Do alignments improve the gaming experience?

[Imaro]

To go point by point (at least within Fate):
"Table conflicts" - The standard process for creating characters in Fate obviates this in practice. You don't really make up your character's aspects in a vacuum. So if something is unclear, then it can be clarified before play.
"GM fiat" - Fate includes a method (the compel) for the GM to make your aspects work against you, but you get Fate points to drive the plot forward later. So, when the paladin's code (Follow the code of Egregius) calls him do something that seems otherwise foolish, he gets the reward for accepting that challenge and living up to his code. Both the player and the GM are encouraged to both point out and seek for ways for this kind of thing to happen. Even better, we don't have to define the code beforehand! The compel is an offer not a bludgeon. In the traditional parlance, the GM says "Are you sure that the code of Egregious doesn't demand that you help them?" while holding up a Fate point token to tempt the player. The player is free to either accept the point (and act accordingly) or to buy off the GM by paying a token. The whole character doesn't become dysfunctional simply because the GM and player disagree on what's "right" for the character to do.
"disempowerment" - By default, in Fate, St. Egregious may not have even existed in the gameworld until the player wrote that aspect down.

Emphasis mine... so unless you go along with the GM... you are actually being punished by having a fate point taken away, right? That seems like a bludgeon to me, especially seeing as compels, invokes, etc. are based around the use of fate points... I'm not seeing how you aren't being punished in Fate if you don't agree with the way the GM wants you to play and then have to give up a fate point to refuse to act how he is saying you should?? It's not as drastic a punishment as the paladin but you are still loosing resources (being punished) because you choose not to do what the GM thinks you should.

 

[Imaro]

But that isn't what I am doing. I am saying let one person determine what good and evil mean inside a fictional fantasy setting . It isn't real world good and evil, it's what Malledhyr the God of Clouds and Sunshine says is good. The point is having a source external to me or my character make these judgements, not impose a real world moral philosophy on me by the GM. This is make believe, I can imagine a world where good and evil do not match my own personal views.

I am with you, not interested in the GM being there to moralize me on religion or ethics. That isn't what this is about.

Have to spread some XP around first... but yeah, this.

 

[Hussar]

But that isn't what I am doing. I am saying let one person determine what good and evil mean inside a fictional fantasy setting . It isn't real world good and evil, it's what Malledhyr the God of Clouds and Sunshine says is good. The point is having a source external to me or my character make these judgements, not impose a real world moral philosophy on me by the GM. This is make believe, I can imagine a world where good and evil do not match my own personal views.

I am with you, not interested in the GM being there to moralize me on religion or ethics. That isn't what this is about.

But, since it is the DM who is in actuality Malledhyr then he is, in fact, moralising at you.

I think a single player could be more consistent than the GM. The issue is you want one person being the judge, so it is consistent for the group, otherwise you have (potentially) 3-6 competing views on what constitutes lawful good or chaotic evil. This is set in a world where there are cosmic moral forces who make their will known. So for me, it's important those judgments be somewhat consistent and feel like they are actually coming from outside the characters. Again, preference, but that is what I like.

They should be consistent when the group is actually compatible. Note consistent does not mean, "always one way". There are multiple interpretations which can be consistant and different. What you apparently want is a "correct" answer to moral elements in your game and you are content to allow the DM to make that determination.

To me, it's far more preferable for there to be numerous interpretations that are consistent with genre. It's more fun for there to be some uncertainty about what consists of good or evil rather than having one person tell me, "no, that action is evil." I'm far more interested in having more voices at the table.

Which makes N'raac's point somewhat moot. He's trying to pass this off as a player entitlement issue - only players who want to tell the DM don't like alignment. Sorry, but I DM almost all the time, and I don't want this.

 

[Hussar]

Emphasis mine... so unless you go along with the GM... you are actually being punished by having a fate point taken away, right? That seems like a bludgeon to me, especially seeing as compels, invokes, etc. are based around the use of fate points... I'm not seeing how you aren't being punished in Fate if you don't agree with the way the GM wants you to play and then have to give up a fate point to refuse to act how he is saying you should?? It's not as drastic a punishment as the paladin but you are still loosing resources (being punished) because you choose not to do what the GM thinks you should.

