Do alignments improve the gaming experience?

[Ratskinner]

So why judge it a non-scene instead of stating that??

...because, the lack of it makes is non-scene? I mean, taken as presented I really don't know if this is in the middle of some other scene, part of the setup for another scene, or what. Did anything important to advance the scenario happen? I have no idea. I mean, its not as if its feelings are hurt.

 

[N'raac]

It's fine that you prefer a different approach to campaign backstory set up than me. That still doesn't make the backstory hidden, if in fact it's all out in the open before play starts!

Too bad it wasn’t out in the open to facilitate character conception

I mostly GM, and I am not interested in restricting or permitting my players' action declarations.

A key difference here seems to be your view that this is the GM judging the character, rather than the GM determining an NPC’s judgment, be that his deity or the LG empowering force which provides a Paladin his powers. I’m not sure why you feel such difficulty segregating your interpretation from that of an NPC in this regard, but clearly could divorce your own judgment from that of an NPC’s when:

I've described an actual play episode above in which a PC did summarily executve some unconscious hobgoblin warriors, and I described how I dealt with that: I expressed my shock (as did the other players), and within the game, I had most of the NPCs present in the situation express support for what the PC did.

I would stop using alignment rules to the hypothetical doesn't come up. Also, if I didn't want the issue of "what to do with the orc babies" to come up at all, I wouldn't place any orc babies in the scenario.

So we invade the Orc tribe’s home and there are no young? Do they reproduce by cloning?

Lancelot is actually an interesting example: in one of the Chretien de Troyes stories Lancelot kills half-a-dozen of his fellow knights while escaping from Gawain, who is pursuing him for his wrongdoing with Guinevere. I think to modern sensibilities this would seem quite outrageous, but there is no suggestion in the work that Lancelot does the wrong thing with such killings. Attitudes to death, including who is a permissible target of lethal violence - and particularly role-basd attitues (eg by being knights they have chosen to take the risk of being killed in interpersonal violence, and so can have no complaint if they are killed) - are variable across times and places.

But our games are not scattered over times and places. They exist, typically, in one AD&D world. So, in the GM defining the mores of that world, he would define where killing sits in the views of the powers dictating the various alignments.

Contemporary English-speaking moral philosophy has a very sophisticated framework and vocabulary. I'm a professional participant in this debate, and am quite familiar with the technicalities of it.

I suspect most lawyers can rip apart the legal system in any game setting, and anyone with a grasp of the fundamentals of economics can shred the D&D economy. The geography and climate of most game worlds will not stand up to scrutiny by an expert in the field, and the sociological implications of races that live hundreds or thousands of years are not thought out in any game world I am aware of. So why would it be surprising that the game world will not have an ethical framework which would be consistent with hundreds of years of philosophical debate which has yet to reach anything approaching a consensus?

So put the real aside – it is irrelevant to the discussion. There is no need to determine whether Jefferson and Hamilton and their friends were chaotic (because favouring individual rights) or lawful (because believing that the rule of law was utterly crucial for securing such rights); whether FDR was lawful (because running a social and economic programme - the New Deal - based on ideas of solidarity and common welfare) or chaotic (because prepared to threaten the rule of law in order to get his programme through) in order to play or run the game. That determination would be made in light of the absolute powers of Law and Chaos in this game world.

If a character generally seeks to enhance the well being of society, using whatever means seem best able to achieve that goal at each step along the way, that sounds like NG to me. May we please now move on from real world analysis?

Heh, under that approach then a paladin who commits an evil act for some greater good has in fact committed a neutral act and is safe from the wrath of their diety.

Emphasis added. If he has committed an evil act, we’re done. His alignment may not change – it was one, single evil act. Now, I think we have to judge this in the framework of the game system. “Respect for life” is not “killing a foe”, and I don’t see anyone arguing that Paladins can never kill. So it must be possible for an act to have both good and evil components, and not be an evil act.

Applying this to N'raac's example, then, we're being asked to think about a situation in which the GM frames the PC into a scene where s/he has to rescue some NPCs from a snake, and the GM (presumably) knows that player has not fate points left, and the GM then uses a compel to have the PC flee the scene and thereby fail in his/her goals in the scene. Even if the rules of the game allow for that - and as I don't know them very well I have to concede that they might - how does that possibly look like good GMing? To me it seems terrible - what's the point of framing the PC into a scene only to then resolve it, without the player ever engaging the action resolution mechanics, via a compel?

A number of people have weighed in suggesting it is the result under the game system, and you now seem prepared to accept that the game may well allow for this. I suggest that your analysis indicates agreement that Fate points can carry problems similar to alignment if the GM chooses to use them in a poor manner. The difference is that you seem unable to envision the use of alignment in a positive manner, I suspect because your perspective is coloured by bad experiences in the past.

Does your model imply there may never be complications unless the player has a Fate point to invalidate them? Well, I guess in your game one should use up Fate points ASAP as nothing bad can happen once you run out.

Agreed, that's why my first impression was one of unfamiliarity with the game. That is, such a thing might happen, but its very clumsy vis-a-vis Fate's typical functioning.

