I actually really enjoy the alignment aspect of character creation if only because it is an interesting philosophy study. There in the book is presented all sorts of food for thought.e.g. How can someone actually justify murder for profit? I liked it not so much for the questions it answered but for the questions it revealed. It presented an oportunity to think from another perdpective. It all depends on what the character wants. If they want to help OTHERS then they would learn towards good. If they want to help SELF, then they would lean towards neutral or evil. If they are willing to "throw others under the bus" for their own gain, then they are evil. If they are not willing to demean others for gain then they are neutral. Just because they dont kill people does'nt mean that they are'nt evil. It just means that it does'nt serve their interest. It is also interesting to try to see were you personally fit on the chart. Once again not as a labeling tool but as a introspection tool. Also alignment is seperate from politics. you can have a CG tree hugger or a CG art-lover or a CG government-hater. Just because they focus on diff. aspects of life does'nt affect their alignment.
Understanding Alignment
- Thread starter Bullgrit
- Start date
Quote: The same people running companies that use sweat shop labor to cut prices also donate millions to philanthropic causes every year.
Then why do they cut cost. Is it for more profit on their end, or is it to give more to charities. He could be donating to charities to make himself look popular or get more business. Millions of $$ is pocket charge for Billionares. It depends on the motivation of the person. If he sincerely believes that doing business this way is for the greater good then he is merely an good person who needs counseling. If his practices are so bad that they MUST be stopped then the players could explain the reality to him and if he refuses to heed, then that would either suggest insanity or an alterior selfish motive (which would make him evil). The players would have to make the call to try again or kill him. This provides the always interesting moral dillema. But ultimately if the characters kill him out of the desire to help people they are still good. But no one is concieously evil. But they are sub-consiously evil. perhaps he believes he is doing good but really that is just the emotional response of the smiling poor people that he gives charity too. Hitler believed that the Jews were out to take over the world. which sounds good right? But he did'nt try diplomacy first. Good and Evil depends on the subjective value of a sentient life. How hard will you try to make peace before using force? How bad will you feel when you take life? Do you wish you did'nt have to kill, or do you see it as another nessissary death for the cause of "good".
Then why do they cut cost. Is it for more profit on their end, or is it to give more to charities. He could be donating to charities to make himself look popular or get more business. Millions of $$ is pocket charge for Billionares. It depends on the motivation of the person. If he sincerely believes that doing business this way is for the greater good then he is merely an good person who needs counseling. If his practices are so bad that they MUST be stopped then the players could explain the reality to him and if he refuses to heed, then that would either suggest insanity or an alterior selfish motive (which would make him evil). The players would have to make the call to try again or kill him. This provides the always interesting moral dillema. But ultimately if the characters kill him out of the desire to help people they are still good. But no one is concieously evil. But they are sub-consiously evil. perhaps he believes he is doing good but really that is just the emotional response of the smiling poor people that he gives charity too. Hitler believed that the Jews were out to take over the world. which sounds good right? But he did'nt try diplomacy first. Good and Evil depends on the subjective value of a sentient life. How hard will you try to make peace before using force? How bad will you feel when you take life? Do you wish you did'nt have to kill, or do you see it as another nessissary death for the cause of "good".
MrGrenadine
I Cast...Brainstorm!
I agree. I was and still am a big fan of the 3.5 alignment structure, and never had a problem understanding or implementing it.
Alignment is never a straitjacket, because that would be putting the cart before the horse. It is simply the sum of all of a character's deeds and decisions--not the thing driving them, but a representation of past actions, and in that way, a fair barometer of how the character is likely to act in the future.
In other words, characters act freely, according to their values and/or whims, and those actions can all be classified as being somewhere on the Law-Chaos and Good-Evil axes. Over time, a character's actions will add up to Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil, or wherever--perhaps without the character even being aware of such distinctions.
Of course, this presupposes an order on the universe that won't work for everyone's campaigns, but I love the fact that over time my character can act as he or she wishes, and at higher levels, realize that his or her actions have garnered the attention of far more powerful forces, (some of whom want the character to continue on that path, and some of whom want to stop the character in his or her tracks).
