Your Funniest Tabletop Story

Don't you mean Pragmatic Villainy?

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

That too, but the overall result to my character was Designated Villain as I never got a chance of actually playing evil. I was instead drowned by the responsibilites of being the group's healer, diplomat and legal face.

Srg. Dornan: Troper, what are you doing here?! Get back to your post!!!

So basically you were group's attorney?

Yup, you are playing lawful evil right :D

You could say that :)

Srg. Dornan: Troper, what are you doing here?! Get back to your post!!!

Well, my DM's been on a Lovecraft kick recently, and added some stuff from the Mythos to the game. Context: We're floating in the Astral Plane, atached to one anther by a web spell, when we go splat against a rock, which turns out to be a ship full of Kiothke (pardon spelling) space pirates. We try to sneak in, try to negotiate, and we're just randomly running around trying to find our stuff. We bust into a room full of guards, when a Shoggoth floats in and eats them. Our PALADIN gets the bright idea of feeding the WHOLE CREW to the Shoggoth, which does clear up our problem with them, to be fair. Why? Because he wants to tame it, and he figured feeding it would help. Eventually, we're cornered in the treasure room, where we get our stuff but are now boxed in. What do we do to tame it? A running gag, of course! We start singing "What is Love?" at it, and it's so moved it takes us back to the material plane.

Feeding people to a Great Old One is certainly an alignment violation for the paladin. Your GM needs to design fun (to the players, obviously) penance.

Nope. Paladin of St. Cuthbert, he was tecnichally "punishing evildoers", the space pirates. Our paladin's trying to become a pokemon trainer.

Paladins don't deal in technicalities. Feeding people to a Great Old One is evil (which is against St Cuthbert's alignment), no matter what wrong they have done.

... Shoggoths are a servitor race of the Elder Things, not Great Old Ones. As such, I don't think that feeding someone to one of them would do anything particularly unpleasant to that someone's soul, so I really don't see how feeding someone to one would be any more evil than, say, murdering said someone with blunt force trauma.

I bow to your superior knowledge of the Cthulhu mythos (and corresponding greater insanity ). However, I consider feeding people (by which I mean sentient creatures) to ravenous creatures (which I assume covers Shoggoth, since the tactic works) more evil than outright killing them with blunt force trauma, even if it doesn't do horrible things to their souls.

Well, I guess it heavily depends on whether the paladin gave them pirates a quick and merciful death then feeding the shoggoth the corpses or if the paladin threw them to the shoggoth alive to be agonizingly eaten to death. The former might skate by on the barest of justifications (particularly if the paladin comes from a society that looks at corpses the same way that Klingons do in Star Trek - namely, they don't care, since the soul is the important part), but even then I might be looking to ding a pally on the law/chaos axis (I guess there's an off chance that's a lawful act in certain societies, but I'm dubious).

Feeding someone alive to the shoggoth? That's a torturous way to go - at best, I'd be demanding an atonement spell, and I might just be taking the pally's player aside and discussing blackguards instead.

Reminder: Offscreen Villainy does not count towards Complete Monster.

Nope, we straight-up tossed them to the shoggoth like candy. As for why the paladin's still a paladin, originally he said it as a joke, but the DM convinced him to do it. the session ended before we could really asses everything, but he'll probably still be a paladin.

I believe it's because the DM's interpretation of St. Cuthbert is more "PUNISH THE WICKED" than "Uphold truth, justice, and Superman's ideals". I know that the church we visited had an alter made from the bones of evildoers, and lawful torture was definitely an option on captured enemies. He's really pushing Cuthbert's lawful neutral angle. Plus, he REALLY wanted us to try and tame this shoggoth. And we were fighting the space pirates, we did try to negotiate (to no avail), we tried peaceful solutions, and the shoggoth was eating them all anyway.

Plus, the world's going to end in two weeks, and I'm not sure we'll have time for an atonement process.

edited 15th Oct '15 10:57:48 AM by SigfriedWild

I'll cop to the 'greater insanity' thing , but it's less 'greater Mythos knowledge' and more 'insanely retentive memory for incredibly pointless trivia I don't even necessarily care about'.

And that would explain it, heh. DM fiat wins again (although every time I mention 'DM fiat', I get the mental image of a dragon driving a Fiat Panda >.O I blame too much Top Gear )

Which is fine and all, but Cuthbert's paladins aren't going to be lawful neutral. Which puts them in the interesting position of being verifiably more moral than their deity. The theological discussions must be fascinating.

Isn't "punish the wicked" a more chaotic outlook ? CG destroy evil, LG create good ?

Worldbuilding is fun, writing is a chore

Lawful's the side of things setting up the codes of, er, law, with accompanying punishments for breaking them. But I don't think "punish the wicked" or "create more good" really belongs on either end of the alignment divide. Law's just going to have more of system set up while chaos is more likely to wing it.

Lawful is about making, upholding and enforcing rules. Chaotic doesn't care about rules. Chaotic good specifically is ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight (when the rules get in the way).

Regarding the paladin-feeding-someone-to-something: You know, it's funny you say that - I once had a paladin do exactly that. Granted in this particular case the guy on the receiving end was getting Laser-Guided Karma for a long string of Van Helsing Hate Crimes. Wasn't significantly different than leaving a prison warden at the mercy of his prisoners, except with more teeth involved.

edited 16th Oct '15 2:55:02 AM by KyleJacobs

Honestly, if your DM didn't give knock your paladin a few notches, I'm concerned that he doesn't really get how the whole "be a good person" thing works.

Anyone who assigns themselves loads of character tropes is someone to be worried about.

Ah, whatever. The way the paladin is treated at his table won't change the way I DM and play mine.

Also, getting back on topic, on Sunday session I got my self as a DM saying "No matter how hard you try, you still get the feeling that three decapitated humanoid heads tied by their hairs aren't a much effective or harmonic music instrument."

I am merely an agent of 'random'. Because you know, the order is only inside our minds. Out here, there is only Chaos.

I believe most orcs, trolls, and goblins would disagree. Honestly though, the paladin has been doing stuff that might be technically illegal the whole session, but squeaks by because he's like a deep-cover cop, ferreting out deep evil. The DM loves complex stories and motivations. Though it is a bit worrying that my wizard is the most moral of the party, and the bard the most responsible.

edited 16th Oct '15 8:38:11 AM by SigfriedWild

Paladins aren't suited to undercover work, at least when it involves evil acts.

Allow me to introduce the Gray Guard Prestige Class :)

Srg. Dornan: Troper, what are you doing here?! Get back to your post!!!

My group we quite messy too. We had a backstabbing barbarian, a cannibalistic fighter and a demented ranger. My character (the aforementioned evil priest), the other cleric and the Neutral Evil drow rogue were the only sane and serious ones.

Srg. Dornan: Troper, what are you doing here?! Get back to your post!!!

Which makes me wonder...is it cannibalism if a human eat a being of another face such as an elf/orc? What if it's a half-elf/orc, then it's half cannibalism?

I am merely an agent of 'random'. Because you know, the order is only inside our minds. Out here, there is only Chaos.