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  1. - Top - End - #151
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    ... a bunch of punch-clock villains just wearing skulls on the armor and committing garden-variety crimes, sure, there's no need for any kind of alignment system. But as soon as you stick Sir Kills-a-lot the Death Knight at the head of your Legions of Doom and make the plot about the clash between him and his gods vs. Lady Saves-a-lot the Paladin and her gods, you need an alignment system of some kind, just like how as soon as you make a game involving combat you need a combat system of some sort.
    All other points aside, this is the one where you fall apart. Because you still can't say WHY.

    I as a DM say:
    "This is The Army Of King Ebon The Vile, servant of dark gods."
    I know this is true. I have them and their leader ACT accordingly.

    "This is the army of Lady Valiant, servant of the holy gods."
    I know this is true. I have them and their leader ACT accordingly.

    Depending upon what the players do, the logical consequences for their interactions with these cosmic forces occurs. I might use a countdown clock for things that might happen over time if not addressed, but countdown clocks aren't alignment.

    In what way would my players have a lesser experience for not being able to magically scan people and determine if they're on Team Badguy?

    In what way would my player experience suffer if I say in session 0 "You are all fighting on the side of truth, justice, and cosmogical goodness" rather than implementing a 3x3 grid system and telling them to only be in these three arbitrary squares?

    In what way *specifically* would my players be unable to experience a cosmological struggle by my decision not to label things as NE or LG? (Assuming I'm playing in 5e, where alignment has no associated mechanics.)

    In what way *specifically* am I depriving them by not using a "corruption points" system and instead working through the effects of a character falling to evil organically, working together with the player?

    Until you can answer why any of the above approaches are impossible, you cannot argue that an alignment system is required for high fantasy.


    ON THE SUBJECT OF STAR WARS DARK-SIDE POINTS:
    They're literally Fate Points from Fate but if the GM has them they're Dark Side points. Unless you're ready to argue that the MERE EXISTENCE of Fate Points is an alignment system, this is the stretchiest of stretches.

    ON CORRUPTION SYSTEMS:
    This presents a bit of a problem. You said Alignment is Descriptive, but Corruption Systems are Prescriptive. And also you said using Alignment Prescriptively is being a bad GM, but Alignment Systems are always good for High Fantasy, but a High Fantasy system using Prescriptive Alignment is... good for High Fantasy?

    Are you seeing where I'm suddenly having a harder time taking this position seriously?

    On Dungeon World:
    I mean, according to you so long as it has a Detect Evil spell it has alignment, and Alignment is required for High Fantasy, so DW should be able to do High Fantasy just fine, since all that's needed (according to you) is Alignment and Combat systems. Yet it's an affront to High Fantasy and made for Sword and Sorcery....

    HMMMMMMMMMMMM

    Also claiming an ability to reach out for guidance about what might be evil nearby is the same thing as a fleshed-out alignment system is another reaaaaally stretchy stretch. I look forward to seeing you in Cirque Du Soleil.

  2. - Top - End - #152

    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by JoeJ View Post
    Establishing a definition doesn't make communication difficult. On the contrary, it's what makes communication possible at all.
    Establishing a definition that contradicts established use makes communication difficult. If I want to talk about the number between 2 and 4, calling it 3 is useful. Calling it 2 is not.

    Whether or not people change their mind about some silly trolley problem is absolutely irrelevant to any of this.
    How people feel about ethical problems is at the core of your ethical system. If your "objective Good" doesn't change people's minds about questions of morality, then it isn't a moral property. It becomes exactly the same as "Cold" or "Fire" -- an arbitrary property with mechanical effects, but no relevance to ethical decisions. By insisting we use ethical terms for it, all you are doing is increasing confusion.

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    Firstly and most obviously because White/Black/Blue/Red/Green don't directly map to Good/Evil/Law/Chaos/Neutrality, either in terms of their relationship to each other or in terms of definitions, so the idea that the swap is just replacing moral terms with team labels is incorrect; and secondly because the colors also include things like personality, technology levels, and such that alignment explicitly doesn't.
    This seems like a weak argument. Obviously the thing we want to replace alignment with won't be the same as alignment. Otherwise why replace alignment? The color wheel is generally superior, because it's a set of terms with definitions that are easily agreed upon. If you really need the properties of e.g. the Great Wheel, you should use Planar Alignment as your replacement (in no small part because that is what the Great Wheel actually is already).

    but go back to the earlier periods when the Republic is led by Jedi, they're opposed by the Sith Empire, Force-users are a credit a dozen, and the Force is almost visibly shaping events on a grand scale, and it's very much the case that the two are closely intertwined.
    If you're going to bring the EU into things, it needs to be the whole EU, and when you do that the notion of the Force as binary really falls aparnt.

    This is a double standard. Claiming that you know how "Motive Utilitarians" act just from the name but have no idea how "Acheronians" act just from the name just means that you think you have a handle on the former but not on the latter
    I have no problem with "Archeronian" as an alignment. By problem is specifically with the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes D&D uses, because I don't think they're useful or meaningful.

    If they're a bunch of punch-clock villains just wearing skulls on the armor and committing garden-variety crimes, sure, there's no need for any kind of alignment system. But as soon as you stick Sir Kills-a-lot the Death Knight at the head of your Legions of Doom and make the plot about the clash between him and his gods vs. Lady Saves-a-lot the Paladin and her gods, you need an alignment system of some kind, just like how as soon as you make a game involving combat you need a combat system of some sort.
    Why? That's the plot of The Stormlight Archive, which doesn't have an alignment system, at least not in the way D&D does.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    The alignment system has demonstrated more than enough that it doesn't promote collaboration at all. It promotes divisiveness if anything.
    Exactly. I don't understand how you can think "these behaviors are Objectively Good" is a stance that promotes collaboration.

  3. - Top - End - #153
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by ImNotTrevor View Post
    All other points aside, this is the one where you fall apart. Because you still can't say WHY.

    I as a DM say:
    "This is The Army Of King Ebon The Vile, servant of dark gods."
    I know this is true. I have them and their leader ACT accordingly.

    "This is the army of Lady Valiant, servant of the holy gods."
    I know this is true. I have them and their leader ACT accordingly.
    Better yet, not having an alignment system means you don't have to label one side being "objectively right". Which means that it allows for example a paladin PC to question the method of Lady Valiant's army when the war turns ugly, or the reasons why some decent people rallied the banner of King Ebon. I think that allows more interesting stories and character development than the convenience of neatly labeled "blue team vs red team" alignments would allow. :)

  4. - Top - End - #154
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Morty View Post
    This might be a stronger argument if there weren't actual RPGs based on LotR, which don't use alignment. IIRC at least some of them use a "corruption" mechanic of some kind - but that just goes to show that the alleged goals of the D&D alignment system can be accomplished much better in other ways.
    For the record, the morality system in The One Ring, the most modern LotR RPG I'm familiar with works like this:
    1. Each player Calling (sort of their character class) has a Shadow Weakness which represents the path they would follow if they fail to resist the Shadow's influence. Scholars have the Lure of Secrets, Slayers have the Curse of Vengeance, Treasure Hunters have Dragon-sickness, Wanderers have Wandering-madness, and Wardens and Leaders have the Lure of Power.
    2. Players gain Shadow Points from several potential sources: experiencing distressing events, directly confronting more powerful beings of the shadow (like Ringwraiths), crossing or dwelling in areas tainted by the Shadow, committing despicable or dishonorable actions ("regardless of the end they sought to achieve"), or taking possession of a cursed or tainted item or treasure.
    3. Players regularly use Hope points to power their abilities and make difficult rolls. Players become Miserable when they have more Shadow Points than their current Hope score. If they roll an Eye of Sauron on their feat die (a 1 in 12 chance with every roll) while Miserable then they are subject to a Bout of Madness where the Loremaster (GM) takes control of their character for a limited time and makes them do something they will regret later. Like trying to take the Ring from Frodo.
    4. A Bout of Madness resets the player's Shadow Points to 0 but also gives them a permanent Shadow Point and a Flaw that the Loremaster may invoke at appropriate times in the future to force a player to roll two Feat dice and take the lower result (Disadvantage, basically).
    5. A character who already has all four Flaws for his Calling and succumbs to another Bout of Madness becomes an NPC permanently. Elves lose interest in Middle-Earth and return to Valinor, while Men, Hobbits, or Dwarves either kill themselves in despair, threaten others to the point they have to be killed, or "starves to death in some solitary place, forsaken by men and animals."
    6. Temporary Shadow Points may be removed in a limited fashion by downtime activities between adventure phases, usually by practicing some creative craft. Permanent Shadow Points are, as the name implies, permanent.

    The alignment system in The One Ring therefore doubles as a sort of Sanity system, since you can get corruption for misdeeds but also take corruption hits for confronting powerful enemies or witnessing distressing events. Misdeeds that earn Shadow Points include (in escalating order) violent threats, lying purposefully or subtly manipulating the will of others, cowardice, theft and plunder, unprovoked aggression, abusing own authority to influence or dominate, torment and torture, or murder.

    The system is very different from D&D in many aspects. Aside from the game mechanics there are no PC spellcasters in Middle-Earth. PCs can gain some abilities that are obviously magical, but there is no spell casting system, and Gandalf, Saruman and Radagast are all powerful NPCs with abilities that are mostly up to the Loremaster to define. Combat tends to be short and rather deadly, with players only able to take a few hits. Travel rules are also a big part of the system, and all the printed adventures involve traveling extensively.

