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Nifft
2021-02-08, 03:53 PM
Alignment has often been a sore spot for me in D&D, and most groups I've played with have either ignored it or wrestled with it (usually unproductively).

In games I run, Alignment is either changed or outright ignored.

How do you all change or replace Alignment to make morality useful in the game?

OldTrees1
2021-02-08, 04:01 PM
I do not know of a better moral system than moral, amoral, immoral. Choosing another system sounds like an invitation for misdirection.

Nifft
2021-02-08, 04:05 PM
I do not know of a better moral system than moral, amoral, immoral. Choosing another system sounds like an invitation for misdirection.

Misdirection is a key part of storytelling, so I'm not sure that's always a bad thing.

But please do give more details about "moral, amoral, immoral" (if possible).

Anymage
2021-02-08, 04:46 PM
Most of the time it's easy to just ignore. On the off chance that your magical effect only works for someone of pure heart it's just as easy for the GM to adjudicate as it is to go off whether the sheet has a G or E on it.

For more in depth characterization, and using 5e character elements as examples, this can go two ways;

If you're talking general character traits (e.g: bonds/ideals/flaws), I like treating them as akin to fate points. If your character's personality traits would make them behave suboptimally, they can ask the GM for a plot point. (This puts the effort in the players hands, meaning that the GM doesn't have to juggle one more thing.) If your character is giving their all for something that's relevant to one of their core personality traits, they can spend a plot point for some advantage. GM adjudication is still required, but it's a much smaller amount.

For mandatory behavior limits (e.g: the tenets of a paladin's oath), dunno. Most of the time it's okay to just let the player make their choices and treat it as a general character trait. If the player intentionally wants to play a fall from grace for narrative reasons, they can talk it over with you. There's the off chance where a character swears a mystically binding oath and then pointedly violates it. Auto-fall complete with lack of class features is excessive while ignoring it is giving up on a very useful bit of characterization, so again can't think of a good general answer for this.

Batcathat
2021-02-08, 04:52 PM
This might be kind of a non-answer, but I prefer to just not formalize characters' morality. A player portrays their character's morality along whatever lines they envision and that's about it. In my experience player having to actually describe (or just act according to) their character's morality is a lot more meaningful and interesting than picking an option of a menu.

Lacco
2021-02-08, 05:25 PM
How do you all change or replace Alignment to make morality useful in the game?

Riddle of Steel provides the character with several "Spiritual Attributes", which act as additional dice for actions relevant to them. Basically: bonus dice for your roll. You also spend them to advance your character (so they act as "level ups").

One of those is "Conscience". You can leave it unspecified or you can specify it - describe the morality system or belief you subscribe to - it can be "heroism", compassion, or just plain "conscience". What it does is that any time you choose the "right" over the "easy" or "profitable" or whatever, you gain a point. If your sacrifice or the danger you get in is significant, you can even get two. Now when the attribute fires up - basically, when you are doing the right thing and there is opposition or difficulty, you add these dice to your roll.

Example: a man you know innocent is being sentenced to execution unless someone steps up to defend him in - unfair - trial by combat. Your character steps up, even though their skill with blade may not be sufficient (let's say you have 10 dice for combat, your opponent is known to have more). By stepping up you prove your Conscience - and GM awards you 2 points. Now you get 12 dice instead of 10 to combat them. The points stay with you unless you spend them or go directly against your conscience (e.g. stealing food from a starving kid... like, really low bar usually).

This works on the "moral vs. amoral" axis. Amoral characters simply choose a different spiritual attribute.

Telok
2021-02-08, 05:28 PM
Well, thinking about it turned up something funny. I like the Palladium, Pendragon, and Paranoia morality systems best.

However, if you want something to slot into D&D with minimum fuss I once did a rework that turned D&D alignments into explicit magic auras. Went like this: Do a find-replace with "good"->"light", "evil"->"dark", and "law"->"order". Then each god has about 10 things they like, 10 things they dislike, and two alignments. Everything below a god can only have one alignment aura at a time. Only gods and magic can apply or change auras. All necromancy spells & effects are "dark", abjuration is "order", evocation is "light", and transmutation is "chaos". Divine casters must have a god, get one of that god's alignment auras, and cannot prepare/know more spells of opposed to their god's auras than they prepare/know of their own aura. Arcane casters have an aura of the highest level aligned spell on them, or of the last aligned spell they cast if they don't have any spells on them. Everyone else only has an alignment aura while under the effect of an aligned spell or effect.

This system is, obviously, completely divorced from subjective/cultural morality considerations. If you want to enforce social mores you do it socially.

OldTrees1
2021-02-08, 05:58 PM
Misdirection is a key part of storytelling, so I'm not sure that's always a bad thing.

But please do give more details about "moral, amoral, immoral" (if possible).

By "moral, amoral, immoral" I am referring to the answer that the Philosophy branch Ethics is trying to answer. I usually abbreviate it as trying to answer "What ought one do?". It has the supreme advantage of being accurate and the supreme disadvantage of being unknowable. However attempting to guess the unknowable and use that guess is a common practice. That is what I use as the good vs evil axis.

However it is such a complex "axis", even for for the simplest common guess (utilitarian), that I don't think it can be replaced with a simpler system. So I don't think that would solve the arguments you have had. If you replaced it with altruism vs selfishness, then I bet your group would have arguments about exactly when excessive altruism becomes immoral. Thus reinstating the morality axis in addition to the "new axis". This is the misdirection revealed.

Now if you choose to ignore instead of replace, then you might be best served figuring out what you want from an alignment axis. Is the axis basically a personality test? In that case choose questions that fit the campaign (or ignore it too). Consider Fallout for an example, we could have a social vs loner axis.

Duff
2021-02-08, 07:40 PM
What do you want alignment/morality systems to do?
Are you looking for a mechanical effect? What?
If you're not looking for a mechanical effect, probably better if it's just included in the description of the character's personality

PhoenixPhyre
2021-02-08, 07:46 PM
Playing 5e, I just ignore formal Alignment as anything other than a roleplay guide for players and DMs. It has no cosmological weight[1], I'll never ask a player what their character's alignment is (if they even have answered that question) and I only use it as a very shorthand for shallower NPCs (for a broad "if I don't have anything else to go on, what's going to be their kneejerk reaction" guide).

That doesn't mean I ignore morality or have no consequences for actions. There are consequences, but they depend on who they offended (or helped) and how, based on the motives and belief structure of the groups in question.

I do try to have a working agreement with the players that certain types of actions/campaigns aren't enjoyable to me, so please refrain. Specifically the "baby-murdering, orphanage burning, demon summoning, destroy the world types". That doesn't matter what the character thinks--I just ask that people don't make characters for whom those are in the viable option list. But that's entirely meta.

[1] Literally. No group of beings, whether celestial, infernal, or whatever, has a fixed alignment. Everyone has freedom of will, and uses it. Certain cultures are predisposed to certain behaviors, but they span the spectrum. There are no "designated bad guys", although my players have taken "people who abuse women" and "icky demon things created by the Twisted[2]" as their own "kill on sight" types.

[2] Body-morphing, nonconsensual, living "art" created by a particular demon. Things like the jellyface--a head made out of transparent jelly, with a brain inside, with the face wreathed in jellyfish tendrils. They bite. Or the twisted puffers--take a small dog. Substitute the body for that of a puffer fish, and give them the ability to throw their spines. Or my personal favorite, the goblin baby bomb piles.

JNAProductions
2021-02-08, 09:01 PM
[2] Body-morphing, nonconsensual, living "art" created by a particular demon. Things like the jellyface--a head made out of transparent jelly, with a brain inside, with the face wreathed in jellyfish tendrils. They bite. Or the twisted puffers--take a small dog. Substitute the body for that of a puffer fish, and give them the ability to throw their spines. Or my personal favorite, the goblin baby bomb piles.

Might I recommend a Swarm of Dog (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?568731-Swarm-of-Dog)?

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-08, 09:10 PM
I've pretty much never seen a morality mechanic that works. I've seen alignment work, but only when it's restricted to 'what side of the cosmic conflict are you associated with'.

So I like it in LotFP where it basically boils down to 'are your powers and destiny provided by horrific angelic beings, gribbly demon things, or neither' and days literally nothing about character beliefs or actions. A Magic-User or Elf could be the most moral character ever, but they still count as Chaotic because they use gribbly demon magic.

It's probably better to track reputations and fame, things like (perceived) honour, violent tendencies, uncouth affiliations, contribution to population growth, and whatever else you fancy. Also ask players to state their character's Ideals or Values, and allow them the chance to change them after dramatic situations. 'Vengeance can only be met with vengeance' says a lot more about your character than 'neutral evil', and most people can probably come up with two or three.

Mastikator
2021-02-08, 11:57 PM
Most RPGs I've played have had no morality/alignment system at all, and it was never missed. They tend to be destructive to storytelling and roleplaying in my experience, they remove more than they add. IMO you'd be better off with zodiac signs.

Segev
2021-02-09, 01:29 AM
Were I to be the head designer of a computer RPG that featured a number of different organizations you could cozy up to or oppose, I would use them for the closest thing to an alignment system. In a setting with superheroes (where money shouldn't be the focus) or nobility (where money should be dross) are the expected PCs, I would also use them for the money-equivalent.

"Favor" would be something you accumulate with various groups. Each group's Favor would essentially be its own currency. You get favor by doing things that please that group, and the groups would have strong "alignment" principles, though not necessarily using any specific alignment grid. Just...you can tell what kind of people they are by the group standards, activities, methods, members' personalities, etc.

Comingling this "alignment" / "reputation" thing with currency, you'd expend favor to get, well, favors (goods and services) from the groups.

And your alignment would be colored by the groups with which you have favor; NPCs would react to you based on the groups that you align yourself with, treating you as if you're the kind of person those groups approve of, or even as members of them if you expended favor to join.

Morty
2021-02-09, 11:20 AM
How do we define morality here, or making it useful? There are many systems with rules to govern characters' values, morals, ethics and convictions, but they rarely assume purportedly objective view like D&D. The norm is, in my experience, stating what the character believes in and how it informs their actions. This might mean morality, like if the rules represent a character's belief in justice and charity - but it might just as well not.

Quertus
2021-02-09, 02:56 PM
The best thing to do with "alignment" is to ignore it / remove it.

If it has value, ask *why* it has value. Replace it with something that fulfills that need.

The ideas of "power sources", or "reputation", or "favor" (and disfavor) are good ones.

But it depends on the needs of your individual game.

I once ran a game where the quiet woodcutter who secretly murdered elves whenever he could get away with it would have had…

Community: 1
Family: 3+
God of Elves: -5
God of Secrets: 1
God of Murder: 2

But, ultimately, I found the system too much bookkeeping, and abandoned it for "just role-playing".

Cluedrew
2021-02-09, 08:03 PM
If it has value, ask *why* it has value. Replace it with something that fulfills that need.Simple: The common alignments in the party tell you what sort of campaign this is going to be. Good/Neutral/Evil tells you the type of objectives and Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic give you the approaches.

Honestly I never understood why people hate it so much. Its a fine broad strokes system. There are characters outside of D&D that I will drop an alignment into their description because it can get some of the important ideas across.

Still I wouldn't inject it into a system that needed it. For instance a system I am... playing around with some ideas for? I kind of want to try making it but I don't have time. Anyways there are five "alignments" in this setting and there are cosmological reasons for it but that has also shaped the culture of the setting. And yes you have to pick one... Its a huge part of the culture down to preferred professions and dress.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-09, 08:44 PM
Honestly I never understood why people hate it so much. Its a fine broad strokes system. There are characters outside of D&D that I will drop an alignment into their description because it can get some of the important ideas across.

Because by this point it's been played around with too much to give much abroad information. Once most mechanics behind it were removed it became harmless, but more Ideals do the job of alignment much better.

The few times I've seen it matter have generally been in one axis systems, normally Order versus Chaos, and notably the more extreme such systems go the more simplistic they become. At the end of the day I find it's just better to ask what the character believes, what drives them to fury, what they'll sacrifice their life for, what's the one goal they'll drop everything to pursue, what makes them require new trousers, anything that isn't something shared by roughly a tenth of the intelligent creatures on the planet.

You don't have to ask every question you can think of for every character, but these sorts of questions have another major advantage: they encourage proactive characters. Nothing is worse than the party of six detached loners, give me the party of individualistic proactive amoral *******s any day because they'll keep the game moving. And then surprise you when they start coming up with unexpected goals.

KineticDiplomat
2021-02-09, 11:08 PM
Mostly by playing games that are not D&D. Players are free to act as players, and NPCs are free to act as humans with all the foibles, failings, and strengths that implies. You never need to worry if Bob would do a thing because of his alignment, only if he would do it because he is Bob.

Segev
2021-02-10, 12:05 AM
Mostly by playing games that are not D&D. Players are free to act as players, and NPCs are free to act as humans with all the foibles, failings, and strengths that implies. You never need to worry if Bob would do a thing because of his alignment, only if he would do it because he is Bob.

That is equally true in D&D with the alignment system played fully.

It is always a choice by the players whether alignment dictates behavior or the other way around.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-10, 12:13 AM
That is equally true in D&D with the alignment system played fully.

It is always a choice by the players whether alignment dictates behavior or the other way around.

Okay.

But that still means the alignment system is superfluous and unneeded. At best. At worst its confusing and muddying things away from fun roleplay. Its an extra thing added on top of things produced nothing meaningfully different from what fun roleplay already is. So not really helping its case.

Lapak
2021-02-10, 12:26 AM
Riddle of Steel provides the character with several "Spiritual Attributes", which act as additional dice for actions relevant to them. Basically: bonus dice for your roll. You also spend them to advance your character (so they act as "level ups").Variations on this have been the most game-useful functions I've seen, honestly.

Running in a different direction on the same theme is White Wolf's Exalted 1e/2e and how its Virtue system impacts the (Solar) Exalted. Having a high Virtue stat is good because you can spend the points to aid your relevant rolls; having a high Virtue stat is bad because you might have to succeed at a roll and/or burn a Willpower point to act against that virtue. (For Solars having a high Virtue stat is also bad because encountering extreme situations revolving around that virtue can force you to roll your high stat and successes pile up until you temporarily lose control of your PC.)

Quertus
2021-02-10, 01:24 AM
Simple: The common alignments in the party tell you what sort of campaign this is going to be. Good/Neutral/Evil tells you the type of objectives and Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic give you the approaches.

Objective and approach? OK, let's explore that.

Objective: exploration, knowledge, self-improvement… preserving reality if necessary.
Approach: exploration, study, research, experimentation, hypothesis, experimentation.

Objective: fun.
Approach: sex, drugs, rock and roll, and magic.

Objective: homeland for refugees; survival.
Approach: stealth, diplomacy, violent allies.

Objective: family, family, nation, world, religion, friends, those who have suffered, those who will suffer.
Approach: 5d chess information wars.


Honestly I never understood why people hate it so much. Its a fine broad strokes system. There are characters outside of D&D that I will drop an alignment into their description because it can get some of the important ideas across.

Just what ideas does it get across? Certainly not much of what I wrote for "objective and approach", I'd imagine.


At the end of the day I find it's just better to ask what the character believes, what drives them to fury, what they'll sacrifice their life for, what's the one goal they'll drop everything to pursue, what makes them require new trousers, anything that isn't something shared by roughly a tenth of the intelligent creatures on the planet.

Hmmm hmmm hmmm…

Belief: everything seems so unimportant.
Fury: nothing? (Possibly child endangerment)
Sacrifice: reality
Goal: knowledge
Fear: the end of everything

Belief: I am awesome.
Fury: touch my stuff
Sacrifice: friends? God?
Goal: none (meaning? Purpose?)
Fear: being the last man standing.

Belief: loyalty is the currency of the universe - the only one that matters.
Fury: disloyalty, harming his friends.
Sacrifice: … maybe his "children"?
Goal: repay loyalty
Fear: ignorance (very specific), being stretched thin by allies

Belief: reality… may not be - and that is irrelevant.
Fury: sacrifice of others
Sacrifice: friends, allies, strangers, a just cause
Goal: to leave the world a better place
Fear: good works undone

This felt harder to answer.


You don't have to ask every question you can think of for every character, but these sorts of questions have another major advantage: they encourage proactive characters. Nothing is worse than the party of six detached loners, give me the party of individualistic proactive amoral *******s any day because they'll keep the game moving. And then surprise you when they start coming up with unexpected goals.

Few things are better than a world rich with opportunities for my characters to acquire new goals!

Batcathat
2021-02-10, 02:07 AM
Okay.

But that still means the alignment system is superfluous and unneeded. At best. At worst its confusing and muddying things away from fun roleplay. Its an extra thing added on top of things produced nothing meaningfully different from what fun roleplay already is. So not really helping its case.

Agreed. I feel like alignments are either interpreted so strictly they become confining or so loosely that they become almost meaningless.

I mean, just look at OotS. Roy, Durkon, Miko, Hinjo, O-Chul and Lien are all Lawful Good. Does that label really tell us anything meaningful about them either as a group or as individuals?

hamishspence
2021-02-10, 02:12 AM
It tells us that they all actively help innocents in need, and that they all have a preference for following rules.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-10, 02:28 AM
It tells us that they all actively help innocents in need, and that they all have a preference for following rules.

Okay.

why do we need a label to tell us this? show don't tell, a character is better established through their actions than anything a made up label can do. tons of media already instinctively grasp such distinctions without needing a nine-box chart to tell them. Han Solo is a smuggler on the Outer Rim! Gee I wonder if he will follow the law or not? I can't tell without him being properly labeled. Conversely: Whether or not he was actually a good person was a big part of A New Hope as Han suddenly showing up to fire at Vader was the best part, and it wouldn't have worked if we knew he was a good guy right off the bat, because there is the uncertainty to him, the possibility that he could've left without helping and it would be totally in character for him to do that. You can't have that uncertainty with a system telling you outright what they will probably do in a situation. But Han instead SHOWED he was good at a point when it mattered rather it being known from the start like in alignment. That he is a criminal who doesn't follow the law is blindly obvious that anyone who needs alignment to tell them that is seriously over-relying on it, but whether he is good or not is something intentionally hidden and played for surprise and would be ruined if he was just labeled something that made us able to predict it, no matter what alignment you put on him.

Satinavian
2021-02-10, 02:35 AM
The most important part is to not use the same thing to describe behavior and to assign teams.

For behavior there are a couple of ways to include virtues and vices into the rules. That works reasonably way. Just don't expect there to be any not contrieved conflict between team greedy and team chaste. or any such nonsense. If you don't like the traditional virtues and vices because they carry outdated morality, any other behavorial descriptors work as well and can be made into rules. Usually those rules would somehow punish going against your morality or reward going along with it.

If you want team jerseys, it is best, to use group allegiance/loyality tallies instead. Just let teams or sides of a conflict be actual teams/sides.

Lacco
2021-02-10, 03:04 AM
Okay.

why do we need a label to tell us this?

You don't. I don't.

Problem is, D&D had this very interesting idea, pretty good for fantasy games, that you could use the alignment in the world. Locks that open only when "good" people touch them, weapons that can be only wielded by "evil" people... hell, the game has 1st level spell called "Protection from Evil", which - surprise surprise - works only on people that wear the tag "evil".

I think it started with the "chaos vs. law", but the system got more complicated down the way.

Now the tag itself is not a problem. But when you get the rules-lawyers, it becomes extremely necessary to have clear rules for these tags - otherwise, these will be argued. So you remove most of these points of argument.

So, they changed the interesting idea to something unworkable. That's why the OP is seeking alternatives.

And yes, you can work with D&D alignments and they can work and be a good addition to RPG - if you accept the underlying assumptions. As Cluedrew stated, they also can provide some basis - not really to tell you the objectives/approaches, but to give you a framework to evaluate those in play. Yes, your character wants the cookie. Would he steal it? Nah, he's lawful good. And yes, you don't need it - you know your character - but from my experience, when players have this framework, their characters experience the dilemmas differently. Not necessarily easier or even better - just different.

That said, I don't use alignments.

OldTrees1
2021-02-10, 09:00 AM
Okay.

why do we need a label to tell us this? show don't tell, a character is better established through their actions than anything a made up label can do.

When writing notes that summarize characterization so I can better remember the characterization, using a label is a useful shorthand. I don't want to write a paragraph where a sentence or a word would do. The note is just a reference to jog my memory.

The point of labels is to be able to express a complex idea (possibly via show don't tell), and then reference that complex idea with a word or short phrase as part of another complex idea (again possibly via show don't tell).

That is why stories that touch upon morality frequently use words related to morality. It would be extremely hard to discuss morality without using those words.

So need? No. But can words be useful for storing complex ideas like the characterization someone showed? Yes.


The most important part is to not use the same thing to describe behavior and to assign teams.

Indeed.

Batcathat
2021-02-10, 09:24 AM
When writing notes that summarize characterization so I can better remember the characterization, using a label is a useful shorthand. I don't want to write a paragraph where a sentence or a word would do. The note is just a reference to jog my memory.

Sure, but I don't see how alignments are the best choice of words. To use the OotS examples again, we could use "Lawful Good" to describe both Miko and O-Chul or we could use "judgemental, aggressive" for the former and "protective, heroic" to describe the latter. Same amount of words, but I think the latter pair is more useful.

Jorren
2021-02-10, 09:24 AM
Start with a system that does not place the gamemaster in a position to interpret the morality of player actions.

This should solve the majority of your problems with alignment-related systems.

OldTrees1
2021-02-10, 09:40 AM
Sure, but I don't see how alignments are the best choice of words. To use the OotS examples again, we could use "Lawful Good" to describe both Miko and O-Chul or we could use "judgemental, aggressive" for the former and "protective, heroic" to describe the latter. Same amount of words, but I think the latter pair is more useful.

The right summary words depends on the question(s) you are asking. And it is fine to use the same words to mean different things.

I do agree that the latter pair is more useful for most questions, but it does not answer the question I am more interested in. So I might write down:

"judgemental, aggressive, moral with failings" and "protective, heroic, moral exemplar"

Or something similar, because "judgemental, aggressive" also partially describes Redcloak. I would want some differentiation in my notes about their moral character (including Redcloaks potential rise).

Quertus
2021-02-10, 09:40 AM
Sure, but I don't see how alignments are the best choice of words. To use the OotS examples again, we could use "Lawful Good" to describe both Miko and O-Chul or we could use "judgemental, aggressive" for the former and "protective, heroic" to describe the latter. Same amount of words, but I think the latter pair is more useful.

Bingo!

Alignment is just… bad. Inefficient. Suboptimal. When it isn't actively detrimental.

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 10:33 AM
Alignment is shorthand to define some broadly defined moral and social attitudes, for use by the Players (PCs) or DM (NPCs) as motivations.

It works best when it's not the only motivations being used for a character, as it can be too easily proscriptive. And it's pretty much useless when used as a ex post facto label being applied after viewing and judging previous actions, or descriptive. Both proscriptive and descriptive are what ruins alignment.

You can not use it if you want, but that means either replacing it with other specifically defined broad moral and social attitude motivations that each creature must individually have made up for them, or having a game in which broad social and moral attitudes aren't a required part of personality motivations.

There's nothing wrong with either of those. The former takes more work but potentially results in more interesting variations, and the latter just results in a different flavor of game.

Edit: obviously all this is irrelevant in the truly old-school Law-Neutral-Chaos method of alignment, which was very roughly shorthand for Team Civilization, Team Nature, and Team Conquering Civilization/Entropy

Telok
2021-02-10, 11:18 AM
Alignment is shorthand to define some broadly defined moral and social attitudes, for use by the Players (PCs) or DM (NPCs) as motivations

Issue: Moral and social attitudes vary between individuals, cultures, geographic regions, social strata, life experiences etc., etc., etc.

Going with D&D alignment is often like painting with "red" that includes orange, brown, and violet. As soon as you leave the inarguable core (nice <-> not nice, follows rules <-> breaks rules) people start arguing because they have different expectations.

Honestly, I've had far better results using the Palladium scrupulous alignments as paladin codes than any description of "lawful good" I've ever run across.

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 11:45 AM
Issue: Moral and social attitudes vary between individuals, cultures, geographic regions, social strata, life experiences etc., etc., etc.

Going with D&D alignment is often like painting with "red" that includes orange, brown, and violet. As soon as you leave the inarguable core (nice <-> not nice, follows rules <-> breaks rules) people start arguing because they have different expectations.If they're arguing, it's because they aren't using it as part of the player's motivation in roleplaying the PC (aka making decisions in the fantasy environment). Because In that case, what matters is the players opinion. Not anyone else's.

If the DM wants to put restrictions on the moral and social attitudes of the game, they need to explain what they mean by it in advance, so the players understand.


Honestly, I've had far better results using the Palladium scrupulous alignments as paladin codes than any description of "lawful good" I've ever run across.Thats interesting, because the Palladium alignments are far more heavily defined that D&D alignments. That makes them more useful as a code, but less useful as motivations. They're not broad enough to fit other personality traits easily in to. They're clearly designed to be covering a host of personality traits in and of themselves.

Segev
2021-02-10, 12:32 PM
Okay.

why do we need a label to tell us this? show don't tell, a character is better established through their actions than anything a made up label can do. Why do we need a label to tell us that something has di-hydrogen monoxide molecules clinging via electrostatic effects in such a way that it is weighted down and engaging in behaviors with different cohesive properties from if it were not so laden with such a fluid? "Wet" doesn't tell us anything that we couldn't "show" via description, after all.

Labels are useful because they tell us information quickly. If you need more specificity, elaborate. But scoffing that labels are unnecessary is missing the point of language itself. (It's also a trope in sci-fi and fantasy that really, really irks me. The super-advanced hyper-intelligent being mocks petty mortals/humans for their need to "name everything" and claims it inhibits understanding. The opposite is true: it is our ability to name things, to apply mental symbols that categorize and define, which enhances and enables our understanding of concepts. The "super-intelligent being" may as well be mocking humans for insisting on using math to model physics.-


Alignment is shorthand to define some broadly defined moral and social attitudes, for use by the Players (PCs) or DM (NPCs) as motivations.

It works best when it's not the only motivations being used for a character, as it can be too easily proscriptive. And it's pretty much useless when used as a ex post facto label being applied after viewing and judging previous actions, or descriptive. Both proscriptive and descriptive are what ruins alignment.
I agree with the first paragraph, but have some disagreement with the second. Descriptive works just fine. The key is that "descriptive" doesn't mean that there aren't ways to judge/detect it.

Descriptive alignment works just fine if it's used accurately. "He's Chaotic Good" is useful to know, assuming that the descriptive qualities that led to that label are accurate. On a PC, a descriptive alignment declaration is a declaration of intent. If that intent changes, or isn't met, the alignment may shift. This is similarly true for NPCs, but unless the DM is really bad at guessing what alignment might be portrayed in a given scene by a given NPC, only long-running NPCs who have time to show character growth/change are likely to run into problems with this.

Batcathat
2021-02-10, 01:02 PM
Labels are useful because they tell us information quickly. If you need more specificity, elaborate. But scoffing that labels are unnecessary is missing the point of language itself. (It's also a trope in sci-fi and fantasy that really, really irks me. The super-advanced hyper-intelligent being mocks petty mortals/humans for their need to "name everything" and claims it inhibits understanding. The opposite is true: it is our ability to name things, to apply mental symbols that categorize and define, which enhances and enables our understanding of concepts. The "super-intelligent being" may as well be mocking humans for insisting on using math to model physics.-

Yes, labels can be very useful, but not all labels are. If Lawful Good has two dozen different interpretations, how much time do we really save by labeling one character as such? Sure, we might get a very vague idea of their drives and intentions but I doubt it would be much more useful than any other two word description, as with my Miko/O-Chul example above.

Segev
2021-02-10, 01:05 PM
Yes, labels can be very useful, but not all labels are. If Lawful Good has two dozen different interpretations, how much time do we really save by labeling one character as such? Sure, we might get a very vague idea of their drives and intentions but I doubt it would be much more useful than any other two word description, as with my Miko/O-Chul example above.

The alignments have consistent themes to them. The "two dozen different interpretations" are almost always due to people specifically wanting to make some sort of point.

Miko is not LG by the broad strokes standards. She's LN working for an LG society, so the laws she follows are motivated by Good even though she is not. One MIGHT argue that she started LG and fell to LN, but the things people talk about when discussing Miko being an example of "different intepretations" of LG are really her actions taken that lead to her fall.

So such arguments are essentially saying, "because we watched this initially-wet towel sit out in the sun for hours, 'wet' has varying interpretations that make it meaningless, since the end result was a dry towel."

Telonius
2021-02-10, 01:17 PM
Every "alignment" (in the D&D sense) has moral values that come into conflict with each other. What you choose when they come into conflict will show what a character really values. Something like the old "Ultima: Quest of the Avatar" class questionnaire tries to get at that. When starting the game, it asks the player a series of "ethical dilemma" questions that figures out where the character stands on eight separate "virtues" (moral values), like Honesty, Compassion, Valor, and so on. It assigns the class based on the answers. (If Compassion is your biggest one, you're a Bard; Honesty, a Mage; Valor, a Fighter, and so on).

They picked eight because they wanted to have a game with eight main dungeons. But there's nothing saying you couldn't come up with different ones, or as many as you want; and nothing saying you'd need to tie the value to the class like they did.

Quertus
2021-02-10, 01:27 PM
The alignments have consistent themes to them. The "two dozen different interpretations" are almost always due to people specifically wanting to make some sort of point.

Miko is not LG by the broad strokes standards. She's LN working for an LG society, so the laws she follows are motivated by Good even though she is not. One MIGHT argue that she started LG and fell to LN, but the things people talk about when discussing Miko being an example of "different intepretations" of LG are really her actions taken that lead to her fall.

So such arguments are essentially saying, "because we watched this initially-wet towel sit out in the sun for hours, 'wet' has varying interpretations that make it meaningless, since the end result was a dry towel."

Impossible. She had her Paladin powers, so she absolutely definitionally *had* to be Lawful Good.

Her world's interpretation of "Lawful Good" includes (at least one of) your interpretations of Lawful Neutral.

Still convinced that these are meaningful labels?

(They're clearly *suboptimal* labels for their stated intent)

(Really, the whole arc is… badly done for showing a "fall", as (as I recall) she doesn't exactly feel that "high" to begin with. Good thing it's a spoof world)

Telok
2021-02-10, 02:07 PM
If they're arguing, it's because they aren't using it as part of the player's motivation in roleplaying the PC (aka making decisions in the fantasy environment). Because In that case, what matters is the players opinion. Not anyone else's.
Take for example something like mercy killings. People have disagreed on basically everything surrounding them. It is not an exceptional statement to say that you could have a player & DM where one thought such a thing was lawful good and the other thinks that it is evil murder. That's the sort of "d&d alignment problem" (admittedly an extreme example) that I've been seeing for decades, and why I'm not exactly a fan of how they're tied to modern RL cultures & ethics.

Thats interesting, because the Palladium alignments are far more heavily defined that D&D alignments. That makes them more useful as a code, but less useful as motivations. They're not broad enough to fit other personality traits easily in to. They're clearly designed to be covering a host of personality traits in and of themselves.
This brings up something interesting. I think you use "alignment" as a cause of character personality, where I use it as an effect of character personality. I would do something like "Bob McUrist is a loyal, honest dwarf who hates orcs and rarely drinks too much. Therefore Bob is LG with a side of prejudice.", and it sounds like you would do "Bob is a LG dwarf. Therefore he is loyal, honest, does not drink too much, and hates evil (especially orcs)." So I see someone picking a Palladium alignment and think they're saying that the character has morals and ethics that include those things. It sounds like you'd see that as someone picking a personality for the character based on the alignment. That right?

Segev
2021-02-10, 02:28 PM
Impossible. She had her Paladin powers, so she absolutely definitionally *had* to be Lawful Good.

Her world's interpretation of "Lawful Good" includes (at least one of) your interpretations of Lawful Neutral.

Still convinced that these are meaningful labels?

