I Love Alignments

[Satinavian]

Alternately, it means it works great, demonstrating that one can be a villain without being evil.

One can even be an antagonist while being good.

That is why i wrote "evil villain". Most people generally seen as evil don't go out of their way to cause harm. They are just too willing to cause harm for seemingly minor or egoistic benefit.

I would argue pretty strongly that being a villain makes you evil by definition. If you arent evil, youre just an antagonist.

Having said that, if you have two ways to proceed with a plan, one that involved hurting people and one that doesnt, and you pick the one that involves hurting people, I think you have a very limited ability to argue you arent hurting people for its own sake there.

But it stops being "hurting people for its own sake" when you pick the plan because it is faster or cheaper or less risky etc.

[Keltest]

That is why i wrote "evil villain". Most people generally seen as evil don't go out of their way to cause harm. They are just too willing to cause harm for seemingly minor or egoistic benefit.


But it stops being "hurting people for its own sake" when you pick the plan because it is faster or cheaper or less risky etc.

Eh, not sure I would agree with that. Irrespective of anything else, hurting people drums up a lot of opposition to whatever youre doing. People dont like being hurt, go figure. Opposition means needing more resources to go deal with that, which frequently means hurting more people, etc... and the next thing you know youve spent more time and energy trying to just do what you want in peace than you had saved by taking that shortcut.

[Mordante]

I think that good and evil are useless concepts where morality is concerned. This is true for DnD, a fantasy world where things that we might now consider evil are perfectly good in a fantasy world. But it's also true for modern life.

The nature demeanor system of World of Darkness is far superior IMHO. It says more about a character without adding some arbitrary values like good and evil to them.

[Sigreid]

Batman is the perfect example of why alignment fails when you go beyond basic categorization. He's a complex character with many complex reasons behind his complex actions. So you really can make an argument for him to fit into nearly any alignment simply because of how poorly defined each alignment is and what it means to actually be that alignment.

And that's before you get into the complexities of morality, something that people have never been able to come to an agreement on. Like killing for the most obvious example. Some people will say killing is always wrong. Others will say it is okay in defense of yourself or others, and others will say it is okay if it is for the greater good.

So yeah, I don't like alignments. Particularly when you get out of a D&D or game setting. Most characters don't easily fall into a category, and there really isn't much point to trying to pigeonhole them into an alignment in the first place.

Any time you hear the word "for the greater good" you know someone is about to do something reprehensible. 😝

[Tanarii]

Oh, you’re accustomed to a bad implementation / utilization of backstory.

Yes, it usually is a bad version. Focused on story and/or history. Not always. I definitely paint it with a broad brush because of that.

“Motivation” is good, but history and personality are required to roleplay and generate a proper reaction to events.

Motivation is all the parts of history and personality with the unnecessary prose boiled out, so that all your left with is the core bullet point list of things that may affect decision making (and under what circumstances) for the character in the fictional environment, aka roleplaying.

You can do it with a story about history and personality, but it's messier. Because the important stuff is buried in the prose.

[gbaji]

Axis 1: I do not enjoy, so I am neither Good nor Evil. I consider the impact / harm of my actions, so I am not neutral.

Ok. But do you consider the impact/harm of your actions as a moral choice? Or in the context of whatever other thing you are trying to accomplish? Is your reason to avoid causing harm based on "If I do this, I might get caught and go to jail, so let's see if there's a different way to do things", or is it "I can't do that! I'll hurt people. And that's wrong". If the former, then you are neutral (in my system). If the later, you are good. And yeah, if your rationale is "People getting hurt is part of my plan. Muhahah!", then you are evil.

A neutral person will perform helpful actions usually for utilitarian purposes as well: "if I help out these villagers, they'll like me and be more likely to help me with my mission", is a neutral motivation. You're not helping people because it's just what you like to do. You're doing it because it's a part of something else that's of benefit to you. The point is all about internal choices. What motivates the character to do things?

From what you are describing you would be neutral.

Axis 2: my methodologies are not consistent, so I am not Lawful. I hate to be random and wing it, so I am not Chaotic. I feel the need both to plan, and to test to see what will happen, so I am not neutral.

The bolded part *is* your methodology. If that's how you approach doing things, and you "feel the need" to do things that way, then you are lawful. A neutral person would not feel a need to either plan things out, nor to be random and wing it. That's what I meant by "consistent methodology". If you meticulously plan out an assault on the orc stronghold, and systematically search that stronghold for treasure, making sure to follow the same procedures in each room searched so as not to miss anything? You are lawful. If you just run up to the walls to see what's there, see an opening and charge, then once inside randomly run down hallways and into rooms looking for stuff, then you are chaotic.

A neutral person isn't drawn to either position and will tend to defer to others in terms of planning (or not planning) things out. They will tend to think things through, but not as long and hard as a lawful person will, and are more likely to change their plans when an opportunity comes along (a lawful person would stop to consider the new opportunity more fully). They aren't random in how they do things, but they don't color code their battle plans either. Think OCD for lawful and ADHD for chaotic, and neutral being the folks more or less in between.

I agree with your conclusion, that having a personality is the way to go.

Yeah. I was just tossing that out there as a (slightly?) better way to handle alignments if you really really really wanted to retain the bi-axis labels for some reason. It at least makes it possible to identify people somewhat. If not definitively then at least on a spectrum, and most importantly to restrict it solely to personality traits and not to the mixed up mess that D&D tends to go with.

My preference is to just toss the entire thing out though.