Hussar
Legend
I'll point you yet again at Keep on the Borderlands. The orcs and various other humanoids are living in the caves, and have their females and young with them.
How is that not a village?
Well, that's true enough. They no longer have the call. But, that wasn't what I was questioning. You claimed that in 4e there is no effect for ignoring the goals and strictures of my paladin's faith. There are.
I would point out that the 500 xp is only spent for deliberate acts, so it's not always a cost. But, that's still not the point. You claimed that there is no problem with a 4e paladin ignoring his code. That's false.
There is absolutely nothing preventing you from playing a 3e style paladin in 4e. Nothing. You could have a code of conduct exactly the same as a 3e style paladin. The only difference is, you no longer have the DM's Sword of Damocles hanging over your head, but, ((shudder)) you actually have to role play your character by choice rather than being forced by mechanics. Oh noes. Whatever shall you do?
Voadam
Legend
From the 3e srd
I'm dedicated to the cause of humanity and not to others by personal relationships.
I protect innocent human life and make personal sacrifice to protect and help other humans. I'm good.
I also destroy innocent nonhuman life to make way for humanity. I'm evil.
I'm both evil and good.
I'm also clearly not neutral with respect to good or evil.
According to the clear rules of alignment in 3e.
I'm dedicated to the cause of humanity and not to others by personal relationships.
I protect innocent human life and make personal sacrifice to protect and help other humans. I'm good.
I also destroy innocent nonhuman life to make way for humanity. I'm evil.
I'm both evil and good.
I'm also clearly not neutral with respect to good or evil.
According to the clear rules of alignment in 3e.
Some D&D players find alignment to be a helpful tool for creating interesting character and conflicts. Some of them have done wonderful things in their games with it.
Other D&D players find alignment to be unhelpful, unnecessary, and/or downright confusing. Some of them have done wonderful things in their games without it.
Now we all understand alignment!
Other D&D players find alignment to be unhelpful, unnecessary, and/or downright confusing. Some of them have done wonderful things in their games without it.
Now we all understand alignment!
Exactly -- coincidentally, I made this point earlier
.Practically speaking, what a player needs in order to play a paladin the way they are conceiving of the class is the DM's consent and support. The DM needs to provide a setting and adventures that make the paladin archetype possible. In a very real way, the rules don't matter, particularly the fluff in the rule books (why would you need the rule book to restate the paladin archetype if you already have a firm idea of it in your mind?).
Despite what the rules state, I'm pretty confident that many DM's over the years ran campaign featuring paladins that were little more that 'fighters with holy water poured over them' (this might have something to do with the inherent tension between the clear swords and sorcery roots of D&D and a class based on Sir Galahad). I'm guessing quite a few were no more that stone-cold killers in plate mail who were immune to disease, rode fancy horses, and eventually swung Holy Avengers.
Mind you, I'm not knocking the desire to play a souped-up Grail knight in D&D. But realistically speaking, it's the DM (and group) that ultimately make that possible.
Voadam
Legend
There is a little more than that.
It also tells you what good characters do for purposes of D&D, protect innocent life and make personal sacrifices to help others.
Of course, an evil cultist can sacrifice everything for others as well. The selfless fanatical minion who sacrifices himself for his master/cult/cause is a clear evil archetype IMO. It shows you are a dedicated servant of others, not that you are good, IMO. Sacrificing for others is only good IMO for the benefit to the others, the sacrifice itself is not an important good in and of itself.
awesomeocalypse
First Post
Alignment was a clunky and often nonsensical behavioral straightjacket for players, and has therefore essentially been removed from the game in any mechanically meaningful sense. Which I'm grateful for. I don't have much use for the revised alignment chart either, but at least the game doesn't force me to acknowledge its existence.
That doesn't mean I don't lend morality any weight in-game. I just do so in a more organic and interesting way.
