Alignment - is it any good?

[Alnag]

I know, I know... this is neverending discussion. But I have recently met with group of people, who believe that the best one can do with alignment is not use it. In their opinion, it is not good even for newbies.

I would like to find some sources on both positions. The positive and negative effects of alignment. Why does D&D 3.xE even uses the alignment. What was the designer's goal? Was it just - keep this sacred cow alive or something more?

Is it good as a moral compax or does it limit you free role-play? What are you experiences. Thank you in advance for any insight on this issue.

 

[Doug McCrae]

It serves the same purpose as character classes - it's a communication tool. Just as class is a quick way of learning a character's abilities and party role so alignment is a quick way to find out how he will act. Most useful for NPCs, and for PCs if there's a high turnover. For campaigns with long established complex PCs it's not necessary.

 

[Pbartender]

I know, I know... this is neverending discussion. But I have recently met with group of people, who believe that the best one can do with alignment is not use it. In their opinion, it is not good even for newbies.

I would like to find some sources on both positions. The positive and negative effects of alignment. Why does D&D 3.xE even uses the alignment. What was the designer's goal? Was it just - keep this sacred cow alive or something more?

Is it good as a moral compax or does it limit you free role-play? What are you experiences. Thank you in advance for any insight on this issue.

An amusing anecdote...

Whenever my group plays D&D with its very segmented alignment-based moral system, no matter what alignment they profess to be, the whole group eventually ends up, to one degree or another, with a very mercenary mind set.

Recently, I tried using Burning Wheel's Instincts and Beliefs as a substitute for alignment, thinking that it would better support my players' preferred play style. Oddly enough, I ended up with characters that had suprisingly strong beliefs in some very high-minded ideals.

So, in my experiment at least, alignments were greatly inhibiting free role-play, and my group was much better served by switching to seomthign different.

 

[Ourph]

I have never found alignment to be particularly useful. However, it is integral to the way many classes, spells and items work in standard D&D so removing it is usually more hassle than it's worth. I would not be sad to see it go in future editions of D&D and to have the rules modified to support that change.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I know, I know... this is neverending discussion. But I have recently met with group of people, who believe that the best one can do with alignment is not use it. In their opinion, it is not good even for newbies.

I would like to find some sources on both positions. The positive and negative effects of alignment. Why does D&D 3.xE even uses the alignment. What was the designer's goal? Was it just - keep this sacred cow alive or something more?

Is it good as a moral compax or does it limit you free role-play? What are you experiences. Thank you in advance for any insight on this issue.

IMXP, most uses of alignment that turn out negative do so because they're not really using it according to the 3e method or they have some preconceived notions about what they're "supposed" to do. So with a group like that, alignment is better dead than alive.

But it's immensely useful to describe motives and philosophies for characters, IMXP. Say your character wants to be feared as a ruthless warlord because of a weak childhood of abuse. You may be both Chaotic and Evil, but you'd be a very different kind of CE from the barbarian prince of slaughter, and a very different kind of CE from a tanar'ri lord.

When you abandon the idea that all CE people believe the same thing and act the same way and have a way they're "supposed" to be, it gets a lot easier to use those words as a description, rather than a class: you believe in individual autonomy and you delight in your own power, disregarding the value of the lives of everyone you kill on your way to the top.

That doesn't mean you can't work with an LG character, either, as long as you're facing a common enemy: maybe the current evil king who rules the lands with an iron fist. The LG character wants him overthrown (so benevolence can be restored), the CE character wants him overthrown (so he can take his place), and until he is, they can work together.

 

[Mistwell]

I am not a fan of alignment. It makes the game less fun. Evil people should be determined to be evil based on the actions you can discover them doing, not what color they glow. And people should be able to radically vary their behavior based on the circumstances and not the pigeon hole words on their character sheet.

 

[tzor]

I've always had the opposite approach. I've found alignment to be a "good" general guide. The problem is that many people either try to make alignment what it is not or they want to impose some sort of neutral balance on the system. Face it, "good" is harder on the characer than "evil" and "law" is harder on the character than "chaos." Some people don't like to play characters where there are restrictions on their actions based on alignment conditions that they have placed on their characters.

Most people like to play their characters, so their aligment flows from their play. Hopefully their resulting alignment won't be true random and they will at least play their character somewhat consistantly. Some people like the ideals of some alignments and will play their character to those ideals. "I want to be a good guy who likes liberty and hates laws ... aka a somewhat chaotic good person."

Alignment is like other things. No two fighters think exctly alike. No two elves think exacty alike. No two chaotic good beings think exactly alike.

 

[GreatLemur]

I have to believe that the alignment system is a good thing if you want to play a game with the assumed setting and theme peculiarities of "generic" D&D: clearly-defined bad guys, absolute morality, moral inclinations as real and objective qualities, etc.

Beyond that, though, they're a pretty annoying feature of the system, and encourage a lot of really absurd character behavior. Instead of "I steal from people because I believe the world owes me a free lunch, and everybody else is corrupt, anyway." you get "I'm Chaotic Neutral, so I steal stuff, and mouth off to the guards, and dance on tables, and wander off in the middle of the dungeon to look for food, and generally try to act like a cartoon character with ADHD." It's completely fair to look at these situations and say that the real culprits are players who don't understand the alignment system, but the sheer frequency of the phenomenon still tells me that we'd be better off without an alignment system for them to misunderstand.

And, speaking personally, I'm not really interested in the D&D setting and theme elements that require an aligment system, anyway, so I wouldn't want one even if it worked correctly.

 

[Alnag]

IMXP, most uses of alignment that turn out negative do so because they're not really using it according to the 3e method or they have some preconceived notions about what they're "supposed" to do.

I like your way point of view. I also believe, that alignment is kind of "ready to use" mindset description.

It is a little bit as if I would say, I am phlegmatic, pessimistic materialist. These are also alignments, aren't they. (Choose one out of four temperament alignments -phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic, choleric), (Choose one out of three world prognostic attitude alignments - optimist, pessimist, realist), (Choose yourself one philosophical alignment out of many).

Isn't it pretty much the same? And is it so bad to pigeon-hole people this (or any other) way?

 

[shilsen]

Kamikaze Midget summed up my take on it perfectly. Alignment is a handy, if non-essential, tool in the game, and that's all.

One thing I will add is that I've found the existence of alignment actually adds more moral ambiguity to the game. When PCs find themselves being aided by clearly evil NPCs and opposing good NPCs, or find themselves having to pick sides between two opposing good (or two opposing evil) forces, it really makes them - and often the players - think about the meaning of good and evil and its applicability to human choice, belief and action.