In my current rework I am considering dumping alignment. In most of the other games that I have played there is no such thing as alingment. It seems a very arbitrary way to put a limit on a character. People aren't lawful good or chaotic evil. They are varying shades of the polar ends as determined by their experiences, their feelings and the situation.
What does having an alignemnt gain you in terms of game mechanics? The main thing that I see is that allows certain spells to have an effect or no effect on the character. Other than that?
Do you use alignment and if not have you replaced it with something else?
I don't use alignment. I tend to use religion-based, or magical-ability-based, spells in place of detect/magic circle against/protection from blah-de-blah etc etc, but other than that I don't replace alignment with anything.
For my own campaigns, I have simply banned alignment, making no use of the rules that go with it (though I have found that some players still prefer to think of their character as having a certain alignment).
Epic Meepo, however, has created a far more elegant solution to tie up the loose ends in the rules that you create by removing alignment: Astrological Alignment (http://www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?4885). The idea here is that you still have an alignment, but it doesn't have a one-to-one correlation with your character, thus keeping the rules systems associated with alignment intact.
Túrin
My own approach has been to make alignment-based magic work only against supernatural alignment. Thus, creatures from other planes, religious creatures, and certain types of characters that have been blessed or touched by aligned magic can be affected by alignment magic. This would mostly apply to higher level priests, paladins, those who've made a pact with outsiders, etc. Even there, alignment doesn't necessarily compel your behavior - it just describes what "team" you are playing for.
Effectively, if you aren't playing a campaign that deals a lot with this kind of stuff, alignment is out of the picture entirely. You could still use it as a partial description of character tendencies, if you want. In this option, chaotic good describes a person who tends toward certain types of actions, while Chaotic Good describes someone who has aligned themselves with a certain set of supernatural beings or powers.
One thing to be aware of is that this substantially reduces the power of certain types of characters, especially paladins. Detect evil, protection from evil, smite evil, and a few other things just won't work against very many targets. Players need to be aware of that, so they understand what their characters can and can't do.
I've dumped alignment as well. It's too arbitrary and does not reflect the many shades of grey that occur when no right answer to a problem can be found. I will sometimes use taint from OA/UA/Heroes of as the basis for the magic circle/protection/detect spells. But taint in my worlds is a very real adn tangible thing; not some nebulus concept unique to each person.
I prefer to avoid alignment when at all possible, applying it in the situations snakefing mentioned (supernatural beings). Taint and areas of great evil will still be noticeable, but otherwise alignment is removed entirely.
Mostly however, my gaming preferences have shifted to the World of Darkness game system and/or free-form RP, so the alignment issue isn't a problem. I generally prefer concepts such as curiosity, whimsical tendencies, or valorous tendencies to any ambiguous alignment strictures.
I keep alignment when I run D&D, but almost never think about it. I guess no one has run a Paladin in one of my games, which may help explain the non-emphasis on alignment. It doesn't much matter if a Fighter or Wizard acts in alignment all the time.
I don't mind the alignment thing, frankly, except that far too many players and DMs treat it as a leash for the character, determining what the character would or wouldn't do. I treat is as a loose description that's free to change.
Of the two axis, I'd like to see one focus completely on the law/chaos side of it; Good and evil, though I personally have very specific ideas of it, brings a whole can of worms that you can KNOW that what you're doing is wrong and/or right.
I use an astrological alignment system that is in part derived from Epic Meepo's. I have 12 astrological signs and each has certain general personality characteristics. Each character has a primary [sun] sign and a secondary [moon] sign. These basic personality traits can be fit into a wide variety of actions.
Wow, lots of great ideas and feedback. Thank you. I have read the astrological alingment thread posted and also find it interesting. I'm still not sure what route I am going to take, but will post any ideas I come up with here. If anyone else has any thoughts please share!
:-p
I've always wondered whether alignment might be more palatable if you expanded the 'chart' as it were from 3x3 to 5x5, so that you have an additional slot beyond good, evil, law, and chaos.