    I ran a whole year-long campaign in the game and my group and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Cubicle 7 also, sadly, lost the license, so its now out of print. A second edition from a different publisher is planned.

  5. - Top - End - #155
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    I don't see what points your talking about "raised upthread".
    Sorry, got this thread confused with the other alignment one going on at the moment. Basically, the point of alignment is not, and has never been, simply to put big labels on creatures saying "these are bad, you can kill them" and "these are good, you can't kill them." Alignments serve as roleplaying prompts and mechanical hooks, as I mentioned, at multiple levels of granularity.

    Using alignment as a roleplaying prompt has three main benefits:

    1) Information density. One of the major benefits of D&D's race and class system compared to more freeform systems is the ability to briefly convey a lot of information about your character. You can give a newbie one list of races and one list of classes, have them pick something from each, and go from there, and an experienced player saying "I'm an Elf Ranger" conveys a heck of a lot of information about their character, compared to more fiddly games like GURPS where a newb has to do everything from scratch and a veteran can't convey detail "packages" in the same way. Alignment is basically that for roleplaying prompts: Saying "here are six flavors of general moral and ethical outlook, pick one" can get a newbie thinking about character motivations and such without going through long lists of character traits or whatever, and "I'm a CE Elf Ranger" vs. "I'm a LG Elf Ranger" is a quick way to convey party dynamics and such between veterans.

    2) Universality. In games with defined settings, a character's moral and ethical outlook usually has something to do with the religions or organizations they belong to; in a real-world setting a character might be a Catholic or a Buddhist, and in Star Wars they might be a Jedi or a Sith, and each of those four things gives you a good sketch of their outlooks on life. But there are a lot of religions and organizations even in a single setting--if I tell you my d20 Modern character is a Zoroastrian or that my Star Wars character is a White Current Adept, do you know offhand what that means about their philosophy?--and D&D has a bunch of different settings to the point that "I worship the sun god" means very different things depending on whether you're talking about Pelor in Greyhawk, Amaunator in FR, Dol Arrah in Eberron, or Paraelemental Sun in Dark Sun.

    Alignments, meanwhile, are constant across settings (to the point that people can meaningfully talk about what alignment characters from non-D&D settings would be) and there are exactly nine of them you need to remember.

    3) Overlaying. People in this thread have talked about replacing alignments with character traits or the like, but the great thing is that they're not mutually exclusive, you can use both (as 5e kinda sorta does). What's more, adding that extra layer can give you more depth: a character who's Altruistic is one thing, but a character who is Lawful Evil and Altruistic? Figuring out how to express that gives you a great prompt right there. Conversely, alignment can be ignored in cases where you think it doesn't make sense (see the bit about swords-and-sorcery in my last post) because D&D functions just fine if you arbitrarily declare that all creatures are TN and alignment magic is gone.

    As for mechanical hooks, people have already given examples of systems that work based on alignment systems--Dark Side points, join-Cthulhu-if-you-go-insane sanity meters, and so forth--and then you have the usual detecting/smiting/etc. stuff as well. If you want to represent profane shrines, corrupted swamps, and so forth, there's really no substitute for a mechanical alignment system, especially in a D&D-like setting where "evil" means everything from demons to undead to aboleths so you can't just point to a handful of creatures or one kind of magic or whatever and key everything to those.

    Edit: also you haven't actually answered my question. So I'll state it again: why do you need the confirmation, even when its so obvious beyond all reasonable doubt that they are evil?
    Again, even if detect evil were (anti)magically removed from the game, there are still plenty of benefits to having alignment around, Evil is not just a neon sign in the shape of a skull.

    Quote Originally Posted by Morty View Post
    That's good/evil, mind you. I've yet to see a plausible case of the law/chaos helping with anything. Really, it seems that the entire D&D alignment system is essentially a tool for being able to slap a big, red "EVIL" label on some people or things. Everything else is just twisting logic into knots trying to pretend it's some kind of sensible larger framework.
    Law and Chaos have a much vaster pedigree than Good and Evil in terms of fiction and mythology alike. Lots of real-world religions have a fundamental law-vs.-chaos struggle in their mythology (can't give specific examples here, obviously) and while Moorcock's specific take on it was the closest inspiration for D&D there's plenty of other authors and series who delve into that conflict. If anything, the ethical axis is more important and influential than the moral one both at a personal scale ("Sure, you want to be the good guy, but what kind of good guy?") and a cosmic one, and if you put a gun to my head and forced me to ditch one of the two axes in my games I'd ditch Good and Evil and keep Law and Chaos.

    Quote Originally Posted by ImNotTrevor View Post
    In what way would my player experience suffer if I say in session 0 "You are all fighting on the side of truth, justice, and cosmogical goodness" rather than implementing a 3x3 grid system and telling them to only be in these three arbitrary squares?
    Those "three arbitrary squares" are broad enough to contain literally the entire span of real-world moral and ethical philosophy and a broad variety of characters from fiction, mythology, and history can fit in each of those squares.

    In what way *specifically* would my players be unable to experience a cosmological struggle by my decision not to label things as NE or LG? (Assuming I'm playing in 5e, where alignment has no associated mechanics.)
    If you were to describe the Blood War to your players, how would you do that? Would you, perchance, go into detail about how demons are power-hungry maniacs who give into every evil whim and want to carve up the multiverse into little fiefdoms for every demon prince while devils are cunning and strategic types who embody the evils of bureacracy and believe the multiverse must be placed under the Baatorian yoke and so on and so forth?

    Congratulations, you've just reinvented the LE and CE labels, you've just gone out of your way not to use labels because they're bad or something.

    Like, seriously, Order and Chaos show up all over basically every mythological system (see e.g. here and here for some examples), and Good and Evil has been doing the same thing since at least Zoroastrianism. I simply don't understand why applying near-universal symbolic mythical principles to a roleplaying game involving creatures, places, items, and plots from those same myths is such a controversial idea.

    In what way *specifically* am I depriving them by not using a "corruption points" system and instead working through the effects of a character falling to evil organically, working together with the player?
    Serious answer? Many character arcs that involve explicitly pre-planning things between the player and the GM are generally either very fragile or very capricious.

    Fragile, because unless you heavily railroad the party and you have a very cooperative group, the plot can go in totally unforeseen directions that require making drastic alterations to the plot arc or perhaps render the planned arc impossible, other players can do things that derail the arc either intentionally (e.g. they don't want to deal with a fall-and-redemption arc in the game so they sabotage it) or accidentally (e.g. a cleric PC saves an important NPC in the PC-to-fall's backstory who would otherwise have set them on their dark path), the player of the PC-to-fall can derail it themselves either accidentally (e.g. they realize that, whoops, after something that happened a few sessions ago they need to add in some epicycles so their arc still make sense) or intentionally (e.g. they come up with an awesome idea mid-campaign and want to take things in a different direction), and so on.

    Capricious, because if there are no hard-and-fast rules for corruption then a GM has to issue rulings on a bunch of game elements, the GM and players might disagree how corrupting certain acts are (see: every player ever who wanted to play a Mace Windu-style "carefully walk the boundary between Light and Dark" Gray Jedi character in a Star Wars game run by a "one Dark Side act and you fall" GM), and so on.

    And then there's the basic fact that a lot of games have uncertain schedules or varying group compositions or rotating GMs or are plot-less sandboxes or whatever, and pre-planning character arcs just doesn't make sense for logistical reasons either in- or out-of-game.

    Having defined corruption mechanics puts everyone on the same page, ensures fairness and impartiality, removes the need to pre-plan character arcs while not preventing someone from planning them, and such. Plus, it allows for more organic "falling" scenarios, where there's a mechanic right in the book that says you can do X at the cost of Y and you hadn't planned for your character to take that step but y'know this boss is pretty hard and you could use a bit more oomph in your spells/Force powers/etc., so why not just dip a toe in the deep end of the morality pool...., adding spontaneity and character variety in the same way that wizards learning spells from scrolls instead of picking them at level-up, getting random treasure and incorporating that into your build, and the like can.

    ON CORRUPTION SYSTEMS:
    This presents a bit of a problem. You said Alignment is Descriptive, but Corruption Systems are Prescriptive. And also you said using Alignment Prescriptively is being a bad GM, but Alignment Systems are always good for High Fantasy, but a High Fantasy system using Prescriptive Alignment is... good for High Fantasy?
    You're using very...interesting definitions of descriptive and prescriptive, here. When I used them, and pretty much every other time I've seen them used in alignment discussions, here's what it means: some people think alignment is prescriptive, where you put CG on your PC's character sheet and now you're a robot locked into some random CG personality until the end of time and if they act outside their alignment the DM says "You can't do that, you're CG!", while in fact it is descriptive, where you put CG on your PC's character sheet but can act however you feel your character would and if they act outside their alignment then their alignment changes to match.

    Similarly, Dark Side points are descriptive, in that if you do Dark Side-y things you get Dark Side points and if you keep doing Dark Side-y things you keep getting Dark Side points until you fall off the moral cliff but if you try to atone you lose Dark Side points until you come back from the brink. A prescriptive corruption system would be a setup where, I dunno, as soon as you have a single Dark Side point you're not allowed to be polite to people and are obligated to kick one puppy per week, or something.

