Do alignments improve the gaming experience?

[Cadence]

But, if I'm playing a LG character, paladin or not, why would I choose an action that is not Lawful or Good? Wouldn't that be out of character? If I know that action X is judged as not LG, then how can it be the right thing to do for a LG character? Wouldn't the most palatable action for my character be the one that is most in line with my alignment?

Because your choices don't always include something that would be described as Lawful or Good? (Or is "lesser of two evils" just a saying?) Because in the heat of the moment people don't have time to weigh everything perfectly? Because maybe the character has other weaknesses and doesn't have the will power of Captain America and the battle against those inner demons is part of what they're role-playing? Why do people in real life do things they regret all the time?

But, in following his beliefs for his character, which he believes to be LG, he is actually violating his own code of ethics since alignment is supposed to be an outline for a characters code of ethics and morality isn't it?

Because alignment is a rough sketch of what the character believes forced down into one of nine boxes? Because people change their beliefs organically in real life? Because a player doesn't have total insight into how a real person would react based on a few dozen hours of role-playing and might realize they should act differently?

 

[pemerton]

if all the players are “Special Snowflakes”, then none of them are “Special Snowflakes”.

That makes no sense.

I have two children. Both of them are special. From the fact that both are special it does not follow that neither is. It follows, tautologically, that both are.

Providing the same treatment to everyone is not “special treatment”.

This is a non sequitur that turns on an equivocation on the meaning of "the same".

If the treatment you accord to everyone is that which is particularly and distinctively due to them as a unique individual, then you are treating everyone the same (in one sense of that word) but you are also according everyone special treatment, because (obviously) each is being treated differently, ie as befits him or her as a unique individual.

A school which says "We offer every student a unique learning experience" - as many do - is not contradicting itself. It is making a highly attractive pitch about the education that it is able to provide, namely, that for each student the program will be specially tailored to that student's distintive needs and aptitudes.

My reference was to that one player whose desires, game preferences, etc. must always override the preferences of everyone else in the group.

My game is full of such players. If the player of PC A wants A to do such-and-such, and the player of PC B wants A to do some different such-and-such, then the desires of A win out everyone time. Is A some terrible person? Or is it just that, in the rules of most RPGs, the player of a particular PC gets to choose how that PC acts, even if other participants in the game would prefer that the PC at some other way.

Putting the player in charge of adjudicating the extent to which his/her paladin or cleric lives up to that character's ideals doesn't raise any distinctive issue of selfishness beyond this ordinary principle, that it is up to each player to play his/her PC, and to develop, articulate and implement a conception of that PC.

That sounds very similar to the often touted “my players are all reasonable” statement often used to back up lack of any need for an alignment system. It seems like those players simply don’t push the boundaries, whether their motive is a lack of desire to do so, a mechanical alignment system (not so in your case, clearly) or a social contract.

Alternatively, pushing the boundaries within the fiction might be part of the permitted social contract. Once you don't use mechanical alignment, there are no boundaries in the relevant sense, other than sincerity in the playing of the character (and a corresponding willingness to own the choices that you make in playing him/her). Speaking for my players, at least, they don't conform to my conceptions of what honour (and other salient values) demand. They make their own choices for their PCs, which frequenlty surprise me.

And you haven't actually answered my question. If the GM's response to differences of evaluative opinon is to simply push back the boundaries of neutrality, so that every declared action is within the "shades of grey" and there is never any need to adjudicate an action as evil (or good?), what role is the alignment system playing? When is it actually being put to work so as to improve the gaming experience?

 

[pemerton]

Because your choices don't always include something that would be described as Lawful or Good? (Or is "lesser of two evils" just a saying?)

In a standard providential morality, the person who chooses the lesser of two evils has chosen rightly, and has therefore not done a wrong thing.

For instance, if villains configure a situation so the paladin can only save X and Y but not A and B, the paladin is not responsible for the deaths of those s/he cannot save - the villains are. The paladin, in choosing to save only those s/he can (and thereby letting the others die, for some tenable sense of "letting"), has chosen the lesser of two evils, but hasn't thereby chosen evilly.

Because in the heat of the moment people don't have time to weigh everything perfectly? Because maybe the character has other weaknesses and doesn't have the will power of Captain America and the battle against those inner demons is part of what they're role-playing? Why do people in real life do things they regret all the time?

But these are all examples of irrational choices - as is shown by the fact of regret. The person who chooses wrongly out of ignorance or weakness doesn't maintain that s/he chose rightly. Rather, s/he concedes that s/he chose wrongly. Hence the regret. (If s/he chose rightly, there would be nothing to regret, would there?)

people change their beliefs organically in real life?

With the exception of those few blessed by revelation - which is, in its nature, uniquely personal - the only access people in real life have to moral truth is the best arguments of the best thinkers.

In D&D, though, the evidence is available publically and trivially. Detect X spells, and the loss of class powers, provide objective measures of these posited objective cosmological forces. They make the relevant truths publically accessible in irrefutable ways.