That is why i wrote "evil villain". Most people generally seen as evil don't go out of their way to cause harm. They are just too willing to cause harm for seemingly minor or egoistic benefit.

It was a list of reasons one causes harm, not a check list that must all be checked to qualify as "evil". I would point out, however that in most cases the evil person is evil because they are trying to do something, and that "something" will cause harm to people. The very act of setting out to enact the "plan" can be seen as "going out of your way to cause harm". It's not just walking across the street to kick someone sorts of things that makes on evil. Redcloak's conquest of Azure city didn't just give his people gobotopia. He also enslaved and/or killed off the human population, right? He literally tortures people to get information, and threatens their lives (and kills a bunch of people) to achieve his goals.

He's not going "out of his way" to do that? I mean, he could have just tossed the cloak into a dumpster and chosen to live a peaceful life.

But it stops being "hurting people for its own sake" when you pick the plan because it is faster or cheaper or less risky etc.

Sure. And if someone only ever caused harm to others out of absolute necessity for a goal that was itself not designed to hurt or harm others, then that person would not be "evil". The King leading his soldiers in battle, but who gives enemy soldiers every opportunity to surrender, treats the injured/captured well, and citizens in areas he captures are also treated fairly, would not be evil. Probably neutral, maybe even good depending on the politics of the situation and motivation/cause for the war.

I suppose we could also put degrees in there as well. So a rogue who knocks people out with a sap, or sleep potion, then steals stuff, may be neutral instead of evil. One who kills the folks in the home when they could have dealt with them non-lethally may be evil. Both are causing "harm" to others, but the degree relative to their objectives is different.

It's all about degrees IMO. Again though. I honestly think it's just much simpler to not even go there. Just let characters take actions, and have natural consequences for those actions occur within the game world. I do think that players should come up with personality traits that drive their characters to do things certain ways, since that makes them more "real". But the idea of rigidly applying a single alignment for all actions seems absurd. The closest you should ever get to that is maybe a tendency towards certain ways of doing things. It should never be absolute (unless you really do chose to play a character with that sort of personality I guess).

[Forum Explorer]

Any time you hear the word "for the greater good" you know someone is about to do something reprehensible. 😝

By many people's standards yes.

[Quertus]

Yes, it usually is a bad version. Focused on story and/or history. Not always. I definitely paint it with a broad brush because of that.

Motivation is all the parts of history and personality with the unnecessary prose boiled out, so that all your left with is the core bullet point list of things that may affect decision making (and under what circumstances) for the character in the fictional environment, aka roleplaying.

You can do it with a story about history and personality, but it's messier. Because the important stuff is buried in the prose.

I feel like, “why Popeye cares that the spinach Plant shut down” is not something that would be answered by what *I* would write under “motivations” (which would probably focus on “olive” and “sailing” (I say in ignorance of the character)), but would by what I consider “backstory”. I’d love to see an example or two of your “motivations” for a character. If they are what I guess I’d dub, “hyper efficient backstories”, I may reevaluate the Utility of “motivations” to me.

That said… watching HiSHE, I know that (for example) HiSHE Batman will say “because I’m Batman”. Do you encapsulate the character quirks, the distillation of the history into predictable patterns, into your motivations? Does this get harder when dealing with an actual character rather than a caricature like HiSHE Batman?

Regardless, (your) motivations or (my) backstory are much more suited to “character” than something like “Alignment”.

[Mechalich]

Alignment is not a personality trait. Alignment is a judgement, one that is imposed on the character by a moral arbiter. It's a summation, based on actions, intentions, feelings, and whatever else is considered to represent moral information, that determines the moral position of the character with consequences attached to that position. In D&D the moral position utilizes two axes and places every character on a pie chart and depending on which piece of the pie they match up to that impacts how various magical effects impact them and also determines their afterlife destination upon death.

Critically, alignment, or really any system where an external entity acts as the moral arbiter to determine the moral position of others, does not care what the character believes their alignment to be or about how they justify their actions. The rules are the rules, they operate however they operate, and if a given character doesn't like it, tough. This is also why 'I rebel against the gods' stories are fairly common in this kind of system, because it is easy to devise a scenario where the moral arbiter is hopelessly corrupt or simply massively out of alignment (heh) with extant cultural norms.

The difficulty with moral systems of this kind, in a TTRPG context, is that it forces the GM into the role of moral arbiter, which has a very strong tendency to poison at-table dynamics if moral questions are interrogated with any degree of depth. After all, even in the video game case where all morally engaged actions are scripted, players get into huge arguments about whether or not something should be coded one way or another (dark side points for that? b***s***! is a common refrain), they are simply unable to actually do anything about it so that grumbling goes nowhere.

[SimonMoon6]

I Hate Alignments.

First of all, I grew up in 1st edition AD&D days, so that has something to do with it. Alignments were even worse back then. There was such a thing as "alignment languages". All Lawful Good species can communicate with each other, but possibly not with someone who is Neutral Good or Chaotic Good. And, no, you can't learn the language of another alignment.

Second, the concept of alignments tends to be very reductive. Some things are purely good or purely evil. There can be no discussion. For example, using poison to kill a foe? That's the purest darkest most horrible EVIL in the entire universe. But stabbing a foe with a sword? That's fine. You're SUPPOSED to do that. Can we discuss this? No. Poison is evil. Go away. Stop talking now.

