Deities Divorced From Alignment

[Devils_Advocate]

I disagree, because we're looking at magic, and powerful magic at that. You might as well say "Dead is dead", and not account for the various ways of bringing people back from the dead in D&D.

Man, what? I'm the one taking into account how stuff works in practice. You're the one ignoring the setting's magic and doing the equivalent of saying that death is irreversible. WTF?

Furthermore, if a DM did say that death is irreversible, I would take that to mean that there is no resurrection in that DM's game. I think that that's how most of us would understand that statement. But there seems to be a weird implicit assumption that "Alignment describes behavior" is less than entirely sincere. Is it understood to really mean "Alignment is a tool for the DM to punish players"? That's not a rhetorical question; I'm genuinely confused about this.

Alignment is an amalgam of past behavior in most cases.

If alignment doesn't necessarily have anything to do with past behavior, then that's not what alignment means. There may be a strong correlation, but it won't be anything definitive.

But the Helm of Opposite Alignment is, essentially, a powerful and pervasive charm effect, that immediately changes you behavior and your place in the universe.

No one can do anything in exactly zero seconds. Even a minute is a very, very short time do anything warranting a change all the way to the opposite alignment under the "personal history summation" model. And even if feasible, would you want that to be what happens to an affected character?

You are not only Chaotic Evil, but you now regard Chaotic Evil as being the right and proper way to behave.

I'm not sure how compatible Chaotic Evil alignment is with caring about what's "right and proper".

you might be neutral, for example, if you kept doing good deeds, but mostly so you could get paid and laid; you'd tend good, but with selfish-but-not-too-selfish motivations, you're more neutral

There are many upsides to using alignment to categorize characters' values rather than their actions, which is probably why that's pretty much how D&D has, I'm pretty sure, always presented alignment. It facilitates characters with different alignments working together; it allows for sudden change in alignment; it makes alignment a more reliable predictor of what someone is liable to do in the future.

But if you're going to treat alignment as being is about the motivations that drive characters' actions rather than the specific actions themselves, why not admit it?

[brian 333]

No. Alignment has always been a case of 'do not say'. Intent matters, but only where actions are intentional attempts to game the system, such as a charitible donation to offset a crime, or when the result cannot be known, such as saving the old man from a flaming arrow which then burns down an orphanage.

Alignment is also a world attribute like gravity or time and, like any other world phenomena, it can be manipulated using magic. A haste or telekenisis spell violates the rules of time or gravity, and the many alignment-based spells similarly make use of these natural phenomena.

A Helm of Opposite Alignment is no different than a Ring of Teleportation, which instantly alters the character's location in violation of several laws of nature through the use of magic.

[Max_Killjoy]

And those "force of nature" and "you can impose an alignment change" bits are a chunk of why I concluded that alignment was (at least as intended by the writers) not simply descriptive, but rather prescriptive.

And thus why I ditched alignment long ago, considering it a net negative for the gaming experience (and for worldbuilding).

[Devils_Advocate]

Throughout the history of Dungeons & Dragons, alignment has repeatedly been described as indicating attitudes and thereby providing guidelines for deciding (or broadly predicting) how a character will behave. Fortunately, I happened upon a helpful compilation of information a while back, so no need for extensive research on this one. Relevant excerpts below, with pertinent phrases underlined for emphasis:

Original D&D: "Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take"

Moldvay/Cook Basic (B/X): "Three basic ways of life guide the acts of both player characters and monsters. ... The alignments give guidelines for other characters to live by. The characters will try to follow these guidelines, but may not always be successful."

2nd Edition: "The character's alignment is a guide to his basic moral and ethical attitudes toward others, society, good, evil, and the forces of the universe in general. Use the chosen alignment as a guide to provide a clearer idea of how the character will handle moral dilemmas."

3rd Edition: "A creature’s general moral and personal attitudes are represented by its alignment ... Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies"

4th Edition: "If you choose an alignment, you’re indicating your character’s dedication to a set of moral principles ... A character’s alignment (or lack thereof) describes his or her moral stance"

Alignment is also a world attribute like gravity or time and, like any other world phenomena, it can be manipulated using magic. A haste or telekenisis spell violates the rules of time or gravity, and the many alignment-based spells similarly make use of these natural phenomena.

A Helm of Opposite Alignment is no different than a Ring of Teleportation, which instantly alters the character's location in violation of several laws of nature through the use of magic.

"The change in a character's position and velocity is the sum of the forces on her over time."

"Well, consider: What if two characters, thousands of miles apart, are summoned to the same place on another plane of existence? They were far apart, but now they're right next to each other. Yet because they've been relocated to a different space, it doesn't seem meaningful to say that one has traveled a greater distance than the other. In fact... if the conjuration is instantaneous, notions like acceleration and speed don't really even seem to apply, because the change isn't over time. And that consideration applies even to teleportation between different locations on the same plane. So--"

"Well obviously that's different! You're talking about magic, the whole point of which is to change things from how they work normally!"

"... You don't seem to be taking my point. I'm not talking about how things work normally, I'm talking about how things work in a fully general sense, and more specifically about what the physical quantities you're naming even are within the context of the setting. And for that purpose, describing someone's location in terms of her history is preposterously convoluted. What happens going forward is determined by where she is now, which isn't the same thing as how she got there. It's the result of that, but they're not the same thing."

"It's important to track player characters' locations so that players can't just claim that their characters are wherever!"

"That's, uh, a pretty adversarial outlook. But, hey, maybe you know from experience that your players are untrustworthy and dumping them for better ones isn't an option for whatever reason. Or you like them despite that. Or whatever, I don't know your situation. But I'm not saying not to track anything. The question that I'm getting at is what it even is that's being tracked. Because if we're tracking something in the setting, I want to understand what it is that so we can model it appropriately."

"Well, maybe that makes internal sense, but... your line of inquiry seems akin to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What does it have to do with how anything is adjudicated? Why, if something makes no observable difference, it's not even part of the setting as experience by the characters! Worrying about it will just get in the way of immersion, then, not help."

"Well, for example, what's a creature's velocity upon being summoned? What is it velocity before and after summoning measured relative to? Does it appear moving at the same speed it was moving at just before it was summoned? The same speed relative to what? If 'relative to its environment', what constitutes 'it environment'? Treating descriptors as black boxes works fine for defined operations, but if you want to answer novel questions about how something hypothetical behaves, a limited set of mappings of cause to effect are inadequate. It becomes necessary to look at the internal details."

