Do alignments improve the gaming experience?

[Umbran]

My fundamental issue with prescriptive personality mechanics (Alignment, WoD Humanity and Nature, SWSE Force mechanics, L5R Honor, GURPS personality flaws) is that they define the conflicts that game should focus on for you.

GURPS personality flaws are on a character-by character basis. If you took a flaw, but claim the game is defining the conflict for you, you have chosen to forget that you asked for it.

In L5R and Star Wars (and, arguably, WoD), the games make no bones about being of specific genres in which these pre-defined conflicts exist. If you pick up Star Wars, and then gripe that the game is defining the Light side/Dark side conflicts for you... well DUH!

What I enjoy about tabletop RPGs in particular is their capacity for a GM and their players to work together to determine what is at stake.

Yes. And then the only problem is if you choose a system that has these mechanics, and only then decide what you want to be at stake. Which is kind of silly - the basic sorts of conflicts and what's at stake should be some of the first stuff you figure out, not he last, as they are often central to the genre of the game. If you do that work with the GM before you choose the system, then there's no problem with those stakes being part of the system.

I don't want to feel like I'm fighting against the tide for not trying to game these systems that encourage avoiding conflict rather than pushing play towards it.

I completely reject the assertion that these systems encourage avoiding conflict. I also suspect you may be implicitly limiting yournotion of "conflict"

In these systems, sometimes you will find a character is automatically driven to conflict (You're a paladin, you see an evil sorcerer - guess what? Conflict!). In other times, you will find the character held back from *physical* conflict (cuz cutting innocents into meaty chunks is bad, and all that). But being held back from violence only shifts the basic conflict into a different form, it does not remove it. The conflict is delayed or extended ("I can't cut these prisoners to ribbons, so they'll live, and I can expect the BBEG will hear about this, and act...") or becomes internal, or becomes a social conflict rather than a swordfight, and so on.

 

[Cadence]

@N'raac and @Cadence, I'll try to evaluate your posts in full and post a response in the coming days. However, I just want to clarify a few things:

Cool. A few other musings to maybe incorporate...

This evolution of ideals within an orthodoxy has no place within an alignment system. There is orthodoxy and there is heresy. There is LN and there is LG. If orthodoxy and alignment were malleable, moving targets, they would be pointless. But they are not. Observation of this cannon is embedded in thie system. As such, this evolution is impossible, even if the final product (heresy) may be aesthetically and functionally in-line with a non-D&D "veneration of nature.

I'm not sure why an orthodoxy can't be slowly moving or why that makes things pointless. Don't real religions and what is acceptable in different countries drift over time? Drifting also seems to fit with the 1e DMG (iirc, maybe 2e) saying that what is considered good differs from country to country.

I think it would come back to exactly where the Druids got their power from. If it was established that they get it from the "spirits of the untamed green that hate industrialization" then I think the character would need to walk away and find a different power source. And if I had gone through effort to type up the details of the setting in detail and that was a main source of tension in the game world, and they still pushed it. then I might even take it as a lack of respect on their part. If the druid powers come from some "deity of the wild, where deities aren't super-powerful exemplars, but more like super-powerful NPCs" then maybe the character can try to work from the inside and try and convince the deity that the true wild is in the human heart and see how it goes. If it sounds like a cool idea I'd probably run with it. If the power is nebulously drawn from "all of the spirits of the plants and animals, rocks and sees" then as a DM it sounds completely reasonable to me that there are still spirits of those things in the artificial lakes, clay bricks, and tilled fields of civilization -- they're just ones that other druids haven't tapped into yet.

It seems to me that exploring religion in a world where deities actively send down servitors and give people spells is an essentially different act than philosophizing about it in a world where they're more distant. If I'm running a game like the later then I feel I have the wiggle room to deal adjust to the druid. If I'm running the former then of course the evolution of the character couldn't happen in the way it did in your game -- it would have resolved in some other way. Doesn't every game need pre-set parameters? If I have a game where some player does a nice job of developing some technology organically in the game (dirigible, gun, antibiotics, etc...) - is another DM artificially constraining the players and shutting down valuable stories if they set up the world so that the physics/chemistry/biology work slightly differently? Or, if I have it set up that the ultimate fate of men is the great unsolvable mystery that won't be solved until the end of the world (like in Tolkien), am I cheating the character if I don't listen to their cool idea of what it might be?

