New OOTS products from CafePress
New OOTS t-shirts, ornaments, mugs, bags, and more
Page 2 of 2 FirstFirst 12
Results 31 to 35 of 35
  1. - Top - End - #31
    Firbolg in the Playground
    Join Date
    Oct 2011

    Default Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

    Quote Originally Posted by OldTrees1 View Post
    Edit: Nvm. I see upthread you are ignoring the system I was talking about (you call out ignoring 2 elephants) and thus are critiquing a version that is artificially harder. Thus my reply to your post is a non sequiter.
    Yes, I was intentionally ignoring some elephants.

    Spoiler: Elephant
    Show
    Quote Originally Posted by OldTrees1 View Post
    This already matches my existing understanding of descriptive alignment.

    An alignment axis, much like the XY axes, is a one dimensional continuum that summarizes the complexities of the character relative to that axis. This summary is similar to the X coordinate from the sum of 14 vectors summarizes the left/right movement at the end of those 14 vectors. While this one dimensional description does omit some of the initial information, it does not delete that information. Looking at the x coordinate from the sum of N vectors does not tell you how many vectors existed, or how many pointed left/right, nor about the magnitude of any individual vectors. This means despite the x coordinate being a high level summary, there is more detail and nuance remaining if you want to look deeper. It is similar with alignments.

    The high level descriptive alignment summary neither reveals nor erases the nuance in the details. A rather boring character living a life of non-action and inconsequence might be summarized as mildly good but mostly amoral. A character struggling to do the right thing in a complex and dystopian world might live a life with few amoral choices, a some moral failures, and a some good accomplished. They might also be summarized at the high level as mildly good but mostly neutral. However despite both having the same high level summary, they are quite different characters when we look at the nuances.



    So, yes, alignment is a continuum and the characters are more nuanced than any high level summary. Water is also wet.

    However your ponderings about the detect spells is new. I don't see it making a big difference whether the Detect spells work on the high level summary or on one level deeper.


    That said… if I understand your “vector” theory… if you take 4 characters, one of whom roofies girls and promotes good causes, another improves the world while pursuing their genocidal quest, a third saves worlds while animating the dead, and the last commits war crimes while, uh, fighting for what they believe in, I guess… there exists some balance of their actions where they reach the same point, and, depending on the specifics of that balance / where that point lies, that point could lie within the range defined as good, neutral, or evil; thus, they could all be described as generally good, neutral, or evil, depending on the balance of their actions… and they could also all be described with something pithy, like “light and dark war within them” or something.

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

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

    Regardless of the implementation, I still feel that writing down “+2 good” seems the easy part of the process.

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

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

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

  2. - Top - End - #32
    Titan in the Playground
     
    NecromancerGuy

    Join Date
    Jul 2013

    Default Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Yes, I was intentionally ignoring some elephants.

    They could also all be described with something pithy, like “light and dark war within them” or something.
    Yes different characters with different moral characters and their own moral success and failures can end up being described with a similar summary when describing just the high level position on the spectrum.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Regardless of whether I’ve read/Interpreted that right or wrong, the point remains, I still hold that developing the heuristics by which you a) assign numbers to those vectors, and b) convert those vectors into a descriptor of the individual’s “goodness” (which, on a second read, I suspect your implementation / conceptualization of the spell isn’t actually doing; that’s more for our benefit) is much harder (and much more likely to promote philosophical disagreement) than simply recording “gave cats thumbs: +1,000 evil”, “funded research into modeling falling damage by dropping puppies from various heights: +2 evil”.
    That is stretching my metaphor* by assuming the alignment relevant intents/actions/consequences of a character must be quantified and treated as vectors. I would hold you are making it harder than it needs to be.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    Or maybe the implementation of the “know Alignment” Spell is different. Maybe the spell just (almost literally) paints you a picture, simply showing you the vectors, and leaving the caster to interpret them. A whole forest of little evils and one big good? A whole forest of little good deeds and one huge evil? What that means is open to the caster’s interpretation. And, over time, society learns that different patterns are more suitable to certain occupations. Employers reject candidates based on their “art”(“I’m sorry, but this job requires you to interact with all sorts, and you’ve shown a disturbing predilection towards strong good acts.”), and information privacy becomes a hot topic (“Steve is the only one to gain a new, large evil vector around the time of the murder” (or, if lying is evil, testing Alignment doubles as a “defect lies” spell, making trials disturbingly efficient)).
    This idea of merging the detect spells, combined with them being somewhat more detailed, is interesting. I suggest simplifying it to:
    A) Detect the qualitative (not quantitative) strength of each alignment. You might detect someone with a faint Order aura, moderate Good aura, strong Chaos aura, and no detectable Evil aura.
    B) After more time studying the auras you might detect the Order aura is from a low number of infrequent but high impact events but the Chaos aura is from a deluge of behavior. They probably have a few rules that rarely come up but they would never break. Given the milder moral auras, the caster might conclude these rare rules might or might not be related to a moral code.



