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Will I be able to play as evil character?
scarhunter
Member Posts: 2 Arc User
How does alignment work in neverwinter, will i be able to play as a player antagonist (evil, diabolical, and cunning), I was thinking of making some kind of halfling Rogue/Assassin-type character. Is that going to be possible in Neverwinter Online.
b:laugh b:victory b:angry
b:laugh b:victory b:angry
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Traditionally, Dungeons and Dragons has been a heroic game. Chances are, the PCs will at least be Neutral within the game. Evil and Chaotic Evil is usually left to opponents.
While that's true there's never been a rule that you have to be a good aligned character either. If you look at games such as Baldur's Gate or the original NWN evil characters were allowed although of course much rarer. There's just more work involved in developing a game where PC's are allowed to be either good or evil because it causes the need for alternative conversations.
Just because one is not "just" doesn't mean they won't partake in many of the "Heroics." Baldur's Gate for instance adapted the evil alignment into the storyline by allowing the player to decide why they wanted power and how they planned to use it. Similarly Chancellor Palpatine (Star Wars) was anything but a good person yet he publicly showed his "heroics" which were nothing more than a means to an end for him.
Personally I don't find a D&D game which limits alignment to good or neutral to be a true D&D game. Frankly it's the easy way out to not make conversations that don't sound too out of character for somebody doing actions for personal gain rather than heroics.
Mercenary characters are generally Neutral in alignment, not evil. There isn't a single edition of D&D whose core recommended playing evil characters. Most versions of Dungeons and Dragons, from the original on to 4th edition have mentioned that the primary focus of the game is to play 'heroes' who adventure, not the villainous counterparts.
I understand that they released supplements that focused on this style play, however, most of the information in these supplements are clearly intended for DMs and not players, for use in darker games. (specifically the Book of Vile Deeds). Playing evil characters is a natural option, but not one espoused by the materials provided regarding Dungeons and Dragons.
If there is an 'evil' play, then I'd like to see it considered, but not necessarily release material. I'd much rather have them focus this energy on providing a flexible and strong story experience for people of Good and Neutral alignments, so that multiple playthroughs of such do not overlap.
Controveraial and hard decisions like in The Walking Dead or Fallout 3 New Vegas
Also not everyone's a hero, but everyone's a player. There should be players for either side all working towards their own goals.
That's an opinion. I personally like to have a evil drow.
In BG it was a true hassle to be evil simply because the best NPC's were good in nature. Let's face it you can't play BG without Minc and Boo.
But the storyline did allow for it. I never said it was ideal, but it was not only an option but it was a true option. Playing as an evil character in BG wasn't going through a loving storyline while claiming to be evil.
And in NWN...the original campaigns obviously were pretty rough to do as evil...but I never considered the OC's very good. I did them all once over but as great as NWN was as a game it was only due to the toolset. I cared little for the OC's haha.
In the community generated content you could find a multitude of great campaigns and/or persistent worlds that gave great content and roleplaying opportunities for evil characters.
As for the difference between evil and neutral, that's really a matter of personal opinions. As D&D evolved I personally found the strict definition of good and evil to be too strong and overly literal. If you've ever read any of R.A. Salvatore's works he pushes that issue a lot.
Sure there are those who just want to watch the world burn but they are so scarce I wouldn't claim them as being the only ones fit to be evil...after all then how could they possibly find all those followers!?
In all forms of PnP if you go into a tavern and cast Detect Evil the DM will always say you sense something. It's almost never going to be an important person for the story...just a cruel person going about their "life."
As mentioned an evil person would be more willing to hurt innocents to get what they want. Completely true. But that doesn't mean that they won't control their actions.
The saying is actions speak louder than words, but in the case of evil in D&D it's more about what the person desires to do but will only do if they can get away with it that defines evil to me. Their the person who will stick the stranger in the back when nobody is looking but will put on a false smile for a bit of coin...and if their feeling especially nice not hold a ransom for more coin.
If we take, for example, Ammon Jerro from NWN2: He is classified as neutral evil, because he is willing to sacrifice anyone in his way to achive his goals, and does not even care the least for those he slays, even when it's his own kin. But his ultimate goal is nothing "evil" - on the contrary, he is trying to vanquish the true evil of that time, putting his own life at stake.