I'm wondering if it has to do with how long people imagine they might want to use the campaign world for. Is it different if the world is only being used for that one group of people until they get tired of it, versus being something that might be tinkered with and developed over the years and used with many different parties?

 

[Cadence]

There is LN and there is LG.

I've been waiting for a chance to slip in something related to this and keep forgetting.


The great wheel in 1e has all the in-between spots too. If Arcadia is "neutral good lawfuls" then shouldn't its inhabitants be able to have that alignment? If so then shouldn't the PCs? And why isn't there anything between Concordant Opposition and those other outer planes (a land of the neutral-good lawful-neutrals). And what kind of outsiders do the N deities have serving them?!?

 

[pemerton]

I have very little interest in exploring fantasy morality.

Likewise.

 

[Hussar]

Yes originally I used the word but you continued to use it in your answer as shown below...



It seems that you chose to continue using the word "validly" so I guess it is my "idea"... how is this relevant though since you continued using the word?





So you would decide whether the change was justifiable (by the player) or not... correct? If so what is the criteria you would use to determine whether the change is or isn't justifiable??

Huh? I just said that I wouldn't. So long as the player has a reason that's good enough for me. My judgement doesn't enter into it because I refuse to police my players.

 

[pemerton]

I think it would come back to exactly where the Druids got their power from. If it was established that they get it from the "spirits of the untamed green that hate industrialization" then I think the character would need to walk away and find a different power source. And if I had gone through effort to type up the details of the setting in detail and that was a main source of tension in the game world, and they still pushed it. then I might even take it as a lack of respect on their part.

<snip>

It seems to me that exploring religion in a world where deities actively send down servitors and give people spells is an essentially different act than philosophizing about it in a world where they're more distant.

I have a different perspective on this, I think.

The last two campaigns that I have run (one from 1998 to 2008, the other from 2009 to the present, in which it continues) both involve active deities with many servitors whom the PCs meet and interact with. Both have had divine PCs - paladins, clerics, cleric/monk multi-classes (well, the Rolemaster version thereof), etc. But this has not generated any particular pressure to deploy mechanical alignment, nor to prioritise GM conceptions of what the gods want over player conceptions (at least in relation to those gods where players are playing their PCs as exemplary servants).

To give a very simple (perhaps simplistic) example, from the first of those campaigns. One of the PCs was a fox who could shapeshift into a man. At first we all thought he was an animal spirit who was trying to better himself in karmic/reincarnation terms (a bit like the movie Green Snake). He had turned up in human form, but without memories, at a monastery, and the abbot had recognised his magical nature and had nursed him to health and introduced him to the human way of life. (This was all backstory, prior to starting as a 1st level PC - his shapechanging was handled via a variant of the Rolemaster lycanthropy rules.)

Then one day, about a year or so into the campaign, the player of that PC sent me an email in the form of a diary entry written by the abbot. It speculated that such a clever and puissant being as this man-fox couldn't be a self-upgrading animal, but must have some higher origin. So we subsequently decided that he was a banished animal lord of heaven. (This also fitted nicely into a part of the campaign based around module OA7 Test of the Samurai, which involves various animal lords, including a banished one as a villain.)

Anyway, on this revised version of the PC's backstory, his serving out his time as an ordinary fox was part of the karmic retribution for whatever he had done wrong. (This never became fully clear over the whole course of the campaign, but it was established that the PC, as animal lord of furred creatures, had clashed with the animal lord of birds - and it was jokingly speculated but never actually established that the clash might have been over a rights of geese vs rights of foxes demarcation dispute.)

