Hey there, it’s me, resident Comedy Archmage Dan Telfer. And you know, I was mulling over what I could do with my vast and unchecked power here at D&D Beyond and I got to thinking, if a character is more "lawful" than "good" or "bad," something odd happens. They're not exactly "neutral," they warp into something truly, almost frighteningly, relatable.
Imagine, if you will, that it’s your turn to take watch duty during a long rest, but as you set up your chess set with your druid friend… WHERE ARE ALL THE DAMN BISHOPS? Or I don’t know, what’s a “fantasy bishop” for D&D dragonchess, a thief or whatever? Just stay with me here, your character plays several games a day so someone nearby must have stolen them! Someone in the party even! You immediately cast detect evil.
Well, bad news adventurino, nobody nearby is evil. “Show thyself, evil miscreant!” you cry to the night sky, a horrible echo booming through the elven forest and your friend’s dining room (shhh their kid is trying to make a TikTok on their iPad in the next room). But alas, your wails are of no use. Somebody stole your thieves because… well come on, chess in Dungeons and Dragons? Several times a day? How meta are you gonna make everyone get? Play D&D.
Maybe this hypothetical player character (that is not always just me) is, in fact, a jerk. But they’re probably having a blast.
Yes, Make This Your Real Alignment
This alignment is called Lawful Petty, and you too can convince the narrator of your game to let you write it on your character sheet. Don’t get me wrong, I like the existing rules of D&D, and I remember having fun with alignment. Yet as I theoretically age, I observe a pop culture that leans on its anti-heroes. It’s tough not to want to roleplay a little Walter White action now and again (but he’s more of a Toxic Neutral type).
See that guy on the right? That's the guy you want to be, hands in the air, protesting that he did nothing wrong, meanwhile the guy on the left used to be nice until you drove him insane with your petty rules.
Stare at the words “Lawful” and “Petty” together. You get it. Even if it does start to look like “Lori Petty” after a while. I bet you can see why this idea is perfect for D&D. Theft opens wide up. Complex sabotages unfold. You are a moral champion of cheap slights. A strict adherence to a narcissistic moral code that isn’t exactly evil, and as far as you care is completely good.
A character with all the rules and morality of a paladin, but with a short-sighted view of the world. Think “stinging but relatively non-lethal” revenge, burning something down and driving away smiling. These tropes are your toolbox.
If someone offends thee, they shall get a new scar forthwith. Speaking of which...
Scars Over Death
If you’re worried about how to keep from being evil, give the character a strict “no sentient creature should die if it can be taught a lesson” code to offset the fact that they can be mean as all-get-out. Petty Batman. Not torture; deep, deep humiliation.
If they’re dead they can’t feel justice anymore.
Let’s say you figure out the sleeping quarters of a local crime lord.
Now, the easy thing to do would be to fight your way to his headquarters. Instead, do recon to figure out where he sleeps. And insist on going to great lengths to bring true polymorph to the table, even if it means bribing a local archmage.
Then, while the crime lord slumbers like a beholder making babies, sleep has them turned into a stench kow… forever.
And let's say the crime lord barters with your party, and wary of your antics they shut down any complex life-altering events for him. "Hey," they say, "we noticed you were plotting with a local archmage like a lunatic, so we're calling that off."
But in the process of your little agreement, the crime lord makes a comment on your looks? You are already making arrangements for them to recieve a drunken stench kow tattoo before you even leave the room.
But once you hone in on stench kow there is no going back. You see that crime lord and the stench kow's scent fills in your nostrils like the ring of a stench bell.
Game of Chicken: A Song of Ice and Fire
Here’s a walkthrough you can use as another example. Let’s say only you understand chickens. You had them on your farm since you were a child. You gave them names. Then you eventually liberated them. When someone else owns a chicken, you know they’re raising them wrong. When they eat it, they are the cruelest of fiends. They may never know why, but every time they make the mistake of eating chicken, you’ll make sure they have the most violent of diarrheas.
