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Cyclone231
2008-03-12, 07:52 PM
tl;dr: Nobody worries about whether or not a Mind Flayer is really evil, and there are never debates about the ethics of mass-slaughtering Mind Flayers. However, humanoids with basically human psychologies and arbitrary "often evil" alignments do produce it. Alignment ends up being a crutch in the generation of a humanoid cannon-fodder race. If we remove alignment, a real reason for a race being cannon-fodder will have to be added.

Now, you might be saying, "what the hell kind of question is that?" so allow me to explain.

Let's go with the example of orcs.

In typical D&D, orcs have the "often chaotic evil" alignment. However, they are not clearly given moral reasons to be that way - they just Are. Indeed, "often X" as an alignment doesn't even mean that most members of a given race are that way!

So we go into a village full of orcs, intending to slaughter the military age males (probably also any children that try to fight us off as well) because they are, I don't know, raiding a nearby village for food.

BUT - not all of those orcs are evil. Indeed, a significant number are probably neutral. And there are probably even a few of them who are good, there must be a second side to the story. But no, we just kill them all because none of them ask for a diplomatic meeting in the middle of a skirmish.

This is really the problem with a lot of the "evil" monster races - they're just arbitrarily given evil alignments without any explanation. Does anybody worry about whether or not Mind Flayers are really evil? No. Does anybody complain about the morality of slaughtering Mind Flayer villages?

Why is this? It's not because the Mind Flayers are any different, statistically, from the orcs in this regard. It's because they are a real, true, brutal kind of evil. It's clear why they're evil and elves aren't - they hunt other intelligent creatures, they take slaves, they make brutal empires to maintain their society's need for human sacrifice. And it's also clear why this is a racial thing and not a cultural thing - they have a biological imperative to eat other intelligent beings, and much of their biological and social structures also require killing other intelligent creatures (creating new mind flayers, protecting themselves from retaliatory strikes, et cetera).

So, let's suppose for a moment, that we remove alignment from D&D. What will happen to orcs? Either they will be given clear biological/psychological reasons to be monsters or they will be find a role other than "cannon fodder". And if their alien psychology makes them a consistent threat, the players won't have to worry about whether this orc is evil or not, any more than they have to worry about whether this mind flayer is evil or not.

BRC
2008-03-12, 07:54 PM
It would, however, too many game mechanics are dependant on alignment. For example, Smite Evil. Heck, the entire paladin class.

Frosty
2008-03-12, 07:57 PM
Didn't we *do* this like 3 weeks or a month ago? We had like 4 different threads about alignment. One specifically about orcs.

Cyclone231
2008-03-12, 08:00 PM
Didn't we *do* this like 3 weeks or a month ago? We had like 4 different threads about alignment. One specifically about orcs.

We do alignment debates about once every three seconds around these parts.

But links, if you could?

Paragon Badger
2008-03-12, 08:02 PM
It would, however, too many game mechanics are dependant on alignment. For example, Smite Evil. Heck, the entire paladin class.

I'd rule that in such a case, a Paladin just needs strong conviction in his or her own sense of 'good'.

If they betray themselves, they fall.

Now, if you are so utterly convinced that what you're doing is right...

For detect evil, I'd say it allows the detecter to gain some insight on the creature's self-perceived 'high' and 'low' points. As for outsiders who are evil/good personified? Nothing needs to change, mechanically. :smalltongue:

Kantolin
2008-03-12, 08:14 PM
To be totally honest, most people who would just walk into an orc camp and kill all orcs there... in theory, at least, have good reason for it, as in the vast majority of campagins, the orcs - usually to the exclusion of all else - dash around kidnapping, killing, and raping nearby settlements.

Or, to be less generalizing like that, they may have done so in the immediate past, and therefore be at essentially a state of war.

Even if not, it's possible that orcs and let's say humans are currently at a state of war over what was originally land disputes, or a misunderstanding, or any of a dozen of reasons.

Alignment-reasons to go kill orcs has no part in the above - it'd be reasonable for a good orc to kill the adventurers defending his home, just as it'd be reasonable for a good adventurer to kill said orc.

I suppose the actual point of the above is that, whether or not alignment exists, the scenarios you mentioned can happen - it's up to the DM to alter things such that that isn't the case - perhaps by having the orcs attempt a noncombattive or more defensive solution to the problem.

So in-character, I don't see removing alignment as solving the problem in general, especially given that orcs (and most if not all humanoids) are 'often' and not 'always'

On a more out of character standpoint, a good amount of groups prefer just having some group, preferably identifiably, to go smack around and have it be the right thing to do. I've seen the 'bad guy group' range from always-wearing-black-robes-evil-cultists to evil-rogues-of-the-evil-thieves'-guild, not to mention along racial lines.

If a given group is that way, then that's fine - nothing's wrong with that, and I know of several people who use D&D to 'unwind', and just roam around killing drow and chatting with obviously-good people.

If, however, the DM suggests the goal is to do more than that, then it's up to the DM to put situations like that in game. Perhaps have the goblin tribe offer the group what money they have to make them go away, or perhaps have a hobgoblin attempt to start trade with either the PCs or the nearby town. Humanize them a bit.

This requires, among other things, good communication with your players - I, for one, would love that type of game. Other people, however, don't want to deal with moral dilemmas and the like and just want to go smack around Duergar.

So eh. I suppose what this long rant means is that no, I don't think removing alignment would particularly alter this. If anything, some players I know of are apparantly only halted from slaughtering babies by the fact that their character sheet says 'Neutral good' on it. >_> But that's a story for a different day.

Theodoxus
2008-03-12, 08:30 PM
My next game, I'm adopting a lot from Iron Heroes, which throws out alignment (along with the Paladin). So I've given this topic some thought. I've decided to bring the Paladin back in, but without alignment restrictions. The premise is that while the PCs are unaligned for all intents, the various creatures around them aren't, necessarily.

Paladins will basically be fighters with a code, which grants them specific abilities. The player can write their own code, or choose from a list. Either way, they'll be responsible for sticking with that code, and should they deviate, they fall. (Without divine magic, atonement is more akin to a personal quest - so it will be far less likely to fall than the 'traditional' Paladin.

As for the general player character, I find alignment is very restrictive to most players who see it as a straight-jacket, no matter how often one says its more of a guideline. I guess there were a lot of punitive DMs re: alignment in the 80s, which is when most of my players got their start.

Anyway, other than weaking divination magic, removing alignment won't do much negative damage. It would even make the game more interesting if there were no alignments for anything... you'd never know if the mind flayer you just incorporated into your party was hanging out to help, or because a party is a convenient smorgasbord.

Kantolin
2008-03-12, 08:39 PM
you'd never know if the mind flayer you just incorporated into your party was hanging out to help, or because a party is a convenient smorgasbord.

To be fair, you'd never know that with or without alignment.

If you detect evil him and get a 'yes', you then can guesstimate that whatever he's doing probably isn't for the sake of goodness and virtue, but that doesn't mean much... he could be told by a greater power than himself to go kill let's say the mafia becuase the mafia is edging in on his boss's money.

GammaPaladin
2008-03-12, 09:01 PM
I still think the system I use when I run games works best. There are very few evil or good creatures. Almost everyone is neutral. Only completely depraved serial killer types and demons are evil. Only totally selfless, saintlike humans manage to acquire "good". Everyone else detects as neutral, and doesn't count for smiting or anything of that sort.

I also rule that good/evil alignment is not about your personality. It's purely about what you have done in your life. It's basically a sort of taint that clings to your soul (For evil), due to doing truly evil actions (And I'm not talking picking pockets here), or a brilliant energy that suffuses it when you do good deeds (And again, this has to be Mother Teresa type stuff, not just a minor good deed). They cancel each other out too, so you can redeem yourself for evil deeds with sufficient good deeds.

It just creates a bit more ambiguity when almost everyone shows up as neutral, and I think it doesn't really gimp paladins too badly.

Of course, I also remove the evil descriptor from most necromantic spells, which most people get all annoyed about, but in my opinion it's what you use the spell for that counts. Raising a corpse as a zombie isn't really a big deal if it was already dead. In objective, completely divorced from human emotion type terms, it doesn't matter. You're just animating an object, because that's all a corpse is. Now if you lure people into your lair and kill them to make zombies for your legion of the dead, that's entirely different, and will most definitely earn you evil points.

Hal
2008-03-12, 10:07 PM
I think it just depends on the type of players you have.

Some people need boundaries. The "specific" guidelines of aligment (your mileage may vary) give you a defined area to work with, giving you direction for character growth and action. You have some idea of how to play the character in a way that is true to him, not just playing him in a metagaming way every time.

Other people feel restricted by it. They find the definitions too vague and nebulous and would rather play to the personality of their character rather than the alignment, which can feel arbitrary. It's tiring to examine every decision: Was this really lawful? Am I acting in an un-chaotic way by doing this? And so on.

Of course, the latter player might end up reverting into the standard Chaotic Neutral/Evil "kill everything and sort out the treasure later" style of player, while the former ends up doing nothing because they hem and haw all day long about what actions would be true to the character. Ultimately, just go with what works for your group and worry about the rest later.

Scintillatus
2008-03-12, 10:15 PM
The definition of law, chaos, good and evil change from person to person. What you might judge as an evil act, I might judge as an act of great good. What you might call lawful, I might think of as chaotic. The ethical limitations of a nine-choice grid really don't represent the wealth of human philosophies.

Mix in wholly alien mindsets (borne of eternal life, for example), and things change even further.

Removing alignment doesn't reduce moral dilemmas, it makes them far more enjoyable. You can't end an argument by casting "detect evil" any more.

Avor
2008-03-12, 10:16 PM
I love the undead, no moral issues come up. Zombies don't have children, innocent, daily lives, and culture.

I don't mind alingment, I accualy beleive in moral objectivity, that some things are totaly black and white.

Mind you, in my D&D world, race does not determin alignment. Ask the Sam-orc hai, super samurai orks, LG for the most part. Or LG depending on the campian :P

Chronos
2008-03-12, 10:43 PM
You can't really remove alignment from the game. You can remove all of the magical effects which relate to alignment, and you can stop talking about alignment, but alignment, or something so close to it as to be indistinguishable, is still there. Some creatures are bloodthirsty savages. If you find out that something is a bloodthirsty savage, you fight it. Maybe you don't use the e-word to describe it, but it still does deeds which make it worth opposing. Likewise, some creatures dedicate their lives to helping those in need. Whether you call them good or not, they're still the ones you want to be friendly with. And the dilemma of orcs would remain: If the tribe of orcs camped in the wilderness outside the village is planning on looting or plundering the village, you go try to prevent them from plundering the village. Yeah, maybe some of them are basically decent, and just trying to feed their families or whatnot, but they're still your enemies (unless you can find some way to come to terms with them). How is this any different from saying that orcs are "often chaotic evil"?

The_Blue_Sorceress
2008-03-12, 10:59 PM
Except people often forget that orcs are usually chaotic evil because that's how their god made them and how he wants them to stay, thus in orcish societies those who exhibit behavior that would be classified as evil and chaotic is rewarded (so long as it doesn't tear down the society as a whole) and other kinds of behavior are repressed and punished, probably violently. We're not talking about a few bad seeds, we're talking about an entire group of sentient beings that glorify everything that is abominable, for example wanton slaughter, torture for the pleasure of torture, violent rape and pretty much anything else unpleasant that may come to mind.

It doesn't justify killing baby orcs, but it puts laying waste to an orc encampment into perspective. It's not just cultural differences like we see in the real world, not, let us be clear on this, a mere difference of opinions, it's orcs way of doing things being wholly incompatible with the survival of not just individual humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and so on, but with that of all human, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes etc.

Even if you take alignment out of the equation, they still want every member or every other sentient race dead or enslaved and forced to suffer for their amusement. If orcs were the sort to write religious texts, that would be the big pay off in their version of the Book of Revelations.

