OSNPC Treasure Hoard #2304
OSNPC Treasure Hoard #2304
What is Your Alignment?
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Featured Video
With everything that happened this week and all the talk about Wizards of the Coast vs the rest of the community, it seems like a good time to talk about alignment.
WotC looks to be proudly wearing the Neutral Evil hat very well with the rest of the community taking up a Lawful Good stance in opposition. Time will tell where this all ends up.
All of that aside, alignment is a cornerstone of many (most?) TTRPGs. It has many uses that include helping a player better understand their character and it can also be helpful in to directly impact a character’s standing in the game. If they routinely do things that go against their alignment, then they might find their reputation within guilds or factions or even the general community affected.
Despite the potentially large implications, I’ve found that strict adherence to alignment has not been used a lot at games I’ve played. Most players don’t even think about it unless the situation is rather extreme. After posting the video, I put the question out to the community and got some interesting results.
While I knew there would be a core group that is dedicated to the use of alignment, I did not expect it to be nearly half of those that responded. It also spurred some interesting comments on the subject.
News and Updates
Wizards of the Coast released another statement about the OGL. While this attempt was better than the first, I am finding it very difficult to trust the company. I certainly cannot trust what they say. I will focus on what they do.
After the announcement, there were rumors flying around that Wizards does not actually read the survey feedback. This was refuted by several people that used to work at Wizards. I think there is enough for us to be mad at Wizards about. We don’t need to make stuff up.
Kobold Press was among those pushing back on the One D&D OGL terms. In light of the developments, they made three big announcements.
First of all, they are joining with Paizo, and 1500 other creators, on the effort to create the Open RPG Creative License.
Second, they are going to be creating their own ruleset under the codename of Project Black Flag. To that end, they created a Discord server where the community can participate in the playtesting. The link to the Discord server is in the announcement.
And then they released another statement with links where you could sign-up to be part of the playtest.
During last week’s live stream, we spent a good bit of time looking at Dungeon Crawl Classics. The part I absolutely loved about this game was the rules around magic. The amount of detail provided with each spell was incredible. The spells each had ‘personality’ that would be different based on the character that learned it and how lucky you were when you cast it. Really great stuff and I will be digging into this more deeply in future videos.
I have quite a list of game systems that I will be looking at more closely. One that really intrigues me is the Fate system. It does not use ‘normal’ dice. The Fate dice are 6-sided dice with faces containing 2 plus signs, 2 minus signs, and 2 blank. It also uses Fate Points for tracking…something. I don’t even know yet. But I love games that use cool stuff so this is one I am looking forward to.
January Discounts
DriveThruRPG and DMsGuild are both having huge sales on products through the end of January.
And don’t forget the Dungeon Crawl Classics Humble Bundle if you want a ton of their PDFs.
OSNPC Dungeon Clash series 03 launches on January 30, 2023—exclusively for subscribers. This series will use Pathfinder 2e rules. Check out my website for details about what OSNPC Dungeon Clash is and how it works.
What To Look For This Week
Stay tuned for news about the next OSNPC Dungeon Clash Series
Join me for the live stream on Thursday to talk about TTRPGs
I will also be starting a live stream on Twitch soon. Time and topic TBD
That’s it for now. Note that I use affiliate links to help support the newsletter. Using those links along with paid newsletter subscriptions and any contributions sent through Ko-Fi allow me to keep this newsletter free for the community.
Until next time.
Take care.