As I recall, you don't actually lose the token. You just fail to gain a new one. Isn't that how the compels work? It's been a while and I'm too lazy to look it up.

Which is significantly different from actually losing class abilities and whatnot. You don't lose anything, as I recall, you just don't gain anything either.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But, since it is the DM who is in actuality Malledhyr then he is, in fact, moralising at you.



.

No , not really. When I GM it isn't what I an doing, I am playing Malledhyr, whose notion of good might be very different than my own. And when I am a player the GMs in my groups never strike me as moralizing.

 

[pemerton]

Your assessment of my players is about as reasonable as me asserting that you, yourself, must be an egomaniac who, if trusted with any power to actually adjudicate the game, will use it only in the most arbitrary fashion and override any choice the players may have to play their characters.

I take it from this that you don't have baby-throat ripping players. I know I don't. So why do you keep bringing up players who are not part of either of our play experiences? What does thinking about them add to my understanding of how my game does, and might, work?

I am not the one arguing that each player may independently decide whether their character's actions are, in fact, Good or Evil.

Nor am I. I am arguing that the game does not require any such judgement to be imposed in order to progress, and in fact can better progress if no such judgement is imposed as part of the action resolution mechanics.

On the contrary, given your obvious concern with playes who play torturers and murderers, I can only assume that you have many players who lie about their character's personalities and moral inclinations!

Huh? I have no such concern. I only discuss the issue because you, and some other posters, keep raising it. Do you really need me to point you to your earlier posts upthread, where you posited such examples as the paladin of the Raven Queen who rips out the throat of a child, or the paladin (of some unspecified god) who tortures a peasant to gain information?

I present the extreme example of the players being able to set their own moral choices with no adjudication.

<snip>

I thought appropriate actions were not obvious, so the player must be allowed to apply whatever moral judgement he sees fit, and this moral judgment would become that of the code he follows, be that the Raven Queen or the Demon King.

There are multiple issues here.

First, absolutely the players in my game are allowed to make whatever moral judgements they see fit. This is both true in general terms - I honour freedom of conscience in my games, and don't try to force my players to subscribe to any particular moral conception - and also in the sense of evaluative response: just as, when I see a movie with my friends, we might disagree over what evaluations, if any, should be applied to the characters and the events within the film, so the same is true when playing D&D.

Second, if a player wanted to play a PC who was a wanton murderer, what makes you think that player would choose to worship the Raven Queen (or Bane, or Pelor), rather than (say) Gruumsh or Orcus or Demogorgon? The Raven Queen is a god of death, of fate, of winter. Not a god of murder. There are other beings in the 4e cosmology who fill that role.

You seem to me to be assuming, but without real explanation that I can see, that somehow a player will get an advantage if s/he presents his/her PC as a worshipper of Pelor, but plays his/her PC as a murderer. I can conceive of games where this might be so, but mine is not one of them. I would be interested in seeing you address this issue head on.

So is Asmodeus maybe Good in your game? Can I have my Paladin be a devoted servant of the High Moral Path of Asmodeus? Or has someone made the judgment call in advance that the Raven Queen is Good and Asmodeus is Evil? if so, how can we tell, when any action taken by the PC's may be Good or Evil, based on the moral code that only they may define?

I don't really follow this. In 4e the Raven Queen is unaligned (and would be neutral in 3E alignment I think), as are the 3 PCs who follow her. One of those PCs is also, somewhat reluctantly, is allied with the archdevil Levistus and the war god Bane, both of whom are labelled as Evil in the 4e rulebooks (and would be LE in 3E alignment).

Of these three, only one is a paladin in both the technical sense of class choice, and in the archetypical sense of playing a warrior called by the divine who conceives of his whole life in terms of honouring the Raven Queen through his conduct (from such minor things as sleeping standing up - only when he is dead will he lie on his back - to such major things as leading the party against Torog's Soul Abattoir, where the souls of those who die in the Underdark are subjected by Torog to brutal torture). I think a paladin of Asmodeus or perhaps Bane could make sense - these are entities whom a divine warrior might honour through his/her conduct. Vecna or Torog I can't really see, but I can't say I've devoted that much mental energy to it.

