Changing Alignment

This heading can be found on page 25 of the original DMG.  I suggest reading it closely.  The entire passage is anathema to player agency, the right of the player to control his or her own character.  It speaks of the player being in service to some deity and equating alignment with that deity.  It encourages punishments like a loss of level, expectations of atonement, sacrificing large piles of treasure and an assurance that the DM will make the player "acts accordingly."  It is poisonous, abusive and worthless to the spirit of any game that's about advancement, learning from mistakes and the players choosing their own path.

When a player starts a cleric or a paladin in my game, I ask the player to select a religion.  I don't ask the player to adhere to a behaviour towards that religion; nor do religions in my game presuppose a specific outlook.  It should be plain to anyone that in any religion, there are those who — religious leaders included — practice the tenets of the religion and those that don't.  Leaders and followers alike cherry-pick which parts of the holy writings they want to obey, and judging by the results, Gawd, Jeebus and Abbah don't give a good goddamn one way or the other.  My religions obey the teachings of history: it is  perfectly okay for a player cleric to argue that those not born in the religion are heathens and can't be saved (Presbyterianism), that anyone arbitrarily selected can be named demon-possessed, that demon-possessed people can be burned freely, so long as political power approves, that genocide is legitimate so long as the murdered people are "on our land," that rape of heathens isn't really rape, that theft is good so long as it's done in the name of the invoked deity, that those of the same religion can be first cast out and then killed, that torture is a sanctioned means of forcing a blasphemer to confess ... and that doing all this and CALLING oneself good, righteous, holy, saintly, heaven-bound and full of grace is proof positive that the speaker is honest and truthful.

As such, I don't excommunicate player characters for doing any of these things ... because every religion has done every one of these things, and most of the worst practitioners of these crimes are viewed today as virtuous, godly, pious, infallible and spotless.  My religions will excommunicate a player cleric or paladin for one crime, and one crime only:  betrayal.  Not betrayal of their codes, not betrayal of humanity, not betrayal of decency or morality.  No, betrayal of the other religious thieves, pirates, tyrants, autocrats, etcetera, who arbitrarily get to decide the loyalty of those who belong to their club.

So, as a cleric, as long as you don't fuck over your brothers and sisters, you're free to FUCK OVER everyone else.

Welcome to religion.

Now, this isn't a version of religion that we teach little children.  Little children are, and were, taught this version.  And this version.  And this version and this version.  All of them top ten hits in their time.  When we sell religion publicly, we sweep all that nasty truth under the carpet; we pretend that all those people got their comeuppance, or that they were somehow "just bad apples" ... while continuing to live in cities named after them, celebrating holy names in their name and being "thankful" that they cleaned out dem heathens from de good ol' New World.  Most every horror perpetrated in the world has been done in the name of some religion (and, yes, the Eastern ones too!) ... and then justified.

So no, the company obviously has to pretend that clerics are goody-goody people, except those occasional baddies ... and pretend that clerics calling themselves good actually ARE good, because obviously they are.  They said they were!

Then why, the Gentle Reader might ask, would I let player characters behave in this obviously horrendous way.  It should be pretty clear to the reader, from my tone, that I don't approve of religions hypocrisy.  Then why approve of it in my game world?

Because I won't morally judge of my fellow over their choice to commit a fictitious action.

I am not the almighty telling my liberated, agency-starved players what is right and what is wrong.  I believe that humans, specifically the sort of humans whose company I'm willing to keep, are sensible enough to recognize that the pursuit of extreme vice makes a dull life.

As teenagers, I remember, we took much glee in slaughtering hosts of creatures, committing crime, engaging in debauchery, bathing in the blood of our victims and so on.  I remember doing much, much worse things with my peers at 16 then I read about online.  There was no "online," so we had no overarching community to curb our indulgences.  We were a small group making our own fun, laughing at the suffering of imaginary beings, completely unrestrained in our cruelties.

That word there is the key to why.  "Unrestrained."  Like all teenagers, every day was a nuanced form of restraint against everything we dreamed of, hoped for, thought of ourselves and considered important.  Every day we were told to fit ourselves to a standard, obey, behave, work hard for things we didn't want, enslave ourselves to a clock, take shit from authority and eat that shit with a smile.  Our music was violent, our sports were violent and our gaming was violent.  The expression of violence was the expression of freedom, since the constant restraint on our emotions made us inconsolable.  I wish I could explain what it was to be in a world that looked every bit as much like it was burning down as it does now, only without the shallow but visceral support of social media, without the constant presence of choosable programming, without being able to tap a button and hear someone say the things we were feeling inside.  We were alone.  Except for those few moments when we, um, got off the chain.

