H for Hadarai, Frosty Frost Mage What Frosts Things

Posted on 9 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Hadarai
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

I used to think I was a pure simulationist. I wanted worlds to make logical sense first and foremost, even if that meant campaigns didn’t have a fully satisfying story or particularly fulfilling quests. Hadarai thoroughly disabused me of this.

Hadarai was an eladrin ice wizard. For a full description of the character, read that sentence three more times. He leveraged a few bits of early 4E that allowed low-level wizards to approach striker damage if and only if they stuck with cold spells. As such, he treated every problem as a nail for which ice was the hammer, except for the ones he could solve by teleporting to a place where he could use ice.

This bled into skill challenges as well. Hadarai found a way to use Arcana, the skill in which he had the highest bonus, to do just about anything. Lost? Arcana check to search for magic to use as a beacon. Trapped? Arcana check to use ray of frost to make walls brittle and let another player burst through them. Poison gas seeping in? Arcana check to use ray of frost to cover the vents. Diplomacy? Arcana check to use ray of frost to make ice sculptures to impress people. It got to the point where I started increasing DCs when a player used the same skill repeatedly in the same challenge. After all, the point of a skill challenge is to solve a problem, not have each character find increasingly ridiculous ways to use his or her highest modifier.

In-universe, Hadarai makes perfect sense. Either he was good at one thing and found ways to apply it everywhere, or he used one thing everywhere which let him train so much he got good at it. Either way, it was a wildly simulationist concept with a wildly gamist result. But it made things boring. Hadarai could have been played by a script, and the only thing that challenged him as a build was a monster resistant to cold damage. Nothing challenged him as a personality because eladrin tend to sashay blindly through the actions and opinions of those around him. He wasn’t a person, and he was barely a set of numbers because he only used 15% of his character sheet. He was just…there.

Hadarai’s player left town, and the character left the campaign by joining the villains (take a drink) as a mole. He came back some ten levels later and reunited with the party to fight the villains, dying valiantly by being…either eaten or crushed by a shipping container. That battle is kind of a blur.

I do want to point out that I’m still friends with Hadarai’s player. We game together regularly and he is incredibly aware of his tendency to give his characters convoluted simulationist justifications. This isn’t meant to be a complete burial. One of those is coming Monday.

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G is for Gloves Shieldbearer, Heavy Everything Specialist

Posted on 8 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Gloves Shieldbearer
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori

Often the simplest character ideas are the most interesting. Not everybody needs to break the mold with a celestial necromancer, or a cleric librarian with delusions of adequacy, or a cat person air pirate sorcerer (more on him later, though). Some characters just take the simplest idea possible and run with it. Some characters wear gloves, carry a shield, and are named “Gloves Shieldbearer”.

This can go too far, like the pyromancer Medium Rary. We’re not talking about that.

Gloves was a former slave who carried a giant’s shield and used it as his primary means of attack, defense, negotiation, and, presumably, locomotion. He was a good reference point in a campaign with a half-ton healer, a swarm of rats, and a turtle with apocalyptic ambitions. As part of a group specifically tasked with finding and stopping giant monsters he could work his way through most situations with skill and aplomb. When things were good he was even-headed and happy to think things through before acting. When things got rough he could intimidate with the best of them. And when things got really, really bad, his shield was also a chainsaw.

The biggest issue I had with Gloves was not unlike the biggest problem I had with Egan, which shows how amazing I am at learning nothing. The world of the Eight Arms has racially-aligned countries; there’s a human country, a dwarven country, and elven country, and so on, where people are free to move about them but each government and culture is based around a single race. As part of this I wanted to have countries for the elemental races as well because I liked what they added to the setting and it gave plenty of chances for me to have “monsters” live and act like “civilized races”. Gloves threw a spanner into that particular work by hailing from one of the countries I had created, and also declaring that humans were the dominant race there and the elementals were very, very secondary.

I was upset. I’m still upset; letting things go is not my strong suit. But honestly, this makes more sense than what I had. There’s no country of just ifrits or oreads, that would be silly. Logically, these countries would be dominated by a more common race, and the elemental race would color it. I keep having to remind myself that this is better than what I was planning and adjust the setting accordingly. And it wouldn’t have happened without Gloves. (Though I also want to throw an assist to a certain video game character with Greek-styled armor and a chainsaw shield, who may have served as some inspiration perhaps.)

