Alignment myths?

[prosfilaes]

Don't make this conversation jump a shark, prosfilaes.

It's a real-life example; there's no need to be so snappy. Is selling objects to evil people to be used for evil purposes evil? If so, then it's not just direct results that matter.

 

[Celebrim]

Hussar: You are painting yourself into a corner, and it started here.

Inaction, in other words, is irrelavent to alignment. Watching someone drown is not an evil act even if you can prevent it. Pushing someone into a raging river is.

To put it in terms of D&D alignment, 'good' and 'evil' alignments are active philosophies. They demand actions of the character. The philosophy you begin to espouse here is passive, and therefore neutral. To be a little overly simple, nuetral philosophies have only 'Thou Shalt Nots' in them. For example, a philosophy based on the maxim, "Thou Shalt Not Do Harm" is nuetral. In such a system, you can stand and watch someone drown so long as you didn't do anything to cause the situation. It's the universe that is doing the drowning, and responcible for it and not you. Some karma based systems of thought are nuetral in this way, in that they would argue that interveening in the drowning causes you to acquire as much karma as causing it does. (Please understand, I'm not trying to condemn here, and certainly not broadly since some other karma based systems distinguish between 'good karma' and 'bad karma'.)

Good (and evil) philosophies can (and must) have both "Thou Shalts" and "Thou Shalt Nots" in them. Good demands both that you do no harm, and that you actively try to do good - "Thou Shalt Give to thy Neighbor In Need". You can't therefore standby and watch someone drown, even if it means risking drowning yourself.

To a Nuetral, the fact that Good makes a demand on the believer to take action renders it as unjust and onerous as Evil. Thus, you'll typically here from a Nuetral how Good and Evil taken to thier extreme are indistinguishable. I'm not here to argue against those beliefs (even though I don't share them), since it would turn quickly into a debate on religion. I'm must trying to show how the different ethical systems map to D&D's overly simple 2D map. I think we can all manage to agree to what the map looks like without making a normative judgement of whose right and which way the map should be oriented.

 

[prosfilaes]

I would say his moral attitude is a bit on the evil side personally. Doesn't say anything about their actions, just their attitude.

That's a touch circular. His moral attitude is evil, therefor he's evil?

“Evil” implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others.

So if he is fantasizing about hurting and killing people, seems pretty evil to me.

But he's not hurting, oppressing or killing others. And from purely a game perspective, evil being purely thought makes it impossible for a DM to handle the alignment of PCs, since they could be thinking evil thoughts constantly. I also don't see it as a win for NPCs to be evil not for anything they've done, but for something that no one could verify.

 

[RigaMortus2]

Regarding the shoemaker who fantasizes about evil acts but does not actually commit them, there are a lot of real-world philosophies that wouldn't peg this person as evil. Many systems of karma take only your actions into account, not your thoughts. A lot of modern Western religions, though, take thoughts into account as well, and this shoemaker would be evil by that definition.

You could go either way, based on how you want to handle alignment. As Hussar said earlier, by taking intention and private thoughts out of the picture it makes it much much easier to resolve alignment arguments, but if you decide to take thoughts into account then that's your (or your DM's) decision.

I'm going strictly by D&D RAW where it states your general moral and personal attitudes is represented by alignment.

 

[RigaMortus2]

That's a touch circular. His moral attitude is evil, therefor he's evil?

That is my contention.

But he's not hurting, oppressing or killing others.

Not physically, but per the RAW, it is his attitude that is represented by aligment. If his attitude is one of hurting, oppressing or killing, I'd say that makes in evil in D&D

And from purely a game perspective, evil being purely thought makes it impossible for a DM to handle the alignment of PCs, since they could be thinking evil thoughts constantly.

The DM can simply ASK the PCs what their intentions or feelings or attitude is toward something when it arises. The Player thinking these thoughts is seperate from what his character would be thinking. And since the DM runs NPCs, this is a non-issue for NPCs.

I also don't see it as a win for NPCs to be evil not for anything they've done, but for something that no one could verify.

You can easily verify it through several means. Detect Toughts would be the first thing that comes to mind (no pun intended), and then of course we have the traditional Detect Evil. There is also Zone of Truth and a few other ways we can verify their intentions/feelings/thoughts/attitude.

 

[prosfilaes]

I'm going strictly by D&D RAW where it states your general moral and personal attitudes is represented by alignment.

WordNet defines it as "n 1: a complex mental state involving beliefs and feelings and values and dispositions to act in certain ways; "he had the attitude that work was fun" [syn: mental attitude]"; I think that dispositions to act certain ways is most important here.

On more thought, I think the problem is a bit unrealistic. People who really want to hurt other people aren't nice people and don't just stand around thinking about it. Even if he doesn't kidnap and kill people, he's going to cheat and abuse them in any way he can. He would have a psychosis, and to fear the law enough that he's not going to act on it in any way would basically require another obsession. In reality, most people who have those type of obsessions who don't act on them are stopped by good ol' conscience.

 

[RainOfSteel]

#1 myth that gets under my skin about alignment: that alignment cannot model complex actions and motivations.

And yet, that is exactly the way I have always read the rules. (For 1e and 2e, anyway. I abandoned the use of alignments so long ago I never bothered to even read the 3.x versions.)