I'd imagine you'd have something like anarchic and reactionist for the law/chaos, delegating both the 'blow it up!' and 'the law is infallible' people to those places, while keeping the free spirits and the trustworthy men in the law and chaos slots.
Similarly you'd have righteous and malicious(?) for the good/evil, leaving traditional good and evil to the petty criminals and the do-gooders.
Well, I use to run alignment on a 20 by 20 grid, actually. Each alignment had 10 points, with 0 being dead nutral. I usually counted a 1 or 2 as being sorta neutral. 3 - 9 were various degrees of that axis as arbitrarily decided by myself, and the farthest extrmety was like you said, but for the Good/Evil axes, I used Exalted and Vile. Sometimes, I'd expand the extremity alignments out to 9 - 10.
Any class that required a specific alignment required at least a 4 in that alignment. This can also let you set the degree of alignment you need for different PrCs and feats, but like I said, I don't like having to pidgeonhole soemone, and I really don't like trying to figure otu what is morally right the senarious I try to come up with. I like the solution to be this horribly grey thing that is sorta bad but not as bad as the other options. Make the players think a little, you know?
There's a lot you can do with alternative alignment schemes. One system I played gave characters Karma Points based on their in-game actions. Didn't do much but change the way NPC's reacted, but it is an interesting approach to letting actions dictate alignment rather than the other way round.
The main problem with most of these systems isn't that they are to reductionistic. Reducing ethics and morals to one or two alignment scales doesn't capture the full complexity of things.
What about the Mafia thug who has no respect for duly constituted authority but feels himself bound by the code of omerta? Mostly chaotic with elements of lawfulness, and plenty of evil. It doesn't seem right to say that the elements of lawfulness "offset" some of the chaos - it's more that the law and chaos apply to different people or different circumstances.
The only "chaotic evil" character I ever played had a hard upbringing and as a result was very status-conscious and resentful. If he felt slighted, he might fly off the handle or conversely cook up some elaborate scheme to take his revenge. But he had a soft spot in his heart for street orphans, and often gave them food or shelter just out of pity. Truly a bad person, but it only really came out when he was dealing with his social "superiors".
And of course, you can cook up examples of basically good and/or lawful people who have significant situational flaws as well.
If you are going to play the kind of game where characters like make sense, it just doesn't make much sense to try to capture character traits on an alignment scale. Alignment can still make sense in a kind of supernatural way - like vampires are infused with a kind of evil that is more than just doing bad, it is being bad in some stronger metaphysical sense. Thus, bad people aren't affected by holy water like vampires are - as bad as they might be, they aren't made of evil like vampires.
On the other hand, you might want to play a game in which such metaphysical alignment permeates everything. In such a game, aligned creatures, religions, artifacts, and so on could be commonplace. You might pick up a whiff of taint or and aura of good just by stepping into an (un)holy site. Any adventurer would inevitably end up being affected by the things s/he encounters, so classifying alignment on a small number of dimensions makes sense. Mechanics to score alignment on a -10 to +10 scale and make the numbers mean something could help reinforce the themes.
Ah, here's another "alignment" type approach I've seen somewhere. It's based on the seven deadly sins and their contrary virtues. The basic take is actually to define each sin and virtue as its own "sin of excess" in the sense of Aristotle's golden mean.
The contrasting pairs are:
Lust -- Chastity
Gluttony -- Temperance
Avarice -- Liberality
Sloth -- Diligence
Pride -- Humility
Envy -- Brotherly Love
Wrath -- Meekness
Here (http://www.secondexodus.com/html/catholicdefinitions/capitalvirtue.htm) is a Catholic site that describes the sins and vices in Catholic theology. The system I've seen wasn't really based on that - it treated both ends of each spectrum as a sin of excess. For example, an excess of Brotherly Love means caring for others to the extent that you neglect your own needs or those of people near you. An excess of Meekness would cause you to accept or put up with things that you should get angry about. "Right" behavior would be somewhere in between - the golden mean.