This could go for people who use feathers in spells. People who kick abyssal chickens. People who turn down aarakocra for dates. You name it. You will smite them with your fiery revenge. Perhaps even fiery bathroom revenge.
Holy Insults
Your character could be called narcissistic, sure, but also they see passive aggression as a holy death by a thousand cuts. Each cut full of divine, petty significance.
The moment anyone insults you to your face, smile broadly and shrug. You didn’t come here to make friends, you came here to break friends in. You also came to this game (in the real world) with a stack of index cards and a marker. This is optional of course, but can be a complex character’s best friend if the narrator is game to indulge it.
Pass a note card to your DM asking if they’d approve a series of Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) checks to steal all their water. We’ll see how thoughtful they get during the upcoming desert excursion when they need to call in favors.
And remember, you feel downright virtuous doing this. You're not doing this because it makes you cackle maniacally, you're doing it because it balances the impossibly specific scales in your head. You think they should be in everyone's head, and unlucky for them if your justice doesn't makes sense. You're just out there in a cute outfit, living your best life, stealing all the water.
Cold Compass
To make sure you’re getting this whole Lori Petty, er, Lawful Petty thing right (sorry I just watched some Orange is the New Black), let’s chart it out.
Take a piece of paper. At the top, write your character’s greatest moral joy. Make it real, make it good, make it kind. Otherwise you’re just evil, and it's important we skirt that ancient simplicity.
Then at the bottom, write the thing your character would take the most personally, and make it petty as all Nine Hells.
Every time someone hurts your ego, even a little, stare at your chart and figure how high up or low it falls. Odds are things will land near the bottom fairly often, and you’ll be having a lot of fun being a fantasy jerk as you aim for the top but never forget the bottom. That sweet, salty bottom.
Petty Trademark List
Ready to roleplay a creep, but not sure where to start? You can borrow from any of these you like, but why not roll a 6-sided and see which of these petty moves has been a lawful ritual to your character.
- Spell soiler: Mix cocoa powder in their bat guano, mix glitter in their diamond dust, regardless the resident caster is about to humiliate themselves and you’re never going to cop to who did it. You know how to mess with mages.
- Moral collector: Due to being robbed of a precious thing at a young age, you are now obsessed with re-appropriating all versions of this thing you see in the world as your own. You know, stealing. Maybe it’s scrolls. Maybe it’s decorative vacation spoons. Work with the DM to fit it in the world or maybe even in the pouch of a fellow player.
- Dulled weapon: You carry an incredibly weak weapon, and you attack anyone who insults you with it. Think variations on opera gloves- a wooden dagger, a stocking full of copper pieces, a leather strap made from a beast who looked at you wrong, etc.
- Keen-minds-your-business: Take the Keen Mind feat… just so you can ask your DM incriminating facts to lord over others and manipulate them into doing menial things for you.
- False Samaritan: Do everything a lawfully good character would… but give those benefiting from your actions a verbal, sincere-sounding, but deadly deliberate, “You’re welcome.” Then add them to a list. If they do not reward you in an appropriate and timely fashion, they are a traitor. Or if everyone you’ve helped behaves, call in your good deed beneficiaries to exact revenge on others.
- Guided by the slight: You worship a kind god, and you pray to them often. That’s what you tell people. But in actuality you give your DM some index cards and make an arrangement: every time you pretend to pray that a character receives a holy kindness through Bahamut, you say you’re making a Religion check… but it’s really an Insight check. You tell the group you’re getting holy messages, but really, you’re neutrally analyzing where a character falls on your are-they-in-need-of-fixing-and-do-they-owe-me chart through the DM.
There it is, another alignment forged, farewell 9-part alignment memes, you have cluttered our social media timelines long enough. I hope I can goof on this concept again in the future, and that some of you actually try this. Please let me know if you do, especially if you can pull it off without making every one of your friends mad at you.
