Alignment Issues!

To me an Unaligned character is simply who just hasn't chosen sides yet. A True Neutral character, however is someone who has: they've chosen no side and a middle road.
There's an interesting question that I haven't thought about before, so bear with me: is the result the same thing for both (ie., standing in the middle of the road)? And is alignment the measure of that result or the reason for that result?
 

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To me an Unaligned character is simply who just hasn't chosen sides yet. A True Neutral character, however is someone who has: they've chosen no side and a middle road.
The thing is that that kind of True Neutral is effectively pro-Evil unless you're in a Midnight-esque extremely bleak setting. It's really difficult to imagine a sane character acting like that.
 

Personally, I'd rather they borrowed from games like Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard and went with a system of Goals and Beliefs.

Alignments are a poor representation of this idea of what a person believes in and does not provide much real traction for story at a game table.

If you instead focus on what a player's goals are and what their beliefs are then you have an interesting discussion.

Now, you can have opposing views of Ehlonna.

One person can believe that the Elves should be supreme and all other races are a plague to be eliminated.

Another person can believe that Elves need to live in harmony with other races.

Both players are big on Ehlonna and support elves and can live harmoniously within elvan cultures but both take very opposite ways of seeing elves in the greater world.

This makes a richer story that I would like to participate in and see worked out as the players or player and NPC come to terms with their differences.

The great thing with goals and beliefs is that they can change after each adventure provided the majority of the gaming group agrees with your new goal or belief.

This means that a person that started out as believing that elves need to live in harmony with all races could change their view after seeing Orcs torch and destroy a village of elves.

Now the belief might be stated as elves need to live in harmony with all races but orcs.

If something worse happens then the belief can grow towards this change or the player can choose reinforce their original point. An example of this might be 'Elves need to live in harmony with others despite the actions of others towards elves.'

Either way, the player and the group is enriched by a meaningful statement of belief instead of a word like 'good' or 'evil'.

You could still have 'alignments' but these would be considered initial beliefs from which a player will grow during their adventures and experiences. Most characters in stories go through complex arcs of challenges to how they understand society. The characters grow and change as they go through these experiences.

This is why I think that beliefs and goals is a better representation as it allows the character to change through the experiences of the character.
 

Anybody use ranks in alignment, in which ranks measure your dedication (or apathy)?

Law - Chaos - Good - Evil

Unaligned = 0 ranks in each
Good = 1 rank in Good
Lawful Good = 1 rank in Law, 1 rank in Good
Paragon Good = 2 ranks in Good
Paragon Lawful, Good = 2 ranks in Law, 1 rank in Good
etc.

If the campaign doesn't support Law/Chaos axis, take it out. If the campaign doesn't support Good/Evil axis, take it out. If the campaign supports another belief system or allegience, add it in.

And mechanically, I'd think only Paragon rank in alignment might mean anything.

Edit: I had True Neutral as 1 rank in each (if you want this distinction) but that makes no sense
 
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Personally, I'd rather they borrowed from games like Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard and went with a system of Goals and Beliefs.

Alignments are a poor representation of this idea of what a person believes in and does not provide much real traction for story at a game table.

If you instead focus on what a player's goals are and what their beliefs are then you have an interesting discussion.

Welcome to the boards. My that's a lot of deep topics we can launch off from from there.

I think every player that creates a character needs to think deeply about what their character believes in and what goals that they have. I have no problem with that per se.

But the problem with codifying beliefs and goals into the game, beyond that its one of the harder challenges in game design, is that if you really do a good job of making that codification meaningful you typically create a game that is centrally about the player/characters beliefs. An example of doing a good job of this would be 'Dogs in the Vineyard'. A less well done job was attempted by pretty much every White Wolf game they've ever released, but they have a lot of interesting ideas and mechanical nuggets buried in there. These games tend to be best when you have a group that can really focus on the low drama and get into the theater games involved in it. But they really aren't D&D and if D&D went that direction it would probably alienate a lot of fans. (I'm not saying you can't play D&D as a low drama game, because I've seen it done, it's just not something enforced by the mechanics.)

I agree that alignments are a poor representation of what a person believes in, but I also think that that has never been either what they represent or thier in game purpose. I've discussed what they represent at length elsewhere, but in brief alignments represent not a specific belief but the tendencies in the characters actions when they are subject to stress and must make difficult choices. I believe that two characters with the same basic beliefs will be very very different in the crucible depending on their alignment, and will express their beliefs very differently.

One person can believe that the Elves should be supreme and all other races are a plague to be eliminated.

Another person can believe that Elves need to live in harmony with other races.