And nobody really knows what the alignments MEAN. It's bad enough with "chaotic" vs "lawful", but trying to put down a definitive system of morality about exactly what things are "good" and what things are "evil" (or even "neutral") can never be successful. Philosophers and religions have been arguing about such things for thousands of years. But, with D&D, you can just say, "This book here says stealing is neutral, so I guess I can't be mad if someone steals from me. After all, it's not like they did anything wrong. If it was wrong to steal, stealing would be evil."

Would a lawful person obey the laws of a kingdom? What if they disagree with the laws? Would they still obey them? What if they have their own personal code of conduct that they obey which conflicts with the laws? Would they still obey the laws? What if the king was an evil demon who needed to be killed, but it was against the law to kill the king. Would a lawful person be able to kill the demon king?

These question can't be answered because it's just ridiculous to think that people and actions can be labeled in this way. It's far too reductive to say that there are only 9 categories of morality, especially when nobody can agree on what goes into those categories.

And if you disagree with the official D&D take on morality (I think poison is as neutral as stabbing is and I think stealing is wrong enough to be evil, unless necessary to do a good deed that makes up for it), you have no recourse to the law. You just have to take it. Some people think that creating undead should not be evil (those people are wrong of course), but they can argue all they want without it having any effect.

And being able to detect which people are good and which people are evil makes the world a lot more weird. If you know someone is evil, why wouldn't you kill them? That's another discussion that can get heated. (You can't just go around killing people just because they're evil. Goblins? Sure, kill them for being evil, but not PEOPLE.) It makes perfect sense to kill all the evil people. Just make it illegal to be evil. Then, execute them legally. This would improve the world 100%. But you can't do it... for reasons.

[Mechalich]

And if you disagree with the official D&D take on morality (I think poison is as neutral as stabbing is and I think stealing is wrong enough to be evil, unless necessary to do a good deed that makes up for it), you have no recourse to the law. You just have to take it. Some people think that creating undead should not be evil (those people are wrong of course), but they can argue all they want without it having any effect.

That is how objective moral systems work generally - moral truths, whatever they may be, are true independently of any person who happens to be stating them. This is probably easiest to represent in worlds with a single, all-powerful deity. If the Creator set the rules and you don't like those rules too bad, mortals automatically lose all arguments with the Creator, even if they are, by some measure, correct. You can argue with the Creator that 1+1=2, and the Creator can say, 'no it doesn't' and the Creator still wins.

And there's no reason why this should not be the case in a fictional universe. After all, it's entirely possible to build a simulated universe with morality measures that are arbitrary and have plenty of the people operating in the universe hate those rules but still be forced to abide by them (SWTOR does this). The problem is, when producing media, the moral system is developed by some other person/persons and if the audience disagrees with said moral system it generally does heinous things to suspension of disbelief and causes rapid disengagement. This is why people rarely read fiction with strongly moral overtones by authors whose political ideology is vastly different from their own, and, relatedly, why older media tends to acquire this problem over time as cultural norms change. D&D's moral system was never well designed to begin with - Gygax and co. were no moral philosophers, theologians, or anyone familiar with this sort of thing - and has aged poorly due to changes in cultural norms since the 1970s.

Still, it's important to separate two different factors: dislike for moral systems generally and dislike of the implementation of D&D alignment specifically.

And being able to detect which people are good and which people are evil makes the world a lot more weird. If you know someone is evil, why wouldn't you kill them? That's another discussion that can get heated. (You can't just go around killing people just because they're evil. Goblins? Sure, kill them for being evil, but not PEOPLE.) It makes perfect sense to kill all the evil people. Just make it illegal to be evil. Then, execute them legally. This would improve the world 100%. But you can't do it... for reasons.

Agreed, having moral position as a knowable quantity to essentially all sapient beings is just bizarre, especially in a salvationist world like D&D where reality is essentially a test and the ultimate goal is to get as many people to 'pass' by getting into the good afterlives as possible. it creates all kinds of perverse incentives to basically try and manufacture the maximum number of good people possible.

[gbaji]

Alignment is not a personality trait. Alignment is a judgement, one that is imposed on the character by a moral arbiter. It's a summation, based on actions, intentions, feelings, and whatever else is considered to represent moral information, that determines the moral position of the character with consequences attached to that position. In D&D the moral position utilizes two axes and places every character on a pie chart and depending on which piece of the pie they match up to that impacts how various magical effects impact them and also determines their afterlife destination upon death.

The problem is that, in practical play, it ends up being *both*. From the players perspective, they first come up with a set of personality traits for the character (what kind of person do I want to play), and then the write down the alignment that they think fits that personality.

The GM (acting as arbiter), then judges the character's actions in play based on his own interpretation of what the alignment value written on the character sheet by the player is.

The problem is that it's incredibly common for what traits the player *thinks* is in one alignment to differ from the what the GM judges the actions of the character to be. Some of this can be the player "just not playing the alignment properly", but the player is playing "his character". The player should be the ultimate arbiter of what sort of personality his own character has, and therefore how that character would act in any given situation. So the problem could be "the player put the character in the wrong alignment in the first place". Which is probably true (again assume that the GM is the final arbiter of alignment after the fact based on actions in the game). But that raises the potential for extra pickles here. What if the alignment actually matters for the class chosen by the player? Most of the time, it may not matter, but sometimes it will.

And even if it doesn't, it's usually going to take some time of playing for the GM to basically tell the player (perhaps incrementally over time) that the character isn't being played correctly. So either the player has to play the character along the way differently than how he envisioned (each time the GM points out that doing X would be outside the character alignment, the player is pressured to do this) *or* the player and GM at some point down the line have to sit down and retcon the character in terms of alignment, which somewhat breaks the illusion of reality in the game itself.

