D&D General Rethinking alignment yet again

[Vaalingrade]

I missed the part where he endorses slavery as the Chaotic Good way of things.

Sweet Georgia Brown, how did this game survive?

 

[Cadence]

I missed the part where he endorses slavery as the Chaotic Good way of things.

Sweet Georgia Brown, how did this game survive?

Given everything I've read of.what inspired him in alignment, I'm surprised it wasn't noted as being Lawful Good.

I mean <insert things in the news>.

 

[Celebrim]

So, it seems most people disagree with the basic premise I wrote up. I've been having hard time organizing my thoughts on it, which is why I haven't posted any replies til now.

Ok, on some levels I'm baffled by your response and can only assume I have done a really bad job in describing what I believe. I won't worsen the situation by trying to immediately reexplain myself and likely end up with you just more confused. I assure you I don't believe that the alignments are just teams. I don't know how you read that, but it wasn't my intent.

I will try to address some of the statements you've made in this post in their own right.

So I guess what I'm really working on is the aspect of using alignment as a personality marker..

No, that won't work. You cannot use alignment as a marker for personality or culture at all. It is not descriptive enough to do that and IMO no simple array or list is complex enough to describe personality or culture. That isn't what alignment is for and it does a really bad job of that and cannot be made to do a good job of that. Each of the alignment buckets contains a very large number of personalities, cultures, and philosophical belief systems. You might can analyze a personality or culture and figure out in which bucket to throw it, but you can't do the reverse and take something out of the bucket and know its personality or culture.

My favorite way to explain this is to go the best article ever written on personality in D&D NPCs, which is the old Seven Sentence NPC from Dragon #184 by C.M. Cline. Read that article and its example NPCs and think about them for a moment. I contend that as beautifully described as the personalities are in those examples, they do not tell us what the alignment the characters are. Further, that each of the example personalities could be any of the nine alignments, and most importantly that if we also knew the alignment of the example NPCs we would know something additional about them that we could not know just by knowing their personalities.

So if you are looking for a way to map Alignment to personality, not only have you missed the point of alignment but your project is doomed. You'd be better off doing the Seven Sentence Personality or the Seven Sentence Culture.

And you can go ahead and do that project and say, "Oh, Drow believe in Strength." But what you'll find is that even after you do it, you know more if you also know their alignment because it will tell you a lot about what they think Strength is and how they think it is acquired, or conversely if we know a lot about what they think Strength is or how they think it is acquired, then we probably can guess what alignment bucket to put them in.

Or the model for orcs: Bravery/Cowardice and Loyalty/Infidelity. Bravery and Loyalty are terms that we'd describe as 'good'...

No, no no. Bravery and loyalty are neutral terms. Whether we equate them with goodness depends entirely on what the person is being brave and loyal about. If you are brave and loyal in defense of a terrible cause, we might admire that bravery and loyalty to a certain extent, while still thinking it is foolishness and evil. Merely being brave or loyal tells us nothing about whether someone is good. It just maybe tell us something about their self-control and self-discipline. But Darth Vader is not good just because he's brave and loyal to the Emperor, and he doesn't lose his goodness when he betrays the Emperor - quite the contrary.

And, I don't mean to make you feel bad or anything, but so much of the problem in discussing these issues is just sloppy thinking where I feel the person is making statements that, if they thought about them hard, they wouldn't even agree with them. I don't think you really do think Loyalty is "Good", because there are few modern Western cultures that really take that idea seriously and really claim that Bravery and Loyalty are in and of themselves Good. If you did think it didn't matter in what service you were Brave or Loyal, I think we could characterize that belief system in D&D terms as something other than Good and you'd need to evaluate your biases when trying to describe alignment.

And you get that because you go on to say:

The question is not about the virtues themselves, but about what that bravery is put into service to, and who they are loyal to. If they serve an evil god, then that loyalty is to those who represent that god, and bravery is put into service accomplishing the goals of that evil god. They side with Evil in the cosmological sense, but that doesn't really describe how they view the world.

But don't you think that does matter what you are brave and loyal about? I mean these aren't merely just teams. The perception that all teams are equal and it doesn't matter what they believe you always defend your own is also an alignment viewpoint. It does matter what belief system you have.

I'm not saying there isn't an objective good and evil, only that that's not a very useful descriptor for behavior.

I mean it is and it isn't. It depends on what you mean by "behavior". It is a very useful descriptor for determining whether or not the individual or society values things like compassion and mercy. It's not a very useful descriptor for determining whether or not the individual lies tea ceremonies or music.

They are generally derived from human moral systems, which means they don't feel like they're appropriate when describing cosmological scale separation.

Why?

So, I guess the model is less about alignment itself, and more about how to describe a society's virtue compass.

And I'm not understanding the problem here.