Dan Telfer is the Dungeons Humorist aka Comedy Archmage for D&D Beyond (a fun way they are letting him say "writer"), dungeon master for the Nerd Poker podcast, a stand-up comedian, a TV writer who also helped win some Emmys over at Comedy Central, and a former editor of MAD Magazine and The Onion. He can be found riding his bike around Los Angeles from gig to gig to gaming store, though the best way to find out what he's up to is to follow him on Twitter via @dantelfer.
I agree with everything blockhead46 wrote, and I *SECOND* the request to be able block certain authors on your site. Sometimes on any kind of social media it's necessary to be able to not have to deal with certain jackwits.
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If the players have already agreed to play scumbags and the whole scumbag thing is expected, then I can see this sort of thing being an entertaining and perhaps even hilarious character. If that theme isn't already agreed to and expected by all the players (as I assume almost EVERY random game out there probably is NOT), this is going to be a quick trip to Nopesville.
And yet nowhere in the article did you clarify the point. Posting this on the front page of DND Beyond is a disservice to the community. At minimum, there should have been an editor's note stating "Ensure that the group is OK with your character concept. And be prepared when they give a resounding 'NO!'" or "This is homebrew nonsense and would not sanctioned by any reasonable DM in a public setting." (Does DND Beyond even have editors?!... Were they at work that day?!)
Yes, at the right table, with the right group, anything goes. But there's a requirement there. DID YOU CLARIFY IT?!
Did you ever consider the following scenario:
You're running a pickup game at some shop. You have a mix of random players. Some experienced, SOME BRAND NEW. Some anti-social jerk delights at seeing your recommendation and rolls in with your character suggestion. Lets be clear, as the DM, I would have ZERO qualms with saying, "No... get that mess out of here. This isn't the time or place for it." But there may be other DMs that might have difficulty with the potential confrontation. Yes... I said 'confrontation.' You might be tempted to ask the (stupid) question, "Why would there be a confrontation?" The answer to that (stupid) question is: "Because its now been posted on the front page of DND Beyond WITHOUT PROPER QUALIFICATION. DND Beyond is supposed to be an authoritative source on the game." If the DM at the public table allowed this ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE character into the game, do you think those new players would leave with a good view of the game? Do you think they'll return? Lemme help: Nah... they ain't coming back. They are going to leave thinking "People that play DND are a bunch of antisocial, basement-dwelling weirdos. This game isn't for me."
This isn't The Onion. And although you ridicule all "the rules and numbers" in your first puff piece, that's what this site is: An authoritative source of information. "Here's a character idea based around harassing and antagonizing the other players at the table" doesn't qualify as good content.
Step up.
This game is in a resurgence. MANY people have worked very hard to make it as welcoming and fun as possible for as many people possible. If you are going to write for THE SOURCE of information for the game, you have a responsibility to be clear and accurate in your writing. Take a class or something.
THIS!
SO much this!
It's a fascinating article. There's no doubt about that. But, the thing of it is, and most of the rest of the comments in this thread are missing this point …. in D&D, alignment isn't relative. Yes, motives for a particular action can vary from one PC to the next, and not everyone plays the same alignment the same way.
But, just because someone believed their motives are Good (or, at least, not Evil), doesn't make that necessarily so.
We all know murder is Evil. (Let's not get into justifiable homicide. That's beside the point. There's a reason it's called something different.)
And sacrificial ritual murder is probably even worse.
But, for example, even though some early pre-Columbian Central American cultures believed they were saving the world by sacrificing people to ensure the sun would come up, that doesn't mean that they weren't objectively committing an Evil act.
Evil is concrete and not relative. Alignment varies, and one evil act doesn't necessarily make a person entirely evil.
But purposeful, consistent, intentional acts do.