Congratulations! For:

a.) being an orc
b.) worshiping Gruumsh
c.) helping bring about orcish world domination by killing all those lesser beings

you get to indulge all your most heinous desires on pretty much anything you can get your mitts on! Have fun!

It boggles my mind that people can accept magic without the blink of an eye, but not a species that has been created by a malevolent god and shaped over the centuries into a group of violent killers.

-Blue

Citizen Joe
2008-03-12, 11:31 PM
They (the orcs) are not Us (whoever we are, possibly even another orc tribe). They are consuming our resources and threatening our land (by simply being near). Thus They need to be destroyed so that We can prosper.

You have to remember that We are upper tier predators and We are territorial. It doesn't matter if They are neutral non-combatants, They are competition or prey.

When you remove the objective 'Good' and 'Evil' and replace it with "Good for Us" and "Bad for Us" then morality becomes much simpler and defined.

Cyclone231
2008-03-13, 12:13 AM
Except people often forget that orcs are usually chaotic evil because that's how their god made them and how he wants them to stay, thus in orcish societies those who exhibit behavior that would be classified as evil and chaotic is rewarded (so long as it doesn't tear down the society as a whole) and other kinds of behavior are repressed and punished, probably violently. We're not talking about a few bad seeds, we're talking about an entire group of sentient beings that glorify everything that is abominable, for example wanton slaughter, torture for the pleasure of torture, violent rape and pretty much anything else unpleasant that may come to mind.

It doesn't justify killing baby orcs, but it puts laying waste to an orc encampment into perspective. It's not just cultural differences like we see in the real world, not, let us be clear on this, a mere difference of opinions, it's orcs way of doing things being wholly incompatible with the survival of not just individual humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and so on, but with that of all human, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes etc. This is really my problem with applying alignment the way it tends to be applied to humanoids - even though orcs are a sentient species, it assumes that almost all orc cultures are evil. It's ludicrous to believe that an entire species worth of tribes, city-states and nations is evil, or even primarily evil, without some sort of biological explanation.

Congratulations! For:

a.) being an orc
b.) worshiping Gruumsh
c.) helping bring about orcish world domination by killing all those lesser beings

you get to indulge all your most heinous desires on pretty much anything you can get your mitts on! Have fun!I dunno, I don't get off on sadism, and I'm confused how a civilization can exist that does.

It boggles my mind that people can accept magic without the blink of an eye, but not a species that has been created by a malevolent god and shaped over the centuries into a group of violent killers.Because it's stupid? Any god who has exerted so much control as to unify orcish culture and morality across campaign settings should probably have just killed or enslaved the other cultures himself.

Tengu
2008-03-13, 12:41 AM
*rolls a will saving throw to argue with all the Moral Objectivist arguments on the way, passes*

As almost every single non-DND roleplaying game shows, you can have a complex world with moral dilemmas without an alignment system.

Diamondeye
2008-03-13, 04:05 AM
This is really my problem with applying alignment the way it tends to be applied to humanoids - even though orcs are a sentient species, it assumes that almost all orc cultures are evil. It's ludicrous to believe that an entire species worth of tribes, city-states and nations is evil, or even primarily evil, without some sort of biological explanation.

The fact that they are a separate species is a biological explaination.

In fact, they're a separate species created by an evil god. There's no particular reason they can't be generally evil. Assuming that all humanoid species are just like humans, but look different, and necessarily would have the same range and distribution of moralities that humans have if they were in the same environments, is not a valid assumption.

If you're playing D&D with the alignment system as written, you're already playing in a world with large numbers of sapient species. However, the qualities of those species are dictated by the dieties that are their patrons; they didn't arise over time from evolution in any setting I've ever seen.

Some of those dieties are good and evil according to what the game says is good and evil. Objective morality is very easy to understand and use in D&D is you simply understand this: What's good and evil is so because the book/DM says so. It's true within the game world. It may or may not match up to any given interpretation of good and evil in real life, but it doesn't need to. All it needs is for the participants to be able to say "We understand that X things/deeds are good and Y are evil for purposes of this game, and if that doesn't mate up exactly with our real-world ides, that's fine."

The second part of this is that alignment should follow from behavior, not the reverse. Orcs are generally evil because they engage heavily in activities that are evil according to the game's system. They engage in those activities because Gruumsh made them that way/commands them to. That's the cause of them being evil, not the effect.

The best example I've ever seen so far, in terms of both making alignment work and in terms of matching character personalities to alignment is Neverwinter Nights 2. For those who haven't played, there is a 100 point scale for good/evil and another for lawful/chaotic. When you interact with other characters, your choices move you one way or the other on one or both scales, in a varying number of points; 10 is the most prfound change I've seen so far.

Note that your alignment will therefore follow from your actions. if you consistently do evil things you accumulate evil points, and shift in that direction. Move far enough and your alignment will change to neutral or evil if it wasn't already.

This system also illustrates that alignments can be strong or weak. A character that is at 100/100 is strongly lawful good; one that is at 80/100 is just as good, but significantly less lawful, although still lawful enough to fall into that category.

Alignment works well when you put aside real-world moral debate and agree to assume that for game purposes alignment isobjective according to the written standard. It works best when alignment is based on actions rather than course of action being chosen based on alignment. Alignment change should be expected as experiences change a character and their views are shaped by life.

Bryn
2008-03-13, 04:35 AM
It would, however, too many game mechanics are dependant on alignment. For example, Smite Evil. Heck, the entire paladin class.

I haven't had much trouble removing alignment in the past. For alignment-dependent things, I either removed them or made them apply against everyone. For example, Detect Evil got removed, while Paladins got to use their abilities against everyone (it's hardly the most powerful class anyway). Protection from [Alignment] got combined into one Protection spell.

I was playing in Eberron, though, where alignment isn't so much of an issue anyway, which made things somewhat easier.

I didn't say that characters could not have moral beliefs, of course, but they're not imposed on the characters by the universe.

KIDS
2008-03-13, 04:52 AM
Exactly the opposite in fact. Removing alignment would increase moral dillemas and ethical complexity of the game. Or at very least it would eliminate all the side clutter of misunderstanding that it causes.

My reasons for this are that I have seen dozens, literally dozens of games, ruined by the alignment system. For example, games which had good intriguing plot with hidden villains, but disintegrated into waves of shouting "he's evil!" or "he's good!" or whatever and any moral ambiguity lost in this shortcut.
Also, Alignment is extremely poorly defined. There are no boundaries, scales and even the internal list of attributes for each alignment is not consistent with each other.
Oh you can as DM say "I know 100% this is Lawful, thus the system is well defined", but examples are against you. In that case that would only mean that you are instituting some tyranny into place before complaints come, not that you're right.

Now if you ask me, I personally slightly like alignment because it is a handy shortcut when imagining how your character generally is in terms of personality. But it is misused so frequently that rare are the games which haven't had ideas and character concepts killed off by "no that's lawful neutral" statements, that in fact this misuse forms a lion's share of all arguments in D&D games. This is unnecessary, massively outweighs the benefits and should be removed.

Mind you, I have seen all of this and am writing this after playing D&D for about 5 years. But people who started with the early editions admit that they have been having the same arguments for 30 years now! But why has everyone been having the same arguments?

This is not because the alignment system is an intriguing and masterwork piece of work like Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" or Munch's "Scream" which has thousands of different layers and evokes different responses from everyone. This is simply because it is a poorly defined system, tremendously bullying in terms of killing character concepts (no lawful bards or neutral monks? Come on!) and causes unnecessary conflicts.

This is basically my response to anyone having troubles with determining alignment and I hope to see the entire system removed in the future, or at least massively reduced in its importance.

Roderick_BR
2008-03-13, 05:04 AM
It would reduce moral dilemmas. Players would kill anything and claim that they don't need to bother if they are evil or not.

Xuincherguixe
2008-03-13, 05:42 AM
No. It would not reduce moral dilemmas.

The alignment system imposes dilemmas, because it just doesn't make any sense. If something is made to be evil, can you really blame it for being evil? The answer you're supposed to have is "Yes. It's evil." But, if you actually think about it a bit, it's not an easy answer.

Without alignment, you can't just use it as a scape goat, "Oh hey, I can kill them because they detect as evil."


The people who feel they no longer need the "They're evil" as an excuse to murder everything pretty much ARE evil. And frankly, they probably should have been killing neutral and good people all along really.

But mindless slaughter is boring. Have some fun with it!

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-13, 06:47 AM
Removing Alignment replaces one kind of moral dilemma with a second, different kind of moral dilemma.

An "Alignment-based" moral dilemma will be variants on the theme "how much should be sacrificed in the fight against evil". If you ally with a Necromancer to defeat Orcs, are you choosing the Good path or simply the lesser of two evils? Does a man who abandons his family to hunt vampires right to do so - he is destroying Evil, which is a Good act, but people are suffering as a result of his decisions. Is it right or wrong to kill an unarmed Orc, given that it is verifiably evil and would show you no mercy in the same situation?

A "non-alignment-based" moral dilemma will be a variant on the theme "who are we to say what's evil anyway?" Here you're not asking "how far will we go in our battle against evil", you're asking "is our battle truly against evil at all." These are the situations where you ask yourself "do our people really have more rights to this land than the Orcs do? Wouldn't it be better if we traded with them in peace?"

Both are valid, and it can get confusing if you try to mash them together.

new1965
2008-03-13, 07:22 AM
Theres a good quote in regards to Gruumsh's creation of the orcs on the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruumsh

While they don't HAVE to do be evil, its not a big leap in logic think your average orc is a potential threat when their creator basically made them to kill the other races.

With that said.. in our game we dont usually apply that threat to other orcs (unless theres a reason such as food supply, territory, etc...) and internally the law of tooth and claw runs the tribe

SoD
2008-03-13, 07:57 AM
One thing I find amusing is that people seem to think like this:

Evil Dwarf: OK. Evil dwarf.
Good Orc: Good orc? You've got to be kidding me, right? This is a trick, isn't it? I DISBELEIVE!!!!!

Citizen Joe
2008-03-13, 09:16 AM
A "non-alignment-based" moral dilemma will be a variant on the theme "who are we to say what's evil anyway?" Here you're not asking "how far will we go in our battle against evil", you're asking "is our battle truly against evil at all." These are the situations where you ask yourself "do our people really have more rights to this land than the Orcs do? Wouldn't it be better if we traded with them in peace?"

When people ask that, they step out of combat and are thus flatfooted. Get your sneak attack in while you can.

nagora
2008-03-13, 09:25 AM
Removing alignment, makes morals meaningless. That's fair enough if you want to play that way. If you want a more architypical western heroic fantasy setting then, like classes, alignments help keep things clear, if not always black and white.

The purpose of alignment in the original system was to give an objective grounding for Good v Evil or Law v Chaos in order to try to limit the amount of grey moral areas to managable levels and avoid too much real-world moral fashion from disturbing the fantasy setting.

Orcs are born evil, humans and most elves and dwarves are born neutral. In theory either may change but in practice evil by its nature is unlikely to drift even to neutral, especially when surrounded by other evil beings.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-03-13, 10:03 AM
Removing alignment, makes morals meaningless. That's fair enough if you want to play that way. If you want a more architypical western heroic fantasy setting then, like classes, alignments help keep things clear, if not always black and white.

Yes, because... nobody role-plays if the game mechanics don't force them to?

It's all so obvious now.

nagora
2008-03-13, 10:22 AM
Yes, because... nobody role-plays if the game mechanics don't force them to?

It's all so obvious now.

?

I'm just saying that without an objective standard of morals defined within game, morality, as in real life, becomes realtive. As such, nothing meaningful can be said about them. All moral debate tends actually to be an attempt to define an objective standard. Well, the game already has that built in. Take it away and you end up having to recreate it.

I would illustrate with examples but that would probably cause difficulties with the forum rules on politics and religion.