(They're clearly *suboptimal* labels for their stated intent)

(Really, the whole arc is… badly done for showing a "fall", as (as I recall) she doesn't exactly feel that "high" to begin with. Good thing it's a spoof world)

She follows the precepts of Good because the Law she follows is based around it. She had no reason to try to work around it nor justify any of her prejudices when they didn't apply, because she'd never had them challenged: they'd been right in the past. Her fall comes from having her prejudices challenged and choosing to cling to them in the face of reality, choosing her orderly but mistaken view of the world over a reality that includes nuance and room for goodness as well as law. She thus slipped from LG to LN and lost her powers.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-10, 02:44 PM
Why do we need a label to tell us that something has di-hydrogen monoxide molecules clinging via electrostatic effects in such a way that it is weighted down and engaging in behaviors with different cohesive properties from if it were not so laden with such a fluid? "Wet" doesn't tell us anything that we couldn't "show" via description, after all.

Labels are useful because they tell us information quickly. If you need more specificity, elaborate. But scoffing that labels are unnecessary is missing the point of language itself. (It's also a trope in sci-fi and fantasy that really, really irks me. The super-advanced hyper-intelligent being mocks petty mortals/humans for their need to "name everything" and claims it inhibits understanding. The opposite is true: it is our ability to name things, to apply mental symbols that categorize and define, which enhances and enables our understanding of concepts. The "super-intelligent being" may as well be mocking humans for insisting on using math to model physics.-


Why do you feel the need to confine morality to a label?

A person's morality isn't as simple as saying they follow the law or not and are a good person or a bad person. It never is, and I'd never like to simplify down to such nonsense. Why use something that doesn't accurately represent it at all? Worse, why use to tell information TOO quickly? Again, Show don't tell. I refer back to my Han Solo example. some things are better left unknown until the right time.

And add that I experience more interesting moral situations by removing alignment than by putting it in. Why? because I can define my characters morality however I want without being shunted into one of the nine arbitrary squares. I don't need to consider something that distracts from thinking of my characters values and how their logic works. Plus alignment and the classes that speak of it tend to have the Bastila Effect: the one who most holds to morality becomes overly preachy about it and everyone else ends up avoiding them. Named just now for the fact that many people dislike bastila and leave in her in the Ebon Hawk as soon as they can get Jolee Bindo and Juhani as an all jedi party. Not that its advisable to use Bastila much anyways, because it isn't advisable, given that she is captured and turns to the dark side 3/4's through the game and is not useable afterwards.


like we get it Bastila, don't turn to the daaaaaaark side of the force, it'll make us kick babies, eat puppies, and think The Room is quality entertainment, let me play out my assassin sidequest then I'll get back to saving the galaxy by sith force lightning, choking and draining life force from criminals, sith and the people that work for them. same goes for DnD: I give exactly zero cares about whatever the paladin wants me to do, and screw where universe thinks I belong. let me play my character how I want, I'll get rid of the big bad ickiness when the time comes. you preach at me for falling to the Chaotic Evil side of the cosmos, I'll roll my eyes and go "hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good crossbow at your side kid".

or take Dragon Age Origins. I liked that a lot better. alignment was unnecessary because I ended up doing all the good stuff anyways because I wanted to do it, not because I'm supposed to. but at the same time, there was no right or wrong answer so I could decide for myself whether something was the right thing to do, not some cosmic morality. I define my actions not some system. No, it doesn't still define me, no not even in that way. No not even if you bring up the communication argument, I communicate it just fine without it thank you. and sometimes, maybe I want it to be ambiguous sometimes, and thus not communicate it well at all. alignment is expectations and I don't want those, as expectations are at their best when they're broken.

also Chaos shouldn't even BE apart of alignment, alignment is a form of order and thus antithetical to the vey idea of chaos, thus if its apart of alignment, chaos doesn't really exist and thats just saddening.

Batcathat
2021-02-10, 02:52 PM
The alignments have consistent themes to them. The "two dozen different interpretations" are almost always due to people specifically wanting to make some sort of point.

Miko is not LG by the broad strokes standards. She's LN working for an LG society, so the laws she follows are motivated by Good even though she is not. One MIGHT argue that she started LG and fell to LN, but the things people talk about when discussing Miko being an example of "different intepretations" of LG are really her actions taken that lead to her fall.

So such arguments are essentially saying, "because we watched this initially-wet towel sit out in the sun for hours, 'wet' has varying interpretations that make it meaningless, since the end result was a dry towel."

Depending on whom you ask, there being two dozen interpretations of the same alignment could probably be called both an exaggeration and an understatement. Which is kind of my point. In order to not constrict PCs into specific personalities, alignments have to be so vague they barely say anything meaningful about the individual character.

Perhaps using specific characters, especially one that has falling from grace as part of her character arc, was a mistake. What I meant was that I can't think of a single situation where knowing a character's alignment would tell me more about them than an individual two word description.

I suppose it could be argued that it's quicker to assign a preexisting alignment to a character than to come up with an actual personality, however brief. Which I suppose is technically true. But I don't think I've ever met a GM who didn't think of at least something beyond an alignment for a character's personality or motivation. "Greedy, bloodthirsty" might not tell me much about the no name bandit, but it tells me more about that individual bandit than just "Neutral Evil".

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 03:01 PM
I agree with the first paragraph, but have some disagreement with the second. Descriptive works just fine. The key is that "descriptive" doesn't mean that there aren't ways to judge/detect it.

Descriptive alignment works just fine if it's used accurately. "He's Chaotic Good" is useful to know, assuming that the descriptive qualities that led to that label are accurate. On a PC, a descriptive alignment declaration is a declaration of intent. If that intent changes, or isn't met, the alignment may shift. This is similarly true for NPCs, but unless the DM is really bad at guessing what alignment might be portrayed in a given scene by a given NPC, only long-running NPCs who have time to show character growth/change are likely to run into problems with this.
Others have already pointed out the kinds of problems this runs into, but I'll put it short and to the point. All descriptive labeling alignment is good for is causing arguments between the DM (who is doing the judging) and the player (who is doing the roleplaying).

A DM using descriptive labeling, and taking on the role of being the judge of actions and changing Pc alignment based on their judgement, is either telling a player they are roleplaying the old alignment wrong, or that they should change the way they are roleplaying to match the new alignment.

Segev
2021-02-10, 03:10 PM
Others have already pointed out the kinds of problems this runs into, but I'll put it short and to the point. All descriptive labeling alignment is good for is causing arguments between the DM (who is doing the judging) and the player (who is doing the roleplaying).

A DM using descriptive labeling, and taking on the role of being the judge of actions and changing Pc alignment based on their judgement, is either telling a player they are roleplaying the old alignment wrong, or that they should change the way they are roleplaying to match the new alignment.

I disagree. It is useful because it provides hooks for mechanics. If the DM and player actually disagree on something regarding a descriptive alignment, they should discuss it and come to an agreement. If the DM and the player truly have so divergent a view of what "good" is that this is intractable, this likely calls for some serious discussion, anyway.

The lack of alignment labels wouldn't resolve this issue, because it means that what one of them finds to be perfectly acceptable or even outright morally essential, the other finds to be reprehensible or at least something unimportant. This will impact the game whether you argue over the label or not, as one is going to be expecting vastly different things from the game than the other. If the DM thinks that in order to be proper heroes you have to do things the player thinks makes you a horrible person (or vice-versa), the player is going to have a hard time playing in that game.

Barring such extreme disagreements, the nuance around the edges can be worked out where it matters, or the player can shrug and let the DM state what his PC's alignment is if he doesn't actually care that much. (If the DM doesn't care that much, he can let the PC state his alignment and run with it for the mechanical hooks.)

But in general, I think everybody has at least broad strokes agreement what "good" and "evil" are, and what "order" and "chaos" are. THere's a lot of "I know it when I see it" involved, and if you ask about SPECIFIC actions, you can get argument, but in a broad strokes sense, people either won't care or will be able to come to some agreement.

All this concern over "it causes arguments" is really blaming the wrong thing. Those argument will arise without the alignment labels, as well. Just as often. They'll just use DIFFERENT terms.

Tanarii
2021-02-10, 03:13 PM
If it's used solely by the player as a roleplaying aid, there isn't cause for arguments unless the DM wants to restrict the roleplaying space allowed in their campaign in regards to moral and social attitudes.

That's a common thing, but then it's on the DM to properly communicate their restrictions to the players. I agree that just saying "no evil characters" or "lawful characters only" probably isn't sufficient.

But descriptive post hoc isn't going to be a matter of "communication". Because it's literally a case of judgement. The DM has judged the player's already accomplished roleplaying. That's not the same thing at all. That's a recipe for argument.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-10, 03:20 PM
But in general, I think everybody has at least broad strokes agreement what "good" and "evil" are, and what "order" and "chaos" are. THere's a lot of "I know it when I see it" involved, and if you ask about SPECIFIC actions, you can get argument, but in a broad strokes sense, people either won't care or will be able to come to some agreement.

All this concern over "it causes arguments" is really blaming the wrong thing. Those argument will arise without the alignment labels, as well. Just as often. They'll just use DIFFERENT terms.

Then we come back to the problem of alignment being superfluous, because everyone already knows what they're talking about instinctively, alignment is just reinventing the wheel with more arcane terms for a weird arcane cosmology. We don't need to bother. and Chaos STILL shouldn't even be apart of any system that can define it, because chaos should be against being defined enough to fit into anything.

at least without the labels we can discuss the actual problems rather than debating over whether it falls into some weird thing that has nothing to do with the actual factors, people and values that are at play. jargon is no substitute for clear communication and assessing what is actually happening.

Telok
2021-02-10, 04:19 PM
Oh, heeeey. You lot remember the Neverwinter Nights D&D crpg? Ever try being a LN druid in that? I ended up mugging & killing random people in the street to maintain neutral on the good-evil alignment axis. Good thing they didn't implement the chaos-law axis.

Yeah, yeah, stupid and hilarious at the same time. But it's absolutely how the books portray alignment for a long long time. Even these days I've still seen people run it like that in games. Obviously they haven't done internet searches to find out how the group-mind wants them to use alignment. They just read D&D books.

Personally? I'd give it real mechanical weight or just drop it completely for some general character RP advice. Not going to happen though. It's too sacred cow to ditch and too clumsy/sloppy/open to interpretation for WotC to make it work.

OldTrees1
2021-02-10, 07:10 PM
Then we come back to the problem of alignment being superfluous, because everyone already knows what they're talking about instinctively, alignment is just reinventing the wheel with more arcane terms for a weird arcane cosmology. We don't need to bother. and Chaos STILL shouldn't even be apart of any system that can define it, because chaos should be against being defined enough to fit into anything.

at least without the labels we can discuss the actual problems rather than debating over whether it falls into some weird thing that has nothing to do with the actual factors, people and values that are at play. jargon is no substitute for clear communication and assessing what is actually happening.

On the other hand, sometimes common vocab can help. It is rather hard to speak about morality without using the words moral, amoral, or immoral. Even if you are being nuanced and talking about the morally supererogatory, it is hard to escape the word moral.


Why do you feel the need to confine morality to a label?

A person's morality isn't as simple as saying they follow the law or not and are a good person or a bad person. It never is, and I'd never like to simplify down to such nonsense. Why use something that doesn't accurately represent it at all? Worse, why use to tell information TOO quickly? Again, Show don't tell. I refer back to my Han Solo example. some things are better left unknown until the right time.

Quick point of order: Han Solo's moral character being concealed until a reveal is orthogonal to the topic. In a system that deals with moral character, even to the point of it labeling the characters, that label does not need to be public knowledge. You can have your "show don't tell" and your "better left unknown until the right time" regardless of whether you have alignment or not.

Back to your interesting question: Does labeling morality confine it to a label? If I said Miko and O-Chul are both moral because one is overall moral with a fatal flaw and the other is a moral exemplar, did I confine their morality? I don't believe I did.

So rather than "why do I feel the need to confine morality to a label", a more apt question would be "why do you use a label?". I use the label as a summary of the more complex moral judgement of the character. How much summary is useful depends on context. Sometimes say both of them are moral is precise enough. Other times (see example above) I can break that down to more nuance. Or if I ever really need to be precise I can break it down even further to detailing the exact nature of each moral agent. So why do I use a label? For brevity when the situation calls for brevity.

Which is why I draw 3 conclusions:
1) A moral axis is a tool, it has uses, but it is not universally useful. You can ignore / replace it when it is not useful to you.
2) Themes of morality beget a moral axis. Alternative morality systems will result in a moral axis.
3) I thought this thread was about provide the OP with alternatives?

Cluedrew
2021-02-10, 07:20 PM
Because by this point it's been played around with too much to give much abroad information. Once most mechanics behind it were removed it became harmless, but more Ideals do the job of alignment much better.Yeah that makes sense. Another victim of D&D not changing enough for its changes.


Just what ideas does it get across? Certainly not much of what I wrote for "objective and approach", I'd imagine.Write down the denotations and connotations of chaotic, there you go. No not all of them will be right and it will miss some points but that is what the rest of the description is for. Same could be said of any descriptive word like "frail", "female", "burned", "aggressive", "clever", "wizard" or how about "academic". Should we throw these words out because they are imperfect? You can but I would rather use them together to get the details across. Of course if

On The Topic: I would say it depends on system/setting and campaign. I would enforce anything unless it comes back to mechanics. I've been defending alignment here but I don't often use it as it doesn't always help, but it is a tool I have.* If you want a general tool to help people to figure out characters maybe pick a few significant questions, some general and some tailored to the campaign. On the other hand if you are trying to have something with mechanics then there is a lot of design that has to go into that.

* And other times I realize a character I have had for years is True Neutral and that actually clarifies some things about their story.

Mechalich
2021-02-10, 07:45 PM
Humans categorize, it's one of our fundamental traits. Human-generated categories are necessarily imperfect, since with a small number of exceptions (like numeric integers) reality doesn't confine itself to the short of categories our African-savannah-survival optimized brains generate. That doesn't mean they are useless, but it does mean their utility is imperfect, and as some point if the category matching is sufficiently poor they may possess negative utility.

Alignment is not a good set of moral categories. It's dual-axis three zone system is counter-intuitive and confusing. Likewise, it's attempts at universality and the assignment of alien and often bizarre non-human viewpoints to points on the alignment chart lead to weird conundrums, and insofar as many authors did this in a cavalier and poorly-researched fashion creates extremely troubling definitional arguments regarding where different actions fall at points on the alignment chart.

Of course, moral categorization is difficult in the first place. When the people trying to develop such categories don't share the same moral definitions and hierarchies it becomes almost impossible. And the modern D&D play base simply does not share the same moral definitions, as any argument about 'was X evil?' will illuminate.

Personally I think alignment tries to do too much, but unfortunately the demands of D&D's kitchen sink nature more or less demand that it do so. D&D contains hundreds of different types of sapient beings with vast differences in biology, psychology, and sociology. Creating an all-encompassing moral framework for just human beings is already a daunting task - philosophy is still working on it - trying to handle the diversity of D&D, and doing so at a level 12-year-olds can understand...honestly alignment's a lot better than it has any right to be.

OldTrees1
2021-02-10, 10:38 PM
Personally I think alignment tries to do too much, but unfortunately the demands of D&D's kitchen sink nature more or less demand that it do so. D&D contains hundreds of different types of sapient beings with vast differences in biology, psychology, and sociology. Creating an all-encompassing moral framework for just human beings is already a daunting task - philosophy is still working on it - trying to handle the diversity of D&D, and doing so at a level 12-year-olds can understand...honestly alignment's a lot better than it has any right to be.

Bolded to highlight section.

Hehe, yeah. Philosophy is still working on it and it might be an impossible task.

Although I would argue extrapolating it from "for just human beings" to "sapient beings with vast differences in biology" is a trivial step if the answer ends up in terms of "for moral agents and with regards to entities with moral standing, acknowledging the possibility of entities with moral standing that are not moral agents".
And it is likely to end up in those, or similar, terms.

However boiling that down to something a 12-year-old can understand, yikes. I would rather show not tell on that one.





@Nifft
Does it have to be an alternative morality system? Philosophy systems like MtG's color wheel can do interesting things without reverting to the moral axis.

VoxRationis
2021-02-11, 03:40 AM
The Mythras system (and possibly RuneQuest, but I'm AFB on that one, so I'm not certain) has a system of passions that exist on the same scale and using the same mechanics as skills, such that they can be used as opposed rolls against Willpower checks in situations where one's personal inclinations run contrary to reason or can add to skills in such situations as one's passions align with tactical goals. Passions are customizable according to a variety of relationships and possible foci of those relationships.

Obviously, they do not represent a cohesive moral system, but I feel as though that is the point; they represent the factors that drive a character but do not necessarily map to broader moral systems, possibly driving them into conflict with society or even with themselves.

Nifft
2021-02-14, 01:58 PM
@Nifft
Does it have to be an alternative morality system? Philosophy systems like MtG's color wheel can do interesting things without reverting to the moral axis.

If you have used MtG's color wheel as a mechanical replacement for the stuff that other games used Alignment to manage and represent, then talking about how you did so would be very much on-topic.

OldTrees1
2021-02-14, 06:47 PM
If you have used MtG's color wheel as a mechanical replacement for the stuff that other games used Alignment to manage and represent, then talking about how you did so would be very much on-topic.

What do you mean by "for the stuff"? I am trying to understand which mechanical usage of alignment you are trying to replace.

I already mentioned how replacing morality with a more specific stand in might cause the moral axis to reappear. However that is an RP usage.

For allegiance systems, I don't understand that use case enough to give good advice. That has some mechanical usages like Protection vs Celestials. In Ravinca you could have each Guild be an allegiance. PCs would gain reputation with each guild (including negative reputation) and at certain reputations thresholds the PC would count as part of the Guild for certain effects and get some passive benefits? At certain negative thresholds they lose certain privileges. That is just a guess.

For descriptive personality tests, a test describing the PC's philosophic perspective on 10 different topics has some merit. But that is not a "mechanic".

So what are you trying to replace?

Nifft
2021-02-14, 08:43 PM
What do you mean by "for the stuff"? I am trying to understand which mechanical usage of alignment you are trying to replace. I mean the things that other games have used Alignment to manage and represent. Any of those things, really.


I already mentioned how replacing morality with a more specific stand in might cause the moral axis to reappear. However that is an RP usage. RP mechanics are perfectly valid game mechanics.

Feel free to delve into that if you want.

OldTrees1
2021-02-14, 11:39 PM
I mean the things that other games have used Alignment to manage and represent. Any of those things, really.

RP mechanics are perfectly valid game mechanics.

Feel free to delve into that if you want.

So the MtG color wheel is a personality test asking about the character's position on 5 different philosophic issues.
For example Dun the Dungeon Tour Guide:
Logic or Impulse: Dun tended to think things through rather than jump into danger. Chains of success wear down that caution but a single trap sprung would hammer in the value of caution for the next hundred. Dun shifts on this axis over time as they are naturally inclined towards Impulse but their job constantly reinforces the need for Logic.
Technology or Nature: Dun relies on specialized tools in their job of disarming high tech traps as part of their job of leading tour groups through artificial structures. Dun is so immersed in tech that they would not even recognize this as holding a position.
Parasitism or Interdependence: Dun chose a specialization that lets others rely on them and, in turn, lets them rely on others.
Amorality or Morality: Dun believes their ideal self is in the perfection of their craft rather than in moral perfection.
Chaos or Order: Dun has a series of guidelines that have saved their life or the lives of the tourists. That helps cement the value of rules for Dun.

Kane0
2021-02-15, 12:49 AM
IMO you'd be better off with zodiac signs.

I realize you’re probably being facetious but i’m legit interested in how that would look.

Mastikator
2021-02-15, 03:33 AM
I realize you’re probably being facetious but i’m legit interested in how that would look.

I'm not. A "you were born under the star sign of X and therefore have A, B, C qualities" would be a better system than the alignment system. You can even tie it in with outsiders and magic.

Kane0
2021-02-15, 04:11 AM
Okay so a little bit like elder scrolls, but defining certain personality traits rather than mechanical benefits?

Mastikator
2021-02-15, 04:33 AM
Okay so a little bit like elder scrolls, but defining certain personality traits rather than mechanical benefits?

Yes exactly. Personality traits, goals, bonds, flaws, destinies. You could even get situational mechanical benefits from horoscopes like "today you will face an important relationship choice and make the right decision. Next charisma check with someone you know has advantage". This system I just stole from zodiac thing and elder scrolls is already more interesting and flexible than the dnd alignment system.

Segev
2021-02-15, 12:30 PM
I'm not. A "you were born under the star sign of X and therefore have A, B, C qualities" would be a better system than the alignment system. You can even tie it in with outsiders and magic.

Really isn't serving the same purpose as an alignment system. Evidence: you could have both present in the same game without them clashing or stepping on each others' toes.

An alignment system as D&D uses it - even restricted to "behavior reveals alignment" style "descriptive alignment" - ties your personal desires and methods to cosmic forces. This Zodiac concept would tie something more akin to character race to cosmic forces. (A player would choose the sign under which his PC was born the same way he chooses the race he was born as.)

Kane0
2021-02-15, 02:19 PM
So how about something like ‘faction’ or ‘afterlife’ rather than ‘alignment’ then?

Segev
2021-02-15, 02:43 PM
So how about something like ‘faction’ or ‘afterlife’ rather than ‘alignment’ then?

:smallconfused: "Alignment" being related to morality or ethics is strictly due to it having been chosen by D&D's early creators as the word they used to state with which ethos you were aligned. If they had chosen 'faction,' this exact conversation could have ensued and we'd have somebody likely suggesting "how about something like 'alignment' instead of 'faction,' then?"

Mastikator
2021-02-15, 03:21 PM
Really isn't serving the same purpose as an alignment system. Evidence: you could have both present in the same game without them clashing or stepping on each others' toes.

An alignment system as D&D uses it - even restricted to "behavior reveals alignment" style "descriptive alignment" - ties your personal desires and methods to cosmic forces. This Zodiac concept would tie something more akin to character race to cosmic forces. (A player would choose the sign under which his PC was born the same way he chooses the race he was born as.)

IMO the background personality/bond/flaw/ideal in 5e does a better job of "personal desires", and class does a better job of "methods to cosmic forces". Alignment can be removed from the character sheet entirely and nothing of value would be lost. Next step is to replace alignment based cosmology with zodiac cosmology and bob's your uncle.

That's a ton of work though.

I'm not saying that a Zodiac cosmology is the way to go, I'm picking it as an example of how easy it is to come up with something better than the alignment system. Because a zodiac system is kinda lame, alignment is lamer. Worse. Actively destructive

Kane0
2021-02-15, 04:09 PM
:smallconfused: "Alignment" being related to morality or ethics is strictly due to it having been chosen by D&D's early creators as the word they used to state with which ethos you were aligned. If they had chosen 'faction,' this exact conversation could have ensued and we'd have somebody likely suggesting "how about something like 'alignment' instead of 'faction,' then?"

Yeah, but D&D has changed since those wargame days. Alignment doesnt so much describe which side you’re going to take in extraplanar warfare so much as a loose combined ethics/personality test.

And at this point it’s pretty vestigial. We don’t need it except if you are specifically looking for a shorthand label for some key RP elements. And in that case many other methods of shorthand description will do, and ‘alignment’ ends up carrying unnecessary baggage.

Morty
2021-02-15, 04:17 PM
Unfortunately, "useful" and "serving the same purpose as D&D's alignment system" are mutually exclusive. There are many better systems for ethics, morals, beliefs and motivations, but they don't take D&D's objective top-down moral judgment.

Segev
2021-02-15, 10:25 PM
So far, all I am getting from this is, "It is a terrible system because we say so. It is not useful because words for things are not necessary. We do not like it and thus nobody can have actual use for it." Maybe there is more to the rebuttals than that, but if so, I am having a hard time seeing them.

This would not bother me except that this was the same kind of circular echo chamber that seemed to me to be responsible for 4e and the failure thereof. The notions were not inherently bad, but were very "for their own sake" and had a scoffing sense that anything that pointed out flawed premises was to be disregarded or dismissed as "powergamers" or "ignorance" or "sacred cows."

Kane0
2021-02-15, 11:18 PM
So far, all I am getting from this is, "It is a terrible system because we say so. It is not useful because words for things are not necessary. We do not like it and thus nobody can have actual use for it." Maybe there is more to the rebuttals than that, but if so, I am having a hard time seeing them.

This would not bother me except that this was the same kind of circular echo chamber that seemed to me to be responsible for 4e and the failure thereof. The notions were not inherently bad, but were very "for their own sake" and had a scoffing sense that anything that pointed out flawed premises was to be disregarded or dismissed as "powergamers" or "ignorance" or "sacred cows."

OK, what makes alignment necessary, good and/or not replicated by other means?

Telok
2021-02-15, 11:30 PM
So far, all I am getting from this is, "It is a terrible system because we say so. It is not useful because words for things are not necessary. We do not like it and thus nobody can have actual use for it." Maybe there is more to the rebuttals than that, but if so, I am having a hard time seeing them.

I'm not a fan just because I've seen people arguing about for 30+ years simply for the lack of agreement on what is or is not lawful, good, chaotic, and evil, plus some people insisting on bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment". I've even seen actual cultural differences over them too. I find them too undefined and carrying too much cultural & historic baggage to be useful.

Seriously, at this point explicitly changing them to "nice", "not nice", "follows rules", ignores rules" would probably work better.

Ravens_cry
2021-02-15, 11:49 PM
I had an idea of replacing the alignment with ties and allegiances. A D&D paladin might have an allegiance to the concepts of law and good, but they would also have ties to their friends, their family, the priesthood they are part of, their god(s), and so on.

Segev
2021-02-16, 01:32 AM
OK, what makes alignment necessary, good and/or not replicated by other means?Ah, anything - literally anything - can be "replicated by other means." Whether something is the best way to achieve an effect is always open to debate. So I won't bother, here, because of course it can be replicated by other means.

What do they provide that is necessary? Nothing, I suppose; very little in any game system is "necessary;" heck, the very use of rules is unnecessary. Cops & Robbers and other freeform styles with no official rule set are perfectly viable ways to have a role-playing experience.

What do they provide that's good? World-building, and a mechanical hook for certain spell effects. And other effects, too, whenever the designers of rules (or a DM) decides to use them. It is, of course, perfectly possible to have "team white, black, blue, and orange" instead of "good, evil, law, and chaos," and have them have nothing to do with good or evil or order or chaos as concepts, or to have them CLAIM to be related to these things even if they don't actually embody them. But I think that is actually the source of much of the problem people have with the alignment system as-written: it's treated as "team jerseys" that happen to have some coincidental correlation with the concepts named, but don't actually have to adhere to them. (Worse, people will write storylines to "prove contradictions" or somesuch and have "proclaimed good" actors behaving quite evilly but insisting they're doing it all in a "good" fashion.)

Where they have value, applied straight-forwardly, is not as factions but as philosophies, and broad ones at that. Yes, "be nice, be mean, follow rules, ignore rules" is a good summation for the broad philosophies. It's not perfect, but it's a good starting point.

They have value as means of establishing whether you can trust somebody to share a particular set of morals or ethics. Yes, you CAN trust that a Lawful Good person isn't going to backstab you, but will deal reasonably with you and tell you if there's a conflict of interest they perceive. Yes, you CAN legitimately worry that the Neutral Evil person might kill you in your sleep; it's certainly within his moral and ethical capacity. And as "team jerseys" that are not so much donned and doffed by applying the label, but rather are endemic parts of the creature's being based on the person they are, they work just fine.

You can have your exceptions, if you want them, but they are just that: exceptions. And they're "the evil guy who works with good guys," not, "the good guy who proves that good doesn't actually mean good."

Can you do much of it without them? Sure, but you'll wind up with labels anyway defining good guys vs. bad guys, and even if you ban "law" and "chaos," you'll have people trying to qualify the freedom vs. rules axis without having words to describe it. So, since we have the words, throwing them out doesn't help anything.

And again, in D&D at least, they define part of the setting. Used properly, alignment tying to outer planes works just fine. It is quite useful for telling stories about philosophy and exploring what is and is not a part of them, by using the settings that are literally defined by philosophy to see how things do or do not fit them.

It may cause arguments, but any story about philosophy will.

There is use and value, and throwing them out entirely doesn't get rid of them. It just makes people have to dance around the language.


I'm not a fan just because I've seen people arguing about for 30+ years simply for the lack of agreement on what is or is not lawful, good, chaotic, and evil, plus some people insisting on bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment". I've even seen actual cultural differences over them too. I find them too undefined and carrying too much cultural & historic baggage to be useful.

Seriously, at this point explicitly changing them to "nice", "not nice", "follows rules", ignores rules" would probably work better.

People bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment" is obnoxious. It'll be obnoxious without alignment, too: "You're not playing a Crane Clan member correctly!" is something that I have heard in L5R. And "Crane Clan" is a faction, and you can be aligned to it by birth or adoption. It has definite philosophical leanings. There is no "good/evil/law/chaos" axis, even though evil is a definite force with mechanical taint it can use to corrupt a character into being supernaturally evil. And L5R does a great job of never letting you play the "good guy tainted with evil power;" you WILL NOT be able to "stay good" while "using evil power." (I wouldn't care for that version in D&D, honestly; it's prescriptive, and literally removes control from the character as the taint takes over.)

But the point is, the bad behavior you're not a fan of, Telok, happens with any factional system. It isn't a problem of alignment; it's a problem of players insisting that they have a say in how others play their characters. (And to be fair...there's room to argue this isn't 100% unreasonable. It'd hardly be fun to play in a game of "only heroes, the DM said so," and still have your guy be the only one who wants to help others and doesn't want to murder the orphans for the deed to the mine the orphanage sits on.)

Satinavian
2021-02-16, 03:17 AM
Where they have value, applied straight-forwardly, is not as factions but as philosophies, and broad ones at that. Yes, "be nice, be mean, follow rules, ignore rules" is a good summation for the broad philosophies. It's not perfect, but it's a good starting point.

They have value as means of establishing whether you can trust somebody to share a particular set of morals or ethics. Yes, you CAN trust that a Lawful Good person isn't going to backstab you, but will deal reasonably with you and tell you if there's a conflict of interest they perceive. Yes, you CAN legitimately worry that the Neutral Evil person might kill you in your sleep; it's certainly within his moral and ethical capacity. And as "team jerseys" that are not so much donned and doffed by applying the label, but rather are endemic parts of the creature's being based on the person they are, they work just fine.

You can have your exceptions, if you want them, but they are just that: exceptions. And they're "the evil guy who works with good guys," not, "the good guy who proves that good doesn't actually mean good."With enough squinting that might work for good, but it certainly does not work for evil. Evil is not a philosophy. Evil is following selfish goals because you are selfish, not because you believe in some grand theory that promotes selfishness. Evil people would betray or abuse other evil people as readily as they would good people. And thus are probaly as vary of other evil people as good people are. Evil people seeking out the company of good ones would not be the exception, it would be the norm. Because they would expect good people to be good to them as well.

Good vs. Evil as team jerseys is stupid.

Segev
2021-02-16, 03:32 AM
With enough squinting that might work for good, but it certainly does not work for evil. Evil is not a philosophy. Evil is following selfish goals because you are selfish, not because you believe in some grand theory that promotes selfishness. Evil people would betray or abuse other evil people as readily as they would good people. And thus are probaly as vary of other evil people as good people are. Evil people seeking out the company of good ones would not be the exception, it would be the norm. Because they would expect good people to be good to them as well.

Good vs. Evil as team jerseys is stupid.

Evil is a broad swath of philosophies. Not everyone is a philosopher; some good folks just do what seems right and kind. Some evil characters just don't care about hurting others. But there are a great many stories where evil beings preach about the reasons why evil is the best path for a "worthy" person.

There is plenty of philosophy in evil. I hesitate to give even abstract examples lest real world ideologies be read into them, however, and my post be interpreted as calling some real world ideology "evil" in a manner that might violate forum rules.

Batcathat
2021-02-16, 03:39 AM
So far, all I am getting from this is, "It is a terrible system because we say so. It is not useful because words for things are not necessary. We do not like it and thus nobody can have actual use for it." Maybe there is more to the rebuttals than that, but if so, I am having a hard time seeing them.

If I were to try to summarize my dislike of alignment, it would probably be as follows:

I find the idea of objective morality absurd from a philosophical standpoint and boring from a dramatical standpoint.
As previously stated, I find that alignments tend to end up either confining or too vague to mean much. I'm sure there's a middle ground but a lot of people seem to have trouble finding it, which is an issue.
People seem to confuse a character's alignment with their personality. "What's your character like?" "He's Lawful Good."
I've played a lot of role-playing games without an alignment system or something similar and I don't think I've ever missed it.

