00:12
Hey, Asami.
How's it going?
It's all right. I think in comparison to other things going on, it's going all right.
All right is sometimes perfectly great.
It's sometimes the best you're going to get and you might be okay with it.
Yeah, that's fine.
Well, what if I take it off today and introduce something that people may or may not know about, which has to do with tabletop role-playing games.
I certainly don't know much about it, even though I think it has a lot of the elements that I do enjoy,
like taking a leap of imagination and sort of improvised aspect of things like that.
I just have never played full stop.
Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that's fair. I wonder.
I'll be curious for anyone who listens to this, how many people who listen here have played something like this before.
I don't know what that audience entails, but certainly not many people have played a tabletop role-playing game.
For anybody who might know what I'm talking about, but has not heard it called that before.
This is also called TTRPG because we are too lazy to say the whole thing.
Tabletop RPG, TTRPG.
Right, right. Exactly.
In Japanese, I'm pretty sure that it is table talk RPG.
So and I found that out while looking around and, you know, poking my nose into like, you know,
oh, what what does this section look like here in the bookstore, so to speak?
OK, OK, so that culture exists.
It's just like, like maybe not exactly the same as the version you're familiar with in the U.S.
and the ones over here, like, you know, whether it's like the kind of variety or like the kind of intensity one brings in to this.
Sure. I yeah, I won't judge how much, say, intensity or other exists in these two.
But yeah, I will say that, yes, there are differences.
I won't go as far as to try and explain why the differences exist.
But I will say that the company and the brand that people might know about in the West is Dungeons and Dragons or D&D.
03:05
By Wizards of the Coast.
And that is definitely not the only one out there.
There's actually a whole lot of other ones that are like really cool and really interesting and not nearly as complicated with the math.
So, you know, and there are different settings that you can play them in.
Dungeons and Dragons is always seen as very often seen as like fantasy, you know, that medieval type look to them.
Very Western medieval.
But like, you know, and then it brings in probably more appropriated than respectfully included versions of like other culture monsters whenever they feel like it.
You know, there's some twisting.
Right, right, right.
But, you know, there's that.
And then here I also saw variants of, say, like D&D.
But you also see ones which, and I don't know which comes first, but which is in line with what you might expect in some of the fantasy anime or manga or like the ones with, you know, the swords and magic type feeling.
Right.
So there's all these and you can go even further.
They're not always about fantasy.
Some like one known as Blades in the Dark is a bit more like dark, gritty city, you know, thievery and like stuff like that.
Anyway.
That's a huge topic.
Anybody that knows, you probably already know, you know, all the pieces you need to know here.
But.
OK, so what about TTRPG that you want to introduce to me today?
Right.
So I want to introduce what is known as character alignment.
And so character alignment is something that you either sort of set up for this character because you get to create, as you said, there was improv and there's these.
You create your character or you start filling a role of a character.
OK, OK.
And so one of the ways to either begin designing your character or thinking about your character might be with character alignment.
OK.
We'll talk about other ways after.
But character alignment is a little tricky.
But what it essentially means is like your character's sort of moral decision making type value system.
It's something like that.
And this looks usually like a grid of nine squares.
So, you know, if you're picturing nine squares, you're a biologist out there.
It's just a three by three Punnett square, you know, from your hereditary.
Anyway.
So this has two axes.
Right.
One is from evil to good.
Right.
Definitions we'll talk about.
And one is from lawful to chaotic.
06:03
And in the middle there is neutral on both axes.
OK, OK.
So I guess it's like a two very simplified sort of characterization of any given character.
Yep.
That dictates one axis dictates sort of moral system of this character.
And the other is like a behavioral traits, you know, whether it's kind of predictable, lawful, kind of obedient to the world that this character exists versus chaotic, you said, which is kind of whatever they want.
Yeah.
So, yeah, that's that's sort of the idea.
It is a simplification.
It takes a person and flattens their personality so that it is only two dimensions.
Right.
And then I think the hope would be that the person, the player, right, gets creative with those interpretations.
So what does it mean to be playing this role in situations that your story creates or brings up in front of you?
Now, people might respond, you know, when you think about like good, evil, lawful, etc., etc., etc.
Right. There might be an assumed definition to them.
I'm going to go ahead and give us one just to kind of work off of here.
Yeah.
Because people will go on and on for this.