The other two PCs are a ranger-cleric, who serves the Raven Queen by hunting down the undead and demons to whom she is opposed; and an invoker/wizard, who serves the Raven Queen together with a suite of other entities (besides Bane and Levistus already mentioned there are also Ioun and Vecna - both gods of knowledge - and Erathis, a god of order (both earthly order and divine order) and at least sometimes Pelor). Neither of these PCs sets out to honour the gods they serve through their conduct in the way that the paladin does. And the invoker often finds himself in tricky situations, where making choices is hard.

If all three are telling me "And this is the One True Way under the Code of the Raven Queen, who grants my Holy Powers", it hurts any semblance that the Raven Queen is granting power to her followers based on any actual moral precepts.

Whereas I have no trouble with this at all.

In the First World War, there were Christian clergy both in France and in Germany telling soldiers of each country that God was on their side. Presumably not all of those clerics were correct, although this is perhaps not self-evidently true (eg maybe military service to one's country is a very important value in the eyes of the divinity). Yet they continued to serve as clergy.

There are any number of reasons why the Raven Queen, like any other divine being, might tolerate error and disagreement among her servants yet not strip them of their powers. After all, it is notorious that such beings move in mysterious ways.

And turning this from in-fiction to play-at-the-table, the main aim of play in my game is not for the players to discover what I, as GM, regard as the true moral code of the Raven Queen. It is to play their PCs and find out what happens when the stakes get high. Why would I want to shut down such play by intervening on the basis of some stipulated solution to a moral question?

So what happens to the character whose powers are granted due to his devotion and service to the Raven Queen, when he is determined, after many game sessions, to have opposed her wishes routinely throughout his adventuring career?

To me, this is like asking what happens when you think the other character your PC is adventuring with is a reasonable guy, and then he suddenly executes half-a-dozen unconscious prisoners without warning. I don't think the game needs an algorithm for this - it's precisely the point of playing the game to make these sorts of decisions.

The particular issue with the Raven Queen has never come up, so I don't need to decide yet. If it comes up, I'll deal with it then, drawing on all the resources that the context and history of play give me.

I actually don't think this issue is all that likely to come up, as it happens, but comparable issues - mostly around divine order vs chaos - are increasingly coming up in my 4e game, and I personally devote my mental energies to thinking about these actual play questions rather than hypothetical ones. A big practical factor in D&D is the centrality of party play, which creates a fairly strong pressure at the table not to do stuff, nor to respond to stuff, in such an outrageous way that party unity is no longer feasible. (You can see this in the very common response to a PC "falling" in D&D - s/he is taken out of the game and becomes an NPC.) This does not come up in one-shots in the same way, nor in systems that can better mechanically handle ongoing conflict between and disunity among the PCs.

I'm actually surprised that no one on this thread has defended alignment in these terms, because that is certainly one way I've seen it used: eliminate intra-party conflict by having the GM tell players the limits of their permissible choices for their PCs. (To do this job, GM-enforced alignment needs to be combined with a "no evil PCs" rule, but that has been very common in 2nd ed games I've seen and played in.)

 

[Ratskinner]

Emphasis mine... so unless you go along with the GM... you are actually being punished by having a fate point taken away, right? That seems like a bludgeon to me, especially seeing as compels, invokes, etc. are based around the use of fate points... I'm not seeing how you aren't being punished in Fate if you don't agree with the way the GM wants you to play and then have to give up a fate point to refuse to act how he is saying you should?? It's not as drastic a punishment as the paladin but you are still loosing resources (being punished) because you choose not to do what the GM thinks you should.

One big difference is that the GM (or the rules themselves) aren't pre-defining your aspects for you. So by choosing your aspects, you're choosing what kinds of conflicts or troubles you want to have. Basically, when you put down an aspect, you're signing up for it to be compelled. (Although certainly some aspects are far more compellable than others, which some players also use when constructing their characters.) In this way, the GM isn't really demanding you act according to his dictates, but pushing the character to act as the player stated it would (or sometimes, pushing for the world to react to your character the way you said it would). The nature of the aspects is always in the hands of the players. Additionally, since aspects are defined in a freeform way, your aspects can be as specific and detailed as you see fit. There can be tremendous mechanical variety to characters in Fate who might all be "paladins" under a D&D scheme.