Alignment is defined more clearly in 4e. In 4e you have four alignments:-
Lawful Good: Civilization and order
Good: Freedom and kindness
Evil: Tyranny and hatred
Chaotic Evil: Entropy and destruction
One more is unaligned. Unaligned is not neutral. It is just unaligned and means your actions are independent of good/evil etc.
However, alignments in 4e do not matter much as they don't function like 3e. Your actions are not bound and neither are your alignments permanent. Hence your alignment can be pretty much anything and your actions can be opposite of what your alignment is.
There have been similar discussions in previous posts regarding alignment, you may want to read those as same topic has been discussed quite a lot of times.
EDIT: However point to be noted is that PnP discourages users to play Evil character. It is not recommended for normal campaigns unless DM specifically allows you to play evil character (and maybe modifies the campaign). I would quote it, but I cant find it now though I did quote it before in some previous thread.
I feel that Alignment serves as a slight game control. While I don't feel that class should be dictated by alignment (this includes paladins and assassins), I do feel that it serves as a way to keep players from running around, becoming evil warlords and destroying what would otherwise be a perfectly fine game. Unless a campaign is specifically created for evil characters, even having a single evil character can be incredibly disruptive to a party.
Even a well-played character, on a bad die roll to lie or on a very good roll by a PC, if he's evil in a party of good, is temporary at best. There's only a certain amount of time until the 'evil' PC gets caught, or has to 'go along' with the PCs long enough to have his alignment shift less towards someone more than willing to cause harm to innocents, to someone who takes a backseat in those matters. Alternately, the party's alignment could slowly shift to evil as they start to turn a blind eye to the evil character's misdeeds.
Now, I'm of the opinion that alignment is absolute, but characters are not. Good characters are capable of doing evil acts and vice versa, without shifting alignment, except in traumatic cases. This is what I usually see in R A Salvatore's books. His characters are not defined by alignment, but they'd still -have- one. Sometimes it's not obvious what someone's alignment is at first, and they do change.
I've run evil campaigns before. I do enjoy them, as a short-term change of pace. It's fun, to sit around and do something that you normally don't do, but it's a novelty in a game that is mostly about epic heroic adventuring. If this was set in Dark Sun -maybe- I could see it, as the theme for that setting is harsh and unforgiving, but Forgotten Realms is more about heroes than villains.
There have been many wars on this forums regarding PvP, Roleplay and pets but the longest of them was the 'Alignment war'. The fuel started last year with the interview:
This was archived in the history of this forums as a small failed ambush. However some faction mercenaries were mixed in the ambush and diverted the alignment war to a faction war.
Because the PvP and faction war was going on in the forums, the broken alignment mercenaries joined those groups in order to survive the drought. The drought ended with a direct brazen attack with this thread. It was a good fight without any resolution but all good things must end. This one ended soon (not to be confused with dreaded soon(r) )
Sadly, most of the alignment crusaders fizzled out or turned apostates joining other causes like PvP and RP elements like sleep. When all hope was lost, a desperate attempt was made to revive the topic and it seemed to some that it will sweep through the lands dwarfing issues like PvP, factions etc. The effect was so sweeping that it even made its mark in Drizzt hate - a remarkable achievement according to some forum historians. This was the first true war on large scale where catapults were deployed. (Catapult are the argument "kicking puppies" while referring to alignment in D&D). However, this was not the valhalla and unfortunately, the fighters had to end the war after getting tired and drunk.
However, we had made our mark. We even found a mention in forum hippies (who talk of peace) as alignment war. The cause was established! We were officially at war!!! Hence it was our time to attack other wars and divert them (those PvP and faction wars) but we lost many men (and women(?)) so we abandoned that diversion.
Qumi established a base for us, but we couldn't be contained in a base now, can we? We invaded deities and won. Next we took over character customization and had mixed results. Our warriors kept us proud!!! We brought gunpowder in our wars. We were now technologically advanced.
However, by now we had lost another warrior - Qumi had become a hippy and started talking about something called peace? Saying this war had been fought before? Each war has different bloodshed... Anyways, smaller war like Evil Alignment were fought but they always hit a wall - dev had said alignment dont matter. The remarkable guns "discrimination against bad boys" were a failure as they couldn't pierce walls.
Hence we gave suggestion to implement aligment to bring down that wall. Yours truly also entered this war along with few friends on either side.
Ever since seven large scale wars were fought, larger than PvP. These include the battle of Evil, 3x3 war blunder and retreat, Ambush of the question, and a few more.
