Alignment - is it any good?

[Arkhandus]

I said the same thing above: that in D&D heathens have to be replaced with Orcs and Demons. This is a plot quite unlike the Crusades, where the enemies were ordinary humans just like you and me.

Tolerable change is obviously a matter of degree. I think the changes that alignment forces upon the plot are so great that the plot has been replaced by another plot.

Not exactly. Historical crusaders weren't clerics or paladins in the D&D sense; they didn't hurl around flame strikes and stuff, and didn't spontaneously heal themselves mid-battle, frex. They were civilians, mercenaries, soldiers, knights, even criminals in some cases (IIRC) who the Church convinced to go fight in the Middle East for God and country, and primarily for personal glory/salvation/release from prison/monetary reward.

Ergo, they were Fighters, Rogues, Warriors, Experts, Aristocrats, and Commoners in D&D terms, who marched off to war for the Church but were not, generally, priests or holy warriors of the Church. Thus there is no problem using the same kind of conflict in D&D, generally; it would be a bunch of human Fighters and such facing other human Fighters and such. Since they're not gifted with divine powers (and it's a lot easier to find/amass/recruit a whole lotta laymen from around the country to fight for you in return for payment/redemption/whatever, than it is to acquire an entire army of holy men that have each earned their god's blessings or whatever), they aren't generally going to suffer any backlash or anything in the short term for fighting other Goodly people. And maybe someday they'll earn actual redemption from their deity and not wind up in the Abyss after they die, wondering how they got there after fighting in that so-called holy war they had thought was just. It's not like they can't drift back towards decent behavior after the war and regain Good alignment eventually.

I think that this is part of the problem with alignment - a lot of PCs actually default to behaviour that the system describes as Neutral, but the system (and its mainstream campaigns) assume that PCs default to Good. I think this is a recipe for conflict at the gaming table.

Well, that would be because not every D&D group (or player) actually wants to play a heroic character; they just want to play a bad-@$$. But D&D is a game designed around the expectation that most PCs will, usually, be Good-aligned or at least working toward a Good cause (save the world, etc.), even if they struggle with it. I don't really fault the system for supporting what it's primarily intended for. And besides, most campaigns aren't based around moral ambiguity and hard choices involving Good fighting Good; that's not the default or expected norm in D&D.

I don't agree that on earth it's just a matter of opinion. I certainly don't agree that it's a matter of majority opinion. But I think political and moral conversation breaks the Code of Conduct, so I'll leave it at that.

What I meant by this was that, in the real world, we don't have a universal moral compass we can consult and just say "this is right and that is wrong, and the Universe itself says so, so you can't really debate the ethics of it".

Real ethics is all a matter of philosophy and religion and individual interpretations, even though many things are generally considered 'good' or 'bad' by most folks, generally as part of human nature, but there's still a lot of gray that different ethical philosophies provide opposing answers to. The general public, through systems of law, determines what will be accepted by their peers as 'right' or 'wrong' behavior, at least for determining what can and cannot be punished or condoned. Etc.

In D&D however, there are cosmic forces of alignment that any priestly acolyte can check, and get the same result as a priest of any other faith will get when doing the same check; that so-and-so is Evil, and this other guy is Good, and that guy is Lawful, etc. The Multiverse in D&D determines morality, so D&D characters can take pretty accurate guidance from the Multiverse's forces of alignment and get a solid answer (Phylacteries of Faithfulness, if I recall the name correctly, also help clerics and such). And of course there's stuff like Commune. Hope I clarified what I meant in the first place.....though I think I've started rambling now on a tangent.

As for the gameworld, I realise what alignment is meant to model. I don't think it does it all that well, because the real earthlings who have to implement it don't have access to the modelled fantasy world, so they deploy their ordinary (and competing) concepts of good and evil, and disputes break out.

And it is the DM's most basic job anyway to adjudicate rules disputes and clarifications. The DM's judgment on D&D alignment issues becomes the standard for the group's campaign, as long as they're playing under that DM.

And if the DM is even just a little bit mature, he shouldn't be screwing over the players' characters with a lame ruling that doesn't include letting them change their choice of action (I hate peurile DMs who say "Too bad! You lose! Ha-HAH! Your paladin is so screwed now that he's lost his powers!" or similar things. That's just bad DMing, and people shouldn't keep playing with jerks like that who have a stick up their butts). Of course, any cooperative DM (rather than adversarial DM) will work with the players to determine these alignment interpretations, and won't make it use up too much time in the middle of a game. But it is the DM's game, and someone else could always take up DMing if they don't like it (or better yet, find a more reasonable DM, if possible).

And besides, if the DM wants to mess up the PCs/players, he will do it anyway, regardless of what the rules say (even if he wants to maintain an illusion of 'by the RAW' rulings, he can easily find another rule to exploit and screw over the PCs anyway).

