Do alignments improve the gaming experience?

[pemerton]

The PC made a moral choice to redirect the flow of souls from Vecna to the Raven Queen. As a consequence, his familiar and the Eye itself were removed. At least that’s what I see.

<snip>

Are you now saying the removal of a Paladin’s or Cleric’s abilities (or another character’s level loss) – his influence over the fiction – is not a reason you consider mechanical alignment problematic?

Let me have one last go.

Practically every decision made by a player in my game is a "moral choice" in the sense of your first quoted sentence: that is, a choice driven by the player's evaluative response to the situation in which his/her PC find him-/herself.

I have never said that such choice don't have consequences. Consequences to such choices is the whole point of play - otherwise nothing would happen. Way upthread [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] called these "physical consequences", and he and I agreed on their importance to play. [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has been making the same point in some recent posts.

What I have said is that I am not going is to judge the correctness of my players' evaluative responses. I am not going to judge, as part of my adjudicaiton of the game, whether their concepts of honour, or good and evil, or beatuy, or prowess, or any other value that they bring into play by their play of the game, is sound or unsound. I am not going to judge whether or not the actions they declare for their PCs realise those values.

And judging that the PC's angers Vecna is not a counter-example to that preferene. It does not involve judging whether or not the player made the right choice.

On the mechanical nature of consequences - I have repeatedly said that I think it is a weakness in alignment mechanics that they invite the GM to rebuild the player's character in a mechanically less effective version. The only people who think that shutting down an encounter powers, or inflicting damage, counts as a rebuild along these lines are you and [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION]. It had never even occurred to me until the two of you started posting that anyone would equate changing a PC's class from paladin to NPC warrior with d10 HD is no different from inflicting 1 hp of damage.

The manner in which the Eye moves on – its consequences to the wielder – seemed quite specific in the rules about the Eye specifically. The general rule that an artifact could move on at any point seems not to be modified by, nor to modify, the manner in which this specific artifact moves on.

Except that it also presents a specific, yet different, option for that very same artefact!

And yet we have been repeatedly told that the player’s conflict of interest does not, in any way, motivate them to play outside their character’s stated loyalties, moral code or alignment.

No. You've been told by me, in my game, that there is no conflict of interset here. The player has nothing to gain by departing from the values professed for his/her PC.

NO ONE is saying your game was bad. We are saying it seems inconsistent with your prior statements of why mechanical alignment would have been detrimental to it.

Actually, it would wreck it. Because instead of the player deciding whether ot not to thwart Vecna, he could simply have asked me what is good and what evil, and then I would have been obliged to answer him, presumably. And so instead of actual playing tthe game we would have colour-by-numbers according to the GM's script.

I would suggest your game was GOOD precisely because pressure was placed on the players, and their characters, over their moral choices. But that is similar to the pressure that well-run alignment rules also place on players and their characters.

Please give an example of this.

 

[pemerton]

Putting the familiar in the imp was not giving you implicit consent to control it, activate it and destroy it for an in-definite amount of time

You can't possibly know that. You weren't there. You didn't have the conversations. You're asserting that you know better what happened than I do!

As I said before, not only did the player consent, the player set it up!

 

[N'raac]

On the Batman example - see, this is precisely what I'm talking about. Both N'raac and Imaro have decided that this is not an evil act and thus a paladin Batman would never be punished for doing that.

I would hope that it's fairly obvious that it is possible to view this as an evil act.

So, you're the player and you leave the guy to die, based on your interpretation of evil. I'm the DM and I'm using mechanical alignment. You leave Raz alGul behind and now you're a fighter. This was a deliberate evil act, so, it's not like you can fix it with an Atonement spell.

Again, as @Imaro noted, if the player was told, before taking that action, that in your game world, this was an evil act, and would result in loss of his Paladinhood, the player would have the choice of:

(a) deciding his character will not take an action which, in your game world, he knows to be evil;
(b) discussing the issue prior to making a decision, which I would expect a good GM would be open to;
(c) deciding his character is prepared to take an evil act and lose his Paladinhood;
(d) not having suggested Batman, a character whose primary motivation is, depending on who writes him, vengeance, with justice being the other contender, is a Paladin in the first place.