I'd probably come up with more if I thought long enough, but those are the important parts. Obviously it's all subjective but then again I haven't seen any objective arguments in support of alignment either so it's clearly down to taste.


They have value as means of establishing whether you can trust somebody to share a particular set of morals or ethics. Yes, you CAN trust that a Lawful Good person isn't going to backstab you, but will deal reasonably with you and tell you if there's a conflict of interest they perceive. Yes, you CAN legitimately worry that the Neutral Evil person might kill you in your sleep; it's certainly within his moral and ethical capacity. And as "team jerseys" that are not so much donned and doffed by applying the label, but rather are endemic parts of the creature's being based on the person they are, they work just fine.

This is probably true to some degree, but I'm not sure it's a good thing in a game. Isn't it more interesting if you have to actually get to know characters and figure out whether to trust them or not rather than just go "Ding! He detects as Evil, clearly we can't trust him"?

Morty
2021-02-16, 04:11 AM
This is probably true to some degree, but I'm not sure it's a good thing in a game. Isn't it more interesting if you have to actually get to know characters and figure out whether to trust them or not rather than just go "Ding! He detects as Evil, clearly we can't trust him"?

Yes, the idea that you can slap one of nine labels on a person and that will give you an idea of how they'll act is silly at best, actively detrimental to role-playing at worst. It's not so bad if there's no magic to detect alignment, but even so it's worse than the players actually gauging a character's motives based on their actions or maybe social rolls.

Satinavian
2021-02-16, 05:22 AM
Evil is a broad swath of philosophies. Not everyone is a philosopher; some good folks just do what seems right and kind. Some evil characters just don't care about hurting others. But there are a great many stories where evil beings preach about the reasons why evil is the best path for a "worthy" person.

There is plenty of philosophy in evil. I hesitate to give even abstract examples lest real world ideologies be read into them, however, and my post be interpreted as calling some real world ideology "evil" in a manner that might violate forum rules.Yes, there are evil philosophies. But most evil people don't follow any of them. There will probably even be more evil people following good philosophies but actually lacking the discipline to properly do so.
And even the people who do follow evil philosophies are not excactly natural allies unless they follow the exactly same one.

And then there is the fact that pretty much every real world evil philosophy does not represent itself as evil and most of them have adherents that are not actually evil, just deluded and not particularly smart.

In addition every instance of people preaching why EVIL is the right course for the worthy could well subsumed under "cartoonish nonsense". I don't want anything of that in any of my games. There is no way to avoid ruining any villain and turning them into a carricature while holding such a speech.
You can however have great villains explaining how their evil philosophy is not actually evil in their opinion. But for that cosmic absolute alignments make stuff harder, not easier as you want to your villian be both smart and mistaken here.



I stand by my observation that pretty much every evil person would prefer good allies over evil allies. Which is why the fight good vs evil is stupid.

If you really want to include a faction in the game which actually follows an evil philosophy, use faction rules instead. Those work far better and can even properly adress having competing evil philosophies.

OldTrees1
2021-02-16, 07:55 AM
Yes, there are evil philosophies. But most evil people don't follow any of them. There will probably even be more evil people following good philosophies but actually lacking the discipline to properly do so.
And even the people who do follow evil philosophies are not excactly natural allies unless they follow the exactly same one.

And then there is the fact that pretty much every real world evil philosophy does not represent itself as evil and most of them have adherents that are not actually evil, just deluded and not particularly smart.

You can however have great villains explaining how their evil philosophy is not actually evil in their opinion. But for that cosmic absolute alignments make stuff harder, not easier as you want to your villian be both smart and mistaken here.


I believe Segev's use of the phrase "evil philosophies" contains examples you are excluding but otherwise found reasonable. I think the following list is relatively safe but I do have to lead with the complicated amoral one.

1) Moral Error Theory is a philosophy that morality is an erroneous question. People that believe that philosophy, even if they don't know about it, will be driven by personal philosophies that are framed using amoral terms (ex Survival of the Fittest). If they are wrong and morality is not an erroneous question, then those personal philosophies using amoral motivations might be causing moral, amoral, or immoral behavior. This includes both the villain that says good and evil don't exist and the moral exemplar that does not believe in good or evil.

2) Mistaken Moral Theory: Ever see an evil character think their actions are the right thing to do in the circumstances? This includes the self righteous villain following the greater good.

3) Everyone draws the line right below what they do: In a moral grey area, people will rationalize excuses for whatever outcome they choose. If they are consistent about those rationalizations it will turn into a philosophic belief about why ____ is not immoral because XYZ.

4) I am special: Normally ____ is immoral, but because I am XYZ it is okay for me to do it.

5) Everyone is doing it:

6) We need to do _______ to survive:

7) What do you mean? No, _____ is not immoral:


I stand by my observation that pretty much every evil person would prefer good allies over evil allies. Which is why the fight good vs evil is stupid.

If you really want to include a faction in the game which actually follows an evil philosophy, use faction rules instead. Those work far better and can even properly address having competing evil philosophies.

Why use faction rules when you have factions in the game? I never understood the point of faction/allegiance rules.

I would amend your observation to pretty much every evil person would prefer allies they see as good (which might be more evil people) over people they see as evil (which might be good people) provided those allies don't get in the way of the evil person doing what they mistakenly think is right.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-16, 08:33 AM
I believe Segev's use of the phrase "evil philosophies" contains examples you are excluding but otherwise found reasonable. I think the following list is relatively safe but I do have to lead with the complicated amoral one.

1) Moral Error Theory is a philosophy that morality is an erroneous question. People that believe that philosophy, even if they don't know about it, will be driven by personal philosophies that are framed using amoral terms (ex Survival of the Fittest). If they are wrong and morality is not an erroneous question, then those personal philosophies using amoral motivations might be causing moral, amoral, or immoral behavior. This includes both the villain that says good and evil don't exist and the moral exemplar that does not believe in good or evil.

2) Mistaken Moral Theory: Ever see an evil character think their actions are the right thing to do in the circumstances? This includes the self righteous villain following the greater good.

3) Everyone draws the line right below what they do: In a moral grey area, people will rationalize excuses for whatever outcome they choose. If they are consistent about those rationalizations it will turn into a philosophic belief about why ____ is not immoral because XYZ.

4) I am special: Normally ____ is immoral, but because I am XYZ it is okay for me to do it.

5) Everyone is doing it:

6) We need to do _______ to survive:

7) What do you mean? No, _____ is not immoral:


I once played a supervillain who was so self-centeredly egomaniacal, he was both 2) and 4) at the same time, believing himself the world's eternal savior for all time so of course he thinks he is the most special person in the world and at the same time all his actions are justified in his mind because he is most special person ever to exist. He claimed himself to be above selflessness and selfishness because by being selfish he thought he WAS being selfless because to help himself was to help the universe because he thought all of reality revolved around him and thus his own excellence would somehow radiate out by example to everyone else so they would be like him. Which could lead to examples of 7) or 6) because he believed that whatever he said was true and right, so he thought he was the one who decided whether all actions were right or wrong at his whim, and whether any action was necessary could be only be decided by himself, the perfect being.

Basically he thought he was truly the absolute most perfect ever to exist or ever will and had the morality to match, it was just he was completely wrong about being perfect. If your creative enough, you can have combinations of these kinds of villain philosophies.

But 1) is the one I've seen most often in fiction though. Particularly the Survival of the Fittest idea, as its a convenient philosophy for a villain to have to make them do something pointlessly cruel in a short amount of time to establish how evil they are.

Telok
2021-02-16, 11:39 AM
They have value as means of establishing whether you can trust somebody to share a particular set of morals or ethics. Yes, you CAN trust that a Lawful Good person isn't going to backstab you, but will deal reasonably with you and tell you if there's a conflict of interest they perceive. Yes, you CAN legitimately worry that the Neutral Evil person might kill you in your sleep; it's certainly within his moral and ethical capacity. And as "team jerseys" that are not so much donned and doffed by applying the label, but rather are endemic parts of the creature's being based on the person they are, they work just fine.

You can have your exceptions, if you want them, but they are just that: exceptions. And they're "the evil guy who works with good guys," not, "the good guy who proves that good doesn't actually mean good."

See, thing is, I've occasionally taken a character concept or personality from fiction (or history in a couple cases) that just seems to contravene all D&D style alignment.

I've had the selfish evil dude who was totally honorable and trustworthy, legit improving the world and saving people. Everyone thought he was LG except that he wallowed in glory & fame, plus his enjoyment of slaughtering team monster was a bit creepy. It caused a huge argument when he took an action that was unquestionably evil. Everyone agreed it was in character, but they all thought "LG" meant different things and started arguing about it. I ran a LG character once who committed terrible acts of evil simply by being a clueless twit who believed he could do no wrong. The character was a great person but never thought ahead, never questioned stuff, and always assumed they were in the right. Ticked all the classic LG checkboxes, believed and tried to do good all the time, never felt guilt because he believed liars and thought his absolute intention to do good absolved all mistakes. That game had more mature players, it wasn't a argument but several people couldn't agree on the character's alignment.

My personal experience has been that D&D style alignment is too broad, too vague, and too loaded with cultural baggage to be workable for anything but the most stereotyped characters. Even your "evil -> kill you in your sleep" and "good -> no backstabbing" is a reflection of a cultural assumption.

Segev
2021-02-16, 12:35 PM
See, thing is, I've occasionally taken a character concept or personality from fiction (or history in a couple cases) that just seems to contravene all D&D style alignment.

I've had the selfish evil dude who was totally honorable and trustworthy, legit improving the world and saving people. Everyone thought he was LG except that he wallowed in glory & fame, plus his enjoyment of slaughtering team monster was a bit creepy. It caused a huge argument when he took an action that was unquestionably evil. Everyone agreed it was in character, but they all thought "LG" meant different things and started arguing about it. I ran a LG character once who committed terrible acts of evil simply by being a clueless twit who believed he could do no wrong. The character was a great person but never thought ahead, never questioned stuff, and always assumed they were in the right. Ticked all the classic LG checkboxes, believed and tried to do good all the time, never felt guilt because he believed liars and thought his absolute intention to do good absolved all mistakes. That game had more mature players, it wasn't a argument but several people couldn't agree on the character's alignment.

My personal experience has been that D&D style alignment is too broad, too vague, and too loaded with cultural baggage to be workable for anything but the most stereotyped characters. Even your "evil -> kill you in your sleep" and "good -> no backstabbing" is a reflection of a cultural assumption.
Those only fly in the face of alignment because you deliberately ignore the rules. Alignment is descriptive, and if you know the full truth, you can describe it more accurately. The LG twit is actually Neutral if he is so innocent and naive that he cannot be said to ever act with agency. If he refused to learn when confronted with his harmful acts, he wasn't LG no matter what he tells himself. Agency is critical to alignment.

The other guy is LN or LE due to his sadism. Vainglory on its own probably is not enough to ding his morality unless he lets it lead him to other acts of wickedness in its service. There is room to debate, here, but the difference between a man who is working ain't his base urges and sometimes fails due to his urges unfortunaaligning with what has to be done is likely good if he really is trying and mostly succeeding (to the point that he takes active steps to prevent temptation and opportunity to slip up), and likely Neutral or Evil if he seeks excuses to revel in his wicked urges.

But for a DM, it is pretty easy if he is trying to use the alignment system for its purpose, rather than trying to "prove" it doesn't work: should the party think well of these characters as people to emulate and "have a good feeling" about? Or should they feel a bit off-put and uneasy, like there is something wrong with them and they may need to be watched rather than trusted to do the right thing?

If you can see a cut away to the character on his own in a movie about the game's plot wherein the character gives the audience an indication that maybe he is not as upright and noble as the PCs are led to believe, he is probably not Good. (Unless that cut away is, itself, a red herring).

Satinavian
2021-02-16, 12:58 PM
I believe Segev's use of the phrase "evil philosophies" contains examples you are excluding but otherwise found reasonable. I think the following list is relatively safe but I do have to lead with the complicated amoral one.I wouldn't call simple rationalisations philosophies. That aside, how does that make evil people prone to working with each other ? Or alignment useful as a tool ?

Why use faction rules when you have factions in the game? I never understood the point of faction/allegiance rules.They can be nice if you either have a proper social rulesystem that uses them or a rulesystem for careers in organisations. Otherwise you don't really need them, but superflous is still better than actually detrimental as alignment rules

I would amend your observation to pretty much every evil person would prefer allies they see as good (which might be more evil people) over people they see as evil (which might be good people) provided those allies don't get in the way of the evil person doing what they mistakenly think is right.That might be true as well, but I meant it the way I said. The general evil person probably is evil in one specific way and finds all other ways to be evil as abhorrent as everyone else and just would greatly prefer someone good to someone evil as ally. The only exception would be if the other evil person has the exactly same thing going, but that is usually not the case.

Evil team ups is something for comic-books.

Segev
2021-02-16, 01:31 PM
If I were to try to summarize my dislike of alignment, it would probably be as follows:

I find the idea of objective morality absurd from a philosophical standpoint and boring from a dramatical standpoint.
As previously stated, I find that alignments tend to end up either confining or too vague to mean much. I'm sure there's a middle ground but a lot of people seem to have trouble finding it, which is an issue.
People seem to confuse a character's alignment with their personality. "What's your character like?" "He's Lawful Good."
I've played a lot of role-playing games without an alignment system or something similar and I don't think I've ever missed it.

I'd probably come up with more if I thought long enough, but those are the important parts. Obviously it's all subjective but then again I haven't seen any objective arguments in support of alignment either so it's clearly down to taste.
Most of that seems to me to be because you're used to people using it wrong. It's no more accurate than any other personality test in "getting to know" a character. What it is is telling you their general relationship to morals and ethics. Do they even CARE about rules as anything other than advice? How willing are they to hurt others for personal benefit? That kind of thing.


This is probably true to some degree, but I'm not sure it's a good thing in a game. Isn't it more interesting if you have to actually get to know characters and figure out whether to trust them or not rather than just go "Ding! He detects as Evil, clearly we can't trust him"?Sure. Though that also depends on the scenario and game. In D&D, you're archetypally taking on quests to delve into dangerous places and accomplish specific goals (or just acquire loot). Being able to tell that this creature you just ran into in the dungeon is "one of the good guys" quickly rather than having to RP out hours of interaction or having to guess and worry about double-crossings is a feature, not a bug, in that sort of game.

I get it: for the political intrigue game, you want more ambiguity. The alginment system can support that, too, but the more nuanced reasons why you can't be sure that just because someone is Good they'll agree with your side of things tend to also only come up in less split-second situations.

Alignment tied to cosmic forces can also have use for explaining WHY evil can prosper: when being evil gives you actual magical powers that support your evil, suddenly otherwise really stupid acts of villainy become logical.

Telok
2021-02-16, 01:33 PM
Those only fly in the face of alignment because you deliberately ignore the rules....

That's all a nice after action analysis, but the point is that my playing a character personality caused issues because the people at the table trying to use the alignment system couldn't agree on what the alignments meant. And my experience is this has been going on for 30 years. I don't set out to break the alignment system, I come up with a personality and goals for a character. Generally I ignore alignment until it comes up mechanically, then I ask the table what alignment they think the character is.

Does it personally work for you by fitting everyone into your definitions of the words? Fine. I've seen it being a problem for almost every group where someone's gone beyond "alignment = personality" because they can't perfectly agree on "good" or "law" or if it's supposed to be intent based or action based or what.

OldTrees1
2021-02-16, 01:34 PM
I wouldn't call simple rationalisations philosophies. That aside, how does that make evil people prone to working with each other ? Or alignment useful as a tool ?

If you are dealing with philosophic issues concerning ethics, characters will have beliefs and behaviors related to those topics. Even if the beliefs are Moral Error theory. Depending on how much the play touches on that subject, avoiding using words for the subject will grow frustrating and tiresome. Eventually one would start using words to describe the beliefs, the behaviors, and how those beliefs / behaviors deviate from or emulate moral truth.

Notice this is not the language of a faction system, the usefulness of the tool is having a common language and multiple depths of summary so the right amount of detail can be used at the right time. In some cases I would describe O-chul as a moral individual. In other cases I would dive into more detail to differentiate them from Roy or Elan. Or I might go into even more detail about a particular choice O-chul made. It is not saying Elan and Roy are on the same side, it is comparing and contrasting their roles as moral agents.

So alignment does not presume evil people would be prone to work with each other. Nor does it presume _____ people are prone to work with each other.


That might be true as well, but I meant it the way I said. The general evil person probably is evil in one specific way and finds all other ways to be evil as abhorrent as everyone else and just would greatly prefer someone good to someone evil as ally. The only exception would be if the other evil person has the exactly same thing going, but that is usually not the case.

Evil team ups is something for comic-books.
I don't think it is as difficult as you lay out. So I recognize the underlying tendencies but I come to a less strict conclusion. Organizations or movements can form around a particular immoral behavior. Furthermore depending on the rationalization for their own actions, they might be desensitized to another type of action.

For example a self righteous mistaken individual might be out to purge all ___. Someone that likes general slaughter would be willing to work with them until the victims dwindled. Someone out to acquire wealth might tag along to seize the assets of the victims, they are going to die regardless so why not profit? Etc. Three individuals all willing to kill for completely different reasons. The greedy opportunity might even find the other two abhorrent, but their victims are doomed so the opportunist considers their blood soaked hands to be clean.

Evil will not team up merely for the sake of evil, but evil individuals understand the concept of cooperation (also exploitation, betrayal, and love).

I guess I should also mention that people vary in how morally tolerant they are. A common thug might want to work with some saints, but the saints might not want to work with the thug. In search of allies the thug might lower their standards. Segev went into more detail here, so feel free to only reply to their section.


They can be nice if you either have a proper social rulesystem that uses them or a rulesystem for careers in organisations. Otherwise you don't really need them, but superflous is still better than actually detrimental as alignment rules

I don't see alignment as a faction rule system which is part of why I asked, so I will ignore the final sentence.

I see, so with a decent social rule system framework, a faction system helps codify career mechanics in a way that helps set useful expectations between the players. Sort of like how an example of a skill usage with a DC could set useful expectations. Thanks for elaborating, that helps.

Segev
2021-02-16, 01:39 PM
I wouldn't call simple rationalisations philosophies.They absolutely are, especially as they grow and metastasize due to having to deal with cognitive dissonance and a sense of hypocrisy. Alternatively, they become philosophies by cutting through the rationalizations and saying you don't need them. At which point you're building a philosophy on a wholly different premise.


That aside, how does that make evil people prone to working with each other ? Or alignment useful as a tool ?
They can be nice if you either have a proper social rulesystem that uses them or a rulesystem for careers in organisations. Otherwise you don't really need them, but superflous is still better than actually detrimental as alignment rules
That might be true as well, but I meant it the way I said. The general evil person probably is evil in one specific way and finds all other ways to be evil as abhorrent as everyone else and just would greatly prefer someone good to someone evil as ally. The only exception would be if the other evil person has the exactly same thing going, but that is usually not the case.

Evil team ups is something for comic-books.

Evil people aren't "more prone to working together," but evil people ARE more prone to tolerating other evil people's evil. And if they're okay with one form of evil, and can be told they're allowed to indulge their preferences as long as they put up with others indulging theirs, you'll find evil people working together because working together is better than being alone, and they don't have to constantly hide their nefarious deeds. Being told "it's okay" is actually very heady. The troubled character with an urge towards something wicked (perhaps a sadistic enjoyment of pulling legs off of crabs that...could grow to something worse if he didn't feel so guilty about it) being told that, hey, he's actually just fine for doing that, and in fact his new buddies will help him get some crabs to torture if he hangs out with them rather than with those stuffy people who tell him he's a monster for doing it is pretty tempting. People don't like feeling guilty, and they like indulging their interests. If they can be told their interests are fine to indulge without guilt, they'll be sorely tempted to join up with those who will let them do so.

Sure, there are reasons not to: you don't want to wind up being the crab whose legs are being pulled off, for one thing. But evil is about using other people, so as long as you're more useful than the crab, you're not getting your legs pulled off. And the threat probably doesn't arise until you're in much deeper than merely hanging out occasionally.

Evil CAN work together. This doesn't require an alignment system, but an alignment system helps label it when it's happening. And can explain why the concentration of it is having supernatural effects.

hamishspence
2021-02-16, 01:46 PM
Or, as the D&D splatbooks put it:

Savage Species:

Evil is not stupid. Evil creatures and characters can work together just as well as good characters can. It should be no more difficult to maintain party cohesion with a group that includes LE, NE and CE characters, than a typical adventurer mix of LG, NG and CG. Certainly evil characters attempt to manipulate events to their personal advantage- a phenomenon not limited to evil parties- but not to the extent of sabotaging their own chances of survival.

BoVD:

Two evil PCs do not have to come to blows just because they are both evil. Evil characters with similar goals or common foes can certainly work together. And there's no reason to believe that evil characters can't respect something like friendship. Intelligent evil characters realize, just as nonevil characters do, that they can accomplish more by working together rather than working at cross-purposes.

Champions of Ruin:

No-one is going to question whether the priest of Cyric is really a good guy at heart; he isn't- if he were, Cyric wouldn't grant him any spells. But just because he is evil doesn't mean he is going to slaughter his companions and steal their treasure at the first opportunity. If evil were really that self-destructive, good wouldn't have nearly as hard a time combating it.

Batcathat
2021-02-16, 02:32 PM
Most of that seems to me to be because you're used to people using it wrong. It's no more accurate than any other personality test in "getting to know" a character. What it is is telling you their general relationship to morals and ethics. Do they even CARE about rules as anything other than advice? How willing are they to hurt others for personal benefit? That kind of thing.

Sure, that's part of it. But even besides the fact that a system that a lot of people (I want to say a majority but I can't claim to have any numbers on it) misinterpret and use incorrectly probably isn't a great system to use, some of my issues remain even if people use it exactly as you say.

But I could tolerate a system being flawed and occasionally misused if I saw enough upside to it but even when used "perfectly", I just don't see any advantages to using it.


Sure. Though that also depends on the scenario and game. In D&D, you're archetypally taking on quests to delve into dangerous places and accomplish specific goals (or just acquire loot). Being able to tell that this creature you just ran into in the dungeon is "one of the good guys" quickly rather than having to RP out hours of interaction or having to guess and worry about double-crossings is a feature, not a bug, in that sort of game.

I get it: for the political intrigue game, you want more ambiguity. The alginment system can support that, too, but the more nuanced reasons why you can't be sure that just because someone is Good they'll agree with your side of things tend to also only come up in less split-second situations.

Personally, I prefer moral ambiguity no matter the game type. Worrying about a newfound friend(?) double-crossing is a feature, at least if the alternative is being told by the universe that he's an Objectively Good Guy.


Alignment tied to cosmic forces can also have use for explaining WHY evil can prosper: when being evil gives you actual magical powers that support your evil, suddenly otherwise really stupid acts of villainy become logical.

Maybe. But you could just as well argue the other way around, it's more understandable that someone sold their soul (metaphorically or literally) if they didn't objectively know that the buyer is unquestionably Evil. It's hard to argue that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions when there are clear road signs saying "EVIL!" along the way.

Satinavian
2021-02-16, 02:49 PM
@hamishspence

Yes, evil can work with evil. Evil can also work with good. And nearly all reservations a particular good person can have to work with a particular evil person, might be shared by evil people as well.


Seriously, if a potential party member is someone who would be suspected to murder their future companions during sleep, no one would want to have him. And someone evil but more tolerable would be more tolerable to most others as well.

Saint-Just
2021-02-16, 09:43 PM
@Segev

You seem to think that you have the proper understanding of alignment system; how to classify characters, actions, behaviours under that system. That some of the examples mentioned by others are only possible if you ignore the rules. Yet if it was so clear-cut I think that there would be a greater consensus. Outside of this thread there are many threads where people relay their actual experiences during the game; DMs and players ask others to give their opinion on situations which came in games; in many situations those who ask receive a plenty of contradictory opinions from people who have engaged in hobby for quite a while. In situations where everybody is presuming that alignment does work (not DM engineering situations to prove that it doesn't) a lot of people can't agree on how exactly it works. Official sources offer little help; intensional definitions are usually too vague; extensional definitions seems to end up being an unresolvable mess - yes you can argue for each separate example that it demonstrates the author's incompetence, but in the end if you need to analyze whether official sources are right instead of relying on them then maybe you are not actually using D&D alignment?

As far as trustworthiness goes there are a plenty of examples in the OotS. Miko comes really close to "will stab you in the back" while being LG.

I think that judging alignment using every published source talking about alignment ends up in contradictions; you need to pick and chose; resulting set of rules may end up good, but you don't get to say that everyone who disagrees is doing it wrong

Nifft
2021-02-17, 02:30 AM
As far as trustworthiness goes there are a plenty of examples in the OotS. Miko comes really close to "will stab you in the back" while being LG.

Just as a point of order, Miko turned out to NOT be LG, and that was a bit of a plot-point.

Perhaps "will stab you in the back" is incompatible with LG.

Morty
2021-02-17, 02:34 AM
Just as a point of order, Miko turned out to NOT be LG, and that was a bit of a plot-point.

Perhaps "will stab you in the back" is incompatible with LG.

She was Lawful Good until she killed Shojo, otherwise she wouldn't have been a paladin. Whether or not she stopped being LG or merely lost her paladin status is anyone's guess - though I don't think it's a question worth spending too much time on.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 02:47 AM
Just as a point of order, Miko turned out to NOT be LG, and that was a bit of a plot-point.

Perhaps "will stab you in the back" is incompatible with LG.

1) Miko underwent character development. In one very long page (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0406.html) Miko tried to solve a complicated ethical dilemma after her world was flipped upside down. She concluded she should do a dramatic change in behavior which makes sense, the revealed information suggested a revaluation that would likely lead to changed behavior. Her wisdom failed her when she tried to find the right response to the situation. The god's reaction to the change in behavior (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0407.html). I think most would describe early Miko as a moral individual. Not a moral exemplar, but still a moral individual. Honestly even at the end I think maybe Miko was still moral. Her final plot point (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0464.html) was about not becoming a paladin again, I did not read that as necessarily saying Miko is not lawful good.
2) It is a large leap to go from "There is a non black non raven" to "Perhaps all ravens are black". If Miko was not LG and did backstab, that is very very weak evidence about whether LG is or is not compatible with backstabbing.

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 10:08 AM
People bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment" is obnoxious.
And yet this is literally what the DM is doing when they judge a PCs alignment based on in-game actions after the fact, and decide it is different from what the player wrote down on the character sheet.

Descriptive Alignment is indeed obnoxious.

hamishspence
2021-02-17, 10:13 AM
That's not "bludgeoning" if the paladin and DM are on the same page about the written alignment - that it's where the player starts from, and that there is no requirement to stay there.

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 10:38 AM
That's not "bludgeoning" if the paladin and DM are on the same page about the written alignment - that it's where the player starts from, and that there is no requirement to stay there.
Like I said, if the DM is changing the alignment because descriptive, it's bludgeoning,

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 10:50 AM
People bludgeoning others for "not playing their alignment" is obnoxious. It'll be obnoxious without alignment, too: "You're not playing a Crane Clan member correctly!" is something that I have heard in L5R.


And yet this is literally what the DM is doing when they judge a PCs alignment based on in-game actions after the fact, and decide it is different from what the player wrote down on the character sheet.

Descriptive Alignment is indeed obnoxious.

But that is not what the DM is doing. There is a key difference here, let me elaborate:

I once had a lich character that wanted to cull the population back down to what it was when they were alive. Let's say I thought that PC was morally neutral (for the record I didn't think that).

One day the PC uses their draining touch combined with a healing touch to torture a captive for information.

Case 1: Someone says "You are not playing your alignment right, your PC would not do that. You are mistaken about what your character would do." If it is the DM they might even block the player's agency until a "valid" action is chosen.

Case 2: Someone says "Huh, I don't think that matches the description of neutral. They seem to be acting evil." If it is the DM they might even change the official description of the character from neutral to evil.

Notice the big difference? In one case the player is told they are playing the character wrong and might even be prevented from playing the character that way. In the other case the player is told that the description of the character seems off and the official description might change.

Now maybe you find both obnoxious. However I would not equate the two.

However from past threads it sounds like you take the DM's judgement of the PC's moral character pretty harshly. If a DM rules that eating cake is evil then it sounds like you view that as similar to but not precisely equivalent to the DM saying PCs can't eat cake. Am I understanding why you feel it is "bludgeoning"? I ask because I did not mind when the other Players thought my Lich was evil or when the DM ruled it was neutral with evil leanings.


The lich did not understand morality as everyone else used it. They were following what could be best described as a blue/orange morality around a proper balance of the circle of life. Things like decreasing morality rates was breaking the cycle. They adopted the words "moral / immoral" to describe it to others but that is a mistranslation that neither the lich nor the party noticed.

It was fun playing an entity that could not comprehend morality but still did actions that we normally associate as moral/immoral. Is the ability to understand concepts of morality necessary for an entity to be a moral agent? That was fun to think about during play.

During the campaign they were doing a rough census to figure out how out of balance the cycle was rather than enacting the culling, which is why I used the torture instead of the inevitable culling as the example.

Telok
2021-02-17, 11:29 AM
Since when is it evil to backstab the evil high priest of murder, genocide, and cannibalism, during a human sacrifice ritual trying to open a portal for an army of demons to come through?

That reminded me of an old discussion. Is fantasy racisim is a D&D setting evil? We had a setting where there was a goblin racial god, just one. It was a god of genocide, cannibalism, and evil demony stuff. In that setting all goblins were default described as evil, genocidal, cannibal, demon worshippers. Our party spent something like 6 levels and in game months fighting off an invasion from the evil goblin nation. Ambushing, being ambushed, hunting evil goblin spellcasters, a siege. Eventually we ended up in a 3-way battle between 2 goblin factions and some starving refugees. We killed all the goblins, as usual.

The DM was upset because there was supposed to be some plot thing about a LG goblin paladin leading one of the factions. Apparently we'd missed some knowledge check or clue about goblin religion having some sort of schism and simply gone with our usual "enemy caster = double dead ASAP". We were unrepentant, goblins were evil and we killed them to save people. A goblin with an axe casting divine spells wasn't someone we'd talk to, it was a demon worshipping, baby killing, cannibal priest that needed to die. The usual alignment arguments ensued, of course.

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 12:38 PM
Case 1: Someone says "You are not playing your alignment right, your PC would not do that. You are mistaken about what your character would do." If it is the DM they might even block the player's agency until a "valid" action is chosen.

Case 2: Someone says "Huh, I don't think that matches the description of neutral. They seem to be acting evil." If it is the DM they might even change the official description of the character from neutral to evil.
Case 1: you're roleplaying wrong, neutral would do this.
Case 2: you're roleplaying wrong, start roleplaying evil instead.

They are the same thing, with minor variation. Either you're telling them they are roleplaying wrong because they aren't doing the written alignment described behavior correctly. Or they're doing it wrong and should start following this other alignment described behavior instead.

All that matters is:
- the player has something to use to help make in-character decisions.
- the in-universe reacts to the characters perceived behavior

DM-judged descriptive alignment & associated forced changes are not the latter, because they pre-empt the former.

hamishspence
2021-02-17, 12:41 PM
They're not the same thing. A character that eventually changes alignment is not "being roleplayed wrong" - they're being played as having an unusual character arc.


The point of descriptive alignment, is that the character can be role-played any way the player wants - it's the DM's job, not the player's, to figure out what alignment the character's behaviour most closely corresponds to.

Altheus
2021-02-17, 12:43 PM
Is there room in DnD for something like the traits system from Pendragon? You get a set of virtues and vices that work as a pair and have numerical values that add up to 20, as one of the pair goes up the other goes down.

For example a character might have

13 Generous - Selfish 7 The character is more generous than selfish.
4 Just - Arbritrary 16 The character will make judgements without thought of fairness
13 Forgiving - Vengeful 7 The character is more likely to forgive a slight than take revenge
16 Indulgent - Temperate 4 The character likes his ale, and food a lot

If you can amass the a certain number on the virtue side of the column (an arbritrary 40 in my example) you can call yourself a paladin.

These can guide pc behaviour but don't have to govern it, however, significant actions in line with one of the traits increase the trait and decrease the opposing trait.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 12:49 PM
Case 1: you're roleplaying wrong, neutral would do this.
Case 2: you're roleplaying wrong, start roleplaying evil instead.