Dervag
2008-03-13, 10:30 AM
The way I see it is:

If the players and/or characters agree about right and wrong, you can have moral clarity even without an alignment system. Everyone will agree that (for instance) robbing ordinary citizens is wrong while robbing other robbers is OK and robbing Menacing Overlords is actually a good idea. Everyone wants to rob the same group of people, so there's no argument about who to rob and whether or not it's OK to rob someone if they present a target of opportunity.

In which case you don't need to suspend the threat of losing their Chaotic Goodness if they rob the wrong person over their heads.


On the other hand, if the players and/or characters don't agree about right and wrong, you won't get much moral clarity even if there is an alignment system. The only change is that now the people who disagree will most likely have different alignments.


The same goes for NPCs- the only thing that changes is whether or not there's a readily accessible supernatural mechanism for judging people. Which there may or may not be.

Back in 1st and 2nd edition, when Detect Evil/Good didn't work on ordinary mortals who weren't actively committing supernatural acts of evil or good, this wasn't so much of a problem. You might want to consider that as a much less drastic solution to the problem than the one of removing alignment entirely.

nagora
2008-03-13, 10:37 AM
Back in 1st and 2nd edition, when Detect Evil/Good didn't work on ordinary mortals who weren't actively committing supernatural acts of evil or good

That was not how it worked in 1ed. It detected alignment even in normal folk asleep in bed.

Kioran
2008-03-13, 10:38 AM
Yes, because... nobody role-plays if the game mechanics don't force them to?

It's all so obvious now.

Well, some people have different tastes, and for example Nagoraīs ones are really old school. Alignment allows one to have clear cut conflicts and easily set the stage for epic conflicts, if one so wishes. In addition, previous editions of D&D more or less used this cosmic conflict as a backdrop for most novel, adventure modules and stories. In a way, itīs a fight with relatively clear aims, that frees and time and consideration for other aspects of the game

On the other hand some people believe alignment oversimplifies things, and either play without alignment, or make alignment more.....shall we say diffuse? Itīs not as dominating an aspect of a character and thereīs no simple recipe in dealing with it. However, it might still exist. In this game, people might find it interesting to explore a characters self and dealings with his environment.

Well, thereīs points on both sides. I personally do not beleive in absolute alignment, but firmly think alignment doesnīt prevent people from having fun. Itīs just that people need to have consent how itīs dealt with:

Absolute: Alignment is clear cut, villains commit evil, heros fight evil, others desire to stay out of it or struggle for balance. Alignment is an integral part of the character and defines the story

Fluid: Alignment is a part of a character, but thereīs different kinds of good or evil, and people might have strong motives besides their alignment. Alignment gives a certain compass, but doesnīt necessesarily determine the course of a conflict.

Relativist: Eberron. īnough said. Alignment is a vague indicator and might as well be totally removed. In fact, thatīs what many proponents of this system do........



Now okay, anything less than absolute Alignment is, theoretically, a deviation from the original design, and while prevalent these days, I think alignment is actually an integral part of the identity of D&D to me........

Tsotha-lanti
2008-03-13, 10:45 AM
I'm just saying that without an objective standard of morals defined within game, morality, as in real life, becomes realtive. As such, nothing meaningful can be said about them. All moral debate tends actually to be an attempt to define an objective standard. Well, the game already has that built in. Take it away and you end up having to recreate it.

I would illustrate with examples but that would probably cause difficulties with the forum rules on politics and religion.

You said "meaningless."

Plenty of games have absolutely no alignment/morality mechanic, and morality is not irrelevant in them by any stretch of imagination.

In any game what-so-ever, breaking against the mores and rules of the society you are in can have very immediate consequences, in an endless variety of forms, shapes, and degrees of severity.

In any game with deities that have real power, good and evil - whatever each deity considers them to be - can be rewarded or punished in a big way.

In RuneQuest / HeroQuest, morals - or rather, beliefs in general - are the most important thing in the world, because belief and faith, combined with the right kind of magic and ritual, literally shape the world. If you are a Heortling and break the cultural-magical-religious proscriptions against incest, rape, or kin-slaying, your entire community will suffer the magical-mystical consequences, which can get very concrete. (And even killing human enemies is discouraged; there are vendettas and blood-money and ransom.) The same goes, to a lesser extent, for any game that relies on ideas of heroic story-telling - evil begets evil.

In Cyberpunk 2020, probably the most amoral game you'll find, PCs who go around murdering people without cause are liable to die very soon, at the hands of street-gangs, neighborhood watches armed with assault rifles, the police, vigilantes, or the like. Those who survive are going to have horrible reputations and will be able to find no work (except with Arasaka, I suppose, when they start hiring terrorists to gun down civilians with flechette rounds).

And this is still ignoring the fact that plenty of players want to play a character with a set of beliefs and morals or a philosophy. Morals should originate with the PCs, after all - the society is there to either set an example, or create conflict and RP by punishing "inappropriate" actions.

The reason culture-based morals are superior to game-mechanics-based is logic, consistency, and versimilitude - and enforcement. You don't get the endless logical problems of the absolute, engraved-in-stone Good-and-Evil / Law-and-Chaos cosmology of D&D. You get a variety of real-feeling systems of belief and cultures that have their own rules.

Subjectivity is not a problem; it's a strength. The subjectivity of Glorantha, for instance, is the greatest part of the awesomeness of the setting and the games (RuneQuest and HeroQuest) set in it.


Alignment is unfortunately intricately bound to the rules of D&D. Fortunately, it is not a part of almost any other d20 game, which is just awesome for them. (Even the Code of Honor system in Conan d20 is much better.) It's a legacy of games that were never made to accommodate complexity and versimilitude of setting. It's much, much easier to have one big culture all through the world, and just slap alignments on the nations and cities. Cormyr is Lawful Good, Zhentil Keep is Lawful Evil, otherwise the cultures are the exact same except for this list of superficial customs... great.

nagora
2008-03-13, 10:51 AM
You said "meaningless."

If morals are relative then they have no intrinsic meaning.



Plenty of games have absolutely no alignment/morality mechanic, and morality is not irrelevant in them by any stretch of imagination.

I agree. Meaninglessness and importance are not connected in this case.

There's nothing wrong with playing subjective morals, as in RuneQuest. I like AD&D and RuneQuest's different approaches.

Morty
2008-03-13, 12:03 PM
One thing I find amusing is that people seem to think like this:

Evil Dwarf: OK. Evil dwarf.
Good Orc: Good orc? You've got to be kidding me, right? This is a trick, isn't it? I DISBELEIVE!!!!!

Awesome, isn't it? Better yet, people won't blink on an evil elf, despite the fact that by the rules there are more good orcs than there are evil elves.
As to the OP question, no, it wouldn't. If anything, it'd spawn more of them, now that you aren't automatically on the right side by the virtue of not having green skin and fangs and/or being Good. Also, players who kill every goblin or orc they encounter 'cause they're Evil and whatnot won't stop doing this if you remove the Evil label.
Removing alignment improves the game, but doesn't remove moral dilemmas.

Cyclone231
2008-03-13, 01:14 PM
No. It would not reduce moral dilemmas.

The alignment system imposes dilemmas, because it just doesn't make any sense. If something is made to be evil, can you really blame it for being evil? The answer you're supposed to have is "Yes. It's evil." But, if you actually think about it a bit, it's not an easy answer.

Without alignment, you can't just use it as a scape goat, "Oh hey, I can kill them because they detect as evil."If alignment disappeared, would anyone have any trouble asking themselves "Oh, can I kill this mind flayer? I mean, is it really evil?"

I suggest that the answer is no. If a species is consistently cannon-fodder in an alignment-less world, it will have to be defined some way other than "Often Chaotic Evil" - some way which actually makes it clear why they are evil.

If morals are relative then they have no intrinsic meaning.
If morals are arbitrary then they have no intrinsic meaning.

As to the OP question, no, it wouldn't. If anything, it'd spawn more of them, now that you aren't automatically on the right side by the virtue of not having green skin and fangs and/or being Good. Also, players who kill every goblin or orc they encounter 'cause they're Evil and whatnot won't stop doing this if you remove the Evil label. But not all orcs/goblins are evil. In fact, by the book, there is doubtlessly a significant portion of their population that is neutral or even good. So if you go and slaughter a bunch of orcs/goblins, you could be killing some good creatures.

BUT, if we remove alignment, we must give cannon-fodder species an actual reason to be cannon-fodder species, not just arbitrarily say that they are that way.

A "non-alignment-based" moral dilemma will be a variant on the theme "who are we to say what's evil anyway?" Here you're not asking "how far will we go in our battle against evil", you're asking "is our battle truly against evil at all." These are the situations where you ask yourself "do our people really have more rights to this land than the Orcs do? Wouldn't it be better if we traded with them in peace?"
Again, the idea is that we make cannon fodder "evil" species actually, clearly evil with definite constant practices which make them completely unsympathetic. Without alignment, would anyone feel bad about killing mind flayers because they weren't sure it was really evil?

Morty
2008-03-13, 01:21 PM
I
If morals are arbitrary then they have no intrinsic meaning.
But not all orcs/goblins are evil. In fact, by the book, there is doubtlessly a significant portion of their population that is neutral or even good. So if you go and slaughter a bunch of orcs/goblins, you could be killing some good creatures.

Oh, I know that. It doesn't stop the issue from spawning numerous multiple paged threads.


BUT, if we remove alignment, we must give cannon-fodder species an actual reason to be cannon-fodder species, not just arbitrarily say that they are that way.

Or we can just, you know, not make any species dedicated to be cannon fodder. However, if you need one, you can just have greenskins to do what they always did.

nagora
2008-03-13, 01:35 PM
If morals are arbitrary then they have no intrinsic meaning.


Externally, yes. In the game-world, no. The current system (or, at least, the 1ed system) give the game world a non-arbitrary inherent morality system. Within that frame work you can have meaningful discussions about "is this person actually, objectively, Good or Evil?" without it you are no better or worse off than in real life, which is to say that you an argue forever and not establish anything :smallsmile:

Skjaldbakka
2008-03-13, 01:45 PM
I would say no. I love using moral dilemmas in my plots, often ones with no right answer whatsoever. I also don't use alignment, unless the campaign uses alignment based outsiders, in which case it is too much trouble for me to homebrew all the alignment based powers they get.

In my view alignment is a crutch. Serious games don't need it. Sometimes light games do. If you want to just raid the dungeon, kill the orcs, take their stuff, having them detect as 'evil' removes the complication of whether or not it is 'the right thing to do'.

The Paladin class has to be slightly modified w/o alignment though. I suggest tearing it out of the PHB, and stapling in the Arcana Evolved Champion class.

Actually, I would recommend this even with alignment, but I work at a library, so I am morally opposed to destroying books.

Athaniar
2008-03-13, 01:49 PM
Oh, just remove alignment already. Alignment, as I have explained earlier, gives no room for good morale-based roleplaying. And the "orcs are evil" thing? No race or species is inherently evil. Some individuals are "evil", and therefore, if they are given ruling positions, cultures may become "evil". It's not really that simple, but it's somewhat like that. Also, one of the most important things: evil is a label placed upon people by those who are morally opposed to them. Nobody sees him/her/itself as evil.

Feel free to counter my arguments if you can find valid counterarguments.

nagora
2008-03-13, 04:26 PM
Oh, just remove alignment already. Alignment, as I have explained earlier, gives no room for good morale-based roleplaying. And the "orcs are evil" thing? No race or species is inherently evil.

Ooops! There go spell casters, because no person can really create a fireball from magic. In fact, now I think of it, elves and orcs and all that don't exist either.

In your campaign, no species is inherently evil, but that's a design choice that you've made, not an argument for abandoning alignments.



Also, one of the most important things: evil is a label placed upon people by those who are morally opposed to them.

Not in D&D.


Nobody sees him/her/itself as evil.

Maybe, maybe not, but in either case not important to the question of whether they are actually evil or not, certainly in D&D and often also in the real world.


