What is your alignment?

[Holy Bovine]

Cross out your character's alignment and replace it with the opposite. What has changed? Nothing.

How I play my character has changed quite a bit I'd say. You seem to be wanting to make a point but in honesty I have no idea what it is.

 

[Moonsword]

And as others in this thread have said, 2 people would often view what alignment meant completely differently and on top of that many people view it as a straight jacket (despite clear and abundant rules to the contrary.) So is it your characters outlook, or is it a word or two that everyone will interpret differently and has no meaning? It certainly has no effect on game play.

And if you decide you're going to murder a village does it mean you're not allowed to because it says LG on your sheet? No, it doesn't, unlike every other thing on your character sheet. It is the one thing on the character sheet that doesn't mean what it says. If you want to lift a two ton block and it says you have 10 strength on your character sheet, guess what, you're not lifting that block. LG and kill a village, go for it, two tons with 10 STR, no.

So, because it's just two words on the sheet, lawful good characters will go out and murder a village? Uh, nope. It sums up a lot of your moral and ethical outlook based on the definition in the book. That's the common reference right there, and it certainly has an effect on gameplay if you play this as something other than a pure hack-'n-slash fest where the characters have about as much personality as a piece on a chess board. Just because there aren't hard and fast definition, or it doesn't actually have a strict mechanical* effect doesn't mean it doesn't affect play.

*: Assuming you're not a divine character with a spiritual pact of some sort with a divinity, anyway (including invokers and avengers who are sworn to a specific deity). Bahamut and Moradin would undoubtedly yank your powers right then, no questions asked, and I sort of doubt Erathis, Kord, or Pelor would look too favorably on that little stunt while we're on the topic. I'm not looking to play the 3E paladin code out, but there are minor faults and then we have "direct, wanton, and grievous violations of a divinity's entire moral ethos". You're looking at Category B there.

 

[aurance]

I think Regicide's point is, play your charcter the way you want to portray him/her. It really shouldn't matter what's written in the alignment space - if you want to play him as what you think is "lawful good," then play him as lawful good. If you've got a good grasp on what you want to do with your character's personality, writing down alignment serves no real function other than saying to other players, "Hey! My character is lawful good!"

If one of my players consistently plays a "good" personality character, even though his sheet says "evil," then the campaign world and its NPCs will react accordingly to his "good" personality. It matters not one bit what he has written down on his sheet - that's a piece of metagame reminder note, nothing more.

 

[aurance]

*: Assuming you're not a divine character with a spiritual pact of some sort with a divinity, anyway (including invokers and avengers who are sworn to a specific deity). Bahamut and Moradin would undoubtedly yank your powers right then, no questions asked, and I sort of doubt Erathis, Kord, or Pelor would look too favorably on that little stunt while we're on the topic. I'm not looking to play the 3E paladin code out, but there are minor faults and then we have "direct, wanton, and grievous violations of a divinity's entire moral ethos". You're looking at Category B there.

4e is pretty careful to separate out a character's powers from his behavior. No class loses powers based on ethos violations - at least that's the default assumption.

 

[Ryujin]

I think Regicide's point is, play your charcter the way you want to portray him/her. It really shouldn't matter what's written in the alignment space - if you want to play him as what you think is "lawful good," then play him as lawful good. If you've got a good grasp on what you want to do with your character's personality, writing down alignment serves no real function other than saying to other players, "Hey! My character is lawful good!"

If one of my players consistently plays a "good" personality character, even though his sheet says "evil," then the campaign world and its NPCs will react accordingly to his "good" personality. It matters not one bit what he has written down on his sheet - that's a piece of metagame reminder note, nothing more.

And yet an alignment still makes for effective shorthand on a character's general motives, when used correctly. In 4e if a player was going against his stated alignment, then I would have no issue with changing it unilaterally. IT would have no effect on the character other than those couple of words on a sheet of paper, but do you think that most players would take it with equanimity?

There are two things in the game that tend to point to a character's life outlook; alignment and deity. The way that a deity's sphere is defined in 4e also helps to show a character's social tendencies. You won't typically find a follower of Erathis out defending a wood from evil land developers, but you might find him protecting those same developers from the ravages of "evil" (to him) forest barbarians who are killing the developers.

 

[Bumbles]

Using it as a short-hand descriptor is relatively fine, it's the use as a yoke (as it was in prior editions) that gets on people's nerves.

 

[Ryujin]

Using it as a short-hand descriptor is relatively fine, it's the use as a yoke (as it was in prior editions) that gets on people's nerves.

Everything in the game is essentially optional, to one degree or another. It's all open to house-ruling, interpretation, or outright disposal at the whim of the GM. I've run campaigns in which I didn't use alignment at all. Characters who were aligned with a deity in some way had to tell me how the god's tenets were applied or create a code of conduct, that they were thereafter expected to follow.

For the "straight jacket" type alignment systems my favourite has always been Paladium RPG. My only objection was that my typical Dirty Harry style character (Aberrant alignment) was seen as evil. Enh. I learnt to live with it.

 

[Bumbles]

Everything in the game is essentially optional, to one degree or another.

And what? We can't find disagreement with things written in the books because it's all optional?

In the case of Alignment, that's been one of the things people have found disagreement with, particularly in regards its use as a straitjacket.

And of course, even though it's all subject to group consensus, the base rules of the game do have a profound impact, so many people are glad that the default isn't the strict yoke of prior editions.

 

[Ryujin]

And what? We can't find disagreement with things written in the books because it's all optional?

In the case of Alignment, that's been one of the things people have found disagreement with, particularly in regards its use as a straitjacket.

And of course, even though it's all subject to group consensus, the base rules of the game do have a profound impact, so many people are glad that the default isn't the strict yoke of prior editions.

Quite the contrary. My position is that through every version there has been tacit (and frequently expressed) permission to disagree and handle things just as you feel you should.

 

[Bumbles]

Quite the contrary. My position is that through every version there has been tacit (and frequently expressed) permission to disagree and handle things just as you feel you should.

Well, I think you're underestimating the impact of the default. Me, I can understand why people are relieved to see the core rules changed to something more akin to their liking. Sure, you could have changed it already yourself, many people did, for things besides just alignments, but when they see it in the core rules? It looks good. And this isn't just alignment. Things like level limits, hit points, and thief skills also fall into this domain. I don't know how else I can help you understand it. Hope that helps. If not, maybe somebody else will try.