They are the same thing, with minor variation. Either you're telling them they are roleplaying wrong because they aren't doing the written alignment described behavior correctly. Or they're doing it wrong and should start following this other alignment described behavior instead.

All that matters is:
- the player has something to use to help make in-character decisions.
- the in-universe reacts to the characters perceived behavior

DM-judged descriptive alignment & associated forced changes are not the latter, because they pre-empt the former.

But that is not what happened in case 2.
Case 2: you're roleplaying correctly, but we would describe that as ___ instead of ___. Continue having full agency over what your character is choosing to do.

Under descriptive alignment Case 2 has no prescriptive elements. There is no command to "start doing ___ instead" because that only makes sense if alignment were prescriptive. That phrase would be commanding the player to treat the ___ as prescribing what they can do. Descriptive alignment does not do that.

Consider the follow: I have a fearless barbarian that runs away in terror from every fight, if the other players start to describe the barbarian as a coward, that is not saying "You must roleplay them as a coward now" it is saying "The roleplaying you are choosing to do is described as "cowardly" rather than "fearless" in our vocabulary. So we will describe it as cowardly while that word fits what you are choosing to portray." Nowhere does it say "start roleplaying as X".

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 01:11 PM
But that is not what happened in case 2.
Case 2: you're roleplaying correctly, but we would describe that as ___ instead of ___. Continue having full agency over what your character is choosing to do.

Under descriptive alignment Case 2 has no prescriptive elements. There is no command to "start doing ___ instead" because that only makes sense if alignment were prescriptive. That phrase would be commanding the player to treat the ___ as prescribing what they can do. Descriptive alignment does not do that.

Consider the follow: I have a fearless barbarian that runs away in terror from every fight, if the other players start to describe the barbarian as a coward, that is not saying "You must roleplay them as a coward now" it is saying "The roleplaying you are choosing to do is described as "cowardly" rather than "fearless" in our vocabulary. So we will describe it as cowardly while that word fits what you are choosing to portray." Nowhere does it say "start roleplaying as X".Except Alignment does contain aspects of a roleplaying tool for the player to use. So if you as a DM force change it based on description, it is inherently telling the player something about how they need to roleplay moving forward.

hamishspence
2021-02-17, 01:18 PM
Not really. It's up the the player how to roleplay the character, not the DM. "Alignment change" doesn't change that fact.

Though there is a DMG recommendation that if alignment keeps changing back and forth (from the point of view of the DM) then Neutral alignment may be best - so the DM might eventually just change the character's alignment to Neutral and leave it there.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 01:18 PM
Except Alignment does contain aspects of a roleplaying tool for the player to use. So if you as a DM force change it based on description, it is inherently telling the player something about how they need to roleplay moving forward.

What is it telling them? It really sounds like you are conflating descriptive and prescriptive.

Let's say there was a character that was revaluated as being better described by evil than by neutral, does this mean the DM is saying "you must go kick puppies" or is the DM saying "continue roleplaying as you were, we are just recognizing the label evil is more accurate than the label neutral".

That is the main point to get across. Descriptive Alignment never tells you how you must play your character, it only describes how you have been playing your character. Under Descriptive Alignment if the DM changes the alignment label describing your character, that tells you nothing about how they should roleplay going forward. It merely describes how they have been roleplaying.

This is the big difference between prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive tells you something about how you need to roleplay. Descriptive describes how you have been roleplaying.

Batcathat
2021-02-17, 01:21 PM
This reminds me of another argument against alignments: without them there's no discussion about whether you're playing "wrong" or if some label need to be changed. The player just plays their character however they wish and the GM can focus on in-universe consequences rather than what's on the player's sheet.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 01:26 PM
This reminds me of another argument against alignments: without them there's no discussion about whether you're playing "wrong" or if some label need to be changed. The player just plays their character however they wish and the GM can focus on in-universe consequences rather than what's on the player's sheet.

Interesting argument. However, despite using alignment, my group has not had any of these arguments. So I wonder if those prescriptive arguments would merely shift to a new topic (see "You're not playing a Crane Clan member correctly!" above). Likewise I wonder if the descriptive arguments would also shift to another topic.

My conclusion is, only use tools when those tools are useful. Alignment is not always useful despite sometimes being useful. Only use it when it is useful?

Oh, and it is time for me to remember that the thread has a main topic:
So if you were using alignment as descriptive for a moral axis, it is likely to resurface even if replaced. It is just hard to talk about morality if moral, amoral, and immoral become taboo words. However if you want to keep it gone, have the GM not know the moral truth of the campaign world. If every player is equally in the dark then no descriptive moral axis will resurface due to a lack of information. You still will have people talk about the moral axis, but you won't have the labels.

If you were using alignment as prescriptive for the moral axis, then it is easy to replace it with example moral theories. Even something like 5E's flaws/ideals could work. However be warned, prescriptive anything can easily result in the same kinds of arguments. You might still deal with "You are not playing X right". Be prepared with ways to intercede in arguments and calm things down.

If you are using alignment as some celestial vs fiend faction system, it might be better to create a more detailed faction system (ranks, perks, social mechanics). While you do it will either look less like alignment or you might find new factions to focus on as a replacement.

Batcathat
2021-02-17, 01:31 PM
My conclusion is, only use tools when those tools are useful. Alignment is not always useful despite sometimes being useful. Only use it when it is useful?

I agree. That's why I never use alignments when I have the option not to.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 01:42 PM
I agree. That's why I never use alignments when I have the option not to.

And you almost always have the option to ignore it.

Despite frequently using alignment, I think only 1 of my characters absolutely needed a descriptive alignment system. That was the lich. I needed the players and the DM to judge how they would describe that character because 1) I was focused on the causes for their behavior and 2) I wanted to know the other players' opinions on whether the conceptualization of morality was a necessary condition for an entity to be a moral agent. I have had plenty of characters that I was invested in questions about their morality, but I think only that 1 time was alignment required.

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 02:15 PM
What is it telling them? It really sounds like you are conflating descriptive and prescriptive.No, both of those are harmful.

What's useful is motivational, as a player roleplaying tool, one (broad) moral/social personality trait of several to be considered when it might impact decision making.

Prescriptive assumes Alignment is the sole motivation and must be followed slavishly.

Descriptive assumes the DM gets to judge based on past actions taken, which ruins Alignments use forward-facing motivational RP tool, since it becomes the DM telling the players how to roleplay.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 03:06 PM
No, both of those are harmful.

What's useful is motivational, as a player roleplaying tool, one (broad) moral/social personality trait of several to be considered when it might impact decision making.

Prescriptive assumes Alignment is the sole motivation and must be followed slavishly.

Descriptive assumes the DM gets to judge based on past actions taken, which ruins Alignments use forward-facing motivational RP tool, since it becomes the DM telling the players how to roleplay.

It sounds like you only see prescriptive utility in alignment and thus are casting both prescriptive and descriptive alignment as if they were both prescriptive, and then judging them to both be harmful due to the prescriptive elements.

Consider my lich example, I did not go "hmm, they are evil and that informs how they might make certain decisions" instead I went "hmm, they believe they ought to cull the population, I think they are wrong about that.".
1) The lich still used their beliefs as forward facing motivational RP tool.
2) I was still motivated to see the lich follow that philosophy.
3) But alignment only was used in the descriptive context as a judgement / description of the characterization.
Now I did note how they have been behaving as that is a general indicator of how they will likely continue to behave, however that is still just descriptive rather than actually having prescriptive force.

Batcathat
2021-02-17, 03:10 PM
And you almost always have the option to ignore it.

Yes, that's kind of my point. Using it frequently (though not always) comes with a number of different issues and ignoring it usually isn't much of a loss. Which I why I don't really see a point to it (for me personally, that is. As with most things in life, I'm fine with others doing their own thing as long as they don't try and force it on me).

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 03:35 PM
Yes, that's kind of my point. Using it frequently (though not always) comes with a number of different issues and ignoring it usually isn't much of a loss. Which I why I don't really see a point to it (for me personally, that is. As with most things in life, I'm fine with others doing their own thing as long as they don't try and force it on me).

You had a good point. There is a lot we agree on.

We both value the ability to ignore it (we prefer it not be forced on anyone). We both see it can cause arguments (but does not have to). We both know that different people will see it as having different amounts of value. We both see that even when valued, it is a tool and thus can be ideal or ill adapted to the situation.

I think we only really differ in how much value we see for ourselves personally.

I kinda wonder if maybe alignment should be moved to an "off by default" optional rule in the official books. I don't expect they would remove it, but maybe it is time for "off by default"?

----
Main topic tax:
Other replacements for alignment:

Someone mentioned zodiac as an character creation effect. I had done something similar with the 6/26 inner planes influencing the material plane.

Tanarii
2021-02-17, 04:40 PM
It sounds like you only see prescriptive utility in alignment and thus are casting both prescriptive and descriptive alignment as if they were both prescriptive, and then judging them to both be harmful due to the prescriptive elements.
No. That's not what I am doing.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 05:00 PM
No. That's not what I am doing.

Then would you elaborate on when is the "DM telling the players how to roleplay." if the system is descriptive rather than prescriptive? If the DM is not telling the players how to roleplay, how are they telling the players how to roleplay. That is the contradiction I am not understanding.

You mentioned the DM using alignment as a "forward-facing motivational RP tool" to bludgeon the players, but unless I am missing something, that is prescriptive alignment. The process of of "My character is X, and the DM decided X acts like Y, so my character acts like Y" is an example of prescriptive alignment. Or "The DM decided my character is X, and the DM decided X acts like Y, so my character acts like Y" is another example of prescriptive. These are not exhaustive examples. Or "My character acts like Z, and the DM decided my character is X, and X also acts like Y, so my character also acts like Y" as another example. This is just prescriptive so I don't see why descriptive would be blamed for the problems of prescriptive.

Morty
2021-02-17, 06:23 PM
If alignment is, as people keep claiming, a measure of allegiance to objective cosmic moral forces, isn't it entirely appropriate for a GM to enforce a particular vision of alignment? Since there are actual forces of Law and Good who decide if someone qualifies to be labelled as such.

Mastikator
2021-02-17, 06:55 PM
If alignment is, as people keep claiming, a measure of allegiance to objective cosmic moral forces, isn't it entirely appropriate for a GM to enforce a particular vision of alignment? Since there are actual forces of Law and Good who decide if someone qualifies to be labelled as such.

If that is what alignment is for then you'd be better off with the real thing: religions, pantheons, deities and the rules that followers must obey. Most official D&D settings already have reasonably detailed stuff for that already. In Eberron for example you could simply write down "vassal of the sovereign host (Dol Dorn)" and that would more accurately describe your characters allegiance to cosmic forces, your characters rules of conduct, their values, etc than "chaotic good" ever could.

Saint-Just
2021-02-17, 07:05 PM
2) It is a large leap to go from "There is a non black non raven" to "Perhaps all ravens are black". If Miko was not LG and did backstab, that is very very weak evidence about whether LG is or is not compatible with backstabbing.

Sorry. I was indeed confused.

The point is: Miko was LG in the Giant's judgement, decided to, eh, frontstab a helpless individual, while still being LG at the moment of making the decision and initiating the action. It was an Evil act of unknown magnitude (not guaranteed to be enough to shift her alignment down; again people have spent so many, many hours discussing whether it was enough to guarantee the shift in alignment and in the end nobody was convinced about anything).

Segev's point was "you CAN trust that a Lawful Good person isn't going to backstab you". I say it's not true. I would say that LG person is extremely less likely to backstab you than any Evil or any Chaotic person (LN may outperform LG in non-backstabbing depending on what they consider a law for them).

And there were no leap there. Original argument was about how all ravens are black (LG is a defined category, not a negation like "non-raven"). I presented one white raven.

OldTrees1
2021-02-17, 07:59 PM
The point is:

Um, that quote was a reply to Nifft's reply to you.

Mechalich
2021-02-17, 08:21 PM
If that is what alignment is for then you'd be better off with the real thing: religions, pantheons, deities and the rules that followers must obey. Most official D&D settings already have reasonably detailed stuff for that already. In Eberron for example you could simply write down "vassal of the sovereign host (Dol Dorn)" and that would more accurately describe your characters allegiance to cosmic forces, your characters rules of conduct, their values, etc than "chaotic good" ever could.

Right, but a lot of D&D takes place in homebrew settings.

The idea of morally-mediated powers is a fairly strong fantasy trope. This takes any number of forms, from being evil causing physical corruption to the power of love directly boosting stats to fairly mundane things like 'Smite Evil.' If a setting is going to have powers with moral mediation, then it needs to have a moral framework in place. 'Smite Evil' is predicated on defining certain things as 'evil.'

In single-author fiction the author sets up the moral framework and the audience has to accept whatever justifications they provide for such decisions. This is almost certainly never going to match up perfectly and many authors present moral quandaries in the clearest and most generalized way possible to avoid large portions of the audience rejecting their work (reading works from with cultural origins other than your own is a good way to expose yourself to differences in moral judgments of this nature).

D&D has the problem that the system demands the enforcement of moral systems in order for morality-mediated abilities to function, but the only arbiter is the GM and the players may not agree with the GM's judgment. A system like alignment can be helpful to provide context for how decisions of this nature work - if its clear. Unfortunately alignment isn't clear and tends to just spawn arguments. This isn't unique. Star Wars has this problem in spades. It has a morally mediated power system but everyone is trying to work out light v dark based on a bare handful of examples from the movies to the point that even book length philosophical treatises on the subject often contradict each other.

Cooperative morality is hard, especially among non-homogenous groups (it's probably worth noting that D&D's original 1970s audience was considerably more homogenous on this subject than the current one, though forum rules prohibit going into why this is so). There is therefore a strong argument that it would probably just be better to not have morally mediated abilities at all, though that does mean giving up on a bunch of traditionally important fantasy story elements.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-17, 10:14 PM
There is therefore a strong argument that it would probably just be better to not have morally mediated abilities at all, though that does mean giving up on a bunch of traditionally important fantasy story elements.

I'd argue that this is the best possible outcome actually.

the traditionally important fantasy story elements all come from single author fiction, which doesn't work like improvised fantasy roleplay. in single author fiction or SAF, everything is pre-determined and nothing is left up to chance. they have the effects on this or that because the writer writes it that way. There is no need to argue about the morality of it, because the writer just decides it, and it is done. SAF does not have the luxury of not knowing what will happen and rolling for the outcome. it furthermore means the magic is as rare as you need to be, since there is no chance of it not being used, therefore SAF can determine how many times its used and how common it is and such. There the author can achieve the proper effect that such tropes are going for: rare uses of moral magic that shine against the darkness that make it feel special and moral since everything was set it up to make the use feel right in the story.

improvised fantasy roleplay on the other hand? can't do that. you can't set up a story to that degree, players will ruin it. you can't control how many times its used or anything, therefore to give the players the ability to use such a thing must be carefully considered how. especially since these morally mediated powers are often written as trump cards over evil that basically win you the fight instantly. In SAF, this can be done as a symbol of the characters friendship or of hope or whatever as long as you write it well enough that its believable that got that power within them. in improvised roleplay this wouldn't work, because it would be the GM handing you a "you win" card which wouldn't make the victory feel earned.

thus the thing has to give you an advantage, but not enough of one to insta-win. Thus you get DnD alignment system where the effects are made relatively commonplace, the classes who use it as just dealing more damage and such, but it still doesn't feel quite the same, and the morality is all over the place. and sure you'll probably never get a 100% replication of the feel of SAF and thus the closest you can get is the next best thing, but at the same time you have to acknowledge when something is too much of a hassle to be worth the trouble of systematizing it: morality can be ambiguous, murky and mysterious and only in certain times does it become stark black and white. the times it does in SAF are often dramatic, epic moments, it is when the sword of evils bane is used on the final villain or when the big holy beam is fired, and not much sooner. often lesser evils are dispatched through more normal means. sure you can use the holy energy to defeat the minions but you don't often see it in SAF.

I mean there is an example of holy energy being used regularly in say, Jojo's bizarre adventure. in the first two seasons, the protagonists weapon of choice was Hamon to kill the evil vampires. the protagonists could come up with quite a few tricks with it, its usage was explored as much one could reasonably expect, probably one the best examples of holy energy being used in fiction especially in a way PCs could use it tactically and.....then it was mostly dropped in the third saga for Stands, a much more flexible power open to more plots and ways of depicting villainy as well as more ways of depicting the abilities of the hero. because lets face it: Hamon was real specialized. Sure it can kill the undead real good, but it wasn't really good for anything else other than enhancing your own body with a few tricks.

so if you continue to insist upon using holy energy....well don't be surprised if all your enemies end up being demons or undead without much variation or potential for expansion beyond that. and there is only so many times you can play Violent Exorcist before it gets old. assuming one even wants to play that in the first place.

Mechalich
2021-02-17, 11:53 PM
I'd argue that this is the best possible outcome actually.

I broadly agree, but I would say there is a downside in terms of flavor, especially with regard to powers.

For example, take The Force, from Star Wars versus Biotics, from Mass Effect. This is a particularly useful example because Mass Effect is a blatant Star Wars rip-off and game mechanically Biotics do all the same things Star Wars Force Power do just stripped of the moral component.

Thing is, Biotics are boring. The games tried to talk about biotic oppression and implant-associated difficulty and element zero and stuff and no one cared. No biotic plotline had any of the staying power of Quarians/Geth or the Genophage or the Rachni or anything. It was just a flavor of powers that some characters had.

The Force is many things, and its morality is controversial as it gets, but the very fact that the fandom wars over it so hard it a testament to how much people are interested and care.

So it's a matter of trade-offs. Are the additional hooks and flavors worth it despite the arguments that will almost inevitably accrue? In the context of D&D, which is basically a dungeon-crawler engine, I'd argue that no, it definitely isn't, especially as the mechanics mostly induce players to try and keep their characters some specific alignment in order to avoid losing powers rather than actually play their characters organically. But I can also see a game where it would make sense to have. As mentioned, 'holy' powers make sense if there's explicitly unholy enemies, and if all the common enemies are like that, then there probably should be some kind of morality based abilities.

Segev
2021-02-18, 12:53 AM
"It is for the best that we tell players they cannot play iconic archetypes of high fantasy in a high fantasy game because..." ...what, again?

Lord Raziere
2021-02-18, 01:09 AM
"It is for the best that we tell players they cannot play iconic archetypes of high fantasy in a high fantasy game because..." ...what, again?

What not?

Archetypes are there to be deviated from so that real characters can be made. if every character was the same, we wouldn't be playing people with different names, but constantly just playing Lancelot, Merlin, Robin Hood, Legolas, Frodo and Gimli.

I am not to repeat that which has already been made. Why should I?

OldTrees1
2021-02-18, 01:26 AM
"It is for the best that we tell players they cannot play iconic archetypes of high fantasy in a high fantasy game because..." ...what, again?

I think they are suggesting moving those mechanics from the books into the homebrew. That is not quite the same as telling the players they cannot. If the morally mediated abilities were removed from the base game (5E did a lot of that) then groups could still homebrew extra mechanics and add them. So it is not "they cannot play" and more "some assembly and innovation required".


What not?

Archetypes are there to be deviated from so that real characters can be made. if every character was the same, we wouldn't be playing people with different names, but constantly just playing Lancelot, Merlin, Robin Hood, Legolas, Frodo and Gimli.

I am not to repeat that which has already been made. Why should I?

I believe Segev is using archetype to describe a broader category than you are using it. For scale in an amoral context consider the archer archetype rather than the Robin Hood archetype.



I apologize if I misread either post, I just thought I saw something that could be clairified.

Mechalich
2021-02-18, 01:52 AM
"It is for the best that we tell players they cannot play iconic archetypes of high fantasy in a high fantasy game because..." ...what, again?

Relatively few iconic high fantasy archetypes actually have morally mediated powers actually, especially in modern series. They are rare even among D&D classes. Out of all the major classes only the Cleric and the Paladin have explicit moral components (the Ranger and Druid have 'adherence to nature' as a requirement, but this need not contain an ethical association). Cleric and Paladin type characters in high fantasy are actually quite rare. Explicitly channeling divine power is actually very unusual and generally confined to series that are ruminating heavily on the concept of divinity itself. Most of D&D's major inspiration sources don't have anything resembling clerical magic at all.

Iconic paladins are mostly limited to a handful of characters appearing in Arthurian romance or The Song of Roland. Iconic clerics - not iconic healers, which can be entirely non-religious in derivation - are particularly thin on the ground, especially ones who are actually channeling legitimate divine power and authority and not just some sort of ambient energy source that has in-universe religious connotations but is revealed by the author to be nothing of the sort.

Replacing 'cleric' with 'white mage' is a super-easy change that removes a whole lot of troubling moral-mediation with functionally no archetypical cost. Approximately a zillion MMOs already do this with no trouble. Paladin's a little trickier, but that's partly because there's overlap with the Monk class in the 'Ki-empowered' warrior department.


I think they are suggesting moving those mechanics from the books into the homebrew. That is not quite the same as telling the players they cannot. If the morally mediated abilities were removed from the base game (5E did a lot of that) then groups could still homebrew extra mechanics and add them. So it is not "they cannot play" and more "some assembly and innovation required".

Not necessarily into the homebrew, but into setting-specific mechanics (so yes homebrew when the setting is homebrew). It's a lot easier to add associations to a barren chassis than to try and strip them away and retain the functionality and flavor.

This applies to alignment too. D&D alignment, in order to work at all properly, means bringing the whole Great Wheel cosmology along for the ride. Good example - Pathfinder had to basically reinvent its own Great Wheel for their setting with new alignment exemplar concepts and everything when product identity got in the way (Proteans instead of Slaadi, etc.). You can't have a moral system in a vacuum, so if you're using alignment you're implicitly accepting a whole lot of stuff about how a given setting functions.

Satinavian
2021-02-18, 02:22 AM
If you want morality based powers, then link the powers themself to specific moral ideals. A bit more like the exalted vow feats work. You don't need some all encompassing alignment system for that. You only have to consider specific behavior when deciding whether a specific power works. Same benefit much less arguments and hassle.

@Megalich

As for the cleric archetype i kind of disagree. Sure, in western tradition priests don't use magic because all magic comes from the devil so that is missing from most of the stories and inspirations. But considering anime influences with their quite strong miko archetype and the tendency to interpret all other priests in a similar way there is really no lack of archetypes channeling divine power in contemporary fantasy.


As for the necessity of the Great Wheel or something similar, Eberron does quite well without it.

VoxRationis
2021-02-18, 03:54 AM
I broadly agree, but I would say there is a downside in terms of flavor, especially with regard to powers.

For example, take The Force, from Star Wars versus Biotics, from Mass Effect. This is a particularly useful example because Mass Effect is a blatant Star Wars rip-off and game mechanically Biotics do all the same things Star Wars Force Power do just stripped of the moral component.

Mass Effect is not a particularly original work, but I would disagree that it's a "blatant Star Wars rip-off"; it has certain superficial similarities, of course, by virtue of the broad genre, but also significant differences in tone, philosophy, and worldbuilding. It's relatively harder than Star Wars, though not especially hard in sci-fi overall, and less so as the series went on. Star Wars has a moral conflict intrinsically tied with its physical ones; Mass Effect's physical conflict is essentially amoral, and its ethical dilemmas A) are mostly about an action's effects on others, and B) do not alter the course of the story or what side the protagonist is on. Mass Effect is also a much more familiar universe (at least to the modern American audience) than Star Wars; not only is it set both nearer in space and time to the here and now, but its society is more akin to ours (and explicitly descends from ours).


@Megalich

As for the cleric archetype i kind of disagree. Sure, in western tradition priests don't use magic because all magic comes from the devil so that is missing from most of the stories and inspirations.

Touching very lightly on the subject so as to avoid transgressing forum rules, while modern Western literature generally lacks priests with supernatural powers, Western religion is replete with them, and they seem to have been the inspiration for much of the clerical magic.

Nifft
2021-02-18, 05:50 AM
1) Miko underwent character development.

Miko started out as a caricature of bad LG role-playing, and she stayed true to that failure-to-LG until she disqualified herself from the LG afterlife.

It's true that she underwent character development, but it's not a valid argument in this context because she started out on-screen exhibiting marginal behavior, and she continued with marginal behavior until she ended up crossing a line (or several).


In one very long page (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0406.html) Miko tried to solve a complicated ethical dilemma after her world was flipped upside down. She concluded she should do a dramatic change in behavior which makes sense That's not a drastic change in her behavior though.

Her intro was her trying to Smite Evil on Roy.

She has always "solved" problems by applying violence in dumb ways.

She was never an actual paragon of Lawful Goodness.


Her wisdom failed her when she tried to find the right response to the situation. Her wisdom fails in the same direction with remarkable consistency.


The god's reaction to the change in behavior (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0407.html). I think most would describe early Miko as a moral individual. Not a moral exemplar, but still a moral individual. She was one crit away from murdering Roy, at which point she might have Fallen during her intro scene.

It could be argued that she's been lucky about how her consistently bad behavior hasn't had sufficiently awful consequences until ... well, until it did.



2) It is a large leap to go from "There is a non black non raven" to "Perhaps all ravens are black". If Miko was not LG and did backstab, that is very very weak evidence about whether LG is or is not compatible with backstabbing.

Miko is absolutely terrible as an example of LG behavior.

She starts as a satire of LG being played badly, and she ends up falling when her consistently bad behavior lands her sufficiently far down the slippery slope that she's been on for her entire tenure.


My point is that Miko's actions -- including but not limited to backstabbing -- cannot be used to justify anything about proper LG behavior, because her character absolutely sucked at LG behavior. She started out as a parody of badly done LG, and she ended up far enough over the line that twelve gods showed up to give her twelve middle fingers, and most of those gods don't even have fingers.

Morty
2021-02-18, 07:20 AM
If that is what alignment is for then you'd be better off with the real thing: religions, pantheons, deities and the rules that followers must obey. Most official D&D settings already have reasonably detailed stuff for that already. In Eberron for example you could simply write down "vassal of the sovereign host (Dol Dorn)" and that would more accurately describe your characters allegiance to cosmic forces, your characters rules of conduct, their values, etc than "chaotic good" ever could.

Yes, of course it's better than alignment. I was refuting the point that it's wrong for a GM to dictate a character's alignment. Or rather, it is wrong for a GM to do it, but it's a logical conclusion of how alignment supposedly works.

As far as clerics and paladins go, the argument feels academic, because they don't require alignment. 4E and 5E both demonstrate that rather clearly. Clerics have deities, paladins have oaths. Both can define what is expected of them much better than alignment.

Satinavian
2021-02-18, 07:33 AM
Miko started out as a caricature of bad LG role-playing, Miko is mostly an example of bad roleplaying. Or more preciely how a particular, far too common way to play LG is extremely disruptive and annoying and should be avoided in a party based game. But there is little to nothing about how this is not LG.

Other alignments have quite disruptive and annoying ways to be played as well.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-18, 08:25 AM
Miko is mostly an example of bad roleplaying. Or more preciely how a particular, far too common way to play LG is extremely disruptive and annoying and should be avoided in a party based game. But there is little to nothing about how this is not LG.

Other alignments have quite disruptive and annoying ways to be played as well.

Which you achieve by making those behaviors something to aspire to by pemphasizing them in this way. You place these narrow set of behaviors on pedestals, say that a character can only be this or that category or if they do bad MUST be this or that category, and your surprised when the common response is not balanced healthy behavior, but a caricature?

That is not how you present or teach morality. morality requires a lot of fine balancing, flexibility and moderation, not exaggeration of singular or narrow traits. No matter black and white the setting is or how grey, a good person must be well-rounded or they are not good.

Mastikator
2021-02-18, 09:42 AM
Right, but a lot of D&D takes place in homebrew settings.

The idea of morally-mediated powers is a fairly strong fantasy trope. This takes any number of forms, from being evil causing physical corruption to the power of love directly boosting stats to fairly mundane things like 'Smite Evil.' If a setting is going to have powers with moral mediation, then it needs to have a moral framework in place. 'Smite Evil' is predicated on defining certain things as 'evil.'

In single-author fiction the author sets up the moral framework and the audience has to accept whatever justifications they provide for such decisions. This is almost certainly never going to match up perfectly and many authors present moral quandaries in the clearest and most generalized way possible to avoid large portions of the audience rejecting their work (reading works from with cultural origins other than your own is a good way to expose yourself to differences in moral judgments of this nature).

D&D has the problem that the system demands the enforcement of moral systems in order for morality-mediated abilities to function, but the only arbiter is the GM and the players may not agree with the GM's judgment. A system like alignment can be helpful to provide context for how decisions of this nature work - if its clear. Unfortunately alignment isn't clear and tends to just spawn arguments. This isn't unique. Star Wars has this problem in spades. It has a morally mediated power system but everyone is trying to work out light v dark based on a bare handful of examples from the movies to the point that even book length philosophical treatises on the subject often contradict each other.

Cooperative morality is hard, especially among non-homogenous groups (it's probably worth noting that D&D's original 1970s audience was considerably more homogenous on this subject than the current one, though forum rules prohibit going into why this is so). There is therefore a strong argument that it would probably just be better to not have morally mediated abilities at all, though that does mean giving up on a bunch of traditionally important fantasy story elements.

They got rid of "smite evil" and all that junk in 5e. That is a 3.5e specific problem and does not present in other editions.

hamishspence
2021-02-18, 10:18 AM
It's not in 4e and 5e. It is, however, present in 2e and 1e.

Nifft
2021-02-18, 01:29 PM
But there is little to nothing about how this is not LG.

You cut off the half of the sentence where that was brought up, and the rest of the post where it's discussed a bit more.

To re-iterate: she started out paranoid and violent. Her first unmasked action on-screen was an attempt to murder an innocent (Roy). Her violence and paranoia became more disruptive, and finally she succeeded in murdering an innocent (Lord Shojo). That's her character arc: escalation of violent paranoia until she succeeds in performing the sort of [Evil] action which she had been attempting since her introduction.

"Miko did X" is never a justification for X being LG, because Miko was bad at LG.

Saint-Just
2021-02-18, 02:48 PM
"Miko did X" is never a justification for X being LG, because Miko was bad at LG.

This is literally No True Scots(wo)man.

When people say that certain behaviour is something that you can trust LG not to perform, then we have example of LG performing them and then it gets dismissed as "she was bad at LG". That even goes back to the earlier point of discussion: bashing people for roleplaying X alignment wrong. I do not mean the eventual fall in-story, but outside discussion of her behaviour well before the fall. Even presuming that people who say it about the character would not have said it to real player who played similarly it still shows the problem of clashing expectations, which is bad between players and worse between a player and DM

Nifft
2021-02-18, 03:09 PM
This is literally No True Scots(wo)man. No, it's really not. The action itself might or might not be compatible with LG -- that's not my objection.

As an example, there is a 3.5e prestige class which give both Sneak Attack and require you to be Lawful Good -- that edition's version of backstabbing can be LG, and you can support this by showing the class requirements and mechanics.

But Miko can't be used to justify anything about LG behavior, because Miko was not a good example of LG behavior, and we know this because her behavior resulted in her not being LG.


When people say that certain behaviour is something that you can trust LG not to perform, then we have example of LG performing them and then it gets dismissed as "she was bad at LG".
If the sum of your actions disqualify you from a category, then you cannot be used as an exemplar for including those actions in that category.

Her actions got her kicked out of the Lawful Goodness club.


That even goes back to the earlier point of discussion: bashing people for roleplaying X alignment wrong. I do not mean the eventual fall in-story, but outside discussion of her behaviour well before the fall. Her eventual Fall was in-character given her previous behavior.

Faily
2021-02-18, 05:13 PM
One of the things with many D&D settings is that Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are cosmic forces that affects the world in one way or another. The Prime (the world adventurers usually live and go on adventures in) is like a center of the cosmology, and all the major planes are trying to influence it for their own agendas (some which are more benign than others).

While it's not nescessary for all D&D stories and adventures, Alignment is a representation of where a character falls within the scope of the cosmos. In settings like Planescape, alignment becomes a more important trait.

Of course it's silly to try to apply Alignment to real world philosophies and thoughts, because our world (as far as we know) aren't part of a cosmos with actual manifestations and planes of existence defining Law/Chaos/Good/Evil. Many D&D settings on the other hand takes place in a world that *does* have that.