Feel free to counter my arguments if you can find valid counterarguments.

You didn't make any arguments, just assertions which were subjective.

Cyclone231
2008-03-13, 04:33 PM
No race or species is inherently evil.
Mind flayers.

Artanis
2008-03-13, 04:44 PM
No race or species is inherently evil.
Demons. Devils. Chromatic Dragons.

Blanks
2008-03-13, 05:52 PM
Just to announce my self:
Im on the "Use alignments, but could live without them" wagon.

lets take a player discussion as an example:

With alignment:
Player1: "he is evil, we should kill him"
player2: "how do you know?"
player1: "he eats babies"
player2: "okay then"

without alignment:
Player1: "he is bad, we should kill him"
player2: "how do you know?"
player1: "he eats babies"
player2: "okay then"

To me, it doesn't matter all that much. The "detect evil" changes things slightly, but does it matter? If you don't want to give players an "easy out", just have "ring of undetectable alignment" be really cheap. Then you get the best of both worlds.

Writing this post i just thought of a whole list of spells who would be useful for both with and w/o alignment campaigns:

detect bodycount (how many sentient beings have the person killed)
detect laws broken (how many laws have the person broken to date)
detect bounty (how many persons are chasing this person because of a bounty)
detect lives saved ( how many sentient beings have this person saved)

The list goes on and on i would guess. Why haven't anyone invented these? :smalltongue:

EDIT:
spelling

Woot Spitum
2008-03-13, 06:02 PM
BUT, if we remove alignment, we must give cannon-fodder species an actual reason to be cannon-fodder species, not just arbitrarily say that they are that way.
Again, the idea is that we make cannon fodder "evil" species actually, clearly evil with definite constant practices which make them completely unsympathetic. Without alignment, would anyone feel bad about killing mind flayers because they weren't sure it was really evil?
Couldn't your party end up killing orcs because they are either an invading army, raiders attacking innocent peasants, or bandits robbing and killing travelers? To me it doesn't really matter what race these villains belong to. What does matter is why the PC's are attacking them in the first place. If the party is good, then fighting them to stop the invading, raiding, and banditry is good enough. How the races of our villains act in general has no bearing on the fact that acts of villainy are being committed, and the PC's are trying to put a stop to it.

You don't need an alignment system to figure this out. If someone starts trying to stab people, it is natural for a heroic character to try and stop them, without pausing to detect evil.

Cyclone231
2008-03-13, 08:26 PM
Externally, yes. In the game-world, no. The current system (or, at least, the 1ed system) give the game world a non-arbitrary inherent morality system. Within that frame work you can have meaningful discussions about "is this person actually, objectively, Good or Evil?" without it you are no better or worse off than in real life, which is to say that you an argue forever and not establish anything :smallsmile:No, you can't have meaningful discussions in D&D, all you can say is "he's evil" or "he's good." This is not a question to be discussed and considered. D&D alignments are not based upon a rational, clearly defined philosophical viewpoint. They're arbitrary reasons to say that it's okay to kill people who have this alignment, but it's not okay for those people to kill you.

Or we can just, you know, not make any species dedicated to be cannon fodder. However, if you need one, you can just have greenskins to do what they always did.Pfft. "Evil savage cannon fodder" is an important villain role, just like "big dumb monster" (such as the Tarrasque) or "evil intelligent creature that eats humanoids" (like the Mind Flayer) or "unintelligent mass-produced warriors" (bee swarm) or "super-coordinated military team" (formian warriors) or "artificial sentry" (lots of constructs).

Tengu
2008-03-13, 09:34 PM
Am I the only person in the world who thinks that you can judge each action and each character as good or evil without actually using the alignment system?

nagora
2008-03-14, 04:03 AM
No, you can't have meaningful discussions in D&D, all you can say is "he's evil" or "he's good." This is not a question to be discussed and considered. D&D alignments are not based upon a rational, clearly defined philosophical viewpoint.

You should read the rule books some time, alignments are exactly that. Whether you agree with the viewpoints is a different issue.


They're arbitrary reasons to say that it's okay to kill people who have this alignment, but it's not okay for those people to kill you.

You don't really "get" them, do you? Alignments are a guide mainly for the DM as to how a person will act in various circumstances. An NPC who is CE may well not be "okay to kill", just as a LG one may be a pain in the arse who is despised by those around him/her/it.

Roderick_BR
2008-03-14, 05:19 AM
You said "meaningless."

Plenty of games have absolutely no alignment/morality mechanic, and morality is not irrelevant in them by any stretch of imagination.

In any game what-so-ever, breaking against the mores and rules of the society you are in can have very immediate consequences, in an endless variety of forms, shapes, and degrees of severity.

In any game with deities that have real power, good and evil - whatever each deity considers them to be - can be rewarded or punished in a big way.

In RuneQuest / HeroQuest, morals - or rather, beliefs in general - are the most important thing in the world, because belief and faith, combined with the right kind of magic and ritual, literally shape the world. If you are a Heortling and break the cultural-magical-religious proscriptions against incest, rape, or kin-slaying, your entire community will suffer the magical-mystical consequences, which can get very concrete. (And even killing human enemies is discouraged; there are vendettas and blood-money and ransom.) The same goes, to a lesser extent, for any game that relies on ideas of heroic story-telling - evil begets evil.

In Cyberpunk 2020, probably the most amoral game you'll find, PCs who go around murdering people without cause are liable to die very soon, at the hands of street-gangs, neighborhood watches armed with assault rifles, the police, vigilantes, or the like. Those who survive are going to have horrible reputations and will be able to find no work (except with Arasaka, I suppose, when they start hiring terrorists to gun down civilians with flechette rounds).

And this is still ignoring the fact that plenty of players want to play a character with a set of beliefs and morals or a philosophy. Morals should originate with the PCs, after all - the society is there to either set an example, or create conflict and RP by punishing "inappropriate" actions.

The reason culture-based morals are superior to game-mechanics-based is logic, consistency, and versimilitude - and enforcement. You don't get the endless logical problems of the absolute, engraved-in-stone Good-and-Evil / Law-and-Chaos cosmology of D&D. You get a variety of real-feeling systems of belief and cultures that have their own rules.

Subjectivity is not a problem; it's a strength. The subjectivity of Glorantha, for instance, is the greatest part of the awesomeness of the setting and the games (RuneQuest and HeroQuest) set in it.


Alignment is unfortunately intricately bound to the rules of D&D. Fortunately, it is not a part of almost any other d20 game, which is just awesome for them. (Even the Code of Honor system in Conan d20 is much better.) It's a legacy of games that were never made to accommodate complexity and versimilitude of setting. It's much, much easier to have one big culture all through the world, and just slap alignments on the nations and cities. Cormyr is Lawful Good, Zhentil Keep is Lawful Evil, otherwise the cultures are the exact same except for this list of superficial customs... great.
The way you said it, it looks like RuneQuest / HeroQuest does have an unspoken alignment system, since it affects your spells.
In Cyberpunk 2020/Shadowrun games, the rule of thumb is "don't get caught". You can still kill anything and get away with it, unless the DM zero rules that no matter what you do, someone WILL get you. In the end, you are not being moral, you are just trying to avoid directly retribution, or trying to hide the evidence.

GammaPaladin
2008-03-14, 05:22 AM
Writing this post i just thought of a whole list of spells who would be useful for both with and w/o alignment campaigns:

detect bodycount (how many sentient beings have the person killed)
detect laws broken (how many laws have the person broken to date)
detect bounty (how many persons are chasing this person because of a bounty)
detect lives saved ( how many sentient beings have this person saved)

The list goes on and on i would guess. Why haven't anyone invented these?
Because they would completely and utterly ruin the game? I mean, it's bad enough that the players can detect evil... They should have to do some actual investigation if they want to find out exactly what he's done. And I'm not talking skill rolls. I'm talking actual, honest to god, roleplayed investigation.

And they should need proof before whacking him. And if they're lawful, they should really try to arrest him/take him to the proper authorities.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 05:35 AM
Just to announce my self:
Im on the "Use alignments, but could live without them" wagon.

lets take a player discussion as an example:

With alignment:
Player1: "he is evil, we should kill him"
player2: "how do you know?"
player1: "he eats babies"
player2: "okay then"

without alignment:
Player1: "he is bad, we should kill him"
player2: "how do you know?"
player1: "he eats babies"
player2: "okay then"


I don't mean to pick on your example over others, but I think this is actually a good example of why I don't think Alignment should be removed from D&D without serious consideration.

As far as I'm concerned, those two conversations are functionally identical, and both of them carry the assumption of "Alignment". It carries the assumption that there are Evil people who do Evil things and must therefore Be Killed To Stop Their Evil.

The real difference between a game with and without Alignement is more like this:

With Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He eats babies.

Without Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He's invading our land, and there is an unconfirmed rumour that he eats babies.
Player 2: But we invaded his land last year, and we probably just made up that baby-eating thing to make him look bad.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 05:41 AM
Am I the only person in the world who thinks that you can judge each action and each character as good or evil without actually using the alignment system?

You're making two different claims there.

Judging actions as good or evil doesn't require an Alignment system.

Judging people as good or evil, I would argue, does.

To take a hopefully-not-too-controversial example (and one which draws on no real world crimes or issues) let us assume that in a particular D&D world "necromancy" is evil and "summoning demons" is evil.

With alignment, the logic goes.

Summoning demons is evil.
Carl the Conjurer summons demons.
Therefore Carl the Conjurer is evil.
Therefore Carl the Conjurer is likely to commit necromancy.

Without alignment, that logic doesn't hold.

If you're assuming a world in which a person who commits one evil act is equally likely to commit any evil act, you've got Alignment. If you've got a world in which a person can commit one evil act without necessarily being willing to commit other evil acts, you can't really call that person evil.

Blanks
2008-03-14, 05:49 AM
Because they would completely and utterly ruin the game?
Sadly the quotes left out the "tongue in cheek" smiley that was in my original post.

I actually don't think "detect bodycount" would ruin the game, depending on setting. If someone pings as having killed 1000 sentient beings, is he then a foul villain or a great hero? All you know is that he is seriously dangerous (or have been incredible lucky or unlucky).


And they should need proof before whacking him.
Depends upon what you mean by proof. If i use a Wish spell to get the identity of the man who murdered the princess, and then proceed to hack him to pieces, i might have broken the law, but its not certain that i did something evil/against my alignment.

Blanks
2008-03-14, 06:09 AM
I don't mean to pick on your example over others
By all means do, thats why i write them :)


As far as I'm concerned, those two conversations are functionally identical, and both of them carry the assumption of "Alignment". It carries the assumption that there are Evil people who do Evil things and must therefore Be Killed To Stop Their Evil.
That was my point as well. Some people do bad things and needs to be stopped. Whether they do the bad deeds because of an alignment, bad childhood or the voices told them to, it boils down to:
Stop them (killing or no killing depends on the groups preferences).



The real difference between a game with and without Alignement is more like this:

With Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He eats babies.

Without Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He's invading our land, and there is an unconfirmed rumour that he eats babies.
Player 2: But we invaded his land last year, and we probably just made up that baby-eating thing to make him look bad.
No it isn't :)
This is a difference in facts, not in "mindset" (that is, alignment). Playing with alignment doesn't necessarily lead to hackNslash, nor does playing without lead to sophisticated campaigns. Let me try it again and then you can point out my errors. Eventually we will get it right (just ask the monkeys about shakespeare ;) )

With Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He's invading our land, and there is an unconfirmed rumour that he eats babies.
Player 2: But we invaded his land last year, and we probably just made up that baby-eating thing to make him look bad
Player 1: Okay, lets find out whether the babyeating is fact or not. If it is, he is clearly evil and going DOWN!

Without Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He's invading our land, and there is an unconfirmed rumour that he eats babies.
Player 2: But we invaded his land last year, and we probably just made up that baby-eating thing to make him look bad
Player 1: Okay, lets find out whether the babyeating is fact or not. If it is, he is clearly dangerous to the cute babies and going DOWN!

