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Rosstin
2013-03-20, 07:48 PM
Hey all-- I'm writing an essay about alignment systems, and I'm curious about people's attempts at using non good/evil law/chaos systems in their games. Do you think there are other deep philosophical koans that can be used to model alignment systems on?

I remember a silly game where we made a laundry list of ridiculous alignment spectrums, including misogyny/feminism, faith/skepticism, violence/pacifism, and a host of other ridiculous oppositions.

TuggyNE
2013-03-20, 08:06 PM
Hey all-- I'm writing an essay about alignment systems, and I'm curious about people's attempts at using non good/evil law/chaos systems in their games. Do you think there are other deep philosophical koans that can be used to model alignment systems on?

I remember a silly game where we made a laundry list of ridiculous alignment spectrums, including misogyny/feminism, faith/skepticism, violence/pacifism, and a host of other ridiculous oppositions.

We collected a lot a month or two back. Categorized to a fair extent, too.

Mastikator
2013-03-20, 08:08 PM
Alignment, as in which side you're on on a cosmic scale/battle or as in what type of personality trait you have on a scale between two mutually exclusive opposite types or as in what kind of political/religious convictions you hold?

Rosstin
2013-03-20, 08:50 PM
@Mast: I'm less interested in factional alliances than I am about philosophical questions, although faction can play an important role in characterizing alignment.

That thread sounds awesome, gonna check it out right now.

Feddlefew
2013-03-20, 09:26 PM
I added a color system to my game to simulate blue and orange morality. I then assigned each in game culture a color and a list of values and taboos. For instance, Gnolls (N-green) in one campaign believed that dead bodies had to be burned or eaten, sometimes both, to prevent them from being desecrated by marauding spirits. This extended to all corpses they found, including animals larger than small dogs.

The Gnolls in this world lived in a vast plain bisected by a long, winding river fed by many tributaries. The riverfolk (NG-Blue), who were basically sea elves that breathed air, controlled and lived on this river. The traditional riverfolk funeral consists of placing the deceased on a special raft and floating them down the river and out to the ocean.

Both of their civilizations existed at the "barely tolerating each other" level for the duration of the campaign.

JusticeZero
2013-03-21, 02:33 PM
Hey all-- I'm writing an essay about alignment systems, and I'm curious about people's attempts at using non good/evil law/chaos systems in their games. Do you think there are other deep philosophical koans that can be used to model alignment systems on?

I remember a silly game where we made a laundry list of ridiculous alignment spectrums, including misogyny/feminism, faith/skepticism, violence/pacifism, and a host of other ridiculous oppositions.

point the first: There are three accepted theories regarding Good Vs. Evil in philosophy. Those are: Consequentialism, Deontology, and a third one that I forget the name of. None of them are satisfying in isolation, but improving it gets down to a lot of hazy value judgements and the like.
Consequentialism says "Whatever the end result of what you do is is how you are judged."
Deontology says "Whatever the action you take is is how you are judged, regardless of what the effects are."
the third one says "Whatever your god (who gave you the Detect Evil spell in the first place) thinks is Good is Good."
These are absolute positions; if you try to mix them you start getting insoluble problems that make paladins unplayable and annoy everyone.
In a Consequentialist world, a paladin has to worry that if they rescue a child, that child might become a murderer and cause the paladin to fall for rescuing them.
in a Deontological world, a paladin has to worry that stealing from demons is evil.
In the third world, a paladin has to worry that their god of Good's scripture describes torturing orcish infants and children - thus, if they find orcish babies, and they DON'T torture them, they will fall for committing an evil act.. even though the LG Ranger they fight beside is a Half-orc.
The makers of the world will want some easy system of discerning who belongs where. This system might run up lots of false matches.

In the game world I spent most of my time dealing with, things that were aligned tended to have a contagion effect on that. The world was Deontological.

There were a bunch of spells that were "Evil" to cast. None of these actually affected your behavior in the least bit. That's how I ended up playing a wizard-type character who fought evil selflessly and stood by the Paladin on all of his decisions who at a certain point was the proud and satisfied owner of a 2e Book of Vile Darkness that he'd acquired from a defeated boss villain's lair. He used a lot of spells with "evil" aspects, being a necromancer.

