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I rest pretty confident in my belief that phrases like "debase sentient life" aren't unambiguous, and interpretation of them requires reference to beliefs and mores not found purely within the text.
That's my main point, and what I think separates alignment "rules" from other rules. The definitions of alignments themselves are composed of ambiguous terms that require further explanation. While someone can point to the text for "Lawful Neutral," the terms used to describe it further are only slightly more descriptive than "Lawful Neutral" itself is.
The alignment "rules" are nothing remotely like the rules for half-elves, longswords, and grappling. Those are all defined mechanically by their game terms, and have basically zero ambiguity in any reasonable sense.
Other than that, I think I can sit back and watch my basic thesis prove itself: that people who believe that morality is cut and dry and unambiguous, even though they disagree with other people who also believe that morality is cut and dry and ambiguous, are the real reason alignment fails as a set of rules.
So your thesis is that the game rule fails because people can’t come to agreement on real world rules? People can’t agree that D&D Good means X (the definition text in the book) because they can’t agree what real world Good means?
Ask some non-D&D gamers what an elf is, and how many different descriptions will you get? Some will describe what we D&D gamers call a gnome, a halfling, a pixie, a goblin, or goodness knows what else. But we D&D gamers have no problem discussing elves despite the real world different definitions.
Yet “Chaotic Good” gets all kinds of confused in conversation despite it is pretty much originally and still strictly a D&D term, defined in the D&D books – defined as well or better than “elf”.
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the people who believe that written text is always cut and dry and unambiguous are having their say
No one has said this. You’re setting up a strawman.
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phrases like "debase sentient life" aren't unambiguous
If you think that, fortunately for your understanding, those are not the only three words in the definition.
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I'd risk suggesting that this is because you want alignment to explicitly define a character for you, and that you think a character can and/or should BE defined explicitly by alignment. But alignment isn't supposed to be applied that way.
We might differ about how alignment is "supposed" to be applied. As I think you know, previous editions took it more seriously, not just as description, but as prescription. DMs were instructed to carefully monitor the PCs' compliance with alignment norms, and to penalize them when they strayed (loss of levels, increased training time, etc.). 3e loosened this considerably, while still retaining (and even enhancing) some of the rules effects of alignment. 4e has stripped nearly all of it away.
But my concern in the Baltar example is not so much that I want to reduce him simply to an alignment on a grid, and to be able to derive his personality and behavior from that alignment. It's more that the personality and behavior that we see onscreen can be plausibly assigned to several different alignments (and of course you can do this for practically any fictional character, not just Baltar). In other words, the nine alignments aren't capturing meaningful differences. They're too fine-grained for my taste, and are needlessly symmetrical. The differences between neutral good and chaotic good are utterly negligible, relative to the importance that the game assigns those differences in rules terms ("detect" spells, intelligent magic items, etc.) and in cosmological terms (different planes and outsiders and whatnot).
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There's no doubt that aligment is problematic. It has never, EVER had it's purpose for being present in the game properly, clearly defined. Largely because of this it is an interpretational nightmare because people try to make it do things it really shouldn't do, or CAN'T do. Even at that, it is by necessity vague in many ways. It can neither fully define, nor fully describe a characters motivations, personality, religion or philosophy, and collapses utterly the closer you get to making it do just that.
What it CAN do, imo, is to provide some roleplaying guidance, or possibly even some roleplaying substitution, for players who cannot or will not do so otherwise. Obviously then, the better and more dedicated players are to roleplaying the less it is needed or even wanted. Then the problem still remains that alignment has so many tendrils reaching into the game (at least for older editions - I don't really know from 4E).
Your approach seems to be pretty consistent with 4e's approach: alignment as a rough guideline for roleplaying. I'm down with that. It's also coarser-grained, which I think leads to more meaningful and useful distinctions.
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Provide the obvious, unambiguous, clearly correct application of the 3e alignment rules to the trolley problems.
Remember, your answer doesn't just need to be convincing to you! It must be so convincing to you that you are willing to claim that the 3e alignment system objectively and unambiguously morally condemns the responses of people who come up with different answers than yours.
I'm not sure I understand the difference between DM problems and alignment issues, at least for my example.