Alignment also touches on representations of a character's "wickedness" or "goodness" in the vein that many myths, fairytales, folklores, and fantasy stories do. Many of those have ideas like "only those of pure heart may open this door", "only the wicked will be burned by these sacred flames", etc. Alignment is an easy representation of where a character falls on the scale there for such stories, and I don't think D&D is wrong for trying to give an easy method to cut to the heart of the matter for these kind of stories. And I think it's wrong to say that people who enjoy this are dumb/wrong/simple/lacking in creativity/other derogatory words. To me it's like saying that people who like to read comics are dumb compared to those who read novels.


Other systems have touched on similar ideas. Someone mentioned Pendragon's characteristics, which I think works really well for the Arthurian stories and the virtues/flaws of the characters in those kind of stories. Numenera has Tides, which is "totally not Alignment but actually is", but with some differences. L5R has Honor which defines how well your character upholds the ideals of the society.

I think the most important thing is to find the system you like the best for the stories you and your group wants to play with. Or just don't have any Morality system at all. FFG's Star Wars went the easy way of mostly making it self-policing for the players by letting them choose their own Strength and Weakness that defines their character, and it mostly has no effect on whether they're Dark Side or Light Side.

Tanarii
2021-02-18, 05:33 PM
This is literally No True Scots(wo)man.

When people say that certain behaviour is something that you can trust LG not to perform, then we have example of LG performing them and then it gets dismissed as "she was bad at LG". That even goes back to the earlier point of discussion: bashing people for roleplaying X alignment wrong. I do not mean the eventual fall in-story, but outside discussion of her behaviour well before the fall. Even presuming that people who say it about the character would not have said it to real player who played similarly it still shows the problem of clashing expectations, which is bad between players and worse between a player and DM
Unfortunately that was specifically an issue with Paladins in the past, because it was the worst possible combination: both proscriptive & descriptive alignment. You had to maintain a LG alignment by choosing the right action, with each action being judged through the lens of "is it LG?" And the DM was the arbiter of if you'd done it right. Unsurprisingly, a huge point of contention.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-18, 05:37 PM
Okay cool but.....

what if I LIKE playing characters that don't conform to a world's morality system?

or what if there was a person born into a world that hated its cosmic morality system? Such as Kreia? or someone like her, but not evil if you think she is?

like say I have a rogue character in DnD who doesn't believe in DnD's morality, who finds a load of nonsense spouted by clerics and paladins or their evil counterparts, seeing them as nothing but nonsensical philosophies put in place to keep them under control, who rejects every label applied to them, who if they are presented with proof that the morality does indeed exist, will do nothing but seek its eradication on both sides of the spectrum so that they can't be controlled by forces they never wanted any part of?

whose entire character concept is that they have a massive disagreement with the cosmos and isn't willing to accept it as unbreakable?

like I imagine that kind of person would occur eventually, no matter how improbable the circumstances. I'm not interested in answers like "oh that doesn't happen/the system works anyways" or whatever. I like to see what happens when something is questioned, when something is broken, or goes off the rails. I'm not in this to make people fit into boxes, I'm here to show how people are beyond boxes.

OldTrees1
2021-02-18, 06:16 PM
Okay cool but.....

what if I LIKE playing characters that don't conform to a world's morality system?

or what if there was a person born into a world that hated its cosmic morality system? Such as Kreia? or someone like her, but not evil if you think she is?

like say I have a rogue character in DnD who doesn't believe in DnD's morality, who finds a load of nonsense spouted by clerics and paladins or their evil counterparts, seeing them as nothing but nonsensical philosophies put in place to keep them under control, who rejects every label applied to them, who if they are presented with proof that the morality does indeed exist, will do nothing but seek its eradication on both sides of the spectrum so that they can't be controlled by forces they never wanted any part of?

whose entire character concept is that they have a massive disagreement with the cosmos and isn't willing to accept it as unbreakable?

like I imagine that kind of person would occur eventually, no matter how improbable the circumstances. I'm not interested in answers like "oh that doesn't happen/the system works anyways" or whatever. I like to see what happens when something is questioned, when something is broken, or goes off the rails. I'm not in this to make people fit into boxes, I'm here to show how people are beyond boxes.

That sounds like an interesting and common character trait.

1) Someone that knowingly (or unknowingly) believes in Moral Error Theory.
2) Someone that believes morality exists but believes in a different moral theory than is true in that campaign setting.
3) Someone that believes morality exists when actually Moral Error Theory is correct in that campaign setting.

Those kind of characters do happen. They effortlessly fit into campaigns and systems. What is your question about them?

For example, my Lich character mentioned above was using a blue/orange morality (life and death should be balanced and population should be constant). They would similarly disbelieve both the popular moral beliefs about morality and the actual moral theory the campaign setting used.

Another example is anytime a villain says "good and evil are just fictions".

Kreia believed will of The Force was not equivalent to, and was conflicting with what she believed was moral in the Star Wars universe. We the readers never learn whether she is right that The Force is not equivalent to moral truth, so I will split it to the 3 possibilities:
1) The DM chose to have will of the force map 1:1 with moral truth. In this case Kreia is wrong but an interesting character to play as they explore a counter argument despite being ultimately incorrect.
2) The DM is amazed that Kreia guessed correctly. They had set it up where The Will of the Force was not the moral truth despite popular belief.
3) The DM chose to have them both be wrong. Kreia guessed correctly that The Will of the Force was not the moral truth, but does not arrive at an accurate answer.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-18, 06:47 PM
That sounds like an interesting and common character trait.

1) Someone that knowingly (or unknowingly) believes in Moral Error Theory.
2) Someone that believes morality exists but believes in a different moral theory than is true in that campaign setting.
3) Someone that believes morality exists when actually Moral Error Theory is correct in that campaign setting.

Those kind of characters do happen. They effortlessly fit into campaigns and systems. What is your question about them?

For example, my Lich character mentioned above was using a blue/orange morality (life and death should be balanced and population should be constant). They would similarly disbelieve both the popular moral beliefs about morality and the actual moral theory the campaign setting used.

Another example is anytime a villain says "good and evil are just fictions".

Kreia believed will of The Force was not equivalent to, and was conflicting with what she believed was moral in the Star Wars universe. We the readers never learn whether she is right that The Force is not equivalent to moral truth, so I will split it to the 3 possibilities:
1) The DM chose to have will of the force map 1:1 with moral truth. In this case Kreia is wrong but an interesting character to play as they explore a counter argument despite being ultimately incorrect.
2) The DM is amazed that Kreia guessed correctly. They had set it up where The Will of the Force was not the moral truth despite popular belief.
3) The DM chose to have them both be wrong. Kreia guessed correctly that The Will of the Force was not the moral truth, but does not arrive at an accurate answer.

Yes but how do people handle such a concept? I'd assume that if people really want the moral system to apply so much they'd disallow such a concept as a matter of course from an archetypical story about good and evil and see such a concept as only detracting or interfering with it by questioning the morality beneath, which I'm all about, so I don't see why anyone would see it as worth the inclusion.

Faily
2021-02-18, 06:52 PM
Okay cool but.....

what if I LIKE playing characters that don't conform to a world's morality system?

or what if there was a person born into a world that hated its cosmic morality system? Such as Kreia? or someone like her, but not evil if you think she is?

like say I have a rogue character in DnD who doesn't believe in DnD's morality, who finds a load of nonsense spouted by clerics and paladins or their evil counterparts, seeing them as nothing but nonsensical philosophies put in place to keep them under control, who rejects every label applied to them, who if they are presented with proof that the morality does indeed exist, will do nothing but seek its eradication on both sides of the spectrum so that they can't be controlled by forces they never wanted any part of?

whose entire character concept is that they have a massive disagreement with the cosmos and isn't willing to accept it as unbreakable?

like I imagine that kind of person would occur eventually, no matter how improbable the circumstances. I'm not interested in answers like "oh that doesn't happen/the system works anyways" or whatever. I like to see what happens when something is questioned, when something is broken, or goes off the rails. I'm not in this to make people fit into boxes, I'm here to show how people are beyond boxes.

I don't think anyone has said that such a character can't exist, and I agree with OldTrees1 that it is a very interesting (and common) character trait.

But I think it's important to keep separate IC and OOC points of view for a moment.

A character can *absolutely* be what you described in any given D&D setting, thinking that the cosmos is a big hoax and refuses to consider themselves defined by the cosmos' rules. In some settings that could be an incredibly interesting path to explore as well, such as Planescape. IC, that is what the character believes. OOC, the setting or the DM has explained that "this is how the cosmos works". If that is something that makes you uncomfortable that is also something that can be approached with speaking with the group if Alignment is something you want to have in your games (people play with and without alignment and manage to have fun, but it's important to find the fun that works for your group). A group or a DM doesn't have to follow the established rules of the setting if it doesn't contribute to the fun of the game. The different groups I've played with through my years of gaming have always used alignment and it's been fun for us. Doesn't mean I need alignment for every type of game I play though outside of D&D, but I like engaging with that concept for D&D.

Few characters actually think they are Evil, or consider themselves defined by their "alignment". There are those who do of course, and they are usually considered to be agents of those cosmic forces on the prime plane (Clerics, Paladins are some more easy examples, moreso in editions where they things like Aura of Good, but anyone really can be an agent of Chaos/Law/Good/Evil).

Yora
2021-02-18, 06:52 PM
Alignment had pretty much always been a solution in need of a problem.

Dave Arneson had a post on his website (might still be up) how they tried to introduce alignment to make players stop being jerks. The players immediately said "then our characters are chaotic" and that was the end of that failed experiment. Nobody really knows why it appeared in the released product anyway.

OldTrees1
2021-02-18, 07:05 PM
-snip-

While you were replying I reread your previous post and have an addendum, but I want to focus on your current post (below the addendum)
Edit:
On a reread, maybe you are only interested in the "cosmic"* part?
*an overloaded overused word with multiple meanings in this context
For instance Kreia wanted to destroy the Force. That might be similar to someone on Faerun wanting to destroy the Wall_of_the_Faithless (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Wall_of_the_Faithless). That is not really necessarily going against the setting's moral truth but it is going against some of the mechanics that reference morality. Redirecting which evil souls to celestial would be changing the mechanism of afterlives, but it is not refuting the moral truth of the campaign setting.


Yes but how do people handle such a concept? I'd assume that if people really want the moral system to apply so much they'd disallow such a concept as a matter of course from an archetypical story about good and evil and see such a concept as only detracting or interfering with it by questioning the morality beneath, which I'm all about, so I don't see why anyone would see it as worth the inclusion.

Wait, why would someone disallow such a concept? I mentioned how common it is for a character's moral beliefs to not match the moral truth of the campaign setting. Some of those characters are at their most interesting while the audience (the players) know the characters are mistaken. Part of the point of my Lich character was that I knew they were wrong about the necessity of culling the population.

Imagine, you have a character with enough of a fleshed out moral belief that they are disagreeing with the moral truth the campaign setting was based on. That means you already have lots of depth and detail into the moral character of the character, if the DM were going to be using alignment, I would expect them to welcome such an interesting character. Sure the character's beliefs are wrong, but that is a common trait among moral agents.

Now what if we are not focusing on the difference between moral belief and moral truth (despite that being such an interesting topic). What if instead we are focusing on the character making moral judgements (using their moral beliefs) about the mechanisms of the campaign setting that reference morality? Imagine the Wall_of_the_Faithless (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Wall_of_the_Faithless) (not exactly cosmic alignment, but it is close), did you know the source material did not say whether the wall is a good thing or whether saving souls from the wall and destroying the wall was a good thing? The DM has to decide that. But more interestingly, characters that learn about the wall also have to decide their beliefs about that. They too might conclude "tear down that wall". They might even conclude that no soul should go to the lower planes. If the campaign can handle that amount of self motivation in the PCs (maybe it is a sandbox) then the party might go on a quest to save those souls.

Sure someone in some campaign might not allow such interesting characters for some reason, but I would welcome those characters in the same context.

Kane0
2021-02-18, 07:11 PM
Kreia was pretty much envisioned as a deconstruction and refutation of the established philosophy regarding the Force, to a greater extent than the undertones of the same conversation in KotOR 1 with Jolee and such.
The same sort of twist was present in a lot of early Bioware/Obsidian writing, come to think of it. Jade Empire had some fun ethical theory before the second half of the game kinda ruined it.

Anyways, I can see that being a thing in D&D. If there is an established authority, especially morally or ethically, pressed upon the players some are bound to attempt to subvert and/or dismantle it. That would be some fun RP to me.
Such a character refusing the labels doesn't stop the labels being placed on them of course, they would probably be strongly associated as being Chaotic in some form but that's sort of the point isn't it? They don't want to be stuck with a big magical footnote on their soul that says "Individual thought detected, send to Limbo upon death"

Lord Raziere
2021-02-18, 07:20 PM
I dunno why someone would disallow such a concept, I just assume that they would, because if its all about archetypes, then something that goes against the settings moral assumptions isn't archetypical at all. an archetypical moral character in a setting typically means that the falls into the settings view of morality: for example Jedi are good because they are passionless, sith are evil because they are full of passion, therefore any good force user full of passion or evil force user suppressing their emotions are not archetypical and thus don't fit into the setting and people would disallow it because it wouldn't make sense.

similarly I would love to destroy the Wall of the Faithless. but the assumption is that its somehow accepted as a needed thing for arcane preservation of existence reasons supposedly, and therefore any GM who wants to run a game in FR probably wants the setting intact and not some person like me going around being a snarky/sarcastic a foil to the entire setting thinking the whole cosmic set up is bull because to some people that probably looks like the player just hating the setting and thus not wanting me in the game, especially if they want to keep things "light and fun". And to be fair, Forgotten Realms isn't really a setting I particularly like so there would be some truth to that assumption.

so its like.

I am skeptical that my entire thing would ever be looked upon as desirable in such games?

OldTrees1
2021-02-18, 07:40 PM
I dunno why someone would disallow such a concept, I just assume that they would, because if its all about archetypes, then something that goes against the settings moral assumptions isn't archetypical at all. an archetypical moral character in a setting typically means that the falls into the settings view of morality: for example Jedi are good because they are passionless, sith are evil because they are full of passion, therefore any good force user full of passion or evil force user suppressing their emotions are not archetypical and thus don't fit into the setting and people would disallow it because it wouldn't make sense.

From your description it sounds like, Light side magic is disrupted by emotion (Qui Gon Jinn might disagree, that sounds more like Jedi doctrine than Light side) and Dark side is powered by emotion. I could easily see a very passionate jedi having to fight their passions in a fight as they try to evoke Light side force techniques. It is even easier to see a Sith suppressing their emotions when not in mid combat. Maybe they are disguised. Maybe they value control. Maybe they want the element of surprise when they suddenly stop suppressing their emotions and they explode. Or maybe you are describing a Jedi and a Sith that are willingly forgoing a power boost because it is not worth how it effects them mentally. This Sith fights with suppressed emotions because they would rather be weak than lose control. This Jedi refuses to ignore their compassion because understanding why these actions are good is more important than mere power.

Yeah, lets see those characters!


I am skeptical that my entire thing would ever be looked upon as desirable in such games?

I cannot speak for the hypothetical group / campaign you next approach, but I view it as desirable.

(Although I don't know why you assume "its all about archetypes". Was that in reference to Segev (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24934025&postcount=125) saying some mechanics that reference morality are important to specific character archetypes? Some characters that resemble those archetypes exist in my campaigns and I still find your "entire thing" to be desirable in those games)

Faily
2021-02-18, 09:04 PM
Isn't also destroying the Wall Of The Faithless the plot of Neverwinter Nights 2?

Really, it's fully possible to play characters that defy society, expectations, the cosmos... anything really. It can often be a great story and adventure!

And I agree with OldTrees1 that there is a wide spectrum of Jedi and Sith, where you have Sith who prefer to be in control, or Jedi to struggle with trying to master their emotions. The Star Wars: Old Republic novel Decieved has Jedi Knight Aryn Leneer who is an empath and struggles with controlling her emotions and the emotions she feels from others that influence her in return. Likewise, Palpatine and his master Darth Plagueis in the Plagueis novel aren't really described as being emotional and deeply passionate people. So we have examples of different characters at odds with the dogmas they are affiliated with.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-19, 12:08 AM
Thanks. Guess I'm a bit too cynical about what people will accept sometimes.

Mastikator
2021-02-19, 03:13 AM
Alignment had pretty much always been a solution in need of a problem.

Dave Arneson had a post on his website (might still be up) how they tried to introduce alignment to make players stop being jerks. The players immediately said "then our characters are chaotic" and that was the end of that failed experiment. Nobody really knows why it appeared in the released product anyway.

Classic. Using game mechanic to fix a player problem.

Mechalich
2021-02-19, 03:29 AM
Classic. Using game mechanic to fix a player problem.

In the pre-internet days, players were often thin on the ground and a lot of people at best marginally interested in the game and extremely likely to have their characters engage in immature, deliberately transgressive, pointlessly violent, or otherwise story-inhibiting behavior were dragged into games just to make up a party big enough to actually run adventures (this is hardly a tabletop only thing, pretty much every adult group activity has people brought in simply to meet numbers quotas).

And while in-game carrots and sticks to try and police character behavior by jerkish players is not a good solution or an ideal solution it does work some of the time - especially when carrot heavy - and when attempting to solve the player problem directly would lead to an empty spot not easily filled, well, I can certainly understand why that sort of thing happened a lot. Especially when you consider that, while a large portion of players may be happy to be jerks all the time and just run around causing mayhem in a fictional setting, that type of play tends to leave GMs extremely miserable.

Batcathat
2021-02-19, 03:31 AM
In the pre-internet days, players were often thin on the ground and a lot of people at best marginally interested in the game and extremely likely to have their characters engage in immature, deliberately transgressive, pointlessly violent, or otherwise story-inhibiting behavior were dragged into games just to make up a party big enough to actually run adventures (this is hardly a tabletop only thing, pretty much every adult group activity has people brought in simply to meet numbers quotas).

And while in-game carrots and sticks to try and police character behavior by jerkish players is not a good solution or an ideal solution it does work some of the time - especially when carrot heavy - and when attempting to solve the player problem directly would lead to an empty spot not easily filled, well, I can certainly understand why that sort of thing happened a lot. Especially when you consider that, while a large portion of players may be happy to be jerks all the time and just run around causing mayhem in a fictional setting, that type of play tends to leave GMs extremely miserable.

While that might explain the attempt, I don't understand how it was supposed to work since it included alignments that allowed for exactly the kind of behavior it was intended to stop.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-19, 03:40 AM
While that might explain the attempt, I don't understand how it was supposed to work since it included alignments that allowed for exactly the kind of behavior it was intended to stop.

Yeah?

Thats kind of the fatal flaw of using it to police player behavior:
GM: "this morality system designates this that these actions are villainous!"
players: "okay cool, this game is now a villainous game, lets kill all the npcs we don't like, steal all the booze and treasure then get it on with a succubus while doing demon drugs".
GM: "but consequences and punishment!"
Players: "We're villains now, we don't care about those."
GM: "I'll make you care by sending forces to kill you!"
Players: "Sweet more Exp! Lets do this even more!"
GM: "Argh!"

Kane0
2021-02-19, 03:47 AM
Lol thats exactly the sort of exchange i'd expect to see in Darths & Droids

Mechalich
2021-02-19, 06:54 AM
While that might explain the attempt, I don't understand how it was supposed to work since it included alignments that allowed for exactly the kind of behavior it was intended to stop.

The key is gating abilities behind moral mechanics and having those abilities be better than were otherwise available. In 1e and 2e AD&D the Paladin and Ranger were simply better than fighters in basically every way. And good clerics were better than evil ones from an adventuring perspective.

There is a certain class of player who will respond to this kind of incentives, and it's actually really, really common. MMOs use carrot/stick inducements to encourage proper group behavior and disincentive trolling ubiquitously, they just have more effective tools like bonus rewards and timed lockouts.

D&D is saddled with a lot of subsystems that were first attempts to do something that are really effective at what they were trying to do or have become, as the rules have evolved, useless. The creation of Blackguards, for example, took away any value of gating the paladin's awesomeness behind the 'good' alignment door. However, the player base is extremely resistant to change and it has been very difficult to evolve D&D to a more modern framework that takes advantage of nearly 40 years of accumulated understanding of how tabletop gameplay actually works.

Somewhat ironically, the catastrophic failure of 4e to slay sacred cows actually provided 5e with evolutionary space in design because WotC abandoned the idea of the actual tabletop D&D as any kind of profit generator and published the new edition on a comparative shoestring with no expectations.

Quertus
2021-02-19, 07:24 AM
It sounds like you only see prescriptive utility in alignment and thus are casting both prescriptive and descriptive alignment as if they were both prescriptive, and then judging them to both be harmful due to the prescriptive elements.

Consider my lich example, I did not go "hmm, they are evil and that informs how they might make certain decisions" instead I went "hmm, they believe they ought to cull the population, I think they are wrong about that.".
1) The lich still used their beliefs as forward facing motivational RP tool.
2) I was still motivated to see the lich follow that philosophy.
3) But alignment only was used in the descriptive context as a judgement / description of the characterization.
Now I did note how they have been behaving as that is a general indicator of how they will likely continue to behave, however that is still just descriptive rather than actually having prescriptive force.

I'm not seeing where the story of your Lich - of a character with different morality being judged by the party - would have been in any way diminished by being run in a system without built-in alignment, like ShadowRun or Mutants and Masterminds.


If alignment is, as people keep claiming, a measure of allegiance to objective cosmic moral forces, isn't it entirely appropriate for a GM to enforce a particular vision of alignment? Since there are actual forces of Law and Good who decide if someone qualifies to be labelled as such.

And deities of Evil and Chaos deciding the same.

I can see now: a desirable soul detects as Lawful Chaotic Good Evil, as the gods fight over it, whereas an undesirable soul detects as Neutral, because none of them are willing to claim it.

I'd accept alignment as useful in this world.


The key is gating abilities behind moral mechanics and having those abilities be better than were otherwise available. In 1e and 2e AD&D the Paladin and Ranger were simply better than fighters in basically every way.

Specialization
increased to hit bonus (meh, AC was bounded)

Increased damage (big)

Increased number of attacks (huge)

Only Fighters could specialize.

Paladins and Rangers leveled slower than Fighters.

So I'm not sure that this is strictly true.


And good clerics were better than evil ones from an adventuring perspective.

This, however, is completely wrong.

2e Clerics had *no limit* on their "control pool". Evil Clerics controlled undead; Good Clerics destroyed them.

Evil Clerics also could create undead.

Evil Clerics win, hands down.

OldTrees1
2021-02-19, 08:35 AM
I'm not seeing where the story of your Lich - of a character with different morality being judged by the party - would have been in any way diminished by being run in a system without built-in alignment, like ShadowRun or Mutants and Masterminds.

You missed (possibly by choice of which post to quote) the part about the campaign world (via the GM) also making the judgement (something we can't know IRL but can know in the context of a game). At that point, it is a 1 axis descriptive alignment system. I don't think it needs to be built into the default rules of the game, but it would be in the rules of the campaign.

Also when is the last time you heard a player of Shadowrun comment on the moral character of your character? Some games are actively trying to bring up topics of morality, and others are actively trying to use an amoral lens. That impacts how likely and easily it is to have other players interact with that aspect of the characterization.

That is why I value a built in but completely optional (and maybe off by default going forward?) system. Think about 5E D&D, that system makes it trivial to completely ignore alignment, and yet still includes context and support for those running with alignment.

However, to drag it back to the opening topic, for each usage of alignment, what alternatives can you think of?

I have explained why the moral axis would reemerge if there is an omniscient PoV able to see the Moral Truth (including if Moral Error Theory is correct). So I mentioned the idea of removing the omniscient PoV and asking the characters relevant moral questions at character creation.
I have talked about faction systems.
I have talked about personality quizzes.

What insights do you have on the OP's question?

Satinavian
2021-02-19, 08:53 AM
Also when is the last time you heard a player of Shadowrun comment on the moral character of your character? Some games are actively trying to bring up topics of morality, and others are actively trying to use an amoral lens. That impacts how likely and easily it is to have other players interact with that aspect of the characterization.
Actually that happens all the time with all the characters being criminals and not exactly sharing the morality of their own culture but each having their own boundaries that are regularly tested by the jobs available and their tactics and teammates.

I would say i have had far more fruitfull and deep discussions about morality in Shadowrun than i ever had in D&D.

OldTrees1
2021-02-19, 09:23 AM
Actually that happens all the time with all the characters being criminals and not exactly sharing the morality of their own culture but each having their own boundaries that are regularly tested by the jobs available and their tactics and teammates.

I would say i have had far more fruitfull and deep discussions about morality in Shadowrun than i ever had in D&D.

Huh, I observed the opposite*. That just goes to show how much this depends on the people involved. Use the tools that work best for the current context (group, campaign, etc).

*In Shadowrun there was talk of boundaries (some were amoral boundaries at that) but nothing deeper. In D&D we talked about necessary and sufficient conditions of moral agency (which is a "slight" bit deeper).

Segev
2021-02-19, 10:49 AM
Archetypes are there to be deviated from so that real characters can be made. if every character was the same, we wouldn't be playing people with different names, but constantly just playing Lancelot, Merlin, Robin Hood, Legolas, Frodo and Gimli.

I am not to repeat that which has already been made. Why should I?And because they're made to be deviated from, a system that supports them is bad? There's an enormous gap between "the system supports this" and "you can't play anything but this."


I think they are suggesting moving those mechanics from the books into the homebrew.Yes, just like moving the determination of skill DCs to "homebrew" (i.e. the DM has to make them up) made 5e so much better-received than it would have been with even a HINT of suggestions in the PHB or DMG for what actually constitutes a "hard" Dexterity check in terms of actual actions.


Homebrew can ignore alignment rules far more easily than it can make them up out of whole cloth.


Now, wasn't this thread supposed to be on developing ideas for alternate systems that can serve a similar purpose?

Satinavian
2021-02-19, 11:47 AM
Now, wasn't this thread supposed to be on developing ideas for alternate systems that can serve a similar purpose?
Yes and a couple of ideas was already mentioned.

But quite a lot of posters don't see use in alignment or any replacement. And those who do actually use alignment don't really want any replacement. So for whom are those alternatives ?


None of the ideas mentioned really got an "Oh, that is something i want to use" reply. So no one feels like developing them further.

Kane0
2021-02-19, 04:01 PM
Hey i’m all for hearing about this zodiak morality concept.
We have a bunch of creature types, I can imagine a character born under the sign of the golem or slime or angel and having common mentality with others born around the same time

Mastikator
2021-02-19, 04:19 PM
Hey i’m all for hearing about this zodiak morality concept.
We have a bunch of creature types, I can imagine a character born under the sign of the golem or slime or angel and having common mentality with others born around the same time

Now we're talking. "Born under the sign of the golem", now that's some stuff I want on my fantasy character's sheet!

Lord Raziere
2021-02-19, 04:28 PM
Now we're talking. "Born under the sign of the golem", now that's some stuff I want on my fantasy character's sheet!

And can be better written towards societies using it as a system having intentionally written rather than unintentionally written injustice, because say if one astrological sign is associated with criminals and the lower class in a culture, people might having a whole self-fulfilling prophecy about it where they end becoming criminals because no one gives them a chance to be anything else. Because generally its better to write a system with built in injustice and how that affects the world rather than trying to say it works perfectly and there are no problems with it.

Kane0
2021-02-19, 04:38 PM
And can be better written towards societies using it as a system having intentionally written rather than unintentionally written injustice, because say if one astrological sign is associated with criminals and the lower class in a culture, people might having a whole self-fulfilling prophecy about it where they end becoming criminals because no one gives them a chance to be anything else. Because generally its better to write a system with built in injustice and how that affects the world rather than trying to say it works perfectly and there are no problems with it.

Like it leading to a sort of caste society? The majority of Demon Month characters would tend to be aggressive, impulsive and/or selfish and thus are generally looked down upon regardless of how well they actually deal with their tendencies.

Quertus
2021-02-19, 06:38 PM
You missed (possibly by choice of which post to quote) the part about the campaign world (via the GM) also making the judgement (something we can't know IRL but can know in the context of a game). At that point, it is a 1 axis descriptive alignment system. I don't think it needs to be built into the default rules of the game, but it would be in the rules of the campaign.

You've got cause and effect backwards - the part I chose to quote is, in part, because I missed that bit. (I don't know why my player thought that "reading comprehension" would make a great dump stat, but, apparently, they did)

So… the party had an interesting conversation… about morality… trying to play "read the GM's mind"?


Also when is the last time you heard a player of Shadowrun comment on the moral character of your character? Some games are actively trying to bring up topics of morality, and others are actively trying to use an amoral lens. That impacts how likely and easily it is to have other players interact with that aspect of the characterization.


Actually that happens all the time with all the characters being criminals and not exactly sharing the morality of their own culture but each having their own boundaries that are regularly tested by the jobs available and their tactics and teammates.

I would say i have had far more fruitfull and deep discussions about morality in Shadowrun than i ever had in D&D.

Completely agree, @Satinavian. Because there *is* no ham-fisted, monolithic 'truth' built in, everyone has to actually think through their character and actually, you know, roleplay.

And because the game is, by definition, about criminals, that question of "who do you trust?" is kinda central to the gameplay.

Easily way more conducive to good exploration of *character* and *morality* than D&D alignment has ever facilitated, at any table I've been at.


However, to drag it back to the opening topic, for each usage of alignment, what alternatives can you think of?

I have explained why the moral axis would reemerge if there is an omniscient PoV able to see the Moral Truth (including if Moral Error Theory is correct). So I mentioned the idea of removing the omniscient PoV and asking the characters relevant moral questions at character creation.
I have talked about faction systems.
I have talked about personality quizzes.

What insights do you have on the OP's question?

I'm more a "poke at other peoples ideas" kinda guy.

For morality, I explicitly *wouldn't* create a system unless *that explicit shoebox system* was *integral* to the gameplay. "The Force", for instance. No matter how bonkers that morality may be, it is central to the mechanics of *at least* the Jedi / other Force users.

Anything else, I very much would not create such shoehorn systems.

Unless I was making multiple, conflicting systems.

The Verbena have "Detect Good", which detects your connection to nature. The Jedi have "Detect Good", which detects how in control of your emotions you are. The Klingons have "Detect Good", which detects how much Honor you have. The Playground has "Detect Good", which detects how pedantic and good at reading rules you are. The Vampires have "Detect Good", which detects how high up the food chain you are. The Tech Priests have "Detect Good", which detects how respectful to machines you are. And it's the same exact spell.

Basically, think the "Humanity" scales from WoD (or DtD40k7e), but each faction applies them to *everyone else* when evaluating morality. And can only detect their own scale. Because that's what the spell does.


That is why I value a built in but completely optional (and maybe off by default going forward?) system. Think about 5E D&D, that system makes it trivial to completely ignore alignment, and yet still includes context and support for those running with alignment.

Off by default might be better, but… morality just doesn't seem central enough to D&D to be worth including a specific implementation thereof, even optionally.

OldTrees1
2021-02-20, 02:06 PM
So… the party had an interesting conversation… about morality… trying to play "read the GM's mind"?
The players had an interesting conversation with the advantage of the omniscient PoV that moral agents lack IRL.
The party had an interesting conversation while lacking that omniscient PoV and having a language barrier.

IRL sometimes people talk about "Assuming moral theory XYZ is correct, then what can we conclude about this situation".

If you use an alignment system where the GM has access to that omniscient PoV, then the game can be similar to one of those discussions (in addition to being a game). Although in practice the GM creates the omniscient PoV rather than having access to it, so sometimes they are also going in with the ability to discover the answer rather than knowing the answer in advance. In those cases it is more like a discussion were a conclusion is reached (which is a nice feeling to have in a game when IRL lacks that conclusion).

This can also apply to metaethical theories. The main question about the lich was about whether they were a moral agent (with a side question about their moral character if they were a moral agent). Again the campaign can either have the GM responsible for there being an answer to these questions (thus giving people access to the omniscient PoV) or the campaign can also blind the GM in this area. It depends on if you want to frame the discussion with that answer being knowable to unknowable.



I'm more a "poke at other peoples ideas" kinda guy.

For morality, I explicitly *wouldn't* create a system unless *that explicit shoebox system* was *integral* to the gameplay. "The Force", for instance. No matter how bonkers that morality may be, it is central to the mechanics of *at least* the Jedi / other Force users.

Anything else, I very much would not create such shoehorn systems.

