Do alignments improve the gaming experience?

[S'mon]

I'm kinda back in this thread despite ENW's terrible comments box

(with the smileys that overlap over the writing area and the lines that
go outside the visible text area, needing frequent carriage returns to see what I'm writing)

because I've found this to be an issue in my current Pathfinder campaign.
The Hellknight organisation in Golarion uses harsh means to fight against worse evils.
Are they justified? Are they 'Good'? 'Computer says no' per the Alignment system,
since the game pegs them LN/LE. I find this is getting in the way of a lot of
otherwise-interesting moral questions.

Edit: I play the Hellknights as Judge Dredd types - or Dirty Harry types...
They're LN/LE, which means the moral pre-answer is that they're better than the NE factions,
but worse than the CG factions.

 

[S'mon]

That said, if I were participating in the kind of campaign you are envisioning, where the DM puts an Evil label on anybody with whom he has a political disagreement, I would agree with you that alignment is being used to stifle debate rather than enrich the campaign. Good means making sacrifices for other people, not necessarily making the objectively correct choice that will best result in people being helped by those sacrifices. Choosing to disregard due process of law in order to protect the innocent, as a number of "anti-heroes" like Dirty Harry do, doesn't make one Evil in a D&D context even though it is something about which many LGs would strongly disagree.

I was discussing an actual campaign another poster mentioned, where LG and LE factions
were working together against Chaos, and the LE were distinguished from the LG by their lack of compassion. Since Dirty Harry represents a reaction against the emphasis on compassion
of the US justice system in the late '60s and early '70s, I used him as an example of
uncompassionate policing. In the movies Harry is the protagonist and his political
opposition are straw men - if you were doing Dirty Harry in D&D 'straight' you'd probably want to ggive him a G alignment, his political opponents an N, and the criminals CE.
IRL there's an interesting debate to be had about the limits of compassion - but the Alignment system just gets in the way. It pre-decides the answer: if Harry is G and his boss N, we know Harry's POV is right (or that the author thinks he's right). If Harry is N or E and his political foes are G (as in 'rogue cop as antagonist' shows like Between the Lines) then we know Harry is wrong.

Nobody says "Harry has an Evil alighment, and he's right. His boss is Good, but wrong".
Do they?

 

[pemerton]

Well they could be Neutral IMC. The Evil merchant would enslave the parent and connive to let the children starve anyway!

<snip>

AIR Gygaxian Evil is very Evil indeed, while it's not hard to be Gygaxian-Good, and you can be as murderous as REH-Conan and be Neutral. This got changed a fair bit in 2e & 3e, in 2e Evil became Selfishness rather than an active desire to cause harm.

I think this is a reasonable point about changes in D&D alignment over time; although other things that Gygax says suggest that Good is stricter, with references to "human/creature rights".

But in a Hyperobrian campaign - or a bleaker Roman-style one - then I agree with you about the N merchant insisting on slavery/servitude as a payment. You could say that some of my own judgements/prejudices informed my earlier post!

 

[N'raac]

If you look at actual, real-life attempts to understand matters like balancing compassion with community protection, you don't see anything like D&D-style LE vs LG. You find essays like Max Weber's famous "Politics as a Vocation", or Michael Walzer's work on "dirty hands", or Isiah Berlin's defence of Machiavelli as a virtue theorist: that is, various attempts to explain why certain approaches to compassion or similar values are in fact naïve and dangerous. You don't find mere assertions of selfishness or ego-privilege.

And we're back to needing a degree in ethical philosophy to play the game. No thanks.

First, actual real-world attempts to resolve these sorts of conflicts of morality and value are far more enlightening than Gygax, who was not himself trying to solve them, and did not provide us a very good framework for thinking about them.

Second, in the sort of "good game" you describe, how is alignment improving the game experience? It seems to be irrelevant to it.

As indicated numerous times, I am not saying alignment automatically improves the game. I am saying it does not automatically detract from it either, and both you and Hussar have repeatedly said alignment does, or would, make your games worse.

That quote from the 2nd ed books is so obviously wrong (perhaps naive is a better word) that all it tells us is that the author has not read much philosophy, nor much serious fiction, nor much history, nor much economics.

An, again, I do not need my fantasy world to reflect real world ethical philosophy any more than it needs to reflect real world history, sociology, economics (compare price to wage; where is the tax system?), legal theory, geography, climatology, etc. etc. etc. Its a game, not a Ph.D. thesis.

For instance: a character whose children are starving will probably pay anything to obtain food for them, even selling him-/herself into slavery or servitude. Is a merchant who will charge such a parent as much as s/he is willing to pay evil? You need to tell me something else pretty special about the situation to stop me answering "Yes, absolutely!"

