Tag: alignment

  • Goodbye Alignment. Hello short-form personality.

    Goodbye Alignment. Hello short-form personality.

    Alignment is tired, boring and essentially meaningless in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

    Many playing the modern game trying to replace it with personality. Wizards of the Coast tried to take major steps towards personality play with their Traits, Ideals, Bonds and Flaws system attached to backgrounds. That system uses five sentences of 5-25 words to describe the personality of the character. Alignment also exists.

    Then, if the DM and/or the other players remember your TIBF and you play to it you might get advantage via Inspiration.

    It’s a bulky system that requires memorizing a lot of detail that aren’t necessarily relevant to how your character is played. The Acolyte is in the SRD 5.1 CC BY. Here’s a sample of TIBF for a lawful good Acolyte.

    I see omens in every event and action. The gods try to speak to us, we just need to listen.
    I quote (or misquote) sacred texts and proverbs in almost every situation.
    Faith. I trust that my deity will guide my actions. I have faith that if I work hard, things will go well. (Lawful)
    I would die to recover an ancient relic of my faith that was lost long ago.
    I am suspicious of strangers and expect the worst of them.

    That’s 82 words plus two for lawful good. But really, it’s just a few. You don’t need that much detail.

    Just like when you fill out that your character has brown or brown-green eyes you know there is more detail to the eyes than just that word or two. You can do this for your personality.

    That Acolyte?

    Faithful, Suspicious, Orderly, Erudite.

    Replace the entire TIBF system with those four words. Can you memorize a few words that describe how the other characters in the party act? Absolutely! Your mind was already taking the shortcuts on the way to do so.

    Then award inspiration when the character is played along their personality.

    You could build your short-form personality using the official background information already provided. That’s a great start. But you could also use a list of personality traits. Here’s 638!

    A character modelled off a favorite movie or TV or comic or book or video game or etc character could use their traits too.

    • Margot from The Magicians — sexy, strong willed, crass, loyal
    • Wesley from The Princess Bride — dedicated, adaptable, loving
    • Tasselhoff from the original Dragonlance – friendly, curious, brave, aloof
    • Moiraine from early Wheel of Time – determined, withdrawn, studious
    • Lan from early Wheel of Time – lawful, loyal, commanding
    • Awf, my PC in Lost Mines – persistent, exuberant, fearless

    The intent with short-form personality is to reduce memorization, reward roleplaying and continue the de-emphasization of alignment in D&D.

    Be generous with the Inspiration you award. Play up the personality. Just make it simpler than a system that might require 100 words when you only need three to five.

  • Errata for December 2021 mostly focused on helping your character be yours

    Errata for December 2021 mostly focused on helping your character be yours

    The semi-regular blog by the D&D team at Wizards of the Coast released today is from Jeremy Crawford, folding in Sage Advice and Errata updates.

    Four rules answers are shared, all about spells. The biggest impact on my games would be the clarification that spell attacks are not spells. This means Counterspell and similar are not effective against the consolidated stat blocks for monsters in the latest and upcoming releases. Also, Silvery Barbs is ineffective against Legendary Resistance, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The other two questions seemed to have obvious answers, but the clarification helps.

    There is a significant change to Drow, and that connects to most of the player-facing Errata updates.

    This new text replaces a description that confused the culture of Menzoberranzan—a city in the grip of Lolth’s cult in the Forgotten Realms—with drow themselves. The new text more accurately describes the place of drow in the D&D multiverse and correctly situates them among the other branches of the elf family, each of which was shaped by an environment in the earliest days of the multiverse: forests (wood elves), places of ancient magic on the Material Plane (high elves), oceans (sea elves), the Feywild (eladrin), the Shadowfell (shadar-kai), and the Underdark (drow). Drow are united by an ancestral connection to the Underdark, not by worship of Lolth—a god some of them have never heard of.

    Sage Advice December 2021

    Within the nine books that have Errata updates that theme is extended.

    The Player’s Handbook sees 15 of 22 new changes being related to Alignment. The most common change is “The “Alignment” section has been removed.” No longer are characters going to be directed towards certain behaviors. They are, instead, the heroes and anti-heroes of the story — unique and special.

    “The “Alignment” section has been removed.”

    Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (which is not only still in print, but still getting updates!) have similar changes to their PC-facing content. Volo’s also notes that Volo himself is an unreliable narrator with almost all of his experiences being confined to the Forgotten Realms.

    “The lore in this chapter represents the perspective of Volo and is mostly limited to the Forgotten Realms. In the Realms and elsewhere in the D&D multiverse, reality is more varied than the idiosyncratic views presented here. DM, use the material that inspires you and leave the rest.”

    Volo’s Guide to Monsters Errata

    SCAG has some changes to the Sun Soul Monk and the Swashbuckler that bring them in line with these subclass’s appearances in other books.

    Overall the Errata focuses on the concept that only canon that matters is what’s at your table, and that your character is yours. All nine books with Errata in the last year are linked at the Sage Advice update.