Ofcourse with alignment detection possible the concluding remarks could be this:
player3: He pings "total babyeater" on the Detect evil scale of paladinhood...
Entire party: KIIIIILLLL!!!

Capt'n Ironbrow
2008-03-14, 06:24 AM
My experiences:

No Alignment (Warhammer Quest): Players can do whatever they want and be moraly ambiguous in the extreme. Without players kill and maim anyone who annoys them, or just because they like doing it. Furthermore, you'll find a lot more torture and extortion in no-alignment games and only the fanatic roleplayers will object if they have chosen their character to have somewhat of a moral code. Beer and Pretzel gamers usually don't have one (no fun?)... And any traditional cannon-fodder creature will be killed just the same, no or litlle questions asked. The Players are there for the treasure/glory, bonded into a party by necessity, coincidence or previous relationships. If there is no alignment, players just don't care if something is considered good or evil.

Alignment (WFRPed1): It's a system of checks and balances and a flexible mould for the role your character will play. It is a better base for moral dillema's than no alignment at all, and religion can play a part there too. If used well, the Alignment is not the only tool to build a moral dillema. There are more things to it, like race, relationships, beliefs, oaths etc. These might still be valid in a non-alignment setting, but alignment adds something extra, maybe the general direction to go with the dillema, or the whole point of the dillema. For example, a Good Character in WFRP will get an insanity if he witnesses someone being tortured without being able to stop it (the only alignment that is troubled by torture). If the torturer is actually a party member, you have a dillema on your hands that is closely tied to alignment and loyalty to the compatriot torturer...

Besides, even in games with alignment, the Good aligned characters should still question any action that would lead to violence and killing, because it's not nice to do to creatures, whatever their (the creature's) alignment. Or at least, in my experience, Good aligned Characters shy away from violence of most kinds, and even feel sorry for killing traditionally evil creatures for self-defence... My Dwarf Captain once proudly proclaimed to his good friend "Dragonbabyfosterdadhalfling" that he had slain a great dragon... The Halfing and his pet lizard were seriously upset, but I could give this "good guy" a moral dillema of his own: "So you'd rather have your friends, who saved your life more than once, killed than that some aggressive, people-eating, fire-breating monster is killed for trying to kill them?"

There are, and I expect it to be in the D&D manuals too, basic attributes to alignment. But these attributes are indeed a guideline. It's up to the players to decide what to do with them. To me, Alignments are part of the "Script". A minor part, yes, but it gives something to work with when building a character. My group isn't against shifting alignments too. The earlier mentioned Dwarf Captain started as a Neutral character... He became lawfull after he became an officer of disciplinairian nature... become quite physical to underachievers and insubordination...

Tsotha-lanti
2008-03-14, 08:10 AM
The way you said it, it looks like RuneQuest / HeroQuest does have an unspoken alignment system, since it affects your spells.

Eh? Where did I say that?

It's plainly not true. You can lose your magic by acting in a way that displeases your god, or weaken it by disrespecting ancestors or local spirits, but there's no alignment system of any sort. (There's "Chaos" and "not Chaos", but Chaos is only considered irredeemably and inherently evil by certain cultures, and its nature in general is a major point of conflict between several cultural-mystical systems.) In fact, the subjectivity is explicitly built-in and flaunted. If you are a Heortling barbarian, your "smite evil" type abilities work on the foul Lunar Empire conquerors; if you are a Lunar Empire soldier, your "smite evil" type abilities work on the intransigent Heortling rebels. Different myth cycles tell contradictory and equally "mystically true" stories of events in the God Age, etc.

My best RP experiences in this respect come from Glorantha-based games; once the players know what their society's and gods' rules are (and understand that there are consequences, on multiple levels, for violating the internal rules of a system you are trying to participate in), they become appropriately conscious of them, either abiding by them or being very aware when breaking them.

Providing reasonable alternatives for the old "kill and loot everything" approach helps, too. The PCs don't have to be cold-blooded murderers and thieves out for themselves. In Glorantha, murdering common enemies - like members of other tribes - in cold blood is a no-no. Deaths happen in combat, yes, but you don't go out of your way to kill disabled or surrendering enemies, much less murder anyone unawares. At the very least, everyone on your side will begin to think of you as blood-thirsty, unvirtuous killer, to be feared; often the dead person's kin and clan will come seeking for blood-price or vengeance. In the case of non-human "monster" races, you still risk retaliation from deadly enemies by intentionally butchering them, and are forfeiting ransoms and information.

The cool thing is, pretty much all of that last part fits right into most games. In fact, in classical D&D games it works out even better. The PCs who kill twenty Zhentarim agents they find fomenting in Waterdeep are going to have to answer a lot of questions, and unless they can provide some watertight proof that they had cause to kill them, they're likely to see end up hanging from the walls. (Even if they can provide such evidence, since they weren't appointed or deputized agents of the city acting in the course of their duties, they're likely to be found guilty. Fancy that!)

Edit:

Alternatives to looting and pillaging are easy; in all my favorite settings, the PCs are logically tied to a society or community. This community is the obvious way of rewarding them.

In my Glorantha games, the PCs very rarely get their hands on coins, or even "trade goods" (which I mostly substitute for coinage; they live in a tribal Dark Ages society, so obviously it's barter-based). When they take part in cattle raids, they are given a share of the cattle and sheep by the chieftain. When they undertake other adventures that turn up treasures, they take it back to the chieftain, who distributes it (and, being a good, generous, and far-sighted chieftain, gifts much of it back to the PCs).

I find my players will easily give up gold and silver and treasures in exchange for community status, which has much greater benefits; their chieftain and temples arm and train them, their family puts them up even though they often miss such crucial events as planting and harvest; and their entire community is willing to support them both mystically and martially.

Edit2:

Removing the assumption that all combat is to the death helps the game and gives PCs more tactical options. Plenty of great stories can be told from surrendering and from attempting unconventional, non-violent solutions to problems. If combat to the death isn't the assumption, the GM is more free to use powerful NPCs and creatures - even as challenges - without fear of the PCs getting themselves killed (by following the assumption - present in D&D - that enemies are there to slay).

Morty
2008-03-14, 08:49 AM
Pfft. "Evil savage cannon fodder" is an important villain role, just like "big dumb monster" (such as the Tarrasque) or "evil intelligent creature that eats humanoids" (like the Mind Flayer) or "unintelligent mass-produced warriors" (bee swarm) or "super-coordinated military team" (formian warriors) or "artificial sentry" (lots of constructs).

Uh huh. I never appreciated the value of deidicating whole species to serve one chliched role, but I'm just weird that way.


Am I the only person in the world who thinks that you can judge each action and each character as good or evil without actually using the alignment system?

You aren't.

Citizen Joe
2008-03-14, 08:51 AM
With Alignment
Player 1: He's evil and we should kill him.
Player 2: How do you know?
Player 1: He eats babies.

Baby what? Chickens? I do that all the time.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 02:25 PM
Ofcourse with alignment detection possible the concluding remarks could be this:
player3: He pings "total babyeater" on the Detect evil scale of paladinhood...
Entire party: KIIIIILLLL!!!

I kind of like "Total Babyeater" as a description of a particular type of villain. :smallsmile:

However, I also think that's where we're talking past each other.

My issue with the Baby Eating is that effectively "eats babies" is code for "Evil".

To put it another way, to me, Alignment doesn't only affect the way people perceive your world, it affects what the world is actually like.

In a world with alignment, it is plausible and reasonable to say "this guy eats babies, go get him." A world with alignment posits an objective good and evil but more, it posits the idea that some people are Just Plain Evil. That they are, if you will, Total Babyeaters.

In a world without alignment, if somebody eats babies I am going to want to know why he eats babies. In particular, I am going to want to know why from his point of view eating babies is the right thing to do. Ideally, I would like it to be possible to actually agree with the guy that sometimes, eating babies was totally justified. That, to me, is the important difference between "with alignment" and "without alignment." If I am presented with a villain who just eats babies for no reason I will not be able to take it seriously outside the context of an Alignment system.

To put it in conversation form:

With Alignment:

Player 1: We have you now, Torvak the babyeater. Before we kill you, tell us why you ate all those babies.
Torvak: Because I'm eeeeeeeeeevillllleeeee and I love their juicy baby flesh! Mwahahahahahahahahaha. Hahaahahahahahahaha. Haha. Ha.

Without Alignment

Player 1: We have you now, Torvak the babyeater. Before we kill you, tell us why you ate all those babies.
Torvak: Because I am the last guardian of Velshandarr, God of Eating Babies. If I fail in my duty to eat one baby a week, Velshandaar will arise and eat all the babies in the world.

GammaPaladin
2008-03-14, 02:43 PM
Sadly the quotes left out the "tongue in cheek" smiley that was in my original post.

I actually don't think "detect bodycount" would ruin the game, depending on setting. If someone pings as having killed 1000 sentient beings, is he then a foul villain or a great hero? All you know is that he is seriously dangerous (or have been incredible lucky or unlucky).


Depends upon what you mean by proof. If i use a Wish spell to get the identity of the man who murdered the princess, and then proceed to hack him to pieces, i might have broken the law, but its not certain that i did something evil/against my alignment.
I'd argue that if your character is Lawful, you're violating your alignment. Lawful means you value order and the rule of law. People who value the rule of law frown on vigilante justice. A lot.

Not saying it's violating a "good" alignment. Only Lawful (And I'm talking LG, LN, AND LE here).

But, even if you're not Lawful, there are going to be consequences for your actions. The local constabulary isn't going to take your word for it that the Wish spell named him as the killer.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 02:44 PM
Uh huh. I never appreciated the value of deidicating whole species to serve one chliched role, but I'm just weird that way.Sometimes your party just needs to kill a bunch of raiding tribal villagers and not feel bad about it. Easiest way to do it is to make a race of raiding tribal villagers you don't have to feel bad about killing.


You should read the rule books some time, alignments are exactly that. Whether you agree with the viewpoints is a different issue.Maybe I didn't make myself clear:

YOU CANNOT HAVE AN IN-GAME DEBATE ON THE SUBJECT OF MORALITY IN A GAME WITH ALIGNMENT. A CHARACTER IS EVIL OR HE ISN'T. Period. No debate - he is what it says on his character sheet.

You don't really "get" them, do you? Alignments are a guide mainly for the DM as to how a person will act in various circumstances.Then why do PCs have alignments? Hell, why even have such vaguely defined alignments as we have? Wouldn't it be better to have alignments like "greedy" or "amoral" or "charitable"?

An NPC who is CE may well not be "okay to kill", just as a LG one may be a pain in the arse who is despised by those around him/her/it.No, I'm afraid you need to provide an example of a CE character who there is moral questionability as to whether or not he's cool to kill.


To put it in conversation form:

With Alignment:

Player 1: We have you now, Torvak the babyeater. Before we kill you, tell us why you ate all those babies.
Torvak: Because I'm eeeeeeeeeevillllleeeee and I love their juicy baby flesh! Mwahahahahahahahahaha. Hahaahahahahahahaha. Haha. Ha.

Without Alignment

Player 1: We have you now, Torvak the babyeater. Before we kill you, tell us why you ate all those babies.
Torvak: Because I am the last guardian of Velshandarr, God of Eating Babies. If I fail in my duty to eat one baby a week, Velshandaar will arise and eat all the babies in the world.
Now you're just being silly. If I want to have trite and motiveless just-plain-evil villains, I don't need to have alignments. If I want to have complex and morally questionable villains, it's much harder with "detect evil" on the player's spell list.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 02:48 PM
So alignment = trite and motiveless evil?

If that's the way you want to look at it.


Now you're just being silly. If I want to have trite and motiveless just-plain-evil villains, I don't need to have alignments. If I want to have complex and morally questionable villains, it's much harder with "detect evil" on the player's spell list.

