PDA

View Full Version : The Null Stone



Frozen_Feet
2014-08-17, 09:36 AM
Most alignment systems can be visualized as a sort of scale. For example, in case of Good Vs. Evil, you place a hypothetical white stone on one side for each good action, and black stone to the other for each evil action. Neutrality, in such a schema, can be visualized as there being as many stones on each side, or absence of stone all together.

But this raises an interesting question that has implications for both a game's moral philosophy and mechanics. Most of the time, in addition to actions defined as good and evil (etc.), there are also actions that are neither. Do we just ignore those actions for determining alignment, or do we count them as separate set of "null" stones?

If the former, neutrality is often very hard to maintain and characters will very easily shift from one side to another. Alternating between good and bad actions will make a character regularly go from good to neutral to evil and back over and over again.

If the latter, since good and bad actions tend to be rather exceptional, most characters would end up with a towering pile of null stones over the course of their life. It would be very hard for a common person to be either good or evil. So in addition to moral and immoral, we would have a much larger group of amoral people.

Which model do you use or prefer?

JusticeZero
2014-08-17, 09:52 AM
Neutral actions don't count; a portion of actions depreciate over time; neutral has gravity. Your models are not taking the depreciation effect into account; most models allow that acts decrease in relevance and mass over time, thus favoring more recent actions.

DM Nate
2014-08-17, 10:26 AM
And this precisely why I don't use alignment systems. They have no connection to anything in real life.

Frozen_Feet
2014-08-17, 10:48 AM
Neutral actions don't count; a portion of actions depreciate over time; neutral has gravity. Your models are not taking the depreciation effect into account; most models allow that acts decrease in relevance and mass over time, thus favoring more recent actions.

Ah, true, I didn't consider this third option. It is valid one as well. Though the null stone model has much the same effect: old actions cease to matter as the debris of neutral actions pile on old acts. But it doesn't just favor more recent events, it requires those recent events to be increasingly more extreme and consistent to overcome the burden of null stones (or "gravity" of neutrality, as you put it).

EDIT: such systems also raise another question: should the value of actions be forgotten/forgiven? In my past alignment debates, I've noticed many players feel like the "taint" of evil actions should not fade away with just time; however, similar attitude does not exist towards good actions. This kind of thinking naturally leads to a world where evil is "winning", because decay of time makes good actions cease to matter but doesn't do anything about evil. It makes evil into entropy of sorts.


And this precisely why I don't use alignment systems. They have no connection to anything in real life.

That's not true at all. All alignment systems can be traced to some real-world moral philosophy and each such philosophy was deviced to judge real people and actions. Many of them have since become obsolete or forgotten and would naturally feel alien to a player who espouses a different set of values.

DM Nate
2014-08-17, 10:53 AM
The real-world moral philosophy, yes. But forcibly inserting a moral philosophy that I find personally obsolete feels about as genuine as making all my PCs "find Jesus" at the end of the campaign.

Frozen_Feet
2014-08-17, 11:14 AM
Considering clerics, gods and demons are mainstays of fantasy despite many of the players being atheists, I have to wonder what your issue is. :smalltongue: It's one the main appeals of fantasy to explore those obsolete philosophies, moral, religious, natural or anything else. It's why so many settings are set in medieval stasis or have classical elements as their basis. It's analogous to kids having fun by putting on their parents' old clothing.

DM Nate
2014-08-17, 11:32 AM
True. In fact, in my current campaign (http://www.darkhaunt.net), I've done away with all outer and contiguous planes and simply replaced them all with "Hades" (basically an amalgamation of the shadow, ethereal, and astral realms). But "Hades" was a concept popular long before "heaven" and "hell," and all my dead people go there, regardless of their various personal ethical systems.

JusticeZero
2014-08-17, 11:48 AM
I don't worry about "forcing a moral compass" on players, because I always play alignment in the game universe as a flawed approximation that can be gamed and manipulated. It doesn't need to tell fundamental truths, really. It just needs to tell what their charge and mass is when those bits of physics come up.

DM Nate
2014-08-17, 12:17 PM
In that regard, why introduce a "null stone" if we're purposely doing forced approximations? It feels abstract enough as it is.

JusticeZero
2014-08-17, 01:00 PM
It's a question of how a given entity builds up and retains a good or evil charge; in one set of assumptions, the neutral charge space becomes increasingly small in the relative sense, resulting in virtually everyone eventually being one of the corner alignments; in the other, null mass increases and weights alignment to neutral, until on the long scale, almost every entity will be Neutral. Or, as I noted, individual deed-weights can evaporate over time, which normalizes the distribution at the cost of letting elves who committed genocide in their youth into heaven because the deed-weight of the genocide eventually evaporates away.

DM Nate
2014-08-17, 01:18 PM
Reading that made my eyes bleed. I think I'll stay out of these abstract philosophical discussions from now on.

AMFV
2014-08-17, 01:28 PM
Most alignment systems can be visualized as a sort of scale. For example, in case of Good Vs. Evil, you place a hypothetical white stone on one side for each good action, and black stone to the other for each evil action. Neutrality, in such a schema, can be visualized as there being as many stones on each side, or absence of stone all together.

But this raises an interesting question that has implications for both a game's moral philosophy and mechanics. Most of the time, in addition to actions defined as good and evil (etc.), there are also actions that are neither. Do we just ignore those actions for determining alignment, or do we count them as separate set of "null" stones?

If the former, neutrality is often very hard to maintain and characters will very easily shift from one side to another. Alternating between good and bad actions will make a character regularly go from good to neutral to evil and back over and over again.

If the latter, since good and bad actions tend to be rather exceptional, most characters would end up with a towering pile of null stones over the course of their life. It would be very hard for a common person to be either good or evil. So in addition to moral and immoral, we would have a much larger group of amoral people.

Which model do you use or prefer?

Well you're ignoring a few important things. First, Inertia. If one is good or once one moves towards Good (or Evil) it's harder to leave it since Good acts become a force of habit. Also it may take more than a single Evil act or even a habitual series of Evil acts to push somebody into Evil or into Good.

I tend to follow the former system, but I have a strong sense of inertia to it. Somebody who is Good has built up enough Good acts to be hard to dislodge, and there are neutral people, who are people who act in a way that is neither Evil or Good, now it might seem like this is close to the null stone hypothesis, but I would say that it's just inertia at work.

After all in D&D (for example) one Evil act is very rarely enough to make a character spontaneously convert to Evil, the same way as smoking Marijuana once doesn't spontaneously make you into a crack addict who lives on the street. That's the idea I have behind Evil, it's addictive, and controlling, it's very comparable to a drug habit. But there are people who have functional drug habits, and there are people who can stay afloat despite having occasional Evil habits.

I know that this is fairly rambly and not quite addressing the exact question, but I hope it addresses it in some way.

nedz
2014-08-17, 02:00 PM
I tend to view alignment as a secondary statistic. It describes a character's behaviour rather than driving the character. There are exceptions where someone tries to follow alignment — that doesn't always work out as planned however.

Also alignments should be less black and white. Earlier editions modelled this with concepts like Neutral tending Good and Alignment graphs. I suppose 3.5 does this with BoED, and maybe Paladins, but those are exceptions.

In terms of The Balance Stone — all actions count. If you do 1 Good thing and 10 Neutral then you are Neutral; add in a few more White stones and you start to tend towards Good; and so on.