games

I can either play a stealth assassin/thief who kills from the shadows but is really nice to people, a magic user who blows people up in horrible ways but is really nice to people, or a paladin type who hacks people to death but is still really nice to people. I’ve been gaming for decades and I’ve always fallen into the same patterns.

Wallace Shawn wrote a great essay about how being an actor is about showing how you would be if you were Henry V or Darth Vader, and I just read a fantastic book by Robert Sapolsky about how we don’t actually have free will but instead are the products of our biological and psychological histories. If I were to have the exact same genetics, epigenetics, life history stretching back over multiple generations, and chemical imbalances as a randomly chosen person on death row, would I not be there?

I’m going to try playing a bad guy one of these times just with that in mind. I’d just like to know if the game has a different play through for alignment or if being bad breaks the game. I still remember the Dragon magazine article about the anti-paladin class that continuously emphasized that this was an NPC class and D&D was about discovering the good in you. I think that kind of put me on this path.