The catapult also functions as a Skittles delivery vector!

There’s plenty of opinion about 4th Edition and I’m not going to run a fanboy flag up the internet pole regarding the OBVIOUS SUPERIORITY of one or another, but I’m especially fascinated by the new alignement system.  I like it.  I really do.

But I’m not going to use it in the upcoming campaign. Alignments are banished!

When I played a character in 3.5 I spent a lot of time thinking about how my sorceror would react based on his alignment (chaotic good) rather than roleplaying a decision and figuring out how it aligned later.  It made the ethical decisions seem shallow instead of deep character traits.  Alignment hindered my roleplaying experience because I was using what I now understand to be a description of past deeds to prescribe future deeds.  Starting as out as a new adventurer, I only had my backstory behind me and that did not have the same challenges that an adventurer would face.  That time that you saved a cat from a tree is not dissimilar from delving into a red dragon’s lair to save a prince, but the varying degrees involved displays exactly how committed you are to helping the prince (or saving the prince so that he can give you booty).

Predicting a character’s alignment from the first game would be like me saying that I’m going to be remembered for my bucolic, florid prose.  A PC can angle towards a certain alignment but they’re not prescient.  Whether or not she is really unaligned or actually chaotic evil depends on the context of her deeds.  For instance, McClane from Die Hard, where does he fit?  Nowhere on this chart!  He’s Chaotically (and I would argue, Chronically) Badass.

(Of course, the vast array of ethical issues that alignment raises are staggering and would make for a fascinating game of Dungeons and Dragons.)

Moreover, characters change during the course of an adventure.  That’s roleplaying.

As a Dungeon Master, I’ll keep rough track of my players’ alignments if there’s ever a game mechanic that needs alignment values to resolve.  But I think that it’s more important to the fun of the game that the players feel unhindered in roleplaying a character.  The less they’re shackled to a muddled system of ethics, the freer they’ll be to explore their characters.

In other words, too many of them cause bad lag and/or allow tank spawns way too fucking early.  So I ponied up for a Left 4 Dead server with my brother helping to admin it when I’m asleep or too drunk to be at the wheel of a game server.  The configuration process took a few hours scattered between this morning and last night, and not a little bit of digging.

The important thing to remember about setting up a Left 4 Dead server for versus is that versus isn’t a switch you hit.  What differentiates a versus server from a campaign server is a handful of options: setting the versus maps into rotation instead of the campaign maps (make sure that “vs” is in the mapname somewhere); setting the default map to a versus map (something that the server owner will have to do); and changing the server.cfg to allow players to play as zombies.

Not that big of a deal for the most part, but nobody really documented the process very well.

Happy Holidays to everyone!