I don't know what to say regarding DM Fiat. If you didn't need a DM to adjudicate things occasionally, wouldn't you just be playing a board game, where absolutely everything is handled by a strict rule, and roleplaying is entirely 'coincidental' rather than an integrated part of the game? Or something. I just don't see a problem with needing a little bit of DM adjudication. And besides, you could always just choose to play characters of reasonably clear moral standing; unless you play a cleric or something, you don't have to worry about whether or not the DM chooses to insist that your character's recent actions shifted his/her alignment; as long as you keep playing the character, his usual behavior should return his alignment to its previous setting, unless the DM is a jerkwad that only ever counts negatives.

This is very true. But I think that alignment actually induces the problem, it doesn't alleviate it, because it brings the question "Is my character Good or Evil" to the forefront of the game. A game without alignment just lets the player play the character, and the NPCs and other PCs can respond to the character as s/he is played, without having also to worry about what moralising label gets applied. If the GM tells the player of the paladin that the gods have cancelled her PC's powers, he doesn't also have to tell her that she's been Evil. The player (as we do in the real world) can quite happily take the view that the god has made a moral error. Feeling might still be hurt, but I think it's not quite as confrontational and potentially upsetting as it is when alignment labels are involved.

That's more a problem with an immature DM than anything else. Even without alignment, trying to play a paladin-esque character could get your powers revoked at some point just ENTIRELY due to baseless GM fiat, rather than having some rules to back you up and refute his/her decision.

If your GM is a super-strict and opinionated person who doesn't show signs of caring about the players' participation/enjoyment of the game, then you should've already figured beforehand that it might be unwise to try playing a morally-restricted character in his/her campaign, when you weren't sure yet if he would cooperate and not screw your character up at random without giving you any kind of warning or 'are you sure you want to do that?' response first. Otherwise, you should be able to work it out like reasonable gentlemen in a reasonably short discussion.

The D&D alignments really just give players a reason to think "maybe I should avoid messing with the town guard/stealing that cool item/slaughter those goblin children" because the DM may consider that grounds for an alignment change, which may or may not matter to the player. And really, all the player has to do usually is ask the DM "do you think my character is drifting towards evil alignment?" or whatever. Heck, if there's a mid/high-level Cleric in the party, it's easy; ask him to Commune with one of the questions being "is so-and-so close to falling out of your favor (or so-and-so's patron deity's favor)?" or ask if they're turning towards evil, and he can probably get a straight answer.

If alignment wasn't in the game, PCs would generally be able to do the most horrendous things whenever they feel like it and not suffer any consequences unless they do such things while observed in public or whatever. That doesn't mean they would, but it does mean that a paladin or cleric or whatever probably couldn't be trusted any moreso than an average Joe Mercenary, because they're not really beholden to follow a particular code of behavior to remain within Pelor's/Heirroneus'/St. Cuthbert's good graces and retain their special powers. Or something, I dunno. I just generally find alignment to provide a bit of incentive and rationale for heroic PC behavior and such.

 

[pemerton]

Arkhandus, thanks for the reply. A lot of what you say I agree with, there's just a couple of points I wanted to pick up, to try and explain a bit more why I see things a little differently.

Historical crusaders weren't clerics or paladins in the D&D sense; they didn't hurl around flame strikes and stuff, and didn't spontaneously heal themselves mid-battle, frex.

<snip>

Ergo, they were Fighters, Rogues, Warriors, Experts, Aristocrats, and Commoners in D&D terms,

<snip>

And maybe someday they'll earn actual redemption from their deity and not wind up in the Abyss after they die, wondering how they got there after fighting in that so-called holy war they had thought was just. It's not like they can't drift back towards decent behavior after the war and regain Good alignment eventually.

Without wanting to offend anyone's religious sensibilities, I'm happy to agree that the historical crusaders were not miracle-workers. They were real people. If we wanted to stat them out in D&D terms, we'd therefore use classes like Rogue, Fighter, Aristocrat etc.

But that's not exactly how they saw themselves. The Knights Templar, for example, saw themselves as holy warriors. They lived under a rule drawn up by Bernard of Clairvaux, widely acknowledged by his peers as the most important monk of his era in western Christendom. They believed that carrying the relic of the True Cross would bring them blessings in battle. If I want to play a fantasy RPG in which I model these beliefs, then I'm going to want to make some of the Christian clergy clerics, some of the Templars paladins, etc (think about how Ars Magica might handle it - at least some of the crusaders had True Faith).

Furthermore, at least according to Catholic teaching of the time, fighting in the crusade really was sufficient to earn redemption from sin. So if we want a game that reflects the world-view of the participants (rather than our own, more sceptical, beliefs) it won't do to say that the crusaders are really Evil, and going to the Abyss.

