loose there body and they could only be summon for a limited time. Instead of going to get back there body they use the effect of getting teleport back to there lair at the end of the summon has a escape plan to cause a maximum of chaos in a city. I cant say what they did because of how insanly evil for YT but I had nightmare that night.
lets just say burning a church and something that rhyme with grape was involved. Also when the first thing they do is killing parents using there child as a weapon. Then calmly eat the still hot breakfeast from that freshly murdered familly as there first 10 min play. I realize my mistake they had fun I had nightmare.
2:48 "How do alignments work?"
They don't
No shit
I now want to write a fantasy story where the villains are just a rag-tag bunch of adventurers who tried to fix things but through a combination of character flaws and incompetence destroyed the world.
"Are we the baddies?"
"What?"
"Have you seen our hats? They have skulls in them."
2:32 ''pure fucking evil, Tyrone what have you done?''
"I did pure fucking humor!"
"We've killed people up there"
That even killed me, man.
Honestly the idea of super villains just being a group of selfish, ignorant fools is so real and hilarious XD
I want a show to where the “bad guys” are just good men/women that just look evil
Like say a lich who is buying plants for his garden and gets attacked by a paladin attacks him and says he’ll stop his evil attacks on these people, while the his speech goes on the lich just leaves him to his ego.
That's why DnD characters are adventurers, not necessarily heroes.
I love how he just says “OH NOES”.
Thank you for been you and making these video. You made me fall inlove with dnd so much more then i already was. Thank you for that.
My charachter is a chaotic good elf who is basically an anarchist ended owning an entire county due to inheritence. My father died long ago so my mother remarried... to the (previous) owner of the country. They had a daughter who had a 4 year old son and another one on the way but whose husband had just perished. The count acknowledged me as his son under the condition that my half-sister's line would be the primary heirs to his title. However, a group of religious fanataics (who had been fighting my group for about a year) converted both him and my sister to their religion. To show their devotion, they sacrificed my nephew which really pissed me off so (with a little help from the local dwarves) my group launched something that could be best described as a coup d'état. The count died and my sister reliquished all rights to the title in the name of her unborn child. So now a half-crazy, anarchist elf is in charge of the largest county in our setting. :D
One of my characters is Julia Blood, rightful heir to the throne of Thule, which is pretty much Medieval France if everyone was an elf. Her mother having been forced into flee due to siding with the previous royal family during the revolt that turned the Elven kingdom into a Republic, her uncle and grandfather having died in battle, and her father being executed. They lived in the home of a human merchant named Cicero who got rich selling weapons to the loyalists until he and her mother died when she was sixteen, the servants selling her into slavery. After leading a successful revolt among the slaves, she sailed for the Rajput Empire, my fantasy world's equivalent of India, and offered to make Thule a vassal state if the Silver Emperor gave her the army needed to reclaim the throne. However, on the way to Thule, she received news that the Rajput Empire had been conquered by the Barca Sultanate, my fantasy's worlds equivalent of Carthage and the Ottoman Empire, the warriors under her command deserting her. Alone, she began wandering in search of allies who would place her on the throne, scheming and double crossing to gain the funds needed to raise an army strong enough to put the rebels to the sword.
I do really love that. You turned out to be obliviously evil because your actions kept having terrible results! Good stuff.
Alignment is just a guide for new players. And they're not even Good and Evil. 'Good' characters are ones that put other people first. 'Evil' characters just put themselves first. Alignment isn't something the GM should force you to change. No matter what you do, your Alignment is how you perceive yourself. If someone believes that everything they do is for the betterment of everyone else, the BBEG can be Chaotic Good. Trying to bring down the current order to establish a better one. They'll have to be in control to begin with, but the goal isn't to control everything.
Indiana Jones "It belongs in a museum!"
Bad guy" Wait... are you stealing my culture?"
You" Dude is an evil artifact."
Baddie" It isn't inharrently evil. It's our heritage."
I have just boiled down 2018, yw.
There are always scenario's in witch its acceptable for a DM to change one's alignment. Getting the alignment card in the deck of many things, replacing your hand or eye with the hand or eye vecna. Alignment can and should serve the story.
