LawfulGoodness

matahitorigoto:

I f****** hate Paladins. Well… ok, maybe not Paladins so much as characters of the lawful good alignment.

The last time we played, the DM focused the storyline around my character’s backstory. In this particular campaign I play a vampire pixie named Vivian. Up until the last gaming session, I had played her as a very childlike fluttery thing obsessed with sparkly pretty things. Kind of vapid and innocent but at the same time grotesquely DEVASTATING in combat. She can do up to 35 damage if I roll well with an At-Will. An At-Will!!! (first time i’ve played a striker). It’s been super fun to play her because the DM will describe how she flew through the chest of a carrion crawler for the killing blow and emerged covered in ichor and gore and bits of internal organs, and I’ll role play her getting fussily skeeved out by the mess and using prestidigitation to clean herself and her companions up.

But all that has changed.

Vivian’s backstory :

I didn’t want to have to deal with a maker, so I had to come up with a story that was quasi feasible or the DM was just going to give me one. I decided that Vivian was kind of a goth-kid fairy, preferred solitude, no one understood her etc. etc. very apathetic and bored. She was in the forest one day when a vampire was teleported into the feywild from another realm. He was severely wounded and upon catching Vivian’s scent immediately attacked. However, he stepped into a ray of sunlight just as he reached her, which caused him to disentegrate. But not before he sprayed her in the face from a gouting, gaping wound. As Vivian is a pixie, this small amount of vampiric blood was enough to turn her.

She proceeded to live as a vampire pixie, now completely avoiding all other fey folk and living alone in the woods, feeding off various forest creatures. Whenever a pixie village became aware of her presence she would move to another forest. And so she lived for many years. Then one day she came across a boy goth-kid pixie who was living exactly how she had before she was turned. They became very close (he’s the only one that understands me!) and eventually she turned him. He delighted in his newfound strength and began feeding upon the pixies of his village. He was caught, she tried to rescue him and was caught. The villagers tore him to pieces before her eyes when they realized what he was. They turned to Vivian to do the same and that’s when her memory just goes blank.


So my character was introduced to the other members of this campaign after a few hundred years of being a sort of assassin/bodyguard in the material plane, with no memory of how she left the feywild or what happened there and not really caring. As long as she has her pretty sparklys and things to slay she was happy.

Until a pixie bounty hunter came after her. The second she tasted his blood her amnesia was gone. She remembers going into an absolute feral frenzy and massacring the entire pixie village (children and all), Pixie authorities trying to restrain her and finally being sent to the mortal plane with her memory locked, and a spell cast upon her that would not allow her to harm anything “pretty”. Thus insuring that no more pixies would meet their demise at her hands.

The DM just laid all this on me during combat. Very, “hey guess what… this happened… what’re you gonna do?” So… now she is a completely different character and I play her very cold and adult and matter of fact. Different but still has potential to be a lot of fun to play. What I was NOT anticipating was the f****** fighter character Nathan (who is the leader of our group) deciding that Vivian is now an evil character who must be destoyed! But only after she is no longer useful in the campaign. Yeah, I know it’s just a game. And I know he’s just role playing the way he thinks his character would react. But he really pissed me off. I get it. He’s a Paladin. He’s lawful good. But I think Nathan would remember all the times Vivian helped him, was kind to him, consoled him. Instead he has decided that, no, she is evil, her innate evilness cancels out any good she may have done in the past. He’s being a total douche. For example, it’s Yule in the game, he received a gift of hunting dogs. Vivian is kind of drifting along on the outskirts of everything since he’s making it extremely uncomfortable for her to interact with the other PCs. She sees the dogs and goes to hang out with him (pixies can speak to natural and fey beasts). He notices and immediately takes the dogs away mumbling something about not wanting their training to be compromised. He won’t look at her or talk to her, despite Vivi having saved his ass multiple times during the year we have been playing this campaign.

The other players told me that he (the player) was a having a “that time of the month” kind of day. They’ve been playing this game since they were in high school back on the East Coast and I just started playing a year ago. So they know him better. (we play with him via Skype which I think is super cool) But now i’m not looking forward to Friday like I normally do. Last gaming session wasn’t fun. I game to escape from tedious reality and the stress that being a stay at home mom can bring, I don’t want my escape to be a place where I feel unwanted and uncomfortable. I was having so much fun. I have a vampire bunny minion, a pretty cool ass back story, and I’m SO effective in combat! F****** Nathan and his Paladin ways are taking away my fun. I can deal with having to play my character in a different way due to story line, I could still have a lot of fun playing her, but not if the leader of our group continues to treat her like this.

hmph. Maybe I should turn him in his sleep.

Sounds to me like that’s just poor roleplaying.  ”Lawful Good” gets a bad rap by players who focus on the “lawful” part more than the “good.”  If you have done good, but he fails to see that and focuses on the bad you did before, he needs to be reminded (by you or the GM), that you were (and are) punished for your actions and have served your term.  If it is more a problem with the change in how your roleplaying the character, then penance/remorse for past deeds is the first part of a redemption story.

He needs to get over the “bad things were done I must vanquish her” view and actually work on lawfully doing good to those he’s around.

This is all besides the obvious point of… if he’s a paladin, is he not using his frickin’ “Detect Evil”?  Or did he fail the roll and so he assumes it anyway?  Sounds more like you need a better paladin. 

Two cents from a lifelong lawful good.  ;-)