Honestly, I have trouble thinking of Roy as Lawful Good, period. That’s what Durkon was when he wouldn’t break people out of jail since they did violate a law that was not evil.
Roy seems much more Good that Lawful, to the point that I think he rides the line between Lawful and Neutral.
I also think that Elan is more Lawful–his laws are the narrative laws that he thinks he has to follow.
He’s a bard, he can’t BE lawful.
As for the mutiny, I think it’s going to basically give them an object lesson on why Bandana was put in charge, and knew what she was doing. They’re gonna run into the exact problem she foretold.
I just hope it happens quickly. Right now, we’re within the “one random encounter” rule. There had to be one between them and their destination. But, if they go a long time in the wrong direction and have to turn around, the trip will get even longer.
What makes you think this is a random encounter?
No, but I think it would be extremely out of character for Roy to threaten a bunch of people with violence/death if they don’t all do what he demands. Which is what he would be doing. These aren’t goblins or monsters and they aren’t even evil humans. These are people who range the neutral-to-good alignment spectrum (I doubt Julio knowing hired evil people) who simply have a very strong disagreement on risking their lives for Roy’s cause. Threatening them with violence or death to get his way just ain’t Roy’s thing.
I agree it wouldn’t be in his normal character. But as I pointed out, Roy is in a desperate race to save the entire world. While the mutineers don’t know this, they’re putting billions of lives at risk by their actions. Roy may be Lawful Good but he’s also intelligent and pragmatic enough to weigh the lives of a couple dozen mutineers against those billions (which would include the mutineers themselves).
I can’t see it happening. What’s more, I can’t see Elan, Hayley or V going along with it either (Belkar, sure).
Of course, it’s also possible that Andi is still in favor of saving the world – and getting the crew’s promised pay day – and simply has a smarter/better way of doing it than Bandana’s. Andi’s primary beef seems to be that Bandana is making bad calls (and now ruining the ship and/or getting them killed). If Andi & Crew are still willing to take the Order to the dwarf lands, would Roy & Co see the need to roughhouse them into making Bandana captain again for what’s primarily an intra-crew conflict?
Nice callback to the black dragon incident…
No X’s in B’s eyes. She’ll survive.
And yet he is. All the more reason alignment restrictions are stupid.
As for this time, while it made me laugh pretty hard, I wonder how Roy found out about that. His dad didn’t give him the memo, and I would not expect V to talk about it with anyone. Is he just guessing baser on V’s personality?
No, he isn’t. Even his ideas about narrative are flexible and there’s been strips where Elan’s narrative expectations are subverted. But everyone has SOME lawfulness to them aside from dumb PCs who think that Chaotic means “run around waving my arms and cawing like a bird then I poop in the king’s drink because I’m so chaotic!”
V told Roy about it after they left on the airship.
From the 3rd edition Player’s Handbook:
It’s basically a live and let live attitude so long as people are being cool by one another (very “Dude”). A bunch of laws and restrictions just get in the way of living that lifestyle.
Belief in an overarching system (in Elan’s case, The Narrative) doesn’t disqualify him from being Chaotic Good any more than a priest of a CG deity is disqualified for following his deity’s general edicts and beliefs. Even when he does something like warn Haley not to divulge all of her wands, he’s doing it because he wants to help her, not because of any concern that he’d be violating narrative law. It’s no different to him than warning someone not to step off a cliff because of gravity – the narrative is just a natural force in his world.
This is why I should have known better than to discuss alignment again. It gets long and complicated. But here’s my take.
All Good characters do things out of the desire to help people. That’s just what it means to be Good. A Good character primarily feels the need to help others. A Neutral character primarily feels the need to help themselves. And an Evil character primarily feels the need to hurt others.
I would not expect a Chaotic Good Deity to even have edicts. They may have general ideas of what counts as “Good,” but I’d expect a Chaotic Good priest to be encouraged to use their own judgement. Sure, there might be some general rules, but, as you point out, very few character are actually on the exact edges of the alignment grid. Everyone is a little Good/Evil/Chaotic/Lawful.
So, while I agree that Elan is following his narrative laws because he thinks they will help him do the most Good, I would say that, in doing so, he is being lawful (lowercase L). I don’t think I’d actually call him Lawful Good, since he does indeed disregard the law when he can. But it’s absolute bullshit to say he can’t be lawful. He is.
I personally would call him Neutral Good, leaning Lawful. Sure, he disregards his laws easily, but he is very devoted to them, far beyond what I think can be called Chaotic.