Arguing with a Detect Evil spell, or with your loss of class abilities, makes about as much sense as arguing with a tape measure. Ie none, to me at least.

 

[Cadence]

If an ostensible ideal is unrealisable, for instance, then it's not a genuine ideal, it's just fatuous.

Do you mean in a particular circumstance, or consistently over one's entire life? If the former, that makes sense (and the next four sentences might be unneeded). In the later, I can see an argument that if one's ideals are easy to meet consistently, then they've probably aimed too low. Is that a common mentality in sports -that one can always do better and no performance is completely flawless? And at least one popular real world religion seem to argue that it is impossible for human beings to always live up to its ideals. Would that imply that a Paladin who always does the exactly right thing should be just as alien for a player to get into the character of as something from the far realms or a Sabbat vampire in WoD?


RE: @pemerton's post #1143. That all sounds right to me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

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Beause he lacks evidence. Note that, as the available evidence changes, so do the opinions of the character in question. Whereas I am talking about characters who have irrefutable evidence that their choices are not good (via the evidence of lost paladinhood, or the evidence of changed alignment as detected via magic).

it is compelling evidenve. Most people would accept it and realize they are wrong. But the character doesn't have the players hsndbook. The character might believe the god is mistaken, but just powerful enough to enforce his will on the character. People existing in these settings do not require perfect knowledge of how the cosmology works. Characters have limited point of view and can beliebe whatever they want to believe. Even in our own world we see people deny the truth in the face of overwhelming evidence. I do not think it is so crazy that character might choose to believe his godwas in error.

I really do think we've reached the end of the discussion here. If you cant accept this then that totally fine. But it is getting a bit frustrating being told by you that things we do in our games all thetime that make total sense to us and are viewed as completely logical and rational by our groups are irrational. I think you will just have to continue being puzzled by our behavior.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I don't disagree with this, though as I've said multiple times upthread, it's not a playstyle that personally appeals to me.

That makes sense to me. I see alignment as a distinctly D&D thing, and when I'm not playing it, I don't want it. When I do use alignment, I also tend to do the "is Good actually good?" thing when I'm running the campaign.

The argument that I've been running, that (I think) you stepped into, is that it makes no sense both to run the game in the way you have just described - positing objective cosmological forces of good and evil - and to allow that it makes sense for a character in such a gameworld to deny that the demands of objective cosmological good are really good. If you are going to run an "objective cosmological forces" game, then it seems to me that everyone buys into that, and the characters within the gameworld, recognising that there exist these forces of objective cosmological good and evil, accept their judgements.

Yeah, you'd think that it'd go one way or the other. Either you play as I described my campaign (shades of grey within the alignment system... "is Good actually good?"), or you'd go for the more clear-cut, no-debate approach ("Good is good, and we all agreed to this definition"). It doesn't make much sense to mix the two. To me, at least. I can easily see running with the "shades of grey" style and having many characters (even PCs) that don't end up questioning things, but if you're going with the "no-debate" approach, then mixing them doesn't seem like it'd work out well.

So, basically, if you want to be able to debate real-world morality in the game, there's still not a problem with saying "these things are Good and these things are Evil", in my experience, because you can still ask "but what is right and what is wrong?" And while you may discover, in play, that Good isn't always right (from your character's perspective), the alignment system certainly doesn't discourage you from exploring those questions. Again, in my experience.

This is one of the reasons I asked you earlier in the thread to stop conflating the words "right" and "good", in this context they are not the same thing and I believe you are the only one using them in a manner where they do equate to synonyms.

This is something I could see being a problem. I'm definitely not using them in the same way here.

But, if I'm playing a LG character, paladin or not, why would I choose an action that is not Lawful or Good?

Because your character feels that it would be morally correct to perform that action.

Wouldn't that be out of character?

If the character has been trying to be as morally straight as possible (which usually makes him end up at Lawful Good), then I sincerely doubt that it'd be out of character to continue to act in such a way. I say this from extensive personal experience on the "shades of grey" alignment side, and two LG PCs regularly debating their actions (as well as many NPCs that fell into that category that I ran).

If I know that action X is judged as not LG, then how can it be the right thing to do for a LG character? Wouldn't the most palatable action for my character be the one that is most in line with my alignment?

It depends on how beholden to that alignment he is. If he's a Paladin, I could see him being such a zealot that he's not going to stray from the path of Lawful Good; his faith in its ideals could blind him to any considerations that it might not always be the morally right path.

If, however, the character is concerned about right and wrong first and foremost (and not about alignment), and their actions have landed them a Lawful Good alignment, then it'd seem awfully out of character to not take the hypothetical non-LG action, as long as they felt that it was the morally right thing to do.

In my mind, you are arguing that the character is incoherent.

I don't understand your thought process.

IOW, if I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt (because the DM has told me before I do it) that my action is out of line with my chosen alignment, why would I continue to pursue that action, knowing that I'm violating the consistency of my own character?