Getting out of high school, getting into university, getting out from under our parent's thumbs, having the freedom to publicly pursue sex, drink, whatever we liked ... changed everything.  We had other ways to handle stress; and less stress to handle, to be honest, though I've often heard people claim that university was far more stressful than being an imprisoned child.  That's a delusion speaking.  In any case, our gaming shifted away from vice, because our access to the real thing made gaming about it ... silly.  Education made our gaming very different.  Learning gave us choices.  A sense of personal responsibility pushed us towards self-respect and mindfulness.  Players who still wanted to "burn down the bar" got pushed out of our circle.

I can tell players in my game that they can "do anything they want" with confidence that they will do things of which they want to be proud.  That's been the case for 35 years.  So while I say that a cleric doesn't have to adhere to a code, because clerics throughout history didn't, that doesn't matter.  The clerics in my game WANT to adhere to a code.  Their code.  Not mine.

And the idea that I should punish them somehow because their code doesn't perfectly reconcile with mine?

Holy fuck.  What kind of a shithead treats people that way?

Alignment Language

After two-and-a-quarter pages dedicated to alignment, Gygax adds a third of a page to this subject.  And then another half page to "changing alignment," which unfortunately I'll have to tackle later.  In toto, Gygax dedicated 1% of the DMG's content to alignment here; and later, he'll talk about it more.  I can't imagine any subject of less relevance to D&D; or any content that is a greater waste of my time.  But this isn't "my" time; this is the reader's time ... and with alignment continuing to be a central theme in D&D, with hundreds of thousands of DMs, I'm stuck.

Right off, Gygax states,

"Alignment language is a handy game tool which is not unjustifiable in real terms. Thieves did employ a special cant. Secret organizations and societies did and do have certain recognition signs, signals, and recognition phrases — possibly special languages (of limited extent) as well. Consider also the medieval Catholic Church which used Latin as a common recognition and communication base to cut across national boundaries."

He hasn't explained what it is yet and already he's defending its inclusion.  He stresses that the thieves "did" have a cant, clearly having argued with people about it, since he's anxious to hang the concept on it.  Thieves didn't, not really; the essential reliable sources suggest more of a slang than a "language," which we have today and which children still habitually develop.  His phrasing that special languages "possibly" existed doesn't make a strong case, either.  But most idiotic of all is that he thinks "personality" is a logical basis for a language, rather than the examples he gives of societies, cabals and professions.  But then, in his system, all the druids would be of like alignment and all the thieves as well.  As if this were sensible, given what we know of thieves, criminals or other groups that gather.

This language was supposed to be secret and limited to a few score words (again, obviously slang).  In places, the way it's presented is rather ridiculous:

"Druids could discuss at length and in detail the state of the crops, weather, animal husbandry and foresting; but warfare, politics, adventuring, and like matter would be impossible to detail with the language."

My, that's useful.  It's ever so important to keep those needful details about crop growth from becoming common knowledge!  Good thing there are no farmers around to witness the weather and husbanded animals — they might spill the beans.

Consider this line that starts the third paragraph:

"Any character foolish enough to announce his or her alignment by publicly crying out in that alignment tongue will incur considerable social sanctions."

Clearly, Gygax felt the players should metagame their alignments In Game as part of their character's make-up.  It's all so strange, it's no wonder the section has dropped through the cracks, as it were.

I feel an apology is warranted.  It's hasn't been my goal in discussing the DMG to cut into Gygax point-by-point ... but the previous content, spanning four pages, deserves nothing else.  With so many useful and concrete aspects to set up and make practical in my game world, I don't have any interest in devising languages that will enable players to talk about crops or inquire about the health of someone else of the same alignment.  Since when is openly stating in a public forum, "I feel fine, thank you," considered a subversive statement?  I find myself pounding my head on the table.  Any game-writer foolish enough to announce his or her dumbfuckery to this degree by publicly crying out in English words should incur considerable written sanctions!

I'll probably come around to the subject again, when reaching that point in the DMG, but language is very limited as a game feature in role-playing.  The game is communication, between players and between the party & DM.  Any information critical to the game that's stated in another language by another race, or written on a wall, will eventually have to be stated in the language used by the players; so the only real use of an unreadable language is to suspend the time between when the party sees the lettering and when the party discovers what the lettering means.  This is sometimes useful; but very, very rarely.  I suspect it is overused among DMs, as I've had an online player enter my world as a 1st level mage, taking Comprehend Languages as one of his initial three spells.