So, the most people, the fastest? So a paladin's code of conduct is consequence based? Would you call Ozymandius from Watchmen lawful good, or better, if he was a paladin would he fall for doing what he did no spoilers? Would everyone agree with you?
I'm sorry, the two aren't even comparable. Ozymandius slaughtered countless innocent people for the sake of his pride more then any desire to help mankind.
[qoute]What if, and I think this would be more common, the DM is unsure of what to do, and tries to rely on the alignment system to guide him? What should he do when the paladin kills the corrupt official? If nothing, when _should_ the DM force the paladin to fall? If it's the DM's call always anyway, what's the point of the alignment system?[/quote]
Look, this problem exists outside of the alignment problem. If you have a DM who never talks to his players, you're going to have a crappy game, alignment involved or not.
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Who said the courts were corrupt? What if the characters didn't know? Are they justified to take the guy prisoner until they find out?
In which case I'd have an in game note made to tell the paladin he could've held back.
Paladins should not simply fall because of one small mistake. If they do something adamantly evil such as killing an innocent person purposefully, then yes, down the stairs they go. But this wasn't such a case.
RE: Detect Evil:
This is, again, a player problem. Why is alignment at fault when the player shouts "DETECT EVIL!" at everyone they meet, but it's not the skill system's fault when the player shouts "SENSE MOTIVE" at everyone just the same?
__________________ Psionics are too sci-fi, not like the traditional method of spell casting that has existed only in D&D, involves research, laboratory work, and formulas, and was cribbed directly from a series of science fiction novels. I mean, come on, calling forth the power to alter the world from your own center of will? That's not magical in the slightest! Not at all like my wizard's spell "Telepathy!"
Here's an alignment puzzle. A group working out of the wilderness sends secret agents into the city with a magical device to detect vampires. The vampires are then captured, transported instantly to the wilderness and locked up. The vampires are freed and returned to the city of their choice if they pay a very large sum of money. The people who run the center are motivated primarily by profit but are convinced they are helping keep the streets safe.
Now, what alignment is the organization in general? And what alignment would a hero shutting the place down move towards?
Provide the obvious, unambiguous, clearly correct application of the 3e alignment rules to the trolley problems.
Remember, your answer doesn't just need to be convincing to you! It must be so convincing to you that you are willing to claim that the 3e alignment system objectively and unambiguously morally condemns the responses of people who come up with different answers than yours.
No.
Because this is the mark of a bad DM. "WHICH EVIL DO YOU CHOOSE!"
When a DM does this, they aren't being witty or cool or edgy, they're just being a douchebag.
You are attempting to apply things outside of alignment in order to show the "flaws" of the alignment issue. There is no unambiguous, always correct answer to the trolly problem. With or without alignment.
__________________ Psionics are too sci-fi, not like the traditional method of spell casting that has existed only in D&D, involves research, laboratory work, and formulas, and was cribbed directly from a series of science fiction novels. I mean, come on, calling forth the power to alter the world from your own center of will? That's not magical in the slightest! Not at all like my wizard's spell "Telepathy!"
Here's an alignment puzzle. A group working out of the wilderness sends secret agents into the city with a magical device to detect vampires. The vampires are then captured, transported instantly to the wilderness and locked up. The vampires are freed and returned to the city of their choice if they pay a very large sum of money. The people who run the center are motivated primarily by profit but are convinced they are helping keep the streets safe.
Now, what alignment is the organization in general? And what alignment would a hero shutting the place down move towards?
Gee, a group that takes vampires and then sets them free in cities.
What alignment should they be?
__________________ Psionics are too sci-fi, not like the traditional method of spell casting that has existed only in D&D, involves research, laboratory work, and formulas, and was cribbed directly from a series of science fiction novels. I mean, come on, calling forth the power to alter the world from your own center of will? That's not magical in the slightest! Not at all like my wizard's spell "Telepathy!"
Provide the obvious, unambiguous, clearly correct application of the 3e alignment rules to the trolley problems.
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Trolley Problem
A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?
LG = Would be highly upset and distraught over the situation.
NG = Would be highly upset and distraught over the situation.
CG = Would be highly upset and distraught over the situation.
LN = Would be bothered by the situation.