Consequently, those PCs and NPCs who were helping him live a life as a human rather than a fox were helping him evade his karmic dues - and hence were themselves wrongdoers, at least in the eyes of the Lords of Karma. This came to light when some constables of heaven turned up one day to try to take the fox PC into custody for violating the edict of heaven. The other PCs (and their players) had to choose - side with the constables of heaven, or side with their friend. In the grandest RPG tradition, they sided with their friend. And hence found themselves in opposition to heaven. (And some were already a bit sceptical about heaven's bona fides, given other events going on in the campaign.)

How did the paladin and cleric/monk reconcile this with their obligations? Well, the paladin already knew that, while the gods in heaven were mighty, and in some cases enlightened, and on the whole (at least he believed at the time) benevolent, they were not as capable of true enlightenment as humans, and were capable of error. And this, he decided, was an error, grounded in an overly-rigid application of karmic principles without regard to more fundamental questions of character and motivation (those personal elements that, as he saw it at least, are linked to enlightenment). The cleric/monk, a member of a very esoteric sect, had no problem reaching a comparable conclusion, that even the Lords of Karma had not fully pierced the veil of illusion as his sect aimed at.

The point of the example (which turned out longer than I thought it would be) is to illustrate how, even when the gods and their servants are very actively involved in a game, it is still quite feasible to let the players take the lead in determining what counts as honouring the values of the gods/codes to which they are committed. It is also another illustration of a player deliberately setting up his PC as opposed to, or in conflict with, a particular divine entity, in which case I would regard it as a dereliction of my GMing duty not to have the entity respond in some fashion, such as in this case turning up to arrest the PC for violating heaven's edicts. I regard the two approaches set out in the two preceding sentences as both following from a more basic principle, namely of affirming and building upon the players' conceptions of what their PCs are and what they have done, rather than contradicting them.

And a tangent, following from that last sentence: one of my least favourite adventure structures, which seems inordinately popular among module writers, is the one in which the patron of the PCs ends up being the villain. What a way to nuke in a single big reveal the validity of everything the players thought they had chosen and achieved via their PCs! (And often using all the authors tricks one might find in an Agatha Christie story - ie neither expectation nor real prospect of the players, and thereby their PCs, figuring it out based on the fictional material actually provided to them.) This can be fine for Call of Cthulhu, where the players are meant to feel like they are adrift on the whims of the GM's madness; but as a more general approach it leaves me very cold, and seems an A-grade way to deprotagonise the players.

I'm wondering if it has to do with how long people imagine they might want to use the campaign world for. Is it different if the world is only being used for that one group of people until they get tired of it, versus being something that might be tinkered with and developed over the years and used with many different parties?

I don't know. I've used Greyhawk in the past for 10 to 15 years, and Oriental Adventures/Kara Tur for over 10 years, with changing personnel over that time. (If I had to divide it into campaigns, I would say 3 GH campaigns and 2 OA campaigns.) I'm expecting to use GH, at least, again before my GMing days are over. But later games don't just have to be riffs or redos of earlier games. The actual play that happened earlier contributes backstory to the new campaign, but (at least the way I play, and take notes) that hardly locks everything down. If it did, that would probably be a reason for me to treat that campaign world as done: no more conflicts to resolve here! (I think my 4e campaign might end that way, unless the PCs make some errors of judgement in which case the do-over would be as Dark Sun rather than the default 4e world!)

 

[pemerton]

Another comment on the "trigger-happy barbarian" thread: as best I understand the initial scenario, the real action, it seems to me, is in the relationship between the barbarian and his friends. It seems that they clearly knew the institutional significance of the NPC paladin and his demand that the stolen sword be handed over; yet they let the barbarian act as their de facto agent, thereby letting him get into a situation in which he is now probably a target for lawmen and bounty hunters across the land!

I may have missed it, but the debate over mechanical alignment doesn't seem to have helped bring out that (to me, at least) more interesting aspect of the situation.

Also, for all those who want more examples of why I (and I'm guessing others) don't use mechanical alignment, I refer you to these threads (two current, one about 6 months old):

Animate Dead and Alignment Restrictions
RPing and Evil Cleric
Alignment violations and how to deal with them

 

[pemerton]

If the GM already has a clear, certain conception of “honour”, then where is the mental overhead several posters have indicated is required in adjudicating alignment?

