Sup /tg/. I just got back from the zeroth session of a game- as in, this was the pre-session where we rolled up characters, figured out backstories, that sort of thing. There was one other player and the DM, who's been a player in two campaigns with me, but had never taken the reins himself.
And by cracky, he did something really clever. I've never heard of anyone doing this, so I thought I'd share.
(D&D 3.5, though that doesn't really matter for this story)
When we rolled up our characters, he told us not to worry about alignments. I assumed that meant that we just weren't using them, which is something I've done in the past for campaigns that aren't going to be high-fantasy, Good vs. Evil flavor. I rolled up a sorcerer, and my buddy made a barbarian.
Then the DM asked us to sum up, in a single word, what our characters believed in. Having already come up with the bare bones of a backstory about how my character had been looked down on all his life by "real" wizards and was adventuring to prove his worth in the magical community, the first thing I said was "Pride."
The DM told me no, he meant he wanted to know what my character's fondest ideal was. What concept, what abstract principle he felt the world needed more of.
After turning that over a bit, I settled on "justice." He'd only wanted equal treatment for equal ability, at least as he saw it. My buddy came up with "freedom." The DM nodded and told us to go ahead and do our skills, starting gear, and the rest while he worked on something. We were both experienced enough players that we didn't need any hand-holding for character creation, so we did just that while he started sketching something out.
When we were done, he showed us what he'd drawn, which was essentially pic related.
(part 1/2)
(part 2/2)
In addition to the alignment grid I just >1000hoursinmspainted up there, he included a couple of “typical members of each alignment.” City guards were generally Secure Just, doctors were usually Neutral Merciful, that sort of thing. He told us that just like “traditional” D&D is divided into good and evil, law and chaos, so was his world defined by these two opposites. He told us each to choose the alignment most appropriate for our character (I went with Neutral Just, my buddy with Free Just).
I asked him before we went home if he’d have really used whatever we came up with. He said he wanted our alignments to mean something to us, and that as long as we’d come up with something that seemed to be “what our characters believed in,” he’d have put it together. He told me that he plans to spend the week before our first session refluffing a few monsters so that we can start defining them on the Justice-Mercy and Free-Secure axis, instead of thinking of them in Law-Chaos and Good-Evil terms.
Now, I’m not someone who hates on the classical alignment system too much. It’s great if you want to run a game with objective morality and archetypal heroes and villains, and if you’re not doing that you can just ignore alignments. But I thought that this was a really neat idea, and I’m excited to see how it turns out. So, if you’re looking for a way to mix up alignments without abandoning them altogether, here’s an idea for you.
>session 0
More people should do this, helps so much to cut out the 'getting to know the world and other PCs' and get straight to the action
The alignment thing is pretty cool but its pretty obviously not going to work with more than 2 players, which is the vast majority of games, unfortunately.
>no alignments, just
>sum up, in a single word, what our characters believed in
Sounds like you're reading to move past DnD, anon. There's a whole world of other RPGs out there.
>just
>>46214284
That's pretty cool. Mechanically speaking, I'm not sure what it adds to the game, but I'm sure that your GM using these concepts as themes will give things an interesting spin.
i like lotfp personally alignment wise. aka alignment is dumb
your dm sounds close to making instead of alignment some kind of ideals system, a la a bunch of non 3.5 rpgs, including even 5e, but that wasnt the first obviously.