-----------------------------------
Alignment Myths

• Interpretation: That everyone is going to look at alignments in the same way. No one I know of has yet come to any one conclusion about what even the RAW on alignments actually means. When it is impossible to write a set of rules or even guidelines that the majority will agree on, I feel it is foolish to even attempt to write and include such rules.
• Lawful vs Chaotic: Law and Chaos may seem relatively easy to separate, but even here, there are problems. Whose law are we talking about? Every society has different laws, sometimes radically different. One society's law may be another's anarchy (i.e. Chaos). This is a tangled snarl, for sure. "I'm lawful, but wait, I just broke the law, isn't that an alignment violation?"
• Good vs. Evil: Good and Evil are far harder to define. One man's good (obeying the law) may be another man's evil (free spirit). Where one man thinks nothing of starving tens of millions of his own people to death to industrialize his nation (Stalin), other's see it as hideous power-mongering opportunism combined with sociopathic disregard for human life. Many will say, but only a few people act like that, but this ignores that whole legions of people cooperated with Stalin (some may have been at gunpoint, but all of them weren't). No one is ever going to come to one conclusion on what these things really represent. Serious disagreements can occur in even small groups.
• Straight-Jacket: So many DMs treat alignments as a form of straight-jacket. Ok, this is from my gaming in the 1e era, but as far as I am concerned, this is the root of my dissatisfaction with the alignment system.
• Neutrality: That it really exists in anything above microscopic numbers. Neutral people are bystanders and observers, those who wish to be left alone and will not take sides, or perhaps referees or judges. They are not those who seek to interfere in other groups and forces to keep one from triumphing over the others. I think this is pretty much the definition of nefarious meddling or even traitorous behavior. Good PC: "What, you helped us defeat the Dark Lord ten year ago, why have you slain the Band of Heroes in their sleep now that the Dark Lord has returned?" Neutral NPC: "Good cannot be allowed to triumph." Neutral groups and peoples, per the alignment rules, would be despised by all the other forces. In Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, which are arguably one of the great inspirations of the alignment system as a whole, those characters who served the Cosmic Balance, servants of fate itself, were few and far between, and they acted (or only appeared to act) at great turning points.

IMO, alignments cause far more problems than any benefit they might provide. Should there be Law, Chaos, Good, Evil, and Balance in the multiverse? Of course. Can characters serve these forces? Of course. Should characters have an inherent attribute of themselves, in the same way that they have height, weight, and eye color, that specifies what they serve or believe in? No. No, I say.

When we realize that there have been successive redefinitions of alignments combined with myriad interpretations of the RAW combined with the personal beliefs of DMs and players as applied in play, it becomes clear that it all becomes a swampy morass of uselessness.

------------------------

All of these problems and issues, and many more, are covered in Dragon magazine article For King and Country, by Paul Suttie, Issue 101.

I haven't bothered with alignments since reading this article, and I think they should be removed from the core game and made an optional part of the rules.

 

[RainOfSteel]

If a woodsman cut the tree down, but didn't know the child was there, he still commited an evil act.

No, he did not commit an evil act. He may well have done something tremendously stupid and possibly criminally culpable--if he didn't check out the area where he was going to drop the tree ahead of time--but evil, no. Not if he didn't know the child was there. (And in a fantasy-type gaming setting, it may well be that this type of criminal culpability concept hasn't yet been developed.)

Ask yourself this: if the woodsman who cuts down the tree and accidentally kills the child didn't commit an evil act, then why does he feel remorse?

It's called a conscience. Good people have it and when terrible things happen by their own hand, then even it was an accident with not slightest implication of evil, such as the example given above, then their conscience harms them.

Pesky things, these consciences. But if we didn't have them, we would all be sociopaths, and then a lot of evil really would occur.

If it was a morally neutral act, then why would anyone care?

There are few neutral acts and accidentally killing someone isn't one of them. However, just because an act isn't neutral doesn't mean it must be good or evil. Accidents fall into their own zone, IMO. (Like I mentioned above, cirminal culpability may apply in situations where the perpetrator is not evil.)

However, good or evil, the woodsman has still commited an evil act. His actions directly led to the death of an innocent.

Negligence is not necessarily evil.

I don't view drunken drivers who hit and kill people as being negligent. That is malice aforethought and fully evil. They have deliberately removed their ability to control their driving and then driven their vehicle, making them both responsible and evil.

But driving and hitting a patch of ice, skidding out of control, and hitting and killing a child is no more evil than dropping a tree unknowingly on one.

Where criminal culpability rests, and the severity of any forthcoming punishment (if any), that is something else entirely, and highly dependent on a given society's laws.

 

[RainOfSteel]

A woodsman who doesn't do that due diligence is acting negligently and recklessly when he cuts down the tree, and if there is a child there that he didn't bother to check for, then yes he has the responsibility.

Due dilligence in the middle of a forest? In a pseudo-medival or other type of historical fantasy setting?

No woodsman is going to do any of that (put up barriers, etc.), and no one will expect him to. It isn't something that any woodsman anywhere would be doing.

In fact, if we go with medieval Europe, it would likely have been seen as divine will, and the only way the woodsman would receive any punishment is if the parents were important and capable of levying punishment unilaterally or through influence, if friends of the child's family snubbed other otherwise harmed him, or the parents were so angry that they lashed out on their own.

It is generally accepted that before logging an area there is a certain amount of due diligence that should be done to ensure the area is safe and clear, to ensure that the woodsman himself is working in safe conditions, and so on.

No. That is a modern attitude/practice. Not a historical one.

Edit: this presupposes, of course, that the woodsman has the wit and wisdom to realise that he should be doing the due diligence. If he's truly incompetent, he gets off the hook from an alignment perspective.

You are presupposing that a lack of due dilligence in the context of the likely setting in which this scenario is taking place is a form of incompetence. It isn't. The whole idea of due dilligence isn't even going to exist in the setting in question.

 

[RainOfSteel]

What do you feel are the biggest alignment myths?

That it adds anything positive to the game.

I could not agree more.

Alignment should be eliminated. All rules that rely on it should be rewritten [...]

Bravo!