NN = Would be bothered by the situation.
CN = Would be bothered by the situation.
LE = Yay, someone will die!
NE = Yay, someone will die!
CE = Yay, someone will die!
The alignment descriptions/definitions do not tell you how to solve philosophical questions. Just like the class rules do not tell you how to cut down a tree. (Although I’m sure someone will come along and describe, in a humorous fashion, how each class might cut down a tree.)
Most of these hypothetical alignment tests are like:
Statement: “Steel is a strong material.”
Argument: “No it’s not. Watch as this huge machine easily bends that steel bar. And watch how easily I can bend this steel wire. See? Steel is weak, and we should not build anything out of steel.”
As all the rules threads through the years has proven, all the rules in the D&D books can be bent, broken, and blasted to pieces with the right situation. Just because you can come up with difficult moral quandaries doesn’t mean the definition of alignment in the D&D books are bad. I can come up with impossible combat scenarios, but that doesn’t make the D&D combat system bad.
Provide the obvious, unambiguous, clearly correct application of the 3e alignment rules to the trolley problems.
I personally feel that the trolley problem in its generic form doesn't really intersect each alignment's interests particularly strongly. And I think pretty much every alignment is going to view the trolley problem as one with no 'right' answers (or no 'wrong' answers, depending on how they view right and wrong). Even an alignment like neutral evil - for which IMO this is as clear as any alignment - is going to be bothered by the fact that they can't kill both parties. And an alignment like lawful good, for which this might seem to be a clear cut problem, in addition to being deeply troubled that they can't save everyone, is going to make exceptions for the general 'Flip the switch' default answer, for example, if the single person on the tracks is the King or some other figure very valuable to society. Conversely, the chaotic alignments probably make exceptions based on whether one group or the other contains someone who is valuable to them personally. For example, chaotics are likely to be very much more sympathetic to to 'don't flip the switch' if the one person on the track is their child or spouse. We can also imagine situations where the lawful society forgives 'don't flip the switch' if the one person the track is a parent or similar authority figure (as a lesser version of 'I can't kill the King', even to save a larger group because it's outside my authority) where they wouldn't forgive 'It's was my child!"
I think we learn much more about the alignments by trying to figure out what additional circumstances in the trolley problem that they would feel is relevant to the solution.
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Remember, your answer doesn't just need to be convincing to you! It must be so convincing to you that you are willing to claim that the 3e alignment system objectively and unambiguously morally condemns the responses of people who come up with different answers than yours.
Why do I need to do that?
I believe that all you need to do is come up with and communicate a relatively clear and unambigious system that your players can understand. I don't think that alignment needs to operate the same way at every table.
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The way I see is, alignment doesn't tell you what you have to do, but what is your starting point of view of a given situation.
I like alignments because they give the lazy players a decent guide for roleplaying their characters, while giving the more dedicated ones a starting point and, in the best case, an excuse for some interesting dilemmas, as two characters of the same alignment can have very polarized views concerning their course of action over a particular case (as in the trolley dilemma) while having the same final goal.
I'm sorry, the two aren't even comparable. Ozymandius slaughtered countless innocent people for the sake of his pride more then any desire to help mankind.
Whether he had the desire or not, which I think he did from my read, he did help mankind by stopping nuclear holocaust, so fits into your saves more faster criteria. But the important thing isn't what we each believe, the important thing is that we apparently believe different things, and the alignment system is not any help to us at all if we disagree with what good or lawful is.
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Look, this problem exists outside of the alignment problem. If you have a DM who never talks to his players, you're going to have a crappy game, alignment involved or not.
I agree, but see the alignment system as useless in the hands of a good, communicable DM. The good DM under questionable circumstances would declare the situation was questionable, and then the alignment bound characters in question would defend themselves, and there would be no change in alignment. I think alignment is bad player insurance. If the paladin is going around killing innocents, and no one is around to see it, there may not be any in game consequences. So, by taking his paladin powers away from him, the DM has punished the player for being bad, or by threatening it to begin with, has deterred the player from being a problem player.
In the hands of reasonable players and DM, where does alignment become useful?.
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Paladins should not simply fall because of one small mistake. If they do something adamantly evil such as killing an innocent person purposefully, then yes, down the stairs they go. But this wasn't such a case.
