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View Full Version : Roleplaying Roleplaying a character "reversal"



Zweisteine
2014-07-18, 09:01 AM
"Roleplaying a character after an alignment switch."
(The title's a bit vague so a fellow player doesn't accidentally see it.)

Warning: minor Tomb of Horror spoilers below

I've been running the tomb of horrors with some friends, and my Necropolitan Kobold Sorcerer went through the arch of gender/alignment reversal, and failed both saves (made possible by being in Blink Dog form, for, ironically enough, safety pueposes).

So now I'm playing a Neutral Good character in a party that averages Chaotic Evil (1 NE, 2 CN, 2 CE).

I'm a bit at a loss about how to roleplay this change, and need some help. It doesn't help that each player has two characters, and I am also running the cleric (NE Earth Kobold Cloistered Cleric). If I can subtly indicate to myself that the character is now good, I can cast Atonement to fix it, but that's hard to pull of realistically.

It also doesn't help that I have a fiendish graft, which, each day, will force me to save against a moderate amount of wisdom damage. I could try to use the graft to indicate the change to the cleric, but it'll be hard to pull off realistically.

Please help me!

Segev
2014-07-18, 09:08 AM
Okay, first off, is your goal to find a way to justify "fixing" this change so that you're playing the NE monster you were before, or to find a way to make this new outlook work in the party?

If the former, that's something to discuss with your DM. Make it clear you want a story arc (probably a shorter one) that helps you turn back, as you don't enjoy playing the character this way.

If the latter, however, you're in luck on a few fronts. First off, since you're in a dungeon with nothing that could even remotely qualify as an innocent, your party's evil tendencies are little different from your own survival tendencies. The most that's likely to happen is you're going to have to be careful about how nice you are to them so they don't suspect. (Conversely, if you want to hint at the change, you can have your character slip by being too nice...provided the evil party is cohesive enough not to just kill your character off as a "liability.")

Secondly, you're still an adventurer. You and your party have a shared goal of surviving and clearing the dungeon.

Thirdly, you can claim that the wisdom loss is "ever since that blasted portal made me a girl." Whether this comes off as misogyny, as complaining about a curse it put on you, or what, is beside the point; "your own fiendish graft is doing it because of alignment change" is not likely to be the first conclusion to which they jump. On the other hand, the cleric may grow weary of blowing a Restoration every day or two to keep you from becoming a drooling simpleton, and may investigate. Which could lead to discovering the source is the graft, or that your alignment has changed, or both.

Finally, a downside: your character is cursed to be horrified by the idea of changing alignments back. I am not sure if atonement works on an unwilling target.