Of course, this campaign had players, and players hate going by the DM’s plans, especially when they explicitly agree to said plans. The monster-hunting party quickly became the monster-friending party and Gloves got a lot more chances to work his verbal skills than his spinning shield. But in the final session he did help murder a bard in his sleep and fight a scary bird, and in the end that’s really what matters.

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F is for Felicia Elkin, Paladin Rarity

Posted on 7 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Felicia Elkin
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin

It’s hard to join a campaign already in progress. There’s a whole bunch of backstory, team mechanics, inside jokes, and tradition a new player doesn’t know, and they run the risk of feeling like an outsider at the table and in the story. I’ve had plenty of characters join in the middle of a campaign; many worked, some didn’t. But so far I’ve only had one situation where character joined a party between campaigns, and that worked much better.

Felicia joined the Eight Arms Ostensible Crafting Team for their second campaign, several months after the first campaign had finished. She joined with another character who is not on this month’s list. Both characters shored up roles the party lacked. The other character fulfilled their need for a tracker and wilderness expert. Felicia fulfilled their need for a beauty-obsessed front-line tank with heavily reskinned weapons and an unerring moral compass as it related to matters of fashion and decorating.

I realize this is a very specific need.

Felicia played more than a little like Rarity from My Little Pony: obsessed with looking good and making other things look good, against grime on principle and nature by association, but willing and able to focus and fight when things get hairy. She had a large array of abilities her player kept forgetting about (lay on hands, spells, auras, whatever she traded smite evil for), which made her really interesting and capable in a pinch. The only enemies that really gave her pause were, naturally, campaign bosses and, ironically, a crystal dragon powered by condensed pride.

I did talk about this blog post with Felicia’s player, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: I’m going to talk about Felicia.
Player: Is she the best character you’ve ever run whose name begins with F?
Me: She’s the only one whose name begins with F. So I have to think of what I learned from running her in a campaign.
Player: You could say you learned you could make an acceptable piece of portrait art with Photoshop.
Me: I’m not saying that.

The most interesting long-term thing I learned from Felicia was how well a paladin can work when her player isn’t a jerk. Paladins have a reputation as unlikeable because unlikeable people play them, acting as a high-and-mighty “my character wouldn’t abide this sort of levity” yoke. But Felicia functioned in a party that leaned very chaotic and a little evil because she didn’t refuse to allow other characters to play and because the other players didn’t refuse to allow her to be herself. It was Law 0 and Law 4 at their finest, and she’s a good example of somebody who can have an opinion without being militant about it.

Also, I learned it’s really easy to assign the seven deadly sins to a party when one of the characters has a peacock motif.

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E is for Egan Mospru, Second Keeper of Quaison’s Memory

Posted on 6 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Egan Mospru
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao

I’ve done a lot of talking about characters I liked. Let’s mix things up a little.

Egan was definitely the best character in his campaign. His competition was a barbarian who thought he was the living embodiment of the will of the god of mindless destruction; a summoner who though he was Russian despite having exactly none of the traits or culture relevant to the setting’s version of Russia; the summoner’s half-demon, half-alien, half-insect flavorless tangle of stats designed for maximum damage; and J. Jonah Jameson if he was an archer and also a bard. Egan, a fairly straightforward gnome, would have been an ordinary character in an ordinary campaign, but in this one he was a delight.

The big issue I had with Egan was his background. The campaign setting was still in flux, and I didn’t want to come down too hard on player backstory because I wanted to fill things out a bit. But Egan’s backstory was that he was one of the last survivors of a gnomish kingdom underneath the city where the first Eight Arms campaign had taken place, a kingdom that had recently lost a land cave land war with drow. It was challenging to reconcile with the facts that gnomes already had a country, the players had already explored under the city, and nobody aboveground had ever heard of either kingdom.

This is where the really interesting stuff happened, in that Egan’s player and I talked things over and determined that this was the backstory Egan’s father had told him. That didn’t meant it was true. With that we opened up a wide array of potential stories, as we could explore what actually was where, who told what about what events, and how much was lost to time or deliberately covered up. It’s one of the few times I had to give a hard “no” to a character backstory, but it worked better when we gave it a “yes, but” instead. The “yes, but” basically invalidated it on the same level as a “no”, but whatever.

