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View Full Version : So...what alignment would this be?



blackjack50
2019-09-21, 09:12 PM
So my girlfriend came up with a character. It was for me to play in a 5e game (lost a bet lol). And now I知 trying to figure out where this is in the spectrum of alignment.

The backstory is this. It is an 11 year old girl who has an 6 year old attack dog she remembers as a puppy. She misses him as a puppy. So now she is on a quest with her K9. She was told by a fey creature that if she finds and captures someone she can trade their life to make her dog back to a puppy. And the more years the person has, the longer her dog stays a puppy. And the more powerful? The more powerful the puppy will be.

So. I have to play this. But I知 trying to figure out what alignment that fits under? That is evil. But is that chaotic? Or is the neutral???

Koo Rehtorb
2019-09-21, 10:41 PM
Has she done anything? If not, true neutral with aspirations for chaotic evil.

Karl Aegis
2019-09-21, 10:54 PM
Unaligned. Getting tricked into doing something so you get a desirable reward is what animals do.

False God
2019-09-21, 11:33 PM
The quest itsself is probably evil, since she'd be sacrificing someone against their will to a fae in exchange for doing something unnatural (de-aging her dog).

Does she not like the adult dog? Or does she just like the dog better as a puppy? When you say "remembers" is she an amnesiac or something?

I'd probably pick her as neutral evil. She's not doing evil for the sake of evil, and she's not doing evil in a "use the rules to her utmost advantage" (though she may turn that way later). But she's still doing evil. She may or may not understand that what she's doing is evil, depending on how she does about "sacrificing" the person to the fae. When you say "captured" do you mean delivered to the fae against their will? IE: no willing sacrifices?

The L/N/C really depends on how she goes about it. How does she approach the task? Is she cruel? Callous? Does she kill people who aren't "good enough" or who won't make her puppy powerful enough? If the fae suggests that *this other guy* would be better, would she go after them instead of a target she'd already caught? This might make her Chaotic Evil, since she's willing to do more evil than necessary to complete her task, or just because it's convenient.

Is she looking to take advantage of the contract? Is she more interested in long-term puppy-ness or more puppy-power? Is she looking to possibly game the contract to her advantage to get more out of it than was promised? This would probably lean her more Lawful Evil.

If she's just straight-forward looking for the best combination of youth and power, but not trying to game the system and not killing others without reason, she's probably just be NE.

(As an aside, god i feel bad for this dog, and so help me, if this quest doesn't TOTALLY backfire on her and turn her dog into a monstrous "puppy" who she has to then discover that she loves no matter how they look and go all Digimon love and tears to get him back to normal I will be very disappointed.)

DeTess
2019-09-22, 03:52 AM
Whenever I see a question like this, I'm tempted to just give 'chaotic evil' as an answer without even reading the opening post. I tend to be right more than half he time. So let's see how I'd have done this time...

..yep, seems like another win for 'if you have to ask, it's probably chaotic evil'.

In all seriousness though, this could go in a lot of ways depending on how you play it. Your character could be looking for the oldest, meanest evil person in the land for the deal, which'd put the child probably somewhere in the N to G range, but if anyone will do as long as they're powerful you're definitely evil. The quest as a whole is chaotic leaning in my opinion, but you could go about it in a very lawful way if you wanted to.

ezekielraiden
2019-09-22, 04:00 AM
Does she actually understand the evil of what she's doing? A child is extremely easily fooled. We don't try young children for adult crimes for this exact reason. If she is meaningfully deceived, or simply lacks the faculties to understand the wrongness of what she's doing, she's TN or simply lacks alignment at all. If she actually understands that a person will suffer, probably permanently, for her benefit and she just doesn't care, the action is Evil--and may end up being her "start of darkness" as it were.

It very much sounds like this child lacks the faculties to make proper moral judgments.

blackjack50
2019-09-22, 07:43 AM
True neutral seems to make sense based on argument. The kid isn稚 doing evil knowingly. Which I think is the kicker. I知 not excited to play this character lol. Fortunately it is just a 3 shot. Lol.

Anymage
2019-09-22, 09:09 AM
Unaligned if she doesn't really grasp what's going on. If she makes bad people go away to make her puppy feel better, there's a good argument that she doesn't understand what "go away" really entails. (Also, children can have very strange ideas of what "bad people" means.) She's still a danger that needs to be stopped, but she doesn't ping Detect Evil unless there's something residual from her deal with the archfey.

If she understands that other people are being hurt and just doesn't care, evil. Not giving a toss that what you're doing is hurting others is pretty much definitionally evil.

Mystral
2019-09-22, 10:25 AM
So my girlfriend came up with a character. It was for me to play in a 5e game (lost a bet lol). And now I知 trying to figure out where this is in the spectrum of alignment.

