Alignment-to be or not to be?

[Ravenspath]

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?

[Wensleydale]

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.

[Túrin]

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. 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

[snakefing]

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.

[Raven Bloodmoon]

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.

[Numinous]

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.

[khyron1144]

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.

[Stargate525]

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.

[Seraph]

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.

[Ravenspath]

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

[Stargate525]

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.

[Raven Bloodmoon]

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?

[snakefing]

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.

[snakefing]

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 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.

[Túrin]

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