Unfortunately we never got to explore that, at least not with Egan himself. Near the end of the campaign he died, one of the few characters deaths about which I feel bad. We did manage to bring him back as a vampire, which normally is really neat. Since we were in an east-Asian pastiche, he became a hopping vampire. And hopping vampires have half the speed of their base creature. Egan became a rogue who could only move at ten feet per round via pogo stick. He didn’t deserve that.

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D is for Danny, Whip-Wielding Bard

Posted on 5 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Danny
Campaign: Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant

Danny is a great example of the hazards of picking last. He was the fifth character in the campaign, and by the time we got around to him in session zero we already had a cleric wielding a bow, a rogue wielding a sap (back when that build was broken), a paladin wielding a ladder, and a wizard wielding a decade of experience in construction and remodeling. We already had the big four role archetypes, and everybody had a wacky weapon. That left only poor Danny, who got to be a whip-wielding bard.

Imagine a typical bard, add a whip, take out anything overtly flamboyant, and you pretty much have Danny. He wanted to help people, but not too much. He wanted money, but not as much as fame. He participated in combat, but in quiet ways that didn’t destroy monsters so much as irritate them. He sang, he spoke eloquently and not belligerently, he had the occasional unexpected trick up his sleeve for when things got dire, and every so often he found an opportunity to use his bardic abilities to devastating effect against enemies and allies alike.

He didn’t even have a last name. This is how typical a D&D character he was.

As a bard, I like bards, so I liked giving Danny ways to show off. I soon learned he didn’t need help outside of combat; I don’t remember if I planted the seeds or if he managed all on his own to get himself on the program to perform at the crime lord’s birthday party. He was also fantastic at incapacitating and frustrating minions, what with his expertise in ranged tripping and disarming. But surprisingly, he really only shone in two battles. In one he managed to shatter an enemy only kept alive by alchemy, nearly saving his allies while also blowing them up when he caught a table full of dangerous reagents in his blast. In the other he basically did nothing except sing something that became one of our favorite gaming songs. I think it went something like this:

“Everyone we like except for Crunk get better!
Attack the assassin we outnumber five to one,
And is slowed and prone and you guys don’t need me
So I guess I’ll go to a restaurant.
Tell me when it’s done.”

As mechanics went, the whole point of Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant was that there are enemies too scary to fight head-on and the players needed to think their way around them. Of course, this meant the players did a startling amount of fighting enemies head-on, especially enemies with a CR five higher than the party level. Surprisingly none of the PCs died. It meant Danny lived until the campaign suffered the ignominious fate of being cancelled when I moved a thousand miles away, just as he was starting to get in the good graces of a lich mob enforcer (take a drink).

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C is for Cid Viscous, Disgusting Slime

Posted on 4 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Cid Viscous
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

Yes, it’s a pun. There are a lot of puns in my character list. Mostly from one guy.

I think Cid was the heaviest reskinning I’ve ever seen from a player. On paper he was a shardmind (psychic crystal person) druid with a staff that let him teleport. But during play he was a man made of slime. He wasn’t a telepathic crystal; he attached slime tethers to your head and spoke through vibrations. He wasn’t changing into a goat; he was switching between “slime form”, where his uncontrolled lashing devastated nearby enemies, and “slightly less slime form”, where he maintained enough control to look vaguely human and manipulate his body more delicately and at greater range. He didn’t teleport; he contorted his body, warping it in ways impossible to predict or stop. He left portions of himself around instead of summoning swarms, he became the floor and moved enemies instead of pushing them, and he forcibly supported your internal organs instead of healing you with primal magic. He had a disgusting, intolerable, phenomenally creative build.

His personality was similarly interesting, in that he had an actual, honest-to-goodness growth arc. He started as an insufferable lone wolf, willing and able to leave the party in the dust while he solved problems and accomplished things without the party’s knowledge or consent. Over time he grew to accept his role the group, right around the time he became a campaign villain (take a drink) and the party tried to kill him. From then on he was merely obnoxious. (Get it? Noxious? Slime? I’ll see myself out.)

