Allegiances v. Alignment

[EditorBFG]

I don't think you really solve anything with regards to allegiances except to give some assurance to people who've been burned by bad DMing that you aren't trying to screw them over.

Well, here is shameless plug to a product I wrote to solve the problems you mention, Celebrim: http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?cPath=1604&products_id=20163&it=1

I set out to adapt Allegiances for D&D, and ended up doing a lot more. Using some open content alignment rules from Monte Cook's Book of Hallowed Might and a little from RPG Objects' stuff, I think I turned it into system that helps DMs and Players both have a clearer understanding of what their alignments/allegiances mean, and under what circumstances they become important. Also, it goes into detail about all the possible interactions between Allegiances and the existing D&D rules (mostly spells and classes with alignment requirements), allowing it to fit seamlessly into any existing campaign.

I was really happy with this one turned out, and surprised more people didn't go for it, given how much people complain about alignment as it stands. In many ways I'm prouder of this than any of my other rules products.

If nothing else, it's plug and play for folks who want to add Allegiances to D&D.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Happiness with Allegiances over alignments I suspect probably involves more of 'there is no penalty' than 'this is a much better system'.

If true, that's one of the bizarre things about Alignments...

...because they don't inflict any penalty anymore.

They did, but they stopped doing that before Allegiances came on the scene.

Unless you consider "being evil" a penalty. But the D&D game doesn't really seem to see it that way.

 

[Celebrim]

If true, that's one of the bizarre things about Alignments...

...because they don't inflict any penalty anymore.

That's not entirely true.

I believe much of the angst about alignments comes from one of the three following things:

1) DM's who use alignment as an excuse for playing the the PC. 'No, you can't do that because you're Chaotic Good' or worse yet, "Because you are Chaotic Good, you do this."
2) The old first edition occurance of a DM springing on the player that his actions constituted an alignment change, and therefore he's lost a level.
3) In any edition, DM's springing on the player that his actions constitute an alignment change, and now he's just lost all paladin/barbarian/druid/cleric/whatever class abilities.

After a player gets burned by that, or maybe he just lives in the paranoid fear of that, he tends to look on alignments as a bad thing.

Most of these problems can be overcome by maintaining the separation between what the DM controls (everything but the PC), and what the player controls (the PC), and by better DM communication and a little less DM big stick.

Personally, I get sick and tired of hearing players whine about alignment. Virtually every system has an alignment system of some sort. D&D's just happens to be abstract and suited to high fantasy. I've heard complaints about how you shouldn't have alignment so many freaking times, that I could probably classify the sort of players that always bring it up. If you don't like the restrictiveness of D&D alignments, play a neutral. If you claim that 'in the real world people don't have alignments', realize that that is in itself an alignment stance corresponding to an alignment. If you think you're characterization is too complex to classify, explain it to me, and I'll asign something to you and leave you to your characterization (generally, its a neutral). If you don't like the idea of actions having predictable consequences in a fantasy game, find someone else to DM. Otherwise, don't let it worry you.

 

[delericho]

1) DM's who use alignment as an excuse for playing the the PC. 'No, you can't do that because you're Chaotic Good' or worse yet, "Because you are Chaotic Good, you do this."
2) The old first edition occurance of a DM springing on the player that his actions constituted an alignment change, and therefore he's lost a level.
3) In any edition, DM's springing on the player that his actions constitute an alignment change, and now he's just lost all paladin/barbarian/druid/cleric/whatever class abilities.

After a player gets burned by that, or maybe he just lives in the paranoid fear of that, he tends to look on alignments as a bad thing.

Most of these problems can be overcome by maintaining the separation between what the DM controls (everything but the PC), and what the player controls (the PC), and by better DM communication and a little less DM big stick.

The problem is, #3 isn't always avoidable. The truth is, a player should never be surprised by an alignment change - after all, they've been playing the character, they chose the character's actions, so they should be expecting it.

Sometimes, however, players and DMs have different interpretations of what a given alignment means, and sometimes players want to eat their cake and have it also - they want their character to act Neutral Evil, but keep that Lawful Good alignment for accounting purposes.

At some point, the DM may have to declare the character's alignment changed, regardless of player wishes. So, as I said, #3 may not always be avoidable.

 

[Klaus]

My suspicion is that for the most part, people who are unhappy with alignment are going to be unhappy with any system which places an implicit limitation on player behavior if there is any possibility of there being a penalty involved for foresaking these limitations.

Happiness with Allegiances over alignments I suspect probably involves more of 'there is no penalty' than 'this is a much better system'.

Are people really limited to three allegiances? Are heirachies of allegiences really clear cut?

