Here I come to save the day

In my last game of Planescape Torment my Nameless One had a dramatic change of character: he turned Lawful Good. It was the latest step in a three step path that started at True Neutral and carried on through to Neutral Good.

I must admit I was surprised by this: I was all too aware that the player’s choices will ultimately build their version of the Nameless One but I was kind of expecting it to be ambiguously presented – I was kind of hoping that the alignment would be kept hidden away from the player until the very end, like in Ogre Battle 64, thus building suspense and not really giving them something to deliberately aspire to. But then again, Ogre Battle 64 is Ogre Battle 64 whilst Planescape Torment is Planescape Torment, so anyway…

But to be Lawful Good in a game like Planescape Torment is indeed an odd occurrence. This is a game that was deliberately setting out to break from tried-and-tested RPG tropes and seemed intent on making the player anything but the good guy. Indeed, it is hard to be the ‘good guy’ of many other RPGs when the world of Sigil isn’t really one of any grandiosity, the majority of party members are either Lawful Neutral or Chaotic Neutral, and the Nameless One himself has more than a few skeletons in the closet  – and that may have well been precisely the point.

I know that there are some gamers that enjoy being the bad guy and doing appalling things - without any sense of a conscience whatsoever - that would make Joffrey Baratheon or Ramsay Snow envious. But I can’t do that. Maybe through playing games since the eighties being the good guy has been ingrained into my mind. Maybe I’m so used to being the good guy that I can’t bring myself to do anything nasty. Maybe I’ve too big a guilty conscience. Or maybe I’ve found myself being too wrapped up in the artificial world laid out before me that I can’t find it in me to go ahead and ruin it.
Yeah lets go with that.

I don’t think me being horrible in an RPG is a complete impossibility however. If anything I wouldn’t mind playing as a Lawful Evil character because a) it’s where honor walks hand in hand with self-advancement and b) therein lies a challenge worth rising up to….

…Just not now. XD