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

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

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

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


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


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



    Edit: Where did all the "Â"s come from? I did not edit the quotes. That is weird.
    Last edited by OldTrees1; 2023-01-30 at 12:47 PM.

  3. - Top - End - #33
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    Stonehead's Avatar

    Join Date
    Jun 2019
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

    It's kinda funny how much alignment gets under everyone's skin for how minor a part it actually plays in the game. Mechanically, it's basically just a tag for a relatively small amount of spells and abilities to interact with. I think a lot of the issues come from treating alignment like a bigger deal than it actually is.

    The designers want a Paladin's Smite to hit a demon harder than it hits an innocent. That makes sense intuitively to most people and a simple alignment grid serves that purpose pretty well. There are a lot of hypothetical weird edge cases (source: the thousands of pages us internet nerds have spent debating it) but they don't actually show up at the table very often.

    You might disagree with that, you might remember some time your group got into an argument about a character's alignment, but did their alignment ever actually matter? I don't want to speak for everyone, but in my experience, the problems entirely consist of a character acting a certain way, some other characters, or the GM objecting to that behavior based on their alignment (or objecting to the alignment based on the behavior), then everyone argues a bunch. Eventually they settle on an alignment for the character, sometimes changing it, sometimes keeping it the same. Then that alignment never actually comes up in the rest of the campaign.

    Alignment is a dumb, hyper-simplified mechanic, because its purpose is just to make a few abilities work a bit closer to what we expect (ie. protect evil should protect from skeletons). Most of the problems that arise from it come from people trying to use it for more than that.

  4. - Top - End - #34
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    BardGuy

    Join Date
    Mar 2007
    Location
    Australia

    Default Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

    You actually have 2 different concepts in there:
    Scoring alignment - Where PC actions generate a numeric total that matters (for detects, effects and/or afterlife). It's adding a new thing to remember, so as a table you need to have enough buy in, or else you're going to realise it's months since you remembered to note down a score for an action. If it's worth it too you, great. But that means those points [B]matter[B]. You're running a setting or game where a character's connections to alignment are a defining feature.

    Relative alignment can be done descriptively. The detects are then a little more informative
    "Detect alignment shows this character quite often performs both good and evil acts". "This character rarely performs good acts but does some evil"

    Or, more interestingly, detect good and detect evil only show a character's connection to the respective plane. "This character often performs good acts" without giving any hint that they work for Kitten Squishers Incorporated
    Last edited by Duff; 2023-01-30 at 06:10 PM.
    I love playing in a party with a couple of power-gamers, it frees me up to be Elan!


  5. - Top - End - #35
    Troll in the Playground
    Join Date
    Jul 2015

    Default Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

    Quote Originally Posted by Stonehead View Post
    It's kinda funny how much alignment gets under everyone's skin for how minor a part it actually plays in the game. Mechanically, it's basically just a tag for a relatively small amount of spells and abilities to interact with. I think a lot of the issues come from treating alignment like a bigger deal than it actually is.
    Alignment is a big deal for the relatively small number of classes - mostly paladin and various divine casters, but also the occasional PrC like assassin - for whom basically the entire suite of class powers is dependent upon maintaining within a certain sector(s) of the alignment pie chart. That's where most of the big arguments actually arise.

    You might disagree with that, you might remember some time your group got into an argument about a character's alignment, but did their alignment ever actually matter? I don't want to speak for everyone, but in my experience, the problems entirely consist of a character acting a certain way, some other characters, or the GM objecting to that behavior based on their alignment (or objecting to the alignment based on the behavior), then everyone argues a bunch. Eventually they settle on an alignment for the character, sometimes changing it, sometimes keeping it the same. Then that alignment never actually comes up in the rest of the campaign.
    A lot of alignment arguments are ultimately about abilities versus role-playing restrictions. Specifically, it's about players trying to acquire (and keep) various alignment-gated class abilities while playing as far off from the actual intent - admittedly often narrow and stereotypical - that the class, PrC, or other feature is intended to portray. Things like people who want to play non-evil assassins, or clerics of alignments vastly removed from those of their gods, and so forth.

    And I get this, since I've run up against it myself. For example, in a playthrough of Pathfinder: Kingmaker (the cRPG), I played a LN inquisitor, because I wanted the animal domain (animal companions are powerful in that game), but because I'm a big softy in cRPG play, I ended up playing the character much more like LG, and had to cast Atonement multiple times in a single playthrough to regain LN status and avoid losing all inquisitor powers. This is the kind of cheese that absolutely would not, and should not, fly at an actual table. Now, one solution is to avoid making certain options only available to certain alignment combinations, because that is unnecessarily limiting. Unfortunately, that interacts rather poorly with D&D's pseudo-mythology.
    Now publishing a webnovel travelogue.

    Resvier: a P6 homebrew setting

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •