Useful Morality Subsystems (Alignment Replacements)

[Herbert_W]

Instead of going back to the 9 alignments, why not use those 6 values?

That's what I'm suggesting. I only brought the train of thought back around to the nine alignments to show how much each one glosses over - how many different ways there are for characters who have the "same" alignment on the nine-sector grid to have dramatic ethical differences.

This sounds like a workable concept, however i’m curious if we can cut or combine these six into a set of three? I’m a sucker for the rule of three and it might make the concept a bit easier to utilize at the game table.

Ultima: Quest of the Avatar was mentioned earlier in this thread, and that managed to expand three core principles into six virtues (and then added ones "above" and "around" to make eight). We could do a similar thing here to make it seem like the six foundations come from three.

For example, we could have these cores, each of which composes one foundation when unalloyed:

• Beneficence: Care
• Acceptance: Authority
• Trust: Liberty

When alloyed, the other three foundations emerge:

• Beneficence/Acceptance: Loyalty
• Trust/Beneficence: Fairness
• Acceptance/Trust: Sanctity

(It's a little bit tempting to posit a seventh foundation that consists of all of the cores alloyed together. Perhaps this could be balance, as in the ability to strike a good balance between the foundations when they conflict. That's not a foundation that people are instinctively inclined to value - it's not baked into human brains, like the original six supposedly are - but it is something that people might learn to value after spending time trying to build consensus and community among others who have varying foundational preferences.)

I'd recommend having this three-core representation serve as a way of justifying the system within the rule of threes rather than as a replacement for having six independent values. You would loose a lot of nuance if you were to collapse these six foundations into just the three. Someone could value liberty very highly while not caring much for fairness and sanctity, or vice versa, for example.

This system is drawn from real-world human psychology (or, at least, a certain group of psychologists' understanding thereof). That's good in a way, as it makes it suitable for describing believably human-like characters. However, it does mean that it's going to be a little messy. We shouldn't expect things to fall into neat categories and patterns that match our aesthetic preferences. It's really quite a wonder that things work out as neatly as they do!