For example, suppose I have allegiances 'Law', 'Police Department', and 'Good'.... where does self-interest come into that? Will I always sacrifice self-interest in favor of those three? How about other allegiances, say, 'Nation' or 'Family'? Don't abstract allegiances differ significantly from concrete ones, and is the whole system any less relative than alignments? For example, a broad allegiance like 'Humanity' or 'Earth' is so vague as to be meaningless outside of a sci-fi campaign where something is meaningfully not human or of the Earth.

I don't think you really solve anything with regards to allegiances except to give some assurance to people who've been burned by bad DMing that you aren't trying to screw them over.

When I use "Allegiance Hierarchy", I do it more as a roleplaying guideline than anything else. On the "Self-Interest" or "Family" note, I guess only allegiances that are meaningful to the game are listed. If, say, your character is in the Mafia, you could list "The Family" as an allegiance.

Say a character wants to list "Me" as an allegiance, and the top tier one at that. He'd be willing to do anything to advance in life, going over family, friends, laws and whatnot. Might as well list "None" as an allegiance (which is a valid choice).

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Say a character wants to list "Me" as an allegiance, and the top tier one at that. He'd be willing to do anything to advance in life, going over family, friends, laws and whatnot. Might as well list "None" as an allegiance (which is a valid choice).

I disagree with the equivilence. Listing "none" to me would be saying that the character has never really been challenged to determine what she believes in and wanders through life not making a lot of strong choices. Allegiances would develop through play when the character faces choices and gains convictions, just as some folks like to start all 1st level characters with N in their alignment spot and see what they act like.

"Me" on the other hand indicates a dedication to be selfish, greedy and basicly evil.

 

[I'm A Banana]

1) DM's who use alignment as an excuse for playing the the PC. 'No, you can't do that because you're Chaotic Good' or worse yet, "Because you are Chaotic Good, you do this."

So DM's who use it wrong.

2) The old first edition occurance of a DM springing on the player that his actions constituted an alignment change, and therefore he's lost a level.

So DM's who use it wrong.

3) In any edition, DM's springing on the player that his actions constitute an alignment change, and now he's just lost all paladin/barbarian/druid/cleric/whatever class abilities.

So DM's who use it to screw over their players (if not technically wrong).

Sounds like a problem with DMs, not with Alignment. Though I agree, these are some of the big reasons for angst over Alignment.

 

[Celebrim]

So DM's who use it wrong.

So DM's who use it wrong.

So DM's who use it to screw over their players (if not technically wrong).

Sounds like a problem with DMs, not with Alignment. Though I agree, these are some of the big reasons for angst over Alignment.

Hense, the reason I wrote in my first post:

"I don't think you really solve anything with regards to allegiances except to give some assurance to people who've been burned by bad DMing that you aren't trying to screw them over." - emphasis added

 

[Celebrim]

The problem is, #3 isn't always avoidable. The truth is, a player should never be surprised by an alignment change - after all, they've been playing the character, they chose the character's actions, so they should be expecting it.

I agree, which is why I said that the problem was often basically a lapse in DM/player communication and why I repeated the phrase 'springing on'. Short of a curse of somesort, a player should always know when his actions constitute something sufficient to change alignment. This belief is not only based on meta-game consideration, but also on what I feel is a reasonable in game spiritual framework. It seems really unlikely to me that ones basic nature would change and there not be some conscious indication of a rejection of past beliefs and an acceptance of new ones. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like such a change would stick with much force. Instead of a change in alignment, it would likely be a lapse in alignment, which I see as something totally different. I think basically good people can commit acts of murder in moments of passion or as a result in a lapse in judgment, and they may not necessarily stop being good (or wanting to be good) as a result of it.

So I'd associate alignment change more with either conscious decision or an ongoing pattern of behavior, and what to give fair warning to the player what I was thinking before it became an issue. (Actually, its been a long time since I had this particular problem.)

Sometimes, however, players and DMs have different interpretations of what a given alignment means...

Yes. It gets particularly bad when you have DMs and players who themselves have beliefs which could be strongly characterized by some alignment. Since most people tend to characterize 'good' as "what I believe", you can have players/DMs at the table whose alignment map is completely at odds with each other (say a LG and a CN who both want to define the alignment 'good' as conforming to thier own personal beliefs). When this happens, an in game disagreement tends to turn into a fight over something neither party wants to relinquish because each party believes that there is some real world value at stake.

and sometimes players want to eat their cake and have it also - they want their character to act Neutral Evil, but keep that Lawful Good alignment for accounting purposes.

This is the classic case, but it's been a while since I had to deal with this exact issue. For one thing, the game has gotten away from 'lawful good is the bestest alignment', so there is less metagame reason to insist on it from an accounting standpoint. A more typical situation I run into now is that the player believes things that are traditionally accepted as evil, but does not wish to believe that they are evil and so labels what they believe as 'good'. This sort of player then will insist that there is nothing wrong - and in fact its in making pacts with fiends, using sex to manipulate people, stealing from 'faceless organizations', murdering innocents in order to obtain a goal, and so forth. That gets to be problimatic, but fortunately that type rarely endures my settings and goes to find a DM more inclined to give them what they want from a game.