[LibraryOgre]

A Helm of Opposite Alignment is no different than a Ring of Teleportation, which instantly alters the character's location in violation of several laws of nature through the use of magic.

This is it, succinctly. Space and time work like X... unless you apply magic, then they can work like any number of things.

Man, what? I'm the one taking into account how stuff works in practice. You're the one ignoring the setting's magic and doing the equivalent of saying that death is irreversible. WTF?

I do not follow how that is the case.

Furthermore, if a DM did say that death is irreversible, I would take that to mean that there is no resurrection in that DM's game. I think that that's how most of us would understand that statement. But there seems to be a weird implicit assumption that "Alignment describes behavior" is less than entirely sincere. Is it understood to really mean "Alignment is a tool for the DM to punish players"? That's not a rhetorical question; I'm genuinely confused about this.

Alignment is usually an amalgamation of a person's actions and, to a lesser extent, their intentions. Under most circumstances, a mortal's alignment develops over time, until it is a fair predictor of behavior... a person whose actions have consistently been mostly Lawful and mostly Good is more likely to behave in a Lawful and/or Good manner in any given instance.

This changes when magic gets involved. Under a standard Charm Person, they're likely to still remain Lawful and Good, even if they now have a radical change of heart regarding one person. You usually cannot get a LG person under a Charm Person to burn down an orphanage... unless you can somehow convince them that the orphans really deserve to die.

Under a Domination spell, or some of the more powerful charms (q.v. vampire charm in AD&D), this changes; they will act against their alignment while under your command though, arguably, this should not significantly affect their own alignment (since they are not under their own control).

More extreme than Domination or Charm Person is the Helm of Opposite alignment. It takes the idea that alignment is an amalgamation of previous behavior and chucks it out the window... in a way, it's an answer to Ravel Puzzlewell's question, "What can change the nature of a man?" The Helm of Opposite alignment doesn't change your past, but it does change your nature in a pervasive way, essentially rewriting your soul to be the opposite alignment. It teleports your behavior from 9,-9 to -9,9 on the moral and ethical plane. It divorces your alignment from your previous actions, and changes your mind so you think this is the "right and proper" way to behave.... or, as I said elsewhere, so you tend to view this new alignment as the way the world works.

Lawful Good people tend to regard the world as being best when everyone chips in to make things better for everyone. Chaotic Good people lean towards "Do the next right thing". Lawful Evil is "Unity creates the strength which leads to more unity and strength", while Chaotic Evil is very much "**** you, I do what I want." (Chaotic Neutral tends to be "Screw you, I do what I want", but not quite so much of a **** about it). If a Lawful Good person puts on the Helm of Opposite Alignment, their view of the way the world works fundamentally shifts, due to the influence of powerful magic.

In most cases, alignment is about actions and one's history. But even in the normal course of things, intentions matter, and sufficiently powerful magic can remove one's alignment from its association with past actions.

But if you're going to treat alignment as being is about the motivations that drive characters' actions rather than the specific actions themselves, why not admit it?

I never had trouble admitting it; as I said, there's a lot of ways where Good actions can be mitigated by Selfish or Evil intentions.

A slightly silly version: I am going to dump thousands of gallons of poison into this well to murder the people of this town! But, it turns out, that the well was inhabited by an evil monster, and my poison happened to be exactly what was necessary to counteract it and save the town. The outcome of my action was serendipitously extremely good. My choice was motivated by evil. Does that action count as good, or as evil? I would say that the intervention of serendipity doesn't mean that you weren't doing evil, because intentions matter.

If I want the people of the town to remember me. I could become an evil bandit, or I could become a great hero. I choose to be a hero, because I think that will make them love me and remember me better than if I'm an evil bandit. My motivation is selfish, which means the overall effect on my alignment is less than if I were simply motivated by the desire to help people. It doesn't make me evil... but it makes my actions less good, because they are on a shakier foundation.

I tend to think of alignment as a coordinate plane; absolute Lawful Good is -9,9, absolute Chaotic Evil is 9,-9. True Neutral is between 2 and -2 on both the x and y axis... 2,-2 is TN, so is -2,2, and any alignment where the absolute value on both scales is equal or less than 2. 2,2.1 is Neutral Good; 2.1,2.1 is Chaotic Good... but not as Chaotic Good as 9,9. Any given action shifts your position within the coordinate plane, but it is seldom enough to change your alignment on its own.

[Yakk]

When viewed as a descriptor of general attitudes, as was intended, alignment works fine as a broad predictor of behavior.

Alignment was intended to split the world into the forces of Law and Civilization vs the forces of Chaos and Barbarianism.

You didn't have to be Lawful to live in civilization, or Chaotic to live in the wilds, but that was the overall alignment axis.

It was a very colonial mindset; Law was also attached to Good and Chaotic to Evil as a secondary lean.

The AD&D additions of the second axis -- good/evil -- came after.

...

Viewed that way, insert a definitional struggle into your world, and call that your alignment axis. If your world is about the battle between City and Wilderness, that could be a good alignment axis to use. If it is a battle between 5 elemental powers, a pentagonal alignment system might work better.

[Devils_Advocate]

The question that I've been getting at is this:

What does "alignment" mean in D&D? What does it mean for a character to have a particular alignment, rather than a different one? What's the difference between alignments and things that aren't alignments? An alignment may happen to be lots of things, but what are all alignments definitionally?

I have increasingly gotten the impression that lots of posters on this forum regard alignment as, well, a fakey fake gamey game thing. Not only that, but the assumption that alignment is a fakey fake gamey game thing seems to be so deep and so implicit that it just doesn't register when someone treats alignment otherwise, even when that should be clear from context.

Now, D&D contains various obvious fakey fake gamey game things. Take XP and leveling up, for example. Characters advance in capability by overcoming challenges, and what they improve at may well be entirely unrelated to what they did. One can make this less silly by requiring training in between adventures, but that still doesn't explain why ganking kobolds should even enable someone to get better at lockpicking. All in all, pretty fake and pretty gamey.