Again, you pick an extreme situation which is not the one I believe the book is trying to represent. Need the merchant be evil, or is he Neutral ("I don't care if those children ie - I can sell my food/clothing/medicines for a higher profit over there")?

 

[billd91]

I was discussing an actual campaign another poster mentioned, where LG and LE factions
were working together against Chaos, and the LE were distinguished from the LG by their lack of compassion. Since Dirty Harry represents a reaction against the emphasis on compassion
of the US justice system in the late '60s and early '70s, I used him as an example of
uncompassionate policing. In the movies Harry is the protagonist and his political
opposition are straw men - if you were doing Dirty Harry in D&D 'straight' you'd probably want to ggive him a G alignment, his political opponents an N, and the criminals CE.
IRL there's an interesting debate to be had about the limits of compassion - but the Alignment system just gets in the way. It pre-decides the answer: if Harry is G and his boss N, we know Harry's POV is right (or that the author thinks he's right). If Harry is N or E and his political foes are G (as in 'rogue cop as antagonist' shows like Between the Lines) then we know Harry is wrong.

Nobody says "Harry has an Evil alighment, and he's right. His boss is Good, but wrong".
Do they?

I haven't seen a Dirty Harry movie in a long time, but is there a reason Harry and his opponents can't both be good or both be neutral? The argument that the alignment system pre-decides the issue depends on too many assumptions. It assumes that someone of a good alignment can't be mistaken in their moral judgment. It also seems to assume that people of the same basic alignment can't disagree or that moral disagreement must come from a conflict of essential alignments. Please take off the straight jacket.

 

[jsaving]

IRL there's an interesting debate to be had about the limits of compassion - but the Alignment system just gets in the way. It pre-decides the answer: if Harry is G and his boss N, we know Harry's POV is right (or that the author thinks he's right). If Harry is N or E and his political foes are G (as in 'rogue cop as antagonist' shows like Between the Lines) then we know Harry is wrong.

If Harry is G and his boss N (or E), we know that Harry values compassion more than his boss does -- but that is because Harry has more compassion than his boss does. The labels G and N are only shorthand labels for those values, correctly achieving their goal of telling you which character is more compassionate without "dictating" or "pre-deciding" this themselves.

It almost sounds like you're saying something else, though -- that if a player or the DM writes the letter 'G' on a character sheet, then that character should be deemed "right" no matter what the character actually does during play. If this is what you mean, then I would completely agree that alignment is "getting in the way" because it is being used in a way that inaccurately describes the core values of its characters. I've seen this in a couple of campaigns, when the DM is either a very strong liberal/conservative ideologue and thinks the other side is objectively uncompassionate or when the DM's relative/friend is in the game and gets special leeway to be selfish without "falling" to N or E.

In short, alignment is useful when and only when it accurately reflects the underlying values of the characters in the game. If it does this, then it isn't dictating anything; but misused, it can dictate everything and do more harm than good.

 

[pemerton]

It almost sounds like you're saying something else, though -- that if a player or the DM writes the letter 'G' on a character sheet, then that character should be deemed "right" no matter what the character actually does during play.

Of course [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] can speak for himself. But as I happen to agree with him, I'll also reply to this.

I am saying that if a player or GM uses the label "good" to describe one outlook, emotion or set of behaviours, then they are endorsing that. And if the label "evil" is used to describe a different (and conflicting) outlook, emotion or set of behaviours, then they are condemning the latter. (The endorsement or condemnation may be in the real world - I think Gygax certainly had aspects of that in mind- or may be simply imagined, within the scope of the shared fiction of play.)

What makes no sense is for (say) a cleric to cast Know Alignement or Detect Evil and say "I know that action/person is evil but I don't know whether or not it is right/virtuous."

 

[pemerton]

I am not saying alignment automatically improves the game.

But presumably you think it sometimes improves the game. It just seems to me that every example you give of alignment improving the game is in fact an example of alignment not getting in the way of the game. I haven't really seen in what way it actually improves it, other than the occasional hint - swiftly repudiated - that it provides outer boundaries for GM enforcement of acceptable player action declaration.

And we're back to needing a degree in ethical philosophy to play the game.

<snip>

I do not need my fantasy world to reflect real world ethical philosophy any more than it needs to reflect real world history, sociology, economics (compare price to wage; where is the tax system?), legal theory, geography, climatology, etc. etc. etc. Its a game, not a Ph.D. thesis.

I think you misunderstand me.

