When the character writes himself, his "descriptors" which have been "pre-given" by the author's vision
This is tortured. There
are no descriptors. As you yourself go on to say, the author draws upon "the manner in which the character has already been written to date, and the experiences he has had (in backstory and in play)".
The manner in which a character has already been written is not a descriptor. There may not even be a word or phrase of English able to adequately capture that manner, whatever exactly it is. Similarly for
the experiences a character has had in backstory and play. There is no descriptor there: there is a simply a known history of experiences.
As I said upthread, this is the exact opposite of alignment. It is the reliance upon spontaneous intuitions generated by familiarity with and interpretation of prior material. It has nothing in common, either cognitively or artistically, with identifying and then applying a descriptor.
That's not to say that you couldn't do that if you wanted - identify and then apply a descriptor. But then the character wouldn't be writing him-/herself. Rather, there would be very conscious authorship involving two stages: first, distilling that
manner and those
experiences into an overarching descriptor; and second, inferring from that descriptor what the character should do next.
At that point, of course, we
still wouldn't have alignment: because alignment, at least played as the 2nd ed AD&D PHB suggests, involves a third element too: of ensuring that whatever one has the character do at the second stage
does not itself undermine the truth of the overarching descriptor. That means not only very conscious authorship, but authorship with a very particular goal. (And one which has no appeal for me.)
Much as the conclusion that "Sir Gallice would not take these actions because he is Lawful Good."
But that's not the character authoring him-/herself! It's conscious authoring based on a preconception of what Sir Gallice desires and is capable (or not capable) of.
LG becomes a shorthand for some of those traits.
And this raises a
further issue, that goes to the heart of alignment: who gets to define the shorthand? If the
player - who is the typical author of the character - gets to do so, then LG should have whatever meaning the player imputes. But at that point we don't have mechanical alignment anymore. And if the
GM gets to decide on the shorthand, then the character is clearly not authoring him-/herself, because there is the prospect of real-time editorial correction from a 3rd party. The player becomes less like an author and my like an actor of someone else's screenplay.
So you can manage without full, formal definitions of all of these terms to know it when you see it, but Lawful, Chaotic, Good and Evil cannot be similarly treated
Of course they can be. I'm not the one who has insisted they be defined - you are! (Do I really have to trawl back through the thread to find the posts? In post number 530, you said that "we can have a deity of honour and heroism, can we not? Assuming that deity is, in some way, directly influential, that deity’s concept of honour and/or heroism must be determined in some way". In the post to which you have now replied, I
denied that this was so. That is to say, I denied that we need to "determine" a concept of honour and/or heroism to use it. Likewise in the same post I denied that we need to "determine" a concept of good or evil to base a game on the trope of good vs evil.)
My point - which you seem still to be missing, or perhaps just ignoring for some reason - is that mechanical alignment requires the use of these evaluative words and phrases as standards, imposed by the GM as part of adjudicating and refereeing the play of the game. THIS IS SOMETHING I DON'T WANT TO DO. Hence I don't use mechanical alignment. I don't see why that is so hard to understand.
The players can argue over what best serves Divine order and the forces of chaos, and decide that, say, Divine Order is best served by making all decisions based on random chance (say rolling dice) or that chaos would be best served by homogenizing all its servants into a large army, with each member having a role to play and serving it perfectly, as dictated by his superiors?
I believe that you are intending this as some sort of knock-down argument, but it is a failure at that. Because you've given no reason
why the players have reached such a conclusion.
I don't know if you are familiar with the plot of Wagner's Ring Cycle, but it actually has roughly the shape you here treat as a knock-down counterexample! Wotan (Odin), between the conclusion of The Valkyrie (the 2nd opera) and the opening of Siegfried (the 3rd opera), realises that the only way to restore a proper order to the world - which he, Wotan, has doomed via the pacts he has entered into which have permitted the dragon Fafnir to gain possession of the Ring, itself tainted by (i) its creator's theft of the gold from the Rhinemaidens and then by (ii) Wotan's theft of it from its creator - is to allow the emergence of a wild man unbound by any obligation or law. That is Siegfried, who - when he meets Wotan - uses the sword that he forged himself to cleave in half the spear on which Wotan has engraved all the runes that record the pacts and laws of the world.
So here we have Wotan, divine ruler of the world - and no slouch in the reasoning department - forming the view that the best way to serve divine order is to permit the emergence of a wild man who decides based on whim and passion, and that to proceed in conventional ways would only compound the problems that the theft of the Rhinemaiden's gold, and then of their ring, have created for the world.