Or consider hit points. Ah, hit points! Has ever any other game mechanic inspired more futile attempts to rationalize it? "Hit points represent the ability to avoid damage! The amount of damage dealt to a character isn't the amount of damage dealt. Nor is the amount of healing received the amount of healing received, for that matter. Everything is something other than itself!" But not only do I only need to describe that perspective to make it sound preposterous, but characters still have their hit points while paralyzed, so it also doesn't even work. "Nuh-uh! Hit points represent luck, not skill!" But good luck is things going improbably well. Something that raises the likelihood of good results isn't luck.

Let's face it: Hit points represent the ability of cinematic fantasy characters to survive things that, realistically, would kill them ultra super dead. D&D models the results of combat in a very fake, very gamey way, and not just in how many attacks someone can survive. Characters being maimed or injured in ways that hinder them is simply not treated as a normal and expected result of getting hurt. There may be variant rules for that, but the default is that characters just lose hit points, which is way more forgiving than, you know, actually modeling injury realistically.

And, come to think, experience points and hit points work in essentially the same way. You add to and/or subtract from a point total until a predefined cutoff point is reached, at which point some effect manifests. But nothing is directly based on the points themselves -- they're not used in any calculations to determine what happens in the game. They can be "fluffed" in various ways, but a character having 19 hit points really just means that there's a "19" next to "HP" on his character sheet, and a character having 750 experience points really just means that there's a "750" next to "XP" on her character sheet.

Character class is actually an interesting example, because 5th Edition makes it significantly faker and gamier in a specific way! See, starting class represents capabilities acquired in a character's background. But 5E introduced Background as a separate mechanical thing from class, even though it frequently covers the same ground! So training at crime, for example, has no particular mechanical representation. It's covered by the Criminal Background, but it's also part of the Rogue class; or, at least, that's the default explanation of how someone learned Thieves' Cant and how to use thieves' tools. And "Having a criminal background doesn't necessarily mean that you have the Criminal Background" is "Damage doesn't necessarily represent damage" levels of silly. XD

But classes are silly anyway, because of how they arbitrarily package abilities together. Why should all Clerics turn or rebuke undead, independent of whether their deities especially care about undead? Why should all Rangers who level up enough gain spellcasting? It's not like it's a natural progression of the concept of a skilled wilderness expert and warrior. (Of course, that one is in the overlap between "character classes are fakey fake gamey game things" and "leveling up is a fakey fake gamey game thing".) Even so, class feels less fake and less gamey to me than do HP, XP, and levels. Those correspond really loosely to stuff on the fiction level, but it feels a lot more like there's a real, in-setting difference between a Fighter and a Wizard. Like, being a Wizard means more than just having "Wizard" next to "Class" on a character sheet.

Even less fake are the Ability Scores. At this point, we're getting fairly legit. Like, are some people in the setting stronger than others? Are some people in the setting smarter than others? Would that be assumed to be true even if "the stats" didn't exist as numbers on sheets? Yes, yes, and yes! Which of these "stats" spellcasting is based on depends on class, even when characters are casting the same spell, but that can be put down to the fakeness of classes. "Wisdom" is pretty vague, and some of the assignments of stat to skill are a bit dubious, but it seems at least possible to get something quite non-fake by tweaking things at most, while keeping the core concept and basic implementation.

Finally, I would put race on the other end of the spectrum from XP and HP. While the concept of a "species" is a bit fuzzy, various species do seem to exist; even different but very similar species. How plausible the various specific races of D&D are is another matter, but the basic concept of other species similar to humans seems perfectly sound. Furthermore, race is clearly an actual thing in the setting. In fact, it's primarily that. It may determine some of the stuff that fills up a character sheet, but the rules don't generally care what particular subtype of humanoid you are. It's a flavor thing, with mechanical impact derived from that flavor.

... Which brings me to alignment. Alignment doesn't seem to fill a necessary role of reward or failure condition like XP and HP. With race, class, and Ability scores, it's not really needed to differentiate characters. The rules generally don't invoke alignment as such to determine how character actions play out, and where they do, as with race, it's because it's a thing in the setting that characters care about. Aligment seems to be in the game as a setting element. Like, it would be really weird for fiends to wage an unfathomably relentless and massive Blood War over level. But being Chaotic Evil means more than having "Chaotic Evil" on your character sheet or in your statblock. I seriously see alignment as being roughly as non-fake as Ability scores.

I've been talking about what alignment is as a setting element. I can see how that could be a confusing way to respond to statements about how to use alignment as a system element. In particular, I can see how that could be confusing to someone who doesn't take it for granted that the fiction layer and the rules layer are, and should be, related. Not sure whether that's what's going on here.

I thought it best to get that out of the way first, in order to hopefully give a better understanding of where I'm coming from. With that taken care of, there are still specific points that I'd like to address, because some of what y'all have said about the use of alignment as a system element seems bonkers to me, even taking for granted that alignment in your games is not what the Player's Handbook says it is. But I'm going to bed soon, so that will have to wait for another time.

[LibraryOgre]

The question that I've been getting at is this:

What does "alignment" mean in D&D? What does it mean for a character to have a particular alignment, rather than a different one? What's the difference between alignments and things that aren't alignments? An alignment may happen to be lots of things, but what are all alignments definitionally?

I have increasingly gotten the impression that lots of posters on this forum regard alignment as, well, a fakey fake gamey game thing. Not only that, but the assumption that alignment is a fakey fake gamey game thing seems to be so deep and so implicit that it just doesn't register when someone treats alignment otherwise, even when that should be clear from context.

...

I've been talking about what alignment is as a setting element. I can see how that could be a confusing way to respond to statements about how to use alignment as a system element. In particular, I can see how that could be confusing to someone who doesn't take it for granted that the fiction layer and the rules layer are, and should be, related. Not sure whether that's what's going on here.

The thing is, alignment is both.

It is absolutely a setting element. Alignment underlies a lot of the game's assumptions about how the world works, from the morals and ethics of mortals to the reality of gods, fiends and celestials. In the Great Wheel cosmology, alignment is location, even existence. In 1e, there were entire languages related to it, which would be instantly forgotten upon alignment change.

But, the thing is, it's also a game mechanic. In AD&D, changing alignment was momentous and could cripple even those characters who weren't divine casters, costing levels of experience and even scrambling your speech.