Cid was the final nail in the coffin for the “I run off on my own and do things while the rest of the party watches” character concept. Players aren’t allowed to do that in my campaigns any more, and it’s a large part of why I loathe the vigilante class in Pathfinder. But at the same time, he’s the example I give players whenever I explain how powerful and fun reskinning is (along with everybody in the One Piece campaign). Cid got away with things I wouldn’t have let any other character do by virtue of his design, like using an Acrobatics check to get through a solid wall by extruding himself through a monomolecular hole. Initially I was worried about this, but I changed my mind when I saw how much everybody enjoyed it, even if he was explicitly working against the party at the time. When people applaud your efforts to thwart them, you’re doing something right.

At this point I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say I think less of a character with no reskinning at all. I don’t know if that’s necessarily good, but Cid’s definitely part of it.

Cid was part of the final party in the Great Tower, so he ascended to godhood and he’s now part of every campaign I run. He changed his name to Velius, for in-character reasons I’m sure have nothing to do with how I refused to have a character with a pun name in my pantheon.

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B is for Bjarn, Borris, and Baerd, Dwarven Dwarves

Posted on 2 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Bjarn, Borris, and Baerd
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

We’re only at B and I’m already cheating, but I felt I really needed to discuss all of these characters together. All three of these characters were dwarves in the same campaign, run by the same player:

  • Bjarn, dwarven fighter. Those three words tell you most of what you need to known about the character. He didn’t last long enough to really leave his mark on the campaign.
  • Baerd, dwarven fighter/runepriest. Beard was amazing at getting into trouble willingly and surviving it, usually through steady and high but not massive damage. His character life has a defined beginning and end as he only existed during the gaiden, but considering how he complained about his build at every opportunity I don’t think he minded.
  • Borris, dwarven ???. Borris started off as a warlock, but changed powers and classes pretty much every level. This wasn’t a simple retraining as allowed by 4E. This was a completely new build, often with different reskinning, just about every time he could get away with it. When I asked his player about it, he said it was a test to see if the other players paid enough attention to the character to notice any changes. This went over as well as expected.

Obviously I had some trouble with the dwarves; I don’t subscribe to the same power-first style of play, I don’t like players keeping things hidden from the DM, and I don’t like dwarves at all really. But all three of them had backstory and personality in a way most of the characters in the beginning of the campaign didn’t, and they contributed to the group instead of trying to make the game all about them. Their worldviews were consistent, they solved problems for other characters instead of creating them, and they functioned correctly in a system the rest of the table was still figuring out.

Borris most affected my gaming style, in that he (along with Barl, who was also on the shortlist for this letter) finally convinced me that players keeping secrets from each other was a bad idea. Characters keeping secrets is fine depending on the purpose and the campaign tone, but now I ask that players be up front with each other. When a player tries to hide something from another player, there’s competition in an ostensibly cooperative game. When the players are both in on it, they can tell a much more interesting story around making sure it stays a secret.

None of the dwarves had satisfying conclusions to their arcs because Bjarn and Borris both left the party well before the campaign ended. I assume they died offscreen. Beard did complete his quest and survive, so I suppose he had one of those “and the adventure continues” endings and went on to have many exciting encounters, griping about how his healing powers didn’t contribute to his damage.

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A is for Azeld, Blackguard Princess

Posted on 1 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Princess Azeld
Campaign: The Legend of Zelda: Shaman Gates

Things of course, start difficult. It turns out I’ve had more characters beginning with the letter A than any other. Possible contenders for this spot included:

  • Steampunk Iron Man/Wolverine hybrid
  • The world’s fastest mummy
  • A golem from the plane of elemental falsehood
  • A literal witch doctor
  • A magic gnome with delusions of grandeur
  • A fire-hurling nihilist bird
  • An old-timey circus strongman
  • Juju David Bowie

In the end I decided I couldn’t very well go all month without talking about Princess Zelda, murderhobo.

Azeld may be the least inventively-named character I’ve ever had, and this is from a person whose roster includes Rock Hardslab, dwarven shouting enthusiast. She is, as is to be expected, an adventuring princess. However, she’s also a blackguard, dedicated to spreading her influence through power, rage, and control. She would have made a perfect villain for a Zelda campaign except that she’s the leader of the heroes and arguably the main character. I’ll say this repeatedly over the course of the month, but unlike many DMs I don’t feel the need to run an evil campaign, where the party is actually the villains. I find that happens enough organically.