Unless I was making multiple, conflicting systems.

The Verbena have "Detect Good", which detects your connection to nature. The Jedi have "Detect Good", which detects how in control of your emotions you are. The Klingons have "Detect Good", which detects how much Honor you have. The Playground has "Detect Good", which detects how pedantic and good at reading rules you are. The Vampires have "Detect Good", which detects how high up the food chain you are. The Tech Priests have "Detect Good", which detects how respectful to machines you are. And it's the same exact spell.

Basically, think the "Humanity" scales from WoD (or DtD40k7e), but each faction applies them to *everyone else* when evaluating morality. And can only detect their own scale. Because that's what the spell does.

Interesting, so have "Detect adherence to my philosophic values"? A "Judge Character" spell that is very subjective (but at the faction level so the GM has a chance of answering)? Neat idea for when the moral truth is unknowable. Those are some good examples too.

Honestly that is a good replacement (ignoring the extra work for the GM) for Detect Good in general, regardless of morality system.

You could even have ancient magic items that Detect <unknown> as a way to add flavor.


Off by default might be better, but… morality just doesn't seem central enough to D&D to be worth including a specific implementation thereof, even optionally.

Huh, the genres D&D draws from has a lot of themes of morality in it. So I suspect it is still worth some optional implementation. Maybe selection bias is effecting how central you are viewing it? D&D does have the paladins, heroes, angels, devils, etc. I wonder how many people that use alignment did not bother to come to this thread and post suggestions for a replacement? Probably worth an optional implementation.

Kane0
2021-02-21, 05:57 AM
Aight so this zodiak thing, i’ve been thinking

Depending on when you are born you are blessed under the sign of one of the following;
Angel
Demon
Golem
Fairy
Dragon
Titan
Slime
Elemental
Dead
Tree
Beast
Monster

Those born of each month tend to possess shared personality traits (before adjusting for other factors like race, culture, magical influence, you know all the other parts of the whole nature vs nurture thing). I’ve yet to write down which go where but for example Dragon sign creatures tend to be rather commanding and resistant to self esteem issues and but also carry high standards they dont drop. In fact most if not all signs will have multiple subcategories that may or may not be self-contradictory (eg sign of the dragon has chromatic and metallic which differ among some personality trends).

Now preserving the precious rule of threes, each month generally gets along really well with two others and really badly with three others. If you care about approximating the popular great wheel cosmology these four groups of three will roughly agree on what they consider heaven and hell to be like which makes for 8 outer planes not counting any limbos and whatnot these groups might consider.

Regarding afterlives, priority is given to the deity that may claim to an individual followed by the plane that most closely represents ideals they feel strongest about (dominance, liberty, self-sufficiency, altruism, etc).

Importantly, your sign/omen is a factor only of nature, not nurture, and is variable in strength from person to person and at different times (and even location). Like the lunar cycle some will experience the aspects of their sign more strongly at various times during the year, and at varying strengths overall depending on the exact circumstances of their birth (eg the apex of each month making for stronger-signed individuals).

Thus the label scribbed on your character sheet is not uniform and best applied as a descriptor of inclination rather than concrete behaviour pattern in regards to players.

Sidenote, i found something online defining five cornerstones of personality that may be better than the good old (wrong) meyers briggs: openness to new things (or not), consciensciousness (or spontanaeity), intraversion/extraversion, agreeableness (compassion, empathy, etc) and neuroticism (or emotional stability). Not sure if that is a current theory but probably worth something to draw traits from.

Jorren
2021-02-21, 01:30 PM
While that might explain the attempt, I don't understand how it was supposed to work since it included alignments that allowed for exactly the kind of behavior it was intended to stop.

I had heard that the reasoning was partly that the availability of alignment detection systems would allow the good aligned characters a 'heads up' as to who they were adventuring with and therefore a fair chance to defend themselves. Given the philosophy behind the game in the early days my guess would be a fair chance was deemed sufficient, as opposed to mechanisms designed to discourage the behavior.

Faily
2021-02-21, 02:45 PM
Aight so this zodiak thing, i’ve been thinking

Depending on when you are born you are blessed under the sign of one of the following;
Angel
Demon
Golem
Fairy
Dragon
Titan
Slime
Elemental
Dead
Tree
Beast
Monster

Those born of each month tend to possess shared personality traits (before adjusting for other factors like race, culture, magical influence, you know all the other parts of the whole nature vs nurture thing). I’ve yet to write down which go where but for example Dragon sign creatures tend to be rather commanding and resistant to self esteem issues and but also carry high standards they dont drop. In fact most if not all signs will have multiple subcategories that may or may not be self-contradictory (eg sign of the dragon has chromatic and metallic which differ among some personality trends).

Now preserving the precious rule of threes, each month generally gets along really well with two others and really badly with three others. If you care about approximating the popular great wheel cosmology these four groups of three will roughly agree on what they consider heaven and hell to be like which makes for 8 outer planes not counting any limbos and whatnot these groups might consider.

Regarding afterlives, priority is given to the deity that may claim to an individual followed by the plane that most closely represents ideals they feel strongest about (dominance, liberty, self-sufficiency, altruism, etc).

Importantly, your sign/omen is a factor only of nature, not nurture, and is variable in strength from person to person and at different times (and even location). Like the lunar cycle some will experience the aspects of their sign more strongly at various times during the year, and at varying strengths overall depending on the exact circumstances of their birth (eg the apex of each month making for stronger-signed individuals).

Thus the label scribbed on your character sheet is not uniform and best applied as a descriptor of inclination rather than concrete behaviour pattern in regards to players.

Sidenote, i found something online defining five cornerstones of personality that may be better than the good old (wrong) meyers briggs: openness to new things (or not), consciensciousness (or spontanaeity), intraversion/extraversion, agreeableness (compassion, empathy, etc) and neuroticism (or emotional stability). Not sure if that is a current theory but probably worth something to draw traits from.


I like the idea behind this, and you could probably do something that each Sign has both virtues and flaws associated with them. If you don't want to use Zodiac, you could also do something with Major Arcana in the Tarot or similar ideas. Or even throw in elements in like in the Chinese Zodiac to shake it up even further, as a secondary nature type of thing.

But I think the biggest problem I'd have with a Sign to decide Morality is that it doesn't seem to have room for changing one's Morality? In D&D, an Evil person can become Good, or a Good person can become Evil (both which often serve as big story-pivots). Just like in RL where people can learn to grow and change, D&D and similar games leave it open for change to happen to the character. How much change would be possible within the scope of the Zodiac-Morality? Are you restricted to the Sign you were born under or is it something that can change?

Kane0
2021-02-21, 05:27 PM
But I think the biggest problem I'd have with a Sign to decide Morality is that it doesn't seem to have room for changing one's Morality? In D&D, an Evil person can become Good, or a Good person can become Evil (both which often serve as big story-pivots). Just like in RL where people can learn to grow and change, D&D and similar games leave it open for change to happen to the character. How much change would be possible within the scope of the Zodiac-Morality? Are you restricted to the Sign you were born under or is it something that can change?

You could implement something like the atonement spell or similar ritual to change it, though for the most part I wouldn't imagine it to be necessary. Sign wouldn't be the thing you can point to and say 'this is what makes X a good/bad person', it's portion of what makes a person. You could have someone born under the sign of the golem and exhibit the expected methodical, level behaviour but you could also have someone under the sign of the demon that is not as selfish and impulsive as would be considered 'typical'.

Point being, sign alone doesn't make you a certain kind of person, it simply leans you in certain directions. It shouldn't be used to define heroes and villains. I suppose you could say that this is more a personality indicator than moral one.

Mastikator
2021-02-21, 07:31 PM
I like the idea behind this, and you could probably do something that each Sign has both virtues and flaws associated with them. If you don't want to use Zodiac, you could also do something with Major Arcana in the Tarot or similar ideas. Or even throw in elements in like in the Chinese Zodiac to shake it up even further, as a secondary nature type of thing.

But I think the biggest problem I'd have with a Sign to decide Morality is that it doesn't seem to have room for changing one's Morality? In D&D, an Evil person can become Good, or a Good person can become Evil (both which often serve as big story-pivots). Just like in RL where people can learn to grow and change, D&D and similar games leave it open for change to happen to the character. How much change would be possible within the scope of the Zodiac-Morality? Are you restricted to the Sign you were born under or is it something that can change?

The major point of using a star sign instead of alignment is that they aren't associated with morality, they're associated with personality traits, magical forces and destiny. Golem isn't good or bad, the person born under the sign of the golem is. You don't have to change your star sign to change your morality from good to evil.

Cluedrew
2021-02-21, 09:35 PM
I actually abandoned the thread for a while because I thought it was going down hill. Turns out that was premature.


So… the party had an interesting conversation… about morality… trying to play "read the GM's mind"?Why don't you just ask them? I mean they are there at the table right?


Personally I think alignment tries to do too much, but unfortunately the demands of D&D's kitchen sink nature more or less demand that it do so. [...] honestly alignment's a lot better than it has any right to be.Which, building off of Segev's reminder is another issue. I think a system has to be tuned for the setting and/or campaign pitch and D&D doesn't have either of those. So you can't tune anything for them and you can highlight important parts of a character with them. One could actually make a setting/campaign where this 2 axis morality is very relevant. But I have no urge to so instead I am just going to leave another four descriptive terms in my box. Also sometimes even describing why a character doesn't cleanly fit into the alignment system can be useful.

Also I really like the zodiac personality system people are cooking up. It could be a cool addition. And for what its worth although it isn't really about morality I think it is an "alignment replacement" in that it provides some broad descriptions of your character. One you could use anywhere but would probably be best suited

Actually the biggest morality system I ever made (for a homebrew that never got off the ground) was similar in that it had more to do with personality (and preferred profession) than good or evil. There were four (or five) paths people can follow and are seen as the ways you can improve yourself and contribute to society. They also have codes of dress, the professions that are seen as the embodiment of that path and so many stereo types. But all of that is cultural, role-playing only. The only mechanical part is the stat bonuses they grant (and explicate supernatural abilities four grant).

That four/five difference was interesting because mechanically there are just five options. But culturally they aren't universal across the setting and the four with active components are relatively stable but the fifth can going from being basically an equal to the other four all the way to is not recognised at all.

Faily
2021-02-22, 01:47 PM
You could implement something like the atonement spell or similar ritual to change it, though for the most part I wouldn't imagine it to be necessary. Sign wouldn't be the thing you can point to and say 'this is what makes X a good/bad person', it's portion of what makes a person. You could have someone born under the sign of the golem and exhibit the expected methodical, level behaviour but you could also have someone under the sign of the demon that is not as selfish and impulsive as would be considered 'typical'.

Point being, sign alone doesn't make you a certain kind of person, it simply leans you in certain directions. It shouldn't be used to define heroes and villains. I suppose you could say that this is more a personality indicator than moral one.

The Atonement-suggestion an interesting idea. It puts a significant marker on changing one's "nature" so to speak, by undergoing a sacred ritual to begin upon a new path and a real committment. :smallsmile:

Satinavian
2021-02-22, 03:27 PM
Interesting, so have "Detect adherence to my philosophic values"? A "Judge Character" spell that is very subjective (but at the faction level so the GM has a chance of answering)? Neat idea for when the moral truth is unknowable. Those are some good examples too.I have seen such spells in a game recently. They were called variants of "detect traitor" and mostly used by the magical secret police. Their origin was demonic and they were sponsored by some demon lord of tyranny and would obviously work very well if someone wanted to establish one. The users generally had far more benevolent motives but there were some cults ative trying to infiltrate the society and using dark rituals to sacrifice huge portions of the population so there was motivation to use the spell despite its origin.
Of course the spells did never explain what exactly the mismatch in the worldview was, only that one existed.

Nifft
2021-02-22, 03:36 PM
The Atonement-suggestion an interesting idea. It puts a significant marker on changing one's "nature" so to speak, by undergoing a sacred ritual to begin upon a new path and a real committment. :smallsmile:

Nameless One: "What can change the nature of a man?"

Astrology Cleric: "One hour and fifty bucks cash."

Lord Raziere
2021-02-22, 03:41 PM
Nameless One: "What can change the nature of a man?"

Astrology Cleric: "One hour and fifty bucks cash."

Really I'd house rule this kind of thing so it can't be memed like this. One of the biggest problems of DnDs alignment system is the normalization and mundanization of its implications so that all becomes a dumb meme.

OldTrees1
2021-02-22, 03:51 PM
Of course the spells did never explain what exactly the mismatch in the worldview was, only that one existed.

"They believe it is a half full glass of milk before bed instead of a half empty glass of milk! Mismatch! Traitor! Heretic!"

What a perfectly reasonable reaction.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-22, 03:56 PM
"They believe it is a half full glass of milk before bed instead of a half empty glass of milk! Mismatch! Traitor! Heretic!"

What a perfectly reasonable reaction.

really at point you might as well have "Detect Enemy", which is just a spell that detects whatever person is an enemy to you as determined by the GM. technically more useful for the average DnD group without any of the morality arguments.

Satinavian
2021-02-22, 03:59 PM
"They believe it is a half full glass of milk before bed instead of a half empty glass of milk! Mismatch! Traitor! Heretic!"

What a perfectly reasonable reaction.It did give a degree of mismatch as answer, not just yes/no. So it actually was useful.


But there was also some "detect hostility" effect that some other part of the rulesystem provided. Didn't get much use though.

Kane0
2021-02-22, 04:11 PM
"Detect Trolley Dilemma"

Lord Raziere
2021-02-22, 04:20 PM
"Detect Trolley Dilemma"

honestly that would be a useful thing for a morality system to have. one I might even prefer over detecting evil. evil is relatively simple to deal with no matter how strong or weak it is. a trolley dilemma is something with no real right answer and thus far more dangerous.

Kane0
2021-02-22, 04:38 PM
Perhaps I should have put it in blue, but I think it would just be easier to cast Detect Thoughts or Zone of Truth and ask them what they think about certain things you consider moral. Having a spell that just cuts out the middle man and gives you that information wouldn't sit well with me, especially if there's no chance to resist it.

OldTrees1
2021-02-22, 04:58 PM
It did give a degree of mismatch as answer, not just yes/no. So it actually was useful.

I missed that it gave the degree. Neat. I had presumed it was of some utility but also reinforcing that it can't be used as a single source of truth (just like Detect Evil is not a license to kill despite the parodies).

But it inspired a joke about the most zealous person using the least reliable spell I could think of for the least significant difference being mistaken as a valid difference.


"Detect Trolley Dilemma"

Oh what about "Pose Trolley Dilemma"?
As you cast this spell speak aloud and concentrate on a trolley dilemma. Entities will glow green for option 1, orange for option 2.

Kane0
2021-02-22, 05:07 PM
Oh what about "Pose Trolley Dilemma"?
As you cast this spell speak aloud and concentrate on a trolley dilemma. Entities will glow green for option 1, orange for option 2.

Black for 'refuses to participate'
Purple for 'requires further context'
Red for 'out-of-bounds response'

Tanarii
2021-02-22, 05:27 PM
Black for 'refuses to participate'
"No glow" for they've realized the Trolley Problem doesn't indicate anything useful about morality.

Quertus
2021-02-24, 07:49 AM
Perhaps I should have put it in blue, but I think it would just be easier to cast Detect Thoughts or Zone of Truth and ask them what they think about certain things you consider moral. Having a spell that just cuts out the middle man and gives you that information wouldn't sit well with me, especially if there's no chance to resist it.

Why does the opportunity to resist the spell make its existence sit better with you?

Segev
2021-03-03, 01:59 PM
"No glow" for they've realized the Trolley Problem doesn't indicate anything useful about morality.

It might provide some argument for those who wish to determine whether toddlers are, in fact, neutral evil or not. :smallwink:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4

In case it's not obvious, I share this for amusement value more than anything else.

Taking it way too seriously, given the lack of an actual switch and the need to consciously steer, this version of it would ask different questions than the normal one of "is inaction the same as action?"

In terms of D&D's objective alignments, I think the trolley problem has more bearing on ethics than morality: are there rules you follow to make this decision, or do you make a more snap judgment when presented with each case individually?

OldTrees1
2021-03-03, 05:34 PM
In terms of D&D's objective alignments, I think the trolley problem has more bearing on ethics than morality: are there rules you follow to make this decision, or do you make a more snap judgment when presented with each case individually?

Good insight. The way people approach the problem does say a lot relative to their answer.

Other common approaches are:
Finding a 4th option (because 3 is too few)
Rewriting the trolley problem as 5 new variants
Creating distance from the problem (flip a coin, defer to another, etc)

Segev
2021-03-03, 06:12 PM
Good insight. The way people approach the problem does say a lot relative to their answer.

Other common approaches are:
Finding a 4th option (because 3 is too few)
Rewriting the trolley problem as 5 new variants
Creating distance from the problem (flip a coin, defer to another, etc)

Yeah. I think trying to find more options (3, 4, however many) is actually an answer on the moral test: they find both (all) solutions provided unacceptable, and will devote their emotional and intellectual effort to finding something better.

Rewriting the problem is similar: it's a rejection of the scenario as impossible, because they believe that real scenarios will have alternate solutions. Or, if you mean things like "well, what about pushing a fat man onto the tracks," that's less about the people answering the trolley problem and more about the people asking it.

When they create distance, that's actually an ethics answer, same as any other evaluation of their process. In this case, they have a set of rules they follow, and we can have long and arduous discussions on whether the rules they follow are lawful, neutral, or chaotic.

OldTrees1
2021-03-03, 06:39 PM
Yeah. I think trying to find more options (3, 4, however many) is actually an answer on the moral test: they find both (all) solutions provided unacceptable, and will devote their emotional and intellectual effort to finding something better.

Rewriting the problem is similar: it's a rejection of the scenario as impossible, because they believe that real scenarios will have alternate solutions. Or, if you mean things like "well, what about pushing a fat man onto the tracks," that's less about the people answering the trolley problem and more about the people asking it.

When they create distance, that's actually an ethics answer, same as any other evaluation of their process. In this case, they have a set of rules they follow, and we can have long and arduous discussions on whether the rules they follow are lawful, neutral, or chaotic.

By rewriting I meant people asking themselves 5 variants in order to think about the original question. It is the opposite of trying to find a 3rd option.

Trying to find a 3rd option is rejecting the investigation the question is asking. Usually due to thinking about it as a concrete case that must have enough detail to find a 3rd option.

Asking yourself variants is driving the investigation deeper. I answer this way in the default case, but is it really about inaction vs action or not? If I do variations that keep that consistent, will I still answer the same way? Famous examples include the fat man, the organ harvesting, and the miracle cure. Maybe inaction is no excuse in the default case but suddenly inaction sounds right in the organ harvesting case. Hmm. Then there must be a different reason explaining why.

For the distance I was talking about them trying to reduce ownership of their answer. They try to inject some other actor (a coin for example) into the situation. Although if there is no agent around to inject, does a non agent actor actually create distance, or just the illusion of distance?

Some of these tell us other details about the character's personalities.

Quertus
2021-03-03, 09:19 PM
Grrr…

IMO, the trolley problem breaks down as follows:

If I do nothing, I am not at fault. I did not set this trolley on this path. If I act, I am at fault.

Moreover, if I act, I am *legally* at fault, and can be charged accordingly.

Moreover, I may be *wrong*, and what I *perceive* as a threat might not actually be a problem (shooting a film, for example). If I am wrong, then it could be a choice between 0 deaths and 1 death.

In order to remove all those excess variables… well, it depends on which aspect you *want* to evaluate.

Because, not unlike the original CaW vs CaS article, the trolley problem seems to be comparing too many variables at once.

Kane0
2021-03-04, 04:07 AM
Why does the opportunity to resist the spell make its existence sit better with you?

One of the nice trends ive seen happen with D&D is for magic to be less automatic. There are more chances of failure in the form of attack rolls and saving throws rather than relying on magic to counteract magic (spell resistance, miss chance, contingencie, etc). The fewer instances of ‘nope, it just happens’ the better for me, as TTRPGs for me derive a lot of their enjoyment from their uncertainty, that chance of success and failure. The roll of the dice is interesting, automatically reading someone’s morality takes a chunk of fun out of it.
Like, having no save leads to things like Belkar’s trusty sheet of lead.



Grrr…

IMO, the trolley problem breaks down as follows:

If I do nothing, I am not at fault. I did not set this trolley on this path. If I act, I am at fault.

Moreover, if I act, I am *legally* at fault, and can be charged accordingly.

Moreover, I may be *wrong*, and what I *perceive* as a threat might not actually be a problem (shooting a film, for example). If I am wrong, then it could be a choice between 0 deaths and 1 death.

In order to remove all those excess variables… well, it depends on which aspect you *want* to evaluate.


Ah, so you’d glow purple then :P

Herbert_W
2021-03-07, 10:25 PM
The trolley problem is a good case to consider, because it illustrates the point that not only are there multiple axes on which good can be measured, but that they can actively oppose each other.

There are several moral principles that could apply to the trolley problem: the principle of "avoid causing death" would have us not pull the lever, while "more survivors is better" would have us pull it. Most people would agree that both of those principles are important - but, when they are in conflict with each other, there's widespread disagreement over which one is more important. People who consider themselves to be good (or at least, in DnD-terms, neutral with good leanings) can and do disagree on what the good thing to do in this situation would be, or whether there even is a good thing to do, or whether there's only one.

One of the downsides of having a game with objective morality is that conflicts of this sort are difficult to represent well. That's not to say that they can't be represented at all - Miko's aforementioned kerfuffle is a shining example - but the fact that detect good can confirm that you're all on the same team combined with the existence of imminent threats that ping on detect evil does tend to put a damper on them.

I think that moral foundations theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory) would be a good place to start if you want to formalize this. The six foundations (Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression) could work very well to represent, in a way that's nuanced enough to be useful for roleplay and characterizations yet simple enough for a game system, both which principles a character considers important and how they measure up in light of those principles.

There are plenty of real-world examples of conflict between people with differing opinions on which of these moral foundations are more important, so there's lots to draw from if you want conflict between "good" characters. I won't discuss specifics because most of these conflicts are political, but there's fertile ground here.

A system based on moral foundations theory would also do quite a nice job of representing the law/chaos axis with more nuance than the original nine-alignment grid. Characters who value authority highly are quite different from those who value fairness and loyalty, yet both would be considered "lawful" under the old system. Characters who would choose liberty over authority are quite different from those who would choose liberty over absolutely all else, yet both would be considered "chaotic" under the old system.

Actually, let's spell this out in full:


Lawful good: Primarily values care plus at least one out of of authority, loyalty, fairness, and sanctity. (Depending on the DM, any of these last four may be required. Authority is likely to be required.) May appreciate liberty, but when push comes to shove will choose other principles over it.

Neutral good: Values care very highly. Everything else is optional so long as the character doesn't stray into LG or CG territory.

Chaotic good: Primarily values care and liberty, and doesn't put much weight on authority. Everything else is optional.

Lawful neutral: Values at least one out of of authority, loyalty, fairness, and sanctity. (Depending on the DM, any of these four may be required. Authority is likely to be required.) May appreciate liberty and care, but when push comes to shove will choose other principles over them.

Neutral: Either doesn't value anything so much that it's always a clear overriding factor, or has a combination of values that can't be made to fit sensibly into any other alignment.

Chaotic neutral: Doesn't value authority, and probably places low or no value on loyalty, fairness, and/or sanctity. Values liberty and/or care enough to avoid being CE but not so much as to be CG.

Lawful evil: Values at least one out of of authority, loyalty, fairness, and sanctity. (Depending on the DM, any of these four may be required. Authority is likely to be required.) Does not value care or liberty.

Neutral evil: Does not value care. Everything else is optional so long as the character doesn't become LE or CE.

Chaotic evil: Does not value any of the moral foundations at all. (No, not even liberty - as much as they may like it for themselves, a CE character does not care about the liberty of others.)



There's a lot of nuance here. The only alignment out of the original nine that doesn't have room for significant differences in opinion between members is CE, and that's an alignment that's well-known for being one-note. (It's also an alignment whose members usually end up fighting each other even if they all want exactly the same thing, so if you're looking to make a game where fine ethical disagreements can lead to conflict, you really don't need a way to represent those disagreements here.)

I think it's also important to note that players can also disagree with their GM on what's good and evil, and it can be very disheartening to do what you believe is the right thing only to be told that your character is now evil as a result. Worse yet, the only way to restore your character's alignment requires that you agree (or at least pretend to agree) that what you did was wrong - the atonement spell only works on someone who is truly repentant, so someone who thinks that they actually did the right thing can't benefit from it!

If your DM were to instead say something to the effect of "OK, that's going to loose you a mark of Sanctity" then that'd feel a lot better as a player - because if the player thinks that whatever they did to loose sanctity was the right thing then they must not consider sanctity to be important, so they won't take that loss as a mark against them personally.


Black for 'refuses to participate'
Purple for 'requires further context'
Red for 'out-of-bounds response'

Since we're talking about the trolley problem, I'm going to have a little fun with it: you should derail the cart. If you pull the lever at just the right time, you'll send the front wheels of the cart down one track and the rear wheels down another, potentially saving everybody.

Of course, that's only what I'd do if I had time enough to think. One of the key components of the trolley problem as it's normally posed is that everything happens quickly. It's supposed to be a forced binary choice, and forcing this binary choice is justified by the assumption that there won't be time to look for third options.

Yet what people who pose the trolley problem almost always miss is that, if it happens too fast to look for third options, then it also happens too fast to reason and philosophize and wring one's hands over the right response. The real answer to the fast trolley problem must be a reaction, with justification being either absent or contrived to fit. You can't have it both ways - either this is an exercise in moral reasoning where we can actually perform moral reasoning, or it's one with a forced binary choice. If it's the latter, then regardless of what you might think that you should do, for many of us the real answer would be "panic and freeze."

The trolley problem is moderately useful as a contrivance. I think it's only useful it it's acknowledged as a contrivance, though. When we're talking about the trolley problem, we're not really talking about trolleys. We're talking about how we make hard decisions between distasteful options via a fantastical (and therefore comfortably not real-world) example.

As I said earlier, they trolley problem illustrates the point that there are multiple principles that could be considered good but which can oppose each other. I suspect that any further insights that could be drawn from it would only be further elaborations on that theme. Nitpicking the presentation of the problem may be fun, and I'll admit that I indulged in that nitpicky fun in the above few paragraphs, but seriously, I think that the best insights that can be gleaned from it come from acknowledging the contrivance and then that, accepting it as constructed model example, it is a problem.

So, I suppose I'm glowing red.

Tanarii
2021-03-07, 10:34 PM
It might provide some argument for those who wish to determine whether toddlers are, in fact, neutral evil or not. :smallwink:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4
That may be the only useful result to ever come out of the trolley problem. :smallamused:

Kane0
2021-03-07, 10:50 PM
I think that moral foundations theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory) would be a good place to start if you want to formalize this. The six foundations (Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression) could work very well to represent, in a way that's nuanced enough to be useful for roleplay and characterizations yet simple enough for a game system, both which principles a character considers important and how they measure up in light of those principles.


This sounds like a workable concept, however i’m curious if we can cut or combine these six into a set of three? I’m a sucker for the rule of three and it might make the concept a bit easier to utilize at the game table.

OldTrees1
2021-03-07, 11:38 PM
I think that moral foundations theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory) would be a good place to start if you want to formalize this. The six foundations (Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression) could work very well to represent, in a way that's nuanced enough to be useful for roleplay and characterizations yet simple enough for a game system, both which principles a character considers important and how they measure up in light of those principles.


Instead of going back to the 9 alignments, why not use those 6 values? There are a few ways to do that.


This sounds like a workable concept, however i’m curious if we can cut or combine these six into a set of three? I’m a sucker for the rule of three and it might make the concept a bit easier to utilize at the game table.

I don't see how to compress it down to 3. 6 feels like an incomplete list but should be mostly servicable.

Herbert_W
2021-03-08, 12:14 AM
Instead of going back to the 9 alignments, why not use those 6 values?

That's what I'm suggesting. I only brought the train of thought back around to the nine alignments to show how much each one glosses over - how many different ways there are for characters who have the "same" alignment on the nine-sector grid to have dramatic ethical differences.


This sounds like a workable concept, however i’m curious if we can cut or combine these six into a set of three? I’m a sucker for the rule of three and it might make the concept a bit easier to utilize at the game table.

Ultima: Quest of the Avatar was mentioned earlier in this thread, and that managed to expand three core principles into six virtues (and then added ones "above" and "around" to make eight). We could do a similar thing here to make it seem like the six foundations come from three.

For example, we could have these cores, each of which composes one foundation when unalloyed:


Beneficence: Care
Acceptance: Authority
Trust: Liberty

When alloyed, the other three foundations emerge:


Beneficence/Acceptance: Loyalty
Trust/Beneficence: Fairness
Acceptance/Trust: Sanctity

(It's a little bit tempting to posit a seventh foundation that consists of all of the cores alloyed together. Perhaps this could be balance, as in the ability to strike a good balance between the foundations when they conflict. That's not a foundation that people are instinctively inclined to value - it's not baked into human brains, like the original six supposedly are - but it is something that people might learn to value after spending time trying to build consensus and community among others who have varying foundational preferences.)

I'd recommend having this three-core representation serve as a way of justifying the system within the rule of threes rather than as a replacement for having six independent values. You would loose a lot of nuance if you were to collapse these six foundations into just the three. Someone could value liberty very highly while not caring much for fairness and sanctity, or vice versa, for example.

This system is drawn from real-world human psychology (or, at least, a certain group of psychologists' understanding thereof). That's good in a way, as it makes it suitable for describing believably human-like characters. However, it does mean that it's going to be a little messy. We shouldn't expect things to fall into neat categories and patterns that match our aesthetic preferences. It's really quite a wonder that things work out as neatly as they do!

Kane0
2021-03-09, 12:43 AM
So knowing full well it would reduce the depth/complexity, how about each character just prioritizes Care, Fairness and Loyalty from most to least important. Should be quick and easy for most players to get their heads around and get on with the game.
I think Sanctity wouldn't really translate well into something like D&D, though Loyalty to the group and Respect for authority could be split into their own separate values (but as noted i'm a sucker for the rule of 3's).

Segev
2021-03-09, 01:27 AM
So knowing full well it would reduce the depth/complexity, how about each character just prioritizes Care, Fairness and Loyalty from most to least important. Should be quick and easy for most players to get their heads around and get on with the game.
I think Sanctity wouldn't really translate well into something like D&D, though Loyalty to the group and Respect for authority could be split into their own separate values (but as noted i'm a sucker for the rule of 3's).

Sounds a lot like Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.

Satinavian
2021-03-09, 01:41 AM
I think Sanctity wouldn't really translate well into something like D&D, though Loyalty to the group and Respect for authority could be split into their own separate values (but as noted i'm a sucker for the rule of 3's).The whole morality issue of necromancy is primarily about sanctity. Including sanctity would mean that this and simila practices would be properly represented instead of making excuses why they relate to the other axes or to make them morally neutral.

Kane0
2021-03-09, 04:18 AM
Sounds a lot like Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.
Which when properly utilised is also a great stand-in for alignment I suppose.


The whole morality issue of necromancy is primarily about sanctity. Including sanctity would mean that this and simila practices would be properly represented instead of making excuses why they relate to the other axes or to make them morally neutral.

Necromancy isn’t the same between settings though. In some cases its irredeemably bad, corrupting, nasty and always so, in others its just another tool in the magic toolbox and comes largely down to how it’s used. Then on top of that you have how people feel about it in-world of course.
Sanctity doesn’t really strike me as a means of determining good/bad or right/wrong any more than tradition or external authority does, you’re just offloading the process elsewhere.
But i get your point, not everyone shares this point of view.

Segev
2021-03-09, 07:20 AM
Which when properly utilised is also a great stand-in for alignment I suppose.

Maybe, if you're trying to use Alignment as strictly a personality test, but even then, they tell you somewhat different things.

An Ideal of "I will see my brother's death avenged" seen through the eyes of a Lawful Good character will be rather different than through the eyes of a Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, or Chaotic Evil character.