Ever since then alignment wars are going on. Some legends say that alignment wars pre-date the birth of world itself.
hmm... the hippie trying to create peace. THIS IS WARRRR!!!! RAWWRRR!!!!
Disclaimer:- Not intended to put someone down but to just provide a perspective of oft repeated topic.
Well, I'm only really familiar with 3.5e (since I only play D&D through videogames, not PnP) but 4e alignment imo is a step down from the previous, dual-axis model. Where the previous model was somewhat restrictive and innacurate, in 4e it's just meaningless.
At any rate, MMOs thankfully don't have any real need of a solid alignment system, simply because, at the end of the day, you are dealing with humans that, unlike NPCs, do not need to be shown your spreadsheet before they can engage in a realistic conversation.
PS. Disregarding alignments, I've always had a fascination with playing anti-heroes from supposedly "evil" races (drow, druegar etc). And since drow and tieflings have become mainstream (because apparently half the existing D&D playerbase shares the same fascination) I guess I'll have to go even further into Mord- cr*p, wrong franchise:p.
Anyway, I would really like to play an illithid. I don't care who makes that game, but someone please do. Ideally in a campaign with a githyanki companion, for maximum hilarity
Evil gets to do whatever it wants, and decide on goals and how to carry them out. You need a DM for that. Evil writes the plot.
PvP is a central part of this game. You can be ultra evil to the core... and steal their hard earned loot. Awesome.
Can't tell if sarcasm or serious.
PvP (and party killing) has never been 'central' to DnD or to Neverwinter Nights.
You got the gist of their approach. Although, it was probably intentional that they would try to make alignment a bit meaningless in 4e. That is because of the criticism of "Detect Evil" and jokes about it. Recent games like Dargon Age, Witcher etc. handle moral compass quite nicely.
Tieflings can be good in 4e as they no longer are children of devil unlike 3e. In 4e, they were humans of an empire who made a dark pact for power, but that pact lost its meaning long ago. So for most part they are the same as humans. But their appearance is a bit disconcerting for peasants.
Drow, imo, shouldn't be good unless it is 'that rare drow' or until they are free of Lolth's control. But that is just my opinion, writers of 4e and devs of NW don't agree with me it seems.
Actually the point is that alignment system has become meaningless. So the content can be written freely for both evil and good people. However, official content may not put evil things because that is controversial. If can understand what this video is sarcastic about, you can very much guess the reason.
However, (hopefully) in foundry content, we can make campaigns as we want to.
hey Van! Yep, the war will go on!
Did you check out my history post? I couldn't find the recent thread where truth and me were fighting over alignment, do you remember which one was that?
No matter what, it's sadly decided that alignment doesn't matter in this game. I'd love to play a chaotic evil drow assassin and have both positive and negative repercussions for it.
Not meant to be though.
Himmelville - Are you easily frightened?
Click Here
On one side of the mountain, there were bones...
This is about factions and sides. Like Horde - Alliance
Will there be an neverwinter - bad necromancer boys/girls faction that you can join ?
DDO has applied alignments to their game. You can't be chaotic monk, for example. But they have excluded evil part.
Also, 4e doesn't have 3x3 box but just 4 alignments. I did a shoddy job to make a 4e alignment matrix here. But it is teh closest representation of 4e as you can get from me.
They said no factions (Alliance vs Horde) in NW. However there might be a potential expansion later down the road similar to how in some NWN PWs they had an Underdark starting area vs the surface world. But really that's wishful thinking but if they allow PWs to be created by players I can see the possibility of an evil side being created.
b:sin Welcome to the dark side!
(If you can bear with it, that is)
(pun intended)
I actually don't mind Cryptic's suggestion that they might not include alignments in the game, that'd still leave as much room for RPing an alignment if you want to.
Overall, I think alignment in D&D CRPGs is rather useless unless you have a functional alignment slider, as well as content that makes use of it. The only game I know that made full use of this was Planescape: Torment; a few more dabbled in it, but to little effect.
Factions are a possible alternative, but I don't want to see it in NWO, since for MMO it means full-****** PvP.
But like some have already mentioned I believe that Cryptic has already said no alignments.... but that doesn't mean we can't pester of it.
You can bet there are going to be a ton of evil or morally ambiguous quests made in the foundry b:cool
It's feasable that you could play through only evil adventures in that way
Himmelville - Are you easily frightened?
Click Here
On one side of the mountain, there were bones...