Critically, alignment, or really any system where an external entity acts as the moral arbiter to determine the moral position of others, does not care what the character believes their alignment to be or about how they justify their actions. The rules are the rules, they operate however they operate, and if a given character doesn't like it, tough. This is also why 'I rebel against the gods' stories are fairly common in this kind of system, because it is easy to devise a scenario where the moral arbiter is hopelessly corrupt or simply massively out of alignment (heh) with extant cultural norms.

But again, it matters a heck of a lot how the player of that character thought their character should be. If we go back to the assumption that the player is the final arbiter on what their character's actual personality is, and how that character should act in different situations, then the alignment should always be what results from those choices and actions, not something that's there at the start. But this means that in any situation where the player is "playing the alignment wrong", it's not really that the player is playing wrong, but that the player is playing correctly a different alignment than that written on the character sheet.

But if "the rules are the rules", then this creates tons of problems (as I mentioned above). I'm curious what you think should happen here. Should the player be forced to play the alignment written down on the character sheet correctly? Or should the GM enforce an alignment change on the character to match their actual personality? And what if "the rules" include punishments and/or consequences for that change in alignment? Do we dogmatically follow those, even though it's quite obvious that the character should never have been written in with that alignment in the first place?

The difficulty with moral systems of this kind, in a TTRPG context, is that it forces the GM into the role of moral arbiter, which has a very strong tendency to poison at-table dynamics if moral questions are interrogated with any degree of depth. After all, even in the video game case where all morally engaged actions are scripted, players get into huge arguments about whether or not something should be coded one way or another (dark side points for that? b***s***! is a common refrain), they are simply unable to actually do anything about it so that grumbling goes nowhere.

Yup. It's incredibly common for there to be dramatic differences of opinion about how any given decision or action may fall on the alignment spectrum. It's well and good to say "these are the rules", but in this case the arbitration (by the GM) is going to be extremely subjective, but "the rules" are very firm. It's a recipe for disaster IMO.

To be perfectly honest, except maybe in games where there are specifically defined cosmic forces with "sides" that one may choose to align with, there's more or less no value to alignment systems in any game. Especially when those systems have anything at all to do with moral/ethical choices and actions. Just no reason to do it at all. And tying those things into spells and effects? Also silly.

I think alignment was originally included as a RP guide, knowing that many players were perhaps not very familiar with the concept of roleplaying in the first place. And as a guide, they can be somewhat useful (especially to new players maybe?). But as they have evolved over time, IMO they serve no real purpose anymore. I think that players can usually figure out how to assign personality traits to their characters (heck, if anything I sometimes see a bit too much of this), and then play those characters out based on those things. It's kinda like the training wheels for players in terms of sticking to a role for their characters, but alignments tend to be extremely simplistic and rigid, while real people are not. At some point, they become a restriction on playing more realistic characters, and no longer provide any useful benefits.

[Quertus]

Huh/heh. If you replace “alignment” with “personality”, and “GM” with “player”, you get my problem: some of the characters I create, when they see play, do not exhibit to my satisfaction the personalities I had intended them to have, and had written on their “character sheets”. So I either have to accept their new, corrected personality label, or reject it, and scrap the character.

[Mechalich]

But again, it matters a heck of a lot how the player of that character thought their character should be. If we go back to the assumption that the player is the final arbiter on what their character's actual personality is, and how that character should act in different situations, then the alignment should always be what results from those choices and actions, not something that's there at the start. But this means that in any situation where the player is "playing the alignment wrong", it's not really that the player is playing wrong, but that the player is playing correctly a different alignment than that written on the character sheet.

But if "the rules are the rules", then this creates tons of problems (as I mentioned above). I'm curious what you think should happen here. Should the player be forced to play the alignment written down on the character sheet correctly? Or should the GM enforce an alignment change on the character to match their actual personality? And what if "the rules" include punishments and/or consequences for that change in alignment? Do we dogmatically follow those, even though it's quite obvious that the character should never have been written in with that alignment in the first place?

Generally, I believe that the GM should enforce an alignment change. In my experience, unless there are in-game punishments nobody cares when this happens, because however the player is representing the character's actions clearly works in-party or there would have already been intraparty dynamics problems. Obviously in-game punishments can be problematic, but, I would note that punishments of this kind, which basically represent a player not having the character follow some set of rules the character agreed to follow in order to maintain access to a power set, can very easily be put in place for rules that are not considered to have moral values at all. For example, in a game where all the characters represented clandestine agents of Country X, and then one of the players betrayed Country X, they would, and should, lose access to all the cool stuff that being an agent of Country X offered (this happens in spy thrillers a lot).

In most forms of fantasy fiction, the link between moral position and power is religious in nature and basically boils down to follow the rules of Entity X in return for supernatural abilities. Those rules should be clearly established during chargen and they player should be very aware of both what those rules are and their march on the path to violating them. For example, Star Wars games usually show a meter with light side/dark side affiliation, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker moves your character's alignment dot across the pie chart as choices are made in play. I've found that people usually have less issue holding to some sort of defined religious doctrine, with a moral component, compared to the vagueness of alignment (it also eases the burden on the GM to conduct enforcement because the GM is able to step into character as God X and use that voice rather than their own). I think experience broadly demonstrates this - in D&D the biggest 'alignment punishment' issue is the paladin's fall, because it's the one explicitly tied to the nebulous, bad, vague setup of alignment.