If you have trite and motiveless "Just Plain Evil" villains, you have Alignment by definition. If you've got people who are "Just Plain Evil" that's Alignment, that's sort of my point.

Morty
2008-03-14, 02:55 PM
Sometimes your party just needs to kill a bunch of raiding tribal villagers and not feel bad about it. Easiest way to do it is to make a race of raiding tribal villagers you don't have to feel bad about killing.

No, I don't? Really, I know many people appreciate things like that, but you shouldn't assume everyone needs a race dedicated to be mindlessly murdered.



If you have trite and motiveless "Just Plain Evil" villains, you have Alignment by definition. If you've got people who are "Just Plain Evil" that's Alignment, that's sort of my point.

It's sort of true, but if you have alignment, everyone is either "just plain evil" or "just plain good" or "sitting on the fence". Without alignment, those are just extreme cases.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 02:58 PM
If that's the way you want to look at it.Oops, didn't realize I responded to that post twice. Heh. Teach me to forget to preview my post.

If you have trite and motiveless "Just Plain Evil" villains, you have Alignment by definition. If you've got people who are "Just Plain Evil" that's Alignment, that's sort of my point.Yeah, but you don't need to have something on your character sheet that says "Chaotic Evil" in order for you to be an obnoxious murderous prick who kills people just because.

No, I don't? Really, I know many people appreciate things like that, but you shouldn't assume everyone needs a race dedicated to be mindlessly murdered.I meant the vague "you," in the sense of "some person out there" not the "you in particular". Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 03:16 PM
Yeah, but you don't need to have something on your character sheet that says "Chaotic Evil" in order for you to be an obnoxious murderous prick who kills people just because.


Of course not, but the point is that in a game without alignment "obnoxious murderous prick who kills people just because" is a stupid and unsupportable character concept whereas in a game with alignment it's perfectly legitimate and sensible.

Lord of the Rings, for example, is an archetypal "with alignment" setting. Nobody (or at least nobody worth listening to) complains that the Orcs get badly treated, because they are literally manifestations of evil in the world. It's still actually quite morally complex (one can sympathize, for example, with Theodin not wanting to risk his people by taking up arms against Saruman, even though it is the objectively "Good" course of action, and we can understand Saruman and Boromir's desire for the ring, even though it is objectively "Evil").

Remove the "alignment" from the world, though, and it becomes completely nonsensical. The Fellowship become this bunch of genocidal bastards who go around having competitions to see how many sentient beings they can slaughter in one night. Boromir takes the perfectly reasonable attitude that they should maybe try using the ring instead of destroying it, and he gets killed for his trouble. Denethor similarly is apparently driven "mad" just because he saw that his people were in a bit of a bad situation, and really what was Sauron going to do with Middle Earth anyway.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 03:41 PM
Of course not, but the point is that in a game without alignment "obnoxious murderous prick who kills people just because" is a stupid and unsupportable character concept whereas in a game with alignment it's perfectly legitimate and sensible.It's never a "legitimate and sensible" character concept, but it's as easily supported by one as the other. Are you really saying you can't accept someone as a malicious baby-eater unless it says "Chaotic Evil" on his character sheet?


Lord of the Rings, for example, is an archetypal "with alignment" setting. Nobody (or at least nobody worth listening to) complains that the Orcs get badly treated, because they are literally manifestations of evil in the world. It's still actually quite morally complex (one can sympathize, for example, with Theodin not wanting to risk his people by taking up arms against Saruman, even though it is the objectively "Good" course of action, and we can understand Saruman and Boromir's desire for the ring, even though it is objectively "Evil").

Remove the "alignment" from the world, though, and it becomes completely nonsensical. The Fellowship become this bunch of genocidal bastards who go around having competitions to see how many sentient beings they can slaughter in one night. Boromir takes the perfectly reasonable attitude that they should maybe try using the ring instead of destroying it, and he gets killed for his trouble. Denethor similarly is apparently driven "mad" just because he saw that his people were in a bit of a bad situation, and really what was Sauron going to do with Middle Earth anyway.None of the characters in LotR have character sheets, and thus the clear "good-evil" morality is part of the writing, not some mechanical implement like it is in D&D.

strayth
2008-03-14, 03:45 PM
It would reduce mechanical problems with morality- duh, right? :smallsmile:

As for as social or topical problems? No- good and evil exist at least as their own behavior or beliefs, not to get into the mechanic influence. In their abstraction, chaos and law are powerful too.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 03:48 PM
It's never a "legitimate and sensible" character concept, but it's as easily supported by one as the other. Are you really saying you can't accept someone as a malicious baby-eater unless it says "Chaotic Evil" on his character sheet?

No, I'm saying that I can't accept somebody as a malicious baby-eater unless you're positing a world that has an objective standard of morality, and in which some people are Just Plain Evil.

That's what Alignment is.


None of the characters in LotR have character sheets, and thus the clear "good-evil" morality is part of the writing, not some mechanical implement like it is in D&D.

This is obviously true, since LotR is a book, not an RPG, however it still contains the concept of Alignment, pretty much as it is implemented in D&D.

Suggesting that Lord of the Rings doesn't use Alignment because it's not an RPG is like suggesting that they don't use swords because it's not an RPG. The game mechanical implement "a sword" represents a real in character implement of the same name. Same with "evil". Sure you could get rid of the rules for swords but still keep the swords in-game, but why would you want to?

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 04:00 PM
No, I'm saying that I can't accept somebody as a malicious baby-eater unless you're positing a world that has an objective standard of morality, and in which some people are Just Plain Evil.

That's what Alignment is.Okay, well, let me repeat the point of the original post: if a species is defined as Evil by alignment, that gives lazy designers an excuse to not say why they are evil (baby-eating or whatever). If there is no arbitrary stat for Evil, then baby-eaters have to actually be called on what they do wrong, not just "they ambush people! goblin tactics not like elf tactics at all, we swear!"

This is obviously true, since LotR is a book, not an RPG, however it still contains the concept of Alignment, pretty much as it is implemented in D&D.Do they cast Protection from Evil? Do they channel negative energy and get their undead creations consequently labeled "evil" with no regard if they use them to rescue orphans and puppies from a burning building? Do they cast Smite Evil? Do they deal with the problem that a deity-powered cleric can't stray very far from his deity's alignment, even if he's got the exact same goals in mind?

Suggesting that Lord of the Rings doesn't use Alignment because it's not an RPG is like suggesting that they don't use swords because it's not an RPG. The game mechanical implement "a sword" represents a real in character implement of the same name. Same with "evil". Sure you could get rid of the rules for swords but still keep the swords in-game, but why would you want to?Differences:
• D&D alignment gets in everything. It gets in spell lists, it gets in class abilities, it gets in deities, it gets in everything and cleaning it out is a bitch. I can easily remove swords from my game if I want to.
• Rules for swords do not create a crutch whereby designers don't feel a need to give any fluff for why a given group uses swords instead of axes or bows (they don't do that much, but that's because they're just plain lazy).

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 04:05 PM
Okay, well, let me repeat the point of the original post: if a species is defined as Evil by alignment, that gives lazy designers an excuse to not say why they are evil (baby-eating or whatever). If there is no arbitrary stat for Evil, then baby-eaters have to actually be called on what they do wrong, not just "they ambush people! goblin tactics not like elf tactics at all, we swear!"

What do the Orcs in Lord of the Rings do that is "evil"?


Do they cast Protection from Evil? Do they channel negative energy and get their undead creations consequently labeled "evil" with no regard if they use them to rescue orphans and puppies from a burning building? Do they cast Smite Evil? Do they deal with the problem that a deity-powered cleric can't stray very far from his deity's alignment, even if he's got the exact same goals in mind?

No, because none of those specific in-character powers exist in Lord of the Rings. On the other hand the Ring is evil, even if you try to use it to rescue orphans an puppies from a burning building.


Differences:
• D&D alignment gets in everything. It gets in spell lists, it gets in class abilities, it gets in deities, it gets in everything and cleaning it out is a bitch. I can easily remove swords from my game if I want to.
• Rules for swords do not create a crutch whereby designers don't feel a need to give any fluff for why a given group uses swords instead of axes or bows (they don't do that much, but that's because they're just plain lazy).

Again, you're missing the point. What you're talking about is not "removing alignment" it's "removing some of the alignment-specific game mechanics". That's not the same thing at all, and in fact it could make a huge mess if you let it, because you're going to wind up with a situation where you abolish the concept of objective evil, but still have people and things that act in an evil way for no clear reason.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 04:19 PM
What do the Orcs in Lord of the Rings do that is "evil"?
1. They eat people.
2. They follow Sauron, who is clearly shown to be a great big imperialist mind-controlling ****.

No, because none of those specific in-character powers exist in Lord of the Rings. On the other hand the Ring is evil, even if you try to use it to rescue orphans an puppies from a burning building.Yeah, because it slowly turns you into a huge *******.

Again, you're missing the point. What you're talking about is not "removing alignment" it's "removing some of the alignment-specific game mechanics". That's not the same thing at all, and in fact it could make a huge mess if you let it, because you're going to wind up with a situation where you abolish the concept of objective evil, but still have people and things that act in an evil way for no clear reason.See my second point for why removing alignment period is a good idea.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 04:27 PM
1. They eat people.
2. They follow Sauron, who is clearly shown to be a great big imperialist mind-controlling ****.

To (1): What exactly is wrong with eating people, given that the people you are eating want to exterminate your race.

To (2): So it's evil to be ruled by an evil ruler?


Yeah, because it slowly turns you into a huge *******.

But why does it do that? In the absence of a concept of absolute evil, there is no reason for it to turn you into a huge string of asterisks. That's exactly the point I'm making, and exactly the point I made upthread. If you abolish the concept of Alignment, Lord of the Rings is basically about how a bunch of genocidal bastards crushed the last fragments of opposition to their horrific imperialist ambitions, see The Noam Chomsky Lord of the Rings (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html).

This was basically the point on which I entered this thread. There are some concepts for which you need Alignment (LotR doesn't work without it), there are some for which you need not to have it. This, put simply, is why more than one RPG exists in the world.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 05:11 PM
To (2): So it's evil to be ruled by an evil ruler?Yeah, if you do it willingly.

But why does it do that? In the absence of a concept of absolute evil, there is no reason for it to turn you into a huge string of asterisks. That's exactly the point I'm making, and exactly the point I made upthread.Really? Magically being made selfish is impossible without alignment? Also, I laughed at it "turn you into a huge string of asterisks".

If you abolish the concept of Alignment, Lord of the Rings is basically about how a bunch of genocidal bastards crushed the last fragments of opposition to their horrific imperialist ambitions, see The Noam Chomsky Lord of the Rings (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html).While humorous, the commentary is just arguing that what is observed in this movie is different from the "real" Middle Earth.

This was basically the point on which I entered this thread. There are some concepts for which you need Alignment (LotR doesn't work without it), there are some for which you need not to have it. This, put simply, is why more than one RPG exists in the world.A story involving clearly good and evil teams can be done without an obnoxious alignment system. PERIOD. One doesn't need rules to have Baron Von Baby-eater love the succulent flesh of innocent babes. One only needs to have him do it.

Okay, let me just sum up your idea here, assuming I have it correctly: having stupid-evil characters is having an "alignment" in your game, that is, "stupid-evil" = "objective morality" in the same way that "swords" = "combat". There is a problem here: people in the real world do not react to "stupid-evil" people like serial killers as proof of objective morality. They don't react to movie and TV show "lol evil" characters as proof of objective morality existing in those universes.

Blanks
2008-03-14, 05:19 PM
Perhaps we need to clear up the discussion a bit?

This is copy/pasted from wikipedia:

Moral absolutism is the belief that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are right or wrong, devoid of the context of the act. "Absolutism" is often philosophically contrasted with moral relativism, which is a belief that moral truths are relative to social, cultural, historical or personal references, and to situational ethics, which holds that the morality of an act depends on the context of the act.