But the point is not to lock yourself into a box and be like, this is how this is how it is defined and therefore must be exactly this sort of thing.
That's that's not what we're looking to do.
So this this comes from I was directed from a Reddit thread to theangrygm.com.
I do not know.
The most credible sources on the Internet.
Most credible source.
Honestly, it'll get you at least a collection of, you know, agreed upon information.
Does it mean it's right or good?
No.
Which is true. Yeah.
I mean, some some level of consensus is extremely hard to get these days.
Yes. There is another topic we can talk about here.
But it's more of a like sort of seed in my brain from awareness of how consensus.
Well, let's focus on the nine Punnett scores for now.
No, no, not the nine Punnett squares.
That's so many Punnett squares, right?
Is it one Punnett square?
The two by two?
Oh, shit.
All right, everyone.
Time to pull out those pencils and pens.
The nine grid, the three by three Punnett square.
Three by three Punnett squares.
Yes.
So so to set us off with the definition and then I will connect us to another reason why I'm talking about this.
09:06
Good versus evil quoted by the Angry GM, which I think is a fine quote that I'm about to read.
The quote is, are you willing to suffer harm or make sacrifices to benefit others?
If so, you're good.
Are you willing to harm others for your own benefit?
If so, you're evil.
Otherwise, you're neutral with respect to good and evil.
End quote.
Okay.
So this idea is sort of how you act towards others and in what is what is your goal.
Right.
Like, is it for your own benefit?
Is it to benefit others?
Are you suffering harm and making sacrifices or are you harming them to sort of get ahead?
And again, not perfect.
Right.
And these would then have to play out with the character.
But that's the good versus evil vibe.
Lawful versus chaos.
He's got another one here.
Okay.
Quote, do you think individuals should be expected to give up freedoms for the benefit of society as a whole?
If so, you're lawful.
Len's note, we're not taking this into the societal and national real world level right now.
No, that's not.
Hold that thought, listeners.
Okay.
Continuing the quote.
Do you think you are better off retaining your individual freedoms by living outside of society?
If so, you're chaotic.
Otherwise, you're neutral with respect to law and chaos.
And a final little note here, I think, is the angry GM saying, like, don't clarify.
Don't accept.
It depends.
Just tell people to answer those questions and write down the alignment results.
So basically, end quote, just let them work it out.
And then as players, work through it.
Because that's just the way that it should go.
You should develop your character through the story.
If you are trying to incorporate any elements of reality into this fictional space, everything is going to depend and everyone is going to be somewhat neutral.
Right.
And then you lose the whole point of having an alignment charge.
I guess it's good for that specific situation where the decision making is required.
What would your character do is kind of like the way to frame the questions and start.
And I kind of appreciate, you know, the good versus evil was like a pretty expected, like it was not too far from what I thought it was.
12:01
But the lawful versus chaotic, that was like a little bit different than what I understood those words to be.
So.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good.
Good to know.
OK.
Interesting.
Difference in definition or like first definitions for what that's supposed to mean.
And I think it's probably changed.
Right.
Over.
Yeah.
Iterations.
Right.
Yeah.
And I would imagine that some characters like belong to different squares of the nine squares, depending on the situation, depending on who they're acting towards.
Right.
Etc.
Right.
OK.
So that's kind of the intent.
Now, the way it plays out is that, you know, human players tend to lean in a particular direction unless they're like trying to play one of those other roles.
Right.
And they do have, you know, particular monsters that are treated as being like a specific alignment.
And therefore, you know, they are you know, let's say they are a chaotic evil monster and they always are.
Right.
And so like this thing is always that way, which becomes very prescriptive and people have started to become annoyed with it.
So there's there's room for flexibility anyway.
What I think we can try to do, and this may or may not work because we'll have to think back on our multi hour long conversation about a special book called Babel, is to think about those characters, maybe the main ones, maybe some others.
We can we can decide.
Let's see.
Let's see if we can remember.
Yeah, we can.
We're going to right now for the listeners, we're going to just like look at a list of characters and we're going to see if ones stand out based on those definitions.
I think that's the best way to do it.
And we're just going to see what happens.
And then at the end, I can add the alternatives for these sort of alignment things.
Right.
There are other games out there that do other things.
Yeah.
I may or may not remember their names, but I can talk about the different ones.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening.
And find us on X at Ego de Science.
That is E I G O D E S C I E N C.
See you next time.