What does it MEAN for a character to have an alignment? It means that this is how they view the universe working properly. A Lawful Good person does Lawful Good things because they view the world as working best when people work together for the betterment of all. A Chaotic Evil person, even one who lives in society, whose Chaos and Evil are petty but consistent, believes that everyone will secretly sell out their mother for enough silver., and that anyone who says they won't is lying... either to the world, or at least to themselves. Law means Unity; Chaos means Freedom. Good means Altruism, Evil means Selfishness. It is not just, as some allege, Teams, but a fundamental belief in how the worlds work.

NPCs most often simply ARE their alignment. A LG shopkeeper is going to behave in a Lawful Good manner because he is Lawful Good. A CE assassin is going to behave in a CE manner because he is Chaotic Evil. Someone with a significant moral or ethical event may change alignment, but that's an extreme circumstance. An NPC subjected to a Helm of Opposite Alignment will BE their new alignment... that LG shopkeeper becomes CE through magical fiat. And now he IS that alignment, and will behave as such.

Now, alignment is defined for PCs through actions... PCs are less tied to the world, because they are controlled from outside it. They have to define their alignment, rather than be in it. Objectively, in the world, they may BE their alignment, but that's not how it can be done in the fakey-fake game sense. I can write LG down on my character sheet, but if I'm a murdering, backstabbing, bastard in play, I'm not LG.

[brian 333]

What is light? Is it a particle or a wave? How can its destruction create an electron and how can it be created by destroying an electron?

And gravity. OMG! Was there ever a fakey fakey faker than gravity? How can a particle that does not exist attract everything in the universe to it? And if it does that, then how can the universe and everything in it be accelerating away from everything else?

You see? It's easy to overthink a thing to the point of absurdity. And that's why so many people have trouble with alignment: the more you reason it out the less sense it makes.

Back when I was learning trigonometry i was a C student on my best days. Until my younger brother said, "Okay, Einstein. Make a zipper."

You may be saying, "What?" right about now. I know I did. His point was that I could use a zipper without understanding how it is made, and I could similarly follow the rules of math without knowing how log tables are calculated.

I became an A student in math from then on through calculus, not by being smart enough to understand it, but by following the rules.

This applies to Alignment as well. Stop trying to figure it out. It's just a rule in a game that does not map to any real world phenomenon, but its game usage is clearly defined.

So what if Author A wrote that LG characters never lie and you think a LG character should be able to lie? It's just a rule for a game with no real world application. Use the rule as written and don't waste your time trying to make it make sense because at some level it was just an arbitrary choice by guys who wanted to escape reality for a while.

[Devils_Advocate]

So, one way to deal with the fake gaminess of a fakey fake gamey game thing is to outright make the setting unrealistic in the way that fits the fakey fake gamey game thing. And this can often work very well! Instead of trying to B.S. up some purported explanation that how hit points work is compatible with high-level characters working like real humans, just say that a high-level fighter can have a boulder fall on top of him and keep on trucking just fine. Because why shouldn't he?

Because the conceit that non-magical things in D&D work like their real-life counterparts is a long-standing tradition? Well, sometimes it's time to admit that a tradition is bad and you should feel bad about it. The fundamental laws of nature by definition can't be broken, so "real world physics but also magic" never made much sense in the first place. Besides which, D&D uses the classical elements, the coexistence of which with the periodic table feels forced at best.

But the most compelling reason to ditch this assumption is that it makes non-magical characters relative chumps, not even just in play but conceptually! When half of the classes are in concept limited to what a real person can do, and the other half in concept aren't thus limited, that's a big glaring unpopular disparity. While magic could be limited to being only as powerful as stuff that real people can do, with magic characters differently capable instead of more capable, D&D isn't that game. And some characters being weaker than others is what levels are for. It makes more sense for characters of the same level to be of roughly equivalent power, regardless of class.

So, all things considered, that long-standing tradition is bad and we should feel bad about it, so time to chuck it right out the window! Hey, wow, that's way better! Just saying that non-magical characters are allowed to be fantastic doesn't make the ones we have right now any more fantastic, but it's a good first step, and it at least acknowledges that they shouldn't be nerfed when they do excel. Neat!


Similarly, someone who wants alignment to normally but not always correspond to a character's history can just say that alignment is a special thing independent of normal character traits that develops based on a character's behavior. That's basically the concept of karma, which is probably already familiar enough to most players or at least fairly easy to understand. It's a special sort of record of one's behavior, and one that can potentially be falsified; just find a way to swap the karma out for different karma. That makes enough sense, right? What even is my problem with that?

Well, the thing is, alignment-changing stuff in D&D doesn't leave characters' personality the same. It changes personality in proportion to the alignment shift. Meanwhile, faking an alignment for the purposes of detect spells or magic item activation is a different thing that doesn't change a character's personality, because that character retains their real alignment. All of that fits with my understanding of alignment as describing normal character traits and not with alignment as being a totally separate thing.

But let's assume for the moment that magical alignment change is the exception, here. That alignment being a description of a character's current state (or, getting technical, the state that the character would have without alignment-as-extra-trait) isn't how things work normally. Is someone who does Good deeds for selfish reasons thus Good, even though his Good behavior is as much a product of circumstance as of his personal nature? "Well, no; intentions do matter." Ah, okay, so alignment is an account of past actions, but those actions can be characterized by intentions. Fair...

Well, okay then, try this one on for size: A character experiences a major, life-changing event, resulting in a dramatic shift in worldview without the influence of magic. A kindly, gentle man's family is killed by an invading army; he is filled with anger and hatred by this injustice, and he dedicates himself to achieving revenge at any cost... and now will even hypocritically choose to take actions that harm innocents so long as those actions advance his personal quest. A bitter, selfish, cruel man is shown unexpected mercy by an enemy, and is deeply moved by this kindness; after years of resentment towards nearly everyone he encounters, he decides that he wants to do what he can to fix some of the world's problems, not contribute to them.

Do you want the ruthless, vengeance-driven character to be categorized as Good until he causes "enough" unnecessary suffering to "cancel out" all of his past beneficence? Do you want the reformed villain to be categorized as Evil until he does "enough" good to "cancel out" his past maleficence? (There's a follow-up "How does one even quantify such things?" question, but that applies to a lot of approaches to alignment, and anyway let's deal with the non-parenthetical questions first.)

