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View Full Version : I Keep Drifting to Good... or maybe not. What do you think?[3.5]



Callista
2010-11-13, 02:10 AM
If you'll remember, I recently posted about my tendency to inevitably end up with Good (or sometimes Evil) characters when starting out Neutral. The character in question was a wizard who started out LN but has on several (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173112) occasions (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9661724&postcount=46) willingly put herself in great danger for the sake of her friends and her mission; so I gave in and figured I'd probably given her a LG personality to begin with.

I had to bring this up again because my character's just had a very interesting experience which may very well reverse the alignment drift: A man whose life she has saved just basically murdered an orphanage full of children, all abandoned by superstitious parents when their magical ability became known. The child-killer in question was a PC, a convicted murderer who was serving out his sentence with us. At the point when this happened, she considered him her friend because they had both taken risks for each other in battle. It doesn't help that she is an idealistic, bookish, somewhat naive woman from a small town, and he's a charismatic bard.

Here it is, from her perspective:

The children remind me of myself, when I was little, planning pranks and playing with magic like it's some sort of new toy. It makes me wonder what might’ve happened to me if I had been abandoned for my own small magical talents. People can be so superstitious sometimes, and of course the innocent suffer for it.

Their guardian seems like a nice enough fellow. Troubled, maybe. There’s a lot of history here and I’m still working it all out. Still, anyone who takes in hundreds of children, however haphazard his parenting, can’t be all bad.

I’m jolted out of my complacency when suddenly the childrens’ guardian begins to convulse and suddenly falls unconscious. He’s barely alive. We’ve just escaped from one of the worst battles we’ve fought so far and we have no more healing.

This is magical; I need to find the source of the damage so we can save him.

Someone suddenly notices we’re missing a friend… or, what I thought was a friend; after all, if you save someone’s life twice, it tends to be a logical assumption that they are indeed a friend.

We run out of the building, into the courtyard. There’s the missing man himself, surrounded by dead children. It’s always been an odd talent of mine, to be able to count things without having to think; so I know there are ninety dead. The living children are crying. Our… friend… is gathering up the small magical marbles the children were playing with. I’ve seen those marbles in action; I know they’re very powerful. Many magic-users would sell their souls to have this many of them.

Before anyone can say much of anything, three of us have attacked our so-called friend, and then he’s on the ground dead, neck broken and burned beyond recognition. I have very fast reflexes, so several of the burns show the distinctive patterns of my own magic missiles.

Even though I am a genius, it doesn’t take one to figure out that the children must have been magically linked to their guardian. We run in just in time to see the man die.

The building starts shaking. It must have been linked to him, just the way the children were.

Everyone starts running for the exits, but I can’t leave. There are still children in here. I won’t see them die. Someone grabs at me to try to drag me out. I shake him off.

Plaster dust starts sifting down from cracks in the ceiling, and it’s getting hard to stand up. I call after the children, try to grab them, get them out of here. They run away. They’re scared of me.

Their fear is logical; my friend was the one who killed their playmates.

The doorways begin to collapse, and a large piece of the ceiling nearly crushes me.

I calmly begin casting a spell. I’ve done this a thousand times, even in deadly peril; so it’s easy, even with chunks of rock falling all around me. Near the ceiling, a small portal opens up, a door to a tiny pocket dimension, with a handy rope to climb in. I call for the children to come and be safe. Surely they must understand that they’re now as trapped as I am, and that this is the only way out.

But the sound of the earthquake is too loud, or the children’s fear is too great. No one comes.

I slip through the portal just as the ceiling falls in entirely and sit there, staring at my blank white surroundings, until the rocks settle. Then I climb out onto the rubble, blinking in the sunlight.

I look down to see a little girl’s black leather slipper lying in the ruins of the building. Its owner will never need it again.

I pick my way towards the edge of the devastation, carefully avoiding shifting rocks that might injure me. My companions are waiting for me.

They’ve all made it out alive—all, that is, except for the one who should have died long ago, when I chose to let him live. We all explain to each other that everyone’s all right, that we’ve got to continue our mission.

It’s been a long day, but I still have one spell prepared. A good wizard is always prepared, after all.

I chant the words of the spell and point my finger to channel the magical energy into a fallen section of the wall. I move the target of the spell with precision, so that the ray of fire etches an epitaph into the rock:

LET THIS PLACE BE A WARNING TO THOSE WHO WOULD HAVE MERCY ON THE UNREDEEMABLE.

So... yes.

I could go two ways with this. I could have her become a great deal more ruthless, believing that it's better to kill first and ask questions later and that she needs to gain more power in order to stop this from happening again.

Or I could have her realize that she's been too naive, face up to the fact that she can't save everyone, and spend her life trying to make up for the deaths of those several hundred kids.

The first option would be LN or maybe even evil, depending on her methods. The second option would mean she'd stay solidly LG. She would in either case still believe in protecting the innocent... but naturally one can go too far in one's methods, and the innocent can fall by the wayside in one's quest to become powerful enough to try to protect the entire world.