Take a look at artifacts for instance. In previous editions, they were explicitly linked to a certain alignment. But in 4e they just have personalities, which have goals much more specific and interesting than merely being "aligned", and the mechanical features that might once have been tied to rigid adherance to a specific alignment now work on a sliding scale of adherance to the artifact's goals. An artifact might be a relic of a people wholly devoted to trade and commerce, and would reward its bearer for engaging in trade, but punish them if they merely hoarded all of their possessions or if they used thievery to bypass honest commerce. IMO thats a much more interesting approach to introducing some sort of moral standard into the game than merely declaring an item "good" and saying it will only work with "good" people. What does good mean, anyway? Does an orc shaman who has spent his life healing those of his tribe think of himself as "evil"? A specific artifact or person or god might have an idea of what is good, but there is no universal absolute, which is the way it should be.
In one of my campaigns the dm has houseruled that the ability to use domain feats to boost at-wills is tied to how well the player is serving their god--deviate too far from the teachings of one's god, and you may lose the ability to use those domain feats temporarily. But those godly teachings are never so broad and simplistic as merely being "lawful good" or "chaotic evil". Instead, each god has highly specific goals and things they care about. Bahumut, for instance, cares a great deal about order and justice and guarding the helpless, and he expects his paladins to uphold those values. But in a recent campaign, one of our adventures involved a lord whose daughter had fled an impending marriage to be with her true love, a member of a rival nation. The lord asked us to get her back, but when we reached her, she offered us a different reward to help her and her beloved flee. A few in our party were all for helping her escape to be with the one she loved...but not our Paladin of Bahumut. He figured that Bahumut values order over mere passion and emotion, and would never approve of forsaking a promise like a betrothal in order to follow the whims of one's heart--the noble thing to do would be to suck it up and try one's best to fulfill the promise even if it made one unhappy. We ended up hauling her back kicking and screaming. On the old alignment scale, this might have prompted a long argument over which course of action was the closest to "lawful good" behavior. But in this game, that wasn't relevant, only one god's particular interpretation of "good", which didn't necessarily conform to our modern conceptions.
This is, in my mind, a far superior approach to handling moral questions than a built in "objective" system.
A classic example of the murkiness/overall uselessness of alignment is to try to place most American presidents on an alignment scale.
For example, JFK: on the one hand a war hero who bravely risked his own life to save others, a champion of the poor and downtrodden who laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights act, an inspiring and charismatic speaker who far more than anyone else of his generation clearly articulated the ideals by which a modern America should live and act, and a shrewd negotiator who helped to avert disaster during the Cuban Missille crisis. On the other: a rampant philanderer who, despite his ostensible support for both Catholicism and women's rights, made no discernible effort to keep to his marriage vows, a pampered rich kid who used his father's gangster connections to vote the cemetaries in Chicago, thus stealing a presidential election, and a naive and arrogant commander who approved a cockamamie scheme to use the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government, resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths.
Do his successes make him good, or do his failings make him evil (and what might a Soviet have said about him at the time)? Do you split the difference and call him Neutral? That seems oddly unfocused for a man with such a distinct ideology.
You could do the same for any other president (please don't. I don't want to start a Bush or Obama flamewar). Or any other figure, really. Try to apply the alignment issue to any figure in history who isn't hopelessly mythologized (i.e. not Lincoln, Genghis or Jesus), and you invariably run into issues like this. People's behavior is a complex jumble of idealism and self-interest, refracted through a thousand different personal beliefs and biases, and every time we judge them we do so through our own, highly subjective experiences. Life is not a morality play. Unless your D&D campaign is purely about Disneyesque moral paragons running around killing Nazi Demon serial killers, its probably not going to be a straightforward morality play either, and mechanics that try to pretend otherwise are just going to result in lots of stupid and nonresolvable arguments.
In my campaigns, nearly every being with more than a basic level of intelligence has a motivation--and that motivation is hardly ever that they want to be "good" or "evil". I mean, the occasional demon or drow lich might revel in their own depravity, but most beings, even of supposedly "savage" races, aren't like that. This is purely because most people aren't like that, and its a lot easier for me to effectively roleplay characters who act in a manner and with a motivation that I can understand.
