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View Full Version : How do you understand alignment in D&D?



Takewo
2015-08-23, 09:58 AM
This thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?434628-Alignment-ectomy-in-a-Pathfinder-campaign) made me curious about how people deal with alignment in their D&D games.

I've always understood it as a kind of two gangs opposed to each other and trying to annihilate the other one at (more or less) whatever cost; never something related to moral, you'd talk about Good and Evil as you could talk about Millers and Smiths. Also, I've never paid too much attention at the Law-Chaos axis.

Thus, my games have usually been those with two sides, which bore unending war with each other, the character's default being the Good side. But considering that most of the characters are basically marauders (Viking-like) who go about massacring dungeon-dwellers and plundering their treasure or killing people just because they are evil, my fellow players and I quickly dismissed the idea that people on the Good side are really good people and, rather, though of them as people with the mindset of 'no one messes with my family, "my family" being people on the Good side.'

What about you? How do you understand/roleplay alignment?

goto124
2015-08-23, 10:06 AM
My take: Guidelines, not rules. I could say that my character is, for example, Chaotic Neutral to briefly describe a freedom-loving individualist who doesn't really care about helping the helpless or taking over the world. Characterization does not end there and then though.

And we have the people who say 'don't bother with DnD alignment'.

Difficulty of doing that depends on version of DnD, too. I'm aware that 5e strips away plenty of the alignment things, and that 3.5/PF is heavily alignment-dependant . Not sure about other editions of DnD though.

How do people deal with alignment in 3.5/PF, by the way? Treat alignment as cosmic forces, not something that has to align (har har) to real-world common sense?




That's exactly why I always consider the source of the code.

Was it from an institution? Great, you're Lawful.

Or is it a purely individual code? Cool, you're Chaotic.

Even if it's the exact same code. Why does this matter? Because the source determines who is allowed to change your code.

Come to the Nifft side! We have cookies!

Seriously, instead of looking at code-vs-not-code, look at collectivist vs. individualist. That's what I do in my games, and it's a coherent system which allows me to separate law/chaos in a way that is consistent and makes sense.

Consider two people acting against their own better judgement:

Miko the Paladin: "I'm here to fight because the Order declared war on the Hoard."

Thog the Barbarian: "thog here because ulf tell thog come here and fight and later get icecream."


Do you want to be here?

Miko the Paladin: "It's an honor to do my duty, though I'd prefer to be smiting a greater evil."

Thog the Barbarian: "thog could take or leave. except ulf has big axe so not leave."


If you were in charge, what would you do?

Miko the Paladin: "Though my wishes lie elsewhere, I would pursue the Order's policy to the best of my ability, even unto the death."

Thog the Barbarian: "thog hear the beach nice this time of year."

- - -

Basically, it's collectivism vs. individualism. Thog obeys Ulf loyally, but Ulf's policies would not outlive Ulf herself. Miko obeys her Order loyally, and the Order's policies do not die with any particular individual.

The Chaotic person says: Thog's code of conduct is more reliable, because it depends only on Thog, and nobody can sabotage that without his consent.

The Lawful person says: Miko's code of conduct is more reliable, because it depends on something greater than herself, and is not subject to the momentary lapses of judgement that can haunt an individual.

Both of them have a point, but neither of them are objectively correct.

Roll 2d20 to determine how many pages this thread will last.

Ninja_Prawn
2015-08-23, 10:12 AM
I see alignment as two things: 1) the moral ideals that a character aims to live up to and 2) a karmic sum of their past actions. The first is what's written on their character sheet, the second is what governs whether they show up on a Detect Evil radar.

And that's one of the reasons alignment in D&D is so unsatisfactory in D&D: it has to go both ways. A person can say "I'm a good person", and mean it, but they can still be factually wrong to say so.

Kitten Champion
2015-08-23, 10:32 AM
I mostly see it as a chance for players to contemplate who their characters are beyond their age, sex, appearance, and occupation. What do they believe in? What are the limits of those beliefs? Those sorts of boundaries which define us as human beings but regularly get ignored when, say, you're getting bored in Skyrim and decide to deep fry a couple dozen NPCs on a whim.

I think it's rather annoying as a mechanic however, try to minimize that aspect as much as possible.

goto124
2015-08-23, 10:43 AM
There's the case of someone who does the most optimal and pragmatic thing every time. Even if it involves brainwashing, contracts with infernal beings, torture, etc.

If Evil is determined by one's evil intentions, only For the Evulz silly villians qualifying for the Evil alignment, when you can do terrible things without being Evulz.

Which leaves the amount of evil to be what determines if someone is Neutral or Evil.

And... you know what? Let's stop to wonder what the very purpose of alignment is. At some point, it was more of a Red vs Blue thing. Then it changed to... someone help please.

SkipSandwich
2015-08-23, 10:47 AM
I'm in the camp of keeping alignment mostly flavor related. To help sell that mechanically, one houserule I've played with is saying that the Detect X line of spells only ping for creatures that either have an alignment subtype (such as many outsiders) or an monster entry that reads "Always Alignment X". Even if their actual alignment is different, these are creatures that by their metaphysical makeup further Cosmic Good/Evil/Law/Chaos by simple virtue of existing.

Thisguy_
2015-08-23, 11:05 AM
...the Detect X line of spells only ping for creatures that either have an alignment subtype (such as many outsiders) or an monster entry that reads "Always Alignment X".

I'm not a huge fan of that rule. It's there for 5e in a way, but it doesn't detect detestable people, and I like that flavor.

One really good idea I heard was that paladins could have abilities like "Detect Heretic," "Smite Demon," or "Smite Terrorist" instead of Smite or Detect Evil (I cannot remember who said it or where, but they are very clever).

