The stuff of life makes always being charitable very difficult. Probably, you weren’t unthinkingly altruistic. Think of moments in your life when you were a do-gooder. What makes these fictional characters three-dimensional are not their ideals, but their flaws. So, when you’re looking to play a lawful good cleric, be more choosy about their flavour: Do they have a fraught relationship with their god? Did their god’s fanbase exile them because of their interpretation of some tome? Are they constantly martyring themselves and thereby inconveniencing their party-members by hogging all the potions?
The characters Perkins brings up each have different moral codes, but dedication and altruism are the two common throughlines. “If that seems too nice to be cool, don’t forget that a lawful good character can be twisted into any shape, be it a psychologically damaged night prowler, a rogue in archaeologist’s clothing, a murder hobo hardened by the cruelty of existence, and a god living among men.” “Being lawful good means treating your enemies better than your enemies treat you, and inflicting harm only as a last resort.” “There are plenty of kickass lawful good figures in pop culture who don’t fit the ‘white hat’ stereotype,” Perkins said, name-checking Batman, Indiana Jones, The Dark Tower‘s Roland Deschain and Wonder Woman. “Identifying with a character on some level (even if it’s to identify that they have opposite reactions to yourself) is often one of the best ways to make them relatable to others in turn.” Look outside Lord of the Rings or The Princess Bride or Conan for inspiration - lawful good exists in sci-fi ( Star Trek‘s Captain Jean Luc Picard), video games ( Overwatch‘s Mercy) and daily life (the recently-deceased Portland hero who stood up against a bigot harassing a Muslim girl).
Adhering to fantasy norms like medieval knights or Amazonian warriors hurts more than it helps, even if it’s the path of least resistance. It’s a lack of creativity that locks lawful good characters into that stereotype. Perkins is familiar with the stigma against our friend Arthur, he said, and characterises the worst-case archetypical lawful good hero as “narrow-minded, uptight, and oh, so serious - like some cardboard do-gooder from a 1950s action serial.” “Being lawful good means treating your enemies better than your enemies treat you, and inflicting harm only as a last resort,” said Chris Perkins, a game designer and Dungeon Master who works on D&D at Wizards of the Coast.
VOX MACHINA ALIGNMENTS CODE
A lawful evil character, for example, will “methodically take what they want, within the limits of a code of tradition, loyalty, or order.” Lawful good creatures, reads the handbook, “can be counted on to do the right thing as expected by society.” There is a dichotomy in D&D between altruism and a complete disregard for life - good versus evil.Īnd unlike neutral good or chaotic good alignments, lawful good heroes are required by some moral code or oath to vanquish bad things and empower good ones. In the latest edition of the Player’s Handbook, alignment is described as “the moral compass that guides” a character’s decisions. The trick, it turns out, is to give your good guy some great flaws. So after over half a decade of encountering almost exclusively lame lawful good D&D characters (sorry, friends), I wanted to find out whether it’s possible to play the blandest of alignments in a way that is dynamic, unpredictable or, at the very least, tolerable. There is no more two-dimensional personality than “likes good things, hates bad things.” In role-playing scenarios, the lawful good hero might as well repeat verbatim canned lines scraped from 1950s superhero movies until either the adventure runs its course or somebody accidentally lights him on fire. And he never says bad things about his mother or forgets to wash his hands before eating. When there’s evil, he must fight it, uncritically, like a wind-up automaton in shining armour. “Lawful good” in D&D is shorthand for “obedient and boring.” Our hero is an upright, honourable knight who slays dragons or pious cleric of the Good God of Justice, Bahamut.
This article was originally published in July 2017 and has since been updated. There you have it: the life of a lawful good Dungeons & Dragons character. Rinse, repeat, and rejoice in those experience points.
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