Who says what is small? How many small mistakes can he make before falling? Is this all up to DM fiat anyway, alignment system or not?
LG = Would be highly upset and distraught over the situation.
NG = Would be highly upset and distraught over the situation.
CG = Would be highly upset and distraught over the situation.
LN = Would be bothered by the situation.
NN = Would be bothered by the situation.
CN = Would be bothered by the situation.
LE = Yay, someone will die!
NE = Yay, someone will die!
CE = Yay, someone will die!
What do you feel was added by using nine categories to divy up three possible answers to a basic moral question, especially when most of the answers do not actually provide any guidance or suggestions on how to roleplay the situation?
Its worth noting that the trolley questions aren't crazy abstract issues that are only of interest to philosophers and moral theorists. They get to some really basic issues that are often at the root of many disputes about alignment. Action versus inaction, choices one seeks out versus choices thrust upon you, responsibility to choose a lesser evil versus responsibility for choosing a lesser evil, intended outcomes versus anticipated but unintended outcomes of your actions, and so on. Even DMs who do not delight in inflicting moral quandaries on their players will sometimes end up invoking some of these issues in a game.
Provide the obvious, unambiguous, clearly correct application of the 3e alignment rules to the trolley problems.
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You are attempting to apply things outside of alignment in order to show the "flaws" of the alignment issue. There is no unambiguous, always correct answer to the trolly problem. With or without alignment.
This bears repeating. A lot of the problems with alignment happened when people started using them as a sort of litmus test for particular actions.
Alignment doesn't tell you what to do in a specific circumstance. That comes from the character, the player, etc. Alignment also does not rest on single acts. Alignment is broad and general.
The Trolley Problem is an artificial philosophical construct, not an in-game situation in a fantasy universe where you have effectively unlimited options. Any DM who presents an equivalent to the Trolley Problem to their players is effectively giving them a binary bottleneck, which is pretty poor adventure design. It's an interesting philosophical question, but it's not a convenient analogue to alignment.
And it's because of mistakes like this that alignment, I think, is OK as an optional adjunct. It's really not worth all the people that get alignment wrong on a casual basis to keep it in the game. Let it be something that those interested in it can keep around, but it's certainly not necessary
We might differ about how alignment is "supposed" to be applied. As I think you know, previous editions took it more seriously, not just as description, but as prescription. DMs were instructed to carefully monitor the PCs' compliance with alignment norms, and to penalize them when they strayed (loss of levels, increased training time, etc.). 3e loosened this considerably, while still retaining (and even enhancing) some of the rules effects of alignment. 4e has stripped nearly all of it away.
Yep. That early approach to handling alignment still colors attitudes to its potential usefulness today. When first introduced it really had no purpose. As it developed its purpose was clarified as bearing on roleplaying, but WOEFULLY misguided in how to implement that - encouraging subtleties of characterization by shooting players with a hammergun. It may be anecdotal evidence but it's a fair volume of it that suggests when those aspects of alignment were ignored or treated contemptuously is when people found it of use in characterization.
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But my concern in the Baltar example is not so much that I want to reduce him simply to an alignment on a grid, and to be able to derive his personality and behavior from that alignment. It's more that the personality and behavior that we see onscreen can be plausibly assigned to several different alignments (and of course you can do this for practically any fictional character, not just Baltar). In other words, the nine alignments aren't capturing meaningful differences.
And MY point is that they shouldn't necessarily be expected to. You can indeed arrive at the same characterization by many different avenues - but it CAN be alignment that would be used to actually achieve the characterization. It DID provide roleplaying guidance. Descriptions of the alignments are used to provide various moral, ethical, philosophical beliefs that might be held and practices that might be evidenced. It frequently doesn't matter that these might be scattershot or even implausible combinations, they provide SOME kind of framework for a player to base his characterization upon as needed/desired. If a player has a clear idea how and why a character would act in a certain way WITHOUT referring to alignment, well good on ya. But for a player who is not a good roleplayer, or is a lazy one who is more in the game for the dice rolling, etc. basing moral, ethical, etc. actions of the character on what his alignment suggests is FAR better than either having completely absent characterization, being compelled to work up lengthy details of philosophy, religion, etc. and attempting to extensively portray them, or perhaps worst of all - seeing the characterization naturally slide to the lowest common denominator and having the character behave in the basest fashion he can get away with but without having any motivation for doing so.