Characters can be characterized by the particular tendancies they have - which excesses they are more prone to. It's more a system of characterization than alignment per se - but it can replace the aspect of alignment as a description or determiner of behavior and morals. It may inspire some interestingly different character ideas as well.
Interesting take, snakefing. If you're gonna try to capture human morality in some kind of system, it makes sense that such a system would be based on one or more of the great moral philosophers (Aristotle being one of them, of course). Now you've got me wondering what a Kantian or utilitarian system of morality would be like.
;) Túrin
Wow, it seems that I'm one of the few here who uses D&D alignment as is. I've never seen it as a restriction on players, just as a mechanical representation of how you intend to play your character. For my players who have a hard time with alignment, and when I'm running a character driven game, I have them describe their character to me and then we discuss their potential alignment. I eyeball character alignment after big events and discuss with them if I think they've been playing a different alignment than what they stated.
But, depending on your cosmology, I could easily see using a different system. L5R uses honor and taint, True20 uses virtues and vices.
Most of all, try to think of alignment as a mechanical representation of how you play your character, not as a rule for how you have to play your character. Play them how you want, and have the DM assign an alignment.
What Xeviat said.
And besides, you can't entirely do away with the existing D&D alignment axes. Without the existing D&D alignments, how is one supposed to engage in endless "What alignment is so-and-so?" debates. They're just not the same without law, chaos, good, and evil.
Snakefing, that system of contrasting qualities looks kind of like the Virtues/Vices part of the NWoD game. But I don't think it's quite the same (haven't looked at the book in a while).
Just an interesting thing to think about in having objective alignment that applies to all people is that you could play it up. Tell the players that their characters have free-will, but they will still be judged based on what side the universe thinks they land on, few or no grey areas, not caring about intent. Of course, this is probably the sort of thing that gets so many people in alignment right now, but if the players were okay with it you might be able to get some interesting stuff out of it.
I've got to go with Meeps and Xev, with the addition that I use the DF Grid that add "tendencies" to the normal amount. I use alignment in games set in the Known Multiverse where it is the defining force. In other worlds using the d20 rules I often find it unnecessary.
Some non-D&D games have done interesting things with alignment-like systems.
Elric! from Chaosium has a system of three forces: Chaos, Law, and Balance. A character can earn points of allegiance towards one of these forces by his actions, for example, using magic is nearly always worth some Chaos points. Actively trying to court one of these forces and swear allegiance to it can have varying benefits.
Pendragon also from Chaosium makes use of virtues in a way that I don't really understand after trying to run a PC in a game but without owning the rules myself about five times. In order to be a Christian Knight, a character must have certain minimum scores in traits like Chastity, Mercy, and Loyalty.
Marvel Super Heroes from TSR and DC Super Heroes from Mayfair both use points rewarded to heroic PCs for good deeds; these points were the basis of the equivalent to the experience point system and also luck points that coud be spent to gaurantee success on various actions. Marvel called it Karma and DC called it Hero Points. Both games had strong rules to encourage heroic behavior by rewarding good deeds with Karma/ Hero Points. Both games also discouraged naightiness, like killing the bad guys, by imposing Karma/ Hero Point penalties. If a Marvel PC, like Spider Man, killed a bad guy, like Green Goblin, the hero lost all current Karma points. If a DC PC, like Bat Man, killed a bad guy, like Two Face, he forfeits whatever his Hero Point reward would have been for that adventure.
I don't know if there's any way to adapt any of those to D&D or if it would be rewarding.
A basic D&D (as in Basic Rules red box - Master Rules black box) game where the Elric! system is added to its already existing three alignments system sounds interesting. D&D alignment was ripped from the Elric books anyway. Unforutnately, I think every PC would go Chaotic for the access to magic, if the system wasn't adjusted a little first.