You can ask [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] about that if you want an answer. It's his notion. And he's not answerable for my account of why I think that exploring a GM's conception of a value is at odds with exploring the value itself.

For me the issue is not cognitive power: classifying actions into normative frameworks is my dayjob, and I'm fairly good at it. It's my lack of desire to do so, combined with my desire that play focus on something else. I can handle the arithmetic of tracking arrows and rations too, but that doesn't mean that I want to.

If it prizes “respect for life” above all, and I think capital punishment is valid, then my “Good” and that of “Cosmological Good” clearly differ.

<snip>

And here is where we come back to the views of that “Cosmological Good” not necessarily matching my own views of “good” in plain English.

This is exactly what [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] has described upthread: the GM, as author of the gameworld, stipulates what counts as good in that gameworld. It is a fantasy morality that the players then explore.

In such a game, though, it makes no sense for a PC, in character, to deny that the cosmological good of that gameworld is really good. Or to escalate to the metagame level, the players, in participating in a game set up along these lines, have agreed to accept, within the framework of the game, the morality that the GM stipulates. And everyone understands that they are exploring that stipulated morality. Mishihari Lord makes basically the same point not too far upthread:

Alignments give a universal standard that players can agree on for moral issues. I play with folks from differing religions and with varying political views, and unsurprisingly we have some pretty fundamental disagreements about the morality of some actions. Alignment gives something we can work with in game without argument.

My reasons for not particularly caring for this sort of play are the same as [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s, and I stated them a long way upthread: I have little or no interest in exploring a GM's fantasy morality. Which takes me to another comment made by Mishihari Lord:

Having alignments improves the game by getting players to think about the morality of their actions, which adds depth to play.

This doesn't fit with my personal experience, because what the players actually think about is the way their action fits within the GM's stipulated moral framework. Which, at least in my experience, isn't necessarily all that deep.

 

[Manbearcat]

Originally Posted by N'raac
If the GM already has a clear, certain conception of “honour”, then where is the mental overhead several posters have indicated is required in adjudicating alignment?

You can ask @Manbearcat about that if you want an answer. It's his notion. And he's not answerable for my account of why I think that exploring a GM's conception of a value is at odds with exploring the value itself.

For me the issue is not cognitive power: classifying actions into normative frameworks is my dayjob, and I'm fairly good at it. It's my lack of desire to do so, combined with my desire that play focus on something else. I can handle the arithmetic of tracking arrows and rations too, but that doesn't mean that I want to.

Working backwards.

I expressed the same a few posts upthread. When I speak of mental overhead being problematic, its typically because I don't find it particularly useful for my GMing principles. Anything that isn't useful for my GMing principles, and requires me to spend table time collating it and considering it, is a mental distraction. A mental distraction may (or may not) be prohibitive to giving manifest a GMing principle.

Consider the PCs trying to win over a dis-unified group of ranger lodges in order to unite all of the lodges against a common foe that threatens them all. During informal parlay, mechanical resolution indicates that the PCs have accrued a failure, lost a contest and gained emotional stress, what-have-you. Now I have to consider what form this takes. What is the immediate fallout and how does it respect player action and the fiction that has evolved "from there" "to here". Further, how close are we to ultimate resolution of the conflict (mechanically) and denouement?

Let us say that the offending PC (who lost the contest or initiated the action that led to the failure that led to the immediate fallout/consequence) and the NPC Ranger worship the same deity. Perhaps it is a deity whose domain-driven commands consist of "exalt in the hunt" and "only the strong survive". In a system with alignment-attendant consequences (PC build fallout due to cosmological inclination - which should be read as "my adjudication of cosmological inclination"), simultaneously to what I'm considering in the immediately preceding paragraph, I'm required to consider how well the offending PC's actions are reflecting their declaration of fealty to those ethos demands. So while I'm hoping to spend 100 % of my mental overhead on compelling, engaging, genre-consistent, immediate, physical fallout between PC and NPC, with respect to the physical world context at the macro and the context of the nuance of the exchange at the micro, I'm simultaneously distracted by considerations external to my GM principles:

- Does my sense of the disparity between PC action and deity dictates indicate that its so egregious that there should be immediate PC-build fallout?