Actually, you know what? Every time I talk about a PC becoming a villain, joining the villains, or being better suited to villainy, take a drink.

While Azeld on her face is exactly the wrong character for the campaign, in practice she’s exactly right. She approaches situations from the perfect angle for a video game (that is, approaching them from the front and hitting them until they aren’t situations any more), which gives us precisely the feel we want out of the game. She knows immediately which items are meant for her character and fits them into her build, which not only keeps them useful but makes me feel great; ask any DM who spent hours designing an item how it feels when the players put it in the “sell for cash” pile. And despite that, turn-by-turn she doesn’t feel beholden to the “hold forward, mash attack button” strategy video games and 4E often warrant. She keeps looking for opportunities to do something wacky, like using fallaway suplexes to hurl enemies off cliffs, keeping our fights lighthearted and creative. She just saves her cleverness for when she’s already ankle-deep in monster organs.

I like when players do interesting things in fights, especially when they use terrain or allies in ways for which they were not intended, so Azeld doesn’t change my DMing style as much as she reminds me what I like about it. However, once her player learned things like that were not only tolerated but encouraged, she started looking for it, and that gave me the idea for the boss of the eighth dungeon, who could only be killed by creative use of the environment. That boss would not have existed were it not for this character, and without that boss the dungeon would not have functioned the same way. I have several instances where a character’s backstory or personality informed or created an adversary, but never one where the character’s playstyle created a whole level.

This campaign hadn’t ended yet, so I don’t know what’s going to happen to Azeld. I assume she’ll reign victorious and not join the bad guys no matter how often I try to get her to. Perhaps she’ll learn something about herself and resolve to be a better, more compassionate ruler. But it’s more likely she’ll say “I don’t know, hitting things with swords has worked for me so far”, because that’s much funnier.

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Blogging from A to Z Challenge

Posted on 21 March, 2016 by Law

I have a tendency to find about things right when it’s too late to do anything about them. I found out about NaNoWriMo in the beginning of the year, when it is a writing content in November. I found out about the Paizo playtest for the vigilante as the first round ended.

In early May last year I found out about the A-to-Z Blogging Challenge, which is of course a few weeks after it was relevant. But it did give me a solid year to think of a theme about which I could write twenty-six articles, and I did eventually have a good idea.

D&D is a game about characters. You can have a kick-in-the-door style campaign without a story, or a pickup game without a setting, or a nuanced narrative without a victory condition, but you can’t have a role-playing game without a role to play. Characters are the means by which players interact with the DM and, usually, vice versa. A player can go their whole career without seeing a summoner or using Combat Expertise or fighting an owlbear, but they can’t go a single session without a character.

A DM, usually, has to be something of an expert on characters. He or she has to know how to design, motivate, present, play, and often retire them. I’ve created easily hundreds of characters for my sessions at all levels, with all sorts of personalities, in all sorts of situations, and I’ve learned so much about DMing through them. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Instead I want to talk about the characters for whom I’ve DMed. I’ve had dozens of characters in campaigns and dozens more in one-shots, and every one of them has taught me something about their player, or the setting, or myself and my own DMing style. Some have made me laugh, some have frustrated me, and some have died ignominiously, but all of them contributed to their stories and the game.

For each non-Sunday in April I’ve chosen a different character whose name begins with the appropriate letter. I’ll describe the character, what they brought to the table, and how they affected my gaming style. I’ve tried for a representative sampling of characters, intentionally drawing from (almost) every campaign I’ve run and looking for different archetypes and players. Even with these restrictions, picking only twenty-six characters to talk about was really, really hard, and this will quickly become apparent. There were some characters and some players I wanted to talk about but couldn’t due to the structure of the challenge. I know I shouldn’t be looking at a challenge designed to make me post more and complaining that it doesn’t let me post enough, but here we are.

I’ll be starting on 01 April with the letter A and ending 30 April with Z. If you’ve been in one of my campaigns and you want to know when I’ll talk about your character, let me know so I can disappoint you.

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Lucifer (the Show, Not the Devil [Well, Kind of the Devil])

Posted on 6 March, 2016 by Law

I normally stay away from endorsing anything not in the gaming industry, but I’d really like it if everybody reading watched Lucifer.