I'm not interested in a guard who mindlessly attacks the pcs because he's on the evil side, I'm interested in a guard who serves a lord whose actions might be considered evil, but who himself just wants a paycheck to keep food on his family's table and tries to be a nice and reasonable person in his day to day job. I'm not interested in the impecabbly virtuous cleric who heals the pcs because its the good thing to do, I'm interested in the cleric who seems impecabbly virtuous, but also relentlessly pursues political power for her church and so extracts certain favors for healing--which of course to her is a "good" action, because she believes her god to be good. I'm not interested in a "good" nation at war with an "evil" empire, I'm interested in two competing countries, each with some legitimate grievances and made up of many diverse people, good and bad. I'm less interested in easy moral "questions" like "should we kill the evil guy?" with clearcut answers like "hell yes", than I am in posing legitimate dilemnas like, "should we help out these settlers in wiping out the orcs who've been raiding their village, even though the settlers themselves drove the orc from their ancestral homeland to make their village?"
My favorite fictional worlds are ones where magic or sci-fi technology exist, and can do amazing things, but people are as complex, morally ambiguous and conflicted as in any other fiction or literature. I'm not interested in how a world of black and white good and evil would react to a magic spell of enormous power--I'm interested in how a world full of complex, dynamic individuals of varied and ambiguous motivations would react to that spell. Rigid adherance to an aligment just makes me feel like some ridiculous pseudo-character in an Ayn Rand book, an abstraction rather than a fully fleshed out person who i could actually imagine in the real world.
Of course, I like political, intrigue and rp-heavy campaigns. If one was to play 4e as simply a progression of fights with a thin veneer of roleplaying gloss, I could see how alignment might be necessary to inject any flavor whatsoever. But once you go deeper than that, I think alignment is fairly limiting. Certainly, I'm glad its not really a mechanic anymore.
Objective notions of good and evil stike me as being inherantly and by definition melodramatic. Take a look at how wikipedia defines melodrama,
That, to me, sounds like a hard and fast alignment system. Villains are villains and heroes are heroes, we always know who is good and who is evil, and who we should be rooting for and why. The only possible emotional outcomes are classically happy (good guy wins) or melodramatically tragic (villain wins).
True drama, as opposed to melodrama, is to be found in shades of gray; in human beings acting not like embodiments of good or evil but like human beings, in partial victories and losses, in ambiguous conflict without a clear resolution.
I feel alignment pushes characters *away* from a complex set of motivations, and towards simplistic, rigid moral codes--that is, alignment encourages melodrama. Yes, if you're sitting down at some LFR event which is likely to consists of nothing but a 4-encounter delve in which the players will just kill a bunch of monsters, alignment can be useful for pushing players to come up with a modicum of personality that they might otherwise have neglected--I'd prefer melodrama to meaningless dice rolling.
But for a long-term, rp-heavy campaign? One in which entire sessions might consists of nothing but rp and skill challenges, and in which each character will undergo significant personal development? Alignment is, at best, an oversimplified, very minor piece of each character's personality--so much so that you could remove the oversimplified shorthand and lose nothing whatsoever. At worst it actually inhibits the sort of complex drama I find interesting.
I love using D&D, and other roleplaying games, to ask and explore moral questions. But those moral debates are only meaningful if they take place on the same terms as it takes place in life--i.e. without objective answers. That is, in life we don't have any access to objective answers. None of us do. We can choose to believe a given holy text or philosophy or political system, or just muddle along as best we can. We can approach things logically via philosophy, or simply take cues from our own emotions and gut sense of morality. We can argue with others and attempt to convince them, or draft laws to enforce certain behaviors. But we will never arrive at an objective, definite answer. And thats what makes it interesting and dramatic.
Using D&D to explore moral questions is awesome. But they have to be genuine questions. If the answers are right there, bound up in some god's degree, the planar structure of the universe, or an overbearing mechanic, then there are no questions.
I've rambled enough. TLDR: I like drama that rings true to my sense of how people actually behave, and dislike melodrama that doesn't, and I find that alignment has nothing to do with the former and actively encourages the latter.
That doesn't mean I don't lend morality any weight in-game. I just do so in a more organic and interesting way.
