Re: what is it about angels?

In article <1170631894.728482.91350@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
psychohist <psychohist@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>As a player, I think I'd actually prefer the angel mechanism.  At
>least that way, the D&D "good" alignment is recognized as simply an
>arbitrary alignment.  It may impose the gamesmaster's interpretation
>of good and evil on the characters, but at least it doesn't pretend to
>impose the same idea of good and evil on the players themselves.

Indeed, it only imposes on the characters in the sense that they may
be beaten to a pulp if they demur.  It doesn't require (with the
possible exception of paladins and some priests) that the PCs acknowlege
the angel's right to beat on them, any more than they'd acknowledge
a demon's right to beat on them.  The angel is just more likely to
succeed.

The PC cleric in this case is a priest of Wee Jas, whose tutelary
"angel" is the ice devil.  He is not inclined to regard the archons
and guardinals and so forth as anything other than powerful supernatural
monsters, and the rules really don't require that he does.

If gameworld "Good" and "Evil" are ideologies rather than absolute
moral good and evil, the whole thing works pretty well for what
I'm doing; I don't feel it's getting in the way at all.  I have a lot
more trouble with the fact that the module presents the "Good" ideology
as deeply ineffectual with occasional outbreaks of flat-out self-sabotage.
This is not limited to supernaturals, either.

My SCAP PCs as a whole are on the very dark edge of neutral, and
it's in large part because they have seen significantly more admirable
qualities from Evil than Good:  things like ability to work together,
courage, persistance, breadth of vision, intelligence, even loyalty.
If Good people had those qualities, the PCs could get some help!

That comes around to the basic question:  if you want to run a
scenario (and Warren, I know you don't do this) that involves the PCs
tackling great threats by themselves, you somehow have to avoid
NPC intervention.  People are uncomfortable with doing this in the
natural way, which would be having PCs whose natural role this is
(top people in their fields, with official standing).  So various
workarounds are tried, but most of them are more or less difficult
to make work sensibly at campaign length.

(The 8th level wizard whose errand back to town to "get help"
is so urgent he can't take 30 seconds to cast fireballs is a really
egregious example; I hope that module series doesn't hand me too
many more!)

I am having quite an interesting time with the collision between
the modules' assumption that no one will help, and two PCs who have
run their social skills up to system max and argue that with a
Diplomacy check of 45 they can darned well *make* them help.  I am
letting this work, which leads to a big party, slow combats,
not enough EXP for the PCs, but interesting play in other respects.
Not letting it work would seem very unfair.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]