I'm glad you're finally starting to get it.
No, I knew you had so very little idea of what you were talking about from the beginning. Because if that oath is enough to make you Lawful, then really you are advocating for 4e Alignment system, because there is only Good and Lawful Good, Evil and Chaotic Evil and not much else.
Because "I promise to be good and not evil" is not a lawful sentiment. It has nothing to do with law, unless you are trying to say that the content of the Oath is less meaningful than making one, in which case Followers of Orcus and Graz'zt would default to Lawful, because they make oaths too.
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Yes, and not just to survive. Now, those types of acts might be considered evil, and I think the element of self preservation ameliorates that, but I don't think they touch upon law and chaos to any great degree.
As I posted upthread, in my game, I use the definition of Law from the 1E DMG. It says that "law dictates that order and organization is necessary and desirable," and "generally supports the group as more important than the individual" (p. 23).
What social bonds is Aladdin actually abandoning by lying, cheating, and stealing to survive? As far as I recall, the only significant social bond he has is with his pet monkey who also depends on him (and his lying, cheating, and stealing) for survival, so those actions are supportive of rather than detrimental to Aladdin's bond.
Then, just like Max above, you are using 4e's model. Because anyone who isn't a complete psychopath is Lawful to enough of a degree that no one is Chaotic. Everyone has social bonds. If Aladdin and his monkey constitutes enough of a group to support Aladdin being lawful, then the only Chaotic people are those who stand completely alone and care nothing for order and organization.
Orcs for example, would be lawful. They have social bounds, and an order and organization they follow. They follow their chief and their chief has his duties to the tribe. If this is our definition, then it is worse than useless, because it only comes into play when dealing with singular individuals who it will be fairly obvious whether or not they are chaotic.
Forgive my facetiousness, but I think you pretty badly misunderstood what I was getting at by saying that part of your premise is that "Aladdin isn't less effective in social interaction than his lawful counterpart, all other things being equal." I meant that if Aladdin and his so-called lawful counterpart were in equally challenging social situations, that Aladdin wouldn't fare any worse. You then described a situation that wasn't a social interaction challenge at all the way you described it and compared that with a situation in which Aladdin uses his charisma to get Jasmine out of trouble. I'd hardly call that a fair comparison.
See, but that was the point.
When you are working within the laws, within the norms of society, you don't need Charisma to accomplish a goal. A situation that required Charisma and would have challenged and developed those skills, turns into a by the book procedure that doesn't challenge Aladdin. Because it is far harder to convince people to break with their lawful and expected behaviors, than to just... do the thing they were doing.
Additionally, if you want to enforce lawful behavior... you appeal to authority. If Aladdin wanted to insist on the Laws being followed, he may have tried making an impassioned speech, but he would also be just as well served calling the guards, whose job it is to enforce the Laws.
Now, if you want to call that the reason for your boost, then we run into a lot of other issues. For example, why do Chaotic characters not get the same boost? If the reasoning is that it is easier to convince people to follow the structures they are encouraged to follow do to external authority, or that they can call upon the authorities to enforce that position, then the boost would apply not to the character, but to any action that calls upon those authorities. And, many times, I would say that approaching enforcers whose job it is to enforce, and asking them publically to do their job, is going to be an auto-result, because that is their role. And if a roll is needed... I'm not giving a Lawful character a boost, because the very fact that they need to roll tells everyone that these people are not swayed by merely the facet of law.
In short, it would seem to make more sense to boost the roll for the situation, rather for an alignment, because that seems to be where the actual easing of conditions happens, not because of whether or not the person making the roll believes in law and order.
As long as you understand that's how the game works, I don't see how there's any basis for your objection that I'm "changing" the DC. Before the specific character did something, there was no DC to change.
And I get what you're saying, but I'm not buying it. Your position relies on the idea that there are these devilishly charming schmoozer characters that can trick anyone into believing they're trustworthy and agreeing to anything they want just by turning on the charm, but doesn't take into account how persuasive someone with the same level of social aptitude can be when they are known to behave in a manner that is consistent and trustworthy. All things being equal, people tend to believe and trust the lawful paladin over the chaotic barbarian. What about that fiction?
Here is the rub though, that relies on knowing the character.
The fiction of the Paladin being trusted has nothing to do with whether an individual Paladin is Lawful, it is the same that people are more likely to trust a doctor than they are a bystander. It is the authority of the badge/uniform. And that would be the same no matter what, if your Chaotic Barbarian is famously part of a tribe who would die before breaking their word, then whether or not the Barbarian will keep his word isn't the point, the point is his people are famous for trustworthiness.