I think I actually contemplated using the book as an attack against one BBEG we never actually got far enough to fight, after I realized that said BBEG's thing involved a lot of vivisection and body modification of creatures and people into mutilated and tortured *things* - because I realized that all the healing spells that said enemy had to be casting to do their "experiments" would have pegged their alignment to profoundly "Good", and so the BoVD would rip them up.

Law vs Chaos is just a Harmony vs Discipline debate. If it's freedom-wild-improvisey-emotional, it moves you toward "Chaos", if it involves getting up early and doing exercizes and routine and "Not tonight, I have to study" or "Page 32 of The Book says.." then it moves you toward Lawful. most things don't move the needle either way. A lot of abilities that players used were more important to determining alignment than anything else; Barbarians would end up being perma-Chaotic because of how often they would use rage (a Chaotic act to activate)

My necromancy specialist wizard - who behaved LG - came up on alignment spells as "Lawful EVIL!!!", the Berserker - whose behavior was pretty NG - came up as "CHAOTIC!!! Good", and the Cleric healer - who was a bit of a jerk - came up as "Neutral GOOD!!!!" even after pulling one of the stunts that nearly got him kicked out for its underhandedness and cruelty, because every time he would bust out Cure Light Wounds for any reason whatsoever counted as a "Good" act.

This said, I wouldn't worry too much about alignments beyond figuring how said alignments will trip the heuristic spell effects that are associated with them. People don't (or shouldn't) be thinking "I need to act more Lawful today", they have much more complex motives and behavior. they should be behaving as themself. The alignment is completely irrelevant to them until the moment that a paladin starts staring at everyone creepily. Or I suppose when they have to wait in line having been eviscerated to get to the registrars' desk of the afterlife they've been fast-tracked to.

falloutimperial
2013-03-22, 05:30 AM
point the first:
Consequentialism says "Whatever the end result of what you do is is how you are judged."
In a Consequentialist world, a paladin has to worry that if they rescue a child, that child might become a murderer and cause the paladin to fall for rescuing them.


Not quite. This is a common misconception, but Consequentialism almost always sees a difference between moral actors and moral actions, acknowledging that one person cannot know everything about every possible choice.

Consequentialism says "The extent to which the end result of what you do, in eventual visitation of pain or pleasure on others, is is how your action is judged. The extent to which you fulfill this principle is how you are judged."

In a Consequentialist world, a paladin has to worry that if they make a significant amount of money, they should probably give most of it to starving and impoverished people, to the extent where the maximum amount of happiness has been achieved.


Many people have joked that "Funky vs. Square" makes for a good axis, and I tend to agree.

JusticeZero
2013-03-22, 04:04 PM
In a Consequentialist world, a paladin has to worry that if they make a significant amount of money, they should probably give most of it to starving and impoverished people, to the extent where the maximum amount of happiness has been achieved.
Which describes a Utilitarian view, which is a subset of but not the whole of the Consequentialist umbrella. I'm not sure what straight Utilitarianim would consider an "evil act", since it's always been described in gradients of goodness to me at least. Anyways, consequences are hard to measure, so they can be a lousy basis of judgement.

Bogardan_Mage
2013-03-23, 12:22 AM
I'd really like to try the Honor (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/campaigns/honor.htm) system at some point. Does anyone have any experience with it?

Ravens_cry
2013-03-23, 12:31 AM
I'd like to try an allegiance system for a civil war campaign, where you can have noble and good people who are your enemies, but you fight them because they are your enemies, and utter depraved scum who you hate everything they stand for, but, dammit, they are your utter depraved scum.

Totally Guy
2013-03-23, 05:26 AM
I think that before an alternative is viable you need to declare what an alignment system is for.

In Dungeon World an evil wizard gains XP for causing terror and fear with magic. It's an objective method that the player uses to gain experience for the character. "Did you cause terror and fear with that magic?" "Yes" "Then you get XP". That's an example of an alignment system that is intended to make the character play a particular way.