But nor do I want to cast the Muslims as Evil. That would be absurd. Apart from anything else, it makes no sense for them to have only blackguards and not paladins - because a blackguard thinks of himself self-consciously as a scheming villian, whereas Saladin had the same sort of self-image as Richard the Lionheart, that is, as a noble, generous and chivalrous warrior, fighting a holy fight.

So we are left with Good vs Good. But for the reasons I gave in response to KM, I find Good vs Good very hard to envision. I thus find that alignment stifles the plot. (For a more extended version of this argument, see "For King and Country" in Dragon 101 - in my view one of the best ever Dragon artilces.)

Another example, if the crusades doesn't work for you, could be Arthur versus the Saxons, or the Saxon kings versus the vikings. Some of the Saxon kings were reputed to have healing powers, and D&D has tended to model Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad etc as paladins. But this creates pressure to characterise the Saxons or Vikings (depending on the campaign) as Evil, which is implausible.

Its always an option, of course, to drop the alignment-drive divine casters from a historically-influenced D&D game. But I've always found it much easier to drop alignment (which I don't like) and keep the classes (which, on the whole, I do like).

The D&D alignments really just give players a reason to think "maybe I should avoid messing with the town guard/stealing that cool item/slaughter those goblin children" because the DM may consider that grounds for an alignment change, which may or may not matter to the player.

<snip>

If alignment wasn't in the game, PCs would generally be able to do the most horrendous things whenever they feel like it and not suffer any consequences unless they do such things while observed in public or whatever. That doesn't mean they would, but it does mean that a paladin or cleric or whatever probably couldn't be trusted any moreso than an average Joe Mercenary, because they're not really beholden to follow a particular code of behavior to remain within Pelor's/Heirroneus'/St. Cuthbert's good graces and retain their special powers. Or something, I dunno. I just generally find alignment to provide a bit of incentive and rationale for heroic PC behavior and such.

This is probably where we have a more fundamental disagreement - though I find your "dunno" telling. Because it suggests what I strongly affirm: that alignment doesn't make any difference.

What stops PCs playing rapists and murderers? In my experience, because they don't want to play such characters. They typically want to play either heros, scoundrels or Conan-esque mercenaries, but not psychopaths.

To put it another way: if a player doesn't care that s/he is playing a psychopath, why should s/he care if his or her character is labelled Evil? Why is alignment change a threat? In AD&D 1st ed it cost XPs, but if that's the case why not just start with an Evil character?

If the answer is, because only Good PCs get healing from the NPC clerics, etc, then we can handle this just as well without alignment: only nice people get healing from the NPC clerics. If the concern then is that PCs will secretly do wicked things, while maintaining an innocent facade, that looks to me like the starting point for a great campaign - though look out, PCs, when all is revealed and the wrath of the church finally falls upon you!

Or is alignment really a tool for GMs to berate players - "Don't have do that wicked thing because if you do you'll change alignment to Evil! And I don't GM Evil PCs." I suspect that this is a common use of alignment - the GM uses it to force players to fit his or her conception of the gameworld, even if this is at the expense of the players' conceptions of their PCs - but if this is what a game has come to then (as your post says, and as I agree) there seems already to be a deeper problem of adverserial GM-player relations

 

[Kmart Kommando]

Every time a campaign starts where one of the rules is "you can't be Evil" there is always a Blasphemy in the PCs' future. :\

Lawful Evil is the only alignment worth playing. I have that one down to a science.

My IH game, when it's my turn to run it, is going to have no alignments. But I think that's the way it comes anyway. As the game should be.

 

[Aezoc]

I think alignment is a useful tool for a group that's new to (or just not particularly comfortable with) roleplaying. Putting every intelligent being in the multiverse into one of nine groups is painting with a pretty broad stroke, but it can provide a very high-level view of a character's thoughts, actions, and goals.

That said, I don't use it in my games. If I have a new player (new to RPGs in general), I'll sometimes suggest they pick an alignment as a starting point, but just for their own benefit. I think for a group that's comfortable developing characters' personalities and roleplaying as those characters, alignment is stifling rather than helpful.

For one thing, alignment is vague - I think you really only have to look at the number of "What alignment is X?" threads and the amount of discussion on them, and it becomes pretty obvious that everyone doesn't see eye-to-eye on the issue. For example, last time I checked the House thread, there were arguments for LN and CN. This becomes a big problem just because alignment is shoehorned into the mechanical aspects of the game by the (IMO very metagame-y) magical effects that discern or depend on alignment, and it can be the source of a lot of headaches if the DM and player don't agree on what alignment the PC is. Personally, I think it's a bad design choice to give characters attributes with mechanical implications, and give only nebulous guidelines for how to determine said attribute's value.