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Your approach seems to be pretty consistent with 4e's approach: alignment as a rough guideline for roleplaying. I'm down with that. It's also coarser-grained, which I think leads to more meaningful and useful distinctions.
Yeah, I think designers have repeatedly missed the boat in not removing the in-play tentacles of alignment, shifting it squarely into a meta-game factor and being more specific in HOW and WHY to use it as a roleplaying guide. For example, the discussion of alignment is inherent in the discussion of the behavior of paladins, but I think that determining in-game what paladins should and should not do would be FAR better handled just by more extensive, detailed vows instead of leaving DM's with the irrational idea that simply having a paladin PC being played meant they could and should be routinely creating morality traps for them and then whacking them upside the head with the alignment stick.
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Last edited by Man in the Funny Hat; 24th September 2009 at 02:20 AM..
There is no unambiguous, always correct answer to the trolly problem. With or without alignment.
Ding! And now we're back to the original point: some people believe there Right and Wrong answers, and the alignment system provides a flashpoint for them to come into conflict with other people who also believe there are Right and Wrong answers, but who believe in different Right and Wrong answers.
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The Trolley Problem is an artificial philosophical construct, not an in-game situation in a fantasy universe where you have effectively unlimited options. Any DM who presents an equivalent to the Trolley Problem to their players is effectively giving them a binary bottleneck, which is pretty poor adventure design. It's an interesting philosophical question, but it's not a convenient analogue to alignment.
Pssh. the Trolley Problem may be an artificial philosophical construct, but the issues it (and the many other trolley problems, remember the trolley problem is actually a large set of problems) are actually really important ones that are encountered in real life. You could rewrite the trolley problem to be about how to vote in an election, or how to decide what to do if you know a friend's spouse is cheating on them and your friend doesn't know. The trolley problem simplifies things by limiting you to only two choices, giving you guaranteed knowledge of the effects of your decisions, and making consequentialist reasoning simple and mathematical. But there's nothing that says you couldn't pose the same problem with a multitude of choices, uncertain outcomes, and unclear moral weights.
First off, I don't think alignment is all that necessary in most campaigns. Really, if you're running just about any type of campaign, chances are you're characters are neutral to good, but don't really think about it so much. And that's fine. Alignment only really becomes important in Planescapesque settings where your character's beliefs actually play a huge part of the gameplay and one is regularly dealing with otherworlds and morality. And I've not really seen too many Planescape players with gripes about the old alignment system, as it's only in those books that I believe alignment was really well defined. Now I adore the old 9 Alignments. Wheras many saw it as an unrealistically rigid system, I see only flexibility. The problem I believe was how alignment was communicated and what it meant. First off, and this has been hit on many times in this thread, it's not something that is supposed to determine your character's actions. The other way around. Alignment should shift and ebb depending on what your characters think and do. Alignment shifts shouldn't be common (or else people might not be roleplaying seriously in the first place) but they can happen. It is descriptive, not proscriptive.
I think the major consternation with alignment is that it was never communicated properly, especially along the law-chaos axis. In relation to good-evil, most people just couldn't see whether your character obeyed laws or disrupted them made any real sense. Lawful Good people and Neutral Good people both want to do good right? If the laws in an area are only for the benefit of all, does that mean that by following these laws the Neutral Good person must become Lawful Good? And for that matter, what's the difference between a Lawful Evil person and a Neutral Evil person who both use laws to their advantage. And what's the deal with Chaotic Neutral anyway, is that just giving your character a liscence to act utterly ridiculous and random at any point they wish (to the annoyance of the other players)? Well, I can explain the differences quite clearly.
Good - Evil = This one is pretty easy and most people generally agree one a pretty basic interpretation. A character's relationship to other people. If they are selfless, treat other people as equal or above themselves, and get enjoyment out of helping others, then they are Good. If they are selfish, treat other people as below themselves, and have to make the lives of others worse in order to feel better about themselves, than they are evil. Neutral people are selfish to a degree in that they generally have their other concerns at the forefront, however they do seem to also respect other people enough not to step on toes and don't necessarily see themselves as better than others, though they expect people to generally help themselves.