In Burning Wheel you write out some beliefs for your character, things that they can do something about. "My father knows the location of the idol, I will keep him from drinking long enough for him to have him join my quest." That makes the character play in a particular way too. Is that then effectively an alignment system? I guess that depends on why you have an alignment system.

Khedrac
2013-03-23, 05:44 AM
I remember a silly game where we made a laundry list of ridiculous alignment spectrums, including misogyny/feminism, faith/skepticism, violence/pacifism, and a host of other ridiculous oppositions.

I'm not sure if they really count as alignments, but Pendragon used opposing character traits like this to define your character's character and you could have to make checks against them in game play.

The game was openly biased (being set on the ideal of King Arthur's Court) in that all listed religions had a set of traits that were the ideal, and so did knighthood (I don't recall if there even were other classes), but Christianity was the only religion without a last one trait in opposition to knighthood.
This wasn't a judgement on any religion, just a reflection of the classical fictional ideal of Christian knighthood.

JusticeZero
2013-03-23, 08:22 AM
Right, if you have no rules based alignment tests in your game, you don't need alignments. Alignment in DnD is mostly just for the reason that in the DnD world, Good and Law are fundamental and measurable properties of physics that modify a lot of effects in real and game-relevant ways.

scurv
2013-03-23, 12:32 PM
On the good evil axis I tend to map it to compassion/malice.
Note, Hard love although it can cause much pain is something that is done with the intent of improving the person. Think of things like physical therapy, That hard arse teacher who rode your case to get you to perform. Things such as that.

I view honor as its own stat, And a subjective one at that. A rogue,warrior or even assassin can each have their own code of honor although they might not all agree.
Honor is loosely defined as a code of conduct that holds you to some form of moral or professional standard. Things like keeping ones word is a great sign of honor. If you go back to as early as Philip of Macedon (alaxander the greats father) And machiavelli they both pointed out that it is important to seem trustworthy but that lies are quite often the most effective. Although Misdirection is part of warfare in some cultures Blatent falsehoods tends to be frowned from the world over. Also traits such as never retreating temperance in the face of hostilities and such have been known to be included in the definition of honor as well.
((BTW I will defrock palidins for lieing))

Law and Chaos. I tend to view this as discipline vs impulse driven.
A Lawful person can conflict with the established government and still be lawful in how they do it. So the defining trait i use for this is being non-capricious in your decisions.

Legalistic is an alignment trait were the person follows the letter of the law, But is blind to the moral/ethical implications. This tends to be related to many paladin horror stories

Chaotic i tend to view as acting on impulse with out regard to established norms. Note Acting with out regard to the established norms is not the same as acting against them.

prufock
2013-03-24, 12:14 AM
Mutants and Masterminds uses a system of "complications," which can include pretty much anything about which your character has strong opinions. It absorbs morality, ethics, loyalty, honour, business, and allegiances into one system. In my experience it's been very elegant.

Ravens_cry
2013-03-25, 09:42 AM
Mutants and Masterminds uses a system of "complications," which can include pretty much anything about which your character has strong opinions. It absorbs morality, ethics, loyalty, honour, business, and allegiances into one system. In my experience it's been very elegant.
Complications is more than that, it's also when you allow your character to follow genre conventions even when it inconveniences you, contractual genre blindness to put it in TV Tropes terms. For example, if playing in a Silver Age story, you don't kill the badie, despite the extreme temptation and even justifacation.. Or you let yourself be captured and put in the over complicated death trap because over complicated death traps are part of the genre.

Copper
2013-03-25, 03:50 PM
When I was playing a Lighter and Softer house version of D&D, I changed the alignment system from Good/Evil to constructive/destructive and Law/Chaos to Logical/Emotional. In this version alignment's less of a morality thing and more a personality thing.

Also there's using The Magic colors as alignments. There's a big post on this forum somewhere about that.

JusticeZero
2013-03-25, 07:24 PM
..changed the alignment system from Good/Evil to constructive/destructive and Law/Chaos to Logical/Emotional. In this version alignment's less of a morality thing and more a personality thing..
How did the planar politics and such work with that, then? What sort've alignment based outsiders were there?