    On Dungeon World:
    I mean, according to you so long as it has a Detect Evil spell it has alignment, and Alignment is required for High Fantasy, so DW should be able to do High Fantasy just fine, since all that's needed (according to you) is Alignment and Combat systems. Yet it's an affront to High Fantasy and made for Sword and Sorcery....
    "High fantasy games really need an alignment system" does not at all imply "any game with an alignment system is automatically a high fantasy system," any more than "school buses need to have a flashing stop sign on them to comply with local laws" implies "putting flashing red lights on your car legally turns it into a school bus."

    I pointed out the Paladin's Detect Evil ability not because it's some secret sauce that the alignment system requires to function, but because everyone who's against alignment has been focusing all their ire on detect evil as the primary sin of the alignment system for reasons I can't fathom, and then you turned around and held up Dungeon World, a game with an alignment system and Detect Evil, as a counterexample to D&D, that's all.

    Quote Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley View Post
    If you're going to bring the EU into things, it needs to be the whole EU, and when you do that the notion of the Force as binary really falls aparnt.
    Hardly. The Potentium may claim that the Force is innately good and the Aing-Tii may believe that there are more shades of nuance between pure Light and pure Dark, but that doesn't mean that their views are accurate (the Potentium's "Oh, there's no such thing as the Dark Side, as long as you don't mean to kill someone with Force Lightning it's hunky dory!" stance is pretty Sith-y in outlook) or that their views contradict those of all the other Force traditions (the Aing-Tii may think the Force has "rainbow shades" but that's basically the same as saying that there are gradations of Light and Dark, and no powers they use fall outside the standard dichotomy).

    I have no problem with "Archeronian" as an alignment. By problem is specifically with the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes D&D uses, because I don't think they're useful or meaningful.
    Why exactly is "Acheronian" perfectly acceptable but "Lawful Evil with Lawful tendencies" an abomination that must be deleted from the game? The point of the Great Wheel is that adjacent planes and different layers within the same plane have very similar but importantly different philosophical outlooks, and if you're going to use a bunch of planar alignments arranged by similarity but then refuse to acknowledge said similarity--and refuse to use labels that are applicable in settings with different cosmologies--then that just seems like being contrary for the sake of contrariness.

    Why? That's the plot of The Stormlight Archive, which doesn't have an alignment system, at least not in the way D&D does.
    The entire Knights Radiant setup involves holy knights who gain magical powers from oaths forged with higher beings, complete with falling and losing their powers if they break said oaths, and as Kabsal said, "Everything has its opposite, Shallan. The Almighty is a force of good. To balance his goodness, the Cosmere needed the Voidbringers as his opposite," where the Voidbringers are blatant "demon-corrupted mortal" types complete with glowing red eyes and red stormlight to set them apart from the good guys who have glowing light eyes and blue stormlight.

    Paladin Kaladin may not have a sheet in the back of the book that says "Lawful Good Human Fighter 5/Windrunner 3" on it, but that's still a textbook example of when an alignment system would fit perfectly with an RPG implementation of the setting.
    Last edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2020-11-04 at 02:44 AM.
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  6. - Top - End - #156
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    @ Pair O' Dice: Here is the problem with those reasons

    1. "Information Density" is unneeded and is actually unhelpful, its nothing but meaningless labels that get in the way of making the character what they actually are in favor of stereotypes, and actually tells me nothing about the character:
    A CG elf ranger could be any number of things:
    -serious pragmatic rebel drow wielding a crossbow who wants revenge
    -cheerful wood elf wielding a sword who just wants to adventure
    -decadent high elf noble wielding a bow refluffed as a magic wand that acts a rifle who is bored and wants to amuse themselves but with a good heart

    the label didn't actually tell me anything about the character because there is so many things that could be, its meaningless

    2. "Universality" Again, I don't see why I'd want this. If a different setting has different situations, there is no reason to shove a square into a round hole with misapplying one morality system. and again, the alignments don't actually tell me anything, because if the morality is different then "LG" for example is defined as, changes from setting to setting, so if LG isn't even consistent, why even have it? I see problem with this kind of attempting to slot in alignments to everything with a whole bunch of characters in fiction, especially more complex ones.

    3. "Overlaying" this point contradicts information density because your adding on more labels into a string of words that could again mean anything when your point about it was it was efficient but your making it less efficient by adding on more words. and if you agree with me that situations where alignment doesn't make sense can be ignored, great welcome to 5th edition where its minimized to nothing because it never made any sense

    4. "Hooks" Except there is substitutes. a corrupted swamp is an environmental hazard like anything else. You don't need alignment on top of it. sanity is not an alignment system, its a mental health system, that I wouldn't play regardless because I don't play horror. I wouldn't play any game with corruption in it, because I don't want my characters corrupted if I don't want them to. such mechanics just make me uninterested and uncomfortable.

    5. "Reinvented the labels" No thats just describing the Hells better, CE and LE don't tell me anything. I've seen people argue that someone is "Lawful" because they follow a internal code that has nothing to do with law, and I've seen people argue that someone can be "Chaotic" even if they don't break the law, while what is "Good" in DnD according to the peoples opinions I've seen many interpretations and they don't agree with each other

    6. alignment can also lead to a paradox like this for example:
    good person designs a weapon to kill all evil people using a holy explosion covering the entire world. the holy explosion kills all evil people, which is a victory for Good. except it isn't because there are numerous innocent evil people killed by it, thus the person who unleashed the most pure good in the world is evil for doing so. Except if you wield good energy and technically won a victory for good, how can you be evil? But if you fall for wielding good energy to win a victory for good, how good really is good if your capable of that? Isn't Good itself as a moral force, completely hypocritical then for punishing you for using it in that manner yet still making it happen?

    lets simplify this to one evil innocent: you use smite evil on them and kill them for being evil, what the feature is designed to do, but then Good Itself punishes you for doing so by making you evil despite just allowing it to happen. So Good Itself hypocritically allows you to carry it out but then turns around and takes away the ability to do so despite fighting its cosmic enemy. you can't say Good Itself is unaware of this until its misused because its aware of your alignment and shifts it to Evil, because its always aware of your alignment and keeps track of it. Now Good COULD take your ability to do BEFORE you do it, but then that is punishing people for thoughtcrime. Thus either good Itself is hypocritically randomly choosing paladins to take its powers away from unless they maintain good thoughts at all times which would lead to willful blindness and self deception, or Good is hypocritically allowing innocents to die due to its own energies touching then punishing the paladins responsible for channeling itself to make sure innocent people die.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Now Good COULD take your ability to do BEFORE you do it, but then that is punishing people for thoughtcrime. Thus either good Itself is hypocritically randomly choosing paladins to take its powers away from unless they maintain good thoughts at all times which would lead to willful blindness and self deception, or Good is hypocritically allowing innocents to die due to its own energies touching then punishing the paladins responsible for channeling itself to make sure innocent people die.
    Skip the Evil for a moment. Good energy is capable of killing Neutral people.

    A Holy Word cast by an 11th level caster will kill 1st level Neutral people. The majority of people will be 1st level. A cleric of a Good deity, or of the "cosmic force of Good", using Holy Word in a crowded city, will kill innocents, and will likely Fall and lose their powers.

    Good "taking away the power after it's been used to kill" is really no different from a cop having his gun taken away after he's shot someone innocent .

    It's the right thing to do. If the "cosmic force of Good" is incapable of acting before a person abuses the use of its power, only after, no "hypocrisy" is needed.
    Last edited by hamishspence; 2020-11-04 at 05:03 AM.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Skip the Evil for a moment. Good energy is capable of killing Neutral people.

    A Holy Word cast by an 11th level caster will kill 1st level Neutral people. The majority of people will be 1st level.

    Good "taking away the power after it's been used to kill" is really no different from a cop having his gun taken away after he's shot someone innocent .

    It's the right thing to do. If the "cosmic force of Good" is incapable of acting before a person abuses the use of its power, only after,, no "hypocrisy" is needed.
    But if Good knows the person is innocent, then why do they die at all? The energy is the physical embodiment of goodness. Therefore it shouldn't be capable of physically doing anything that is wrong like harming an innocent. Otherwise it isn't an actual physical embodiment of good. Neutral people being harmed only further proves this.

    Meaning Good isn't actually physically good.

    Meaning what is Good really?

    Thus either devolves into alien morality, or its not actually moral.
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    The actual trope all variations of Holy Word are based on, is the idea that your petty and mortal soul cannot cope with presence of true divinity and will shrivel away in shame or fright.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    But if Good knows the person is innocent, then why do they die at all? The energy is the physical embodiment of goodness. Therefore it shouldn't be capable of physically doing anything that is wrong like harming an innocent. Otherwise it isn't an actual physical embodiment of good. Neutral people being harmed only further proves this.
    Neutral people are a mixture of Good and Evil. The Good energy damages the Evil component in Neutral people - killing them.

    Good people, by contrast, have so little Evil in them, that the Good energy cannot harm them - there's not enough there for the harmful reaction when Good energy collides with Evil energy.

    Good and evil can combine constructively - as in regular life - or destructively - spells used by one, that damage the other.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kardwill View Post
    Better yet, not having an alignment system means you don't have to label one side being "objectively right".
    The thing is, alignment doesn't mean you're "objectively right". Because there isn't an "objectively correct" answer to moral questions. It just means that the universe is on a particular side. But you're under no obligation to agree with the universe. Indeed, you very likely disagree with the universe on questions like "should I eventually die" already, without bringing alignment into it.

    Basically, imagine that you can't use the words "Good" and "Evil". One side is "Purple" and the other side is "Green". Why should the output of "Detect Green" change your opinion on the morality of someone it targets?

