Immortal Alignment

[PSadlon 88]

So I'm sitting here trying to fit Pandora into the D&D Alignment and I start thinking "Why not the other Immortals too, stupid?"

To me it's becoming more and more clear Pandora is Chaotic (much emphasis on chaotic and proud of that fact) Neutral. She may be petty focus much of her abilities on entertaining herself and making the world better for her family there is rarely any true malice to her. Most incidents of true malice for her are triggered thing like her hissy fit over Adrian being hurt (good example of a mother's wrath). While people can get hurt she seems to do a lot of what's in her power to minimize the possibility though if they were hurt sucks for them.

Voltaire, I get a sense of Lawful Evil. "Chaos" is an anathema to him and he's pretty good at  following the letter of the law. That said his best plan for countering her was to murder Eliot (a Lawful Good) and his backup was to cause a total s--tstorm involving abominations.

Jerry, is a bit harder but think neutral good might be the best choices to describe him. He's got a decent sense of right and wrong and sides with what's right even when it's a pain in the butt but he's not overly hung up with the rules themselves plus he is a horrible practical joker.

Helena & Dimitri are difficult, in part because of the forced reset. They obviously have some sorta conscience so it's unlikely their evil or chaotic enough to justify anything they want to do. At the same time they don't seemed overly burden with the need to follow the rules or even do the right thing. I kinda want to say they are true neutral but I just don't know for sure.

[Tom Sewell 268]

But is The Shive into D&D/d20 alignments? TSR went broke and got snapped up by Wizards of the Coast after MtG and maybe the Pokemon card games sucked the market away from tabletop RPGs in the nineties. The Shive's really from the post-D&D era, and this is His universe we're playing in.

[PSadlon 88]

He's mentioned them a few times and from I could tell what I could tell his feelings on them were ambiguous. Still lacking a better system, it's what I'm using.

[mlooney 3,417]

I pretty much agree with your choices.  H&D might be "unaligned" to use the 4th and 5th ed middle ground.

[PSadlon 88]

Well most of my knowledge is from 25 year old rule books and net searches based on the former. My last real opportunity to play anything tabletop was in 1991-1992 when AD&D 2nd Edition was the preferred format.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

I never had the impression that Les Immortels were forcefully reset.  They just did not handle their own "death" well.

As for their alignment?  They firmly believe that they are doing the right thing for the right reason by tailing Elliot.  Even if they don't know WHY they are tailing Elliot.  So they are probably "good".  Or at least their players checked that box on the character sheet.

Their place on the Lawful / Order - Disorder / Chaotic spectrum is a little harder to determine.  We know that human law does not mean much to immortals.  And Immortal "law" appears to be laughably easy to work around.  So we might need to determine their attitudes regarding the ancient concepts of Order and Chaos.   Or perhaps we should consider their place on the Creative - Destructive spectrum proposed by the Erisian movement.

Quote

From The Principia Discordia.  Page 00063
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/downloads/Principia%20Discordia.pdf

The Curse of Greyface and the Introduction of Negativism

To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only accept creative disorder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to destructive disorder.

The Curse of Greyface included the division of life into order/disorder as the essential positive/negative polarity, instead of building a game foundation with creative/destructive as the essential positive/negative. He has thereby caused man to endure the destructive aspects of order and has prevented man from effectively participating in the creative uses of disorder. Civilization reflects this unfortunate division. 

Greyface is described on page 00042 of the Principia as a "malcontented hunchbrain" who deluded honest men into believing that reality was a straightjacket affair.

 

[Don Edwards 548]

On 8/18/2016 at 6:52 PM, mlooney said:

I pretty much agree with your choices.  H&D might be "unaligned" to use the 4th and 5th ed middle ground.

Of the people I knew who otherwise loved 4E as compared to earlier editions, almost none used the 4E alignment system. 3E's alignment system was much better.

(In 4E-by-the-book it's impossible to be Lawful but not Good, or Chaotic but not Evil. Bugger that.)

[mlooney 3,417]

9 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Of the people I knew who otherwise loved 4E as compared to earlier editions, almost none used the 4E alignment system. 3E's alignment system was much better.

(In 4E-by-the-book it's impossible to be Lawful but not Good, or Chaotic but not Evil. Bugger that.)

5th has all 10 alignments.  There is a difference between "Neutral" and "Unaligned"

[The Old Hack 2,448]

6 hours ago, mlooney said:

5th has all 10 alignments.  There is a difference between "Neutral" and "Unaligned"

Ah, me. That reminds me of the time I played a paladin in a rather silly campaign way back in First Edition AD&D (which wasn't called that, it was just AD&D). We all kept making various silly jokes, meta and otherwise. My own most successful one caused the DM to throw a pillow at me and was based on the fact that paladins were so snobbish that they would only adventure at most once with people that they weren't sure was of good alignment.

We'd been on three adventures. At the end of each adventure, my paladin had sold his horse and bought a new one. At last the DM gave in to his itch and had the horse trader ask me, "Why do you keep coming back for a trade? Is there something wrong with the horses I'm selling?"

And my paladin replied, "Yes. They aren't Good enough for me." (Due to horses automatically being Neutral in the game.)

Cue pillow to the head.

