Baby's alignment?

[CRGreathouse]

nature vs. nuture...

actually in a world where alignment is an integral part of the game... i'm going with the race alignment in womb and at birth. nature

the nuture part is what can change baby's alignment.

So does mean a human baby is Neutral, or that the human base alignment is Chaotic Evil?

 

[Fester]

What is the alignment of a baby?

It totally depends on the angle you take. Do people in your campaign develop their nature through their experiences in life or are they just born a certain way? Of course, you may run a campaign which allows for both of these options (mostly, people are born Neutral, some of whom will become evil; some are just born evil).

 

[Lord Judas]

Any being that: puts my ATM card in the VCR, snaps a new PS2 disk in half, does a WWF style dive onto the dog, then comes running with a big smile and "Daddy!" to give out hugs is *clearly CN. However, my daughter is 3, not a infant.

Now the 8 year old...hmmm....I guess CN as well because I get the full spectrum of alignments. We have the LG day of bliss, followed by a day where I uncover a web of deception of NE proportions...

 

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

I can't foresee a situation that would require a baby's alignment needing to be checked but, obviously, you can, so I'd go with TN.

Well, in a campaign I started running last week, this was an issue, and I had the same question. The party is all divine--a paladin, a cleric and a druid. They were rescuing some women who were trapped in the remains of The Temple of the Mother following an earthquake. The High Priestess didn't want any official help and wanted the search attempt kept quiet--and the party soon found out why. There were three babies that the temple was sheltering, as well as a woman in the midst of giving birth, all of which had been sired by a half-dragon. (In the campaign, there's a rising incidence of hybrid babies being born that are in very delicate health at birth, and the government has ordered that they not be allowed to live, but the high priestess is sheltering them and the mothers.)

When the paladin cast Detect Evil (as he is wont to do), I had to decide quickly if the babies were evil or not. Despite their parentage, I decided they weren't evil just because their father was a half-dragon.

Although I do wonder how the paladin would've reacted had they been evil.

 

[Breakdaddy]

All babies start off as CM (chaotic malleable), and are likely to turn to whatever alignment is most prevalent in their lives (parents, friends, etc.), though this is not always the case.

 

[painandgreed]

For heroic fantasy like D&D, I'd say that they'd be either pure and good, or that their soul has begun the basic formation of self and each would have their own alignment. While most would be N a few with tendenceies, it would be possible for the truely good or evil "chosen one" to be born. In the case where they're good and pure but soon to be corrupted by the world, it's just one of those things but could have ramifications for evil creatures needing to sacrifice good or things that can't affect good. THis pure state would wear off long before the baby could talk, walk, or even crawl.

 

[Aaron L]

Babies are Neutral, just like animals are Neutral.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Probably TN, but you could make a case of CE or CN. If you go with CE then I guess people are inheitly evil.

 

[ghettognome]

This is interesting that a thread like this came up because I had been pondering the alignment of a couple of children in a campaign I am writing, they had been made vampire, so the obvious alignment is CE, BUT they are too young to understand, and innocence then puts a kink in the whole evil thing, so I was trying to figure what their alignment would have been before they were brought to the dark side.

 

[AuraSeer]

I've ruled that children in my world are TN, unless their race has an innate alignment descriptor. The soul doesn't start "keeping score" until around the onset of puberty; at that point, major intentional acts can begin to make them drift away from the center. As age increases, the "scoring" system gets less lenient, until finally they reach adulthood and everything they do counts toward alignment.

This leads to some interesting effects in the gameworld. For instance, thieves' guilds (and hidden cults) recruit children not just for their small size, but also for their ability to bypass many traps and effects triggered to alignment. An antipathy spell or glyph of warding that wards against evil will be no protection against a sneaky 7-year-old. A child thief who hits puberty is like a boy soprano whose voice begins to change; no matter how much talent he retains, he's lost something he will never get back. (I toyed with the idea of extending that correspondence even more, saying that preventing physical puberty would prevent alignment change. But I ditched that concept, because I didn't like the idea of a preocious evildoer castrating himself and staying TN for the rest of his life.)