 

[Dausuul]

Alignment is both personal AND cosmic team. You aren't really pledging yourself to the cosmic team consciously like you are envisioning. You are automatically on a cosmic team by virtue of your behavior(alignment) and you further it through those behaviors.

But what if your "alignment" behavior doesn't actually further the interests of your team?

According to most recent setting material, demons vastly outnumber devils in the Blood War, but the war remains in balance because demons are incredibly disorganized; they have to be forced into service by more powerful demons, show no discipline, etc. This behavior matches the ethos of their cosmic team... but it severely hinders the interests of that team.

Under @Jer's approach, you'd still expect most of the Chaos team to behave in such a manner; it wouldn't be the Chaos team otherwise. But if an archdevil were to turn against Asmodeus and join the forces of the Abyss (as Graz'zt did in the 4E cosmology), the archdevil would become aligned with Chaos, despite being as methodical and disciplined as ever, and those traits could greatly advance the demonic cause.

I think this results in a much more interesting take on alignment.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I have played for decades. It’s always been fine for my group with the idea that you and the DM are on the same page.

I think describing your general approach to morality to the DM and discussing is fine if your group struggles with it—though I have no idea how some convention play goes.

I miss having rules that reflect tropes about being pure of heart—-able to wield certain items based on alignment etc.

Really the group just needs a shared understanding and it can be a boon. It can also be a point of contention if the group and DM are not in alignment. (Pun not intended).

 

[Kurotowa]

This is why I don't give alignment any more weight than a personality test that starts with "What's your favorite color?".

If alignments are significant indicators of what cosmic team you're on, they do nothing more than reveal the designer's own worldview biases. The original Gygaxian setup was that LG was a Jehovah's Witness's idea of what was holy and righteous, and everyone else was at best a misguided heretic or virtuous pagan, at worst a literal tool of Satan. All attempts at revising the system are just trading the seating arrangement, not changing the fact that there's one "right" alignment and everyone else is wrong. But if alignments are subjective or relative moral judgments, you run into the problem that everyone has a justification and no considers themselves to be Team Evil. And if they're supposed to be some sort of objective evaluation, then who's making it and by what standard?

There's still a place for alignment as a board shorthand personality trait in NPC stat blocks. But as a game mechanic? I'm not a fan.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

That's why I personally don't put much emphasis on Good and Evil when I DM or in arbitrating what is Good or what is Evil. I'm much more interested in Law and Chaos, which I personally find easier to define in a way that I don't think would step on many people's toes. To me, Lawful just means "makes things more predictable" whereas Chaos means "makes things less predictable". Law works towards building unified standards that all follow willingly, while Chaos is more about personal freedom (but not necessarily freedom for all, such as in the case of tyrannical demon lords).

 

[Cadence]

No, that won't work. You cannot use alignment as a marker for personality or culture at all. It is not descriptive enough to do that and IMO no simple array or list is complex enough to describe personality or culture. That isn't what alignment is for and it does a really bad job of that and cannot be made to do a good job of that. Each of the alignment buckets contains a very large number of personalities, cultures, and philosophical belief systems. You might can analyze a personality or culture and figure out in which bucket to throw it, but you can't do the reverse and take something out of the bucket and know its personality or culture.

How long does a marker for personality or culture need to be in order to be descriptive enough? Two sentences? A paragraph? A book? An entire field of study?

That the human eye can distinguish around something like 10 million colors doesn't mean that describing something using the closest of the Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Purple, Pink, Black, White, Grey is useless, does it? Or does it just means one needs to not claim it gives all of the important details. The chair in the room is described as Red and one can imagine that. The base color plus the car make might be good enough for watching out for your ride. You need something a lot more in depth for matching paint colors though.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Ever since I first heard about how alignment entered D&D — in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, the players organized themselves into Team Good and Team Evil and competed for treasure and territory; Gygax decided to use Law and Chaos in his Greyhawk campaign instead, because he was a Moorcock fan — I cannot see alignment as anything other than teams for different groups of players operating within the same campaign milieu to belong to. Less moral philosophies, more sports factions that get out of hand (like the Byzantine Blues and Greens).

And if you don't have multiple groups of players operating within your milieu? Just one group of players that acts as a single party all the time? Then alignment serves no useful purpose whatsoever.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Ever since I first heard about how alignment entered D&D — in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, the players organized themselves into Team Good and Team Evil and competed for treasure and territory; Gygax decided to use Law and Chaos in his Greyhawk campaign instead, because he was a Moorcock fan — I cannot see alignment as anything other than teams for different groups of players operating within the same campaign milieu to belong to. Less moral philosophies, more sports factions that get out of hand (like the Byzantine Blues and Greens).

I was unaware of this, but it sounds fascinating. I need to look into it.