I ask because, if you instead would like alignment to reflect a character's current attitudes and proclivities, why not just have it do that? Why have one standard for which characters you would like to have which alignments, and a different standard for which characters do have which alignments? I'm sure that you can patch standard 2 with special rules and exceptions, but seriously, why not just have standard 2 equal standard 1?

Let's return to that teleportation analogy:

DM: The change in a character's position and velocity is the sum of the forces on her over time.
Player: Does that apply when a character is teleported?
DM: Aha, no, that magically alters a character's position. It also changes where the character is.
Player: ... A character's position is where she is... right? Those aren't two separate things.
DM: No, no. See, normally a characters position is the result of forces over time--
Player: Well, normally, yeah...
DM: But teleportation interferes with that; it changes things from how they work normally.
Player: ... Right. I'm not seeing how that makes position a different thing from where a character is, though...
DM: Well, they do normally correspond to each other. And teleportation maintains that correspondence by adjusting both equivalently.
Player: They normally correspond? So you're saying that a character's position not only isn't the same thing as where she is, but it's possible for those "two different things" to not correspond to one another? Are you kidding me?
DM: Ah, well, ideally the two are equivalent, but special circumstances might throw that equivalence out of whack.
Player: Ah, I see, you are kidding me. You had me going there for a bit.

Seriously, if your goal is just to cut a piece of paper, why construct a Rube Goldberg machine to do it instead of just using a pair of scissors?

I do not follow how that is the case.

DM (probably responding to someone's observation about a lack of explicit restrictions attached to the "dead" condition): Well, corpses don't get up and walk around, come on.
Player: Well, animate corpses are exactly what zombies are. Dead characters can also be brought back to life by--
DM: Well, of course, but that's magic. That's different.
Player: Well, uh, a dead body moving on its own is certainly different from that not happening. That's my point?

You: When viewed as an aggregate of [a character's] actions, [alignment] works fine as an indication of [that character's] general attitudes, as was intended.
Me: There are cases where that's explicitly not true!
You: I disagree, because we're looking at magic, and powerful magic at that.
Me: Even granting for the sake of argument that your claim is only inaccurate in cases involving powerful magic, those are still instances where it's wrong. So... there are at least some instances where your claim is wrong.

Do you see how the above two exchanges are analogous to each other?

Alignment is usually an amalgamation of a person's actions and, to a lesser extent, their intentions.

So, given your later response, this translates to "How they view the universe working properly is usually an amalgamation of a person's actions and, to a lesser extent, their intentions."

"Amalgamation" is a bit vague, but this seems to be a claim that someone's prior actions are part of their current outlook. That doesn't seem to make much sense to me. As I indicated previously, I gather that such statements are understood to be insincere, but the non-literal meaning is less than clear to me, and in any case I don't see how it would hurt to put it plainly.

In most cases, alignment is about actions and one's history.

Similarly, "In most cases, how one views the universe working properly is about actions and one's history." While I don't doubt that some of one's actions wind up influencing such a perspective, this doesn't seem to be true in the way you seem to have meant it.

as I said, there's a lot of ways where Good actions can be mitigated by Selfish or Evil intentions.

Flip that around, though: A lot of the time, you allow selfish or Evil intentions to be mitigated by Good actions (I take it). Why? What even makes an action Good, if not the intentions behind it? The expected results? To me, it seems like the alignment of a character who doesn't care how anything impacts anyone else shouldn't move all over the place because of the opportunities that present themselves even as the character's values remain the same.

In 1e, there were entire languages related to it, which would be instantly forgotten upon alignment change.

But, the thing is, it's also a game mechanic. In AD&D, changing alignment was momentous and could cripple even those characters who weren't divine casters, costing levels of experience and even scrambling your speech.

What does it MEAN for a character to have an alignment? It means that this is how they view the universe working properly. A Lawful Good person does Lawful Good things because they view the world as working best when people work together for the betterment of all. A Chaotic Evil person, even one who lives in society, whose Chaos and Evil are petty but consistent, believes that everyone will secretly sell out their mother for enough silver., and that anyone who says they won't is lying... either to the world, or at least to themselves.

Ah, the "psychic parasite" model of alignment.

Under this approach, alignments are all-pervasive entities that infect all sapient beings in the multiverse. The Alignment Overlords pump beliefs into the beings they infest, thereby preventing any outlook that they mutually oppose. Hence it's impossible for anyone to believe e.g. that there is no such thing as "the universe working properly". One can only free oneself from the control of one's alignment through great effort and at great personal cost; and even then, only by adopting another alignment! There is simply no escape from their tyranny.

Fortunately, at some point between 1st Edition and 3rd Edition, someone completed some sort of epic quest to wrest control of all intelligent minds from the Alignment Overlords. Through the actions of this unsung hero, and probably a very noble and moving act of self-sacrifice on Chaotic Good's part, beings are no longer poisoned by delusions implanted by these once-cosmic entities. The values that they pushed are still around, hence non-parasitical alignment, but their thought control has been brought to an end.

The Psychic Parasite Alignment Model takes for granted that various perfectly reasonable characters do not get to exist in the setting. Everyone has to have one of 9 predefined philosophies, and anyone who doesn't isn't a valid character. There are various outlooks that the Alignment Overlords simply do not permit. It's silly to talk about non-D&D characters or real people having alignments in this sense, because alignment is an unusual facet of the setting, not an abstract trait of characters in general. We don't have psychic parasites infesting our brains, or at least almost certainly not the Alignment Overlords, and thus we have no alignment in this sense.

Makes for an interesting setting, especially insofar as maximum sanity is even lower than in real life, but most of us wouldn't want to live in it. Although the artificially limited diversity in worldview probably makes things a bit boring after the novelty wears off. Same old cliches again; yawn. Probably part of why they ditched it.

I can write LG down on my character sheet, but if I'm a murdering, backstabbing, bastard in play, I'm not LG.

In that case, it feels like it's more appropriate to say that the character was never Lawful Good in the first place than that the character changed alignment. Not everything has to be decided in chronological order all the time.

What is light?

There are two different types of answers that can be given to a question like that. One may respond "Light is visible electromagnetic radiation". One may also respond "Light is fast". Now, the second response isn't inaccurate; light travels at a very high speed. But it disregards the point of asking the question. It's a sort of troll response. At best, it misses the point of asking the question.