Law - Chaos = Now here's the doozy. The Law - Chaos axis is used to determine a character's relationship with their environment. This means that the Law - Chaos axis is concerned not with how people should behave towards each other, but rather what the ideal world should be. A Lawful person believes that the world tends towards stability, that peace and harmony bring out the best in others, and that people are simply happier in a routine environment. Chaotic people on the other hand beleive that excessive rules are not natural, that conflict brings out the best in others, and that people are happier when they are free to do as the wish. Neutral people don't particularly care one way or the other how the world around them is ordered or they function best when their lives have a general routine but are not overly disrupted when change occurs.
Part of the problem is in the very wording of the alignment names. The Lawful adjective is improperly named for the most part. A Lawful character, to me, doesn't necessarily have to obey the laws of any society they're in. A better term for Lawful should have been Ordered. Think of the extreme of an OCD person. They have strict rules that must be adhered to in order for them to be at peace. The kicker is, Lawful people don't necessarily have to obey the law at all, especially in areas where they think that the Laws lead to unrest and discordance (and laws can do this). What's important is that the Lawful person have their own codes of conduct and ideas of what the proper way to act in an environment is that would foster the most harmony and follow this as best they can. Ideals of honor and tradition are obviously extremely lawful.
Chaotic is probably an appropriate term for the opposite side of ordered, though I like to think that it might be a bit too extreme. A chaos minded person thrives in an environement that is more fluid and murcurial. They enjoy conflict, but this doesn't have to be in a violent or combative sense... a Chaotic Good person would most probably adore romance and debates. A chaotic person can exist in a place and follow every rule in a society to the letter, but only so long as it suits them or they do not feel that they are trapped in a routine that stifles them. They don't necessarily have to go out and purposefully break laws, they just don't pay laws any heed and will obey them only as long as it is convenient for them to.
Remember that while Good and Evil might be more relatable moral absolutes to many of us, in many cultures it was more admirable and highly looked upon to be honorable to your ancestors and promote a stable environment. Times and places like feudal Japan and China, behaving in an Ordered manner was much more highly regarded than behaving in a Good or charitable manner. They considered morality more than just how one treated others but more about how one existed in relationship to your world. So perhaps it's a culture difference that explains why many have a hard time coping with alignment.
Anyways, going back to my original statement, if you feel that alignment doesn't add anything to your game, you simply should just throw it out. It's simply flavor or perhaps a guide that helps players try to put themselves in the shoes of their characters (especially if they're trying to play a character whose beliefs are very different from their own). It's pretty important in my Planescape campaign, but I can't really see it mattering much in most. However you feel about alignment though, I think we all have to admit that the new system is pretty dumb. I would have been fine with them simplifying it down to Good - Neutral - Evil, however having Super Good and Super Evil (my table has taken to calling it Autobot and Decepticon alignments) and then associating goodness with lawfulness and evil with chaotic...ness is so stupid it should require a patent. Luckily, of course, this is a pretty easy thing to just throw out completely.
Ding! And now we're back to the original point: some people believe there Right and Wrong answers, and the alignment system provides a flashpoint for them to come into conflict with other people who also believe there are Right and Wrong answers, but who believe in different Right and Wrong answers.
No. The original point is NOT that there are right and wrong answers to alignment questions (regardless of whether anyone agrees with anyone else). The original point is that there IS a stated and clear definition/description of alignment in the book. The purpose of alignment is stated clearly, and the use of alignment is stated clearly. None of this is vague or convoluted.
You may not like the rule, just like someone may not like that a falchion is a two-handed weapon, or that elves stand 5-feet tall, or that it's sometimes hard to describe something without someone thinking you're using a game term (she's stunning, he's a rogue, I'm exhausted). But I don't see how anyone can say the alignment rules are not clear.
I find it interesting that I'm the only one using actual information/quotes from the books. Why is this? I think if some would go back and actually read the text in the books, a lot of this thread would be cleared up.
If we were talking about attacks of opportunity, there'd be rules quotes all over the place.
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