Either way, The way I'd play it is that alignment would be pure fluff until either I introduced a paladin or a player made it mechanical.

I've always thought that Good and Evil worked much better as concepts rather than physical or quasi-physical things. Devils aren't made of evil, therefore, their souls are just so touched by their previous evil deeds that they've long passed their point of no return, and a Devil trying to repent with a last action goes against centuries of assurance that what they've been doing is fine.

D(a)emons under this system are just partially/completely mindless and tailor-made to do certain things that humanity finds disagreeable. Pathfinder's Daemons exist to wreak havoc, destroy, kill, maim, and burn things. They're Chaotic evil not because they're made out of evil, but because their instincts, present from their creation (by whatever means produces them) are to break every thing and being they come across, set it on fire, and piss on it.

Detect Evil becomes an altered version of detecting thoughts. Instead of surface thoughts, or all deeper thoughts, it takes a cursory reading of the mind and decides whether it's tooled for antisocial or social behavior.

Smite Evil would work not because the foe was evil, but because the foe went against the Paladin's beliefs. It becomes Smite Good only when the paladin is against someone performing an action with a generally positive outcome for some number of people greater than the number of people it affects negatively by a large margin.

Detect Law would detect methodical people, Detect Chaos would detect those with more spontaneity.

Then again, some people prefer it when Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are physical or at least quasi-physical (like being part of the makeup of the "soul.") To each their own.

As a player, I start with a concept, and then try to pick out what alignment best (though usually loosely, I admit) fits the concept once it is completed. My most recent character had a troubled teenagerhood full of rebellion, vandalism, and hanging out with other emo kids. He would have been Chaotic Neutral there, but has changed to Lawful Neutral as he aged because of a traumatic life event instilling the desire to make fewer ethical choices, and pay significant attention to those choices that he DOES make for himself.

Alignment to me as a player is a guideline only in the sense that it might help me determine how a character might think based on the greater concept behind him. I could do without it; I could simply refer to him as Methodical Normal as opposed to Rebellious Heroic or Spontaneous Kind. But that's a more complicated Personality system rather than Alignment ;)

Yora
2015-08-23, 11:13 AM
When I still ran D&D, my treatment of alignment was to remove it entitrely from the game. It causes lots of problems for how players interact with the world and NPCs and doesn't provide a single benefit for anything.

Morty
2015-08-23, 11:16 AM
I don't. When I still played D&D, I ignored it entirely. I just put something neutral on my sheet and forgot about it. If I were to play D&D again for some reason, I would stick to this approach. Like Yora said, it comes with many annoyances and no benefits. So, why worry about it?

Thisguy_
2015-08-23, 11:20 AM
Why worry about it?

That's more or less what I'm saying.

SimonMoon6
2015-08-23, 11:59 AM
It's a bunch of mixed-up arbitrary hard rules that are actually only guidelines anyway, and everybody has different ideas about what they mean, sometimes with different books telling you contradictory things which doesn't matter because nobody reads those anyway and despite the rules, people just let any alignment mean whatever they want it to mean.

It's a very frustrating concept.

Some particular pet peeves: killing someone in the most brutally violent way possible... is not an evil act, assuming you're killing someone who is a bad person (which you can often tell by looking at them because racism works). But should this brutal violence involve poison? Why, then you must be Eeeevil with a capital Eeeeee. Stealing, even from a good person, is never an evil act, merely neutral.

And then, of course, there are the players (not characters but players) who are evil bastards and therefore think it's okay to be evil but aren't allowed to slap a CE alignment on their PC (because "no evil characters"), so they call their character Chaotic Neutral and pretend that that justifies every evil action they take.

And that goes hand in hand with "I'm neutral, so I'm 50% pure evil and 50% pure good" which is not how good and evil work (at least in my morality). You can't balance out slaughtering a town full of innocents by rescuing some kittens from trees and calling it even.

I have no idea why anyone would ever think alignment is a good thing to have in a game.

Ashtagon
2015-08-23, 12:07 PM
I'm not a huge fan of that rule. It's there for 5e in a way, but it doesn't detect detestable people, and I like that flavor.

One really good idea I heard was that paladins could have abilities like "Detect Heretic," "Smite Demon," or "Smite Terrorist" instead of Smite or Detect Evil (I cannot remember who said it or where, but they are very clever).

That might possibly be me.

In my games, "detect good" is "detect allies of my deity", and "detect evil" is detect enemies of my deity". Equivalent changes are made for the various other spells that interact with alignment. That has interesting consequences for certain priests; a god of strength's detect evil would ping off poisonous snakes whose poison damages Strength, but a cleric of Moradin wouldn't care either way about those snakes. Of course, that cleric of MOradin's detect evil will ping off an elf -- any elf.

Beleriphon
2015-08-23, 12:39 PM
I like the D&D 5E idea that Detect Evil and Good only finds Undead, Outsiders and Elementals regardless of alignment.

Ninja_Prawn
2015-08-23, 12:53 PM
One really good idea I heard was that paladins could have abilities like "Detect Heretic," "Smite Demon," or "Smite Terrorist" instead of Smite or Detect Evil (I cannot remember who said it or where, but they are very clever).


But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter!

OldTrees1
2015-08-23, 05:21 PM
You know how IRL we can look at something someone did then ascribe a moral/neutral/immoral label to it(actually more complex but keep it simple) and many believe that there is a right answer to those questions? How I view morality/ethics IRL is how I view morality/ethics/alignment in game. Good is not a "certain way" but things can good and people can be moral (alignment is descriptive not prescriptive).