Frankly, I think your concerns are a lot more related to lack of trust in the GM (any GM), an issue seen in many prior threads, than about alignment specifically.

See, in the beauty example, I would have no problem with the player of the Shadar-Kai claiming to worship a god of beauty by ritualistic scarification. That's cool. Because, after all, without mechanical alignment, he can actually be wrong. There's nothing saying that he's right. With mechanical alignment, he has to be right or wrong because if he's right, he gets spells, if he's wrong he doesn't. But, lacking mechanical alignment, I'm now free to come up with any number of reasons why he is wrong but still gets spells.

How does this link to mechanical alignment? It links to whether the deity continues to grant miracles to a person who is not following his creed. The deity is incapable of refusing to grant miraculous power to anyone who knows the rituals. That sounds a lot more like Arcane Power than Divine Grace to me.

I have to admit, watching you, Imaro and N'raac, in this thread, you are really not coming off sounding very creative in your games. Considering how dogmatic you are about following the letter of the rules, I can see why you would not like 4e. I mean, the Artifact rules in 4e are deliberately loose to allow all sorts of DM interpretations. They are certainly not exhaustive and they are not meant to be. Artifacts are what you add to the game when you want to chuck rules out the window. Add to that the fact that you are arguing that a GOD cannot kill someone's familiar at will baffles me. it's a GOD. It gets to do anything it wants to do. Gods don't follow any rules in the books.

I seem to recall a fellow named Hussar who told us on another thread that it is critically important we play by the rules so we all have a common frame of reference.

In any case, none of this discussion has anything to do with whether the GM should bind his games to a strictly “by RAW” structure. I’ve stated I believe it would have been a great game. But I don’t believe it was consistent with @pemerton’s stated philosophy about player build elements. And I do not believe his claims it was strictly by the rules were accurate either.

Funny how you provide the quote but fail to read it. "Punished by other members of the faithful". Yup his class powers can't be stripped. But it would be a pretty sad DM who couldn't punish a wayward character.

So he did read it correctly – the deity lacks the ability to withdraw his own blessings.

Let me have one last go.

Please do!

On the mechanical nature of consequences - I have repeatedly said that I think it is a weakness in alignment mechanics that they invite the GM to rebuild the player's character in a mechanically less effective version. The only people who think that shutting down an encounter powers, or inflicting damage, counts as a rebuild along these lines are you and @Imaro .

@Imaro – are we the only ones who posted on this? I thought there were a few others. I’m not sure how many besides @pemerton have posted their support that shutting down powers or inflicting damage outside the mechanical rules is different in philosophy, not merely in degree, from removing one or more class features indefinitely or permanently.

If we add up the clear supporters of your view, and those who have clearly expressed disagreement, I wonder what the percentages would be. I think our sample shows a pretty significant contingent for both viewpoints (and is a very small sample in total).

It had never even occurred to me until the two of you started posting that anyone would equate changing a PC's class from paladin to NPC warrior with d10 HD is no different from inflicting 1 hp of damage.

I keep saying “difference of degree, rather than philosophy”, yet you keep hearing “is no different”. I think the presence of the word “difference” in my statement indicates that it is different, just not different in the manner you assert.

Actually, it would wreck it. Because instead of the player deciding whether ot not to thwart Vecna, he could simply have asked me what is good and what evil, and then I would have been obliged to answer him, presumably. And so instead of actual playing tthe game we would have colour-by-numbers according to the GM's script.

Why would he need to make the Good choice? Does anyone reading this thread think that directing souls to Vecna, the Evil (I assume he is evil in 4e – am I wrong in this?) Deity, rather than the actual deity of the dead, might not be an evil act (or might actually be a Good one, as apparently we need to pick one as Good)? It seems like this character’s raison d’etre is bargaining for power from a variety of powerful beings, and maintaining an alignment would be a source of theme and conflict for the character.

BTW, @Hussar, according to Wiki, Vecna has stats published in Open Grave. Is that in error, or do 4e deities have stats? Another for @Imaro’s list of your rules cites, I suppose.