But, to get back to my main point, I was saying that I think Elan is more lawful than Roy at this point. I just can’t recall anything Roy is currently doing that is all that lawful. But Elan’s narrative laws thing is so ingrained in his character that you can’t imagine him without it.
Roy’s main claim to being lawful is that he chose to fulfill his father’s oath. But, as revealed while dead, he no longer feels that compulsion to the oath. He feels the need to stop Xykon because he’s going to destroy or take over the world.
Problem is, that’s true for all Good characters. Any Good character of sufficient ability would be going after Xykon. He’s not being good to others, and does not want to let others live in peace, so even a Chaotic Good character would want to stop him. Hell, even ____ Neutral characters would want to stop him, since it will affect them and theirs. So that’s not sufficient.
**The main thing I observe is that the alignment grid seems to have a lot of overlap, to the point that a character could still be Lawful Good, since they’ve not done anything to irrevocably change their alignment, while still acting as less lawful than a Neutral Good character. **
That’s what I think is going on with Roy (though I do forget things and could be wrong.) He may still technically be able to get into Lawful Good heaven, but he’s less lawful than Elan. The level to which Elan follows his narrative laws is a lawful thing.
And they are not like the laws of gravity. Gravity may be affected by other things (parachutes, feather fall) but it’s never wrong. And you have no choice but to deal with it. But Elan has been both wrong, and had a choice whether to follow these narrative laws. They are just rules that have been created to help them in the world they live in. Just like the rules that a Lawful Good character follows.
Elan follows a set of laws because he thinks they will lead to the most Good outcome. That’s lawful.
Disagree. Lawfulness comes from voluntarily setting/following rules because you make the conscious choice that rules are the best way to achieve your goals. Roy is lawful because he makes the conscious decision to use rules and order in pursuit of good. He is chided by the deva for letting that ethos slip from time to time but then complimented that he continues to make a commitment even when he fails.
Elan, in contrast, does not voluntarily work to create narrative law, but rather accepts it as simply The Way Things Are, no different than objects fall downward, it gets cold in winter and trees grow towards the sky. Accepting that having a name in a story prevents you from being killed as a mook or that you don’t get rescued until the last moment doesn’t make you lawful any more than recognizing that hot water boils makes you lawful. Tarquin is Lawful Evil because he uses order and rule of law to subjugate people, not because he recognizes the Narrative as a natural force. Julio is Chaotic Neutral because he cares primarily for his own pleasure, fame and good times but also recognizes the Narrative. Incidentally, Elan sometimes getting a narrative rule wrong doesn’t make it any less of a force than me incorrectly guessing what happens when you mix two chemicals.
Related, V is True Neutral because his (let’s go with his) primary motivation is acquiring and understanding power. But V is still bound to the rules of magic – he can only cast a set number of spells per day. He needs the required components. He can only scribe a single Power Word on a spell book page no matter how absurd it seems. But working within the framework of those rules doesn’t make Vaarsuvius Lawful. Working within the framework of The Narrative doesn’t make Elan or Julio (or even Tarquin) lawful.
Everything Jophiel just said. Plus:
Whether dedication to a particular ethos is “lawful” or not also depends on the nature of the ethos. Aleister Crowley famously declared, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” Someone who follows that ethos to the exact letter, every day, is not being “more lawful” than, say, an observant Catholic who misses Sunday Mass two or three times a year.
Bringing it back to OotS, inherent in the “Rules of Drama” is the idea that these rules should be broken. You don’t actually have to fire Chekov’s Gun - sometimes you introduce a gun in the first act, so nobody expects the knife in the third act. Subverting these sorts of expectations is an important and honored part of storytelling. If breaking a rule of drama makes your story better, go for it!
There’s no such escape clause in Roy’s ethos. If he snaps and starts beating up crew members until they turn the airship around, that’s an absolute wrong according to his ethos. Unlike Elan’s, here’s no part of it that says, “This rule is okay to break if you think it’s important enough.”
Thus, while Elan may arguably be a more dedicated follower of his ethos than Roy is, Elan’s ethos is both less demanding of its followers, and that ethos is, itself, significantly more chaotic than Roy’s.
Heck, in the world they live in, the laws of narrative are even more absolute than the law of gravity. One of Elan’s friends defies the law of gravity on a daily basis, as a matter of routine, and his girlfriend does so whenever she finds it convenient. But they’re all of them, even Belkar, are bound by the laws of narrative. The difference between Elan and the others isn’t that he’s more bound by the narrative than they, just that he actually recognizes it.
Looks like Andi will soon find out why she wasn’t chosen as captain. Or maybe just everyone else will.