Alignment: Chosen or awarded?

[Summer-Knight925]

This is not a poll, as many of my previous questions have been, but rather a discussion.

When you make a character, is alignment a choice you make or something based on your actions?

Obviously, many games let you choose, but how does this affect your character?
Would it change the way you wanted to play?
Do you decide on an alignment that suits your needs?



...Do you actually care about alignment?

 

[jonesy]

You choose an alignment, but you then have to justify having it.

I've always had a problem with every incarnation of the alignment system as presented in D&D. It should be something that you earn. Your actions make you what you are. A level 0/1 character should start without one. Changes to alignment should be a history, not an instantaneous conversion to something else. I never did figure out a satisfactory way to represent this. It should have a basis in the adage "good deeds do not erase the bad, nor bad the good". Characters who are both saints and sinners have a hard time fitting into the D&D system. Does Malcolm Reynolds register as good or evil in the detect spells? Cool scene and all, but kicking your prisoner into the jet intake isn't a morally ambiguous action. And yet he's an overall good man. He'd need something like Pragmatic Empathic.

Trying to find a better way to do alignment in D&D is hard because it's been so very ingrained in the mechanics. Spells bound to the system et al.


But anyways, playing D&D. I choose the alignment that most fits the character concept I'm creating, and then try to base the characters actions on it to the end. In effect I suppose I've been treating D&D alignment as a kind of destiny.

 

[billd91]

it's a bit of both. You can certainly choose a starting alignment for a PC - that should reflect what he believes and how he has behaved to that point. And then you've either got to play it, or accept that your alignment should drift based on how you do play your character.

 

[Jhaelen]

When you make a character, is alignment a choice you make or something based on your actions?

Obviously, many games let you choose, but how does this affect your character?
Would it change the way you wanted to play?
Do you decide on an alignment that suits your needs?



...Do you actually care about alignment?

D&D-style alignments are stupid and serve no real purpose except as a (too) simplistic guide to roleplay monsters.

What I care about are personality traits. Ideally, I choose them when creating a character to fit my concept of the character and her background.

And again ideally, the game system allows for personality traits to have a mechanical impact and be checked, increased, lowered, added, and removed.

Then you have a useful tool to portray realistic (player or non-player) characters that have the capacity to evolve and change and be changed by their actions and the actions of those they interact with.

Thankfully, 4e introduces 'Unaligned' as the default choice for pcs, basically removing the alignment concept from the game for players (although sadly, some game designers didn't get the memo and continued to create silly things like prestige classes with an alignment prerequisite).

 

[steenan]

For me, character alignment is mainly a "flag" for the GM - a short piece of information to let them know what kind of situations in play I'm interested in. For this reason, it's definitely something I choose, but also something that may change when my character evolves.

I'm open to GM suggestions that my character's alignment should be changed to better fit his behavior, or that some actions don't go well with the alignment I chose. But I would not accept the GM telling me something like "you are lawful, you cannot do that".

 

[Hand of Evil]

Choose Alignment - My soapbox, A DM has to define good and evil in his games and the player desides and choose what side of that line he is going to be on.

 

[radja]

the player chooses his alignment. I usually (but not always) point out if an action is totally against their alignment. I've only once punished a character for breaking their alignment, which resulted in a slight loss of power for 1 day (Paladins, at least the lawful good kind, should not eat grilled halfling).

 

[delericho]

A couple of years ago I read the 1st Ed PHB & DMG for the first time, and it proved an eye-opening experience. Amongst the things I'd been "doing wrong" for years was alignment - it appears that per 1st Ed "team shirt" alignment was actually the 'correct' interpretation. As I have absolutely no desire to use "team shirt" alignments, that adjusted my thinking on the topic somewhat.

When you make a character, is alignment a choice you make or something based on your actions?

In the past, the way it worked IMC was that players would choose the alignment that they thought was probably the best fit for their character. Thereafter, if I (as DM) felt their actions consistently fit another alignment better then the next time the character sheet was updated I would quietly note the change. (If there was a mechanical impact on the character - for a Paladin, for example - I would have a quiet word with the player in advance of this, but purely as a courtesy. IMC alignment followed from actions, so by taking particular actions the player had already chosen a new alignment.)

Incidentally, I never did the whole "you can't do that, you're {whatever}" thing. Unless the character was somehow magically compelled (and most of the time even then), the player got free rein to choose their character's actions. It's just that them choosing certain actions could cause an alignment change.

Do you actually care about alignment?

These days, I don't care about alignment except for Paladin characters. In fact, I'm going to be dropping alignment restrictions for every other class with my next campaign. I would drop alignment entirely, but it's a little too embedded into the 3e rules for that to be done easily.

However, the Paladin is a bit of a special case. The archetype there is very definitely the holy champion/knight, and the LG-only restriction (or, actually, the code) is absolutely key to that. Further, it needs to be tied into the mechanics (IMO), or what you actually get is the "morality of expedience" - the character will be upright and honest and good... right up to the instant where it becomes even marginally difficult, at which point compromises will start to be made.

So what I may well do with the Paladin is beef up the code somewhat and drop the formal alignment restriction (which actually makes very little difference in reality). But that's hardly an ideal solution. (If I were doing 3e again, I wouldn't have a Paladin class at all. Instead, I would include various Exalted powers that any character could take through feats, but that were contingent on following the Code. That way, a "Paladin" is just a Fighter with the appropriate powers chosen.)

(Incidentally, alignment has only very occasionally been any issue in my campaigns, generally because a player wanted to play a particular class, but didn't want to abide by the alignment restrictions. In which case, they got to choose: the class they wanted, or the alignment they wanted. Probably for that reason, Paladins were and are extremely rare in my games. But that's absolutely fine - plenty of other classes out there!)

 

[delericho]

Thankfully, 4e introduces 'Unaligned'...

Introducing "unaligned" was the one and only good thing that 4e did with regard to alignment. Unfortunately, the game also stripped out any and all mechanical relevance of alignment, without dropping it entirely. Meaning that players had this totally irrelevant additional choice to make during character creation.

I can understand keeping meaningful alignments, as in 3e. I can understand getting rid of alignments entirely. And I can understand removing alignment from the core and making it an optional module for those groups that want it (probably the best solution for D&D at this time).

What I can't understand is keeping alignments as a non-optional element in the core but removing any and all meaning from them. That seems to be the worst of all possible worlds.

 

[Janx]

To me, I always felt that those who didn't get the alignment system didn't understand the concept of roleplaying a character.

I'm not talking about whether they liked the breakdown and definitions of the alignment, I'm talking whether they accepted its core premise.

Which is, at the start of the game, you declare what your PC is like (as in, doesn't eat grilled halfling because he has a Good alignment).

You are not roleplaying if you can't stick to your own chosen character definition.

that's like saying, your PC is like Bruce Willis, but then playing him like StarScream.

As an roleplayer, you have failed to protray the character as defined.