This baffled me, though I let it slide.  A low-level mage is a spongy punching bag where combat is concerned; they can't fight, they can't take damage, when they do hit it's a pin-prick.  Yet, with three well-chosen spells, cast at critical moments, they can turn the tide of a losing battle and preserve the party.  This takes skill: to recognize WHEN to cast and WHAT to have in one's arsenal.  Stripping that arsenal by one-third in order to take an expositional spell, which will only reveal information that will ultimately become revealed in time anyway, is like my saying you can have only three apps on your phone, period, and you choose one that will tell you when the bus comes.

From the choice, I must extrapolate that the "you don't understand their language" is a well that other DMs go to constantly, so much that it's desperately needful because the experience is so fucking annoying.  When I first began to play, we dutifully wrote down that we understood elvish, orcish, goblinish and gnoll, or whatever the hell else ... which played out as a redundancy whenever we would talk to elves, orcs, goblins or whatever.  "Oh, I speak (blank)," we would say, and then an ordinary conversation would commence, in our table's language ... which spoiled any sense of "specialness" that pretending to speak in another language provided.  I quickly understood what a waste of time this was; why go through the pretense of other languages when we were going to say everything in English anyway?  So I dropped it from my game, never looked back, and never had a player express any wish for me to reinstall the language concept.

Occasionally, I put something on a wall the players can't read.  It makes a nice decoration.  They know they're going to find out what it says anyway, so they don't fret much.  And if someone happens to have a scroll of comprehend languages (who the hell would waste a spell-slot with it?), then it's nice.

That's most of what I have to say on language.  I've said it before, but hell, never hurts to re-iterate a relevant point.

Policing Alignment

Let's take an example of design function and behaviour and examine it closely (this is part of a series on the closed blog).  For instance, alignment.  The base premise for alignment from the 1979 DMG, rarely quoted, is this (p.23):

"The overall behavior of the character (or creature) is delineated by alignment, or, in the case of player characters, behavior determines actual alignment. Therefore, besides defining the general tendencies of creatures, it also groups creatures into mutually acceptable or at least non-hostile divisions. This is not to say that groups of similarly aligned creatures cannot be opposed or even mortal enemies ... bands of orcs can hate each other. But the former would possibly cease their war to oppose a massive invasion of orcs, just as the latter would make common cause against the lawful good men ... it likewise causes a player character to choose an ethos which is appropriate to his or her profession, and alignment also aids players in the definition and role approach of their respective game personae."

You can read the whole thing yourself with the link provided.  This is the muddiest thinking imaginable, ignoring everything we know about emotional behaviour, even in 1979.  There is absolutely no logic whatsoever that orcs side together because they are all evil; they, like any group, must be expected to side together because they are all orcs.  Yet the general gaming public bought this idea; they continue to buy it, and argue its legitimacy, because it seems like a good idea.  We must structure our character ideals upon something, we are told ~ and alignment seems to represent an approximation of every kind of behaviour.

As psychologists, Gygax and his peers all get an 'F.'  But let's set that aside and discuss it strictly from a gaming perspective.  The design is intended to enable DMs and players to "group" creatures, presumedly to provide a better playing experience.

Shown here is one of the hundreds of alignment charts one can find on the internet that attempts to use figures from fiction or reality to specify what is meant by each alignment.  They can be found for Star Wars, world leaders, the Big Lebowski, Game of Thrones, Batman, the television show Community, the cast of the movie Pride and Prejudice, CGP Grey themes, Star Trek (the original series and later incarnations), the Big Bang Theory ... the list goes on and on and on.  The apparent need for clarity is itself evidence that there is a problem here.  Over and over we have to create memes that try to categorize highly vague categories into human behaviour (for that is what we're doing in every case, whether the depiction is real or fictional).  And in every case, just as in the example shown, it doesn't really work.  And how, exactly, it doesn't work is different for every witness.  Were I to begin a debate upon Lockhart's placement in the above, we could quickly find ourselves in an insolvable discussion based entirely upon our personal experience with what we believe is the accurate definition of a made up term that itself, in the rules, is no better than your position or mine.

In terms of player behaviour, this being the way the alignment tool was used, we're all over the map.  And attempts to nail down each of the categories are utterly subjective.  Yet in his original rules, Gygax spoke of the DM's need to "keep track of player character behavior."  If it deviated from the assigned alignment, we are told, "Such drift should be noted by you, and when it takes the individual into a new alignment area, you should then inform the player that his or her character has changed alignment."  And yet, according to Gygax, "It is quite possible for a character to drift around in an alignment area ..."