 

[D'karr]

I was going to comment on this but I'm not even sure what it is exactly you are trying to say besides 4e supports non mechanical alignmnet (which has never been argued against in this thread by anyone) and that you like non mechanical alignment better than mechanical alignment... Uhm, ok... I guess

4e was not even mentioned one time in what I said. You used a quote that explains rather clearly what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has been saying, and in the same breath you argued that gods in 4e don't even have the capability to strip paladins of their class features.

This is the same "attitude" I encountered from some players in 3.x. If it's not clearly written in the rules then it can't happen. That is an exaggerated and absurd interpretation of the game world. It is great hyperbole and could denote the lack of a valid argument.

The passage from the PHB that you quoted is what I'll call "world thematics", what some people call flavor, or fluff. It serves to stimulate the imagination and give the DM and players a starting point from which to launch their character ideas and game world. It is in no way exclusive. It is one of an infinite number of ways that DMs can run the "world thematics" of their game. It is not the same as "game mechanics" which are a bit more concrete. Channel divinity is a mechanical class feature. It is a bit more concrete/defined than saying "paladins that stray are punished by the faithful". Because it is more defined/concrete it has certain limitations. One is concrete/limited mechanically, the other is mutable/open according to what the DM & players want from their game. If I say, "all paladins of Syllian wash the feet of the masses on Tuesdays". It is "world thematics". I might be making up my own rites for the faith. For game purposes this is completely mutable/open and the DM and player are encouraged to work this stuff out as they want. If I say, "Channel Divinity let's me fly up to 60 feet once per round", I'm a little bit more constrained. The Channel Divinity class feature clearly does not provide that mechanical benefit.

Using that passage of "world thematics" to argue that a "god" in 4e cannot even "punish" a paladin that strays is hyperbole and what I'd call "ridiculous rules-lawyering".

In this thread what I have seen is a DM providing pretty clear examples of story and mechanics used within the course of a game. The mechanics sometimes have consequences, like damage. Then I'm seeing some vociferously attack him with the "rules". "The artifact rules don't say that, you can't do that". If that particular argument wasn't so petty, and ridiculous it might have been amusing.

 

[pemerton]

Why would he need to make the Good choice?

Because (putting to one side dirty hands situations, which this isn't) no rational person chooses evil? Which you seem to recognise when you say "maintaining an alignment would be a source of theme and conflict for the character." If it makes no difference whether good or evil is chosen, where would the theme and conflict come from?

Or to put it another way - what is the point of having the GM tell the player the evaluative significance of his/her choices? I give that sort of advice to my children - but it seems a bit condescending to do it to my peers!

 

[pemerton]

In this thread what I have seen is a DM providing pretty clear examples of story and mechanics used within the course of a game. The mechanics sometimes have consequences, like damage. Then I'm seeing some vociferously attack him with the "rules". "The artifact rules don't say that, you can't do that". If that particular argument wasn't so petty, and ridiculous it might have been amusing.

Thanks.

 

[Hussar]

Again, as @Imaro noted, if the player was told, before taking that action, that in your game world, this was an evil act, and would result in loss of his Paladinhood, the player would have the choice of:

(a) deciding his character will not take an action which, in your game world, he knows to be evil;
(b) discussing the issue prior to making a decision, which I would expect a good GM would be open to;
(c) deciding his character is prepared to take an evil act and lose his Paladinhood;
(d) not having suggested Batman, a character whose primary motivation is, depending on who writes him, vengeance, with justice being the other contender, is a Paladin in the first place.

I see. So as long as the DM tells you first that you are wrong, that's ok because now you have the choice of being wrong or right, according to the DM.

And this is acceptable to you? Really? Wow. You are a lot more tolerant of interference by the DM in your character than I am.

Then again, you've both nicely illustrated why you can't have any shades of grey. After all, according to you now the DM is supposed to up front tell you that you are wrong.

Bleah. No thanks. From either side of the screen. That just seems so shallow to me.

 

[Hussar]

Something else to note. [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION]. You claim that a DM is obligated to inform a player of the moral status of his actions before he acts.

This appears in no version of DnD and is purely your own house rule. Which is fine but considering your vociferous criticisms of Pemerton for what you feel is not following mechanics I have to wonder why you think that alignment mechanics cannot stand on their own without your house rules.