What do you think? Should I let her become cynical and try to become more powerful because she won't let go of the idea that she should be capable of protecting everyone from everything, or should I let her get sadder and wiser and try to atone for her overconfidence and lapse in judgment in trusting a murderer?

BridgeCity
2010-11-13, 06:59 AM
Why not work out which one would be more fun to play for you personally, and go with that? If it were me I'd pick the going-good redemption one, but that's because I like those kind of characters. Evil or evilish tendencies has never seemed fun to me.

Callista
2010-11-13, 03:57 PM
Well, I was a bit wary of going neutral or evil on this because it would just be too much like Anakin Skywalker, and we all know the angst overload that turned into.

Jjeinn-tae
2010-11-13, 04:16 PM
Even evil, when done well, will tend to have someone or something that they'll put life on the line for. That on it's own isn't necessarily going to shift you from neutral to good.

As for the story in there... I'd say with the marking left at the end, that's solidly neutral. It seems good has to believe everyone is redeemable, not necessarily that it's the best thing to redeem them while they're alive though. I would say that she is probably going to be losing some of her naivete from this.

Aidan305
2010-11-13, 04:38 PM
Beautifully written. Well done.

With regards to you're question, given how you've written the piece, and the final etching, I'd be inclined to go with the former. Your character has a lot of deaths on their conscience and that's going to drive them. I didn't get the impression that your character was a forgive and forget personality.

Just make sure to keep the angst level down and you should be fine.

Marnath
2010-11-13, 05:01 PM
I think option 1. She'll probably lose her faith in the power of a good morality to see justice done, since that led her to leaving a murder alive. I don't imagine her ever losing touch to an extent that she harm's innocents. I think sort of LN, like a judge from Judge Dredd. If someone deserves death, they get it without hesitation. But if they don't deserve death, then she won't cross the line. Since she is lawful, she'll probably be big into making sure the proper authorities punish wrongdoers whenever that's feasible.

herrhauptmann
2010-11-13, 07:24 PM
I'd say a jaded cynical lawful neutral. The common excesses of the evil alignments horrify you because of the slaughter that man created. However, your own loss of naivete from the incident (what a coldblooded way to describe it) was enough to pretty much prevent you from being 'Good' again, for fear of being taken advantage of.
Perhaps you could write up a little mantra like the Bene Gesserit have, but in regards to trust, rather than fear.

These kids were playing with pearls of power? And the guy was another PC, or an NPC? Good story though, well written.

Callista
2010-11-14, 01:35 AM
The kids were playing with a homebrew version of materia, from Final Fantasy. Quite a surreal scene. The murderer in question was a PC, and his actions completely blindsided the poor DM, though in the player's defense he had thought that he would only end up killing a few of the kids, not ninety of them. He was playing a bard and basically talked them into committing suicide. Very, very creepy.

Agrippa
2010-11-14, 03:04 AM
If you want your character to atone for the deaths she feels she allowed by not slaughtering this monster beforehand then it's simple. Hold a zero tollerance policy for characters like this and execute them on the spot or drag them to the proper authorities, which ever one is more feasible and less dangerous for the public at large. Lawful Good characters, in my opinion, should value justice and retribution against truly horrendus criminals over even attempting to redeem them. Justice and protecting the innocent come far before redeeming the wicked. I wouldn't have faulted her at all if she killed this party member before for his previous crimes. Especially if you were playing a paladin.

Callista
2010-11-14, 12:38 PM
Well, if I were playing a paladin, the guy wouldn't have brought in the evil PC. :)

I guess it has a lot to do with out of character stuff; mostly our not wanting to kill another person's character, and not wanting to ruin anybody else's fun. Only when he really forced it by (indirectly) killing children in front of us did we kill the PC.

In the case of my own character, when the legitimate authorities of the town assigned us as basically the man's parole officers--well, that gives her an in-character reason not to kill the man in cold blood. Plus, he had a Mark of Justice on--with the precise wording that it would trigger for "killing an innocent". Of course we didn't realize that a silver-tongued bard can easily talk an innocent into doing the job for him!

The evil bard in question had been quite badly mistreated by our party's warlock, so the bard really wanted to gain enough power to escape this mistreatment. I'm going to be interested in what happens to the warlock, as well as to my character, because both of our characters are blaming themselves now.

djbeerman
2010-11-19, 01:14 PM
I think option 2 would be your best choice. Considering your wizard sees how horrified the children seemed of her when she thought she was like the murderer, she certainly wouldn't want to become ruthless to the point of being just like him. She just has to be more careful about what people she can trust... Especially bards ;)

As for shifting your alignment? Well, see if your character will continue to put her life on the line for strangers. If yes, she's still Good. If she only does it for her friends, she's back to Neutral.

Great story (and storytelling) by the way!

hamishspence
2010-11-20, 05:34 AM
As for shifting your alignment? Well, see if your character will continue to put her life on the line for strangers. If yes, she's still Good. If she only does it for her friends, she's back to Neutral.

In the absence of notable evil acts, this is a good general rule.

With evil acts though, such a character could be Neutral (Dread Necromancer who only casts Evil spells like Animate dead, in the cause of protecting others)

Or even Evil, if they commit sufficiently severe Evil acts to their enemies.