Was there ever a fakey fakey faker than gravity?

You mean "faker fakey faker", of course. Tsk, tsk. Grammar! ;)

You see? It's easy to overthink a thing to the point of absurdity.

I don't follow. Are you implying that your physics questions have, and can have, no answers? That there is no mechanism for any of the phenomena you asked about, and that they are all inexplicable?

It's one thing to say that it's a waste of time to inquire into the nature of a fictional phenomenon, on the grounds that (1) there is no truth to discover and (2) any "understanding" gained has no practical (i.e. real-world) applications. Even then, you might want to consider that some people nevertheless do so because we find the activity to be worthwhile, and that this approach of engaging with fiction is no less valid than your own, rather than being badwrongfun that we should feel ashamed of.

But I feel like I have to dispute the idea that inquiring into and attempting to understand real natural phenomena isn't worthwhile for practical reasons. I'm not at all sure whether that's what you were trying to get across. But I do take it that you asked those physics questions in an attempt to illustrate some sort of point, rather than because you wanted answers to them. (If you do want them answered, why on Earth would you ask them here instead of in the science & technology forum?) It's just not clear to me what that point is supposed to be.

And that's why so many people have trouble with alignment: the more you reason it out the less sense it makes.

Well, let me clarify: I don't assume that it's possible to reconcile everything written about alignment in Dungeon & Dragons, even within a single edition; even within the alignment section of the PHB of a single edition. That's not something that I'm even interested in attempting, because the alignment section of the PHB strongly tends to contain at least a few bad ideas, in my opinion. But most of the basic concepts seem workable and the overall approach to categorizing characters seems salvageable.

A big part of the work involved in salvaging is clarifying stuff. And that includes things like distinguishing between -- or, honestly, just not conflating --

(1) causes of alignment,
(2) effects of alignment, and
(3) alignment itself.

You may respond with "You would seek to turn the alignment system into something not janky and clunky? HERETIC! BLASPHEMER!" But this shall not deter me.

I became an A student in math from then on through calculus, not by being smart enough to understand it, but by following the rules.

And that's perfectly sufficient to use math, rather than to develop math. Which is enough for most purposes! But you only get to use math because others developed it first. If no one had come up with the math of imaginary numbers, no one would ever have been able to apply it.

This applies to Alignment as well. Stop trying to figure it out.

Why? Certainly there's a case to be made that I'm pissing away my finite time on Earth, but the same could be said about this entire thread. "Just use the standard rules and don't worry about the implications; the setting is just a cardboard backdrop for the PC's adventures, and the players will skim over all of your special lore, so don't bother." I fear that the equine creature atop which you are situated is so tall that a fall from such a height would be quite perilous indeed. Best climb down carefully before you hurt yourself.

It's just a rule in a game that does not map to any real world phenomenon, but its game usage is clearly defined.

Of course, what could be clearer than how alignment works in D&D? No one ever argues about that at all!

Use the rule as written

Near as I can tell, the written description of alignment has come down on the side of alignment representing character attitudes rather than character history every time that it addresses the issue. So, uh... NO U.

and don't waste your time trying to make it make sense because at some level it was just an arbitrary choice by guys who wanted to escape reality for a while.

"It doesn't make sense because it wasn't even particularly designed to, so don't fix it" is not the stellar argument that you seem to believe it to be. If anything, it's trying to make sense of something that already makes sense that seems like it would be wasted effort. And, again, your statement seems to apply equally well to what you started this thread to do.

[brian 333]

My point about light and gravity was that if it is easy to analyze real world phenomena to the point of absurdity, then how much easier would it be to do with an arbitrary game rule that isn't based on anything except something some teenagers read in books by sickos like Moorecock and Lewis?

But then the previous post clearly demonstrates my point. It probably has more thought and effort put into it than was ever put into the original design of the rule.

Like a zipper, just use the damned thing or buy button fly jeans.

[LudicSavant]

So, I will propose a domain-based pantheon in which deities have alignments based on their characterization, but it does not restrict who may worship them or who may receive spells by praying to them.

There is precedent for this. For example, in the Eberron setting, there are no alignment restrictions for Clerics, and the predominant religion was pantheistic.

It also might help to imagine why someone might worship a deity who doesn't share their alignment. LudicSavant on this site has some really nice takes on Greyhawk deities like Lolth (though sadly they haven't posted a whole lot recently), which go into why someone would ever worship nongood deities in the first place. See here on Lolth specifically, LudicSavant has links to their other deity posts there as well: https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...olth-Lady-Luck

Hey, that's me!

A simple example of a case where a kind person would worship a cruel deity would be to prevent said god's wrath. Sailors might sacrifice to a dread god of the sea for fear that if they do not, they'll end up like Homer's Odyssey or worse.

That said, in the case of my own deities writeups, I should note that good (morality) and Good (alignment) are not the same thing, even if some in-world factions claim otherwise (there could even be conflicts between in-world ideological factions who have different interpretations of what alignment represents).

[LibraryOgre]

But mostly its a political force describing which team your character decided to join.

I disagree entirely. It is better to have an articulatable philosophy for each, so character know how to be good and evil, not simply say "You're Green. You're Purple. You hate each other." Declaring them merely teams removes the impact of acting Evil when you're Good, or trying to be Good, because "acting Evil" and "acting Good" don't have any meaning.

[brian 333]

And the system you describe makes alignment irrelevant. It also allows 'doing evil for a good cause,' which philosophy I find repugnant on many levels.

The idea behind this topic is to create a pantheistic approach to the game as opposed to the current monotheism in a polytheistic world. Eliminating alignment is your choice if that's how you want to play, but neither eliminating or redefining alignment are the goal of this topic.

[quinron]

And the system you describe makes alignment irrelevant. It also allows 'doing evil for a good cause,' which philosophy I find repugnant on many levels.

The idea behind this topic is to create a pantheistic approach to the game as opposed to the current monotheism in a polytheistic world. Eliminating alignment is your choice if that's how you want to play, but neither eliminating or redefining alignment are the goal of this topic.

The important question to ask here is, will this setting allow for specific-deity worship alongside polytheistic worship? Because if so, then either you're going to have to either deities specific alignments that are functionally ignored by polytheistic worshippers, or you're going to have to decide that alignment doesn't apply to deities. And if you take the latter option, then you've functionally redefined alignment by creating a class of sapient beings (deities) to whom alignment doesn't apply.

