Do you find Alignments useful in your games???

[The Sigil]

Perhaps this muddies the waters a bit, and perhaps not, but here is my take.

Alignment is a great system when used properly.

Proper use is NOT: "You can't do that because you're LG (or whatever)."

Proper use IS: "Because you have done this and that and this other, you are LG."

Also, there is a difference between Lg and lG and LG.

Basically, I allow players to pick from five alignments when generating their characters: LG, LN, NG, N, CG. I have found that CNs are disruptive and any of the evils is "off-limits" in my campaigns - as I have said before, my players are to play HEROES, not villains.

As the DM, I lay down what is G, E, L, and C. It is my world, therefore I am the arbiter of absolute morality for it (because in "default" D&D, the morality is absolute).

Alignment is an almost tangible force in my worlds, and characters can actually FEEL great concentrations of evil (and good, and law, and so on). I don't feel bad describing to players who are entering a temple that once belonged to a LG good and has since been overrun by a CE necromancer and his minions the eerie feeling of a place that had once been holy but has now been desecrated - the walls themselves fairly scream to the characters, "cleanse me or help me disappear!"

Further, those who are of a spiritual bent (e.g., clerics, paladins) can feel smaller concentrations of evil ("I sense a disturbance in the force...") they have a hard time surprising - or being surprised by - the BBEG without teleport spells and the like.

I find that this creates (for me and my players) a more epic, heroic atmosphere - when you can feel the evil around you as a palpable force, it makes for great storytelling.

Similarly, great places of magic power can be sensed by all, with wizards and especially sorcerers sometimes feeling great ebbs and flows in magic when great spells are cast.

In this kind of setting, everything becomes slightly larger-than-life... and nobody's surprised (or has their suspension of disbelief broken) when the slightly dim-witted LG fighter who picks up the BBEG's glowing purple sword with the demon eye embedded in the pommel receives an enormous jolt and has to fight off the tentacles that sprout from the hilt, trying to lacerate his hand.

Also, detect evil only reveals things that are actually powered by evil...so evil clerics, evil outsiders, etc. People who simply happen to have the evil alignment aren't revealed by it, so it's no sure-fire way of determining alignment.

Close to how I work it. If an evil character has supernatural abilities, s/he detects as evil. A cleric who is evil or who is granted spells by an evil god detects as evil.

Otherwise, characters "feel foul" commesurate with their acts and/or level - a first level cultist or thief isn't going to register - but the 15th level thief who just made his "hit" to join the assassin's guild, while he won't "detect" as evil to a spell, can be "felt" as evil by a paladin (again, the "disturbance in the force thing")

--The Sigil

 

[reiella]

I personally perfer to apply alignments as a crutch when matched with a philosphical belief system. Notably I make sure all paladins are Kantian .

 

[The Sigil]

One other "acid test" for alignment...

If you feel the need to explain to me why a specific action was "in alignment/character" it by default means that the action in question wasn't.

--The Sigil

 

[Mark Chance]

Use them all the time...

I think alignments are pretty useless to a DM....

Alignments are quite useful to me a GM. In fact, they are probably less useful to the players because it is me, not them, who judges the morality of their actions. The players write down the alignments they want, but, ultimately, I decide what their characters' alignments really are. If there is a discrepancy between what the player thinks and what I think, I am right and the character suffers from some sort of cognitive dissonance.

 

[barsoomcore]

The usefulness of alignment systems depends entirely on the sort of campaign you wish to run. If you want your players to feel like clear, straightforward heroes, smacking down bad guys and making the world safe for good honest folk everywhere, then alignment's great. It provides a reasonable mechanism to distinguish bad from good, it offers an explanation for such extremes and lets people of either persuasion receive like-aligned help of great power.

On the other hand, if you want to run a campaign where your heroes never know who to trust, don't know who's out to get them and don't even know if they're on the right side, then alignment doesn't provide much value. You can run such a campaign without alignment and not miss it at all.

Barsoom is firmly in the latter camp and I don't use any form of alignment at all. There are no detect evil spells or alignment-based effects of any kind. It's great. I love it. My players have to decide for themselves who the bad guys are, and what they're going to do about it.

But the question of alignment's usefulness isn't one that can be decided once and for all. It just depends on your campaign and what you want to do with it.

 

[Telgian]

Originally posted by Earthshadow
Has anybody devised a system where you could have a scale of sorts, ranging from 0-10 or something similar along the various axis the alignments bring into effect.

The Book of Hallowed Might deals with alignment on pgs. 14-15.

Uses a 1-9 scale for Good/Evil/Law/Chaos (and gives examples).