As for the punishment angle...Fate points are more of an economy during play, rather than finite resource. You should be anticipating such things coming (and going), and Fate points don't usually get treated as a rare resource. While I suppose you are technically correct, it usually doesn't feel that way, IME. In Fate, if you find yourself running out of Fate Points, its usually a sign that the character isn't working the way you intended it, or it isn't striking the interest of the rest of the group. Additionally, you're character never stops being <whatever> merely on the whim of the GM. That is, you may have to pay a Fate point for it, and if it happens a few times you might want to reconsider the problematic aspects, but the GM can't suddenly declare that two of your aspects just don't work and your stunts are all gone.

Now, IME, declining a compel rarely happens, and when it does its usually perceived as an invitation for the GM to come up with something more interesting (although the GM can also up his offer to 2 FP). I can't say if that's a universal thing with Fate or not, but it seems common, at least.

 

[Hussar]

No , not really. When I GM it isn't what I an doing, I am playing Malledhyr, whose notion of good might be very different than my own. And when I am a player the GMs in my groups never strike me as moralizing.

Hang on though. You claim you want an objective definition of alignment provided by the DM. But, if every Good god defines Good differently, then how can there be an objective definition of alignment?

How is it consistent if the definition of a given alignment changes depending on which NPC you talk to?

I thought the whole point of having a single voice determine alignment was so you could have a single, objective definition that everyone is following. But, now you're claiming that alignment will always be relative to the NPC doing the defining.

How is that any different from having each player define alignment? Instead of six people giving one voice each, you have one person giving six different opinions.

To put it more concretely, presuming a standard D&D pantheistic world with numerous like aligned gods, if the DM isn't giving definitive answers, then how can the players act on any information they get? Is a given act good or not? Well, it depends on who you ask, in the game world?

 

[pemerton]

But, since it is the DM who is in actuality Malledhyr then he is, in fact, moralising at you.

This is my feeling too, based on my general play experience.

In my experience, GMs who adjudicate good and evil aren't making up some fantasy conceptions. They're trying to apply the words in their ordinary usage. This is also borne out by Gygax's reference, in his description of "good" in his PHB and DMG, to "weal" and "human/creature rights", and (for LG) to "the greatest happiness of the greatest number".

Look at the SRD:

"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others.​

These aren't stipulated fantasy usages. These terms are meant to hook on to genuine, widely held moral intuitions, such as that life is valuable and killing is at least morally suspect.

To me, it's far more preferable for there to be numerous interpretations that are consistent with genre.

<snip>

Which makes N'raac's point somewhat moot. He's trying to pass this off as a player entitlement issue - only players who want to tell the DM don't like alignment. Sorry, but I DM almost all the time, and I don't want this.

I agree with all this.

by choosing your aspects, you're choosing what kinds of conflicts or troubles you want to have.

<snip>

The nature of the aspects is always in the hands of the players. Additionally, since aspects are defined in a freeform way, your aspects can be as specific and detailed as you see fit. There can be tremendous mechanical variety to characters in Fate who might all be "paladins" under a D&D scheme.

<snip>

if you find yourself running out of Fate Points, its usually a sign that the character isn't working the way you intended it

This all strikes me as pretty close to Beliefs in Burning Wheel. It's very different from the tradition of mechanical alignment in D&D.

 

[billd91]

In my experience, GMs who adjudicate good and evil aren't making up some fantasy conceptions. They're trying to apply the words in their ordinary usage. This is also borne out by Gygax's reference, in his description of "good" in his PHB and DMG, to "weal" and "human/creature rights", and (for LG) to "the greatest happiness of the greatest number".

Look at the SRD:

"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others.​

These aren't stipulated fantasy usages. These terms are meant to hook on to genuine, widely held moral intuitions, such as that life is valuable and killing is at least morally suspect.

The fact that the definitions of good and evil in D&D aren't that different from typical modern uses of the term doesn't mean the DM's moralizing at the player nor that the alignments aren't being defined for fantasy use. Defining them close to typical modern uses makes them easier to understand and accept, both of which are good for helping players get into character. If I tell a player that the character he is playing is drifting from good to neutral or even evil, I'm not judging the player. I'm judging the character's long term behavior according to D&D's morality. I'll save my personal judging of the player based on other behavioral issues (such as if he's a disruptive player, an overall asshat, or a decent guy) not whether or not his PC is evil.