I just never see it as necessary. Aside from things that switch your alignment around. The Paladin in the party i GM for started off Neutral Good, but very quickly shifted himself to True Neutral. The only time i told a player to switch their alignment was the Gunslinger Dwarf, when he burned down a tavern after cucking a guy (long story), and i told him to switch from Lawful Neutral to Chaotic Neutral. He never really adhered to the law too much. His backstory included him being banished from his homeland for disobeying a law because he didn't believe in it.
Honestly their alignment is well meaning dumb.
I kind of side with you. Unless someone is flagrantly doing good/bad stuff for reasons.
As a DM myself I will knock cleric/paladin backed powers off if the cleric doesn't do something against alignment but they do purposely do stuff that would intentionally piss their God off.
Kharn, to the greater extent, I do agree with you. Alignment was not ever designed to infringe on a Player's agency with his or her PC...
It's the character's core "moral compass" from whence ALL actions come and must also be justified... Good being "socio-centric" and Evil being "ego-centric" in nature... Lawful (obviously) is structured by an ethic, and Chaotic is unstructured for individualism/uniqueness... Finally, Neutrality is either described as ambiguous to the duality of natures in question, or flat out ambivalent (doesn't care). It's not particularly difficult, AND only really needs explanation here, to be sure we can all get on the same perspective page on the matter.
A reasonably experienced Player can thoroughly justify ANY action to ANY alignment construct. It's simply a process of explaining from the core value(s) through motivation to intent... Thus you get plans, actions, and outcome (which unpredictably, may or may not end with the intended result).
Now, in the circumstance that a Player takes an action that he or she can't legitimately explain from alignment, then the GM should take the agency to penalize.That's NOT to say instantly change the alignment, nor that every resource in the books exactly tells you how to penalize alignments for counter-aligning actions... In fact, they don't. BUT from one infringement to the next, the penalizing actions grow, until there's some point to actually changing the alignment of the Character to better reflect that Player's motivating narrative.
Good aligned characters that take up rapidly evolving and un-justified "evil" activities can be stricken with steadily growing emotional traumas, nightmares and night terrors, delusions and flashbacks, etc... Until there's a paradigm shift for the Character to finally "lose faith" in the "good" and decide (however dubious) that it's really just a "dog-eat-dog" style of world and there's no purpose in buying into the "betterment of society"... SO "F*** 'em" and the PC can take on a more "neutral" or even cross fully into "evil" alignment... Becoming self-serving (the definition of ego-centric behavior)...
"Redemption arcs" (of course) can be played pretty close to the same way. Granted, thoroughly "evil" (ego-centric) Characters might not exactly endure the SAME kinds of nightmares, delusional behavior, flashbacks, and such that a "good aligned" Character might, BUT there's still something that would interfere with the Character just as much... AND it should be "build-able"...
Finally, since some priestly and monkish powers (among other archetypes) ARE based on alignment or attuned to it, they should mechanically suffer (at least) some consequence in this process... If the arc is carried "to fruition" they should (to be fair to Players and PC's) be replaced or reskinned to reflect the new Character Alignment as necessary.
I might add, that the whole "ego-centric" and "socio-centric" description of alignment is reflected in the D&D Systemics all the way back to first edition, and that while Gygax never actually used those technical terms, it was likely to preserve some notion of theme than to obfuscate his intentions in the ideals... Consistently, it's been printed that "Evil characters do NOT intentionally actively engage in harming others, neither directly nor indirectly. They're only intent on their own gains." Meaning that ego-centric personalities are usually just careless about consequences. Those are someone else's problem. ;o)
I don't think that unintentionally helping the BBEG makes your party evil; its the party's reaction after they find out the truth that really defines them. Thanks for another hilarious video!
All the best villains are the ones that believe they are doing good.
honestly I want to see a campaign where everyone is an accidental villian, they TRY and do good, but end up fucking up and becoming evil... XD! then have an adventure party come after them, and they are all confused XD!
thats weird... is this a march 31 video? i feel like this is legitimate and not at all an april fools joke.
RetroLegend That's the joke
so a real story is a joke? on april fools day?
The only way to fight against the despotic choke hold of april fools jokes on media is to post legitimate content on april the first.
Yeah. TheRPGMinx's April Fools video last year was her legitimate face reveal.
I remember Valve did something similar, they deliberately posted a controversial update on April the first a few years ago. Turns out it wasn't a joke.
It recently made this realization in our campaign, as well. Now we're trying to get it turned around so we don't become the scourge of the realm.