At some point, the DM may have to declare the character's alignment changed, regardless of player wishes. So, as I said, #3 may not always be avoidable.

No, not always. But I think that it should always be a situation where fair warning was given and a clear explanation of what your standards where were foreknown. "John, I warned you when X and Y happened, that if your PC Bob continued to avoid doing good even when it didn't cost him anything, and taking large risks to himself in order to see harm done to someone that I'd have to move Bob the Flayer's alignment from chaotic neutral down to chaotic evil. I think we've reached that point."

 

[Celebrim]

When I use "Allegiance Hierarchy", I do it more as a roleplaying guideline than anything else. On the "Self-Interest" or "Family" note, I guess only allegiances that are meaningful to the game are listed. If, say, your character is in the Mafia, you could list "The Family" as an allegiance.

Say a character wants to list "Me" as an allegiance, and the top tier one at that. He'd be willing to do anything to advance in life, going over family, friends, laws and whatnot. Might as well list "None" as an allegiance (which is a valid choice).

Like Kahuna, I disagree with the equivalence. I think that there is a difference between the unconsidered casual stance of self-interest, and the philosophical considered stance of self-interest. It's the difference between relying on instinct and emotion in a pinch, and rationalizing anti-social, self-centered, ambitious behavior. The former stance is passive and produces an individual that normally takes no great risks and formulates no particular plans to advance himself. That person doesn't do alot of anything based on pre-consideration. The latter is likely to actively pursue his own interests to the expense of all else. The difference in a pinch may not be all that much, but the difference in day to day affairs would probably be striking.

But where I really disagree is over the notion that you can qualify "allegiances that are meaningful to the game." I certainly never know beforehand what individual details or reasoning are going to turn out to be crucial to role-playing inspired problems. I can never tell ahead of time what problems a DM is going to through my way, how I will work out what the character will do, or what thinks a player is going to decide are important. People are complex, which is why I've always found trying to list out all the things that might influence thier behavior far less satisfying than an abstract description. Alignment is nice in that it isn't highly proscriptive or descriptive. (Of course, that's also why we argue about what it means, so its strength is its weakness.)

I'd have a very hard time listing out all my real world allegiances, and some of seemingly trivial allegiances are going to provoke some of the most intriguing behavior on my part. Alot of times I've found trivial allegiances to end up leading to larger allegiance conflicts. A description like, "My character is for God, country, and the NY Mets." is evocative, but not fully descriptive. We can project alot on to a character like that, but it isn't really descriptive. It's attempt to be descriptive in my opinion actually gets in the way.

Consider the fact that it is the trivial allegiances that are most likely to lead to the sort of bonus to social interaction that D20 Modern grants for shared allegiance. I'm far more likely to interact well with someone who has a shared narrow allegiance to say the Green Bay Packers, Paranioa the RPG, or the US Marine Corp - regardless of whether that allegiance is trivial or sacred - than I am if I have a more common, broader allegiance to God, country, good, or whatever.

And what about an allegiance to family? Lots of people have it, but generally if I have an allegiance to family I mean an allegiance to my family, and your allegiance to your family doesn't necessarily give you anything in common with me. This seems to me to be a flaw in the system, in that lots of people have allegiances to things which they are penalized for under the system (in the sense that the benefit is withheld). Allegiances rewards allegiances we'd describe as lawful more than it does chaotic and personal ones. If I have an allegiance to my own self, it doesn't mean I get along better with other people who have a primary allegiance to thier own self and in fact we'd expect something of the reverse in many cases.

Some people may make the claim that I'm confusing allegiances with personal traits. They may argue that I don't have an allegiance to 'the green bay packers', 'Alabama', 'merlot', 'heavy metal', or whatever, in that these things aren't things which I'm willing to sacrifice for. But I think that this just doesn't bear up underscrutiny. People do sacrifice for these things. In my experience, they give up more to have these things more often than they do for the supposedly sacred allegiances. And also in my experience, they are just as likely to get involved in actual violent conflicts with one another over a disagreement about these trivial allegiances than they are over the supposed large and important ones. There are probably more bar room brawls over 'da Bears' vs. 'the Packers', or over ill-thought words said of someone's spouse or mother, than there are over Lutheranism vs. Presbyterianism, or whether it is better to arrange a nation over libertarian or socialist lines, or whether or not cannibalism and polygamy are mere social taboos or actually morally depraved.

Out in the real world its not at all easy to tell what allegiances meaningfully alter a person's behavior.