How exactly is this tracked?  I've never seen anyone try to break down one of the alignment fields into nine or perhaps 16 subfields, each with a perfect definition so we can plot the player's behaviour and be sure they're still inside the boundaries.  Ah, but Gygax says, "... any major action ... will cause a major shift ..."  How, I am forced to ask, do we delineate "major" from "minor"?  Except, of course, with the subjective opinion of the only person who counts, this being the DM.

In terms of user behavioural problems, this is recipe for disaster ~ and it was in every game that I played where alignment was used as a feature.  It doesn't matter what the actual opinions were; players would insist they were living up to their alignment while others would insist they were not.  And the more firm the DM would try to be in dictating alignment, the more the players would chafe at being told the motivations and limitations of how they were allowed to use their character.

This in turn created a long list of logical arguments for how and why a good character could "get away" with behaving cruelly or indifferently, while lawful characters found loopholes that would allow they to act selfishly and greedily.  None of this really matters, except as evidence that humans will find a way if they feel they deserve one.

The problem is from a behavioural perspective, what does the alignment actually do for the player once the alignment is chosen?  It can give me an inflexible standard to play ... which is nothing like a real person in any sense, and therefore becomes dissatisfying after awhile.  What with all the necessity of staying alive, adding alignment feels a lot of the time like having to fight the world with one arm tied behind your back.  "Sorry; I would happily ride on your back across this river, but I'm neutral evil, you understand, so both our characters have to die."  While an interesting tale for why we don't trust scorpions, it makes for a rather frustrating play experience.

And here is the larger thing: if we play without tracking alignment or caring about alignment, this doesn't keep any of the characters who want to use alignment for building their character to continue doing so.  It simply means that if I start as a lawful good person, I can change my mind later on.  Or with a particular incident.  Since no one is measuring my character's behaviour in a real sense, I can style myself as a fellow who floats casually between four alignments and that's fine.

Which means that alignment can still be useful as a means to group creatures (if you're going to embrace that concept) and for designing a personality ... so nothing is actually lost if we remove the policing concept.  The only person the policing concept actually serves is the DM; and only in the sense that the DM can slap a label on the player for "reasons."  The DM's actually running of the game, the presentation of the adventure and the dialogue between player and NPC can all take place without any change whatsoever ... except, perhaps, that where before the DM could say, "You have to fight the orcs because you're lawful good," the DM no longer has the legitimacy to make that argument.

I'm unclear myself on why the policing of alignment is still a thing.  It plainly is, because the community spends so much time on defining it.  Alignment itself, though psychologically ridiculous, and utterly useless if a writer wants to make three-dimensional characters, at least has the benefit of giving people two scales on which they can graph a character in the game.

I could argue this practice has led to an awful lot of misery ... but the reader would just argue back and then we'd be in a flame war, and who really cares anyway.

The larger point is that as a design concept, the strategy proposed by the invention of the alignment was never realized ~ and, in fact, the players did not need it to be realized.  Inconsistency makes a better story.  And something that is meant to be consistent, but cannot be rationally defined, yet is believed to be rationally defined by every person willing to argue about it, only creates obstacles to the playing experience, rather than obstacles between the player and achievement.

Several Bricks Short of a Load

I have posted descriptions of nalfeshnee, marilith and balrog on my wiki.  And again, this was work commissioned through my donate button, which can be found on the sidebar of this blog.  This content was made possible by JB of B/X Blackrazor.  Ask me about commissioning work at alexiss1@telus.net.  I'm open to ideas.

Regarding the post I wrote yesterday about the lack of details after decades of supposed game design.  I should like to make it clear that when I say "detail," I don't mean a story arc, such as the Blood War.  Story arcs are not details, they're examples of someone slapping an overused B-movie plot line on top of D&D monsters, which happens all the time.  Basically, take a WW2 film, scratch out "allies" and "fascists" and write in the monster you want.  It's exhaustively tiresome, boring and definitely not what I was talking about.

