What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

[OldTrees1]

Yes, I was intentionally ignoring some elephants.

They could also all be described with something pithy, like “light and dark war within them” or something.

Yes different characters with different moral characters and their own moral success and failures can end up being described with a similar summary when describing just the high level position on the spectrum.

The Opening post is also suggesting having Detect ___ spells look one level below the high level summary. So the person that lived a mostly amoral life might not ping either Detect spell but someone with a similar high level summary that had a life full of moral consequence might ping both Detect spells.

Regardless of whether I’ve read/Interpreted that right or wrong, the point remains, I still hold that developing the heuristics by which you a) assign numbers to those vectors, and b) convert those vectors into a descriptor of the individual’s “goodness” (which, on a second read, I suspect your implementation / conceptualization of the spell isn’t actually doing; that’s more for our benefit) is much harder (and much more likely to promote philosophical disagreement) than simply recording “gave cats thumbs: +1,000 evil”, “funded research into modeling falling damage by dropping puppies from various heights: +2 evil”.

That is stretching my metaphor* by assuming the alignment relevant intents/actions/consequences of a character must be quantified and treated as vectors. I would hold you are making it harder than it needs to be.

*The x coordinate from a sum of vectors is similar to summarizing a character's moral character to a position on a continuum. Both methods, despite their differences, summarize the overall position but, despite not showing the original information, it doesn't delete the additional information. Just like the sets {+220, -190}, {+25, -15, +25, -15, +25, -15, +25}, and {+30} are different despite sharing the same sum (30).

Or maybe the implementation of the “know Alignment” Spell is different. Maybe the spell just (almost literally) paints you a picture, simply showing you the vectors, and leaving the caster to interpret them. A whole forest of little evils and one big good? A whole forest of little good deeds and one huge evil? What that means is open to the caster’s interpretation. And, over time, society learns that different patterns are more suitable to certain occupations. Employers reject candidates based on their “art”(“I’m sorry, but this job requires you to interact with all sorts, and you’ve shown a disturbing predilection towards strong good acts.”), and information privacy becomes a hot topic (“Steve is the only one to gain a new, large evil vector around the time of the murder” (or, if lying is evil, testing Alignment doubles as a “defect lies” spell, making trials disturbingly efficient)).

This idea of merging the detect spells, combined with them being somewhat more detailed, is interesting. I suggest simplifying it to:
A) Detect the qualitative (not quantitative) strength of each alignment. You might detect someone with a faint Order aura, moderate Good aura, strong Chaos aura, and no detectable Evil aura.
B) After more time studying the auras you might detect the Order aura is from a low number of infrequent but high impact events but the Chaos aura is from a deluge of behavior. They probably have a few rules that rarely come up but they would never break. Given the milder moral auras, the caster might conclude these rare rules might or might not be related to a moral code.

Like… choosing that good and evil cancel out when producing what you dub a “high level descriptive alignment summary” is a choice. One which (for example) 3e determination of which plane a soul goes to does not follow, iirc. That uses a base logic that includes “7 evil acts guarantee an evil plane” (iirc).

Another choice for the “high level descriptive alignment summary” could be that it simply returns the direction of the largest vector (or “neutral” of no vector is larger than X). This would produce different sets of “high level descriptive alignment summaries” than one that worked based off additive logic (and would probably never describe any of my 4 sample characters as neutral, regardless of the balance of their actions).

But, assuming a simple sum was used, and you were simply transitioning from a trinary return value of good / neutral / evil to a something more informative, up to returning the actual current sum… it’s not any harder to implement the code for the new “Know Alignment” Spell. It’s still pretty trivial code. If that’s all you’re saying, I agree… but feel that the *choice* of additive vectors is itself nontrivial, and not guaranteed to be a de facto implementation at all tables.

Thank you for giving contrasting examples of high level summaries.

Sidenote: I mentioned above that I did not state they did cancel out. I stated a summary does not share the whole story, but neither does it delete the whole story. This is true in my (unstated) system, and the 2 you mention. /Sidenote


Summary of what I was saying: Many that use descriptive alignment already use alignment continuums because it is easy to recognize the high level summary is not the full picture. Hmm, the OP has an interesting idea of letting Detect/Know Alignment spell see one level deeper.


In reply to you concern, I agree that letting the Detect/Know Alignment spell see one level deeper takes little effort if one is already using descriptive alignment. You are already describing the character's alignment based on what the character's characterization was/is. Letting the spells see your penultimate conclusions is not much more work than letting them see your conclusion.



Edit: Where did all the "Â"s come from? I did not edit the quotes. That is weird.