Take a look at artifacts for instance. In previous editions, they were explicitly linked to a certain alignment. But in 4e they just have personalities, which have goals much more specific and interesting than merely being "aligned", and the mechanical features that might once have been tied to rigid adherance to a specific alignment now work on a sliding scale of adherance to the artifact's goals. An artifact might be a relic of a people wholly devoted to trade and commerce, and would reward its bearer for engaging in trade, but punish them if they merely hoarded all of their possessions or if they used thievery to bypass honest commerce. IMO thats a much more interesting approach to introducing some sort of moral standard into the game than merely declaring an item "good" and saying it will only work with "good" people. What does good mean, anyway? Does an orc shaman who has spent his life healing those of his tribe think of himself as "evil"? A specific artifact or person or god might have an idea of what is good, but there is no universal absolute, which is the way it should be.
In one of my campaigns the dm has houseruled that the ability to use domain feats to boost at-wills is tied to how well the player is serving their god--deviate too far from the teachings of one's god, and you may lose the ability to use those domain feats temporarily. But those godly teachings are never so broad and simplistic as merely being "lawful good" or "chaotic evil". Instead, each god has highly specific goals and things they care about. Bahumut, for instance, cares a great deal about order and justice and guarding the helpless, and he expects his paladins to uphold those values. But in a recent campaign, one of our adventures involved a lord whose daughter had fled an impending marriage to be with her true love, a member of a rival nation. The lord asked us to get her back, but when we reached her, she offered us a different reward to help her and her beloved flee. A few in our party were all for helping her escape to be with the one she loved...but not our Paladin of Bahumut. He figured that Bahumut values order over mere passion and emotion, and would never approve of forsaking a promise like a betrothal in order to follow the whims of one's heart--the noble thing to do would be to suck it up and try one's best to fulfill the promise even if it made one unhappy. We ended up hauling her back kicking and screaming. On the old alignment scale, this might have prompted a long argument over which course of action was the closest to "lawful good" behavior. But in this game, that wasn't relevant, only one god's particular interpretation of "good", which didn't necessarily conform to our modern conceptions.
This is, in my mind, a far superior approach to handling moral questions than a built in "objective" system.
A classic example of the murkiness/overall uselessness of alignment is to try to place most American presidents on an alignment scale.
For example, JFK: on the one hand a war hero who bravely risked his own life to save others, a champion of the poor and downtrodden who laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights act, an inspiring and charismatic speaker who far more than anyone else of his generation clearly articulated the ideals by which a modern America should live and act, and a shrewd negotiator who helped to avert disaster during the Cuban Missille crisis. On the other: a rampant philanderer who, despite his ostensible support for both Catholicism and women's rights, made no discernible effort to keep to his marriage vows, a pampered rich kid who used his father's gangster connections to vote the cemetaries in Chicago, thus stealing a presidential election, and a naive and arrogant commander who approved a cockamamie scheme to use the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government, resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths.
Do his successes make him good, or do his failings make him evil (and what might a Soviet have said about him at the time)? Do you split the difference and call him Neutral? That seems oddly unfocused for a man with such a distinct ideology.
You could do the same for any other president (please don't. I don't want to start a Bush or Obama flamewar). Or any other figure, really. Try to apply the alignment issue to any figure in history who isn't hopelessly mythologized (i.e. not Lincoln, Genghis or Jesus), and you invariably run into issues like this. People's behavior is a complex jumble of idealism and self-interest, refracted through a thousand different personal beliefs and biases, and every time we judge them we do so through our own, highly subjective experiences. Life is not a morality play. Unless your D&D campaign is purely about Disneyesque moral paragons running around killing Nazi Demon serial killers, its probably not going to be a straightforward morality play either, and mechanics that try to pretend otherwise are just going to result in lots of stupid and nonresolvable arguments.
In my campaigns, nearly every being with more than a basic level of intelligence has a motivation--and that motivation is hardly ever that they want to be "good" or "evil". I mean, the occasional demon or drow lich might revel in their own depravity, but most beings, even of supposedly "savage" races, aren't like that. This is purely because most people aren't like that, and its a lot easier for me to effectively roleplay characters who act in a manner and with a motivation that I can understand.