Dan_Hemmens, what you are saying is that playing with alignment is the same as moral absolutism right?

Clearly DnD alignment is not meant to be relativistic - Demons detect as evil to paladins as well as to other Demons.

That leaves us with situational ethics as the last possibility, but I just can't see it as what DnD intended - no matter the situation, a paladin who kills an innocent loses his paladinhood.

So I have to stick with Dan in that DnD moral is absolute.

This is NOT however, the same as saying that there is no grey areas, or that you cannot have discussions about morality: just because there is an objective good and evil doesn't mean people can't discuss what it is.

Blanks
2008-03-14, 05:29 PM
A story involving clearly good and evil teams can be done without an obnoxious alignment system.
Though i agree with parts of your post, isn't this just ... window dressing?

If one team is "clearly good" and the other "clearly evil", does it matter wether we label the evil as [evil]?
My point being that if it can be done equally well with and without, its much easier not to remove alignment.

In my campaigns as a DM i almost always (if PCs are good) have a good and an evil side(s). Finding out which is which, THAT is the real trick :smallsmile:

Can muddled (unclear) evil and good be done with an alignment system? I think it can.
2 LG knights can kill each other in a duel about love, and still be just as goodaligned. Good aligned countries can still be at war, assuming we mean good and not GOOD like a saint.



Oh yeah, thats all imho ;)

hamishspence
2008-03-14, 05:30 PM
Book Of Vile Darkness suggests grey areas. e.g. killing a irredeemably evil monster for profit is neutral, not good or evil. Motives are relevant to an act,

The same act (climbing a hill to escape monsters, accidentally causing a landslide that kills people) can be true accident (really did not know it would slip) negligance (knew it could slip but was sure he could climb without accident and was wrong) or murder (knew it would slip, knew people would die, wanted to escape anyway)

There are a lot of supplements giving the game some variety to evil and good(Exemplars of Evil, Champions of Ruin, champions of Valor, exalted Deeds, vile Darkness, Tyrants of Nine Hells)

In short, even with D&D absolute alignments, evil can be minor or major, villains can have nice features, heroes have have personality flaws.

Good reason for alignments: it gives you rules to work with. Knowing what is evil or good in D&D gives you a framework to build upon.

Citizen Joe
2008-03-14, 05:45 PM
Good reason for alignments: it gives you rules to work with. Knowing what is evil or good in D&D gives you a framework to build upon.

No, that is a good reason for alignments to be a tool for the DM. Barring any other motivation, the DM can default to the creature's alignment for motivation.

However it is stupid for PC's to have alignments because those characters are controlled by players. They have their own rationales for doing things. A character doesn't do things for good or evil reason (or law or chaos), it does things because there is a player pulling his strings to make the puppet do stuff.

DM's don't have enough hands to control 30 puppets all at once. So he's got to wind them all up like toy soldiers with some sort of internal programming and let them go do their thing. He DOES have enough hands to work a couple puppets. So the important people do stuff because the DM is behind them pulling their strings.

So, the PCs are Alignment: Player, the BBEG is alignment: DM... all the little minions are alignment: As per monster description.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 05:50 PM
Yeah, if you do it willingly.

Since he can control minds, and since nobody ever seems to give Orcs a choice about anything.


Really? Magically being made selfish is impossible without alignment?

No, but a device which magically makes people selfish is a completely stupid thing for a mage to invent. What would be the point of it?

In the text, the ring turns you evil because the ring itself is evil. It is an evil thing by its nature. The entire concept behind the ring is that inanimate objects can be evil. It's very hard to have that in a world that doesn't posit an absolute morality.


Also, I laughed at it "turn you into a huge string of asterisks".

Thank you.


While humorous, the commentary is just arguing that what is observed in this movie is different from the "real" Middle Earth.

No, what it's arguing is that what is observed in the "real" Middle Earth would be viewed, if it were really happening in the real world, as an absolute atrocity.

Again I say: Legolas and Gimili have a competition to see how many Orcs they can kill. If you don't accept the idea of absolute morality, that there exists Good and Evil and to fight Evil is Good (which is the very core of the concept of alignment) then the actual actions of the actual fellowship are insane and genocidal. You can make similar arguments about Star Wars (one internet pundit describes it as "this bunch of maniacs destroy all semblance of order in the galaxy, just so Princess Leia can get her tiara back").


A story involving clearly good and evil teams can be done without an obnoxious alignment system. PERIOD.

A story can be done without any system. Period. You're confusing the concept of Alignment (absolute good and absolute evil) with the specific mechanical implementations of alignment-based spells and effects in D&D. If you have "clearly good and evil teams" you have alignment.


One doesn't need rules to have Baron Von Baby-eater love the succulent flesh of innocent babes. One only needs to have him do it.

Similarly, one does not need rules to have Baron Von Baby-Eater fight with a sword. But removing the game mechanics which govern sword use in D&D is not the same as removing "swords" from D&D.


Okay, let me just sum up your idea here, assuming I have it correctly: having stupid-evil characters is having an "alignment" in your game, that is, "stupid-evil" = "objective morality" in the same way that "swords" = "combat". There is a problem here: people in the real world do not react to "stupid-evil" people like serial killers as proof of objective morality. They don't react to movie and TV show "lol evil" characters as proof of objective morality existing in those universes.

Serial killers in the real world aren't evil, they're mentally ill. That's a different thing. If Baron Von Baby Eater is compelled to eat babies by some variety of mental illness, he should be taken to a Cleric and cured, not killed.

Movie and TV show "lol evil" on the other hand absolutely is evidence of objective, absolutist morality existing in that universe. Again, if that wasn't the case James Bond and Luke Skywalker would be mass murdering war criminals.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 06:14 PM
Since he can control minds, and since nobody ever seems to give Orcs a choice about anything.Eh, I don't think Sauron has enough power to mind control every single orc ever, otherwise it would probably have been more effective to mind control some other race.


No, but a device which magically makes people selfish is a completely stupid thing for a mage to invent. What would be the point of it?If making people selfish is a side effect (as it was) then it's just a side effect. What's the point of making a car that explodes? The point is that you have made a car.

In the text, the ring turns you evil because the ring itself is evil. It is an evil thing by its nature. The entire concept behind the ring is that inanimate objects can be evil. It's very hard to have that in a world that doesn't posit an absolute morality.No it isn't. Just have it be powered by "corrupting forces" or "dark things" or something.

No, what it's arguing is that what is observed in the "real" Middle Earth would be viewed, if it were really happening in the real world, as an absolute atrocity.No, it's all "it's a giant conspiracy by the pipe-weed lobby with aid from Gandalf who is spreading lies about magic rings and the orcs are just trying to compete with economic superpowers."

Again I say: Legolas and Gimili have a competition to see how many Orcs they can kill. If you don't accept the idea of absolute morality, that there exists Good and Evil and to fight Evil is Good (which is the very core of the concept of alignment) then the actual actions of the actual fellowship are insane and genocidal.Plenty of real-world soldiers count kills. That doesn't mean they're "insane and genocidal." It just means they are coping with killing people by making it a game.

You can make similar arguments about Star Wars (one internet pundit describes it as "this bunch of maniacs destroy all semblance of order in the galaxy, just so Princess Leia can get her tiara back").More like "a bunch of rebels destroy a cruel and racist galactic civilization to replace it with a good one."


A story can be done without any system. Period. You're confusing the concept of Alignment (absolute good and absolute evil) with the specific mechanical implementations of alignment-based spells and effects in D&D. If you have "clearly good and evil teams" you have alignment.Perhaps. But, to go back to ORIGINAL POINT, alignment tends to be used as a crutch to ensure that players know that, yes Virginia, even though you can't quite see how, orcs are A-OK to slaughter.

Serial killers in the real world aren't evil, they're mentally ill. That's a different thing. If Baron Von Baby Eater is compelled to eat babies by some variety of mental illness, he should be taken to a Cleric and cured, not killed.Oh, so baby-eating doesn't involve some sort of huge mental ****-up? Jesus man, come on.

Movie and TV show "lol evil" on the other hand absolutely is evidence of objective, absolutist morality existing in that universe. Again, if that wasn't the case James Bond and Luke Skywalker would be mass murdering war criminals.
No, they would be the exact same thing they are in their worlds - a secret agent fighting dangerous organizations and a religious guerilla rebelling against a bad government.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-14, 06:38 PM
Eh, I don't think Sauron has enough power to mind control every single orc ever, otherwise it would probably have been more effective to mind control some other race.

And now we're getting into supposition. The point is that you can't actually judge the Orcs worthy of extermination as a race by their actions in the books or film.


If making people selfish is a side effect (as it was) then it's just a side effect. What's the point of making a car that explodes? The point is that you have made a car.

The one ring does not just "make people selfish as a side effect". It is corrupts the hearts of men because it is utterly evil.


No it isn't. Just have it be powered by "corrupting forces" or "dark things" or something.

So instead of making it innately evil you ... make it innately evil?


No, it's all "it's a giant conspiracy by the pipe-weed lobby with aid from Gandalf who is spreading lies about magic rings and the orcs are just trying to compete with economic superpowers."

But the joke is that - pipe-weed aside - it's all true. Mordor has no natural resources, the Orcs are a slave race bound to the will of a tyrant they have no way to remove and Gandalf's "solution" to the whole situation is the wholesale extermination of their race.


Plenty of real-world soldiers count kills. That doesn't mean they're "insane and genocidal." It just means they are coping with killing people by making it a game.

Which is, itself, kind of messed up. It's about dehumanizing people you intend to kill. I'm not saying it isn't necessary, because war is an ugly business, but it certainly isn't noble.

And soldiers who are counting kills of a race of beings they seek to exterminate are insane and genocidal.


More like "a bunch of rebels destroy a cruel and racist galactic civilization to replace it with a good one."

This is exactly my point though. At the heart of the Alignment system is the false, unsupportable assumption that you can automatically create good in the world by finding evil people and killing them.

The rebels in Star Wars don't replace the empire with anything. They might in the EU, but in the movies the story ends with the destruction of the Empire. Nobody asks "hang on, how are these guys going to run the galaxy" or "what exactly are they going to do about the imperial military, which presumably exists, and actually wasn't the Empire, with its primarily devolved power structures, a lot more sensible than the Republic anyway."

Real life morality and particularly real life politics and governance is not just a matter of killing the bad guys and making everything alright.


Perhaps. But, to go back to ORIGINAL POINT, alignment tends to be used as a crutch to ensure that players know that, yes Virginia, even though you can't quite see how, orcs are A-OK to slaughter.

As opposed to dispensing with alignment, and saying "Orcs are A-Okay to slaughter because they're the slaves of a cruel tyrant"?


Oh, so baby-eating doesn't involve some sort of huge mental ****-up? Jesus man, come on.

In real life, yes. Which is why somebody who eats babies should be hospitalized not imprisoned. In a fantasy world either (a) yes, in which case they should be taken to a Cleric to be cured, or (b) no, because in a world torn apart by fast supernatural powers eating babies might be exactly the right thing to do or (c) no, because this is a world that assumes that some people are just Evil and need killin', no ifs no buts.


No, they would be the exact same thing they are in their worlds - a secret agent fighting dangerous organizations and a religious guerilla rebelling against a bad government.

So you mean, an assassin whose work would be illegal under six international treaties, whose existence would be denied by his own government because it would cause international outrage and public scandal, and a fanatical terrorist?

This is what I don't think you're understanding. You can't abolish Alignment and still have the world work in simple terms of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, people who need to be killed and people who do the killing.

Cyclone231
2008-03-14, 11:05 PM
This is what I don't think you're understanding. You can't abolish Alignment and still have the world work in simple terms of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, people who need to be killed and people who do the killing.Can so.

Okay, let me be clear, once again:
Illithids are evil. It is clear why they are evil. A player knows that any given illithid is going to be evil. Even if it wasn't on the sheet, any book which discusses illithids in any detail will clearly show them as evil. They are monsters who constantly kill humans to survive and reproduce. They create empires of slaves guarding slaves.