And if the Barbarian or the Paladin are known to be liars or cheats... then people react to the person they know, and not the uniform. Which again, becomes about knowing the person, not their alignment. If the Barbarian has a reputation of following through with threats, and he threatens someone, then people are going to believe him. Because his behavior is in this matter is consistent, if he says he will punch you in the face, he will punch you in the face.
I remember you mentioning something about tuning forks and people being magnetized by alignment, so maybe in your mind everyone who encounters the Paladin can feel the "Lawfullness" radiating off of him, and therefore know that he is a person who always keeps his word.... but first off, again, that doesn't change the same bonus you are talking about applying to any situation where the character is well known, and secondly, that is a vast change to how the game works. Because if everyone has a constant "Detect Alignment" sensor then you can't have infiltrators, or evil cults, or anything of the like, because the moment someone met them, they'd know they were evil and untrustworthy.
Well, you left out the part about all else being equal before. I never said that lawful characters are always better at social interaction than chaotic characters, and that isn't the effect of my rule. A lot of variables can make that not the case, including the alignment of the NPC that is being influenced. So no, that's not the intended effect. You're wrong, which is what I've been saying since you started this. There are plenty of characters in fiction like you describe, yes, and there are also lawful characters that are good socially and chaotic characters that are poor socially. Maybe you don't notice these ones as much because they don't overturn normal expectations of human interaction and so aren't as visible.
But in fiction, all else is never equal. This is like saying that Heroes are stronger than Villains in the MCU, all else being equal. Which is false, because the Villains tend to be stronger, that's why the heroes work as a team. You are giving a boost to Lawful characters under an assumption that they should get a boost, that they should be more effective, and you didn't say something like "lawful characters get a boost when trying to persuade other lawful characters in a lawful course of action" You said that lawful characters get a boost to charisma, because they are better at working with people in a group.
That is a very different claim, and it isn't one that make sense, when Chaotic people not only form groups (and that seems to be enough to make them Lawful all of a sudden) but they form groups to oppose the entrenched lawful society. Something far harder, and yet done with regularity in fiction.
Or that you're not using the tool for its intended purpose. You're the one who says they're chaotic. That doesn't make it so.
IF people can't look at a list of characters and figure out their alignment, then how does alignment help us define characters in any meaningful way?
Uh no, the source material is the work of Poul Andersen and then Michael Moorcock. D&D Alignment is derived from that. I haven't read anything by Andersen myself, but I've read a fair amount of Moorcock's Elric stories. In them, Law as an alignment has nothing to do with human laws, and this is the way it was adapted into Chainmail and then D&D, published in 1974. The good-evil axis wasn't officially added until 1977 with the publication of Holmes Basic and the AD&D Monster Manual. Both before and after 1977, Law in D&D, just like in the Elric saga, is a side in a cosmic conflict, nothing to do with following man-made laws. For the record, both sides in the Elric stories were pretty dang evil.
So, again, Moorcock has nothing to do with the current thing I'm complaining about. They didn't have Good Law and Evil Law, which was codified in DnD. Once you have made a split into Good Law and Evil Law, then Moorcockian Law no longer applies, because it is a nonsensical divide to that perspective.
Maybe, maybe you could make a case that Moorcock's version of Law and Chaos was the norm for three years. But then Gygax and Arnenson and the rest of TSR added Good and Evil to the mix, and therefore changed the definition of Law and Chaos. Because you must then have a split between these sides. You can't have Pure Law or Pure Good. You must have Lawful Good and Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil, because those are now the factions.
In Moorcock (or at least a derivative) ultimate pure Law is a static world. Nothing moves or changes, it is Dead and still. Now, look at DnD's "Plane of Pure Law" Mechanus is a plane of movement, constant movement. Ordered, sure, but it is machinery, constantly moving, changing, documenting, The Modrons even can be Chaotic, it breaks them, but in Moorcock's version of Ultimate Law, things don't break. They can't, they are perfectly ordered and precise.
So, once more, and with feeling. Moorcock's version of Law has nothing to do with DnD's version of Law. It may have inspired it, it may have been the source of it for three years, but DnD abandoned that concept pretty early on and took on its own conception of Law and Chaos. So, blaming Moorcock for what DnD did is nonsensical. Again, I might as well blame Homer, Socrates and Plato, who also envisioned the law and order of society in opposition to the chaotic wilderness of monsters and beasts, with both good and evil capable of being found in both places. Moorcock didn't event that conflict, he just made a single famous version of it.