Of course the game isn't a PhD thesis. No one needs a degree in ethics, or anything else, to play the game. But if the game sets out to describe morality, then I am going to hold it to reasonable standards. Why would I take Gygax seriously on the conflict between "compassion" and "social order" when I can read Weber instead? How would dumbing down my game to some half-baked, implausible moral scheme which has no basis in real life, nor in ordinary lived experience, nor in the best writing in the field, improve my game?

It's like suggesting that the Gord the Rogue novels shed more light on the human condition than Graham Greene, or the war poets, or Wagner, or Tolkien, or - for that matter - REH. Whatever my personal view on REH's thesis about the relationship between humanity, civilisation and barbarism, it's more interesting and better thought through (eg via his Conan and Kull storie) than anything Gygax or Zeb Cook has to say on the topic.

TLDR: you seem to be implying that alignment is some tenable approximation for those who don't want to write a PhD thesis in moral philosophy. My point is that alignment is distorting, unworkable and (hence) hopeless. All analogies are invidious, but it is one thing to simplify the rules for character's falling, another thing completely to say that when you fall into a pit you hang suspended in the air. The latter isn't a simplification; it's a distortion. Alignment is like that.

 

[N'raac]

But presumably you think it sometimes improves the game. It just seems to me that every example you give of alignment improving the game is in fact an example of alignment not getting in the way of the game. I haven't really seen in what way it actually improves it, other than the occasional hint - swiftly repudiated - that it provides outer boundaries for GM enforcement of acceptable player action declaration.

I find alignment provides a convenient shorthand, and an indication of a heroic motivation, or a villainous outlook, quiet consistent with fantasy source material. I do not need to agonize over real world ethical philosophy to play the game.

Of course the game isn't a PhD thesis. No one needs a degree in ethics, or anything else, to play the game. But if the game sets out to describe morality, then I am going to hold it to reasonable standards. Why would I take Gygax seriously on the conflict between "compassion" and "social order" when I can read Weber instead? How would dumbing down my game to some half-baked, implausible moral scheme which has no basis in real life, nor in ordinary lived experience, nor in the best writing in the field, improve my game?

It's like suggesting that the Gord the Rogue novels shed more light on the human condition than Graham Greene, or the war poets, or Wagner, or Tolkien, or - for that matter - REH. Whatever my personal view on REH's thesis about the relationship between humanity, civilisation and barbarism, it's more interesting and better thought through (eg via his Conan and Kull storie) than anything Gygax or Zeb Cook has to say on the topic.

Why take Gygax seriously on how to set a fantasy game in play at all? Use the works of REH, Tolkein, Leiber, Moorcock, decamp, Wagner or whatever floats your boat. However, I would note that D&D alignment has not been in Gygax's control for a very long time. Many other game writers saw fit to maintain the 3x3 grid while stripping quite a few other elements away. Your view that it is unworkable flies in the face of the experience many gamers who have found it works just fine in their games. Or are we all playing "unworkable games" and just haven't figured it out yet?

 

[jsaving]

I am saying that if a player or GM uses the label "good" to describe one outlook, emotion or set of behaviours, then they are endorsing that. And if the label "evil" is used to describe a different (and conflicting) outlook, emotion or set of behaviours, then they are condemning the latter.

You seem to think D&D's alignment system is unworkable unless it includes an objective standard for classifying every outlook, emotion, or set of behaviors. I very much disagree with this. All alignment does -- all it is supposed to do -- is provide a shorthand description of how much characters value order and compassion. That's it.

Yes, the label "good" means compassionate/selfless/altruistic in D&D, and those are qualities that many players and GMs would endorse. And yes, the label "evil" means hurting/oppressing others in D&D, and those are qualities that many players and GMs would condemn. But there is nothing inherent in the alignment rules that says good is to be praised and evil condemned -- that value judgment would come from the players/DMs themselves.

No one needs a degree in ethics, or anything else, to play the game. But if the game sets out to describe morality, then I am going to hold it to reasonable standards. Why would I take Gygax seriously on the conflict between "compassion" and "social order" when I can read Weber instead?

I don't think anyone is proposing you should, because the D&D alignment system has never set out to describe morality in a comprehensive way. All it has done is provide shorthand descriptors for two attributes: the degree to which one is compassionate and the degree to which they value order. Those who find those attributes useful will find D&D's alignment rules similarly useful, and those who don't, won't.

If somebody wants to understand the frontiers of moral philosophy, of *course* they should close their PHs and look to Kant, Mill, Hegel, Weber, and countless other thinkers who offer comprehensive moral paradigms through which to view the world. But the D&D alignment system can fail to meet this standard and still be a useful shorthand description for a character's overall outlook.