I've never had too hard a time keeping my players within the realms of acceptable alignment behavior, though I always let them know that I have the right to slap them with a new alignment if they're consistently acting outside of their written ethos. Nothing peevs me off more when there's a paladin-player who fights tooth and nail to say that his alignment is LG, but consistently acts chaotic or something.
Most of the games I've played in recently (all too few) have stressed alternate systems like Honor or Reputation or something, instead of alignment. I think a lot of people, my players especially, have an easier time wrapping their heads around a linear system, instead of something that functions on an actual grid.
Dump it. I don't like alignment, nor how it labels things. I don't agree with its definitions of good and evil, and I don't agree with the alignment line in monster descriptions.
What don't you like about it?
Personally I don't enforce alignment that much but the fact is it is a matter of cosmology more than anything. For instance: if you were running a game set in say Arthurian Britain then frankly you have to have certain things written in stone in your character to get the Holy Grail, rescue the princess from the fiery prison, etc. If in your game it is more like say "A Song of Ice and Fire" or R E Howard's Hyperboria then you don't really need alignment but perhaps a system of reputation points might be in order.
Alignment doesn't really bother me that much. It's not that bad, it's not that great. There are a couple of factors that bother me a little:
First, some players use alignment as a substitute for actual characterization. This is most common among younger players, for obvious reasons. But I would prefer something that at least gave a nudge in the direction of something more interesting.
Second, the game mechanics sometimes intrude. What would you say of the alignment of a character who carefully observes the letter of the law, even the trivial ones, but is more than willing to take advantage of it when advantageous, to push the boundaries, or to flout the unwritten codes of his culture? My answer is, who cares? I've got a perfectly good (partial) characterization there, no need to label it. But then someone comes along and casts Detect Evil/Good/Chaos/Law and wants to know what the results are. All of a sudden the mechanics are kind of forcing me to pigeonhole the character, put him in a box, and suffer the mechanical consequences. Ugh!
That's where I came up with my preference that the mechanical aspects only touch on some kind of deep metaphysical alignment, which is more permanent and concrete than behavioral traits. Now that character can be treated as generally neutral in all respects, regardless of his behaviors, unless there is some specific reason to think he is aligned with some great cosmic force.
I'm wondering where so many people got the idea that alignment is a restriction on players. No where in the PHB does it suggest penalties for players playing "out of character", and the DMG does discuss changing alignments. As far as I can tell, the RAW way of handling alignment is playing your character the way you want to play them and deciding what alignment fits them.
As for tendencies, here's a character I am about to play and my ideas for his tendencies and his alignment:
Simon Farthing is a cleric of Boccob. He is True Neutral, and believes that knowledge is the ultimate reward. Before he began adventuring extensively, he lived and studied in a large library dedicated to Boccob. He believes that knowledge should not be hidden, that the fruits of study are meant for all humanity to benefit from (thus, he despises Vecna's teachings, being the god of secrets).
He dislikes his knowledge being used to cause the deaths of mortals; he would turn down an evil group's asking him to find out the weakness of a good group just as quickly as he'd turn down a good group's inquiries about an evil group's weaknesses. Death is wrong, in his eyes, no matter the cause. He tends to sway towards Lawfulness, as Chaos tends to be more destructive than law, but he has disdane for martial deities and their followers, even Cuthbert.
While he is true neutral, he tends to side with good over evil. To him, killing is always wrong, even if it will save lives. He will use evil to further his goals (his general goals being the uncovering of knowledge), such as summoning devils to question. He believes in imprisonment for wrongdoers, though he has no qualms of killing outsiders, elementals, or other "non-living" creatures.
See, while one could say that he has Neutral Good tendancies, he is decidedly TN. There are things that could sway him; if it weren't for his wisdom, he could possibly be corrupted by devil's, or otherwise drift towards Law (right now, the main thing keeping him from a Lawful alignment is the generally millitarisic attitude of lawful deities and sects).