J'ohn left a comment about how "Pandemonium" is even "more chaotic" than the Abyss.  Let's examine that a moment.  The image shown is the original outer planes chart, that was purposefully used to explain how alignment ~ that which players were supposed to play their characters by ~ was fundamental to the universe.  Evil on the bottom, good on the top, law on the left and chaos on the right.  Pandemonium is also chaotic, yes.  But that only stipulates that they don't like "law" there anymore than the Abyss does.  The separation between the Abyss and Pandemonium isn't how chaotic they are, but where they are on the good-evil scale.  Pandemonium is less evil.  But there's no reason to think anyone in Pandemonium feels any different about a military culture than the Abyss does.  Why would either of these planes have any interest in fighting each other.

I also find it a bit galling to be advised that there a "many planes" and that Pandemonium is one of them.  I believe the phrase suitable to my generation is, don't tell your grandmother how to suck eggs.  I don't expect the young'uns will get that.

The chart above is, by the way, execrable.  A quick reading will tell you there are not four locations in Elysium, there's no logic whatsoever to the three planes of the "Happy Hunting Grounds," which is a racist thing by the way, nor is Nirvana remotely lawful.  Nirvana is not anything.  The "666 layers" of the Abyss is pure Gygaxian bullshit.  The meaning of the word "abyss" is the description of something that is bottomless, infinitely so.  The Greeks called it abyssos, which they used to translate the Septuagint Bible from the Hebrew tehom, "original chaos."  It is, linguistically, the chaos from which all others chaoses come.  So whatever a dumbfuck writer working for the WOTC thought once while casting about for something cool to write in his game module, the abyss was chaos before the word pandemonium was coined.

Pandemonium, incidentally, was a word invented by John Milton in the 17th century.  He needed a name for Satan's Palace in the middle of Hell, so technically it isn't a plane at all, and if "Hell" in D&D is lawful evil, Pandemonium is technically as lawful evil as it gets.  Pandemonium is lawful evil's comfort cushion.  It is lawful evil central.  When you punch "lawful evil" (10-digit number) into your cell phone, the Pandemonium front office picks up.

The "place of uproar" meaning came in 1770.  "Lawless confusion," not until 1865.  The end of the Civil War.  You know, the holiday being celebrated today.

Honestly, people.  The internet and google exists.  It wouldn't hurt to type some of these words into these search engines and LOOK SHIT UP.  In the very least, please do it before teaching me how to suck eggs.

I'm going to long way around the barn to point out that on many, many things, research exists and it will yield some tremendous content.  If the game company were run by just one scholar, just one, who was able to look at a piece of description and throw it back in the writer's face, we'd be farther along than we are now.

Dave Arneson rushes to share his genius
with the world.

A tiny bit of scholarship reveals in a twink how truly unlettered and dense, and unwilling to crack the spine of a book or two, were the inventors and "geniuses" behind the golden age of D&D.  Time and time again I am both stunned and bemused at the sheer numbskullery of these dorks, who got away with it because they didn't have to deal with real editors, experts or indeed adults where it came to slapping their works together.  The adults came later, out of the 6 and 7 year olds who learned to play the game and grew up as stone ignorant as Gygax and others ... who in the intervening years between then and now have continued to perpetrate the chowderheaded dumbfuck unschooled game culture, and to do so from a dim belief that they are upholding some "real" standard of some kind, as they puff themselves up to speak academic gospels like, "Well, Pandemonium is actually more chaotic than the Abyss."  Oh, really.  How interesting.

I suppose, in truth, D&D never had a chance of being anything but a child's game, given the grounding it had from the founding deadbeat fathers who birthed this thing.  There's so much contrary, discordant, willful, deliberately clueless and proud-of-being-unworldly sentiment in the community, misinformation that the pundits preen themselves on using to inform others, there's not much chance of improvement.  The community prefers to tout the benefits of "making shit up," rather than paying any attention to anything that anyone has ever written about the thing being discussed.  And yet, with all this talk about the constant and endless importance of making shit up, whenever I'm driven to look around to see what might have been "made up" about the Glabrezu in the last 40 years, I never seem to find anything.

I guess we make shit up, but we don't write it down.  Hmf.  Most of these dumb bastards probably don't know how.

Dead Thinking

By the time Unearthed Arcana was released in 1985, my friends and I had been playing the game for almost six years. I’m sure that for some players somewhere it was a shot in the arm, but for us it was largely a piece of junk, full of typos and badly worded design flaws. While some of the ideas had merit (notably cantrips), most of these ideas had already been put forth by Dragon Magazine and had been incorporated into campaigns by the players themselves.