The Chaotic Evil character whose Bond is, "I betrayed my family once and lost everything that mattered; I will never betray my adopted replacements," will be quite different from a Lawful Good person with the same Bond. Unless some drastic alignment shift happened between the instigating betrayal and now, the CAUSE of the betrayal and its nature may also be quite different. The LG guy may have betrayed them because he found himself in a "break the law or support family" sort of deal, and has now shifted from choosing "the law/his oaths" to "his family/friends" as how he expresses his Lawful nature. The CE guy may have betrayed his family out of the kind of malicious selfishness one expects of the alignment, and has decided that his in-group is more important to him than himself now (but still will do horrific things to support and protect that in-group against out-groupers).

Herbert_W
2021-03-09, 09:17 PM
So knowing full well it would reduce the depth/complexity, how about each character just prioritizes Care, Fairness and Loyalty from most to least important. Should be quick and easy for most players to get their heads around and get on with the game.
I think Sanctity wouldn't really translate well into something like D&D, though Loyalty to the group and Respect for authority could be split into their own separate values (but as noted i'm a sucker for the rule of 3's).

The issue that I see with dropping moral foundations from the game is that, if you do so, then a character who values those foundations is indistinguishable rules-wise from a person who has no values at all. You'll unintentionally send the message that people who hold those values IRL are not good people (and yes, sanctity, authority, and liberty might seem like an odd combination of vales - but I do know someone who thinks like that, so it's not inconceivable that one of your players will.)

On the other hand, if you split this into a G/E replacement (which is what you seem to be describing, as you listed all of the foundations that relate to beneficence) plus what I assume would be a L/C replacement then you add unnecessary complexity. You also add unnecessary judgement, by implying that all of the foundations that you group together a law-like or chaos-like do not count as good-like.

I'm proposing this system as an alignment replacement. That means that it could replace both the G/E and L/C axes with a single unified system.


Sanctity doesn’t really strike me as a means of determining good/bad or right/wrong any more than tradition or external authority does, you’re just offloading the process elsewhere.

But i get your point, not everyone shares this point of view.

Yes, exactly. The main point of moral foundations theory is that different people can have different ideas about what it means, fundamentally, to be right or wrong.

As an aside, I think that sanctity fits very well into DnD, given that what is true in the game is based loosely yet largely on what was believed (or what modern people think was believed) in medieval times. It makes perfect sense that a rogue who steals from temples in order to feed their street urchin friends would be very unpopular with the gods, or at least with some gods. They certainly value care and would therefore count as good under a classical alignment system, but the disrespect for sanctity that they display would make it entirely appropriate that they could be affected by holy word and the like despite being good. Sanctity allows this sort of consequence to be represented mechanically. It's also the only moral foundation that we can say that the creation of undead universally and indisputably offends. (Care? Nope, you might use undead minions safely if you're careful and can offset any magical negative energy pollution with positive energy, depending on the campaign. Authority? That depends on whether the authority you follow prohibits the use of undead, which not all do. Loyalty and fairness? Not really applicable. Liberty? Not applicable if the undead are mindless.)


Sounds a lot like Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.

You could make it work like that, but I think it'd be mechanically simpler to roll everything into a set of something like Ideals. This is an alignment replacement, after all. We need a simple way to answer the question of "When this particular cleric casts blasphemy, who gets hurt?"

So, maybe it's time to hash this out into a ruleset. Here's a rough draft:


A character's ethical values, and how well they measure up according to those values, are determined by their relationship to six ethical principles: care, loyalty, authority, liberty, fairness, and sanctity. These are not mere abstract concepts in the world of DnD; they are metaphysical principles which are just as real as heat, light, and matter. A creature's ethical status can be detected by magic and determines how they are affected by certain spells.

Write down each of these principles in the order from those which your character considers the most important to the least. This list of values should serve as a guide for your character's behavior - or at least, to what they think that they ought to do. Not everyone can live up to their own standards, after all. You can refer to this list for guidance as to what your character would do when facing a difficult ethical decision, where different principles call for a different course of action. If you find that your character consistently chooses a principle that's lower on the list, that's OK - that just means that your character's values have changed. At the end of a session, you may reorder the list to suit the values that your character has demonstrated through their actions.

For each principle, your character may be opposed (O), neutral (N), or supportive (S). A character who has not regard for an ethical principle, acting against it whenever it suits their interests, is opposed. Being opposed to a principle does not necessarily mean that you go out of your way to act against it, simply that you disregard it when it suits you. A character who opposes care may steal from others and engage in wanton violence, for example. However, this does not mean that they will do so recklessly - a character who opposes a principle may nonetheless be restrained by social expectations and by law. Supporting a principle means that a character is willing do, and does, put effort into acting in accordance with it that goes significantly above and beyond what an ordinary person would be expected to do. Being nice to your friends does not mean that your character supports care or loyalty - supporting care means working to help the needy regardless of their relationship to you or lack thereof, and supporting loyalty means being willing to defend your friends even at great risk your yourself. A neutral character is neither supportive not opposed, but rather somewhere in-between.

The majority of humans and humanoids are neutral. Most people would say that they support a variety of, or even all, of these ethical principles - but they lack the commitment to be truly supportive of any of them.

A character may only be supportive of up to three principles at a given time. Normally, these will be the top three principles on that character's list of values. (If they aren't, then it's probably time to re-order that list.) This is because different ethical principles can sometimes be in conflict with each other; fully supporting a principle requires being willing to choose it over at least some other principles as well as choosing it over one's own self-interest.

In most campaigns, player characters are expected to be at least neutral with regards to care, fairness, and loyalty. This is a pragmatic requirement that minimizes the likelihood and severity of conflict between players. It also minimizes the havoc that the party could wreak upon the DM's carefully-constructed campaign world. Campaigns where this restriction is relaxed are known as evil campaigns.

Here's an example of how a spell like holy word might work:


This spell, when cast, is charged with an ethical principle chosen by the caster. If the caster does not have a patron deity then this must be a principle which the caster supports; if they do, then it must be one which their patron deity supports.

Creatures which oppose this principle suffer the full brunt of this spell's effects, creatures which are neutral suffer a reduced effect, and creatures which are supportive suffer no effect.

By symmetry, it's easy to extend this to blasphemy:


This spell, when cast, is charged with opposition to an ethical principle chosen by the caster. If the caster does not have a patron deity then this must be a principle which the caster opposes; if they do, then it must be one which their patron deity opposes.

Creatures which support this principle suffer the full brunt of this spell's effects, creatures which are neutral suffer a reduced effect, and creatures which are opposed suffer no effect.

Alternatively, it might be simpler to have these spells target every applicable principle instead of choosing just one. However, that brings up weird edge cases - what if a creature supports one of the targeted principles while opposing two of them? Covering these edge cases would require unwanted complexity. I prefer this system, where casters may need to choose which version of the spell to cast as appropriate for the particular enemies that they are facing when they cast it.

Once could easily imagine spells that use this system in more creative ways. For example, there might be a spell called detect enemies that detect creatures which the wizard who wrote the spell considers to be enemies; players who find the spell and wish to make use of it would need to experiment in order to determine what sort of creatures are in fact detected. Even if they know that the spell works based purely on alignment, that could still be an interesting challenge, even if just because they need to seek out creatures of different alignments in order to test it.

Kane0
2021-03-09, 10:33 PM
So what happens if a cleric of one deity like Moradin tries to smite a cleric of another deity like Corellon? I presume both would value Sanctity, so they pick another value?

Morty
2021-03-10, 03:07 AM
So what happens if a cleric of one deity like Moradin tries to smite a cleric of another deity like Corellon? I presume both would value Sanctity, so they pick another value?

I'm not convinced anything needs to happen beyond "the cleric succeeds or fails as normal and needs to deal with the consequences".

Segev
2021-03-10, 11:29 AM
I'm not convinced anything needs to happen beyond "the cleric succeeds or fails as normal and needs to deal with the consequences".

That doesn't answer nor obviate the question. Does the cleric succeed because they disagree on authority vs. liberty, or fail because they agree on sanctity and loyalty?

OldTrees1
2021-03-10, 11:52 AM
That doesn't answer nor obviate the question. Does the cleric succeed because they disagree on authority vs. liberty, or fail because they agree on sanctity and loyalty?

Bad answer: Well these spells / effects now scale based on how many areas are opposed. If you disagree in only 1 then you get a lesser effect than if you disagree in all.

Bad answer 2: Well these spells / effects now have a tolerance threshold. You have to disagree on at least N for it to trigger. N can be 1 for some effects or 3 for other effects.

Bad answer 3: The user of the spell / effect chooses to be harsh / tolerant on each affected target. Harsh means the effect triggers if there is even 1 disagreement. Tolerant means the effect only triggers if there are 3 disagreements.


These are labeled as bad because they were spontaneous thoughts with no quality filter. If they actually make sense, then sorry for presuming they were bad.

Segev
2021-03-10, 11:59 AM
Bad answer: Well these spells / effects now scale based on how many areas are opposed. If you disagree in only 1 then you get a lesser effect than if you disagree in all.

Bad answer 2: Well these spells / effects now have a tolerance threshold. You have to disagree on at least N for it to trigger. N can be 1 for some effects or 3 for other effects.

Bad answer 3: The user of the spell / effect chooses to be harsh / tolerant on each affected target. Harsh means the effect triggers if there is even 1 disagreement. Tolerant means the effect only triggers if there are 3 disagreements.


These are labeled as bad because they were spontaneous thoughts with no quality filter. If they actually make sense, then sorry for presuming they were bad.

We could go back to the D&D 3e (and possibly earlier) approach, and have specific spells target specific alignments. Blasphemy in 3e specifically hits good and neutral creatures. Presumably in this paradigm, it would hit anything that values Sanctity. Holy word would hit things that opposed Sanctity.

Dictum would hit those who oppose Authority, while cry of freedom would hit anybody opposing Liberty. So on and so forth.

Herbert_W
2021-03-11, 04:26 AM
We could go back to the D&D 3e (and possibly earlier) approach, and have specific spells target specific alignments.

Well these spells / effects now scale based on how many areas are opposed. . . . Well these spells / effects now have a tolerance threshold. . . . The user of the spell / effect chooses to be harsh / tolerant on each affected target.

There's a lot of good ideas here. Different spells and abilities could work in different ways. There's a lot of flexibility in this system.

My main point of caution is that we want to keep each spell simple. Each spell could reference up to six scales with three points each. So long as you only reference a few scales at a time there's no more crunch here than the old C-N-L/G-N-E system. However, there's a lot more room for complexity if you reference many values simultaneously and that's not a good thing.


So what happens if a cleric of one deity like Moradin tries to smite a cleric of another deity like Corellon? I presume both would value Sanctity, so they pick another value?

Yes, that's pretty much how I'd make the adapted version of holy word work: the cleric of Moradin would pick a value that Moradin supports, and zaps everyone opposed to it. People who are neutral with regard to that value suffer a reduced effect. If it turns out that they were wrong and the cleric of Corellon actually does support that value, then the spell has no effect.

However, in the specific case of Moradin and Corellion, I don't think there's enough difference of opinion for their clerics to make good use of spells like holy word against each other. These deities are opposed on the C/L axis, but aligned on the G/E axis, and in the case of these deities I think that this agreement represents a more significant part of their values than the disagreement. Alignment based spells would often have some effect, but not enough to be a good tactical option. In cases where these clerics fight (which I think they usually wouldn't), they'd use other spells.

Any campaign world that uses this alignment system would need to establish which values each deity supports and opposes. This is going to vary depending on the writer, so this is just my own interpretation for Moradin's alignment under the new system:


Loyalty (S): Moradin created dwarfs who are famously loyal.
Fairness (S): Moradin really doesn't like cheaters.
Care (S): Moradin is described as LG and offers both the Protection and Good domains in 3e, so this is obvious. I'm not entirely sure that this shouldn't be even higher on the list.
Authority (N): Moradin supports an orderly society, but an orderly society doesn't need to be hierarchical. Moradin respects authority - but he values loyalty, fairness, and care over it and is therefore not committed enough to count as supporting it.
Sanctity (N) Moradin cares about sanctity, but it's far from the main thing that he cares about.
Liberty (N): Moradin regards liberty as less important than other principles - but he doesn't have a complete disregard for it, either.

The cleric of Moradin could choose either care, loyalty, or fairness when casting holy word, since it's their deity's alignment that maters when casting rather than their own. This choice would be made at the time of casting. This cleric would not be able to cast blasphemy, because Moradin does not oppose any values.

This would be a tactical choice, made to suit their target. This raises a question: are there any values that a cleric of Corellon would oppose?

We haven't established rules yet for what alignment a cleric must have in order to worship a deity. However, I think that it would be a reasonable starting point to say that a cleric may only oppose a value if their deity does. (Some deities may be more picky.) The only value that Corellon might oppose is authority. They are CG in 3e, which means that they value liberty and care. Being good means that they probably have at least some regard for fairness and loyalty. As they are interested in the sanctity of nature, they have at least some interest in sanctity.

Authority is the only value that a cleric of Corellon might oppose, and even that's not a guarantee.

Authority is, unfortunately for the cleric of Moradin, just off the bottom of the list of values available to them for holy word. They have three options where the cleric of Corellon might be neutral, so the best that they can hope for is the reduced effect. This is just my interpretation of these two deities, so it's possible that this would be different if someone else were to write the sourcebooks, but the cleric of Moradin doesn't have any options that would be fully effective against a cleric of Corellon . . .

. . . unless they cast a different spell or simply clobber the other cleric over the head. Both of these are things that should be well within a cleric of Moradin's capabilities.


smite

Technically, that's an ability that a cleric of Moradin wouldn't have unless they multiclass into paladin . . . but now that you mention it, how should a paladin's smite ability work?

5e turned a paladin's smite into plain old extra damage, powered by a spell slot, with a rider that adds a little more damage depending on creature type. There's no reference to alignment here.

3e had a paladin's smite explicitly dependent on alignment. To me, that is the iconic defining feature of both this ability and of this class. Paladins don't just smite, they smite evil. One of the main ways that grey guards and blackguards are mechanically distinguished from paladins in 3e is that they have smite powers that work on different alignments - blackguards are anti-paladins, so they smite good, and grey guards are morally ambiguous pragmatists, so they can smite a wider range of alignments. Smiting targets of a specific alignment gives players a mechanical reason to care about the alignment of their enemies and to preferentially target evil foes, thus bringing a player and character's motivations closer together.

I'd have a paladin's smite effective against any targets that oppose either of the two values the paladin values most. (Two, just because one is too restrictive and three is not restrictive enough for the base class.) To keep things simple, I wouldn't bother with extra riders that trigger if the target opposes multiple applicable alignments - it'd just be a simple yes-or-no "do they oppose at least one of these?" question. Grey guards would get to smite a wider range of opponents. Eventually, a high-level grey guard could smite anyone who opposes any value.

Blackguards could become a very weird class in a game with a realistic alignment system. Almost nobody in the real world sees themselves as evil - those few that do embrace the label of "evil" do so out of rejection of the values of others but still have values of their own which they see as right. The fantasy trope of evil as being just like good except inverted doesn't have a basis in real human psychology. Perhaps blackguards should just gain the ability to smite people who support the values at the bottom of their list. For example, it makes sense that a blackguard who values authority highly and doesn't care about liberty would smite people who value liberty, because those people tend to act against authority.

Alternatively, we could embrace the fact that blackguards don't have a basis in normal human psychology and make them the product of magically-induced alignment inversion which causes them to seek to destroy the very same things that they once worked to protect. That would make blackguards a rather sympathetic tragic class - and perhaps also a more frightening one, if whatever cause this inversion is contagious.

There has been a trend in recent editions to fold paladin-like classes into the paladin class itself. If we are playing an edition that follows this trend then he ability to smite a wider range of alignments could be associated with any subclass that leans towards pragmatism, while smiting people based on the values they support as well as oppose could be associated with subclasses that tend towards extremism.

Kane0
2021-03-11, 04:49 AM
A secondary concern; you have said that most people would be neutral on most aspects, supporting and opposing take more ‘effort’ and are pretty rare, at least among humanoids. So if this is the case wouldnt pinning mechanics to revolve around supporting/opposing aspects largely skim over the majority of PCs and NPCs?

Herbert_W
2021-03-11, 06:22 AM
A secondary concern; you have said that most people would be neutral on most aspects, supporting and opposing take more ‘effort’ and are pretty rare, at least among humanoids. So if this is the case wouldnt pinning mechanics to revolve around supporting/opposing aspects largely skim over the majority of PCs and NPCs?

Good catch. That could be a problem, but it is a fixable one so long as it's understood that "most" means "most in the world," not "most that a PC encounters."

I'm working under the unstated assumption that the PCs are exceptional individuals, and that should be a stated assumption. I expect that most PCs will support at least one value, both because playing a hero can be fun and because there are mechanical advantages to supporting values. Recent editions have moved away from attaching hard mechanical advantages to maintaining the "right" alignment, but that's a response to the problems with the old alignment system as de-emphasizing the system mitigates the impact of its problems. Solving those problems by replacing the system means that those mechanical advantages can be safely added back to the game.

I'm also working under the assumption that most of the NPCs that the players meet in a context where alignment-specific abilities matter are going to be unusual individuals. The fact that alignment-specific abilities skim over the average NPC in a town doesn't matter, because those abilities aren't for the average guy in a town. They're for the cultists in the suspiciously-spacious sewers under the town, or the bandits living in caves outside of the town, or the monsters spawned into reality from the dreams of a young latent sorcerer lurking in the dark corners of the town.

It's also worth noting that there are some abilities that could potentially affect a large number of targets, with unexpected results occurring when there's one person who supports or opposes an alignment when the caster expects everyone to be neutral. Blasphemy and holy word are examples - you'd expect that casting either in the town square would affect a lot of people with the reduced effect of the spell. Say, for example, it'll stun and sicken neutral people but never kill them. I can easily imagine a situation where some young miscreant uses a scroll of some low-level version of blasphemy, targeting against authority, as a nonlethal stun-bomb in order to escape when they are caught. They might not even know that the spell can kill anyone, which'll make it all the more tragic when they use it in the wrong place and accidentally kill the captain of the town guard.

As you can tell from this example, there's a lot of potential for good stories to emerge from a system where most abilities skim over most people. On an adventure, neither side in a typical encounter is "most people." In town, the exceptions are notable precisely because there are exceptions, and are still likely to come up whenever area-effects are in play due to the sheer number of people around.

Quertus
2021-03-11, 03:53 PM
Oh what about "Pose Trolley Dilemma"?
As you cast this spell speak aloud and concentrate on a trolley dilemma. Entities will glow green for option 1, orange for option 2.


Black for 'refuses to participate'
Purple for 'requires further context'
Red for 'out-of-bounds response'


"No glow" for they've realized the Trolley Problem doesn't indicate anything useful about morality.


Ah, so you’d glow purple then :P

I think that, if someone cast "Pose Trolley Dilemma", *I* wouldn't glow, but the *caster* would glow based on *why* they think that it is a useful dilemma to pose.


One of the nice trends ive seen happen with D&D is for magic to be less automatic. There are more chances of failure in the form of attack rolls and saving throws rather than relying on magic to counteract magic (spell resistance, miss chance, contingencie, etc). The fewer instances of ‘nope, it just happens’ the better for me, as TTRPGs for me derive a lot of their enjoyment from their uncertainty, that chance of success and failure. The roll of the dice is interesting, automatically reading someone’s morality takes a chunk of fun out of it.
Like, having no save leads to things like Belkar’s trusty sheet of lead.

… you are morally opposed… to PCs successfully knowing things?


So knowing full well it would reduce the depth/complexity, how about each character just prioritizes Care, Fairness and Loyalty from most to least important. Should be quick and easy for most players to get their heads around and get on with the game.
I think Sanctity wouldn't really translate well into something like D&D, though Loyalty to the group and Respect for authority could be split into their own separate values (but as noted i'm a sucker for the rule of 3's).

"Loyalty" is *really* tricky. Why would you assume that Loyalty applies to the group, rather than to family, community, country, etc?

-----

"The only value that Corellon might oppose is authority. They are CG in 3e, which means that they value liberty and care. Being good means that they probably have at least some regard for fairness and loyalty."

I think that it's fair to say that many believe Corellon actively *opposes* fairness :smallwink:

-----

"In most campaigns, player characters are expected to be at least neutral with regards to care, fairness, and loyalty. This is a pragmatic requirement that minimizes the likelihood and severity of conflict between players. It also minimizes the havoc that the party could wreak upon the DM's carefully-constructed campaign world. Campaigns where this restriction is relaxed are known as evil campaigns."

I don't see how any of that follows.

"Loyalty" isn't really a measure relative to classic "good vs evil".

Disloyalty to the *group* is usually an issue for "normal" campaigns… *and* for "evil" campaigns… and disloyalty to corrupt rulers is "part and parcel" to D&D.

Many heroes are *all* about cheating to win.

Just our 2 interpretations should demonstrate how rife with potential for different PoV can be.

-----

"Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression"

Well, I would really enjoy seeing all of these reversed (like "able to think for one's own self" vs "blind obedience" and "community" vs "selfishness"), but I can't manage all 6.

Objective: exploration, knowledge, self-improvement… preserving reality if necessary.
Approach: exploration, study, research, experimentation, hypothesis, experimentation.

Objective: fun.
Approach: sex, drugs, rock and roll, and magic.

Objective: homeland for refugees; survival.
Approach: stealth, diplomacy, violent allies.

Objective: family, family, nation, world, religion, friends, those who have suffered, those who will suffer.
Approach: 5d chess information wars.

Care/Harm - neutral
Fairness/Cheating - fairness
Loyalty/Betrayal - loyalty
Authority/Subversion - neutral?
Sanctity/Degradation - neutral
Liberty/Oppression - neutral

Care/Harm - harm
Fairness/Cheating - cheating
Loyalty/Betrayal - to whom? Neutral?
Authority/Subversion - subversion
Sanctity/Degradation - neutral
Liberty/Oppression - liberty

Care/Harm - neutral
Fairness/Cheating - neutral
Loyalty/Betrayal - loyalty
Authority/Subversion - authority?
Sanctity/Degradation - neutral
Liberty/Oppression - oppression

Care/Harm - care
Fairness/Cheating - cheating
Loyalty/Betrayal - neutral
Authority/Subversion - neutral
Sanctity/Degradation - sanctity
Liberty/Oppression - liberty

Doesn't sound terribly informative to me. How about priority order for their non-neutrals? At a guess,

Fairness = Loyalty

Liberty > Harm > Cheating > Subversion

Loyalty >> Oppression

Care = Sanctity > Liberty > Cheating

Really, when trying to prioritize them, I feel back on "means and ends"; ie, this character would use Oppression as a means to Care, whereas that character would use Caring as a means to Oppress.

I'm not sure how much either list really communicate much, or helps direct role-playing / is able to "serve as a guide for your character's behavior", tbh.

Kane0
2021-03-11, 11:48 PM
… you are morally opposed… to PCs successfully knowing things?

"Loyalty" is *really* tricky. Why would you assume that Loyalty applies to the group, rather than to family, community, country, etc?

Lol no it's a mechanical concern. Detect X is usually pretty accessible (like a cantrip, 1st level spell or ritual). Couple high accessibility with high accuracy and few countermeasures and you have a potent tool that may be quite disruptive or limiting for DMs depending on what sort of game they are running.
5e's Zone of Truth might be a good example. It's a low level spell available from level 3 but isn't spammable by being a cantrip or similar; it allows a save to avoid its effects (against a somewhat rare save type), and even if you fail the save you have the choice of saying nothing or getting creative with the truth as long as you do not outright lie. It's still a very useful spell for its intended purpose but not an automatic total success even when paired up with charming a target.

Those are groups aren't they? Though point taken, you can also be loyal to an individual or ideal (although that would probably double up with some other concepts).

Segev
2021-03-12, 01:46 AM
Would this be an appropriate place to open up the can of worms that is the concept of "fair?"

Have you ever noticed that, when somebody yells at somebody else to "fight fair," they really mean "fight in the manner I am best at fighting, and not in this manner that is letting you win?"

A buff brawler insists that pulling a weapon is "cheating," or that using magic is "unfair" and "cowardly," but that grappling and punching are totally fair fighting. Even against the scrawny mage or the halfling knife-thrower. A master swordsman insists that he'll win a "fair duel" against the brawler, because he knows how to use the sword and the brawler hasn't held a weapon more complicated than a club in his life. But it's "fair" to the swordsman and the brawler throwing a table at him would be "cheating."

What constitutes "fair" and what is "cheating?" Obviously, "cheating" can be defined as going against agreed-upon rules, but do you go with the letter or spirit of them? What if the spirit still proves that the other side was trying to set you up? Was it cheating for them to obfuscate or let you make bad assumptions, or is it totally fair to outwit you that way? The schemer, after all, has a tendency to whine that "it's not fair" when the musclebound powerhouse just plows through his clever machinations with pure brute force. ("You punched through the walls to make your way through my maze? That's cheating!" "Says who? I never agreed to solve your maze.")

This also goes into an interesting layer of authority and its application. If some bullies half again the size of a kid pick on him and beat him up, they might get in trouble for it if they're caught or his allegations are proven. But if he picks up a bat or knife to defend himself, he'll be in far, far more trouble than the bullies, because he threatened them with a weapon. This has some basis in reason, but the concept of acceptable levels of escalation and where it's a "fair fight" that gets only a little punished vs. an unacceptable response where it is punished harshly exists. If some idiot bullies take away Scott Summers's ruby-lensed glasses, and he doesn't close/cover his eyes fast enough, he's the one in trouble for having caused damage/hurt people. If they kick, punch, and shove him around, he is expected to keep his eyes closed and let them do it because it's not fair (or an acceptable escalation) to unleash his eye blasts.

Note: I am not saying these things should be allowed. I am simply pointing out that this plays into the concept of "fair" and how it is malleable and flexible and seems based largely, to many people, on the notion that "it's fair if it's in my favor. It's cheating if you have an advantage that doesn't let me use my strengths, even if it's obvious I'm grossly outmatching you if we stick only to my strengths."

Quertus
2021-03-12, 08:33 AM
Have you ever noticed that, when somebody yells at somebody else to "fight fair," they really mean "fight in the manner I am best at fighting, and not in this manner that is letting you win?"

Not necessarily.

"Balance to the table"

At one table, it was something of a spectator sport to watch me asking people to "fight fair".

We could all play to our strength, at which point, as I've just demonstrated, I will completely crush everyone and everything. Or we could play a more balanced game. Your choice.

Yes, *most* calls for fair play are quite selfish, just as your describe. But it is not inherent to fair play to exclusively be used to stack the deck to one's own advantage.

Segev
2021-03-12, 03:10 PM
Not necessarily.

"Balance to the table"

At one table, it was something of a spectator sport to watch me asking people to "fight fair".

We could all play to our strength, at which point, as I've just demonstrated, I will completely crush everyone and everything. Or we could play a more balanced game. Your choice.

Yes, *most* calls for fair play are quite selfish, just as your describe. But it is not inherent to fair play to exclusively be used to stack the deck to one's own advantage.

"Balance to the table" is good for discussing tabletop RPG gameplay. But less so for discussing "fair," especially as a "moral alignment" concept.

I don't think anybody, prior to you bringing it up, was discussing game balance at the table in an RPG in this thread. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you and the point you're making? If so, I apologize.

OldTrees1
2021-03-12, 06:19 PM
"Balance to the table" is good for discussing tabletop RPG gameplay. But less so for discussing "fair," especially as a "moral alignment" concept.

I don't think anybody, prior to you bringing it up, was discussing game balance at the table in an RPG in this thread. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you and the point you're making? If so, I apologize.

Perhaps it was unwise to open up the can of worms that is "fair". Your initial comment about "fair fights" was as far off topic as Quertus' comment about balance is.

Or maybe they are both on topic and the axis is "Do your best vs Sportsmanship"

Segev
2021-03-14, 07:32 PM
Perhaps it was unwise to open up the can of worms that is "fair". Your initial comment about "fair fights" was as far off topic as Quertus' comment about balance is.

Or maybe they are both on topic and the axis is "Do your best vs Sportsmanship"

I'm not sure what "fair" in the on-topic proposal means, then.

Kane0
2021-03-14, 11:29 PM
I'm not sure what "fair" in the on-topic proposal means, then.

Light of color, often blonde.

Herbert_W
2021-03-15, 02:12 PM
Would this be an appropriate place to open up the can of worms that is the concept of "fair?"

Fairness means that everyone gets the same overall lot in life. Everyone plays by the same rules, with neither special exemptions which give someone an undeserved advantage nor special exemptions which result in someone being undeservedly screwed over. While interpretations of the principle of fairness vary, in general an advantage or disadvantage is considered to be undeserved if it results from something other than a person's choices. It would be fair to hunt down a murderer because they chose to commit murder, while it would not be fair to do that same for a goblin just for being a goblin.

When boatbuilders refer to a surface as "fair," they mean "smooth" - there are no features whereby any specific point has dramatically different elevation or curvature than the points around it. This means nothing sticking out, nothing sticking in, and not sharp corners. This serves as an analogy for what the principle of fairness would have hold true for people. (It's not a perfect analogy, because boatbuilders want this shape of hull in order to promote laminar flow of water whereas moral fairness is a principle that stands on its own rather than being a means to some other end, but it is a good analogy nonetheless.)

People who value fairness tend to:

Advocate for a high social mobility on the basis that people's place in society should be determined by their own merits, not the circumstances of their birth.
Praise people for hard work and dedication, not for innate ability. Someone who values fairness is less likely to think of someone as admirable simply for being intelligent or strong - it's what people choose to do with their abilities that defines their moral character.
Believe that people who are born with advantages, or society as a whole, has a moral duty to help people born with disadvantages so as to mitigate the impact of said disadvantages on their life.
Stridently oppose racial (or gender etc.) prejudice. That doesn't necessarily mean that someone who values fairness is incapable of acknowledging that differences between demographic categories can, as a matter of averages, exist. Rather it means that they stridently oppose using those facts about averages to form judgements of individuals.

Of course, not everyone who values fairness will consistently advocate for all of these things. People pick up specific values from their society as well as deriving them from their own foundational values. Someone who values fairness might still believe that orcs are merely dangerous animals, for example.



Have you ever noticed that, when somebody yells at somebody else to "fight fair," they really mean "fight in the manner I am best at fighting, and not in this manner that is letting you win?"


In practice, applying the principle that everyone should play by the same rules always ends up getting involved with the question of what those rules should be, and with the related question of what rules everyone else is actually following. (The question of whether those rules are rules of spirit or rules that are intended to be followed by the letter is a subset of the question of what the rules are. There are both rules of spirit and rules of letter in society; anyone who disagrees on which are which has a subtle disagreement on what the rules are.) That's a convoluted and multifaceted set of issues. The short and simple version is that the default assumptions that a person is likely to have for what the rules in question are is largely dependent on their culture.

There is a major complicating factor that's worth considering here, and that's that the rhetoric of fairness extends beyond the scope of the honest application of the principle of fairness. There are two distinct ways for something to be unfair:
Certain people are explicitly gain special treatment. E.g. in a society made up of primarily monkeys and sentient fish, the fish are forced to pay extra taxes.
The same rules apply to everyone, but those rules are chosen in such a way that they have disproportionate impact on certain people. E.g. in another society composed primarily of monkeys and fish, everyone follows the same rules where how much you have to pay in taxes depends on how well you can climb a tree.

(I've deliberately chosen a slightly silly example here, because I can't think of a realistic example that doesn't come close to a real-world political issue.)

People who value fairness as a moral principle tend to consistently oppose both types of unfairness. However, people who abuse the rhetoric of fairness tend to selectively oppose the first type of unfairness in order to promote the second.

Your example of someone yelling at somebody else to "fight fair" might be an example of someone abusing the rhetoric of fairness in order to create a fight where, technically the same rules apply to everyone, but realistically those rules were chosen in a way that favors them.

On the other hand, your example of someone yelling at someone else to "fight fair" might be a person who comes from a culture with a specific set of ideas about how a fight is supposed to proceed. (These ideas could be linked to expectations about what winning a fight is supposed to prove. For example, if you win a fight with no subterfuge, no luck, and no tricks - just through sheer brute strength - then that proves that you're strong and will therefore likely win the next fight. So, the next fight might not need to actually happen. A threat of violence serves as a preferable substitute for actual violence. This benefit would not have been obtained if you had won that fight through the use of a dirty trick.) The yeller in this example simply sees that the other person is violating those expectations and be attempting to shame them into conforming with them, perhaps not realizing that the other person may have different cultural expectations for what a "fair fight" entails (or even whether a "fair fight" is a desirable thing.)