Hilarious video! Nothing like strutting around feeling like the "hero" until one day you decide to take stock of your list of "accomplishments" and . . . .oh. . . no. . . .oops.
This channel is a GEM. Such fun videos to listen to and good animations.
i shall now make a really friendly bbeg who's just a former hero who didn't realize what kind of an ass he's been.
"You're not Chaotic Evil, just Chaotic Stupid
"Thats not how alignment works" WTF! Then how the hell did you become evil. Clearly all your evil actions didn't do it.
Just love the refreshing way Ben says "See you guys next time."
Wait, we’re a gang of Murder Hobos?
Woe unto the DM who comes right out and tells their players "Your characters are all evil now"; For unto them is the eternal suffering of players that find ways to destroy the few things that the DM actually cared about in every campaign world thereafter . The only time you should tell the player "Your character was irredeemably Evil" is when that character is secured in the Hell of Blazing Fires, mere moments away from becoming fuel for the crow-shaped nuclear reactor.
Question for you Ben: Have you ever read The Order of The Stick webcomic ? Its based on D&D and has one of the best plots I have ever seen. Keep up the awesome videos. And since you have GMed Mage:The Ascension a lot, could you please tell us some stories ?
KaiserAfini ANOTHER ORDER OF THE STICK FAN
That story is so incredibly well written, I am amazed more people don't talk about it.
KaiserAfini it is a well kept secret that is, in fact, not a secret.
Drizzmantec Shhh, its a secret to everyone (passes a red Rupee under the table)
researchinbreeder nice zelda reference
"I failed my wisdom save against their adorable charm effect. Now I feed them snacky-snacks!"
1:55 cough Scooby doo
That was totally HILARIOUS !!! 😂
The Evil Guy who is so dumb that he doesn't realise that he's evil, until someone lists all the evil things he's done. Brilliant! 😊
The cultist part my party had the exact same thing said to them I said the same thing you did and our barbarian chopped his leg off and said "where is your god now because you better start talking or I start chopping" rolls intimidate with advantage rolls 1 both times and the cultist spits in his face the barbarian says "ok I start chopping" and does so
Aw good times
Well deserved 1s. You can't start chopping and then act like you didn't.
This sounds like me starting the apocalypse to get out of hell... Good intentions... Sometimes don't have the best result
IT was all by accident I swear
The original or the remake?
0:01 johntron is that you!?
I love you and your content
Your monsters are always so adorable. I think it's the faces and rounded shape you give them, but I just want to hug them all. I've never wanted to hug a kraken before, not to mention lava sharks... (though I have wanted to hug a dragon for a while).
NOOOOOOOOOO don't talk about alignment! This can litterly destroy a game. Nothing causes more arguments, limitations, and bull puckery than Alignment. Alignment arguments are PURE EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Alignments are Lawful Evil, as they are often misused to force a character to make a uncharacteristic choice.
Watching this channel makes me wanna start back up on building my own tabletop game that id never play but still have made.
I'm early I hope this isn't a prank
Knowing Puffin... Doesn't sound like it. He's done worse.
Why must you be so entertaining to watch. It take forever for a video to come out, so please stop torturing me.
I loved the bit about alignments. I think the hate of the alignment system is what unites all players.
Rogue Exposure Quite possible. Hard to understand for new players; mostly ignored by veteran players. Not sure why we still have it except it's such a part of DnD I don't see it goimg anywhere anytime soon.
"That's not how alignments work" actually, in D&D it is.
Unless you are explicitly "Good things for the purpose of deception to cause Evil things," you are still doing Good things and thus your alignment will slowly shift.
To be fair, you also would not become Evil even if you helped an Evil person unless what you were doing to help them is either explicitly Evil itself, or you are *knowingly* doing it to cause Evil events to occur. Being deceived into helping a cultist of Nerull is not Evil. Knowing he is a cultist of Nerull and helping in his plans is Evil.
Good and Evil in D&D are literally numbers games. After, that is what D&D is: "Math disguised as fun."
You should seriously make an animated series based on one of these campaigns! I'd watch the hell out of that!
Man, the DC of those lava sharks must've been like 50, they're adorable! Great video as always.
DM - that’s not how alignment works!
PC - then how does it work?
My brain - it doesn’t work.
What's most ironic is that usually players think they are being very edgy and daring and creative by being... just another group of murder-hobos motivated purely by self-interest.