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    Information density.
    Alignment isn't particularly dense with information. "Chaotic Evil" includes demons, drow, Red Dragons, orcs, White Dragons, and ghouls. Those aren't really "the same" in any useful sense.

    Universality.
    The words "Good" and "Evil" are universal, but that's about it. Different organizations are going to have different priorities and philosophies. The Empire in Star Wars and Ruin in Mistborn are probably both "Evil" in D&D terms, but they don't have the same overall goals in any meaningful sense.

    Overlaying.
    It seems to me that anything you could accomplish with "alignment + traits" you could accomplish by adding an additional trait.

    If you want to represent profane shrines, corrupted swamps, and so forth, there's really no substitute for a mechanical alignment system, especially in a D&D-like setting where "evil" means everything from demons to undead to aboleths so you can't just point to a handful of creatures or one kind of magic or whatever and key everything to those.
    Desecrate would seem to disagree with you. That's probably the primary mechanic for representing a "profane shrine", and it doesn't make any specific reference to alignment at all. Even Unhallow only references alignment in the Magic Circle effect, which is a fairly small part of what's going on there. Not only could you have sacred sites without alignment, the existing mechanics for sacred sites largely don't use alignment. You also don't want sacred shrines to demons, undead, and aberrations to be the same thing. For example, a ghoul necromancer cult would love to profane their temple in a way that causes it to radiate negative energy, because that heals them and hurts their enemies. But people who are trying to summon demons, or sacrificing victims to an aboleth for ancient knowledge, don't want that effect.

    Those "three arbitrary squares" are broad enough to contain literally the entire span of real-world moral and ethical philosophy and a broad variety of characters from fiction, mythology, and history can fit in each of those squares.
    This is not helping your case. If "Good" contains "every philosophy you might hold", it is effectively meaningless. For alignment to convey useful information, it has to be narrow. Once you make it narrow, you need more than three.

    Congratulations, you've just reinvented the LE and CE labels, you've just gone out of your way not to use labels because they're bad or something.
    No, you've invented the "Abyss" and "Baator" labels. Those aren't "Lawful Evil" and "Chaotic Evil". Vampire Feudalism is (arguably) also Lawful Evil, but it has very different values and behaviors from Baator. The Unseelie Court is (arguably) also Chaotic Evil, but it has very different values and behaviors from the Abyss.

    Hardly. The Potentium may claim that the Force is innately good and the Aing-Tii may believe that there are more shades of nuance between pure Light and pure Dark, but that doesn't mean that their views are accurate (the Potentium's "Oh, there's no such thing as the Dark Side, as long as you don't mean to kill someone with Force Lightning it's hunky dory!" stance is pretty Sith-y in outlook) or that their views contradict those of all the other Force traditions (the Aing-Tii may think the Force has "rainbow shades" but that's basically the same as saying that there are gradations of Light and Dark, and no powers they use fall outside the standard dichotomy).
    That sounds exactly like "there are multiple force philosophies". Certainly, you think they all map to the Light Side/Dark Side model from the OT, but if people in-world don't think that (which they presumably don't, on account of the Aing-Tii being Aing-Tii and not Sith), forcing everything to Light Side/Dark Side isn't a useful model of the world.

    Why exactly is "Acheronian" perfectly acceptable but "Lawful Evil with Lawful tendencies" an abomination that must be deleted from the game?
    Consider what happens when you add a second "Lawful-Lawful Evil" philosophy to your game. If your alignments are planar or philosophical, that's easy. You just declare that there is now a new faction of people, and they have some beliefs, and maybe they have some relationships with your other factions or whatever. But if your alignments are points on a compass, you either have to do a dance of increasingly absurd subdivisions (e.g. "these new guys are Lawful-Lawful-Lawful Evil, the Acheronians are Lawful-Neutral-Lawful Evil"), or you have to do exactly the thing planar and philosophical alignment systems are already doing and rely on names to explain the differences between things.

    and refuse to use labels that are applicable in settings with different cosmologies
    The labels aren't applicable in different cosmologies. They're the same labels, but the Order of the Emerald Claw is not the same as Baator.

    The entire Knights Radiant setup involves holy knights who gain magical powers from oaths forged with higher beings, complete with falling and losing their powers if they break said oaths, and as Kabsal said, "Everything has its opposite, Shallan. The Almighty is a force of good. To balance his goodness, the Cosmere needed the Voidbringers as his opposite," where the Voidbringers are blatant "demon-corrupted mortal" types complete with glowing red eyes and red stormlight to set them apart from the good guys who have glowing light eyes and blue stormlight.

    Paladin Kaladin may not have a sheet in the back of the book that says "Lawful Good Human Fighter 5/Windrunner 3" on it, but that's still a textbook example of when an alignment system would fit perfectly with an RPG implementation of the setting.
    The Stormlight Archive absolutely has an alignment system. But it doesn't have D&D's alignment system, which is the point. It's system is better in a number of ways.

    First, it is explicitly opt in. There's not some weird dance where the average person is a balanced mixture of Stoneward and Skybreaker or Bondsmith and Elsecaller. They're just not aligned. That's already better than D&D's system, because it means there's room outside of the defined alignments for people who's philosophy doesn't agree with any of them.

    Second, it's not claiming to be objective morality. Being a Knight Radiant doesn't make you a good guy. The Skybreakers decided to pull for Team Odium (which means there are people with glowing blue eyes on the "Evil" side too). The only Dustbringer (at least as-of the end of Oathbringer) is on Team Diagram.

    Third, it's clearly defined. Kaladin doesn't swear an oath to "Do Good", he swears to "Protect Those Who Cannot Protect Themselves" and "Protect Even Those I Hate". The latter is far more useful, because we can agree what it means. Kaladin hasn't sworn himself to the abstract concept of doing things we like, he's sworn to do a particular set of things.
    Last edited by NigelWalmsley; 2020-11-04 at 08:08 AM.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Neutral people are a mixture of Good and Evil. The Good energy damages the Evil component in Neutral people - killing them.

    Good people, by contrast, have so little Evil in them, that the Good energy cannot harm them - there's not enough there for the harmful reaction when Good energy collides with Evil energy.

    Good and evil can combine constructively - as in regular life - or destructively - spells used by one, that damage the other.
    *Unamused stare* Hamish if your going to argue that individualism and selfishness are fundamentally evil thus necessary evils, we're going to have problems because I don't believe that or being functional or vital for anything for a second.

    @ Vahnovoi: okay here is thing about that: yeah sure its a trope. but its blindly holding yourself to it without thought.

    Like guys just because a trope exists and existed doesn't mean its a good idea or that we should preserve it for its own sake. sure its old, but that also means its from somewhere foreign. if you get too caught up in what some alien fantasy form of good is, when are you going to portray a fantasy good that y'know, people can actually relate to? a form of good that actually resembles what we know is good rather than bizarre alien good involving looking at eviltrons of people or using your virtutron weapons on other people?

    like sure it exists, that doesn't mean it has to stay the same. you can make a Good that is actually good and doesn't kill people for "not being good enough", these tropes are not a straightjacket, you can change and rework them to make more sense. no one is going to weep over the loss of the headaches these tropes cause when played straight, okay? there more ways to use them.

    Edit: I agree with Nigel on the Stormlight Archive stuff
    Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2020-11-04 at 08:33 AM.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    @ Vahnovoi: okay here is thing about that: yeah sure its a trope. but its blindly holding yourself to it without thought.
    Uh, no? I know exactly what it's for and why I'd want it in a game or not. I'm not "blindly holding" myself to anything, I brought it up because how Holy Word and derivatives injure and hurt people is relevant.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere
    Like guys just because a trope exists and existed doesn't mean its a good idea or that we should preserve it for its own sake. sure its old, but that also means its from somewhere foreign. if you get too caught up in what some alien fantasy form of good is, when are you going to portray a fantasy good that y'know, people can actually relate to? a form of good that actually resembles what we know is good rather than bizarre alien good involving looking at eviltrons of people or using your virtutron weapons on other people?

    like sure it exists, that doesn't mean it has to stay the same. you can make a Good that is actually good and doesn't kill people for "not being good enough", these tropes are not a straightjacket, you can change and rework them to make more sense. no one is going to weep over the loss of the headaches these tropes cause when played straight, okay? there more ways to use them.
    Firstly, you're presuming these things are particularly foreign or alien to me or my players. If they were actually foreign and alien, that would be a bonus, because unlike you, I am heavily interested in playing up the weird to create horror.

    Secondly, I have no trouble running Alignment that is recognizably based on a real moral philosophy. The chief objection by NigelWalmsley to everything I've said is that somehow, when explicitly using a particular moral philosophy and defining Good and Evil in its terms (keeping in mind plenty of real moral system have no problems using words "good" and "evil"), using the words "Good" a and "Evil" is obscurantism and artificially making the discussion harder. The thing you seem to forget is that none of these have universal approval, so nothing guarantees they'd fit the taste of you or anyone like you. A lot of people don't like doing real moral philosophy because it quickly takes them to places they don't want to visit. You are appealing to common ground where there is none.