To be perfectly honest, except maybe in games where there are specifically defined cosmic forces with "sides" that one may choose to align with, there's more or less no value to alignment systems in any game. Especially when those systems have anything at all to do with moral/ethical choices and actions. Just no reason to do it at all. And tying those things into spells and effects? Also silly.

Broadly I agree. I think moral systems should usually only be introduced in TTRPGs in the context of licensed settings that have such a system already embedded. Star Wars is the obvious example. You can't build a Star Wars game that ignores the light side/dark side issue, the system has to incorporate it for at least Force users.

I think alignment was originally included as a RP guide, knowing that many players were perhaps not very familiar with the concept of roleplaying in the first place. And as a guide, they can be somewhat useful (especially to new players maybe?). But as they have evolved over time, IMO they serve no real purpose anymore. I think that players can usually figure out how to assign personality traits to their characters (heck, if anything I sometimes see a bit too much of this), and then play those characters out based on those things. It's kinda like the training wheels for players in terms of sticking to a role for their characters, but alignments tend to be extremely simplistic and rigid, while real people are not. At some point, they become a restriction on playing more realistic characters, and no longer provide any useful benefits.

The original alignment system was drawn heavily from Three Hearts and Three Lions, along with the Paladin class and other elements. The idea of a holy champion who must maintain moral purity in order to preserve their supernatural abilities has strong roots in certain kinds of western fiction. However, at the same time D&D drew heavily on other works, mostly of Sword & Sorcery, as inspiration that had a much more cynical, broadly amoral take on the whole business of fantasy such as Conan and Nehwon. The result was a schizophrenic mess from the start. Paladin-types make no sense at all in the Hyborean Age or the Dying Earth even as they are essential to the Arthurian Mythos and Tolkien's Legendarium. It's the usual problem of D&D trying to be everything at once.

[Sigreid]

By many people's standards yes.

I don't think it's ever been uttered except to justify making someone else suffer so others can thrive.

[Tanarii]

Alignment is not a personality trait. Alignment is a judgement, one that is imposed on the character by a moral arbiter.

The worst kind of alignment. I'm glad D&D has finally stopped using Alignment as a Morality Score judged by the DM.

[Stonehead]

I don't think it's ever been uttered except to justify making someone else suffer so others can thrive.

[Witty Username]

"The dilemma is clear, how do we kill all six people?"

Alignment is not a be all end all, but it can be useful as a role-playing aid or quick description, and killing Rakshasa's.

I generally don't preplan alignment but will put one down if I or the DM have a strong opinion on the subject.

Unless I am angling a particular stint of moral philosophy, in which case I write down the Alignment I am studying an edge case for and check in with the DM periodically to see if their opinion matches the Alignment goal.
Last project can Lawful Good and the personality trait hedonistic co-exist. Reports came in yes, as doing things for the sake of one's own pleasure conforms if that pleasure is compatible with an ordered existence and and altruistic mindset. I ended up as a hexblade-bard specialized in stage combat, who had the primary goal to entertain others.

Some notes: personality is as unhelpful as alignments, endless meyers-briggs tests have taught us this.
Bond, ideal, flaw, alignment is going to be imperfect but the goals are starting points not full characters, and not everyone who plays rpgs is a novelist. And personality and history are things that change and evolve during play.

Descriptive alignment is generally superior to prescribed alignment, as it is a label we give to sets of thoughts, words, and deeds.

PCs are not indiscriminate murderers because they are evil, they are evil because they are indiscriminate murderers.

Now I do have some thoughts on how I conceptualize D&D alignments.
Generally I consider as 9 distinct alignments as opposed to 2 axis.
This is because the variance and philosophy of each alignment transforms the values associated,
Take Lawful Good and Lawful Evil, each is Lawful, promotion of order and structure. But they do so because because they tie order benefiting opposed veiw points. Evil believing order depowers others and benefits themselves, Good because they believe it leads to collectivism and empowers others in groups.
Also, there is a minor conflating with Good and Lawful and Evil and Chaotic. 4e had it bad with its 5 alignments (good, unaligned, evil, lawful good, chaotic evil). Which I find frustrating.

[Quertus]

Some notes: personality is as unhelpful as alignments, endless meyers-briggs tests have taught us this.

“Trying to put ‘personality’ into a few discrete boxes is as unhelpful as doing so with moral stance” seems like it might have been a better takeaway there.

[KorvinStarmast]

The worst kind of alignment. I'm glad D&D has finally stopped using Alignment as a Morality Score judged by the DM.

Under a good DM, it's a very good tool IME. I guess good DM's are in short supply.
But it requires thought, and a little more effort by the DM, as well as not using the nine boxes silliness but instead the plot on the original Cartesian Grid. Again, I've seen it both well done and badly done.

It's the archer, not the arrow.

[Satinavian]

Under a good DM, it's a very good tool IME. I guess good DM's are in short supply.
But it requires thought, and a little more effort by the DM, as well as not using the nine boxes silliness but instead the plot on the original Cartesian Grid. Again, I've seen it both well done and badly done.

It's the archer, not the arrow.

Certainly, you can avoid all he pitfalls and make alignment not a detriment if you have experienced players/DMs. Then it is only just some more work.

But even then : It is more work for ... what benefit exactly ?


Alignment can be harmful if handled badly and not harmful if handled carefully. But "not harmful" is not enough if it uses any additional work. It needs to be useful. And i just don't see it being that ever. There are some cases where you might use it for something you want but even in hose cases there are other options bringing the same or greater benefit with less work.