Using this on one of my characters, I wound up with Good:4; Evil:2; Law:2; Chaos:2. So once things come out in the wash, the character is Neutral Good.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yar, I suppose. ^_^

I just have to say that just because you have an alignment system doesn't make things clear cut and absolute from the get go. You can have Good be a tangible force, and still not know what is Good and what isn't.

It's one of my favorite things to do!

 

[hong]

The usefulness of alignment systems depends entirely on the sort of campaign you wish to run. If you want your players to feel like clear, straightforward heroes, smacking down bad guys and making the world safe for good honest folk everywhere, then alignment's great. It provides a reasonable mechanism to distinguish bad from good, it offers an explanation for such extremes and lets people of either persuasion receive like-aligned help of great power.

Yep.

If anything, the alignment system doesn't give quite enough detail. You can have one guy donning armour and going out to kill monsters, and another guy staying at home to heal the sick and injured. They're both good, but it would be nice to have their different priorities and actions reflected in some sort of "alignment" setup.

In my current Britannia 3E campaign, I've supplanted regular alignments with the system of virtues taken from the Ultima 4 and 5 CRPGs. For those unfamiliar with it, U4 was basically a game revolving around a "quest for enlightenment". There were eight virtues: Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality and Humility. The aim was to become an "avatar" (enlightened being) in each of these virtues, by doing good deeds and stuff. For example, killing orcs was good for Valor, while giving gold to beggars was good for Sacrifice. Naturally, there was also a whole bunch of dungeon crawling and treasure to be found, but (for the first time ever in a CRPG, I think) the usual kill-the-foozle plot was nowhere to be seen.

IMO the Ultima virtue system is almost tailor-made for a game like D&D (not surprising, given its origin). On the one hand, heroic combat is built into the system, so you can kill all the monsters you want with a clear conscience. On the other hand, you also have "gentler" virtues like compassion, justice and humility, so it isn't just a case of running amok with swords. A paladin who killed everything that detected as evil (to take a hoary old example) might get lots of points for Valor, but their Compassion and Humility would hit rock bottom pretty quickly. To me, this is a lot better than just saying "killing every evil thing is evil!", since at least you can show exactly how their acts affect their virtues.

In my campaign, the PCs have just started on a U4-esque quest for enlightenment. Each character has a rank in each of the virtues, and getting quests from the shrines will help to up these ranks. It's all very metaphysical. You can see what I've written up on the system, here:

Virtues in Britannia 3E

On the other hand, if you want to run a campaign where your heroes never know who to trust, don't know who's out to get them and don't even know if they're on the right side, then alignment doesn't provide much value. You can run such a campaign without alignment and not miss it at all.

In my experience, alignments also provide players with a quick and easy way to get a handle on their own characters. We're not a group that goes in for deep characterisation, generally speaking. For our style of play, being able to say "I'm neutral" or "I'm lawful good" is a convenient shorthand for how a PC can be expected to think or behave. Naturally, this only works if everyone has roughly the same expectations on what "neutral" or "lawful good" means, but it hasn't been a major problem for us.

I was thinking that after this campaign of mine finishes, I might run another one in Britannia, but with a more amoral point of view (say the PCs are all renegades out of Buccaneers Den, or something). For this sort of campaign I'd ditch the virtues entirely, but I'd probably still keep alignments.

 

[Desdichado]

But the question of alignment's usefulness isn't one that can be decided once and for all. It just depends on your campaign and what you want to do with it.

And taste. I can't imagine a campaign I would ever want to run in which alignment played a major role. I could use it, as long as it was relegated to outsiders and was firmly kept in the background. That way, at least, I wouldn't have to mess with mechanics.

Your friend (referring to the initial post) who says that without alignments you're not playing D&D has a bit of a point, though. Alignments are integral to many basic classes of D&D, it is integral to the magic system of D&D, and it is integral to lots of things like magic items and such as well. If you uproot alignment completely, you really have to rewrite to some extent a lot of major portions of the rules.

But, that being said, alignment was always one of my biggest gripes with D&D, back in the years in which I left the game for greener pastures. The fact that you can use alternate classes that don't feature alignment, or alternate spell systems in which alignment don't matter, and such systems are published all the time under the aegis of d20 makes me a very happy camper.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Something I have been working with is the 'taint of evil'.

I have defined what evil is in my games, worshipping dark gods, deeds and such, I then keep track of players actions that match up with that list. If the player hits his WIL score, his alignment moves one degree to evil, good becomes neutral, neutral becomes evil.

Taint has been interesting as I also use it to interfer with some spells like healing (from a good cleric).