[Tom Sewell 268]

26 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

And my paladin replied, "Yes. They aren't Good enough for me." (Due to horses automatically being Neutral in the game.)

Maybe your paladin should switch to unicorns. It goes without saying that your paladin is a virgin.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

21 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Maybe your paladin should switch to unicorns. It goes without saying that your paladin is a virgin.

Ewwwww. They're Chaotic. Almost as bad as Evil.

[Tom Sewell 268]

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Ewwwww. They're Chaotic. Almost as bad as Evil.

Unicorns or virgins?

[mlooney 3,417]

26 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

Unicorns or virgins?

Yes

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

6 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

 way back in First Edition AD&D (which wasn't called that, it was just AD&D)

I thought the First Edition was just plain Dungeons & Dragons?

[The Old Hack 2,448]

6 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

I thought the First Edition was just plain Dungeons & Dragons?

No no. There was a reason for the Advanced part of the name. You needed to distinguish it from the original Dungeons & Dragons, which itself is distinct from Basic Dungeons & Dragons.

ETA: We had a rather mean joke in my circle of friends back then. First edition dragons tended to be... well, a little anemic. As a result we said the abbreviation AD&D meant "Absolutely defenseless dragons." (They got better in Second Edition. And this is not even mentioning Third Edition where you could slap class levels and templates on top of everything else they had...)

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

I still have a T-shirt they gave away at GenCon when they announced the third edition was going to be happening.  It has a checklist of all the changes, like no THACO, and one of them was about how dragons were actually going to be badass -- that one got the most cheers from the audience when it was read out! :-D

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

I still have a T-shirt they gave away at GenCon when they announced the third edition was going to be happening.  It has a checklist of all the changes, like no THACO, and one of them was about how dragons were actually going to be badass -- that one got the most cheers from the audience when it was read out! :-D

They got good enough that my suggestion of an Illithidracolich got turned down as cruel and unusal. (This was a dragon with mind flayer and Lich templates added onto it. In my opinion it would not have been impossible as the game has dracoliches (undead dragons with a load of magical power), illithiliches (undead mind flayers with a load of... well, you guessed it) and illithidragons (dragons subjected to aberrant 'hostile takeover', resulting in a dragon with a buttload of mental powers and face tentacles that swallow brains.)

Or maybe it was just my DM being unreasonable. I still haven't gotten her to accept giving my paladin a half-Axiomatic Dire War Dromedary as a mount. Grumblegrumblemutter.

[FolksyFox 0]

H&D; Lawful Neutral Evil. Why I say evil is that it is heavily implied that they were the ones to help Nanase and Susan awaken their magic...but that they also placed the murder of an aberration on the shoulders of two very young teenage girls, when they had prior knowledge of France's government to help them take out the aberrations instead, and simply awakening Nanase and Susan would've still tremendously helped in the long run.

They believed they were doing this for the greater good, as far as we know, but I hesitate to call anyone who decided that teenagers should take on something like that couldn't fall into the traditional 'good' spectrum.

Volty is Lawful Evil or Neutral Good.

Pandora is Chaotic. I think she's the most representative of the Blue-and-Orange morality spectrum that most immortals will probably represent. Her morals do not fit into the human world as we are aware of it. The most we know is that, no matter how insane she is, she still loves her family. Which is why Volty is taking a mighty big risk here...

[ijuin 572]

I think that Helena and Demetrius wanted Susan and Nanase to face the vampire because fighting for their lives would force them to emotionally "grow up" faster--i.e. the loss of innocence was a goal in and of itself, possibly because the vampire would be the first of many enemies that they would have to face. In other words, this was their way of making them stronger via the School of Hard Knocks. So far Susan has not had to battle anybody magically, but Nanase has been in a couple of important fights--the Omega Goo, Vlad, Abraham, and Not-Tengu, so far (ALL fights in which the enemy had shown an intent to kill somebody if not stopped).

[Scotty 1,061]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

I think that Helena and Demetrius wanted Susan and Nanase to face the vampire because fighting for their lives would force them to emotionally "grow up" faster--i.e. the loss of innocence was a goal in and of itself, possibly because the vampire would be the first of many enemies that they would have to face. In other words, this was their way of making them stronger via the School of Hard Knocks. So far Susan has not had to battle anybody magically, but Nanase has been in a couple of important fights--the Omega Goo, Vlad, Abraham, and Not-Tengu, so far (ALL fights in which the enemy had shown an intent to kill somebody if not stopped).

Yeah, way back around the time I joined the forums (which would have been early last year, heh), I had made a theory that maybe Helena and Demetrius discovered a plot involving Elliot and they needed to protect him, they might have either been close to resetting, or in the process of resetting when the discovery was made and needed to work fast to try to prevent whoever was behind the plot from succeeding, they may have chosen to awaken Nanase whom they knew had the potential for great magic, and meeting Susan and the vampire in France was a coincidence in their favour. As it allowed them to set up 2 Moperville residents with the tools to help them protect Elliot, Nanase they knew was friends with Elliot in the Martial Arts class, and Nanase would be likely to call on Susan for help if need be. Of course it did end up being Susan calling Nanase but still it seemed to work out if that was the plan.