I'm not interested in a guard who mindlessly attacks the pcs because he's on the evil side, I'm interested in a guard who serves a lord whose actions might be considered evil, but who himself just wants a paycheck to keep food on his family's table and tries to be a nice and reasonable person in his day to day job. I'm not interested in the impecabbly virtuous cleric who heals the pcs because its the good thing to do, I'm interested in the cleric who seems impecabbly virtuous, but also relentlessly pursues political power for her church and so extracts certain favors for healing--which of course to her is a "good" action, because she believes her god to be good. I'm not interested in a "good" nation at war with an "evil" empire, I'm interested in two competing countries, each with some legitimate grievances and made up of many diverse people, good and bad. I'm less interested in easy moral "questions" like "should we kill the evil guy?" with clearcut answers like "hell yes", than I am in posing legitimate dilemnas like, "should we help out these settlers in wiping out the orcs who've been raiding their village, even though the settlers themselves drove the orc from their ancestral homeland to make their village?"
My favorite fictional worlds are ones where magic or sci-fi technology exist, and can do amazing things, but people are as complex, morally ambiguous and conflicted as in any other fiction or literature. I'm not interested in how a world of black and white good and evil would react to a magic spell of enormous power--I'm interested in how a world full of complex, dynamic individuals of varied and ambiguous motivations would react to that spell. Rigid adherance to an aligment just makes me feel like some ridiculous pseudo-character in an Ayn Rand book, an abstraction rather than a fully fleshed out person who i could actually imagine in the real world.
Of course, I like political, intrigue and rp-heavy campaigns. If one was to play 4e as simply a progression of fights with a thin veneer of roleplaying gloss, I could see how alignment might be necessary to inject any flavor whatsoever. But once you go deeper than that, I think alignment is fairly limiting. Certainly, I'm glad its not really a mechanic anymore.
Objective notions of good and evil stike me as being inherantly and by definition melodramatic. Take a look at how wikipedia defines melodrama,
That, to me, sounds like a hard and fast alignment system. Villains are villains and heroes are heroes, we always know who is good and who is evil, and who we should be rooting for and why. The only possible emotional outcomes are classically happy (good guy wins) or melodramatically tragic (villain wins).
True drama, as opposed to melodrama, is to be found in shades of gray; in human beings acting not like embodiments of good or evil but like human beings, in partial victories and losses, in ambiguous conflict without a clear resolution.
I feel alignment pushes characters *away* from a complex set of motivations, and towards simplistic, rigid moral codes--that is, alignment encourages melodrama. Yes, if you're sitting down at some LFR event which is likely to consists of nothing but a 4-encounter delve in which the players will just kill a bunch of monsters, alignment can be useful for pushing players to come up with a modicum of personality that they might otherwise have neglected--I'd prefer melodrama to meaningless dice rolling.
But for a long-term, rp-heavy campaign? One in which entire sessions might consists of nothing but rp and skill challenges, and in which each character will undergo significant personal development? Alignment is, at best, an oversimplified, very minor piece of each character's personality--so much so that you could remove the oversimplified shorthand and lose nothing whatsoever. At worst it actually inhibits the sort of complex drama I find interesting.
I love using D&D, and other roleplaying games, to ask and explore moral questions. But those moral debates are only meaningful if they take place on the same terms as it takes place in life--i.e. without objective answers. That is, in life we don't have any access to objective answers. None of us do. We can choose to believe a given holy text or philosophy or political system, or just muddle along as best we can. We can approach things logically via philosophy, or simply take cues from our own emotions and gut sense of morality. We can argue with others and attempt to convince them, or draft laws to enforce certain behaviors. But we will never arrive at an objective, definite answer. And thats what makes it interesting and dramatic.
Using D&D to explore moral questions is awesome. But they have to be genuine questions. If the answers are right there, bound up in some god's degree, the planar structure of the universe, or an overbearing mechanic, then there are no questions.
I've rambled enough. TLDR: I like drama that rings true to my sense of how people actually behave, and dislike melodrama that doesn't, and I find that alignment has nothing to do with the former and actively encourages the latter.
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