    Thirdly, presence of Alignment you can't relate to doesn't mean absence of characters you can't relate to. How many bloody times do I have to say this? In its original form, the system allows playing of all nine Alignments. The only thing required of a player to play a character that fits their own morals, is accepting that in the framework of the given setting, they might not be Good.
    Last edited by Vahnavoi; 2020-11-04 at 09:26 AM.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    1) Information density. One of the major benefits of D&D's race and class system compared to more freeform systems is the ability to briefly convey a lot of information about your character. You can give a newbie one list of races and one list of classes, have them pick something from each, and go from there, and an experienced player saying "I'm an Elf Ranger" conveys a heck of a lot of information about their character, compared to more fiddly games like GURPS where a newb has to do everything from scratch and a veteran can't convey detail "packages" in the same way. Alignment is basically that for roleplaying prompts: Saying "here are six flavors of general moral and ethical outlook, pick one" can get a newbie thinking about character motivations and such without going through long lists of character traits or whatever, and "I'm a CE Elf Ranger" vs. "I'm a LG Elf Ranger" is a quick way to convey party dynamics and such between veterans.
    Alignment isn't information dense. It's Vague.

    John is Lawful Good. Based on that:
    What are his goals?
    What does he value?
    What is his biggest struggle?

    I know none of this information, and alignment implies none of it. And this information is much better roleplaying info than alignment is precisely because it's less vague.

    2) Universality. In games with defined settings, a character's moral and ethical outlook usually has something to do with the religions or organizations they belong to; in a real-world setting a character might be a Catholic or a Buddhist, and in Star Wars they might be a Jedi or a Sith, and each of those four things gives you a good sketch of their outlooks on life. But there are a lot of religions and organizations even in a single setting--if I tell you my d20 Modern character is a Zoroastrian or that my Star Wars character is a White Current Adept, do you know offhand what that means about their philosophy?--and D&D has a bunch of different settings to the point that "I worship the sun god" means very different things depending on whether you're talking about Pelor in Greyhawk, Amaunator in FR, Dol Arrah in Eberron, or Paraelemental Sun in Dark Sun.

    Alignments, meanwhile, are constant across settings (to the point that people can meaningfully talk about what alignment characters from non-D&D settings would be) and there are exactly nine of them you need to remember.
    We can post-hoc apply a lot of labels to a lot of fictional characters. That does not give them inherent value as a thing that must continue to exist.


    3) Overlaying. People in this thread have talked about replacing alignments with character traits or the like, but the great thing is that they're not mutually exclusive, you can use both (as 5e kinda sorta does). What's more, adding that extra layer can give you more depth: a character who's Altruistic is one thing, but a character who is Lawful Evil and Altruistic? Figuring out how to express that gives you a great prompt right there. Conversely, alignment can be ignored in cases where you think it doesn't make sense (see the bit about swords-and-sorcery in my last post) because D&D functions just fine if you arbitrarily declare that all creatures are TN and alignment magic is gone.

    As for mechanical hooks, people have already given examples of systems that work based on alignment systems--Dark Side points, join-Cthulhu-if-you-go-insane sanity meters, and so forth--and then you have the usual detecting/smiting/etc. stuff as well. If you want to represent profane shrines, corrupted swamps, and so forth, there's really no substitute for a mechanical alignment system, especially in a D&D-like setting where "evil" means everything from demons to undead to aboleths so you can't just point to a handful of creatures or one kind of magic or whatever and key everything to those.
    I can't talk about or have a profane and corrupted place without alignment? Bulldroppings, plain and simple.

    [The Desecrated Temple]
    The moment you set foot in this place, a chill runs through you. The shadows seem to quiver unnaturally and lunge for you out if the corner of your eye. The stains of blood upon the walls and floor must be hundreds of years old, and yet they still seem fresh. The wind through the shattered windows sounds like distant screaming, and the stained glass visage of The Kindly Judge now looks more like the rictus grin of a corpse.
    [Entities not allied to The Dark Sovereign are treated as if under the effect of a Bane spell while within this location.]

    Bingo. A profane location, with a simple mechanic which does not rely on alignment. Easy.


    Again, even if detect evil were (anti)magically removed from the game, there are still plenty of benefits to having alignment around, Evil is not just a neon sign in the shape of a skull.



    Law and Chaos have a much vaster pedigree than Good and Evil in terms of fiction and mythology alike. Lots of real-world religions have a fundamental law-vs.-chaos struggle in their mythology (can't give specific examples here, obviously) and while Moorcock's specific take on it was the closest inspiration for D&D there's plenty of other authors and series who delve into that conflict. If anything, the ethical axis is more important and influential than the moral one both at a personal scale ("Sure, you want to be the good guy, but what kind of good guy?") and a cosmic one, and if you put a gun to my head and forced me to ditch one of the two axes in my games I'd ditch Good and Evil and keep Law and Chaos.
    This kinda leaves out how many stories in fiction say "law and chaos" but really it's just good and evil under new labels. "The land was a perfect and beautiful utopia of morally pure people until the God of Chaos showed up!" It's really common and is clearly not meaning the same thing as law and chaos mean in D&D.

    Those "three arbitrary squares" are broad enough to contain literally the entire span of real-world moral and ethical philosophy and a broad variety of characters from fiction, mythology, and history can fit in each of those squares.
    So can the two squares "human" and "not human."
    That doesn't make the categories useful nor necessary, which is the thing you need to do here: show that these squares are a NECESSITY, since you asserted that any high fantasy campaign requires their inclusion.


    If you were to describe the Blood War to your players, how would you do that? Would you, perchance, go into detail about how demons are power-hungry maniacs who give into every evil whim and want to carve up the multiverse into little fiefdoms for every demon prince while devils are cunning and strategic types who embody the evils of bureacracy and believe the multiverse must be placed under the Baatorian yoke and so on and so forth?

    Congratulations, you've just reinvented the LE and CE labels, you've just gone out of your way not to use labels because they're bad or something.
    So you admit I can forego the alignment and High Fantasy still works functionally the same? Great, we can be done.

    And yeah, in my experience putting the stickers on things breeds a qualitatively different reaction from players and DMs.

    Do you know what immediately solved all alignment squabbles at my table? Dumpstering it as a concept in favor of having a conversation during session 0 about our desired tone and regular check-ins. It has never been a problem since, and the quality of the roleplay has gone up since players worry less about "what does being Lawful Good mean I should do" and more about "What does my character WANT?"

    The new players introduced since I began have more naturally flowed into the roleplaying than they did with alignment in place, since they see their character as a PERSON, and not an ALIGNMENT.

    Turns out a lot of those growing pains into roleplay are quite artificial.


    Like, seriously, Order and Chaos show up all over basically every mythological system (see e.g. here and here for some examples), and Good and Evil has been doing the same thing since at least Zoroastrianism. I simply don't understand why applying near-universal symbolic mythical principles to a roleplaying game involving creatures, places, items, and plots from those same myths is such a controversial idea.
    I'm not saying you can't. But I am saying you don't need to, and that insisting nobody can do high fantasy with mythological stakes without your sacred cow being involved is a laughable assertion.


    Serious answer? Many character arcs that involve explicitly pre-planning things between the player and the GM are generally either very fragile or very capricious.
    Who said I'm pre-planning? I'm working together with the player to see what makes sense as we go. You do know that it's allowed and even fun to play some things by ear, right?

    Fragile, because unless you heavily railroad the party and you have a very cooperative group, the plot can go in totally unforeseen directions that require making drastic alterations to the plot arc or perhaps render the planned arc impossible, other players can do things that derail the arc either intentionally (e.g. they don't want to deal with a fall-and-redemption arc in the game so they sabotage it) or accidentally (e.g. a cleric PC saves an important NPC in the PC-to-fall's backstory who would otherwise have set them on their dark path), the player of the PC-to-fall can derail it themselves either accidentally (e.g. they realize that, whoops, after something that happened a few sessions ago they need to add in some epicycles so their arc still make sense) or intentionally (e.g. they come up with an awesome idea mid-campaign and want to take things in a different direction), and so on.
    Since I'm not going to throw a hissyfit if my loosely defined plans go a bit pear-shaped and I *continue working with the player through this process, rather than a one and done, because I have a brain,* none of the above applies.

    Capricious, because if there are no hard-and-fast rules for corruption then a GM has to issue rulings on a bunch of game elements, the GM and players might disagree how corrupting certain acts are (see: every player ever who wanted to play a Mace Windu-style "carefully walk the boundary between Light and Dark" Gray Jedi character in a Star Wars game run by a "one Dark Side act and you fall" GM), and so on.
    Imagine not knowing that players are humans and you can talk to them to solve all these problems.

    Talk to your players like reasonable humans. It works wonders.

    And then there's the basic fact that a lot of games have uncertain schedules or varying group compositions or rotating GMs or are plot-less sandboxes or whatever, and pre-planning character arcs just doesn't make sense for logistical reasons either in- or out-of-game.
    Again, not pre-planning it and making it an ongoing conversation solves these problems.

    Having defined corruption mechanics puts everyone on the same page, ensures fairness and impartiality, removes the need to pre-plan character arcs while not preventing someone from planning them, and such. Plus, it allows for more organic "falling" scenarios, where there's a mechanic right in the book that says you can do X at the cost of Y and you hadn't planned for your character to take that step but y'know this boss is pretty hard and you could use a bit more oomph in your spells/Force powers/etc., so why not just dip a toe in the deep end of the morality pool...., adding spontaneity and character variety in the same way that wizards learning spells from scrolls instead of picking them at level-up, getting random treasure and incorporating that into your build, and the like can.
    I can accomplish literally all of this by talking to my players as we go.

    Amazing.


    You're using very...interesting definitions of descriptive and prescriptive, here. When I used them, and pretty much every other time I've seen them used in alignment discussions, here's what it means: some people think alignment is prescriptive, where you put CG on your PC's character sheet and now you're a robot locked into some random CG personality until the end of time and if they act outside their alignment the DM says "You can't do that, you're CG!", while in fact it is descriptive, where you put CG on your PC's character sheet but can act however you feel your character would and if they act outside their alignment then their alignment changes to match.

    Similarly, Dark Side points are descriptive, in that if you do Dark Side-y things you get Dark Side points and if you keep doing Dark Side-y things you keep getting Dark Side points until you fall off the moral cliff but if you try to atone you lose Dark Side points until you come back from the brink. A prescriptive corruption system would be a setup where, I dunno, as soon as you have a single Dark Side point you're not allowed to be polite to people and are obligated to kick one puppy per week, or something.
    If I tell you that if you eat carrots I'll dye your hair blue, that's not exactly a Descriptive exchange, is it? The blue hair is less of a natural result of the thing happening and more like an outside entity determining the consequence, isn't it? Seems a bit more Prescriptive, when you look at what the exchange actually is. The prescription end is: "you did X, so now you are more evil and here are the consequences, regardless of if they make sense in context."


    "High fantasy games really need an alignment system" does not at all imply "any game with an alignment system is automatically a high fantasy system," any more than "school buses need to have a flashing stop sign on them to comply with local laws" implies "putting flashing red lights on your car legally turns it into a school bus."
    I mean, you've given no other requirements for me to work with, so if a system meets the requirements for High Fantasy then it must, therefore, be capable of achieving it as an aesthetic.

    I pointed out the Paladin's Detect Evil ability not because it's some secret sauce that the alignment system requires to function, but because everyone who's against alignment has been focusing all their ire on detect evil as the primary sin of the alignment system for reasons I can't fathom, and then you turned around and held up Dungeon World, a game with an alignment system and Detect Evil, as a counterexample to D&D, that's all.
    The core problem, however, remains:
    You have yet to demonstrate why High Fantasy as an aesthetic, or the clash of Good and Evil as a theme, is IMPOSSIBLE without formalized alignment, as you previous asserted alignment systems are a "requirement" or "necessity" for High Fantasy campaigns, but have yet to tell me why I CANNOT achieve the same themes and aesthetic without the 3x3 grid.


    This is why I don't take alignment seriously, especially as D&D does it. It doesn't add anything meaningful that I can't achieve with decent DM notes and talking. Nearly every other system DOES.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Vahnavoi View Post
    The chief objection by NigelWalmsley to everything I've said is that somehow, when explicitly using a particular moral philosophy and defining Good and Evil in its terms (keeping in mind plenty of real moral system have no problems using words "good" and "evil"), using the words "Good" a and "Evil" is obscurantism and artificially making the discussion harder.
    Because that's literally and exactly the thing it is. Insisting on using a word that does not mean the thing you are talking about instead of a word that does is exactly obscurantism. It's practically definitionally obscurantism.

    A lot of people don't like doing real moral philosophy because it quickly takes them to places they don't want to visit.
    I get that. There's a real desire to just do hack and slash. And that's fine. But you know what Alignment does in that situation? It raises awkward questions about why you're the literally-and-explicitly Good guys if what you do is practically indistinguishable from violent robbery. If you want to sweep morality under the rug, absolutely the last thing you want to do is throw around Good and Evil (especially in a traditional fantasy setting).

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley View Post
    I get that. There's a real desire to just do hack and slash. And that's fine. But you know what Alignment does in that situation? It raises awkward questions about why you're the literally-and-explicitly Good guys if what you do is practically indistinguishable from violent robbery. If you want to sweep morality under the rug, absolutely the last thing you want to do is throw around Good and Evil (especially in a traditional fantasy setting).
    Yeeeah, the only reason videogame rpgs get away with this "kleptomaniac killer" thing is gameplay and story segregation: most rpgs don't acknowledge the hero is going around stealing things from random containers, nor do they talk about random encounters all that much. the story often assumes they're moral people and focuses on the important fights they do rather questioning the morality of every single encounter. this is partly because the game needs mechanics to support a gameplay loop and there is only so much dialogue you can put in due to work

    y'know, unless they're specifically pointing out how your not a good person for doing so in a post-modern or snarky manner.

    Edit: so....yeah, DnD as always, has a bit of identity problem. its gameplay loop of going into dungeons, killing monsters and acquiring loot contradict its alignment system. why? because adventurers going around killing things in dungeons is actually the least effective way to solve things using objective morality. the logical moral conclusion of the alignment system is that evil should be redeemed, because killing them sends them to the lower planes where they lose all hope of redemption, empowering the lower planes. But the murderhobo style of play is so ingrained into DnD that it is the assumed default, with even a specific term for it and every videogame that has its roots in DnD being basically that very same playstyle just with the social mechanics replaced with cutscenes that contrast with what the player is actually doing, and people kill goblins and orcs in DnD all the time. Thus evil is slowly winning, according to such logic. except this is game that supposed to be about good winning, heroic fantasy which is a genre that supposed to be about Good winning. so the stated goal of the game and what is actually happening doesn't match. except without the gameplay/story segregation of a videogame you have to come up with a reason why they actually do and.....DnD does a poor job of that. in the sense that it doesn't have an explanation either. it just assumes you want to play random adventurers and kill things in combat......

    .....when arguably the best way for good to win is to be a diplomat who maxes diplomacy who then proceeds to persuade all the nations to follow the edicts of the good gods or something, then uses their institutions to train a bunch of professionals to do all the adventuring work for you but instead of keeping it to themselves, takes what they find and figures out how they can be best used for the public good and have a bunch of procedures about whether or not some random ruin should be checked out because there is archaeological concerns about ruining artifacts that might be valuable information, and even then how the professionals should engage with the life forms in there, figuring out which ones should be fought at all before engaging and all that jazz, which would quickly become a procedural kind of thing that I don't think most people would like, no room for quirky adventurer characters when you all need to be stiff professionals following the necessary rules.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Yeeeah, the only reason videogame rpgs get away with this "kleptomaniac killer" thing is gameplay and story segregation: most rpgs don't acknowledge the hero is going around stealing things from random containers, nor do they talk about random encounters all that much. the story often assumes they're moral people and focuses on the important fights they do rather questioning the morality of every single encounter. this is partly because the game needs mechanics to support a gameplay loop and there is only so much dialogue you can put in due to work
    You also shouldn't understate how bad of an idea calling one side explicitly "Good" is. It's a lot easier to avoid questioning your life choices in World of Warcraft or Fallout when you don't have "you are Good and Lawful for killing all those Orcs" shoved in your face. People can mind caulk a lot of you don't insist on drawing their attention to difficult questions. For the most part, of you want to do Hack 'n' Slash, you can just... do Hack 'n' Slash. Combat tends to be fun, and people are (perhaps disturbingly) willing to accept fairly minimal narrative connective tissue between fight scenes (see: most action movies).

    Edit: so....yeah, DnD as always, has a bit of identity problem. its gameplay loop of going into dungeons, killing monsters and acquiring loot contradict its alignment system.
    D&D's problem is that it's a weird mix of Iron Age, Medieval, and Age of Exploration tropes, which results in a moral setup that is... not well-aligned with the moral sentiments of most people. Layer the idea that the side of "basically conquistadors" is objectively Good on top of that and you get some real issues.

    why? because adventurers going around killing things in dungeons is actually the least effective way to solve things using objective morality. the logical moral conclusion of the alignment system is that evil should be redeemed, because killing them sends them to the lower planes where they lose all hope of redemption, empowering the lower planes.
    I'm not actually convinced that's true. The planes are supposed to be infinite, so it's not entirely clear if you can meaningfully increase or decrease their power. Insofar as D&D seems to abide by the "Gods Need Worship Badly" paradigm, it seems at least plausible that if you were to kill off all the mortal followers of Orcus, that might be a more effective anti-Orcus strategy than trying to persuade them to get on board with Pelor. Which doesn't really address the underlying "holy crap that's awful" of things, but I'm not convinced the overall thing is quite as bad as you say.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley View Post
    I'm not actually convinced that's true. The planes are supposed to be infinite, so it's not entirely clear if you can meaningfully increase or decrease their power. Insofar as D&D seems to abide by the "Gods Need Worship Badly" paradigm, it seems at least plausible that if you were to kill off all the mortal followers of Orcus, that might be a more effective anti-Orcus strategy than trying to persuade them to get on board with Pelor. Which doesn't really address the underlying "holy crap that's awful" of things, but I'm not convinced the overall thing is quite as bad as you say.
    Hey man, that is just what I've seen argued in response to my arguments how I don't like killing stuff for flimsy alignment reasons, by people on this very forum. I'm just repeating what others have said about DnD morality on that specific paragraph. while the murderhobo interpretation of DnD is common, on this forum there is a lot of people that try to argue for the redemption/morality play interpretation I just talked about, which I blame Book of Exalted Deeds for.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    *Unamused stare* Hamish if your going to argue that individualism and selfishness are fundamentally evil thus necessary evils, we're going to have problems because I don't believe that or being functional or vital for anything for a second.
    Whether or not selfishness is evil in the real world, it's consistently portrayed as evil in D&D.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley
    Because that's literally and exactly the thing it is. Insisting on using a word that does not mean the thing you are talking about instead of a word that does is exactly obscurantism. It's practically definitionally obscurantism.
    There's a standard procedure for when a work wants to use non-standard definition of a term. The rules fit it to the T; the constructions I've given you follow it to the T. That's not obscurantism, that's step one to avoiding it.

    That you still keep harping about it, is no different to a medical doctor complaining to an electrician how they keep using "positive" and "negative" wrong. In natural language, words that are written and said the same sometimes still mean different things; most speakers of those languages cope with it just fine.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Whether or not selfishness is evil in the real world, it's consistently portrayed as evil in D&D.
    Is it?

    Your talking about a wider world than you think. the game's protagonists entire goals are: acquiring material possessions and gaining power until they are level 20 through violence. that is Greed and ambition viewed as the default motivation for anyone playing, with long lists of potions, magic items, treasures, details of kind of features you gain as you level.

    This tendency to do the acts of selfishness often remain even on Good characters. If literally acquiring anything material and immaterial to become more powerful and killing anyone in your way to do so isn't selfish, I don't know what is. its what the game is known for, its core gameplay loop

    Ah! but here is where someone jumps in with "oh but its some alien form of good that doesn't match entirely to we want good to be". and somehow this makes it beyond criticism. It doesn't. Why? Because DnD is many things, but what it isn't, is a game successfully portraying an alien culture and morality. Its too shallow, all these reasonings that somehow its portraying an objective morality universe and a bunch of alien things that come with it and its tropes....are headcanons at best, giving the universe way too much credit.

    The detect evil and smite good features that is harped on as being "vital" aren't even a universal ability- they are an ability specific to paladins or clerics. entire campaigns can be played without these abilities even coming up, because no one even has them because they are neither of these classes. if alignment were as important as everyone says it was, wouldn't more classes get the ability to discern and make use of it? you could replace the cleric's party role with a druid and it would serve just fine. its perfectly possible to play without the ability to discern alignment even in 3.5, and some players on this very forum have gone on record to state that they'd rather not play with a paladin because of their morality.

    thus the level of focus on morality people in this thread speak of, has always been optional, at best. only clerics and paladins have ability to even play out this "use alignment as a tool for this or that" mentality being talked about, every other class needs to use more relatable moral decisions to make things work, and they are no less DnD or less moral for doing so. these spells and abilities of smiting and detect evil were never vital, they were just denoting a focus that one can easily ignore, and is ignored even now, more than ever. you aren't even morally penalized by the alignment system for not having them or not focusing on it. you can easily be good without involving such matters, as DnD itself admits. all these mechanics get you is extra damage and distrust/paranoia, the latter of which DnD players already have in spades from going through dungeons where literally anything might kill you.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Is it?

    Your talking about a wider world than you think. the game's protagonists entire goals are: acquiring material possessions and gaining power until they are level 20 through violence. that is Greed and ambition viewed as the default motivation for anyone playing, with long lists of potions, magic items, treasures, details of kind of features you gain as you level.

    This tendency to do the acts of selfishness often remain even on Good characters.
    Badly played Good ones, maybe. The "greedy and ambitious" PCs, given their alignments accurately, would be Neutral at best.

    Evil alignment language consistently has lines about greed, "taking what you want" and so forth:

    Lawful Evil, "Dominator"
    A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts.

    Neutral Evil, "Malefactor"
    A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple.

    Chaotic Evil, "Destroyer"
    A chaotic evil character does whatever his greed, hatred, and lust for destruction drive him to do. He is hot-tempered, vicious, arbitrarily violent, and unpredictable. If he is simply out for whatever he can get, he is ruthless and brutal. If he is committed to the spread of evil and chaos, he is even worse.

    Good alignment language is consistently about helping others and self-sacrifice, etc.

    "Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.


    Lawful Good, "Crusader"
    A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. She combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. She tells the truth, keeps her word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice.


    Neutral Good, "Benefactor"
    A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others.

    Chaotic Good, "Rebel"
    A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he’s kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Yet you cannot deny that the level and wealth systems favor a selfish mindset, with numerous magic items to draw you into doing anything to get them, levels to grow stronger for your own benefit and so on, with no commentary on why a good character would seek these things out, and again only 2/11's of the classes actually interact with the alignment system in any meaningful way. what you list, are broad generalizations and don't comment on how the adventurers actually adventure. they provide very general moral guidelines, but they notedly keep away from actually examining or commenting on what this means for adventurers, the people your supposed to play. don't you find that a little odd? you'd think that after what, 40 years, DnD would have some section in the core specifically commenting on the morality of adventurers in relation to the alignment system and what ways they're recommended to be played out to advise people so it isn't misused- instead the alignment system has been downsized into being irrelevant, and the 5e DMG focuses on other things.

    Which says how important alignment really is: not very. its a thing to concern people interested in the divine of DnD 3.5 and nothing more. DnD is driven by its content based nature, and if there is no core content discussing how Adventurers be moral or not be moral, then its not something DnD is normally worried about.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    only 2/11's of the classes actually interact with the alignment system in any meaningful way.
    Clerics, Druids, Bards, Paladins, Barbarians, Monks - all have some kind of penalty for being "the wrong alignment" even if it's only "cannot take any more levels".
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Clerics, Druids, Bards, Paladins, Barbarians, Monks - all have some kind of penalty for being "the wrong alignment" even if it's only "cannot take any more levels".
    except these restrictions aren't equal are they? Clerics can be literally any alignment, the rest is just making up a god to match it. you could throw out every single canonical pantheon in DnD and just make up whatever god you want.

    For bards and barbarians their "restriction" is "any nonlawful". You might as well have given them a free adventuring ticket with no repercussions

    Monk is "any Lawful" which ignores all the chaotic martial artists in fiction who are arrogant about their power and don't play the rules, not emulating their tropes properly at all to restrict monks to very a vague label, not really specifying much beyond that. now you could say they're living an ascetic existence or whatnot, but paladins literally have a more restrictive code of behavior than them, when you'd think they'd at least be equal.

    Druid is oddly, limited to the five "neutral" alignments. Pure good. Pure Lawful. Pure Chaos. Pure Evil or Pure Neutral. honestly this never made sense to me. Nature abhors purity. Life itself wouldn't exist without mixing things, everything being a mix is completely natural. If all five major forces of the universe can describe a druids morality, then all alignments can, because guess what? the other four are mixes of the pure four! if you can have a druid that believes in Chaos and one that believes in Good, its not hard to have one that believes in both. Yet, the Ranger who also has nature magic if less, gets the "any" alignment choice. Inconsistent. what is further inconsistent, is that The Beastlands and Arborea, these planes of infinite nature are explicitly CG, placing nature on the chaotic side of the spectrum, yet neither Ranger nor Druid get "any nonlawful" as their alignment choices? Yet a barbarian does?

    Paladin on the other hand for some reason ONLY gets lawful good AND a highly specific code on top of that- which is inconsistent again with the ranger, who gets an "any" alignment choice despite having a similar class set up and being a more combat-focused counterpart to a divine class. The Paladins morality is the most restrictive while also giving him LESS power than a cleric. At least if you don't count the variant codes, but if you include those then you just have the Druid alignment problem in reverse: the paladin is bound to four extremes of moral/ethical mixes of behavior. Thing is, these almost make sense. Almost. Tyranny and Freedom hold water, but Slaughter is where alignment code restrictions goes laughably stark raving mad nutjob stupid and starts insisting that a Chaotic Evil person, an alignment defined by having zero moral or ethical restrictions .....has a code that gives them moral restrictions. cartoonish ones at that. go home alignment, your drunk!

    Problem is, an adventurers life inherently skews towards the Chaotic alignment. Your traveling around meeting random people you don't know at first, to go on high risk ventures that may or may not be illegal, involving unsafe situations and violence, and probably taking things that belonged to other people no matter how selfless your reasons, and will probably run afoul of one authority figure or another no matter how good or evil they are. The entire lifestyle is basically a code death trap for default paladins. There basically no reason for a default paladin to become one and deal with a bunch of probably nonlawful yahoos they don't know who might have an evil person among them when they can join a legitimate military or knightly order instead. I've never heard of a bard or a barbarian having alignment problems, but a paladin having alignment problems because of a bad GM is pretty much a cliche at this point.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    except these restrictions aren't equal are they? Clerics can be literally any alignment, the rest is just making up a god to match it.
    Yes - but if they change to an alignment disallowed by that god - they lose their powers, and they have to either atone or find a different god to worship.

    Plus, in some settings, you don't get to "make up a god" or "make up an ideal to follow" - you have to use one of the existing ones.

    Finding a different god to worship may involve getting an atonement spell, or a quest from another cleric of that god, to prove eagerness to worship the new one and convince them that they won't defect again.
    Last edited by hamishspence; 2020-11-05 at 09:12 AM.
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    A more important point is that even if you make up a god for your character to worship, by the rules you are not playing your own god; it's your GM who plays their part and thus decides whether your cleric is succesfully following their code of conduct.

    Trying to come up with a god that'd specifically let you get away with anything and everything you want to do would be a pretty blatant attempt at gaming the system and grounds for your GM to say "Haha no. Just use one of the established deities or be a conceptual cleric".

    Being a cleic of concepts is the actual 3e loophole you want to use when no god would fit your purposes. Which is a great reason to to ban clerics of concepts.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
    Yes - but if they change to an alignment disallowed by that god - they lose their powers, and they have to either atone or find a different god to worship.

    Plus, in some settings, you don't get to "make up a god" or "make up an ideal to follow" - you have to use one of the existing ones.

    Finding a different god to worship may involve getting an atonement spell, or a quest from another cleric of that god, to prove eagerness to worship the new one and convince them that they won't defect again.
    And?

