Alignment and Party Dynamics

[JDJblatherings]

1. Is it moral to commit suicide by sacrificing your life for a good cause?

certainy, heroes do it all the time (or risk doing it).

2. Is it okay to kill ogre babies if you feel they'll grow up evil?

yes, if there is big "E" Evil in the campaign.

3. Is it okay to "preemptive strike" an evil person because you feel they'll do something bad in the future?

it might be moral but it almost certainly isn't legal.

4. Is assisted suicide of a dying soldier wrong?

When does that happen in D&D? You heal him, stabilize him or he is already dead.

 

[Wiseblood]

Hmmm moral ambiguity. I like alignment. If explained well or enforced by the GM it puts everyone on the same page. No stupid semantics. The bad guys are in there lets kill em.

 

[ptolemy18]

Why must people be so obtuse as to ignore statements by designers that say that alignment is still in the game, yet take one omission of alignment from a product filled with other references to alignment as a sign that alignment is out of the game?

True, true, good point. I should spend my time complaining about other changes to 4e which are *much* more definite!

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

1E play as written, arguably. I don't have the grounding to know about 1E play as played, but it sure sounds like 1E play as idealized by a vocal segment of the online community.

I can tell you that my group never, ever, ever did anything that old EGG would disapprove of. Nope. Never. Not once. Well, maybe once. Oh, and there was that other time. And all those bits of the DMG we ignored. And the NPCs we looted. Hmm... Maybe we shouldn't have sold that wizard's guild into slavery.

Oh well, I'm sure my gaming experience is a complete aberration and that everyone else who played 1st edition were running around shouting "huzzah!" as they did various entirely heroic and selfless acts.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Yeah. Possibly a "no evil PLAYER" decree, too. :\

Internal squabbling can be fun, but only if all sides are set for it.

Cheers, -- N

I just have the No Evil Player decree. Most of my group has evil PCs.

 

[cougent]

Well, I disagree. Or rather, I think that players need to be friendly to one another, basically, and to be indulgent to one another's character choices. I think that having an interesting group is more fun than having an "effective" group. I'm kind of Chaotic that way, I guess.

...

I think you just went into much greater detail than I did.

As I tell all potential new players, "I am a storytelling DM, not a hack and slash, kill the monsters take their stuff DM, if that is your style of play then my games will be boring to you and you should look elsewhere."

I usually have a "no evil PC" mandate, I lifted it for a time while we ran a mini-campaign and all 5 of my regular players came to me and wanted to set up a secret character motive to justify betraying the party at some point in time. They all thought it was their original idea and that they would really enjoy the look of shock on the rest of the party. I went along, but also set up an NPC to do the same first... they were all PO'd, but after we discussed it they all admitted they would have been more PO'd at the player who did it. despite their desire to do something new and unique as an individual, they all still expect the group to work as a group. After that experiment, I had no more complaints about the "no evil PC" mandate.

No one wants to play cookie cutter PC's, but sometimes ones own personal idea of fun might very well PO the rest of the group and destroy their fun. If you are that individual, then you may say "too bad"... but you don't like it too much when you are NOT the one. It is a balancing act to allow individual freedom in PC's against group dynamics, and sometimes it does call for individual sacrifice.

 

[gizmo33]

Basically, this is a fantasy game, so the traditional D&D idea is that Law, Chaos, Good and Evil really *do* exist in concrete, physical terms, right?

Yes, and so do Earth Air Fire and Water. So such concrete things can exist without people having to actually radiate any of their essence. I think devils ought to BE Lawful Evil, and I'm not particularly happy about them removing alignment from all immortals, if that's what they're doing, but it's a subsystem of the rules that I could just as happily add back in.

 

[pemerton]

I think that players need to be friendly to one another, basically, and to be indulgent to one another's character choices.

I have GMed games with a degree of intra-party treachery - some quite light-hearted (like the elf who was the only one in the party fluent in Elvish, and who explained to the Drow that the party encountered in D1-D2 that the rest of the party were his slaves), some less so (like the wizard who paved the way for the sacrifice of another party member in order to cement his political alliance with the cultists of a dark god). It can be tricky to handle, but interesting when it works out. I think an absence of alignments makes this easier to run, because (i) there is no "Evil" on the character sheet to telegraph these things, and (ii) there is no "Evil" on the character sheet prompting the player to play the PC as a simpleminded, one-dimensional troublemaker.

 

[SSquirrel]

We had a DM have an item that apparently was cursed and slowly altering my alignment. He had my character pocketing some of the loot we were finding when I searched corpses and the other players seemed to be getting mad at my character or possibly me b/c I was doing this. So after the session I explained what was happening...only to have one of the guys who had been griping the most complain that I was ruining the storytelling. I didn't figure it would be fun to have the secret between teh characters when itw as causing the PLAYERS so much angst