I am playing a female psion right now who much resembles this. I have always put down the Alignment of the character after I decided how I want that character to be. Quite often I have had to make adjustments to it as I go along, warping the toon this way or that. My current toon was 12 years old (she was an NPC to start), who was advanced artificially in body age, with 2 other 'sisters', through the DM's mechanics. She jumped from 12 to 20 in a few days, and my then current toon and partner rescued the three of them. I then decided to have a bit of fun with a homebrew psion class and started playing her. So, I'm thinking of a girl, mentally she is still quite 'tween', who now has some rather serious power at her fingertips. She and her city are stuck in a Barovia/Strahd scenario, and is actively working to break the siege when she unintentionally kills a large group of people from the Ghetto part of town, as they looked and acted like bad guys. Needless to say, she is being villianized by a local fear-mongerer and she decided to burn down his house, using her psionics, though giving them enough time to escape the house, and ensuring none of the other houses nearby started on fire. Quite petty, but she believes that he is using an unfortunate situation to stir up a mob to do his bidding, which could cause a lot of harm to the group she is leading. So I think Lawful Petty would be rather descriptive of what she is.
I have a very smug paladin this will be great for. Amazing to see you here Dan.
"Pass a note card to your DM asking if they’d approve a series of Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) checks to steal all their water. We’ll see how thoughtful they get during the upcoming desert excursion when they need to call in favors."
Yeah, the only thoughts would be how quickly my sword would gut you if you don't hand us back our water! No one likes a dick, no matter what their alignment is. This article is horrible advice and should you choose to follow this route in your roleplaying, you deserve to be left behind or worse.
As someone who's actually read the rules of Dragonchess, I can actually confirm that the equivalent of a bishop is a thief.
I don't recommend playing dragonchess, except for maybe once or twice just to say you've done it. It's comically complicated and is almost a testament to everything that is wrong with 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons. The original rules, published in Dragon Magazin #100, were written by D&D's creator, Gary Gygax. The rules take up seven of the issue's pages and drag on and on. Or should I say they dragon and on? Bad puns aside, chess has six unique pieces with unique moves, and a full chessboard is comprised of thirty-two pieces. A dragonchess set is made up of three boards, representing the sky, world, and Underdark. Thankfully, the bottom and top board are only lightly populated, with only three types of pieces (18 pieces total on both sides) on each, adding up to six unique pieces and 18 total. The middle board is the problem. It's roughly modeled after a usual chess set, but has severe modifications, along with a few extra. In total, the middle board has 8 types of pieces, and 48 pieces in total. All three boards combined have 84 pieces and 15 types of pieces, and would be a massive headache to assemble with a mix of pieces and re-sized boards (Did I mention dragonchess having a 12x8 board?) or an online simulation. But to try to create a multi-tiered board with unique pieces of different colors and shapes would be a monumental task.
Then comes the most challenging task in the multiverse. I can safely say from various interviews that it is more difficult than defeating Tiamat at her full power, hunting down the Elemental Princes of Evil, or stopping a mad priestess from resurrecting Bhaal: Finding someone to play it with you.
Dude it's a joke. No need to be mean about it.
But you forget the fact that good and evil are defined by the storyteller/victor. Evil is subjective and what one may deem evil another may deem good. If our society was ok with murder then it would not be an evil act. You are quick to judge morals based on what you grew up with, but someday society my laugh at the morals we believe in because the world believes that the lives of those they deam less than themselves are worthless. It may seem evil to you, but to everyone that is just the way the world works. One should not judge history through the lenses of the modern era. It will lead to us thinking of things as immoral when at the time it was as moral as tying your shoes.
TLDR: Morals are only what society wants us to believe is right or wrong, and can change in time.
Agreed that a lot rides on how your DM runs your world, but in terms of game mechanics the content—especially in terms of monsters—clearly defines what is and isn't evil. Thankfully (At least within 5th Edition) that won't change or evolve as time goes on and we won't look back and freak out that wow, goblins were actually good because reasons. I believe those guidelines make for a better, stronger game experience. One that allows people to dive in and out of various campaigns and play with various DMs while carrying a general expectation of how these worlds work.