- If there is immediate PC-build fallout, what form should it take? And how in the world do I make this manifestation not detract and distract from the exciting, climactic resolution of the unfolding conflict?

- If there isn't immediate PC-build fallout, is there enough of an implication on future fallout such that I should intervene and spend table time (and all of the problems for pacing, aesthetic, mood, etc that such action entails) deliberating the nature of this action with the player of the PC?

And what if the player of the PC disagrees (rightly or wrongly) with my take? Maybe they feel that, within some legitimate nuance, they are observing the dictates of their deity. That will exacerbate the situation dramatically (especially if it turns into a play-disrupting deliberation).

I hope that makes clear my position. I want my focus to be laser-beam like on whatever GMing principle is paramount. In the case above it is delivering authenticity (I have no conflict of interest influencing affairs and have administrated no heavy-handed fiat) and dynamism to the resolution of a climactic conflict of which all of my PCs are invested in. I need to be focusing on all of the macro context that has driven this heated and seminal parlay, all of the micro-components that have evolved the conflict from initiation to the present moment, and how I can best leverage complications and immediate fallout to play into the themes that the PCs have built into their characters and that have emerged/evolved in play. Anything external to that goal, whether trivial or outright antagonistic toward, is counterproductive.

One final note. Having my own (within the real world) conception of any aspect of a deity's domain (perhaps glory in battle or fighting with honour) has little bearing, the way I see it, on how my player may see their PC's connection with the same deity's domain (within the fictional high fantasy world) and their own general conception of their PC. I can be well-considered, a veritable bastion of intellectual profundity, on the topic and be utterly at odds with the player. If that is so, now I'm committing mental overhead on how to bridge that gap (if its even possible).

It seems to me that exploring religion in a world where deities actively send down servitors and give people spells is an essentially different act than philosophizing about it in a world where they're more distant. If I'm running a game like the later then I feel I have the wiggle room to deal adjust to the druid. If I'm running the former then of course the evolution of the character couldn't happen in the way it did in your game -- it would have resolved in some other way.

I think you're running into my point here. In proportion to (a) the rigidity of the deity's dictates and (b) the insidiousness of the game's mechanics that are wedded to them (in this case PC build fallout due to cosmological - GM - interpretation of PC fealty to those dictates), the less "wiggle room" (as you put it) there will be to deal with heresy/behavior that may challenge orthodox (and earn PC build fallout due to cosmological - GM - interpretation of PC fealty to those dictates). As such, PC evolution outside of the orthodox stories that the setting paramaters (and insidious mechanics) expects to deliver is muted or outright neutered. With respect to thematic evolution or PC (ethos, not build) fallout, a game such as 3.x D&D will have an extremely different inclination (and will therefore deliver a completely different aesthetic) than 4e D&D, while both will have a different inclination than Dogs (or Sorcerer).

Hence, why (a) and (b) together are problematic for the kind of play I'm looking for.

Doesn't every game need pre-set parameters? If I have a game where some player does a nice job of developing some technology organically in the game (dirigible, gun, antibiotics, etc...) - is another DM artificially constraining the players and shutting down valuable stories if they set up the world so that the physics/chemistry/biology work slightly differently? Or, if I have it set up that the ultimate fate of men is the great unsolvable mystery that won't be solved until the end of the world (like in Tolkien), am I cheating the character if I don't listen to their cool idea of what it might be?

I'm wondering if it has to do with how long people imagine they might want to use the campaign world for. Is it different if the world is only being used for that one group of people until they get tired of it, versus being something that might be tinkered with and developed over the years and used with many different parties?

I apologize that I don't have the time to address your other post. I will attempt to do so in the future.

The bolded and underlined is what appears to be your main idea with the rest being supporting statements or clarifying queries. I think our respective ships are running aground on the same rocky waters. In the titanic clash of setting (perhaps a meticulously built, GM-derived world that is their masterwork) vs player protagonism vs thematic conflict...what is paramount? Who is king of the hill and who is subordinate?