The backstory is this. It is an 11 year old girl who has an 6 year old attack dog she remembers as a puppy. She misses him as a puppy. So now she is on a quest with her K9. She was told by a fey creature that if she finds and captures someone she can trade their life to make her dog back to a puppy. And the more years the person has, the longer her dog stays a puppy. And the more powerful? The more powerful the puppy will be.

So. I have to play this. But I知 trying to figure out what alignment that fits under? That is evil. But is that chaotic? Or is the neutral???

11 year old human children are almost always neutral, and also not suitable as player characters.

denthor
2019-09-22, 10:43 AM
If the girl does nothing no change. The fey is tempting. You get to decide if you want to:

Do it
Ignore it
Say to hard a task
You do not even have the dog at this point.

Actions provide the alignment. Right now you get to choose after the fact your actions have chosen for you.

Satinavian
2019-09-23, 03:15 AM
11 year old human children are almost always neutral, and also not suitable as player characters.
11 year old humans are old enough to know that sacrificing other people is bad.

So evil it is. There is no clear marker for lawful vs. caotic.

blackjack50
2019-09-23, 11:12 AM
11 year old human children are almost always neutral, and also not suitable as player characters.

Yea. That痴 why I知 not happy lol. A bet is a bet :(

MoiMagnus
2019-09-23, 12:31 PM
1) Even though you lost a bet, that does not allow you to play a character which would make the game uninteresting (unless the DM is your girlfriend and there is no other player), as the other peoples around the table didn't lose a bet, from what I know. Which mean you should avoid being too much of a 11 years old while you play her. (You can still keep kid-like reaction for comical effect). Similarly, you should avoid being "stupid evil" kind of alignment.

2) The default alignment of this character is Neutral Evil, however, you can pretty much change this RP to whatever you want. If you want to play a good aligned character, just RP her as "I want to make the life of my dog better" and "I want to find an evil creature/person to sacrifice so that no innocent is harmed".

CombatBunny
2019-09-23, 12:51 PM
Not good idea to underestimate a child. At that age, children have already a very good grasp of what is good and what is wrong. Tell any kid that if she helps you to lure someone for kidnapping, you will give her a treat, there is no way that the kid doesn't realizes that it is an evil action, even if she doesn't know what will you do with the victim afterwards.

So, neutral-evil.

Keltest
2019-09-23, 12:53 PM
As a rule of thumb, the answer to any "what alignment would this action be in a vacuum?" question is going to be "whatever you want it to be." If its sufficiently unclear that you have to ask, theres generally enough room for you to pick any answer and play the character in that way.

False God
2019-09-23, 03:26 PM
11 year old humans are old enough to know that sacrificing other people is bad.

So evil it is. There is no clear marker for lawful vs. caotic.

I'm really surprised the number of folks giving children a pass on alignment.

I've known some pretty darn evil children. They may not have a grasp on specific morality systems, but they certainly understand what brings other people pain and what brings them pleasure. When the pain of others brings them pleasure (or at least indifference) you've got an arguably NE child. Possibly CE if "others pain" and "personal pleasure" line up more often than not.

Jay R
2019-09-23, 06:27 PM
That will be determined by her choices, and you haven't given us enough information on those.

If she is willing to capture anybody available to be sacrificed for her dog, she is evil. If she's looking for a criminal or individual who has earned death, then maybe she's Neutral. If she is looking for somebody who wants to volunteer his or her life in a good cause, she might even be Good.

Note that if she found an old, dying dwarf in the Order of the Stick world, and offered that dwarf the choice of making the sacrifice, she would be offering him an honorable death, and therefore a much better afterlife with Thor. This would clearly be a Good act.

But the differences between Lawful and Chaotic have more to do with her consistency. We'd need to know about a series of choices to have any idea of her alignment on that axis.

Play her the way you want to play her, and her alignment should become clear.

Elysiume
2019-09-23, 09:19 PM
As a rule of thumb, the answer to any "what alignment would this action be in a vacuum?" question is going to be "whatever you want it to be." If its sufficiently unclear that you have to ask, theres generally enough room for you to pick any answer and play the character in that way.I mean...the OP said it was evil and they were deciding between neutral and chaotic. They were hardly trying to pick between CE and LG here.


Note that if she found an old, dying dwarf in the Order of the Stick world, and offered that dwarf the choice of making the sacrifice, she would be offering him an honorable death, and therefore a much better afterlife with Thor. This would clearly be a Good act.Not sure I agree with this. Doing a good thing for a selfish reason isn't necessarily a good act. It could be a good act, but if the approach was "I need to sacrifice someone for <reason that only benefits me>, might as well find someone who wants to die," I'd probably put that in the neutral range.