The Order of the Stick

Well, you could have an Evil character/spirit/whatever possess a Good character and try to imitate him, while the rest of the party must realize what's happening from the small mistakes the bad guy makes.

It could be an interesting plotline, if you setup and foreshadow things in advance enough to avoid the "read the DM's mind or fail" syndrome. With the player's cooperation, you could even do it with a PC as the center.

Well I did have a player get a forced alignment change during a campaign of mine. It happened as a result of being knocked out by the explosive death of a major villain who wore a possessed armor. The character went from neutral to evil. He managed it well though because he was the best friend of another player in the group, a lord of a castle whom he supported and worked his hardest to increase in power and fame across the realm, so he took that alignment change to make him change his methods to be more ruthless and behind his lord friend's back, but still completely supportive of him. So he hired mercenaries to kill his lord's opponents or spread negative propaganda about them, increased taxes without his knowledge, during the sack of a city (there was a war going on) went on his own to rob a wealthy store and take that money to his lord's treasury, and so on.

Oh, and also at some point he accidentally got his lord possessed by an evil dragon by working together with an evil cult.

There are some things that you only ask/allow a highly experienced and skillful role player to role play. Sometimes you have to carefully match the player and the character.

Edited by DeMarquis on May 4th 2021 at 2:32:01 PM

All this talk has me imagining OOTS as an actual D&D campaign; kind of makes me curious how the players would be out-of-character in contrast to the way they play their characters. It's easy enough to see, say, Roy having a player who acts a lot like his character, for example, while Elan's player early on might have been annoying much more on purpose than the character, who was never anything except well-meaning but insensitive.

I guess that would make Thor the GM, but a GM who only communicates through one player is definitely obtuse for the sake of being obtuse, and he probably received the role from someone else after Durkula's defeat and before Durkon's ressurection.

Nah, that can easily be covered by a quick handwave. "Okay, Thor tells Durkon all this, and then he tells all of you." If there's an actual secret they can do notes, but for the most part Durkon is perfectly open with his party.

I would envision Elan's player as the same person being asked to play Nale (in the first dungeon) and Tarquin when the party meets him. Thor is an NPC, not a DMPNC. Miko was a temporary player/DMNPC.

I imagine Belkar's player must have eventually started getting more into engaging with the story and roleplaying side of the game, but rather than pull a 180 on their firmly-established murderhobo or outright change character have been giving him a relatively subtle growth arc.

And the Familicide arc was the DM's attempt to reign in V's player's increasing ill will towards the other players by showing the bad side of trying to solo the game.

Oh, yeah, I can totally imagine thag sort of thing coming from when the DM had enough of saying "no" and decides to bring out the monkey's paw instead.

Maybe this is a difference in philosophy, but I don't think I would ever introduce something like the familicide arc without the player's consent. Not unless they are such an exceptional roleplayer that I can count on them to react exactly as I anticipate. It's the kind of plot device that can irrevocably break a campaign.

Really the entire Soul Splice arc doesn't work as something that would actually happen in a D&D game even ignoring alignment issues. It gives far too much narrative and story influence power to one specific player. Like, V could have solved the entire damn plot if she were smarter and luckier. Imagine actually being part of a D&D group where one player gets to be God for a bit. It would be boring at best. At worst it would be infuriating. The comic plays a bit fast and loose with D&D but I think most of it could theoretically work as an actual campaign with a bit of artistic license. But that bit just flat out makes no sense.

Edited by Kostya on May 4th 2021 at 8:46:37 AM

It could be a solo session. I think I've heard about people doing those to flesh stuff out or when no one shows. And then, when things go to pieces and the DM offers to make the whole thing non-canon, the player decides that no, they'll keep the consequences as a sign of their growth.

V's original player permanently left the campaign in-between arcs. V has been a DMPC ever since; they've started listening to the other P Cs' tactical suggestions more because the DM doesn't want to overrule the players, but the "they might be temporarily yanked to Hell by fiends at any moment" thing is there as a balancing device to prevent the party becoming overly dependent.

I like that idea too. I've actually been discussing something like that with my DM regarding a character with a decidedly evil secret objective that I was having trouble roleplaying.

Edited by johnnye on May 4th 2021 at 8:56:55 AM

Right, we still have two more times of that. I wonder if we might be approaching one of them now.

I still think there’s another shoe that’s going to drop regarding what powers the fiends have over V. The same general thing happening two more times now that we’re expecting it seems too repetetive as a story element.

If the goal was just “remove V from the fight at crucial moments”, Qarr could have just let Z send V to the Demiplane of Extremely Painful Torture (rather than the Plane of Ranch Dressing) during the fight in the Empire of Blood, like Z wanted. V would have been permanently out of the picture, and the team wouldn’t have had time to recruit a new high-level wizard even if they could find one. Qarr deliberately prevented that instead, as part of his work for the fiends.

That tells me the fiends want something more from V than inaction.

Edited by Galadriel on May 4th 2021 at 12:14:28 PM

V (and ourselves) will find out what that is with the second occurrence, and then the prospect of the Fiends succeeding in whatever their plan is with the third occurrence will be milked for all the drama it can provide.

"Not killing V" also syncs just fine with their stated goals. They wanted the struggle for the gates to continue, not for the Order to suffer an irrecoverable loss.

Now it is down to the last gate and their plans will have to come to conclusion. We don't know what exactly that is, so we can't say for certain. They didn't KO V during the struggle vs vampires, so gods unmaking the world is not their target, but that's just one eclusion out of a wide field of possibilities.

They did describe Hel's plan stalling with some regret as the gods not doing their job for them, so they might want the world to be unmade.

Which would mean either they didn't trust removing V would ensure Hel's victory with sufficient likelihood to call them in, or they didn't have everything else necessary in place yet. There was talk of an artifact they were having moved, right?

So we can't even rule that out.

Edited by RaichuKFM on May 5th 2021 at 3:06:00 PM

They probably didn’t know about Hel’s plan when they set things up, as she was keeping the entire thing secret until the Godsmoot.

There is the question of why if they were okay with Hel’s plan they didn’t pull V during any of the fights to stop it, but I can easily explain that as V never being as critical as they were when trying to stop Roy destroying the gate. Pulling V wouldn’t have guaranteed Hel’s success. That and why they probably regard Hel’s success as a win for themselves their own plan is probably a bigger win, so that’s what they really want.

Edited by Silasw on May 5th 2021 at 8:10:12 PM

The way I could explain a forced alignment change relatively seriously, would be essentially "your shoulder angel dies":

• GM: You know the part of you that says "No wait, this will hurt people" when you have some ideas? It's silent now.

So basically your character becomes a psychopath, but if you’ve got a high-wisdom you’re a high functioning one?

Also, the comic has done that gag.[1]

Edited by Silasw on May 5th 2021 at 8:32:12 PM

The Good Angel, Bad Angel routine is never really played straight, and hasn't been for some time.

The shoulder angel was a metaphor here.

Edited by Medinoc on May 5th 2021 at 9:42:21 PM

Hmm, now I'm imagining playing a character whose alignment changed without them noticing, and keeps being baffled that people don't like their monstrous ideas.