[Mechalich]

Certainly, you can avoid all he pitfalls and make alignment not a detriment if you have experienced players/DMs. Then it is only just some more work.

But even then : It is more work for ... what benefit exactly ?


Alignment can be harmful if handled badly and not harmful if handled carefully. But "not harmful" is not enough if it uses any additional work. It needs to be useful. And i just don't see it being that ever. There are some cases where you might use it for something you want but even in hose cases there are other options bringing the same or greater benefit with less work.

Alignment, or rather a system or morality measurement and arbitration, is useful in fictional settings where those things are explicitly taking place. In fact it is arguably essential because otherwise those such universes no longer make sense, especially if there are abilities in-universe that are dependent upon moral criteria. Essentially, if you have 'holy warriors' you need to be able to define what 'holy' actually means.

Now, in general, if you're designing a game setting from scratch, for a modern audience, its probably best to avoid having criterion-based powers overlap with morality, simply because that's contentious and generates arguments at table. It's much easier to have a 'Eagle Path Warrior' who has to continually follow the Eagle's Path (see table on page XX) or lose their powers because everyone understands that the 'Eagle's Path' is an arbitrary creation and any given player proclaiming 'the Eagle's Path is garbage BS!' isn't going to offend any core values.

However, that isn't what people actually do, and there's at least two reasons why. First, most of the really noteworthy mythic and legendary elements that have stood the test of time are have strong religious and cultural connotations and are consequently inherently tied to moral questions. Any setting that has angels and demons has them representing something, and even if you go the 'two sides in a cosmic chess game' approach everyone whose affiliated with one side ends up playing by their rules anyway even if that's somehow 'not really a moral system.' Second, actual authors who write actual stories that get either explicitly (through licensing) or implicitly (through the reworking of public domain elements and thematic borrowing) often very much are interested in moral debate and moral themes and trying to pull in their work without reckoning with this means something key to those sources is inevitably lost.

I'll go back to the Star Wars case, because it's relatively clean. It is absolutely possible to think the conventional wisdom on the light side and dark side of the Force is ridiculous and even possible to write straight up subversion of the consensus viewpoint (several authors, notably Matthew Stover, even got published by Lucasfilm while doing so), but you can't do Star Wars and pretend those things don't exist and any Star Wars game system that is made has to put some reference to them on character sheets somewhere.

To be clear, D&D alignment is a bad moral system, it's stance on who exactly the moral arbiters are is extremely messy (is it the gods or not?), and the actual implementation of the system is a horrid mess. Most importantly, the overall implied setting of D&D isn't sure it needs it at all. Planescape actually presented this in the clearest way possible: in the Outer Planes morality is literally everything, in the Inner Planes it is absolutely nothing, the Prime Material is regrettably stuck in the middle. The core gameplay focus of D&D, the dungeon crawl, really doesn't need alignment. So yeah, it's bad, and it is highly unfortunate that, because of D&D position as a market leader, alignment became a sort of shorthand for how moral systems should be handled, but none of that means there are settings and stories which, when made into TTRPGs, don't desperately need some kind of morality system.

[Satinavian]

Yes, that is basically why i said that the few useful things alignment can do, other things can do better. That does include representations of morality for settings with inherent absolute morality. Even those derived from religions.
I was not saying you should never put morality into rules. (Though you really shouldn't for setting agnostic systems).


As for Star Wars : What the light and dark side actually mean is even more diffuse than the D&D alignments. I would hate to be tasked with writing rules for that mess that are agreeable to most of the fandom (including all films, TV series, books and cRPGs).

[Tanarii]

"The dilemma is clear, how do we kill all six people?"

Lol yeah the Trolley Problem is a False Dilemma Problem, for philosophy professors to blow the minds of 1st year students. Not an actual analytical tool or in any way applicable to real world situations.

That said, since the DM can set scenarios and railroad tracks, they could always set up an actual Trolley Problem scenario in their game. But the correct response in that case is: stop playing in that game.

Under a good DM, it's a very good tool IME. I guess good DM's are in short supply.
But it requires thought, and a little more effort by the DM, as well as not using the nine boxes silliness but instead the plot on the original Cartesian Grid. Again, I've seen it both well done and badly done.

It's the archer, not the arrow.

I had one experience with a DM in the old days which was really bad ... for the DM. Told me my magical enchantment that kept my Drow Assassin LG was broken by the Evil High Priest and I was CE again, and the EHP wanted me to turn against the party. Result was a TPK, which the DM clearly didn't expect. Not sure why he thought I wouldn't enthusiastically buy-in to his enforced alignment change, and it totally blew his planned railroad story adventure after 2 sessions.

But that was not a retroactive DM judged alignment use at all. It was environmental change in PC alignment with enthusiastic player buy-in, used in a forward looking fashion.

However, before I instinctively disagree it's the archer, unless you can be clear what the added value of a retroactive DM-judged alignment system is? Follow up question, what about its use without player buy-in?

Because that'd be the least contentious. If it required player buy in AND it's retroactively DM judged, that's just a recipe for table arguments.

As for Star Wars : What the light and dark side actually mean is even more diffuse than the D&D alignments. I would hate to be tasked with writing rules for that mess that are agreeable to most of the fandom (including all films, TV series, books and cRPGs).

The CRPGs with -side scores are among the worst. And I'm fairly sure they're inspired by D&D's Dragonlance alignment system, which was especially required for Wizards and (if they had reappeared) Clerics, but also to some degree for Solamnic Knights. As nostalgic as I am about DL, it was the start of several really bad trends in D&D.

