Thac0 with Advantage 93. Moral Quandries

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D knows where our families live.

Sometimes it’s satisfying to present your players with an objective and watch them make their plans to achieve them. But once you start to get an idea about what makes your player characters tick, it may be time to throw them a curve ball once in a while, in the form of a moral quandary. Do you take the quick and easy path? Does the good of the many always outweigh the needs of the few? We’re going to look at adding moral quandaries to your games and how to make those meaningful and fun.

From the Bardic College

In the early days of the game, changing alignment was generally a bad thing, but changing alignment was especially bad for characters like Druids, Monks, Paladins, and Rangers, who would lose their class abilities if their alignment drifted out of the acceptable range for the class.

But the Dragonlance Adventures hardcover in AD&D 1st edition decided to up the ante.

It introduced an alignment tracking chart, with 20 boxes, and 10 boxes labeled “Transition.” Any character in the “transition” area between alignments suffered a -1 penalty to hit, their armor class was one worse, and there was a 10% chance for spells to fail. As with most rules around alignment, there were some disconnects.

Inside the hardcover it mentioned that most actions shifted alignment from 1 to 3 boxes, but the instructions on the tracking box said, well, maybe it’s 1 to 4 boxes. Whenever someone made it through that transition phase, you were instructed to put them in the middle of the alignment tracking chart for the new alignment, but no instructions ever told you to shift alignment to show someone was more dedicated to their alignment, so by the instructions included in the book, 10 boxes in each alignment area never got used, they just sat there taunting you about how you really could do better (or worse) couldn’t you?