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Scalenex
2008-06-24, 03:45 AM
I don't know how many forumites here are familar with second edition, but the 2nd ed players handbook had a lovely section in the alignments chapter where they had a two part story where a team of nine adventurers went on a mission to save a peasant in some catacombs and then divide up the treasure they found. The interesting part? Each of the nine alignments was represented by a member. The group was pretty fighter heavy but I'm weak on the details.

My friends and I loved to quote excerpts from that amusing story "The Chaotic Neutral character also died because he decided to charge a Gorgon." One day I decided I wanted to run a game with an adventuring party for one person of every alignment. I put all the alignments in a hat and drew one for each player. It worked out okay, but the game fell apart from the difficulties of getting nine players together. The first session had eight, but after that I was hard pressed to get six.

The Lawful Good character was either a fighter or a ranger (I forgot which), he died because he was a little reckless. The player was one of our least experienced players. A wall section electrocuted those who touched it. Despite knowing this he tried to hack through it with a military pick (while he was at half hit points).

The Neutral Good character was also some kind of warrior. I think he was a ranger which in 2nd ed means you have to be Good. He didn't amount to much because he was the played by the player who showed up the least so he got passed around to other players who played him as an after thought.

The Chaotic Good character was a notorious metagamer and he came from a group of characters where people routinely stab each other in the back. He found out who the evil characters were out of character and just kind of spent the sessions being paranoid.

I don't even remember the True Neutral character at all and that makes me sad. I want to say druid but I'm not sure.

The Chaotic Neutral character played an insane Wild Mage. The character everyone guessed before we started playing.

The Lawful Neutral character was a dwarf fighter who rode a boar. He threw people off for a while because he got drunk a lot and once peed on a tiny fire elemental to extinguish it (I used homebrew "fundamentals" because the dungeon had an elemental theme and they were too low level for regular elementals). His actions elsewhere eventually made his alignment more clear. He was the player who was able to reason out the group's alignments without excessive metagaming.

The Lawful Evil character was a forest gnome fighter. Only one player managed to figure out his alignment without using the process of elimination and working backwards from everyone else. And he only had one tip off. When they were trying to figure out what to do with prisoners he suggested killing them so they won't come after them later. When no one backed him up on this, he quickly dropped the point.

The Neutral Evil character's player had the most fun I'd say. He played a Mage/Thief and he routinely would try to sneak ahead to the next dungeon room to try to find treasure he didn't have to split with the rest of the party, then come up with crazy explanations for why the traps are sprung and the monsters are mad.

The Chaotic Evil player played a Necromancer, but other than that didn't do anything remotely evil. He was trying to put up a good image until an oppurtune moment for betrayal came. For instance, she had the cooking proficiency and cooked most of the parties meals, though the Chaotic Good character's metagaming player found her alignment out out of game and never ate it.

The two things that made the game short lived were the difficulties getting a group that size together and complaints about my homebrew monsters being overpowered and tacky.

Anyone else try anything like this before?

Solo
2008-06-24, 03:53 AM
Yes, when my game was being DM'd by Tolkien.

ladditude
2008-06-24, 04:31 AM
I just super-loled.

Sounds like an interesting thing to try for a one shot...

Everyone randomly gets an alignment and then everyone has to figure it out for some reward...