Alignment Change

When is it the time to forcibly change someone's alignment? I have a wizard in my game going by chaotic neutral. He's taken to actively thwarting the plans of the other party members and started a genocidal crusade against goblins because one managed to hit him on the first encounter.
Really seems to me like he's not being neutral at all, but I don't want to push it too far.

Does he worship a CN god of vengeance?

If yes, has the party intentionally offended him to warrant him interfering with their plans?

If yes, he is playing to his character.

If the answer to any of these is no, he is CE.

He worships the god of magic and he's the one offending everyone. One PC was trying to buy a cape, he walks in and started talking shit about the shop owner. He's said if anyone gets a pet he's killing it.
We have another session tonight, and if he keeps this shit up I'm going to change it.

It's time for the gender/alignment changing doorway of the tomb of horrors. Make that CN he a LN she.

What reason do the other PCs have to even work with someone like that? Is that the type of person who should be trusted in life or death situations?

Never.

That's Neutral/Chaotic Evil behavior. The genocidal crusade against goblins could be Lawful Evil behavior depending on how he goes about it. If those are the only examples then I'd hold off on changing alignment just yet.

Always? I like changing my allignment because it shows I've been through a life-changing experience. I started out with a True Neutral Bard that didnt want to get involved with anything, accidently got TPed to the Underdark, and then came out a Chaotic Neutral/Chaotic Good/Chaotic Desperate to prepare the above world for the shit going on down below.

Talk to him before the next game and point out what you have a problem with.
If he says "but thats what my character would do!" ask him why he made the kind of character who would do that.

I like the concept from 1 and 2nd ed DND. Although you have to go digging in magazines and supplements to find it

Basically theres this one time Gygax posted a chart that explained how what alignment really meant was how aligned your soul was to a specific afterlife dimension/plane. In other words, "who has dibs on your soul when you die"

Less "are you literally the embodiment of good or evil itself" and more "through your attitude/actions, if you die right now your destined to hell, so your detected as evil, because we're measuring by whether or not Hell can claim you."

So we depart from the realm of players meta opinions of alignment, and focus on the what the game world is asking for in the "Pact Primevil"

Which does lead to some DM fiats due to lack of fleshing out, but at least you have (potentially) concrete measures.

I think you change his alignment from "playing in your game" to "never playing with you ever again."

>If he says "but thats what my character would do!"
Ask him to explain *why* it's what his character would do. If he can't answer, tell him to roll a new PC. A PC with a personality he understands.

Alignment systems are a mistake.
Outer Planes cosmology representing an alignment "wheel" are silly, nonsensical and exist nowhere else outside of a game developer's 3rd rate pastiche.

>and started a genocidal crusade against goblins because one managed to hit him on the first encounter.

That's called "Evil". Neutrality does not permit genocide.

Make one other player to adopt pet, if he didn't kill it it means he was bluffing so its CN but if he kills it for no reason he is CE.
Also kick him out, genocide is fine, killing pet not

>Picard is LG
>Mal is NG
This is why I hate alignment charts.

should be
>Picard is LN

Killing evil races is not evil. It is Good.

You forgot one
>Xenomorphs NE

They're just living out their life cycle. Are we NE because we hunt prey?

I'd be willing to accept that argument if they weren't make 90% of spikes, didn't have acid blood and didn't reproduce exclusively through rape. I don't care what you say there's no way those thing contribute to any ecosystem, if any animal counts as evil that's it.

The problem here is that your player is a cunt. That doesn't have anything to do with alignment.

The real question is, is it intelligent enough to conceptualise morality? Everything below a certain intelligence is neutral by default, unless it's native to some other plane perhaps.

Classic blunder

I was forced to change my CG rogue to LN after he founded a thief guild and became the guildmaster. Reason was I could not be chaotic when I started making rules and enforcing them within the guild. Makes perfect sense really, only minor salty for the high xp penalty I got for having to change alignment, but I knew the reasoning and I also agreed wholeheartedly.

maybe, but neurotypical people understood that in this case the problem is a player using a system as an excuse to fuck with people.
Deliberately misunderstanding a system, I would add.

And what makes you so sure that goblins are evil? OP certainly doesn't say anything to that effect. Indeed, the character's entire motivation isn't even anything that suggests that goblins are evil. OP wants to kill the entire goblin race because one hit him, once, in their first encounter.

The genocidal crusade against goblins takes me back.

In one of my first campaigns I was playing a Chaotic Good druid who, after a series of unfortunate events, involving a flesh regrowing potion, a nat 1 charisma roll against a Goblin king and supernatural bad luck brought on by magical shenanigans, once wiped out a goblin city with an avalanche.

But because the Goblin's had been trying to murder him and his party since the flubbed charisma roll, the Druid's animosity was at an all time high so he just thought the whole situation was very funny. Our DM then lowered my characters Alignment to Chaotic Neutral for his sheer glee on accidentally killing a city by flipping it off and shouting at it. Then since the session had brought the evil out in our cleric and he had actively tried to betray my druid, armed with a new alignment he set about framing the cleric for the crime.

The session after that, and some further shenanigans, the cleric had a genuine murder under his belt (religious bickering with the local cleric went nasty) and a massive bounty on his head for my crimes. Naturally I turned him in, with a spectacular char roll, and made a shit load.

That session ended with out Warrior (Lawful Good) being thrown in a dungeon, our (Neutral Evil) Cleric flying through the stratosphere encased in a frozen block of slime, and my Druid (Chaotic Neutral) fleeing town with no pants, once again pinning the whole thing on his companions.

Fast forward to the end of that campaign and my druid is a remorseless, druid magic peddling empire, drug mogul. He went full Walter White, turning the bounty money into the start up funding for his magic drug business. Our Warrior went mad, and our Cleric ended up bringing his own religion down with a civil war over whether or not he was their second coming of evil Jesus.

Twas a fun campaign.

Our DM liked my Druid's arc so much he made him the villain in another campaign.

I guess what I'm saying is that Goblin themed genocidal crusades can be the start of a magical journey that leads a character to becoming a magical druglord, kingpin of crime over 2 continents.

He always kept a general prejudice against Gobbo's too, and that supernatural bad luck factor. When every now and then without my knowledge the DM would roll on any of my random actions and if he got a 1 add a catastrophic effect. It only bit me once, every other time it either made everything more hilarious or worked to my benefit in some way. Sometimes a curse can be a blessing.

Bit of a tangent though, sorry OP. Just got me all nostalgic, I haven't thought about that campaign for years.

kek. i know most people here think banning for roleplaying out of character is a bad idea, but personally if you are just fucking the game with your "IM TOTALLY EVIL GUIYZ" shtick then you're getting banned pretty much instantly for ruining the game altogether.

I thought xenomorphs had a human level intelligence. could be horribly wrong though

To paraphrase the mad scientist from the 4th movie: They aren't sapient, but they possess a highly refined animal cunning. They learn quickly and can pass on memories to future generations via "genetic memory."

They also absorb characteristics from whatever species they gestate in: larger brains and opposable thumbs when in humans, I think the third movie had a dog-alien that walked on four legs and had bigger teeth.

Why is genetic memory in quotes? That is a scientific thing. Genetic memory is an actual concept in genetics. How far it goes exactly is yet to be determined, but we see it all the time. It's usually little shit, but with smaller lifeforms it can be a big deal.