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<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9511909" data-attributes="member: 6779196">The thing is, rewarding playing to your alignment makes alignment prescriptive. You have an alignment, it’s set in stone, you get a reward when you behave according to it. No room for your actions to define your alignment, only to give or not give rewards. Now, that’s fine if your goal is just to encourage players to act according to a certain set of guidelines, but… why would you want to do that?Now, I get it, having your alignment change because you took the “wrong” action can feel like a punishment, and that’s no fun. But, the only way for alignment to actually be descriptive is for characters’ actions to be able to change their alignments. The key to making that not feel like a punishment is to have the effects of alignment shifts not be punishing. If you can lose your class abilities or spells as a result of your alignment changing, that’s sure to feel like a punishment. Instead, perhaps you get some sort of passive bonus based on your alignment, and when your alignment changes, you swap that passive bonus for the new alignment’s passive bonus. So it’s still always a positive thing, but it changes according to your actions, instead of being set in stone and occasionally paying you when you dance for it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 9511909, member: 6779196"] The thing is, rewarding playing to your alignment makes alignment prescriptive. You have an alignment, it’s set in stone, you get a reward when you behave according to it. No room for your actions to define your alignment, only to give or not give rewards. Now, that’s fine if your goal is just to encourage players to act according to a certain set of guidelines, but… why would you want to do that? Now, I get it, having your alignment change because you took the “wrong” action can feel like a punishment, and that’s no fun. But, the only way for alignment to actually be descriptive is for characters’ actions to be able to change their alignments. The key to making that not feel like a punishment is to have the effects of alignment shifts not be punishing. If you can lose your class abilities or spells as a result of your alignment changing, that’s sure to feel like a punishment. Instead, perhaps you get some sort of passive bonus based on your alignment, and when your alignment changes, you swap that passive bonus for the new alignment’s passive bonus. So it’s still always a positive thing, but it changes according to your actions, instead of being set in stone and occasionally paying you when you dance for it. [/QUOTE]

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