Fairness is a simple principle in the abstract, but in practice the results of its application depend on a host of other assumptions.

Tanarii
2021-03-15, 03:35 PM
I do not agree with your definitions of fairness. But unfortunately your definitions of fairness are a discussion of real world politics, so we can't pursue it, and I'll have to leave it at that.

Quertus
2021-03-15, 03:40 PM
Wow, I so love the Playground.

So, it's not a "fair / cheating" axis, or a "do your best / sportsmanship" axis, but… a… what? (Also, love that "do your best / sportsmanship" both sound positive)

Also (assuming this fictional example is sufficiently removed from politics), in Star Trek, Georgi is born blind. The Federation expended massive resources to develop and give him a visor to let him see. One culture they met was appalled, and said that they would have killed him at birth. A third fictional faction could easily have done nothing.

Do *any* of those 3 stances register on the "fairness" scale, whatever its endpoints are labeled? Or is that unrelated to fairness, too?

Segev
2021-03-17, 10:08 AM
"...based on their own choices" is a nice-sounding way of putting it, but so is "...based on their own deeds" or "...based on their own talents." The last of which is explicitly called out as being an unfairness in the second numbered sort. Deeds and choices leads to some rather squicky cases, though, too: "Yes, by my choices to betray people and destroy my enemies, I have achieved personal wealth and power. This is totally fair; I have made the best, smartest, most ruthless choices to maximize my gains no matter what the cost to others nor others' expectations of what I would do for them."

Is that a person who is Fair or a Cheater?

I think, instinctively, presented with such a character in fiction, people would view him as "unfair," but if you turn the lens around and are writing a Great Man story or a story about Hard Men Making Hard Choices (both of which tend to be denigrated in most circles I've seen online; I could be mistaken in assuming they would be seen as generally a bad genre around here, though), the will and determination to Make The Hard Choices is what earns one greatness. Possibly wealth, power, influence, etc. as well. It's fair that the Hard Man is Great because his choices and deeds made him so, when others would have quailed at the things he had to do. In the most noble-painting of these narratives, the things he had to do were to achieve success and survival/happiness for a greater number of people than suffered at his deeds, and he may, himself, lament the harm that had to come to the eggs in making his omlettes. Or maybe he just was harsher against Deserving Targets than others would be, or there was some minor collateral damage, or....

Regardless, even saying it's based on "choices" leads to questions of what kinds of choices are "fair" to make. At what point does it stop being about "fairness" for somebody to demand that the terms of an engagement include things he's good at, or disinclude things he's bad at?

Even the example about "winning without trickery, in a straight-forward match of brawn" falls apart if the battle is a battle of champions to prove who could win a protracted fight/war: the level 20 wizard vs. the level 20 fighter in a fight that is only allowed to use nonmagical weapons in nonmagical armor with no spellcasting allowed is not very likely to win (and also more likely to just magic his way out of even having it, no matter how "unfair"). But if the wizard played along and lost, did that really prove that the nation full of level 20 wizards would have lost against the nation full of level 20 fighters if they'd had real wars?

If the big muscle-bound orcs can trounce the clever goblins in physical fights but the goblins are winning the war through trickery and sabotage tactics, does having the wrestling match of champions really prove that the orcs would win every fight and thus the war?

Is even basing it on lack of deceit valid? Does that mean that a chess player who baits his opponent into foolish captures to enable him to gain better board position and win the game is playing unfairly, since he's using deception to fool his opponent into making poor tactical/strategic decisions?

"Fairness" is a vague concept that most, if not all, people have a vague grasp of, and they think they know it when they see it. And, yes, if you have previously agreed upon rules, "fair play" is easily defined. But are the rules themselves fair? That's very much a matter of perspective.

It seems to me that the closest we can get to a "Fair/Cheating" axis is actually "Lawful/Chaotic." :smalleek:

Tanarii
2021-03-17, 11:26 AM
It seems to me that the closest we can get to a "Fair/Cheating" axis is actually "Lawful/Chaotic." :smalleek:
Maybe: Combat-as-Sport vs Combat-as-War?
order is deliberate for enhanced sarcasm.

GreatWyrmGold
2021-03-17, 11:54 AM
How do you all change or replace Alignment to make morality useful in the game?
I don't, I just ignore it. And in 5e, I think that leaving out alignment would be the best solution, because 5e already has a good replacement for alignment—Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws. This fulfils what I see as alignment's primary useful role—defining who characters are—in a much less ambiguous form than alignment.

For instance, and bear with me for a moment, think of the Punisher. What alignment would he be? It would be hard to argue that he's Lawful Good, but you could make a decent argument for either Chaotic Good (he's vigilante-ing outside the rules of conventional superheroes) or Lawful Evil (he does evil acts, but he has a code he lives by). As a member of the Punisher-is-to-murderous-to-be-an-antihero club, I find the latter position more convincing, but there are people who would argue that since he only kills "evil" people he can qualify as Good.
But it's much less ambiguous to see what his Ideal, Bond, and Flaw would be—"No crime should go unpunished," "I love my family more than anything, even in death," and "No measure should be spared in pursuit of justice". You can argue about how I phrase or frame each of those, but the essence of the Punisher's character is clearly conveyed by them.

Of course, while this does a good job of defining who characters individually are, it doesn't do a great job of grouping characters together. (It's arguable how good a job alignment does at that, considering the strange bedfellows it often makes—Frank Castle wouldn't fit comfortably with either the Robin Hoods of CG or the machiavellian schemers of LE—but it does do it.) If you want that aspect of alignment, though, it's better to have a specific system for the specific conflict you want to write about rather than a monolithic alignment system that fits all conflicts equally poorly. Do you want a conflict between a tyrannical state and spunky freedom-fighters? Power versus Freedom. How about between an alliance of all the world's races versus a singularly powerful Big Bad? Collectivism versus self-interest. A shining beacon of purity against the unwashed savage hordes? Maybe pick a less problematically clichéd premise.

Anyways, I'm promoting the Trait/Ideal/Bond/Flaw system not because it's the best for every situation and need, or even because it's the best at what it does (the categories are a bit ambiguous and lack specificity), but because it does something useful for every story, no matter the plot, tone, or context. (Also, because everyone here should be at least vaguely familiar with it.)

Satinavian
2021-03-18, 04:52 AM
It seems to me that the closest we can get to a "Fair/Cheating" axis is actually "Lawful/Chaotic." :smalleek:Not really. Fair is also much about "everyone gets the same share", so egalitarism. Fair people would object to stratified societies and probably abhor slavery, no matter how structured and orderly it is. They would probably also like ideas that sound a bit like proto-communism. They would also not want to reward a protagonist of a Great Man story with special privileges and power. They don't like special privileges.

Also keep in mind that this ideal is only called "fairness", originally it is not paired up with "cheating". Fairness in the sense of "playing by the rules" might have more overlap with authority or loyalty unless you like the rules because they provide everyone with the equal opportunity.

Segev
2021-03-18, 09:39 AM
Not really. Fair is also much about "everyone gets the same share", so egalitarism. Fair people would object to stratified societies and probably abhor slavery, no matter how structured and orderly it is. They would probably also like ideas that sound a bit like proto-communism. They would also not want to reward a protagonist of a Great Man story with special privileges and power. They don't like special privileges.

Also keep in mind that this ideal is only called "fairness", originally it is not paired up with "cheating". Fairness in the sense of "playing by the rules" might have more overlap with authority or loyalty unless you like the rules because they provide everyone with the equal opportunity.

To argue the opposite, and I feel the need to point out that I am not framing an argument about what is "fair," but making one as an example of why the notion of "fairness" is not as easily-agreed-upon as indicated in Satinavian's post, fair people believe that everyone should be rewarded fairly. If somebody works 80 hours a week to make his farm a success, and somebody else slacks off and puts in only a few hours a day and barely gets any crops or milk or anything produced because of it, the fair person would not believe that the two people should pool their farms' outputs and then split the results evenly. A fair person would not see somebody who invested money while scrimping and saving and living frugally standing next to somebody who spent every spare dime on lavish living and expensive vacations, and say, "It's fair to ensure that both of them have the same amount of money now." He would not say that the athlete who worked his whole life to make it to the olympics is being treated fairly when somebody who has been a couch potato is allowed into the same race, and allowed to start closer to the end of the hundred-meter dash so that both have comparable times.

A fair person would be drawn to ideas that promote rewards commensurate with effort/risk. He would see it as fair that the student who put hours into his project gets an A while the student who threw it together at the last minute gets a C, D, or F, and would not approve of a "group project" where all but one student push the work onto that one and make him do all of it, but all of them get the same grade.

In short: I can argue the exact opposite positions as the "fair" ones, and both of us sound convincing. This goes back to the question of "what is fair?"

To the guy getting an equal share of the final results, that seems fair, as long as he doesn't feel like he's getting less out of it than he put in. To the guy getting a bigger share of the final results, that feels fair, as long as he believes he put in more effort/work/quality to generate it. To the guy getting an equal share of the final results, it doesn't feel fair if he believes the others didn't contribute as much. To the guy getting a lesser share of the final results, it doesn't seem fair if he believes the others who got more just got lucky (or worse, somehow sabotaged his efforts or stole from him).

Once again, "fair" seems to be entirely subjective.

Satinavian
2021-03-18, 09:58 AM
In short: I can argue the exact opposite positions as the "fair" ones, and both of us sound convincing. This goes back to the question of "what is fair?"
You could make those arguments and there is certainly no easy way to solve them as those exact arguments arise in the real world all the time.

But in that particular model, fairness is about egalitarism and equality, not about liberalism. There is not really much reason to argue about it.

The model does not say that those valueing fairness as it understands it are right. It is just a description of possible moral stances.


You maybe could argue that the word "fair" is not a good name for that because it might be misunderstood. But the remedy to that would be to call it something else, not to insist that some different mindset should be summed up under fair in the context of this model.


The people making that model tried to observe common principles in the morals of people and then put names to those they found. They did not first decide the names and then argued about the meaning.

Quertus
2021-03-18, 10:37 AM
But it's much less ambiguous to see what his Ideal, Bond, and Flaw would be—"No crime should go unpunished," "I love my family more than anything, even in death," and "No measure should be spared in pursuit of justice". You can argue about how I phrase or frame each of those, but the essence of the Punisher's character is clearly conveyed by them.

I'm… not sure I understand what those are supposed to convey.

But let's try. Traits (rather foolishly, IMO) says to focus on your outlier attributes.

Traits: will respond to being drunk-dialed and invited to a party with, "sorry, I'm in the middle of research".
Ideal: Knowledge is Power.
Bond: Reality is worth preserving.
Flaw: Any who would preserve Reality are allies.

Traits: play boy.
Ideal: fun.
Bond: fun.
Flaw: It's not a "flaw" if you're having fun. No matter who gets hurt.

Traits: will respond to physical confrontations by trying to talk people down.
Ideal: Loyalty is the currency of the realm.
Bond: Blood is thicker than water.
Flaw: If you aren't one of us, you are expendable.

Traits: plucky (should be "hey! Over here! I've drawn a sword! Whatcha gonna do? Never mind the 5d chess board, whatcha gonna do about this obvious sword right here?")
Ideal: No one should suffer so.
Bond: It is not for land or wealth, but for the hearts and souls of men that we fight.
Flaw: Keeping secrets is a form of protection.

Segev
2021-03-18, 10:50 AM
You could make those arguments and there is certainly no easy way to solve them as those exact arguments arise in the real world all the time.

But in that particular model, fairness is about egalitarism and equality, not about liberalism. There is not really much reason to argue about it.

The model does not say that those valueing fairness as it understands it are right. It is just a description of possible moral stances.


You maybe could argue that the word "fair" is not a good name for that because it might be misunderstood. But the remedy to that would be to call it something else, not to insist that some different mindset should be summed up under fair in the context of this model.


The people making that model tried to observe common principles in the morals of people and then put names to those they found. They did not first decide the names and then argued about the meaning.

This tells me "fair" is a bad thing to try to define an objective morality around. With "good" and "evil," even if there is a lot of real-world disagreement over specifics, the broad strokes tend to be held in common. We can see this by examining how people are convinced that what they believed was good was, in fact, not good, in cases where this happens: contradictions between the broad, instinctual feelings and the specific requirements of their belief structure's tennets cause them to recognize that the structural requirements can't be good because they lead to evil.

And people, again, tend to agree on those vague, broad notions of good and evil, even if we can't define them precisely in words. Most moral philosophical systems all sound equally good until you drill down to their nuances.

While we have a similar vague agreement on what is "fair," we also find ourselves unable to even agree on what that looks like. We have literal opposite philosophies on the definition of it. With "good and evil," we at least can all agree that something is more likely to be good if it leads to long-term happiness (ignoring all nuance and corner cases, just a very broad, vague, general statement). With "fairness," we can't even agree if fairness is an equality of outcome, equality of opportunity, risk/effort/reward-based outcomes, or even what constitutes "a fair challenge."

It's a useful word, but it isn't easily agreed-upon in even a broad sense, other than it's a good thing to be "fair."

It's a terrible concept on which to build an objective moral/ethical axis into your setting, because it will not be able to have even broad agreement from most people that it's represented well.

Contrast with the good/evil axis, wherein people have to dig for specific (and oft-agreed-to-be-badly-written) rules on SPECIFIC things that are good and evil to say, "this is clearly bunk and proves Good is not good." If you say "the good celestials" and "the evil fiends," you get a very similar idea of broad, general behaviors they'll exhibit. Kindness is (generally) good; cruelty is (almost always) evil. Generosity is a good impulse (even if there's argument over specific implementations). Selfishness is an evil impulse (even if argument can be made over the difference between selfishness and self-interest). Even if there is debate over value-weights, it is generally accepted that it is evil to cause harm to others who don't deserve it (again, with vagueness accepted over the concept of "deserving," and over what constitutes "causing" vs. "allowing" and all).

It's agreed, generally, that a boy scout helping a little old lady across the street is performing a good act, and a thief who knocks her down to steal her purse is performing an evil act. Sure, you can argue over specifics as to why, or under what contrived circumstances each of those might be acceptable or wicked, but presented as a broad example, just about everybody would agree on the morality of the two acts.

You can get a similar broad agreement regarding "fairness," but it takes a lot more specific assumed context. "Is it fair that Alice should win the contest vs. Bob?" is a question with no answer, because it requires all sorts of context. How you frame the question to include more specifics and exclude other context will shape a lot about what the instinctive, broad-strokes answers will be. In some cases, the valid question is, "Can this contest ever be made fair?" Is it possible to have a "fair" race between an Olympic sprinter and blade runner, without removing the physical differences between their legs entirely (maybe by making it a wheelchair race, or a motorcycle race, or a round of Mario Kart)? You could argue "yes" if you think that measuring the differences between their legs is a valid part of the race, just as measuring the differences between the Olympic runner's body and the couch potato's body is a fair race. You could answer "no" if you think there's no real way to have a fair race between the Olympic runner and the couch potato, as well, since their physical abilities are so different. It all comes down to what is "fair" in a contest, and until we nail it down to a specific, agreed-upon rule set (which, itself, might be deemed "unfair" if it favors one side too much over the other), we just can't give a concrete answer.

Hence why, if you're going to get it down to an objective ethical axis, "fair" more or less equates to our existing Lawful alignment in D&D. A fair fight, a fair contest, a fair outcome is one that results from the agreed-upon rules being followed. And even that is an unsatisfactory definition, since "the rules were unfair!" is something that might come up.

GreatWyrmGold
2021-03-19, 04:38 PM
I'm… not sure I understand what those are supposed to convey.
And I'm not sure what you're trying to convey with your post.


But let's try.
Nor what you're trying. At first I thought you were trying to point out how you could make any character trait into any of the four categories (which, yes, but that's not really relevant to my point, nor is it 100% true, some of those are really stretching), but then I came across this:


Traits: plucky (should be "hey! Over here! I've drawn a sword! Whatcha gonna do? Never mind the 5d chess board, whatcha gonna do about this obvious sword right here?")
Ideal: No one should suffer so.
Bond: It is not for land or wealth, but for the hearts and souls of men that we fight.
Flaw: Keeping secrets is a form of protection.
and thought "Hey, this is the outline of an actual character." Obnoxious and secretive, but good-hearted and selfless.



Contrast with the good/evil axis, wherein people have to dig for specific (and oft-agreed-to-be-badly-written) rules on SPECIFIC things that are good and evil to say, "this is clearly bunk and proves Good is not good." If you say "the good celestials" and "the evil fiends," you get a very similar idea of broad, general behaviors they'll exhibit.
I'd argue that this is less because the good/evil axis is actually a better basis for an objective standard of morality, and more that attempts have been made to define good and evil as something that sounds like objective morality.

I'll agree that the resulting circular morality is sturdier than one built on as vague yet distinct a concept as "fairness". Fairness is unclear enough that you can make an argument for just about any direction, but clear enough that you can't really just argue that the allegedly fair thing is unfair.
I feel like this sounds like nonsense, so let me try a specific example. Snidely Whiplash wants to tear down the community orphanage. He could make two possible arguments:
"It's good to tear down the orphanage." It's hard to see how he could follow up on this; "good" isn't well-defined enough for a complex argument, and most people understand that forcing orphans to live in the street is not that on a gut level.
"It's fair to tear down the orphanage." It would be possible—even simple—to follow this up with an explanation of how the members of the community are forced to give up the sweat of their brow to support these orphans who do nothing except slowly grow up. Once this standard of fairness is established, you have to either bypass it ("It doesn't matter how fair it is, it's cartoonishly evil"), somehow explain how making people pay for something is "fair," or overturn the definition of fairness. This last one is tougher than it sounds—any attempt to focus on, say, the plight of the orphans and asking how it's fair for them can be branded as "avoiding the question".
TL;DR: It's easier to subvert a concept at the level of vagueness of "fair" than it is to subvert one a bit vaguer (like "good") or a bit more clear (...I can't think of any example that I think would actually make a good basis of morality, but some people have tried "obedience to X," and it's hard to twist that).

Segev
2021-03-19, 11:46 PM
It's easier to subvert a concept at the level of vagueness of "fair" than it is to subvert one a bit vaguer (like "good") or a bit more clear (...I can't think of any example that I think would actually make a good basis of morality, but some people have tried "obedience to X," and it's hard to twist that).

I would argue that "good" is less vague than "fair," and that's precisely why it is something you can design something with agreement on the broad strokes around.

It isn't circular to use common ground for the basis of your definition.

OldTrees1
2021-03-20, 07:38 AM
I would argue that "good" is less vague than "fair," and that's precisely why it is something you can design something with agreement on the broad strokes around.

It isn't circular to use common ground for the basis of your definition.

1) Is Good less vague than Fair? Yes and no, but in practice more yes than no.
Just like there are conflicting views on what fair is, there are conflicting views on what is good. Fair is less vague because the disagreement is about which fairness is being talked about (equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome as one example) rather than about which definitions are valid in the first place. On the other hand good is less vague because there is some common ground on the broad strokes (aka the easy questions).

2) Fairness is like Law/Order in that it has a split personality. Law/Order could easily be divided into Law (accepting authority) or Order (structured patterns). Segev, you did a decent job of demonstrating this on the fairness side.

3) That said, can we fix "fairness" to fit a single axis? Perhaps. What if we have the axis measure how much they care about "fairness" rather than a particular position on what is fair? People that ping strongly might not agree with one another, but they we agree that they all care deeply about the topic. People that anti-ping strongly would be seeking to gain advantages, to make it unfair in their favor.

Kane0
2021-03-20, 04:16 PM
What i’m gathering over the course of this thread is that we cant use any existing moral concepts because we dont have an objective one to start with.
So we probably need to invent an objective morality that we can use for whatever game the morality system is inserted into.
Which ironically is something like how the alignment system is presented.

Segev
2021-03-20, 04:23 PM
On the other hand good is less vague because there is some common ground on the broad strokes (aka the easy questions).

I think the best way to put my position, in reference to this framing, is that I say "good" is less vague because it has "the easy questions" to ask which require extensive nuance to twist up. Whereas "fair" has "easy questions" that require unspoken assumptions in order to hold, and require very little nuance to throw out of kilter. Though I'll allow/acknowledge that "amount of nuance" might, itself, be subjective.

Morphic tide
2021-03-21, 10:32 PM
Personally, I just want Cosmic Alignment to not be prescriptive morality, but run into the problem of figuring out an alternative second axis that still pattern-matches to the Great Wheel cosmology. The nearest I've worked out is something I can't quite figure out fitting words for, both in terms of not ascribing moral valuation and in terms of fitting nicely with the Law/Chaos "feel": Selfishness vs. Altruism, where Lawful "Good" is about the society at large, Lawful "Evil" is about the interests of the ruler, Chaotic "Evil" is about pure self interest, and Chaotic "Good" is about doing whatever you can to help others.

This would involve a massive amount of reworking particulars (Mind Rape and other such pure domination being [Law]-tagged, for example, as the objectionable thing of it isn't about personal benefit but stripping of freedoms), but the broad structure would remain the same, and the general Protagonist and Antagonist categories are unchanged. But if your players have issues with hardened social structures, then Celestia's going to be pushing buttons hard with coming down with a bag of hammers on any of them trying for pure shameless freedom-fighting. No, you don't get to be a Paladin just tearing down Evil Empires, you have to have a hand in putting together a replacement authority structure that is an actual authority, and not in the de jure hands off modern sense, but in the sense where promotion of some manner of in-group is on the books law, even if it's a form of civic nationalism. Though usually it's going to be a theocracy for the Paladin's patron deity.

It also means that the temptress archetype can actually work because they're not bound to be sadistic rapists who are lying to your face and need to mind control the PC. Particularly with Erinyes being fallen angels, so they understand the Celestial-bothering Paladin mindset excellently and can give genuinely solid deals, usually only presenting the rather limited set that don't result in Falling, generally being to do with granting Law-associated things and working against Demons.

GreatWyrmGold
2021-03-22, 02:23 PM
If you want to stick with the Great Wheel cosmology but don't want to stick with the prescriptive-morality that the standard alignment system implies, I'd suggest making "alignments" more like "allegiances". Good and Evil become Light and Dark, two opposed factions of gods and divine servants; Law and Chaos become Order and Freedom, two different philosophies of how to achieve those factions' ends. Most servants of Light by Order may resemble a standard lawful-good archetype, but they don't have to—if they serve a being of Light and Order, they're considered to be in that corner, regardless of their personal ideals or actions.

This brings the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil down to the level of, say, the Cold War—a struggle between groups who are ideologically opposed, but perhaps more similar than they'd like to admit. Whether that's a bug or a feature depends on how you use it and what you hope to achieve.

Telok
2021-03-22, 04:21 PM
If you want to stick with the Great Wheel cosmology but don't want to stick with the prescriptive-morality that the standard alignment system implies, I'd suggest making "alignments" more like "allegiances". Good and Evil become Light and Dark, two opposed factions of gods and divine servants; Law and Chaos become Order and Freedom, two different philosophies of how to achieve those factions' ends. Most servants of Light by Order may resemble a standard lawful-good archetype, but they don't have to—if they serve a being of Light and Order, they're considered to be in that corner, regardless of their personal ideals or actions.

This brings the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil down to the level of, say, the Cold War—a struggle between groups who are ideologically opposed, but perhaps more similar than they'd like to admit. Whether that's a bug or a feature depends on how you use it and what you hope to achieve.

Did that, it worked fine.

Diety of necromancy was also the diety of reincarnation and Dark aligned, and all necromancy was Dark aligned, so coming back from the dead was a "dark" thing. Calling up the spirit of old uncle bob to clarify his will was also "dark" and way more common than, say a skeleton army. Of course the sun & law diety's inqusition was going to burn you at the stake for violating the natural order and using "evil" magic.

Many necromancers were nasty zombie army types and many sun priests were nice community oriented healers. But decoupling alignment from morals and making deities non-moral cosmic forces let me have more variety in npcs and setting bits.

Morphic tide
2021-03-22, 05:42 PM
I'm not wanting a voluntary allegiance, I just want to decouple the "moral" axis from being prescriptive "Good" and "Evil". I want to keep the Tanar'ri being legalistic dominators, but want that to be consistent instead of abridged the moment temptation plots arrive and make that not the only form of Lawful "Evil". By using Light/Dark, it breaks the opportunity to have Fomorians assaulting Mount Celestia with their own interpretation of communal goods to end up with eusocial insects fighting angels with both being valid Lawful "Good", or Abyssal Druids that are obsessed with competition rather than needing to degenerate to parasitism and decay.

Having Gnolls and Beholders fighting against cyberpunk libertarians right at home in the Abyss while Illithids have enclaves in Baator that are a constant thorn in Azmodeus' side because they pop up every time an Elder Brain dies. A non-Abyssal Succubus remains a Succubus, a Fallen Angel is still an Angel, but there's still aspects that change in response to their turn utterly inherent in changing the Outer Plane they're affiliated with. If a Succubus becomes Lawful, they're still founded on carnality, but shift to being a harsh matron. A Solar joining the forces of Baator is still a beacon of cleansing light, but it becomes a source of domination rather than alms and boons. Aesthetics are mutable, but function has limits.

OldTrees1
2021-03-22, 09:29 PM
I just want to decouple the "moral" axis from being prescriptive "Good" and "Evil".


the opportunity to have Fomorians assaulting Mount Celestia with their own interpretation of communal goods to end up with eusocial insects fighting angels with both being valid Lawful "Good"

Sounds like you already know what you are replacing it with, you just need new names? Altruism and Self Interest should be reasonable. Both have a positive connotation with a hidden dark side proportional to the positive connotation*.

* Yes, some forms or extremes of altruism can be dystopian.

GreatWyrmGold
2021-03-23, 08:46 AM
Having Gnolls and Beholders fighting against cyberpunk libertarians right at home in the Abyss...
Alright, yeah, that sounds rad. But I'm not sure what you want alignment to be. What is it that unites the gnolls, beholders, and cyberpunk libertarians? Or for that matter, what unites them with the Abyssal druids obsessed with competition. What makes all of these different kinds of people CE/Abyssal/whatever? Why are they living in the same corner of the cosmos?

Morphic tide
2021-03-23, 02:04 PM
Alright, yeah, that sounds rad. But I'm not sure what you want alignment to be. What is it that unites the gnolls, beholders, and cyberpunk libertarians? Or for that matter, what unites them with the Abyssal druids obsessed with competition. What makes all of these different kinds of people CE/Abyssal/whatever? Why are they living in the same corner of the cosmos?
Because all three are vicious self-interest in the fashion of disregarding structure. The Gnolls are violent cannibalistic marauders, the Beholders are egotists that are either borderline solipsistic or brutal in pushing their exact personal form depending on edition, and the cyberpunk libertarians are generally full "Screw You, Got Mine" Randian types, while the Druid is all in on predation, having rather pointed issues with accepting that pack hunters and herding are prevalent facts of nature.

Basically, they're all flavors of rampant individualism absent any hierarchies beyond personal influence. Cooperation is by raw necessity, the imposition of the strong, or mutual benefit. The AnCap paradise is in a small corner of Ysgard, while the Abyssals are very much cyberpunk conglomerates being harshly limited in totality of exploitation by the fact there's no outside state to guarantee debt, and trying to become one with public acceptance results in your location moving to Hades if not Baator. Lot more Plane-shuffling going on than canon since real ideologies have so many ways they can twist to fit a different Outer Plane from what's initially expected.

GreatWyrmGold
2021-03-23, 05:35 PM
Because all three are vicious self-interest in the fashion of disregarding structure. The Gnolls are violent cannibalistic marauders, the Beholders are egotists that are either borderline solipsistic or brutal in pushing their exact personal form depending on edition, and the cyberpunk libertarians are generally full "Screw You, Got Mine" Randian types, while the Druid is all in on predation, having rather pointed issues with accepting that pack hunters and herding are prevalent facts of nature.

Basically, they're all flavors of rampant individualism absent any hierarchies beyond personal influence. Cooperation is by raw necessity, the imposition of the strong, or mutual benefit. The AnCap paradise is in a small corner of Ysgard, while the Abyssals are very much cyberpunk conglomerates being harshly limited in totality of exploitation by the fact there's no outside state to guarantee debt, and trying to become one with public acceptance results in your location moving to Hades if not Baator. Lot more Plane-shuffling going on than canon since real ideologies have so many ways they can twist to fit a different Outer Plane from what's initially expected.
So law/chaos is replaced with collectivism/individualism, while good/evil is...actually, I'm not sure. The only good thing you've identified with anything except D&D monsters is an "AnCap paradise," which mostly makes me wonder what you think the difference between an anarcho-capitalist paradise and a Randian dystopia is.

OldTrees1
2021-03-23, 05:58 PM
So law/chaos is replaced with collectivism/individualism, while good/evil is...actually, I'm not sure. The only good thing you've identified with anything except D&D monsters is an "AnCap paradise," which mostly makes me wonder what you think the difference between an anarcho-capitalist paradise and a Randian dystopia is.

It sounds the other way around to me. They replaced good/evil with collectivism/individualism.

Now celestials will argue the good of the many outweigh the good of the one. This leads to the virtue of self sacrifice and the vice of excessive self sacrifice. On the other end you have fiends that focus on self interest. Selfishness being a common vice. But self interest can be a virtue.

That is probably the easiest way to decouple good/evil from celestial/fiends as we know them.

Morphic tide
2021-03-23, 06:54 PM
So law/chaos is replaced with collectivism/individualism, while good/evil is...actually, I'm not sure. The only good thing you've identified with anything except D&D monsters is an "AnCap paradise," which mostly makes me wonder what you think the difference between an anarcho-capitalist paradise and a Randian dystopia is.
Well, with regard to the difference between the extremes of Randianism ("Randian dystopia" has the secondary meaning of the society depicted in Atlas Shrugged) and AnCap paradise, it comes down to stability. The cyberpunk Abyssal residents can't do the de-facto slavery expected, but also can't maintain cohesion and stability any wider than the reach of a given strongman. Every person that arrives must be self-interested and disapproving of hard structures, or else they wouldn't have went to the Abyss for their afterlife, which ultimately means the only Anarcho-Capitalist problem solved is the matter of monolithic megacorps owning everything because there's no outside authority to enforce that ownership and nobody's a passive follower who will just sit down and be exploited.

As for the Good/Evil replacement...


It sounds the other way around to me. They replaced good/evil with collectivism/individualism.

Now celestials will argue the good of the many outweigh the good of the one. This leads to the virtue of self sacrifice and the vice of excessive self sacrifice. On the other end you have fiends that focus on self interest. Selfishness being a common vice. But self interest can be a virtue.

That is probably the easiest way to decouple good/evil from celestial/fiends as we know them.
Basically this, yes. It's the Good/Evil replaced here, not Law/Chaos. It's a fine line, but can work well as a difference between means and ends, as well as degrees of obligation. Baator isn't rampantly individualist, they're an unholy amalgamation of every top-down authority system run for the benefit of the leader in one form or another, because Azmodeus is In Charge and thus has a very nearly insurmountable home-field advantage.

A major thing to note would be leveraging alien psychology like Heinlein did in Starship Troopers, wherein Communism was claimed to not be functional by human nature, followed by introducing non-human enemies that it was, in fact, functional for in the Bugs: Baator, Hades, and the Abyss suck for the standard races... Because humans, elves, dwarves, and so on have psychological needs and beliefs ingrained by the conditions of societies able to survive D&D nonsense rendering them a poor fit.

Gnolls and harpies don't find issues with the Abyss not because they've never had the chance to civilize, but because they, and most of the other "savage" races one expects to be Chaotic Evil, have considerably greater innate abilities than the standard races leading to rather little need to, and by extension little want. Illithids just have issues with who's in charge in Baator, the basic structure of it makes perfect sense for their blend of wholesale slavery and nigh-eusocial behavior.

Cluedrew
2021-03-23, 07:18 PM
What constitutes "fair" and what is "cheating?" Obviously, "cheating" can be defined as going against agreed-upon rules, but do you go with the letter or spirit of them?The Trickster: "I'm not cheating, I never agreed to your rules in the first place."


I would argue that "good" is less vague than "fair," and that's precisely why it is something you can design something with agreement on the broad strokes around.I am going to agree but for a slightly different reason: The word fairness actually covers several different concepts. This is just kind of an organizational difference but it does mean you could have an alignment axis that measures someone's primary value of fairness (say opportunity to reward).