The negative alignment examples I see posited regularly by detractors of alignment seem equally clumsy to me.

 

[Imaro]

...because, the lack of it makes is non-scene? I mean, taken as presented I really don't know if this is in the middle of some other scene, part of the setup for another scene, or what. Did anything important to advance the scenario happen? I have no idea. I mean, its not as if its feelings are hurt.

If it accomplishes one of those 3 things I listed it is considered a scene per the Fate Core rules... Now whether you personally accept it as such is a totally different matter.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Whereas my view is that the (practically inevitable) debates over whether someone is L or C or N show that the problems are as bad in practice as they are in theory.

!

Perhaps for you, these debates are inevitable. I never really encounter them when I play.

 

[pemerton]

But debates about players having more control over the shared fiction only shows problems in theory with no reason to believe they're bad in practice?

Hey, I'm not saying anyone who doesn't want to should play Fate.

In practice, I imagine any given table who enjoys playing Fate settles down into some sort of relatively stable unerstanding of what counts as "complication".

I assume that tables who enjoys using alignment do likewise with who is "lawful" and who "chaotic".

A diffrence, I think, is that probalby those who don't want to work through what counts as a complication triggered by an aspect probably just don't play Fate. Whereas I believe that there are plenty of tables who want to play D&D, but don't enjoy alignment. And at least in some versions of D&D (4e, B/X, 1st ed AD&D are the ones I'm confident in talking about) alignment is pretty easily dropped without disrupting other elements of the game, at least for certain playstyles.

In any case, like every game element, the alignment rules are just a projection of something very complicated in the real world down to a game element that seems manageable and useful to most people. If people have all kinds of house rules about initiative and hit points and healing and etc... I don't see any reason alignment needs to be any more sacrosanct.

Useful to some people, sure. Useful to most people, I don't know - alignment seems to be up there with experience points (and I think ahead of initiateive and healing) for being ignored or house-ruled.

 

[pemerton]

The stated goal of a scene is "the players try to achieve a goal or otherwise accomplish something significant in a scenario." The advice a few pages later is to end the scene as soon as that's resolved. I definitely agree that complicating scenes (or framing them in interesting ways) is the primary purpose of the compel mechanic.

Once again that all makes sense to me.

Here's what it says about scenes...

<snip>

Creating some kind of difficult choice or complication for the PCs. Your best tool to do this with is a compel, but if the situation is problematic enough, you might not need one.

If it accomplishes one of those 3 things I listed

My understanding of the examle was that the PC arrives on the scene ready to rescue the innocents from whatever is threatening, sees that they're threatened by a giant snake, and (due to the compel) runs away.

I don't see the difficult choice there - the player, to me, doesn't seem to have had a choice.

I don't really see the complication, either, unless you treat failure as a limiting case of complication.

While I'm not that familiar with Fate, I am fairly familiar with Marvel Heroic RP. In that system, the mechanical analogue of the "compel" would be the imposition of a "Trembling with fear" or "Running away" complication on the PC; but the action resolution mechanics in MHRP are such that a complication of that sort won't end the scene unless it reaches a certain degree of mechanical severity. Which seems, to me at least, an important difference from the scene-ending compel.

My feeling is that [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION] was thinking along similar lines to me when he suggested that the consequence of the snake acting against the player would be some sort of negative aspect imposed by the snake: that adversely affects that players' prospects of action resolution within the scene, but isn't in and of itself scene-ending.

 

[pemerton]

A key difference here seems to be your view that this is the GM judging the character, rather than the GM determining an NPC’s judgment

<snip>

The negative alignment examples I see posited regularly by detractors of alignment seem equally clumsy to me.

What's clumsy about not using alignment, and about not wanting to have a game mechanic which obliges me to decide whether near-omnipotent, near-omniscient exemplars of goodness agree with what the players are having their PCs do?

You obviously think I'm making a mistake in not using alignment in my games. What is the mistake?

 

[Cadence]

What's clumsy about not using alignment, and about not wanting to have a game mechanic which obliges me to decide whether near-omnipotent, near-omniscient exemplars of goodness agree with what the players are having their PCs do?

You obviously think I'm making a mistake in not using alignment in my games. What is the mistake?

I can't think of any problems with either wanting to make it so that the player interprets their own alignment if it works for a table, or scrapping alignment and much of its accompaniments altogether. Of course I also don't have any problem with it being used in the ways I've always seen it done. :::shrugs::

On the other hand, I can see plenty of flaws in your view on what the right way to have fun is. <- Joke!

 

[Bedrockgames]

Useful to some people, sure. Useful to most people, I don't know - alignment seems to be up there with experience points (and I think ahead of initiateive and healing) for being ignored or house-ruled.

Wait, since when has XP really been all that controversial? (or initiative for that matter?).

 

[Jacob Marley]

Wait, since when has XP really been all that controversial? (or initiative for that matter?).

Presumably he is referring to threads like this, and the frequent number of posters who state that they have given up using experience in favor of leveling characters at milestones, for pacing reasons, or after X number of sessions. The initiative debate is one I have never witnessed, though.