I think we might have different understandings of what "consistency of character" might mean. In my experience, nearly all PCs are driven by beliefs, and their actions based on these beliefs determine their alignments. Very few PCs are driven by a particular alignment itself.

So, for the overwhelming majority of PCs (in my experience), it's not contradictory at all to act on their beliefs. For the few PCs that are driven primarily by a particular alignment, it would be contrary to that PC's beliefs, and thus he wouldn't consider the action the "right thing to do", even if he might feel conflicted, since, in the end, that act would violate what he believes in most (the alignment he adheres to).

Does that make sense?

 

[Umbran]

it is compelling evidenve. Most people would accept it and realize they are wrong. But the character doesn't have the players hsndbook. The character might believe the god is mistaken, but just powerful enough to enforce his will on the character. People existing in these settings do not require perfect knowledge of how the cosmology works.

Or, alternatively - note that in real-world mythologies, many gods are far, far short of omniscient. Zeus? Odin? Wise, sure. Knows lots of stuff, sure. But not omniscient. These gods pass judgments, and what they say may be enforced deific law, but they aren't always right! One can even find stories in which the gods are not themselves static - they make choices, and even though you might figure they *know* the difference between good and evil, they fall from grace anyway...

So, if the GM is judging alignment, by way of fallible gods, it is still possible for the god to have made a bad judgement call.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Arguing with a Detect Evil spell, or with your loss of class abilities, makes about as much sense as arguing with a tape measure. Ie none, to me at least.

The Lawful Evil Monk I gave as an example did almost exactly this -though he dismissed the spell more than argued about it. To him, the magic was obviously faulty; he lived his life tracking down murderers, rapers, thieves, etc., and punishing them. He hurt those who hurt innocent people. In his eyes, he was a good guy, and disputing that was nonsensical.

Of course, he would threaten innocent people that wouldn't cooperate with him, torture people before dismembering or murdering them, etc. By the book, he was pretty Evil. But, in his head, he was pretty far from it, and openly said so. This caused some debate amongst the PCs, but they would eventually go to him when they needed help and felt they had little other choice.

Yes, in the campaign world, he was measurably Evil. But, the debate was still on for whether or not what he was doing was right or wrong. In the campaign, the debate really wasn't "is the tool faulty?" (since they knew the Detect spell had functioned properly), but more of "is the tool always right?" And that was fun for us to explore.

Again, I'm not trying to convince others that this should be fun for them, I just don't see how this is somehow incoherent for the people that want to use alignment and still explore right and wrong. It's easy. I did it for years.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Or, alternatively - note that in real-world mythologies, many gods are far, far short of omniscient. Zeus? Odin? Wise, sure. Knows lots of stuff, sure. But not omniscient. These gods pass judgments, and what they say may be enforced deific law, but they aren't always right! One can even find stories in which the gods are not themselves static - they make choices, and even though you might figure they *know* the difference between good and evil, they fall from grace anyway...

So, if the GM is judging alignment, by way of fallible gods, it is still possible for the god to have made a bad judgement call.

I agree entirely. In fact my own setting has pallible gods on earth like greek or roman style gods, but has a more obscure and distant power from which goodness emanates. But even if the gods were not fallible, the people in the setting are not certain of that. They just have really darn good evidence. However a cynical character might just assume that Loff God of thunder and goodness is really just a powerful jerk imposing his will on the paladin. I just feel theplayers get to decide what is going on in their character's head and if they tell me their character disagree with the god's decision, i am fine with that.

 

[Nagol]

The Lawful Evil Monk I gave as an example did almost exactly this -though he dismissed the spell more than argued about it. To him, the magic was obviously faulty; he lived his life tracking down murderers, rapers, thieves, etc., and punishing them. He hurt those who hurt innocent people. In his eyes, he was a good guy, and disputing that was nonsensical.

Of course, he would threaten innocent people that wouldn't cooperate with him, torture people before dismembering or murdering them, etc. By the book, he was pretty Evil. But, in his head, he was pretty far from it, and openly said so. This caused some debate amongst the PCs, but they would eventually go to him when they needed help and felt they had little other choice.

Yes, in the campaign world, he was measurably Evil. But, the debate was still on for whether or not what he was doing was right or wrong. In the campaign, the debate really wasn't "is the tool faulty?" (since they knew the Detect spell had functioned properly), but more of "is the tool always right?" And that was fun for us to explore.

Again, I'm not trying to convince others that this should be fun for them, I just don't see how this is somehow incoherent for the people that want to use alignment and still explore right and wrong. It's easy. I did it for years.

So really the question became "Is Good the best yardstick for society/behaviour?"

I can easily envision situations where the good choice is known/knowable, but fails to provide the best outcome for the person acting -- either personally, for those important to him, or to how he thinks the wider society should be affected. The question then becomes how far down the slope will the characters go to pursue outcomes they consider best versus good.