House rules that you feel so strongly about that you call DM's who don't use them poor DM's that you would not want to play with.

 

[D'karr]

shutting down powers or inflicting damage outside the mechanical rules is different in philosophy, not merely in degree, from removing one or more class features indefinitely or permanently.

This is the type of "rules lawyering" that I would normally expect from someone that is not familiar with the basic structures of the game. I could see a new DM, unfamiliar with "guidelines not rules", might make a ruling like that. A player that feels slighted or is afraid of the consequences might argue a "rule" like that. Since the player seems satisfied with how the outcome of the encounter went, I don't think [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has anything to worry about. If this is really about the game mechanics of the situation I can't find anything in the examples given to lend any weight to the argument.

I don't see what class feature has been removed indefinitely or permanently. Familiars that are damaged usually "go offline". Under normal circumstances they come "back online" after a rest. Taking damage during a skill challenge is a pretty normal thing. Not being able to regain healing surges is a pretty normal thing mechanically. Changing the pacing of the game by many varied methods is a pretty normal thing to do for experienced DMs. So mechanically I don't see anything weird in all of this.

A player raising the stakes by implanting the Eye of Vecna on their character's familiar, which was granted by Levistus to "balance the equation" - awesome roleplay. Taking out their own eye, in a weird sort of ocular solidarity - beautiful. Knowingly setting the stakes even higher by "thwarting" Vecna - even more awesome. Vecna angered by the character's action and taking action through his own Eye - priceless. No rules lawyering required. As a matter of fact rules lawyering about artifacts is the lamest thing I've ever heard. Artifacts basically "break all the rules". Entirely controlled by the DM. The DM gives them and the DM can take them away at any time. If angering Vecna in this manner was not prompt enough for the Eye to "move on" I don't know what would be.

Losing a familiar for a few minutes, hours, days was the outcome of the "risk taken" based on the player knowingly deciding to set himself up against Vecna's goals (the stake). The outcome could have been favorable or negative that is what playing a stake does, and it emerges from play. The other outcome is that Vecna did not get what he wanted. I might call that a positive in many circumstances. A paladin that commits an "evil act", as interpreted solely by the DM, is not setting any stakes. He is being told by the DM, "you character cannot do that, and if he does he is no longer a paladin". There is no carrot, only stick. The outcome can never be positive. The player doesn't get to "play" his character. The DM gets to ride shotgun with the foot on the brake. Because it is prescripted it hardly, if ever, emerges from play.

In ratio/degree losing a familiar (minor feature) for a very finite time, or even forever, does not begin to compare to losing your paladinhood (main feature). But at the core level, which is really the point, what pemerton has said is that in one instance (his game) the player gets to see the outcome of what the player is interested in seeing (stake => reward/loss). And more importantly to do this the DM doesn't have to make evaluative judgements of whether the beliefs of that character are right or wrong, good or evil, black or white. In a mechanical alignment game the player gets to see the outcome of what the DM decides him to see (stake => loss). And the part he is not interested in, the DM must make an evaluative judgement of whether the characters value system is right or wrong, good or evil, black or white. And then punish him if that evaluation comes up on the wrong side. That is at least one of the reasons why mechanical alignment is an impediment to the game for those of us that don't use mechanical alignment.

 

[Manbearcat]

Going to hone in on these two for the sake of brevity and because I think something constructive might (and by might I mean 1.27 % chance) come of it.

Can you give me an example of where you and your players have an aligned perspective where you framed an expected adversity?

Sure.

One of the PCs in my present game (coming to a close) is a Druid with multiple animal companions (a packmaster archetype). She was "abandoned" as a child by her mother (there is much to this but not relevant here) and was raised by a pack of wolves (the savage wild), was eventually cast out as an outsider and found herself (still a child) brought in and raised by a human settlement (civilization). She found community in both but her need to find security, acceptance and to eschew her fear of abandonment was found with the human settlement and not with the pack the originally raised her as a pup. However, as time went along, the settlement continued to encroach on the deepness of the wild. Unable to live in harmony and unable to return the savagery that fell upon it, the entire settlement was wiped out. Her longing of security and stability again torn from her, her fear of abandonment again renewed.