But the reason orcs are "evil" is because it says so in the book. It gives some flimsy and unbelievable reasons for them being evil ("zomg! they plan to kill people all the time; that's ALL THEY EVER DO!" - it really says they spend their time raiding or preparing to raid)

So I guess what I'm saying is I'd like some believable villain races who are actually shown to be villainous, and I feel like removing alignment would help remove this crutch the writers seem to have about writing clearly villainous races.

Dervag
2008-03-15, 01:17 AM
No, what it's arguing is that what is observed in the "real" Middle Earth would be viewed, if it were really happening in the real world, as an absolute atrocity.Well, it would be viewed as an absolute atrocity by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, anyway. But they see many things as absolute atrocities. Which suggests that either absolute atrocities are so common that we don't really have a standard of comparison by which to condemn them, or that Messrs. Zinn and Chomsky will see atrocities whether they exist or not.


Again I say: Legolas and Gimili have a competition to see how many Orcs they can kill. If you don't accept the idea of absolute morality, that there exists Good and Evil and to fight Evil is Good (which is the very core of the concept of alignment) then the actual actions of the actual fellowship are insane and genocidal.The orcs in question are in fact attacking enemy soldiers.

There have been all sorts of cultures where two warriors might have a competition like that, despite the fact that those cultures were by no means genocidal. For example, some countries have produced fighter aces in living memory who bragged about the number of enemy planes they had shot down and competed with other aces, just as Legolas and Gimli do. And yet those countries did not necessarily proceed to slaughter their defeated enemies.

In many ancient cultures, boasting that you had killed several enemy warriors in personal combat was considered good dinner conversation among the local elite, and you might well be asked to tell detailed, embellished stories about your kills. Again, these cultures were not necessarily genocidal. Most of them weren't genocidal at all.

Were they insane? Possibly, but if so then "insanity" must be defined either in relativistic terms (anyone who disagrees with you is insane), or in some absolute terms that we are poorly placed to define.


A story can be done without any system. Period. You're confusing the concept of Alignment (absolute good and absolute evil) with the specific mechanical implementations of alignment-based spells and effects in D&D. If you have "clearly good and evil teams" you have alignment.I think you can have moral clarity in the absence of designated Team Good and Team Evil, with one being persistently in the right and the other persistently in the wrong. But I guess we may have to agree to disagree on that.


Movie and TV show "lol evil" on the other hand absolutely is evidence of objective, absolutist morality existing in that universe. Again, if that wasn't the case James Bond and Luke Skywalker would be mass murdering war criminals.I really think you're taking this premise a little too far.

Fighting a battle isn't generally considered mass murder, even in the absence of absolute morality that defines your enemies as "evil." I mean, General Veers, the Imperial commander in the big AT-AT on Hoth, isn't a war criminal or a mass murderer for blowing up the Rebel shield generator. He may be working for the wrong guy. He may even be a very bad man; we don't know. But the fact that he just won a fight doesn't make him a mass murdering war criminal.

Likewise, almost all the people that James Bond or Luke Skywalker ever go after at all are fighting, or creating a situation in which a fight is likely. Adages about "he who lives by the sword" are appropriate here. When James Bond gets into a gunfight in the process of trying to gain information, protect a source of intelligence, or sabotage an operation with dangerous consequences, he is not a mass murderer for winning.

When Luke Skywalker goes after Jabba the Hutt in an attempt to help his friends out of a jam, that doesn't make him a monster even if there is no abstract sense in which Jabba is "evil." First of all, because if you can't call Jabba evil you can't call Luke evil because "evil" doesn't belong in the lexicon. Second, because Jabba has chosen to live in a world where outcomes are controlled by people who have power and wealth, and in which people with power can do what they want. So what right does he have to complain if he crosses a Jedi knight by kidnapping his friends? If one of Jabba's friends were kidnapped by someone weaker than Jabba, Jabba might well try to have the kidnapper killed. Why should he (or we) expect Luke to behave any differently, or condemn him for behaving the same?

Denying the idea of alignment eliminates the possibility of monsters of any stripe, not just of monsters on the opposing team. Absent good and evil, there are no monsters, only creatures.


And now we're getting into supposition. The point is that you can't actually judge the Orcs worthy of extermination as a race by their actions in the books or film.Absolutely true.


But the joke is that - pipe-weed aside - it's all true. Mordor has no natural resources, the Orcs are a slave race bound to the will of a tyrant they have no way to remove and Gandalf's "solution" to the whole situation is the wholesale extermination of their race.If Mordor has no natural resources, where is Sauron getting the wealth to equip and support an army vastly larger than any that oppose him? I mean, you can call Gondor and Rohan economic superpowers if you like. But it's pretty clear that Mordor is the military superpower in this picture. Their army is so big it can stomp all over anyone in a straight fight; the anti-Mordor coalition never does more than break one finger of Mordor's power.

Also, I strongly suspect that Gandalf, and most others of Middle-Earth, would cheerfully settle for an end to orc attacks, even if that did not mean an end to orcs. After all, Gandalf is the same guy who doesn't think Bilbo should have killed Gollum because "even the wise cannot see all ends" and so forth.


Which is, itself, kind of messed up. It's about dehumanizing people you intend to kill. I'm not saying it isn't necessary, because war is an ugly business, but it certainly isn't noble.Who said Legolas and Gimli have to be "noble?" In the absence of alignment no one is objectively noble any more than they are objectively evil.

For that matter, you might want to reconsider your use of terms- "noble" used to mean "very effective killer and ruler, or relative thereof." Then all that other stuff about courtly manners got layered on top.


The rebels in Star Wars don't replace the empire with anything. They might in the EU, but in the movies the story ends with the destruction of the Empire. Nobody asks "hang on, how are these guys going to run the galaxy" or "what exactly are they going to do about the imperial military, which presumably exists, and actually wasn't the Empire, with its primarily devolved power structures, a lot more sensible than the Republic anyway."I think the reason is fairly simple. If we go only by the movies, and include extra scenes put in by Lucas later (which, logically, must be just as valid as the original scenes), the fact that the Emperor dies at Endor is met with widespread celebration on many planets.

This suggests that the Empire was not widely liked, even if the sinister and ferocious behavior of its envoys didn't suggest that they were building up hostility (as did their destruction of Alderaan, and the fact that the Death Star's commander has to say "fear will keep the local systems in line.")

So even if the Rebels aren't automatically right, the Empire isn't a particularly nice government, nor does it display exceptional competence in governing. We don't see the Empire being a good government; all we see is tanks and guns and soldiers and warships. For all we know, they're a kleptocracy that is gradually stripping the galaxy of what wealth remains after its industrial sector got wrecked in the Clone Wars.

So who's to say the Rebels aren't doing something entirely reasonable in seeking to overthrow that Empire and replace it with a consensual government? We have no evidence that the Empire actually does a better job than the Republic did, especially in the absence of Sith Lords trying to mess things up.


This is what I don't think you're understanding. You can't abolish Alignment and still have the world work in simple terms of good and evil, good guys and bad guys, people who need to be killed and people who do the killing.Oh, sure. I agree.

But I don't think that means that right and wrong become undefined. It's just that you no longer have "designated right guys" and "designated wrong guys." You just have people who do right, or wrong, or a mix of both. People like James Bond would (in real life) tend to walk that line- in the movies Bond rarely does things that are really wrong, but also rarely does things that are really right, as opposed to 'just following orders.' Bond would be a deeply gray character. Which, I think, is something the new Bond actor is doing a good job of showing.

On the other hand, other people really are sincerely trying to do good by people. And if they aren't part of a designated "team good," that doesn't mean they don't deserve support, emulation, and protection. Conversely, some people try to do really nasty things. And in a world where they can't be brought under control easily, it may be fully just and appropriate to start a war to put an end to the nasty things.

Cuddly
2008-03-15, 02:08 AM
This is really the problem with a lot of the "evil" monster races - they're just arbitrarily given evil alignments without any explanation. Does anybody worry about whether or not Mind Flayers are really evil? No. Does anybody complain about the morality of slaughtering Mind Flayer villages?

Why is this? It's not because the Mind Flayers are any different, statistically, from the orcs in this regard. It's because they are a real, true, brutal kind of evil. It's clear why they're evil and elves aren't - they hunt other intelligent creatures, they take slaves, they make brutal empires to maintain their society's need for human sacrifice.

But what about the orc villages that are doing the same thing? If an orc village decided to go hurt some people, then by D&D morality, it's ok to go hurt them back.

Diamondeye
2008-03-15, 02:52 AM
I'm looking back over the thread, and it seems to me there are two different questions going on here. Whether to use a mechanical alignment system is a separate, albiet related question to the issue of whether there is an absolute morality in a D&D world.

You don't have to have an absolute morality. As long as all the players understand what the DM is defining as "good" and what is "evil" you've got a set morality for game purposes. It doesn't need to match up to any particular real-world moral system or viewpoint; it just needs to be understood what constitutes good, evil, law and chaos. You can even use what's designated as good and evil on the game books without the mechanical descriptors.

The problem with this appraoch is, of course, that it becomes more difficult to use game effects that rely on alignment, such as holy swords or protection from alignment spells, since without a mechanic, the line for where exactly a creature is evil enough to be affected by a holy sword will be basically wherever the DM feels it is (as opposed to whatever's written in the book).

If you have a relativistic world, that exacerbates the problem of alignment-related effects, but, if you ENJOY having questions in your game such as "well, we invaded his country last year so why is it wrong for him to invade ours?" then a relativistic system may work well for you. My personal objection to this method is that it tends to encourage people to import their real-life views into the game, and to pose "moral questions" that are one-sided so as to create an artificial dilemma.

For example, take the "we invaded his country" thing. Ok, you invaded his country last year. He defended himself, right? Apparently so since he's able to invade this time around. So what makes it "not ok" for you to defend yourself? You deserve to get invaded because you invaded him? Maybe, maybe not, but if you create an axiom "It's not ok to invade other countries, and if you do, you don't deserve to defend yourself if they invade you back" you've just created a moral system. A small one that addresses only narrow questions, but I have noticed that "morally ambiguous" environments simply change what behaviors constitutue good and evil and remove "good" and "evil" as labels, while still having behaviors considered universally wrong or right.

Now, if you DO use alignment, a lot of the "anti-alignment" arguments rely on the tail wagging the dog. A creature is given an evil descriptor because its behavior reflects those described as evil in the book, not the reverse. In other words, the Evil Duke doesn't eat babies because he's evil, he's evil because he chooses to eat babies.

You can still have evil creatures that behave in a wide variety of ways; and you can have intelligent evil creatures. A person might consciously choose to be evil because they see it as a route to power, they are easily tempted or foolish, or they might simply be consumed by anger and hate. They might not even believe they are evil; they're just wrong about that, since, under the written system, there is an objective good and evil.

As for the issue of "good orcs" you probably won't find them amongst the orc tribes you typically fight because their incompatible views with the tribe would force them to leave before that. Neutral orcs are a more realistic possibility within a tribe.

In other words, pick the method that works for you. If you expect game alignment to reflect the real world, or if you let alignment drive behavior rather than the other way around, you'll be in for a disappointment.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-03-15, 05:23 AM
Who said Legolas and Gimli have to be "noble?" In the absence of alignment no one is objectively noble any more than they are objectively evil.

For that matter, you might want to reconsider your use of terms- "noble" used to mean "very effective killer and ruler, or relative thereof." Then all that other stuff about courtly manners got layered on top.


You're making a category mistake.

All of the actions of the Fellowship, the men of Gondor, the men of Rohan and everybody else in Lord of the Rings are defined in terms of Good and Evil. Sauron is Evil and must be destroyed. The Orcs are evil and must be destroyed. The Ring is Evil and must be destroyed.

You can't remove the concept of objective evil from the world and leave it the same setting, because then nobody's motivations make sense.