#re:alignment

Link to the document in question if you don't care to hear the tale of it.

That's a really ambitious thing to declare. I even already went to the trouble of making this because I've been planning on announcing like this.

But, yeah.

Maybe I didn't fix it, per se. At worst, you can call this an alternative system to traditional alignment. And it all started because people were getting a little too complicated talking about the "nuance" of the standard alignment system and things like the MTG mana color system.

And my response was going to be "what ya'll are trying to get at is a spider graph." But that extended response post got annihilated because I didn't save it as a draft before switching tabs. So I started writing it up as its own post. And that lead to me making some demonstration graphs, and that lead to me going ahead and just writing up a whole essay. And then I adapted that essay into a variant rules module for 5e d&d.

So. Yeah. That's how I ended up making Re:Alignment. (get it, it's like a pun, because "re:" is the default header for a reply email and I'm responding to the trash state of alignment in 5e, but it's also read as "realignment" like repairing a misalignment.. it's clever, just trust me)

The document is 11 pages and can be read in its entirety as a preview on DMsGuild if you follow the link to it (easier to do on desktop). The doc outline how this approach to alignment changes how alignment works, the actual alignment system itself, and describes what I have essentially replaced good, evil, lawful, chaotic, and neutral with. I also included a print friendly PDF sheet to fit into a character sheet where you can track your spider graph alignment and other important alignment based RP information. Also also, there's a standalone graph jpg that you can slap onto a modified character sheet or other RP tool of your choice.

The doc is priced as "pay what you want", so if you want a downloaded copy or one you can print (though hopefully not the last page, because I make those all black) you can get it for free. If you want to throw a little money my way or if you really like the system, you can pay however much money you want. It was like 48 hours of work, so a decent amount of effort went into this.

If you're wondering "what did this moron replace the alignments with?" I'll answer that right now. I replaced alignment with this:

This is what the character sheet loos like so far. It may change moderately over time and as other aspects of the RPG are further developed.

Some graphical elements are also less than ideal (looking at the text on the spider graph) and will get updated as I have more energy to do so.

And I would describe more about the system as it relates to the character sheet, but I'm just going to give the basics:

+You don't have ability scores, you have an "alignment."

+You don't have features, you have actions that you can take (depending on your alignment) that are written out on action cards.

+You have "Hit" and "Sanity" to determine how much "damage" your character can take before they need to retire from the journey.

+You don't have levels, you have "legs of the journey" which are basically sessions.

+Lots of places to record details, including your character background, how you have changed your alignment over time, and the important choices that your character has made during sessions.

Re:Alignment is a short rules variant doc on the alignment system in 5e. Specifically, the doc is rules for replacing the alignment system with a spider graph system (the kind of polygonal graph they use a lot in anime to show what a character's specialties are).

The original post for this homebrew can be found here.

Alright, so, the more I write these action cards the more I realize that some of the systems that I am developing might need to stretch in some places. Tech stacks, for instance, are currently doing some heavy lifting because they encompass everything that is not a combat obstacle or a NPC stack interaction. Tech stacks gotta be able to handle a lot of rules abuse, though the basic tech actions have the essentials.

I'm rambling. Here's the preview.

From left to right we have the basic combat, sway, and tech actions for the cooperative alignment. There's some minor graphical blegh still going on, but that can be easily fixed. These are more proof of concept for the template + the card design and are using the rough drafts for rules content.

You can see some of the design philosophy for alignment based actions here too. Cooperative actions generally rely on the cooperation of others. These actions usually have a lower priority because someone else has to do something else first. The benefits of going later in stack priority but working with someone else means that you are pretty much guaranteed to avoid a critical failure with a +1 to an action roll or have a high chance of actually working things out with people that value cooperation above all else (the neutral sway on mutual benefit for 3 should actually be the 1 result, that was a typo I'm only seeing now).

Note also that the actions cards have a place for the player or character name to go. Ideally cards are actually placed in an ordered stack or laid out in priority order to resolve the action stack. Having a clear identifier of what player/character is rolling for which action and when is very important. And yet, somehow, did not occur to me until I was actually writing the actions out in a spreadsheet. The GM has to deal action cards back (or have players take their actions cards back) after the end of the stack.

So here's a gist of where it stands mechanically. There are three core interactive mechanics. Combat: which is pretty standard simplified tabletop combat with loose distances and rounds of actions going off (though there are some newer distinctions I will get into later). Sway: I've gamified arguing with an NPC (but it's actually more interesting than that); GMs can call for a sort of combat initiative for social encounters which involves presenting arguments with specific motives to sway the minds of other people in or out of your favor. Technical: everything from traps to scaling a mountain can have a technical initiative where players can put in a sort of technical damage to try and overcome an obstacle, but technical challenges have limits to the number of rounds you can do them before there are *problems* for players.

What's special about combat? Everything "hits" but not in the way you think. You can miss your target, but you are going to hit *something* no matter what. It could be the ground, could be your friend, could be you. And if it hits the ground, that's not a wasted turn, terrain takes damage and the more damage it takes the harder it gets to do things (which generally makes the terrain take more damage) and before you know it you have a bigger problem than what you were trying to solve by using combat. There's stages to it, to be clear, and you can either do the terrain wholesale or you can run an encounter with specific splotches of terrain damage that could work for or against you. It really only ever gets as complicated as the GM wants to run it.

Sway is more than just casting charm person to swindle them. You are making a long term ally or enemy and it sort of plays out a little bit like what the non-dreaming people see of Inception. You are planting an idea in their head like a seed and using the actions you have (your special powers) combined with well crafted arguments to actually nourish that seed. Some NPCs have specific arguments they are more prone to agree with, sometimes you have to deal with a large crowd and that gets rough, but every person being swayed has sort of autonomic counter actions. You aren't just playing actions to move their friendliness meter up, your argument could go wrong, they could have a powerful counterargument, they could experience a sudden epiphany that turns the tables entirely. It's a political strategy game system.