Given her paradoxical background, she found herself venerating the ideals of both Erathis (God of Civilization)

* Work with others to achieve your goals. Community and order are always stronger than the disjointed efforts of lone individuals.
* Tame the wilderness to make it fit for habitation and defend the light of civilization against the encroaching darkness.

and Melora (God of Wilderness)

* Protect the wild places of the world from destruction and overuse. Oppose the rampant spread of cities and empires.
* Do not fear or condemn the savagery of nature. Live in harmony with the wild.

simultaneously. Always would these be at tension with one another. Her Quests (that she would either compose outright or we would do so together) and the conflicts I would frame her into would always work to address the juxtaposition of these premises and see how her character would evolve as a result of her decisions and the physical consequences of her moral choices and the fallout of these conflicts. Basically we would ultimately find out, through play, which ideals would win out. This is what the player wanted.

We are almost at the end of the game (28th level). Ultimately (to our surprise), the ideals of Erathis won out and this Druid prioritizes civilization over the savagery of nature.

One specific conflict that was central to this evolution was one where the Druid used a "Bloom" (Grass grows, trees bear fruit, and the land’s bounty is available to all.) Ritual as the clincher in a Skill Challenge to convince a (very important) young girl (who had run away from home due to possession by a malignant primal spirit) to trust them and have her admit the PCs into her good graces. What they really wanted to do was to parlay with this malignant primal spirit within her (it would manifest and use her physical form to murder locals). The Druid wanted to convince the creature to leave the girl and inhabit her instead (as she figured she could control this savage spirit and, what's more, this creature knew things the PCs were hoping to know). The PCs initiated a conflict with the stakes being the successful "exorcism" or the little girl's life. If they failed it would be a fight to the death and the child's physical form would be destroyed in the battle. They failed the Skill Challenge. The little girl perished, the savage, primal spirit discorporated and fled into the untamed wild, never again to haunt the local settlements.

She had seen, for the nth time, how the allure of nature's beauty would seduce you and then betray you. She had seen, for the nth time, how innocence is stolen by merciless, indifferent savagery. The wild needed to be tamed as it could not be trusted if left to its devices. Savagery deserved condemnation.

The character changed pretty abruptly after that.

Your above statement appears, IMO, to be a ridiculous argument. If you cannot roleplay a cosmological entity due to your own personal limitations, and use that as your basis - how do you possibly NPC any character within your campaigns which you do not have the required necessary expertise?

Needless to say, I don't agree.

My problem isn't about the difficulty of the analysis. I can perform as thorough and decisive a philosophical analysis as anyone I've ever played with. But I don't want the game to come to that. I don't want to pit my take on cosmology versus their take on cosmology. And I want my players to have free will to decide how their vested interests in ethos decisions (that portend fallout in the physical world...and then maybe something cosmological, as conflict waiting to be shaped and resolved, down the line) wax, wane and evolve. The extent of my disagreement stems from the authority requiring me to compel player decision by way of the driver of "internal ethos needle" based on my perceptions of cosmological inclination. I don't want to compel (a hard compel or through soft operative conditioning - "incline your analysis/perceptions of this moral issue towards my own and behave in this fashion or you will be punished - your choice") a player with cosmology.

Again, there is no equivalence in a GM inhabiting creatures of the mortal realm and extrapolating physical fallout from decisions made or not made. Its trivial. Being brilliant is so far removed from nigh-omnipotence and nigh-omniscience that the two can't even be compared. However, one can tangle with the perspective of a God, or an Arch-Demon, or an Ancient Dragon. The heart of the issue for me is extrapolating physical fallout, and mechanically resolving a conflict evolved from that physical fallout, is a world away from (no equivalence) extrapolating cosmoligical inclination toward PC behavior (within context, with the inevitable margin of error), gaining consensus or at least understanding with the affected PC, and then enacting punitive measures which subordinate player decisions (and probably start the process of operative conditioning where they look to me for their thumbs up/thumbs down cue rather than acting of their own volition and conception of their PC) to my own interpretation of that cosmological inclination.

Make no mistake. I can play deities all the way down to beggars. To the hilt. I have very strong, stern, unrelenting, well-concieved opinions on all things philosophy. I just don't want that to drive play.