Also, to your first point, even the game designers have a tradition of creating character options whose whole existence is "doing evil for a good cause" - that's the whole point of the Gray Guard prestige class. Whether or not you choose to include that kind of dilemma in your game is, as always, your choice, and it's good to set the precedent for whether that's allowed in your world & game. But to argue that including something like that is "redefining alignment" is wrong.

[druid91]

D&D has alignment baked in, and every deity is coded into exclusive camps which make specializing easy, but it is harder to be a 'generalist cleric.'

From a pantheistic PoV, exclusion of worshippers makes little sense. A pantheistic worshipper might pray to a dawn deity upon waking, a hearth deity at breakfast, an agriculture deity while taking in a harvest, a trade deity while selling the crop, a travel deity to get home safely with the money, a marriage deity while arguing how to spend the money, and a dream deity when going to sleep. This person would be poorly served by a cleric of Thor.

Likewise, alignment restrictions would make it difficult to pray to most of these deities, no matter what the character's alignment might be.

So, I will propose a domain-based pantheon in which deities have alignments based on their characterization, but it does not restrict who may worship them or who may receive spells by praying to them.

This creates the opportunity for a cleric to be a Generalist Cleric who worships a pantheon rather than the standard cleric of a pantheon. A PC could choose to worship ond deity above others and follow the PHB rules, but most NPC clerics would serve the pantheon.

Depends on the circumstances really. Faerun is a good example that being of Evil Alignment didn't inherently make someone an outcast from society. It just made them a not so nice person. Priests of Evil Gods in the usual human pantheon were just as much part of human civilization. Otherwise Good aligned Sailors would pray to Umberlee and make lavish tributes and offerings to ensure their safety.

Very few gods were just... outright pariahs.

[brian 333]

The important question to ask here is, will this setting allow for specific-deity worship alongside polytheistic worship? Because if so, then either you're going to have to either deities specific alignments that are functionally ignored by polytheistic worshippers, or you're going to have to decide that alignment doesn't apply to deities. And if you take the latter option, then you've functionally redefined alignment by creating a class of sapient beings (deities) to whom alignment doesn't apply.

Also, to your first point, even the game designers have a tradition of creating character options whose whole existence is "doing evil for a good cause" - that's the whole point of the Gray Guard prestige class. Whether or not you choose to include that kind of dilemma in your game is, as always, your choice, and it's good to set the precedent for whether that's allowed in your world & game. But to argue that including something like that is "redefining alignment" is wrong.

I am not advocating that players ignore deity alignment. I admit that I should have done more to define my original pantheistic approach before posting, but I didn't anticipate that the topic would stray so far from my original intent of creating a pantheon which, while composed of deities with alignments and worshipped by priests who worshipped only one deity, would allow worship of the pantheon as a whole by both clerics and lay worshippers who would themselves have alignments.

Let's propose a deity of murder, for example. That's a pretty shallow portfolio for a deity, so why would Joe Average worship it? Especially a good Joe?

"Oh 'deity of murder' stay the hands of those who would take the life of my beloved as she serves the poor in the squalid camps of desperate refugees..."

It does not require alignment to be ignored for a good character to worship an evil deity. Evil rain deities, deities of drought, famine, and pestillence, and deities of illness and misfortune must be appeased by good characters in virtually any setting.

As for doing evil for a good cause, there's another way of saying that: doing evil. I'm not proposing that good characters should be involved in human sacrifice. An evil act is evil. But appeasing an evil deity may be periodically necessary, and there should be good clerics capable of leading such services.

As for redefining alignments, I am not saying it's wrong. I am saying that this topic is not about that. It is about eliminating the requirement that worship only be allowed one alignment step away from a deity.

After all, I'm sure every chaotic high school student offers worship to the lawful deity of knowledge while cramming for the next exam.

[Devils_Advocate]

"Pantheistic" isn't a synonym for "polytheistic". It means something different.

the requirement that worship only be allowed one alignment step away from a deity.

Has there ever been any restriction on what alignments a deity's worshipers (not clerics) can have?

'doing evil for a good cause,' which philosophy I find repugnant on many levels

The impression that I get is that a lot of people who say that are fine with plenty of e.g. killing. If anything, the objection seems to be to acknowledging evil means as evil rather than to accepting them.

With regards to alignment, purge your mind of D&D. Instead look at what inspired D&D. Specifically, the Elric books or in Three Hearts, Three Lions. I'm more familiar with the latter, and to summarize: alignment is a cosmic universal force. But mostly its a political force describing which team your character decided to join.

Don't treat it as more than that.

Why? What are the benefits of that approach? You've described how the source material is different from D&D, but not how those differences make it better.

If only there were a way to combine the two different approaches, with a "law versus chaos" alignment describing how someone wants society to function and a "good versus evil" alignment describing moral character. But, no, that would never work...

That said, in the case of my own deities writeups, I should note that good (morality) and Good (alignment) are not the same thing, even if some in-world factions claim otherwise (there could even be conflicts between in-world ideological factions who have different interpretations of what alignment represents).

I like you. You look at the setting element of alignment from a world-building perspective.

And you make a good point. Much as I concern myself with how things are from an omniscient perspective just because I want to categorize stuff consistently, how things look from an in-setting perspective is often much more important. People often have incomplete or inaccurate misinformation, are biased, try to seem like they believe other than they do, etc., and the ways that those factors influence behavior can have far more of an impact than the stuff that people's opinions are even about in the first place.

I should definitely try to get around to reading more of your stuff at some point.

My point about light and gravity was that if it is easy to analyze real world phenomena to the point of absurdity, then how much easier would it be to do with an arbitrary game rule that isn't based on anything except something some teenagers read in books by sickos like Moorecock and Lewis?

And my point was that I don't see how trying to understand the natures and causes of natural phenomena constitutes "analyzing them to the point of absurdity". I seem to recall that someone once asked Benjamin Franklin what possible use his work with electricity could have; and that Franklin replied "What use is a baby?"

But then the previous post clearly demonstrates my point. It probably has more thought and effort put into it than was ever put into the original design of the rule.

... Do you think that claiming that my analysis is unusually well thought out somehow constitutes a criticism of that analysis?

