Latest / Bards and Barrels / S3 Ep 5 - Alignment

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S3 Ep 5 - Alignment · Bards and Barrels

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to another episode of Bumbards and Variables.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Today, alignments.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: What are they and why should you care?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like surround time crack.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be like Donkey and be like, let's do that again.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: There was the opening crack.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: Brett here with along with Phil and Ross, and we're talking today, guys, about alignments.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: What are those?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, how do you identify?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that was that episode.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Good night, everybody.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I feel like the most most frequent thing that gets thrown out there, right?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: When we talk about alignments, is like moral compass, which is half true.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: So this is the thing that if you start joining Facebook groups for Dungeons and Dragons or Instagram groups or like follow pages, you're gonna start to see these little picture charts.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: And you're gonna see like three by a three by three row like grids, grid of people, and it's gonna be like lawful neutral, chaotic evil, and it's gonna show different pictures.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: You'll you'll come across those pretty quickly.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: They're pretty popular.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Tons, yes.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, essentially, what we're doing here is we're taking a little bit deeper dive into how you build your character.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and one of the choices that you're gonna make that we we kind of glossed, I think we mentioned it in our original character build episode, but we didn't talk deeply about it, was this alignment.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you do get to pick whatever alignment you want, pending what your DM says.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: You should you always should work this out with your DM.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, like Phil mentioned, that it's a moral compass.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: So this is like what's helping you decide or helping you what what helps you drive your decision making.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I think uh I describe it kind of as two well, the player's handbook I think describes it as two pieces, but you can think of it as like that moral compass is one component of it.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Good, evil, and obviously Switzerland, right?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Neutral is in there, right?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's it exists.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um the other component of that is kind of your personal attitude.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So what is your attitude towards society?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: An order, are you lawful, but uh rule follower like a paladin?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um are you chaotic?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, let's just see what happens with the world, or neutral, once again, because if you're one of those people that puts all threes on the scale of one to five, you can be a neutral neutral.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_02: A true neutral.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: A true neutral so that's the first part of this, right in the middle.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: But then you go on the other side of this description of alignment, and you get good, neutral, and evil.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: So those are a little bit more obvious based on what they say.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like, are you doing things for good reasons?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_02: Are you doing them just to see how things happen, or for malicious evil reasons?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: There is a little caveat at this point, and that is that most as in 95% of characters are not evil characters.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's very rare to find evil characters because it's hard to jive an evil character in with a party where they're not all evil.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you're if your ends aren't all going to the same direction, it's very hard to player dynamics are extremely hard with that.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with that.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're playing a good themed campaign, there are campaigns out there that are evil campaigns, and you're right, you're a crew, right, that works together to accomplish a common task, even though you might be evil-aligned characters, or you're out there to thwart or to throw out these plans against you know the realm, and then heroes are gonna rise up to combat you.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think there's a place, right, for an evil character to exist.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but some of that will be campaign specific.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then within being evil, you can have those varieties of alignments with being a chaotic evil or a neutral or a lawful evil, and those can go head to head within your party if you're having multi like evil characters in one party.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I will I agree with Brett because if we do take a look at like a lawful evil character, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: The difference between a lawful evil character and a chaotic evil character, a lawful evil character still has a code.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you could potentially be a lawful evil character still in a party of good aligned people and make it work, right?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whether your code is maybe you're loyal to this group of people, right?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: That could be a thing.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Chaos, it's like it sounds.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: You do what you can get away with.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: You want to see the world burn, basically.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where um when it comes to races, you can be any of these.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like race doesn't factor, playable races don't factor into any of these alignments, but when it comes to monsters or like a specific, like if you're talking about devils, they're almost always going to be evil aligned.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: I love the devil's demons um kind of vision of alignment because if we talk about the two, right?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Devils have a very structured hierarchy.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, they are lawful evil.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, demons, chaos, chaotic evil, just evil because they can be.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that's something that would have been really kind of more helpful to think about when we were going through our Descent to Avernus campaign is the difference between the lawful and the chaotic nature of each of those entities and how they probably would respond based on how we came in contact with them.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it would have been helpful too when we were an Avernus to as far as like picturing them.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because like the whole the whole blood war thing was very, very hard to wrap your head around because the reasoning was very vague and probably lost in ancient history.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Devils and demons fighting each other, but okay, why who's good, who's bad here?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean they're both bad, but but when you think of it in terms of alignment, it does make sense because it's the it's the order versus the chaos in that sense.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like which one should rule that level of of hell, essentially.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I hadn't thought of it that way.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: We need to go back and play through it again.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's not say we didn't.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's like three more years.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: We'll seep over into what we're doing, don't worry.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we may be back anyway inside.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Who's to say that Feyrune won't be the next Avernus?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: Dun dun dun.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: But speaking of campaigns and alignments, so one of the things that we came up against in our campaign, and this is kind of a a frequent occurrence, is having your campaign affect or influence your alignment over time or quickly.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or an immediate thing.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, which happened to one of Bret's characters in the last campaign.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: So Ari in our campaign uh picked up a certain object that immediately changed his alignment.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: So he went from I think it was chaotic neutral to lawful good.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, which was a very very strong change for him.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And challenging from oh, to roleplay that change was hard, tough.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: You did a great job, but it was a huge change.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like I didn't appreciate how much of a change it was be when you sent it to me, but then as I like started thinking through it and we got into it, it's like oh, I'm fighting what I've been doing the last however many sessions because of this one little change.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: You look very pensive over there.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm just thinking now, because for whatever reason, I completely forgot that Arnie like went all the way to lawful coon.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: How the hell is he gonna be a used car salesman?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: I call bullshit on that.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you'll find out more when we come back.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't believe that one bit.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think he can sell cars worth of shit.