Results 31 to 35 of 35
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2023-01-30, 11:59 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2011
Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?
Yes, I was intentionally ignoring some elephants.
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.
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2023-01-30, 12:46 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2013
Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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2023-01-30, 03:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2019
- Gender
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.
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2023-01-30, 04:36 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2007
- Location
- Australia
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
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2023-01-30, 09:23 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jul 2015
Re: What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?
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.
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.