Like a zipper, just use the damned thing or buy button fly jeans.

Don't be silly! You can't just use alignment! You've got to claim that it's something else, even when you don't run it that way. And then, when someone explains in detail how that doesn't make sense, doesn't work, and is a change from what alignment has been presented as being in Dungeons & Dragons since D&D existed, you have to imply that they're the one trying to change alignment.

Apparently.

Seriously, though, what's the point of that? Has making alignments psychic parasites or karma or whatever other damn thing instead of character traits ever improved the game? It seems to me like it always winds up making things pretty goofy.

My arguments have necessarily been complicated for much the same reason that a proof that one plus one equals two must be complicated. When a position on an issue is quite simple, the objections to that position are generally complex, and thus require complex dismantling to fully address. I ain't the one complicating up something simple here:

When viewed as a descriptor of general attitudes, as was intended, alignment works fine as a broad predictor of behavior.

That's not a "Light is fast" style missing-the-point/troll statement, it's my straight-up, no-nonsense, not-B.S.ing-you opinion on the matter, and it's entirely simple and straightforward. Meanwhile, it would be hard if not impossible to succinctly summarize your and Mark Hall's positions without being misleading.

[brian 333]

With all of that said, what does it have to do with the purpose of this topic, which is the creation of a system which allows a cleric to worship and receive spells from a pantheon rather than a patron?

The alignment argument is 50 years old, and I'm bored with it. If you want to argue what it is and how it works, fine.

For my part, I say do with it as you like, but it has nothing to do with this topic.

[Devils_Advocate]

With all of that said, what does it have to do with the purpose of this topic, which is the creation of a system which allows a cleric to worship and receive spells from a pantheon rather than a patron?

Alignment doesn't have to have anything to do with that. Alignment restrictions for clerics have not been a part of every setting and every edition of D&D. One can simply say that the clerics of any deity may be of any alignment, or even just not say that there is a restriction in the first place, depending on context. Similarly, one can simply say that a cleric may worship and receive spells from a pantheon rather than a single patron deity. Neither requires the creation of a system. Maybe a few lines of clarification. If you're the setting author you can just kinda... go ahead and do it?

But you raised the topic of "divorcing deities from alignment" in the world-building forum, contrasting what you're trying to do with other settings. That implies that you're trying to work out how your setting will be different by understanding the role that alignment restrictions play in those other settings. And that raises a bunch of obvious questions: Do those settings even reflect their restrictions on clerics' alignments? Do those restrictions reflect elements of the settings, and what are those elements? Are those elements integral to the alignment system? E.g., do Good and Evil beings invariably have diametrically opposed goals such that it doesn't really make sense for them to work together? What do the various alignments even entail? Etc.

The alignment argument is 50 years old, and I'm bored with it.

I'm curious which argument about alignment warrants the definite article. Regardless, you're evidently not too bored with arguing about alignment to still... well, argue about alignment. Possibly because "too bored to argue" isn't a thing, I suppose.

For my part, I say do with it as you like, but it has nothing to do with this topic.

So something that's part of the opening post and the thread title has nothing to do with the topic of this thread? You're the one who introduced alignment into this discussion right from the get-go.

If you just want to talk about clerics of pantheons and multiple-deity religions, well, uh, 3E's Deities and Demigods covers that ("Tight Pantheons", pages 6 and 7). I take it from your reference to a normal cleric choosing two domains that this is for a 3.X game, although I don't think that you explicitly specified that anywhere.

All that I can think to note is that that's for a group of deities that are worshiped together because they function as a group. There's no option to be a fully generalist cleric of all gods everywhere, all like "I'm on good terms with all of the most powerful entities in the multiverse, even those who would normally hate me and everything I stand for, because my special class feature trumps all"! Not that I've seen anyone suggest that, but I felt like it couldn't hurt to preemptively mention that that seems like a bad idea.

So, I dunno, is that more helpful?

[brian 333]

The idea that a personal patron is possible, and in the case of a cleric perhaps preferable, and the concept that a person, or a cleric, might wish to offer devotion to multiple deities is not incompatible.

I do not wish to discuss alignment or how it works. The default explanation from the PHB is good and simple enough.

What I do wish to discuss is how to create a cleric which worships a pantheon, and it was my original intent to begin with a pantheon lacking the, 'must oppose the red deity because yellow opposes it.'

I intended a pantheon with clearly defined portfolios, with a role as overseers and protectors of fragile mortals in a hard, cruel multiverse ruled by beings who, if they even noticed mortals, wouldn't care about their fate either collectively or individually. Thus, the pantheon as a whole, for Good or Evil, Chaotic or Lawful reasons, works to preserve and is therefore worthy of receiving worship from mortals.

The idea that deities would be petitioned for their boons regardless of alignment of either the deity or the pethtioner is an obvious one. Everyone wants a good harvest, for example, and while an evil person might beseech an Evil deity of misfortune to harm someone, good people might pray for the same deity to not inflict misfortune on them.

So, the question here has nothing to do with alignment, or with the definition of the word polytheism.

It has to do with creating a cleric type which worships a pantheon rather than a patron, and to whom the lay worshippers can turn for instruction in the rites each individual deity requires to remain in the deity's favor.

[quinron]

I do not wish to discuss alignment or how it works. The default explanation from the PHB is good and simple enough.

...

So, the question here has nothing to do with alignment, or with the definition of the word polytheism.

I mean... if that's the case, I think you've chosen a bad title for your thread. You've literally put the word "alignment" in it.

That said, I think the concept you're exploring here is really interesting. It's something I'm doing in my own world, and it has been through at least the previous 2 versions of it that I've tinkered with. A world where farmers pray to the God of Evil because he's also the God of Rain is interesting, much moreso than a world where "evil gods" and "archfiends" are somehow different things despite their followers basically thinking, saying, and doing the same things for the same reasons.

I'd say you're going to be best served by rounding out your deities' portfolios, which it sounds like you're already planning to do. It's all well and good to worship Pazuzu the wind/disease demon in order to avoid maelstroms and plague, and if you make him happy enough he may even send pleasant breezes your way. But - to use your admittedly shallow example - the god of murder is probably not going to get many prayers even from the desperate, since the best thing he can do is not kill you. But even a purely negative god can get a lot of prayer if he's a god of death and disease and crime - that's a guy you need to keep happy.