Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GM Dave" data-source="post: 5777130" data-attributes="member: 6687992">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.</blockquote>

Verification