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's like this is a beautiful 1968 Cadillac, it only needs a new transmission, it's fine.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's a difference between the owner of a dealership and the salesman.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: The actual salesman.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you'll learn more.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm excited.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: No one knows where Thorne is.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk about the other side of that, right?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So a long change.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think that Ross, your character potentially had the opportunity, or maybe not opportunity, but um there was potential impact for something like that with your paladin.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: So uh several times you and I had the discussion of a, you know, what what if Thorne made a a deal with a demon to get information?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like doing something bad for a good end, essentially, right?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: But the the the conversation we had over and over again, so he's a lawful good character.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like if he's doing that, A, does he become an oath breaker?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because that is very staunchly against the oath that he had, he's an oath of devotion, very toe the line, does that get him off that and and cause him to become an oath breaker, which is a lawful evil version of the paladin?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or the other thing is, is like, and something that we probably need to talk about is like fighting that alignment.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, do the ends justify the means in his mind, which is more of a lawful neutral or chaotic neutral type idea.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, is there a shift or something like that in there?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: I you and I had lots of deep conversations about what could have happened there, and it never came to fruition because I didn't make a deal.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but it came close enough that we had to have the conversation about like what if in a moment I do something stupid.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: And this is the weird thing about alignments is you can be different alignments in the moment.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: But when you're picking an alignment, it's your baseline, I would say.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's when you're by yourself in the dark, who are you?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's this type of question is yeah, are you gonna watch the world burn or are you going to uh crack down on lawbreakers?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I and I think this is this is like deep down human, human, like this is what being a human being, uh not human as in DD, but being a human human real life.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because what it boils down to is it is exactly what you just said.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's like given the moment, given the situation, you're not always perfectly good towing the straight and arrow.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if somebody, if something would, if somebody would harm my kid, I would go lawful evil on on their shit.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Hands down.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: We would all do that for our kids.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: Chaotic evil.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: But but I I think that's and maybe that's really what the intention of the alignment was for in the first place, is like, yeah, you pick one, but the reality is you never necessarily stick to it a hundred percent of the time.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where Phil, on our last episode talking about wizards, you made a wizard that had a little bit of a question mark on where their alignment would fall.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it kind of depends where you pick this character up.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh ideally, you know, when this character went to Academy, this was probably a lawful good character, I would say.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe neutral good, probably lawful good, though.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Followed the rules, was on time to class, read all the assigned readings, and then, you know, through this kind of tragic instance that happened in her life, made her start questioning more so the lawful side of things initially, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Became a little more chaotic, experimenting in things that maybe weren't by the book, but slowly I think starts to lose that good side as well.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it becomes kind of this, okay, well, the ends justify the means.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the ends justify the means, right?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it moves away from that.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm gonna follow all the rules and be a good person, to I'm only gonna do what I have to do to make you know this work, and slowly you kind of slide through alignments until I I don't know where I should land.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: I actually kind of want to play that character, but and that was something we were talking about before this is if a homebrew idea we were just spitballing a little bit was if you can have a sliding scale with you and your DM on your alignment over time.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like Ross and I have played Gloomhaven, and in that you have like your reputation.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And if you do certain things, your reputation goes up in the community or it goes down, and that affects else other things.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: Could that happen in DD?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Could you work with that?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then at like at the end of your session, your DM pops in and says, Oh, you went down, you went more chaotic or something.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Just another really good example.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't play Gloomhaven, if you have played Red Dead Redemption uh two, there is a reputation in that game as well based on decisions that you make.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Same kind of concept, it's just a little wider, wider net.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I will say if you want to catch a little bit more about Phil's wizard that he was discussing there, uh, you can catch it on our last episode about the wizard class review.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: But final thoughts, fellas, alignment.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: Where do you fall?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's character specific for me, very much so.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I would say I usually play rogues, so I'm probably uh chaotic good to chaotic neutral, usually somewhere in there in that.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: So chaotic good, lawful neutral, or chaotic neutral.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: I would never just play a plain neutral character.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I need a little more flavor.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, me.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I I think I would be chaotic neutral.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like a lot of my characters tend to jump off ships with an axe or randomly light fires in a pit full of sewer gas.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you never know what I'm gonna do.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: There needs to be an alignment that's just chaos, and I think that needs to be bright.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, for me, a year ago, I would have said all of my characters that I had created to that point were lawful good characters.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think the the black and white that I used to have with characters has turned considerably more gray.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: You're welcome.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: No, I have I can't claim credit for that.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was both of us.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, I I I think I think I've come, I I've certainly changed more to a like a lawful neutral, I think, um, standard on things.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: He's going evil.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: I I do have a question for you guys before we get out of here, because I feel like we have a couple minutes.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: What defines a person?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, like if they say they're lawful good, and lawful referring to like order, government, let's let's say government is an example, right?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you're lawful, you're following the laws, towing the line.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: But what if you realize that the laws were bad in the first place, and you make that realization are you lawful because you follow the laws, or are you lawful because you understand the laws are bad or good?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're still lawful because you care.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: I like that explanation.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's fair.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're empathetic.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like as good aligned, you would attempt to try to change the law to be what you think or like the ones you know are wrong.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like as a good aligned character, you would try to change them.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: My guess would be if we went and found different articles about how people define these, that you would find that lawful is probably designed is either empathetic or honor bound.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's gonna be the most common.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: I would say like any political activist would be lawful.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Also, one of the uh definitions that they even have in the players' handbook too about lawful is that that part of it may even pertain to like your personal code, not necessarily law or traditions.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good pick, yeah.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's gonna do it for this episode of Bards and Barrels.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: You can listen to past episodes of the show anywhere podcasting can be found.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at Bards and Barrels.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: We'll catch you next time.