Quote from: XeviatI'm wondering where so many people got the idea that alignment is a restriction on players.
detect alignment[/i] spells are 1st-level spells). In the kind of campaigns I run, I do not want my characters to figure people out so easily. If they have to figure out who's in an 'evil' cult, I wouldn't want a simple 1st-level spell to be able to rule out 80-90% of the population. Note that this feature of the alignment system is exactly what Epic Meepo's system counters: when someone detects as evil, he hasn't
necessarily committed evil acts in the past.
Secondary, I dislike the idea of alignment restrictions on classes. This is where the alignment system actually is a restriction on players. The paladin code is vital to the nature of their class, so they still lose their class feaures when they don't behave according to their (self-imposed!) code, and clerics have to keep at least some connection to their church, but I can see no reason why a barbarian has to uphold some universal idea of chaos to be able to use his rage ability.
Túrin
The solution however is to do what really makes sense and is rarely the case in the rather manichaean world view presented in D&D; make almost everyone neutral. In my game alignment rarely yields much. Most human beings are neutral and indeed most sapient creatures too.
Recently reading "A Song of Ice and Fire" I found that I would state that overwhelmingly most of the characters in spite of the cutthroat politics and constant fighting are neutral. What's interesting to me is that I would say that even of those with some evil tendencies. Exceptions would be a very few characters indeed, because when you think of it people who are absolute in their views are rather rare.
So for me alignment is more of a way of identifying how characters start to turn out. I don't insist on alignment designation unless a character wants to follow a particular god or something. It has turned out in my current game that one character is lawful neutral, one is lawful good, one is neutral good.
I'm starting a new campaign based off of the activities of INVESTIGATION and BOUNTY HUNTING... That kinda thing. I told the players flat out that Detect Evil does not work and alignment affecting spells only affect those characters who are inherently evil (good, etc) and do not affect the kinda evil.
I also find AT WILL Detect Evil to be very annoying. So, I will likely give any paladins a different ability. Or maybe I will scrap the paladin and go with holy warriors (from either "Pantheon and Pagan Faiths" or "Book of the Righteous", I may not even develop much religion since the players are not interested in religious stuff).
I prefer to use the Virtue/Vice system from nWoD and True20.
As for good/evil specific magic, I follow D20 Modern's idea of replaceing 'good/evil' with 'opponent' or 'adversary.'
:cool:
Quote from: RedBullBearI prefer to use the Virtue/Vice system from nWoD and True20.
As for good/evil specific magic, I follow D20 Modern's idea of replaceing 'good/evil' with 'opponent' or 'adversary.'
:cool:
Opponent of Advresary huh? I like that! Will have to ponder that further!
(http://www.thecbg.org/e107_images/emotes/archivedSmilies/idea.gif)
I cannot decide on how to play alignment in my campaign world. In many ways, evil/good and especially law/chaos are integral to the quest, but I do buy into the relativistic moral scale. I am intentionally blurring the difference between overzealous paladins (a bit of a redundancy with the way I've seen most people play them) and outright blackguards. I was thinking of making every humanoid (including goblinoids) neutral but putting chaos/law bents on each race , maybe showing these bents as a racial starting feat (thogh the majority will be neutral), while outsiders, for the most part, have a good/evil axis. however, good/evil would still be accessible to player in the form of feats...perhaps as bonus feats which are earned by extraordinarily good/ evil acts, it occurs to me after reading this thread. I would keep detect good/evil spell levels rather low, as they will not be that useful, usually, and move the detect law/chaos spell levels up a bit, perhaps.
I think that the above paragraph can be helpful and applicable in most campaigns, but i'm not so sure about the following, as it is more specific to my campaign. still, i am asking for help, so i might as well try to help you to help me.
In my world, there is a brand of magic known as "Ichoric" magic, that is, "blood magic", which deals with the essence of a creature, sort of an overwhelming genetic predisposition. Often, it has to do with an affinity of some other source of magical power (think of PHB sorcerers). however, it can also have alignment affinities (which is why many drow are so vile, as they are ruled and shaped by sorcerers).
eh?