Not the Sunday Group Game

but because it should be recorded for posterity, Scott recently broke his personal best record for shortest lived character when (in our friend Mac’s D&D game on Saturday) his character was PK-ed before the adventure even began. For some reason shortly after Scott’s character introduced himself Walter became suspicious of him and cast Know Alignment; upon finding out that Scott’s character was evil–I almost said Scott was evil, but that goes without saying–Walter and Mike refused to go adventuring with him. After a bunch of pointless argument, Scott’s character drew his dagger and had at Walter’s character, and a couple melee rounds later Scott’s character’s head was rolling around on the tavern floor.
Scott was understandably a bit miffed at this, and I have to confess that I was a bit puzzled, since I had thought that there was an unwritten group rule to the effect that players weren’t allowed to refuse to go adventuring with other players’s characters over something as trivial as alignment. I had certainly felt compelled by Mac and the group to continue to adventure with Rachel’s character Polly when she was obviously ripping off the party in her dealing with her criminal family (and my character was easily smart enough to figure it out)–granted when Polly died nobody expressed any great remorse or suggested that we try to figure out a way to raise her, but that seemed to be the extent of the reaction against her character’s actual transgressions. Why Scott’s new character’s alignment was such a sticking point I really don’t know; in fact, now that I think about it the same group had been happy enough to adventure with my previous (now deceased) character, who was also evil. Maybe the only difference was that they didn’t realize that my character was supposed to be evil, since he didn’t live long enough to do anything bad.
Of course, at that point, neither had Scott’s character. Interestingly enough, though Scott insists that he wasn’t playing the character as obviously evil and halfway suspected Walter of using Out-Of-Character knowledge in deciding to cast the Know Alignment spell, my character simply presumed that Scott’s character was evil but just didn’t care. I’m not actually sure why I supposed that, since I know that I didn’t have any OOC knowledge; either it was something about Scott’s manner, or maybe it was just that he got along with Rachel’s character….