It seems to me that GMs (and players) vary severely on this issue and they expect their D&D to support this. I see GMs here, and elsewhere, who have a visceral reaction to any perterbation of setting canon. Either they have ingested an enormous amount of canonic material, or they have engineered their own, and are deeply invested in that (due to the time and effort spent). In their case those "pre-set paramaters", as you put it, are paramount. Player protagonism and thematic conflict inherent to those PCs are secondary concerns. They are not peripheral, but they are nonetheless secondary. The backdrop of Internal consistency of setting and its evolution (especially off-screen evolution) are the primary order of the day. My guess is for "world builder" GMs or those heavily invested in pre-established setting canon, the players are the vehicle for the GM to watch how the model of their beloved setting responds to the players perturbing the initial parameters. They are performing "a model run" of the setting they are heavily invested in.

Then there are GMs who literally care only for what is on-screen and adlib setting only as is required to facilitate the thematic conflict that their PCs have built for. Low resolution setting (limited "pre-set paramaters") is a boon for them and high resolution setting and insidious ethos mechanics embedded in that high resolution setting are anathema to their preferred style (and product) of play.

Most GMs are somewhere in between. Personally, I am much, much, much, much closer to the latter rather than the former. I take no satisfaction in world building, seeing how the players perturb my initial parameters and seeing how the "model run" plays out. Although I've imbibed a generous portion of various systems, I'm not remotely invested in setting canon (which is why the 4e FR shakeup didn't make me chafe in the least, while it clearly did for so many others to the point that they would hate a system that is, by proxy, attached to the shakeup). Hence, why I prefer broad descriptor action resolution tools and PC build components and low resolution settings without insidious ethos mechanics.

 

[Imaro]

This is exactly what @Bedrockgames has described upthread: the GM, as author of the gameworld, stipulates what counts as good in that gameworld. It is a fantasy morality that the players then explore.

In such a game, though, it makes no sense for a PC, in character, to deny that the cosmological good of that gameworld is really good. Or to escalate to the metagame level, the players, in participating in a game set up along these lines, have agreed to accept, within the framework of the game, the morality that the GM stipulates. And everyone understands that they are exploring that stipulated morality. Mishihari Lord makes basically the same point not too far upthread:

I'm not sure this necessarily follows though. Just because the cosmological force of "L/C/N good" defines what is "L/C/N good" doesn't then mean my character must believe the "good" action in any particular situation is always the best, right or correct action or that these cosmological forces are infallible (Yes, I realize this is a component of your way of playing but everyone doesn't play deities in this manner.).

As an example in the Elric stories by Moorcock one could easily look at the Lords of Law in relationship to the Lords of Chaos (especially in the earlier adventures of Elric) and assume they are a positive force... But as the stories progress we come to see that unbridled and unchecked the forces of Law are just as detrimental and destructive to humanity as Chaos is... Elric comes to realize this and though he started aligned to chaos, he then switches to law and finally he ultimately comes to serve the balance. Even though these powers are capable of granting and stripping their aid and power from him throughout the stories (and Arioch leaves him in dire predicaments more than a few times to teach him obedience) Elric is willing to make that sacrifice in order to do what he sees as the "correct" (though not necessarily good) action. These stories are my basis at least for the personified cosmological forces I run in D&D and they are quite fallible and never pure representations of the actual forces since they have personalities and those personalities affect how they approach the force they represent (for a more modern take on personified and fallible cosmological forces see the Sandman comic series or tones of these types of beings in various comic books).

Accepting that the morality of the campaign is as the GM stipulates does not mean that my character can not then question or even choose to go against that morality... It just means (in the same way a knight would have a code of chivalry laid out which he may or may not agree with and may or may not choose to aspire too) that there is a structure of what is "good" and a character can choose to agree with it, aspire too it, etc. or decide not to, with the accompanying consequences. Exploring a morality is not the same as being beholden to said morality.