I bring up the U.A. because it indicates the thinking process of the company that continued to sell products for the game, resulting in three flaws: A) they were perpetually behind in their thinking process, rushing to solve problems that savvy DMs had already solved on their own; B) they continued to perpetuate the original flaws of the game; and C) they were interested most of all in selling the same game over and over again, reworded or “reworked,” as exemplified by the 2nd and 3rd editions and the books released to support them.

I need not discuss the lag in thinking, as this is to be expected with a corporate mentality. Eventually, the game players split into two factions—one of which is clearly visible everywhere on line, which discusses the latest releases with the avid interest of pop fans everywhere. As this group does little thinking for itself, and is dependent on the corporation to feed it, there’s no need for the corporation to be particularly forward thinking. This plays to point (c), in which we see that all you need is a shiny new cover on the same old shit in order to sell product. Car manufacturers have been playing this technique since their inception.

The other group doesn’t buy product. This group doesn’t need prefabricated plastic-dungeon sets, as they know they can make their own with a few power tools and effort. This group doesn’t need another book with sixty pages of character creation, forty pages of weapons, eighty pages of magic items and sixty pages of spell descriptions (with two pages of equipment and one page describing “outdoor adventures’). Thus, this second group has NO IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER as to the commercial development of the game, which has become the only public face that anyone can see.

Having dismissed points (a) and (c) therefore as mostly uninteresting, let’s discuss point (b)…flaws and failures in the original system.

First and foremost is clearly “alignment,” the brain child of Gygax probably, who felt that players couldn’t have a personality without grafting some standardized graph onto it. I never knew anyone in the first half of the eighties that used it, with the exception of Paladins, forcing them to be “good” in order to limit the character at high level. Later on, I met a string of rather queer DMs who felt that it really fueled character development—though none of them could explain how, and I learned to stay far away from such people as they tended to pocket silverware and such. The public relations problem the corporation was having with the fact that the word “evil” was being used at all in association with a “children’s” game practically guaranteed that alignment would continue to have relevance in the commercial game—along with the clear understanding that parties should be encouraged towards the “good” path.

I have made an unending stream of players happy by merely using the words, “I allow evil paladins.” In fact, I don’t give a rat shit how a paladin behaves…having read Le Morte de Arthur and thus knowing that knights behave in all sorts of ways. Moreover, it’s just common sense. Death and decay are part and parcel with nature; the GODS, having some greater knowledge of the natural world, would have less invested in the notion of mortality than mortals…and thus what care they that paladins rip goodwives asunder and butcher little children? All the more meat to occupy the outer planes and from which to pick an army.

Paladins aside, the problem was made worse with the advent of the Unearthed Arcana, which tried steadfastly to establish character codes, such as those of the Barbarian and the Samurai…characters which, if we were to believe what we were reading, would be run more by the DM than by the players, forced to kowtow to pre-set character traits loaded with punishments for “incorrect behavior.”

Why should I, as DM, suddenly have to behave as the character police every time a puffed-up fighter wants to take a shit in the woods? Or, in the case of the barbarian, wants to behave rationally in the face of extreme danger? It was clear from the first readings that these characters were woefully over-supported with powers and abilities in exchange for the political correctness of their class structures. I saw no way in which this would support the game as designed, so I disregarded the new classes. I took some of their features and sprinkled them among the original classes (without restrictions on their use).

For about six months I heard protests from people wanting to try the new characters. After six months most of these people had had their opportunity to do so, in someone else’s campaign. Interest quickly died.

Free action, I found, was a better sell than character abilities.

Let me take a moment, here, to reflect on another failing in the character system as it stands now—and as it is loved by the commercial advocates of the game: the use of skill points to buy skills to create characters not restricted by class.

I admit, I’m not fully clear on how this manifests itself in the present 3rd edition game. I’ve looked over the tables and read the rules, and I feel confident that the system came directly out of RuneQuest, dressed up of course. I played that system as part of another hybrid, Middle Earth, and hated the system immediately. Here’s why.

It takes very little time to discover the most efficient way in which to use skill points, to create the strongest most efficient players. While there may be other skills available, one has to be an idiot to take them rather than the more practical skills. Our deviating idiot will find his or herself constantly demoted to the second rank in every encounter—because they don’t get +7 when they attack and they don’t cast magics enabling them to fly or what have you. Whatever the system, pretty soon you have twelve characters running in your world who are all exactly the same in their abilities. And don’t say it’s not true, because I’ve seen it happen again and again. If you’re the sort of person who is willing to pay points for useless skills, come on over; I have a used car for sale that you’re gonna love.

So what about character classes? Ah, that gets us down to the nitty-gritty at last. Let’s discuss characters next.