[KorvinStarmast]

However, before I instinctively disagree it's the archer, unless you can be clear what the added value of a retroactive DM-judged alignment system is?

You are mischaracterizing the system by saying
retroactive-DM-judged alignment system

The players are each somewhere on the cartesian grid to begin. As they play they either stay where they are or begin to move in a direction. As movement occurs the DM lets the player know that the trend is toward a change, and basically waits for their response. Usually, that comes in the form of "why" and the DM explains how the world/cosmos is responding to their various decisions since in RPGs decisions have consequences.

The player then is left with the choice to keep on that trend or reverse it.

Granted, when an item forces an alignment change, that's a different case.

In your case, it seems to have been the archers, plural. And as I said, it is certainly something one can screw up, given that players and DMs are human and all to often had (or have) poor people skills.

I find the blinders on attitudes, all too often expressed in this 3.x based community, to be a collective case of crowd myopia. But in defense of the aversion to using alignment in that style, yes, it can be done badly.
Yes, there can be Pexian-lament-DM's who are bad at the DM role.
But we don't give up playing because of that.

Let's see: in the last 8 years, I have let two DM's know that no, I am not interested in playing the game as they are running it, and I have the courtesy to explain clearly to them what it is that I dislike (feedback is useful, or can be).
I stopped playing in those two groups. I am still in four others.

Vahnavoi does a better job than I do at explaining how the AD&D era system works, in terms of the rationality of the assumptions underlying it.
We didn't need any of that explained when we took up the game, we simply made it work, with a few outlying cases of "FFS, what?" happening along the way. Because I have seen it work, I don't presume that edge cases are the norm.

And I also like playing in games where alignment is barely integrated into it. That also works, sometimes.

[Tanarii]

I dont see that im mischaracterizing at all.
At its root, youre still describing the DM judging and determing alignment based on past actions.

The question remains: What's the benefit tho?

Access to items and class features?

If not, and it's still a tool for player roleplaying, what additional benefit does the system gain from final DM judgement? And how does that benefit outweighs the largely well understood potential downside of player disagreement with the DM's moral and roleplaying judgement?

[Quertus]

the DM explains how the world/cosmos is responding to their various decisions since in RPGs decisions have consequences.

Sorry, what? “Alignment has value, because actions have consequences… and those consequences take the form of cosmic forces responding to the morality of the PCs choices”? Is that really your response to explain how Alignment has value?

[Mechalich]

Sorry, what? “Alignment has value, because actions have consequences… and those consequences take the form of cosmic forces responding to the morality of the PCs choices”? Is that really your response to explain how Alignment has value?

Yes, because in that scenario cosmic forces give the PCs stuff in return for promises to maintain a certain moral position.

The fundamental principle is the same as basically any other contract. Party A gives Party B some thing and in return Party B promises that they will carry out some task. The case where Party A is a god who bestows supernatural power on Party B in return for promises to obey their theological doctrine and proselytize in their name is quite common, well established, and usually includes a massive moral element. If your character pledges to follow Lord Good of Almighty goodness and then goes around conducting dark blood rituals of course the supernatural powers are going to get ganked. A blanket moral system that doesn't have gods and applies universally is a little bit more nebulous, but it's the same principle just extended out to the point that everyone has an implicit contract with the universe itself governing their behavior - again the Force in Star Wars, in which an emotionally resonant morally sensitive process is a fundamental component of reality itself (Gravity, Electromagnetism, Strong, Weak, and The Force) is a good example of how this can be setup.

Now, no one is obligated to like this system, but it's an extremely common system and, for most of human history the overwhelming majority of people believed they lived in a universe with either beings or forces exercising moral arbitration over everyone at all times, so it's hardly surprising that fictional universes are built in this way.

D&D alignment, of course, is a really, really bad version of this. Bad and broken rules in TTRPGs often produce more damage than they add value and this is broadly true of alignment, especially it's complicated law/chaos axis (D&D video games usually track lots of actions as good/evil, but hardly anything as law/chaos). That doesn't invalidate the use of morality systems, in settings where they are appropriate though, it's just a case of a specific bad subsystem.

[gbaji]

Generally, I believe that the GM should enforce an alignment change. In my experience, unless there are in-game punishments nobody cares when this happens, because however the player is representing the character's actions clearly works in-party or there would have already been intraparty dynamics problems. Obviously in-game punishments can be problematic, but, I would note that punishments of this kind, which basically represent a player not having the character follow some set of rules the character agreed to follow in order to maintain access to a power set, can very easily be put in place for rules that are not considered to have moral values at all. For example, in a game where all the characters represented clandestine agents of Country X, and then one of the players betrayed Country X, they would, and should, lose access to all the cool stuff that being an agent of Country X offered (this happens in spy thrillers a lot).

Yup. Tend to agree that's the best way to handle this. And if at all possible, I'd try to actually retcon the character's alignment. And yeah, if there are no direct game effects, then you just write the "correct all along" alignment on the sheet, and let the player go on playing their character the way they envisioned it in the first place.

This does get sticky when there are in-game effects though. And can be worse because what often happens is that it's not on day one that this decision is made, but maybe after weeks or moths of playing this character in the game, and the GM is constantly noticing that the character's actions (as played by the player) don't really mesh with the alignment chosen, then there's some discussion between GM and player, perhaps a series of warnings, etc. It can be entirely possible to have to completely alter the character, effectively re-writing the past adventures (or just handwaving them away somehow) in order to make this "work". Or, you stick with "the rules" and apply punishments of some kind, which is somewhat unfair to the player. It would be wonderful if GMs were always 100% able to spot this coming ahead of time during character creation/description, and make alignment determinations/adjustments then, but quite often the GM doesn't realize this until the player has played the character for some time. And that's where problems can creep in.