Xefas
2013-03-25, 07:36 PM
I've never played the game, but I hear that Grey Ranks has a two-axis alignment system, with "Love vs Hate" and "Enthusiasm vs Exhaustion".

Exalted has four Virtues; Compassion, Conviction, Temperance, and Valor. If you have Compassion 1, you don't give a crap about the suffering of others, and can watch babies burning in a furnace without feeling compelled to act on that knowledge. If you have Compassion 3, you're compelled to help innocents in need whenever you see them, even if its somewhat inconvenient or out of your way. If you have Compassion 5, when you aren't actively dedicating your life to selflessly sacrificing everything to help every living thing in the world, or letting your archnemesis live on the off chance that he could one day be redeemed, you're openly weeping at the simple knowledge that the world isn't a heavenly utopia at this exact moment, because it rakes at your soul.

So, it's kind of four separate lines. Each Virtue doesn't effect the others.

(edit: mechanically, characters can channel their virtues for extra dice equal to its rating when acting in accordance with the virtue. So, you could channel your Compassion 5 for a whopping five bonus dice if you're trying to, say, take your archnemesis down with nonlethal force, while shedding a single man-tear over his wasted potential)

Pendragon has a whole... thing. You gotta look that one up, because I don't know enough about it to really state anything with accuracy. But it's got this Arthurian honor/virtue system going on.

Razanir
2013-03-26, 11:22 AM
I'd like to try an allegiance system for a civil war campaign, where you can have noble and good people who are your enemies, but you fight them because they are your enemies, and utter depraved scum who you hate everything they stand for, but, dammit, they are your utter depraved scum.

A good example of this: Inspector Javert is not evil. He's merely Lawful Stupid Neutral. He's actually deeply religious and only acts as he thinks is right. He's only antagonistic to Valjean because he's Valjean's parole officer and Valjean broke his parole

On the other hand, Valjean and the Thénardiers both work the the rebellion, but the Thérnadiers fit that second description to the bill. Well, except that Valjean doesn't like them. He just agrees to side with them when his adoptive daughter falls in love with a man from the rebellion

prufock
2013-03-26, 11:44 AM
Complications is more than that, it's also when you allow your character to follow genre conventions even when it inconveniences you, contractual genre blindness to put it in TV Tropes terms. For example, if playing in a Silver Age story, you don't kill the badie, despite the extreme temptation and even justifacation.. Or you let yourself be captured and put in the over complicated death trap because over complicated death traps are part of the genre.

Not only that, it also provides mechanics for things like colourblindness, having a real job, and so on. Basically anything in your character description that could affect you negatively provides a hero point when it comes up.

Copper
2013-03-26, 04:53 PM
How did the planar politics and such work with that, then? What sort've alignment based outsiders were there?

There was very little planar travel in that campaign, so that wasn't much of a problem. As for outsiders, I would just make traditional chaotic outsiders, but more volatile and emotional and passionate, but law-based outsiders were robotically logical. I based it pretty closely after standard the 3.5 planes and outsiders. It worked pretty well, all in all.

Ravens_cry
2013-03-27, 03:59 AM
A good example of this: Inspector Javert is not evil. He's merely Lawful Stupid Neutral. He's actually deeply religious and only acts as he thinks is right. He's only antagonistic to Valjean because he's Valjean's parole officer and Valjean broke his parole

On the other hand, Valjean and the Thénardiers both work the the rebellion, but the Thérnadiers fit that second description to the bill. Well, except that Valjean doesn't like them. He just agrees to side with them when his adoptive daughter falls in love with a man from the rebellion
Pretty much. I like the inherent moral ambiguity of the situation. It's not just law and chaos good and evil, though such forces exist, it's a question of loyalties. With whom do you stand and why?


Not only that, it also provides mechanics for things like colourblindness, having a real job, and so on. Basically anything in your character description that could affect you negatively provides a hero point when it comes up.
It's a fairly good system and a lot of systems that purposely emphasize role playing use something similar to provide incentive for actions, that while in game terms, are non-optimal are still part of the games tone.