Not because it’s the first show in a long time to meet or exceed my expectations in plotting and characterization. Not because it has a balance between episodic and long-term storytelling I just don’t see any more in a world of heavy-handed myth arcs. Not because the writing is snappy enough to keep me entertained but not so consistently acerbic that it strains credulity. Not because it almost entirely dispenses with the tired “behind the veil” trope where characters keep each other in the dark to manufacture drama. Not even because it has one of those affably evil characters I love so much. I think these are all good reasons, but it would be a stretch to discuss any of them in the context of a tabletop gaming blog.

I want you to watch Lucifer because it has an overtly, unabashedly chaotic evil character in the party, and yet his presence doesn’t ruin the show’s storytelling or character dynamics. It makes them.

Evil characters don’t get a lot of play, mostly because DMs ban them outright. They’re unpredictable, they’re hard to motivate, they cause intra-party strife, they’re disruptive, they derail plots, and so on. Any DM can list a dozen reasons why a hypothetical evil character run by a hypothetical player would cause hypothetical problems in a hypothetical campaign.

That is, they do until you look at each of those worries and consider what they actually mean. The character isn’t actually unpredictable, or hard to motivate, etc. The character is something created, maintained, and guided by a player. Really, DMs aren’t worried about evil characters per se. They’re worried about a disruptive player using an evil character’s alignment as an excuse for intolerable behavior, and they’ve convinced themselves that’s the only reason to play one. An evil character is a sign of a bad player, thus evil characters are banned. Q.E.D.

They are, of course, wrong. An evil character managed by a decent player is no more problematic than a good character, and a good character managed by a disruptive player is significantly worse than any evil character. Evil characters are a storytelling tool that can be used to improved a campaign or abused to harm it like any other.

Consider the character Lucifer. We don’t doubt he’s evil; he says it to anybody who will listen. He’s self-serving, vindictive, capricious, narcissistic, lazy, spiteful and any number of colorful words we use to describe evil characters. In the episodes I’ve seen he’s started a public brawl among innocent people, traumatized or assaulted surrendering enemies, kidnapped suspects, and encouraged people to kill each other. He’s also broken into the house of a party member, refused to participate in the plot, and insulted his allies more times than I can count. He’s exactly the sort of character who’d be banned from a regular campaign on principle.

But the most important thing about him is that he obeys Law 4: he desperately wants to be in the party and solve problems with them. He may not go about solving crimes the same way the police might, and his methods work outside their comfort zone, but he’s still working toward the same goal. Lucifer is a character whose player has found a motivation for him (going on exciting adventures) that differs from the rest of the party’s (catching bad guys), but since he has the same end he’s as easy to motivate as anybody else. He’s unpredictable in a way that feeds into the story instead of derailing it, and he’s irritating to the other characters without necessarily being irritating to the players because he positions himself and acts as their ally, not their enemy.

Full disclosure: there is an episode where Lucifer sees a case, decides it’s boring, and wanders off. But I would argue this isn’t the character’s fault any more than it’s the DM’s. The murder was boring, and Lucifer is not motivated by boring things. The DM knew this and still had a plot around a boring murder. This is no different from a character motivated by justice refusing to raid a dungeon, or a character motivated by greed refusing to save children from the burning orphanage. It’s a jerk move, yes, but if everybody is clear at the onset about their goals and motivations, it’s the DM’s job to find plots that work with them. In this case, the murder occurred during the theft of Lucifer’s possessions, and once he found this out his motivations were met and he went at it as full-bore as in any other episode.

I’ve run games for several evil characters. I’ve often said I don’t need to run an evil-only campaign because my players tend to run evil characters no matter what their character sheets say. In fact, the Tower Campaign ended with three evil characters, a character who did as much evil as good, and a character who shrugged and let them all do whatever. The long-term ramifications of letting three-and-a-half evil characters ascend to godhood with no good characters to balance them out was not lost on me. The point is that my campaigns don’t fall apart. In fact, the least successful campaign I’ve had in a long time was the one where I required all the players be good. It’s as though character’s alignment doesn’t determine the health of the campaign or the story or the table, the players do.

But no amount of anecdotal evidence or impassioned logic will convince somebody who’s absolutely certain evil characters are untenable. That’s why I want everybody to watch Lucifer, to see an evil character work in a functioning party. And also because I really like the show and I’m terrified it’s too weird to exist for more than one or two seasons without a little more support.

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