Obviously, if the "alignment" is with a faction/side/whatever like "Country X", and the character directly betrays it, that's a different thing than "You were really chaotic instead of neutral, or neutral instead of good", or some such.

In most forms of fantasy fiction, the link between moral position and power is religious in nature and basically boils down to follow the rules of Entity X in return for supernatural abilities. Those rules should be clearly established during chargen and they player should be very aware of both what those rules are and their march on the path to violating them.

Yeah. I happen to think that religious rules are the easiest and perhaps best "alternative" to "good/evil;law/chaos;whatever" style alignment systems. It's pretty easy when creating a character and deciding "I'm a rogue, and I worship Blackhand, the god of sneaking around and stealing stuff", and then following lists of "rules" like "you like to sneak around in the shadows", and "a good backstab is the best stab", and "don't forget to tip your local priest his 5% of the take", etc. Or maybe, "I worship Grond the god of smashing things", and following rules like "get into fist fights whenever possible", and "if you don't like someone, break their stuff", and just general "when in doubt, charge". And yeah, it's much easier to play out the deity judging the character's actions based solely on "what would <insert deity here> do" thinking instead of "what exactly is the nature of good/evil and how does it apply?".

Broadly I agree. I think moral systems should usually only be introduced in TTRPGs in the context of licensed settings that have such a system already embedded. Star Wars is the obvious example. You can't build a Star Wars game that ignores the light side/dark side issue, the system has to incorporate it for at least Force users.

Interestingly enough, I've often thought that the whole dark/light side stuff could be done away with in Star Wars (at least conceptually). Obviously, not mechanically as most settings take place during conflicts between Jedi and Sith, but one of the somewhat subtle themes I kinda got from the last trilogy of films (and some hints in the prequel trilogy as well) was the idea that the force doesn't actually care much about light or dark, but just "is", and it was perhaps the very existence and rise to power of the Jedi with very strict rules about force use (the "light side") actually created a balance reaction in the force that required the creation of the Sith (the "dark side"). Certainly the common theme among many who "fell" to the dark side and became Sith was "I just can't follow these ridiculous and stringent rules", and with an absolute "light/dark" dynamic in play had almost not choice but to become Sith. This certainly seemed to be the case with Dooku and with Anakin. Probably others. Ironically, one could argue that by doing what he did and destroying the Jedi, Anakin *did* bring balance to the force, it just took another 20 something years for his son to come along and complete the job. And in episodes 7-9 we actually start to see more force users who don't align themselves as either anymore, kinda just using whatever powers they want, popping up (but, of course, some like Kylo and Rey, still following the "old patterns", or at least trying to). Hard to be sure where they're going with that, but it's something I got a hint of and honestly thought was a much better way of looking at force powers than the old classic "light vs dark" assumption.

How much of the "fact" that use of certain powers innately lead to evil was because it really did, and how much was because for several thousand years, that's literally what the Jedi taught every single force user in the galaxy? If you've been taught your entire life that "if you don't meet this high bar standard we've set, you will fall and inevitably become evil" it's a good bet that most people who fail to meet those standards will kinda go "well, I've already failed, I guess I'm evil then". Doesn't help that there always seemed to be some Sith master lying in wait for such people and goading them into performing "evil" things just to prove the starting assumption (and become useful pawns for their "evil"). And the cycle continues.

The original alignment system was drawn heavily from Three Hearts and Three Lions, along with the Paladin class and other elements. The idea of a holy champion who must maintain moral purity in order to preserve their supernatural abilities has strong roots in certain kinds of western fiction. However, at the same time D&D drew heavily on other works, mostly of Sword & Sorcery, as inspiration that had a much more cynical, broadly amoral take on the whole business of fantasy such as Conan and Nehwon. The result was a schizophrenic mess from the start. Paladin-types make no sense at all in the Hyborean Age or the Dying Earth even as they are essential to the Arthurian Mythos and Tolkien's Legendarium. It's the usual problem of D&D trying to be everything at once.

That sounds about right. Hadn't actually considered the issue of trying to draw on different (and quite contradictory) sources like that. Makes sense though. Also explains the mess even from day one.

It certainly highlights the issues with early play where figuring out how to run a thief character and a paladin character in the same party was darn near impossible. And yet, the game strongly encouraged having thieves because of the trap focus in the game, and the fact that this was literally the only class that could do anything about them. And also adds in the very "mercenary" nature of many of those sources heroes as well.

"The dilemma is clear, how do we kill all six people?"

I think if you just wait to throw the switch until after the front wheels have passed, then you could get the trolley to kinda derail, tip over, and roll on all of them. Might only crush the legs of the one guy up top though, but maybe if you delay medical care and he bleeds out?

Oh wait! Was that rhetorical? Oopps. Er... Disregard that then.

[Quertus]

"The dilemma is clear, how do we kill all six people?"

Seriously, people, they’re helpless. How do you possibly not kill them all? The question is, do you let the trolley kill the group of 5, or do you keep that pleasure for yourself?

Yes, because in that scenario cosmic forces give the PCs stuff in return for promises to maintain a certain moral position.

Ah, I read the context to be, “in the absence of such mechanics, what roleplaying value does Alignment have?”. Has my reading comprehension failed me yet again?