(In framing the campaign in which the PCs turned on the heavens to save the world from the consequences of ancient pacts the gods had entered into, I was heavily influenced by Wagner. But that campaign didn't illustrate your example as nicely as the plot of The Ring itself.)
Therefore, I don't find your putative counter-example knockdown at all. If that's where my players end up, that's where they end up. Let's play the game and see what happens.
I don't need to superintend their choices about these matters, or veto them, or prove them to be mistaken. I'm much more interested in seeing where they take us and the game.
It's unclear to me how you can manage "Primal Chaos" and "Divine Order", but Good, Evil, Law and Chaos throw you for such a huge loop.
They don't throw me for a loop. My point is that
I am not interested in the adjudicative aspect of mechanical alignment. I could do it if I wanted to. I could also adjudicate my players' actions based on whether I like the cut of their rhetorical jibs, or any other such thing. But I don't care to.
earlier in the thread, you were aghast at the suggestion that a Paladin tearing out a baby's throat with his teeth "for the greater good" could ever occur? I'm not seeing how sacrificing a person to a Dark God is somehow less subject to moral judgment.
If a player was setting out to play a noble knight, I'm hard pressed to see why s/he would have his/her PC ride into a village on a whim, grab a baby, and tear out its throat on a whim. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has already discussed this particular issue well.
The player in the episode of play I described didn't have his PC decide to sacrifice his friend and (soon to be former) companion on a whim, however. So I don't really see the connection. And I also don't see the relevance of moral judgement. I don't need to make a moral judgement to express the view stated in the paragraph above this one. I'm just making a prediction: I can't imagine a player of a noble knight declaring, on a whim, that his/her PC rides into the village, grabs hold of a baby and rips out its throat. In relation to the sacrifice episode, I'm not making a moral judgement either. Nor am I making a prediction. I'm describing an episode that actually occurred during play (in early 1994, if my memory serves me well).
It doesn't take much work, from my perspective, to classify that action.
Lots of things don't take much work. It doesn't mean I want to do them. If the point of play - as I posted in reply to Umbran some way upthread (post 454) - is to evoke an evaluative and/or expressive response on the part of a participant, then classifying actions in the way you advocate as part of the process of play is an impediment. It is antithetical to the point of play.
Pictionary would be a worse game if, before a player could show his/her picture, it had to be vetted by a referee. Similarly, for me RPGing is a worse activity if, when a player declares his/her PC's action, that action - as part of the process of play - is subjected to adjudication by a referee.
So your game simply takes place in a moral vacuum - sacrificing a sentient being, indeed a companion (fellow PC) to a Dark God has no moral implications whatsoever? No one at the table considers this "an evil action"? You are fine with an Arthurian Paladin carrying out such an act and continuing to exist in a state of divine grace, freely benefiting from the powers of Good and Righteousness that he is considered to continue representing as a paragon?
This paragraph seems to have a more than one thing going on it.
First, you seem to be (i) asserting that no reasonable person could believe that an Arthurian paladin could sacrifice a friend and companion to a dark god, yet remain a paladin, while (ii) supposing that a player might take that very view about his/her own PC. Which entails that you think players will depart from what reasonableness requires. Why would they do that? This also goes back to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s points about trusting your players. If your players are not reasonable people, why are you playing with them? If they are reasonable people, and they sincerely believe that some course of conduct is consistent with paladinhood, why do you need to contradict that view just because you see the situation differently? This is one of the reasons that I don't use alignment mechanics. I don't feel the need to impose my evaluative conceptions on the players' play of their PCs.
Second, you seem to be supposing that
unless the GM imposes moral judgements as part of the adjudication of players' declared actions for their PCs, then the game is taking place in a moral vacuum. That's such a strange supposition that I hesitate to impute it to you, yet I don't see any other way to make sense of what you're saying. But the notion that events don't have value unless someone sticks an authoritative label on them, which everyone else participating in the activity in question is then obliged to abide by, is so foreign to my way of thinking that I barely know where to begin.
I'll take the example of the movie Casablanca. It is no part of authoring the script to Casablanca, nor filming, producing and distributing Casablanca, nor watching Casablanca as an audience member, to impose evaluative labels in some authoritative way on the actions or characters of Rick, or Ilsa, or Victor Lazlo, or Captain Renault, or Ferrari. But to suggest that Casablanca takes place in a moral vacuum would be absurd.
Moral implications can arise, and be judged by the participants in an RPG, without the need for the GM to adjudicate by way of mechanical alignment. My personal experience is that in fact moral implications are more likely to arise in the absence of mechanical alignment, because the players do not have the GM's judgement to hide behind. They have to take responsibility for their own decisions in playing their PCs.