    If a player has a clear concept for a cleric in mind, why would they ever need to change? Its pointless. you choose a god made up or not, and just follow their beliefs, its a character with a lot of work already done for you, but without any actual restriction on what can be done with that character, because you've already decided what you want to do with them. any story involving a cleric losing and regaining their gods favor or changing to a different one would just negatively impact group effectiveness without any real consequence other than annoying other players. while any story of converting from one god to another like evil one to a good one can be left to an interesting backstory

    now sure a GM could keep track of the clerics alignment and tenets and try to get rid of their powers when they start developing their character a certain way or when they fail to do something their god expects them to, but there are so many gods with so many different tenets and practices I honestly wouldn't expect a GM to remember them all amid so many other details of a world. Furthermore a player would be more likely to keep track of the tenets and stick to them rigidly because its the character they want to play....and thus the stick of alignment is meaningless, because most players if they want to play such a concept wouldn't really care about changing deities midway through anyways- the spell list will be for the most part the same and if they wanted to play something else, they would've chosen that instead. thus assuming no one is a jerk, the path of least narrative resistance unfolds: the GM not planning his campaign around whether or not a player loses his powers and the player not planning to lose his powers, the GM just describes the cleric slowly becoming their gods most favored worshipper or whatever and the character just ends up becoming a high priest of their religion because that is the safest option that doesn't get arguments over morality or complicated changes to one's character sheet.

    Thus the cleric can do whatever they want, with "what they want" being something they decided well in advance and is incredibly consistent with the reasons for their behavior, like any good character.

    and if your playing a shallow game where that characterization doesn't matter all that much.....why would you even care?
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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Man is there a lot to unpack there. I realize you are replying to hamisphence, not me, but at this point hamisphence needs all help they can get.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    And?
    If a player has a clear concept for a cleric in mind, why would they ever need to change?
    D&D is a dynamic game where what happens to your character is meant to be decided through your actions in the game. Approaching it with the mentality that your character is governed by an unchanging high concept, is an user error so severe, it escapes the rule set entirely. It is like choosing to play a strong character, while failing to acknowledge that there are diseases and curses which could make your character temporarily or permanently weak.

    This said, Alignment doesn't exist to punish pious clerics. More on this below.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Its pointless. you choose a god made up or not, and just follow their beliefs, its a character with a lot of work already done for you, but without any actual restriction on what can be done with that character, because you've already decided what you want to do with them.
    Playing according normal rules, a player cannot decide beforehand everything they want to do, because they do not know everything that can or will happen in the game. If you ever manage to preplay your character to that extent, you are not approaching the game like a normal player, you are approaching it as a robot executing preprogrammed algorithm. Why even play at that point, when you know everything that can happen?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    any story involving a cleric losing and regaining their gods favor or changing to a different one would just negatively impact group effectiveness without any real consequence other than annoying other players. while any story of converting from one god to another like evil one to a good one can be left to an interesting backstory
    The statement that "Alignment exists to facilitate a trope" (etc.) does not mean that trope is prescribed to happen in every game, for every game. "Negatively impacting group effectiveness" isn't even a consideration at this level; you might as well be worrying about a character dying. It's a possibility, not an eventuality.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    now sure a GM could keep track of the clerics alignment and tenets and try to get rid of their powers when they start developing their character a certain way or when they fail to do something their god expects them to, but there are so many gods with so many different tenets and practices I honestly wouldn't expect a GM to remember them all amid so many other details of a world.
    So you're assuming the GM won't be able to do the exact thing the rules say is the GM's job? This is the most blatant bad faith argument I've seen yet.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    Furthermore a player would be more likely to keep track of the tenets and stick to them rigidly because its the character they want to play....and thus the stick of alignment is meaningless, because most players if they want to play such a concept wouldn't really care about changing deities midway through anyways- the spell list will be for the most part the same and if they wanted to play something else, they would've chosen that instead.
    The "stick" of Alignment does not exist to punish pious clerics, nor players who are honestly interested in playing a pious clerics.

    It exists for players who want to play through the redemption story. The sort who sees the "stick" and goes "Ooh! Kinky!" and then deliberately trigger the mechanics in an equivalent of screaming "Punish me harder, Daddy!" at the GM.

    It exists for player who, during play, find themselves unable or unwilling to continue following their original pledge for their character, as a model of how losing divine favor and switching deities might work in a game.

    It exists for players who don't keep track of and stick to tenets of their character's faith, because they only wanted mechanical power, and need the GM to remind them that those mechanical powers came with strings attached in the setting.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    thus assuming no one is a jerk, the path of least narrative resistance unfolds: the GM not planning his campaign around whether or not a player loses his powers and the player not planning to lose his powers, the GM just describes the cleric slowly becoming their gods most favored worshipper or whatever and the character just ends up becoming a high priest of their religion because that is the safest option that doesn't get arguments over morality or complicated changes to one's character sheet.
    Yes, that is what happens when a player succesfully plays a pious cleric. "Narrative resistance" doesn't enter to it. You are just assuming the cleric overcomes all of it. That's not something that can be decided "well in advance" ; even if the cleric never sways from their faith, they might get eaten by grue due to a mistake unrelated to their faith.

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    Default Re: No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

    Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
    except these restrictions aren't equal are they? Clerics can be literally any alignment, the rest is just making up a god to match it. you could throw out every single canonical pantheon in DnD and just make up whatever god you want.
    That depends on the campaign world. In some you can basically have yourself as your deity, or some ideal. In others you must pick a member of an existing pantheon.

    For bards and barbarians their "restriction" is "any nonlawful". You might as well have given them a free adventuring ticket with no repercussions
    Barbarians are all about unleashed fury and impulsive action. Lawful alignment includes self-discipline and restraint. That is why they are incompatible. Same issue with bards - wandering adventuring minstrels are supposed to be unpredictable and somewhat chaotic.

    Monk is "any Lawful" which ignores all the chaotic martial artists in fiction who are arrogant about their power and don't play the rules, not emulating their tropes properly at all to restrict monks to very a vague label, not really specifying much beyond that. now you could say they're living an ascetic existence or whatnot, but paladins literally have a more restrictive code of behavior than them, when you'd think they'd at least be equal.
    Again, self-discipline and restraint are required to develop martial arts. Arrogance and playing by your own set of rules can be lawful evil if they are combined with discipline.

    Druid is oddly, limited to the five "neutral" alignments. Pure good. Pure Lawful. Pure Chaos. Pure Evil or Pure Neutral. honestly this never made sense to me. Nature abhors purity. Life itself wouldn't exist without mixing things, everything being a mix is completely natural. If all five major forces of the universe can describe a druids morality, then all alignments can, because guess what? the other four are mixes of the pure four! if you can have a druid that believes in Chaos and one that believes in Good, its not hard to have one that believes in both. Yet, the Ranger who also has nature magic if less, gets the "any" alignment choice. Inconsistent. what is further inconsistent, is that The Beastlands and Arborea, these planes of infinite nature are explicitly CG, placing nature on the chaotic side of the spectrum, yet neither Ranger nor Druid get "any nonlawful" as their alignment choices? Yet a barbarian does?
    Druids and Rangers had more logical alignment restrictions in earlier editions, where druids were limited to only True Neutral and Rangers had to be good-aligned. The argument is that druids must be at least partially neutral in order to maintain the emotional detachment that the natural world requires, where survival often comes at the expense of other animals and ugly things happen to baby animals and such. Rangers, on the other hand, were the protectors of the weak against the more savage parts of nature, and so had to be good-aligned.

    Paladin on the other hand for some reason ONLY gets lawful good AND a highly specific code on top of that- which is inconsistent again with the ranger, who gets an "any" alignment choice despite having a similar class set up and being a more combat-focused counterpart to a divine class. The Paladins morality is the most restrictive while also giving him LESS power than a cleric.
    Again, earlier editions of D&D make more sense, because a paladin in those editions clearly was more powerful than the other character classes. Greater power came with greater responsibility, in effect. There are players who like having a strict code of conduct.

    Problem is, an adventurers life inherently skews towards the Chaotic alignment. Your traveling around meeting random people you don't know at first, to go on high risk ventures that may or may not be illegal, involving unsafe situations and violence, and probably taking things that belonged to other people no matter how selfless your reasons, and will probably run afoul of one authority figure or another no matter how good or evil they are. The entire lifestyle is basically a code death trap for default paladins. There basically no reason for a default paladin to become one and deal with a bunch of probably nonlawful yahoos they don't know who might have an evil person among them when they can join a legitimate military or knightly order instead. I've never heard of a bard or a barbarian having alignment problems, but a paladin having alignment problems because of a bad GM is pretty much a cliche at this point.
    It's a debatable point. What you're describing is a common style of play, but only one style of play, after all. Player groups often undertake missions on behalf of legal authorities, which is right up a paladin's alley, especially if they are also religious authorities. Games can be played where all the players are in fact an order of knights. And the type of alignment problems you describe can happen for clerics or druids just as easily as for paladins.

    Barbarians also had very tough restrictions on their behavior when originally introduced in the original Unearthed Arcana, like not being able to associate with magic users or use magic items at low levels(!) The theory was that this helped to balance their extra class abilities.

    Part of the perceived unfairness of alignment restrictions in later editions is because the designers kept some restrictions while dumping others. Usually if they loosened up restrictions they also reduced the power of the class, but it's been somewhat inconsistent, noticeably with the paladin.

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