One of the more interesting things you can do with a character is make him an alignment which either is, or superficially is, in contridiction to his basic beliefs. So, make the evil character belief that Elves need to live in harmony with other races - you know, like goblins, orcs, and Rakshasa. Make the good character believe that Elves should be supreme and all other races must eventually be - however tragically - elimenated for the sake of the greater good. Then try to play these characters through the tensions and sometimes contridictions their beliefs and alignment have.

The great thing with goals and beliefs is that they can change after each adventure provided the majority of the gaming group agrees with your new goal or belief.

Sure, but at key moments in a characters development, alignment can change and grow and develop as well. And, beliefs can change and grow and shift quite independently of alignment. Maybe the above good genocidal character comes to realize that at least some other non-elf races are just worthy of life and noble and good as elf-kind. Or maybe not. But don't mistake alignment for beliefs. They don't cover exactly the same territory.

Either way, the player and the group is enriched by a meaningful statement of belief instead of a word like 'good' or 'evil'.

You seem to think that 'good' and 'evil' aren't meaningful.

Beliefs tend to be far more diverse than alignments. As such, they are harder to mechanically code into the rules, and if they were so coded and done well, they'd be harder to rip out again.
 
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The thing is that that kind of True Neutral is effectively pro-Evil unless you're in a Midnight-esque extremely bleak setting. It's really difficult to imagine a sane character acting like that.

Again, I'm going to point to Daoism, which isn't so much as pro-evil as it is pro-unattachment. The idea here is not encouraging TN players to randomly backstab their friends when they kill a demon, but rather for them to question the need to kill the demon in the first place instead of simply preventing it from destroying the world.

It's more about caution and believing each action has an equal and opposite reaction and less about doing evil to compensate for good - TN characters (often) believe that naturally takes place anyway.

You're right that it's a hard alignment to play - that's why I placed it among the advanced alignments, along with LG, CG, LE, and CE; it's much easier for players to get wrong. But that doesn't mean it can't be played well.
 

I vote for three alignments: Light, Shadow, and Unaligned.

  • Light means you have a spiritual connection to the powers of good/sunshine/healing/fluffy bunnies.
  • Shadow means you have a spiritual connection to the powers of evil/nightfall/undeath/psycho axe murderers.
  • Unaligned means you're not spiritually connected to either.
None of the three says anything about your behavior or your moral code. That's up to you. Alignment is just a question of what jersey you're wearing in the interplanar cosmological football game*. For example, skeletons and zombies are Shadow-aligned, not because they're malicious or hateful but because they are animated by dark powers. A cleric of Pelor is Light-aligned because she's spiritually linked to a deity of Light. If she renounces Pelor, she becomes Unaligned instantly, even if she continues to help kittens out of trees and escort old ladies across the street.

(It is of course possible that if the cleric of Pelor starts murdering people in the dead of night, Pelor might decide to sever her link to him. In that case, likewise, she becomes Unaligned. But that's a specific action by a specific NPC--Pelor--rather than some kind of vague cosmological moral standard.)

[SIZE=-2]*Do they wear jerseys in football? Heck, I don't know. The only sports I watch are roller derby and politics.[/SIZE]
 
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None of the three says anything about your behavior or your moral code.

Shadow means you have a spiritual connection to the powers of evil/nightfall/undeath/psycho axe murderers.

These two statements seem to contradict each other.

I'm not really in favor to be honest of completely decoupling alignment from ideas of morality and good or evil. As I stated earlier, I'm fine with decoupling the idea of the "greater good" from good vs. evil and putting it in the law vs. chaos slot, but I'm pretty certain the concept of good = basic decency and selflessness and evil = selfishness, malevolence, and hate is pretty simple and universal.
 

These two statements seem to contradict each other.

Not at all. Having a spiritual connection to the powers of evil is not the same as being evil. If you sell your soul to Asmodeus, congratulations: You just got a Shadow alignment. Even if what you sold it for was the ability to heal the sick and comfort the suffering, you're still spiritually linked to Asmodeus.

The 4E warlock is a good example of a class that would have a Shadow alignment regardless of how they behave.

IMO, the purpose of an alignment system should be to enable things like paladins sensing a great disturbance in the Force when undead and demons and evil clerics are nearby. Paladins should be able to sense skeletons and zombies; they should not be able to sense that the guy over there beats his wife and kicks his dog. So I would prefer to have an alignment system focused on supernatural associations rather than behavior.
 

But D&D's never had a real analogy to an all-pervasive Force like Star Wars has. There's no "disturbances" in magic really. Well, aside from wild magic in certain settings but that's still something completely different.

I don't think your idea is necessarily a bad one (in fact, it's my preferred interpretation of LS/DS for Star Wars), I just think it's more alien to D&D than standard alignments are.
 

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